Béatitude
beatitudo
In Spinoza, beatitude is neither a reward promised after death nor the consequence of a virtuous life: it is virtue itself, identified with the intellectual love of God. It is the state of the soul that knows things through the third kind of knowledge—intuitive knowledge—and which, in this act, is fully active, free, powerful. Beatitude does not crown effort; it is its *fabric*.
La Béatitude n'est pas le prix de la vertu, mais la vertu elle-même ; et cet épanouissement n'est pas obtenu par la réduction de nos appétits sensuels, mais c'est au contraire cet épanouissement qui rend possible la réduction de nos appétits sensuels.
The Latin word beatitudo in Spinoza refers to something precise and paradoxical. Most people, he writes in the scholium to Proposition 42, “seem to believe that Morality and Religion are burdens from which they hope to be relieved after death in order to receive the reward for their servitude.” This worldview—virtue endured, reward hoped for—is exactly what Spinoza overturns.
Beatitude is not at the end of the road. It is the road itself, insofar as the mind is active there. His demonstration is rigorous: beatitude consists in love toward God (what Appuhn also renders as “intellectual love of God”); this love arises from the third kind of knowledge, the intuitive knowledge of singular essences; now, an act of knowledge is an act of the mind insofar as it acts, not insofar as it suffers—it is thus, by definition, virtue. Nothing to wait for, nothing to earn: to know adequately is already to flourish.
From this comes a decisive reversal: it is not by first curbing one’s appetites that one attains beatitude, but rather beatitude—the growth of the power to act—that makes such restraint possible. Asceticism does not precede freedom; it is its effect.
Beatitude ≠ joy. Spinozist joy is a passage, a crossing of a threshold of power; it is dynamic, it is traversed. Beatitude is the sage’s stationary state, acquired knowledge that no longer fluctuates with external causes. The ignorant, Spinoza says in the final scholium, “as soon as they cease to suffer, they cease to be”; the sage “never ceases to be and possesses true contentment.” Beatitude is this state of continuous being, independent of fortune.