Amor Dei intellectualis
The "intellectual love of God" is the pinnacle of Spinoza’s *Ethics*. It arises from the third kind of knowledge—the intuition that grasps singular things *"under the species of eternity"*—as a joy accompanied by the idea of God taken as its cause. Not the love of an imagined present God, but the love that follows from conceiving God as eternal. Eternal itself, it is the part by which the human mind participates in the infinite love with which God loves himself.
Du troisième genre de connaissance naît nécessairement un Amour intellectuel de Dieu.
Spinoza distinguishes three kinds of knowledge: imagination, demonstrative reason, and a third—scientia intuitiva—which proceeds “from the adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.” To know a singular thing in this way is to grasp it as it follows from divine necessity, in its eternity. From this knowledge arises a joy; and all joy is accompanied by the idea of its cause. Here, the cause is God himself: joy becomes amor Dei intellectualis.
This love is not an outpouring: it is an act of the understanding. And because its object is eternal, so too is it—“The intellectual love of God, which arises from the third kind of knowledge, is eternal.” Moreover, Spinoza posits it as “the very love with which God loves himself,” insofar as this love is explained by the essence of the human mind. Beatitude is thus not the reward of virtue: it is virtue itself, the state of one who knows in this third way.
To be distinguished from love-passion, which depends on an external cause imagined as present and perishes with it; amor Dei intellectualis cannot be destroyed, for its object cannot cease to be. Also to be distinguished from bhakti, devotion to a personal God whom one worships in expectation of love in return: in Spinoza, “he who loves God cannot strive for God to love him in return,” for God is unaffected by any passion. Amor Dei intellectualis ≠ adoration: one asks for nothing, one understands.