From: Subject: RE: Spinoza quoe Date: November 22, 2020 at 13:22:45 AST To: "'Daniel MacKay'" Hello Dan, please excuse my tardy reply to your last message. I've recently closed up my small cottage in Pictou Co., with all that is entailed in that effort. ---You are right that Einstein embraced Spinoza's God as the God of natural and physical laws. The German poet Goethe also did the same. But Both Einstein and Goethe, great thinkers both, and each in his own way, are egregiously mistaken in holding that while we love God, God does not love us back. That view characterizes the statements of both Einstein and Goethe. In fact, however, Spinoza's doctrine of the intellectual love of God (amor Dei Intellectualis) uniquely teaches us that our love for God arises eternally as our rational and intuitive love for God, and is a part of God's absolutely infinite self-love. This is an immensely difficult and original doctrine on which I've published. In Part 5 of Spinoza's master-work, the Ethics. He writes in the Corollary of Proposition 36 in PART 5 and on human freedom): "Hence it follows that God, in so far as he loves himself, loves man, and, consequently, that the love of God towards men, and the intellectual love of the [human] mind towards God are identical'. But what is not clear here is the fact that God's love of himself as he loves man is only part of the absolutely infinite self-love of God. --It will interest you that a young man studying at the University of Chicago Divinity School wrote me about my work as he was completing a Ph.D. thesis on the intellectual love of God, largely ignored or poorly treated in the tradition of Spinozan scholarship. That communication was very welcome to me in my retirement, but I've somehow lost track of him, having lost his email address. I hope by divine intervention, and not by my very mediocre computer 'skills', to recover it. --I suggest that you google Spinoza on this matter and see how you make out. I can help you in that endeavour, if you wish. Best wishes, Vance -----Original Message----- From: Daniel MacKay Sent: October 11, 2020 7:41 PM To: vmaxwell@eastlink.ca Subject: Spinoza quoe Vance: There is a story below, which is mostly an extremely extended quote from Spinoza. It is quite beautiful however and was posted by Chris Aucoin on Facebook. Now, even I can tell it’s really not a quote from Spinoza. Can you make a, uh, educated guess what it is??? But, secondarily, do you think that it is a loving non-philosopher version of something he *might* have said? When Einstein gave lectures at U.S. universities, the recurring question that students asked him most was: - Do you believe in God? And he always answered: - I believe in the God of Spinoza.