GOD metaphysical system But it is not argued for: it is smuggled in through the original deWnition of substance Spinoza’s initial set of deWnitions includes also a novel deWnition of God as containing an inWnite number of attributes Since we are told that we can only know two of these attributes, namely thought and extension, these inWnite attributes play little further part in the system Once Spinoza has proved to his satisfaction the existence of God he goes on to derive a number of properties of God that belong to traditional theism: God is inWnite, indivisible, unique, eternal, and all-comprehending; he is the Wrst eYcient cause of everything that can fall within his comprehension, and he is the only entity in which essence and existence are identical (Eth, 9–18) But he also describes God in highly unorthodox ways Although in the Tractatus he had campaigned against anthropomorphic concepts of God, he nonetheless states that God is extended, and therefore is something bodily (Eth, 33) God is not a creator as envisaged in the Judaeo-Christian tradition: he does not choose to give existence to the universe, but everything that there is follows by necessity from the divine nature He is free only in the sense that he is not determined by anything outside his own nature, but it was not open to him not to create or to create a world diVerent from the one that we have (Eth, 21–2) He is an immanent and not a transcendent cause of things, and there is no such thing as the purpose of creation Spinoza’s innovations in natural theology are summed up in the equation of God with Nature Although the word was not invented until the next century, his theism can be called ‘pantheism’, the doctrine that God is everything and everything is God But, like every other element in his system, ‘Nature’ is a subtle concept Like Bruno, Spinoza distinguishes Natura Naturans (literally, ‘Nature Naturing’, which we may call ‘active nature’) and Natura Naturata (‘Nature Natured’, which we may call ‘passive nature’) The inWnite attributes of the single divine substance belong to active nature; the series of modes that constitute Wnite beings belong to passive nature Just as the Wnite beings that make up the tapestry of the universe cannot exist or be conceived without God, so too God cannot exist or be conceived of without each of these threads of being Most signiWcantly, we are told that intellect and will belong not to active nature but to passive nature Hence, God is not a personal God as devout Jews and Christians believed Does this mean that God does not love us? Spinoza, as we have seen, believed that intellectual love for God was the highest form of human 311