What follows is a study of the relations between the amor erga Deum invoked by Spinoza in Proposition 15 of Part V of the Ethics and the ‘intellectual love of God’ that he defines in the corollary to Proposition 32. It is often said that these two loves stand in relation to one another as the second kind of knowledge does to the third. Allow us to sketch out a different interpretation.

The amor erga Deum, Proposition 15 teaches us, is the feeling that is experienced by ‘he who understands himself and his affects clearly and distinctly’.This clear and distinct intellection of ourselves and our affects, according to the demonstration of that same proposition, is tied to the type of knowledge that was in question in Proposition 14: that in which ‘the Body's affections, or images of things, are related to the idea of God’. It is thus a matter of the knowledge of our affects, and more generally of our affections, which has as its point of departure the adequate idea of God (which ‘proceeds’ from this idea). Since all adequate knowledge is knowledge through causes, and all knowledge that proceeds from the idea of God opens a way for us to access the ‘intimate essence’ of its object, this knowledge makes us understand, starting from God, by going as far as possible in the intellection of their essences, the causes of our affections and our affects: that is, we ourselves, as Spinoza indicates, and also, as far as possible, the external causes that affect us and that we initially only imagined, whether joyously or sadly.

Now, the intellectual love of God, as the corollary to Proposition 32 teaches us, is born of the third kind of knowledge, itself defined in Scholium 2 to Proposition 40 of Part II as being that which ‘proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things’. ‘Things’, he writes, without qualification. But it is clear that all the finite things that we adequately comprehend (ourselves included) were, whether directly or indirectly, whether by experience or by signs, initially imagined by us.