God’s Creativity

Abstract

God-or-Substance-or Nature is the totality of the real, infinite in the sense of absolutely complete, self-contained, self-caused and self-maintaining. Its eternal essences is expressed in infinite attributes each inexhaustible and illimitable in its own kind, but limited wholly to its own kind. Under each of these attributes there follow from the infinite power (or essence) of God interminable series of modes, some infinite in themselves and the rest infinite, singular things. The infinite modes are the immediate consequences of God’s essences as expressed in his attributes; they follow from his nature, Spinoza insists, in the same way as the properties of a triangle follow from its definition; that is, they are logical consequences of God’s eternal essence. But his essence is the same as his power, so they are consequences, likewise, or effects, of God’s casual efficacy. This two-fold character of God’s creative potency involves some obscurity and needs explanation, to provide which will be the main object of the present chapter.