Alexander, Samuel (1859-1938) Spinoza and Time (1921)
Being the Fourth "Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture" delivered before the Jewish Historical Society at University College on Sunday, May 1, 1929 - Nissan 23, 5681
VII. Religion in Spinoza and the Intellectual Love of God
...The healthy religious mind shares Spinoza's mysticism to the point of its feeling of our oneness with God ; but it asks for the fathering response, and holds that God's need of us is no less than our need of him. It saves the individual from absorption by securing his independent entry into the relation of dependence upon God, and seeks in God fulfilment of the human being and not absorption. But for Spinoza it was difficult to secure such independence because God for him, though singular, is not so much an individual as a totality, and is not a person, for personality is but a finite mode, and his eternity is not duration any more than the immortality of man is prolonged life after death.
VIII. Changes in the Conception of God and Religion. The Conatus of Spinoza and the Nisus
...If we consider Spinoza, we are at a loss to identify God as the sum of reality with the object of worship ; worship, as we have seen, is with him an intellectual passion and wants the specific flavour of devotion. The difficulty is common to Spinoza with every form of Pantheism. For the pantheistic Supreme Being lacks the human note. It contains humanity and all other things indiscriminately, and it contains evil and good alike, for what from our human view is evil is not evil as in the Supreme Being. Whereas worship demands in its object something indeed greater than man, and different from him in kind, not personality, but still something in touch with personality, which therefore in our weakness of imagination we shadow forth to ourselves as a person, and something which if the predicates of good and bad are inappropriate to what is above good and evil, is yet in the lineal succession of goodness.
VII. Religion in Spinoza and the Intellectual Love of God
...The healthy religious mind shares Spinoza's mysticism to the point of its feeling of our oneness with God ; but it asks for the fathering response, and holds that God's need of us is no less than our need of him. It saves the individual from absorption by securing his independent entry into the relation of dependence upon God, and seeks in God fulfilment of the human being and not absorption. But for Spinoza it was difficult to secure such independence because God for him, though singular, is not so much an individual as a totality, and is not a person, for personality is but a finite mode, and his eternity is not duration any more than the immortality of man is prolonged life after death.
VIII. Changes in the Conception of God and Religion. The Conatus of Spinoza and the Nisus
...If we consider Spinoza, we are at a loss to identify God as the sum of reality with the object of worship ; worship, as we have seen, is with him an intellectual passion and wants the specific flavour of devotion. The difficulty is common to Spinoza with every form of Pantheism. For the pantheistic Supreme Being lacks the human note. It contains humanity and all other things indiscriminately, and it contains evil and good alike, for what from our human view is evil is not evil as in the Supreme Being. Whereas worship demands in its object something indeed greater than man, and different from him in kind, not personality, but still something in touch with personality, which therefore in our weakness of imagination we shadow forth to ourselves as a person, and something which if the predicates of good and bad are inappropriate to what is above good and evil, is yet in the lineal succession of goodness.