Beatitude is supreme happiness. The query before us is not whether God will give the blessed supreme happiness, but whether He is their supreme happiness. To put it another way, it is not whether He will give them beatitude as something different from Himself, but whether He will give it to them by giving them Himself. The answer, interestingly, depends on the sense in which the question is asked – for there are two ways of taking it, and they must be treated differently. With this Article we tremble at the threshold of the Gospel.

Ethics, for Spinoza, is knowledge of “the right way of living.” That ethics is central to his philosophical project is unmistakable from the title of his most systematic presentation of his philosophy: Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata). While that work seeks to demonstrate a broad range of metaphysical, theological, epistemological, and psychological doctrines, they are selected for inclusion, at least in large measure, because of the support he takes them to provide for his ultimate ethical conclusions. Many of those conclusions are distinctive and provocative, and many of his reasons for them are innovative and intriguing. This chapter begins by providing an outline of Spinoza’s ethical theory, including is naturalistic foundations; its primary terms of ethical evaluation; the nature and causes of bondage to the passions; the prescriptions of reason; the way to freedom and autonomy; and eternity, intellectual love of God, and blessedness. It then considers four important questions for Spinoza’s ethical theory: the nature and motivational force of ethical judgments; the conditions for ethical responsibility; the role of altruism in ethics; and the value of life and the harmfulness of death.

Beatrice’s salutation in the streets of Florence communicates salvation in a religious and even in an eschatological register to Dante as her lover. Dante translates his experience of “beatitude” in relation to this lady into the lyrical language of his poems. He thereby endeavors, furthermore, in an evangelical mode, to communicate this experience to others who can be transformed in their own existence by means of the revelation of his witness. Beatrice is a Christ-like figure for Dante, even a mediation to him personally of Christian salvation. The lyrical quality of this experience is in excess of all objectively communicable facts and content. Hence the dynamic interplay between autobiographical prose, testifying to concrete aspects of Dante’s existence, and the poetry that manifests what these contextual facts can never encompass or exhaust. Ineffable aspects of existence are translated into the ecstatic language of lyric testifying to irreducibly personal experience. The experience of Beatrice, as interpreted in this poetry, is for Dante a transcendent revelation of divinity. The Vita nuova understands this experience in light of the Gospels and, in its turn, illuminates how the Gospels, through literary and lyrical means, become a revelation of the divinity of Jesus.