The Love of God? Bhakti (Devotion) and the Virtues in Spinoza’s Ethics (Parts IV and V) and Bhagavadgītā Chapters 12–14 (Bhaktiyoga)

Common sense tells us that feeling love involves loving another as another and is not merely an accident of self-love, while the Sanskrit theory of rasa aesthetics tells us that genuine love must be returned. God’s love for humanity would not require these distinctions, however, if it exists at all, and Benedictus de Spinoza (1632–1677) claims that it does not. Rather, he finds that God’s love is not a philosophical problem because the very idea of God experiencing pleasure or pain as a result of desire for another (which constitutes common transactional conceptions of love) is irrational. This philosophical problem is compounded by the intrinsic value of loving without reciprocity, the follies of delusion, and the complicated—if not implicit—demands of reciprocity. Although Spinoza teaches a devotional path to liberation based on a logic of emotion in his Ethics, it is in the Bhagavadgītā’s twenty verses on “Bhaktiyoga” that a philosophy of devotion extends to a practice for the sake of love in moral action. This virtue-theoretic approach to emotion responses yields yoga-classed results such that the characteristic traits of love are dedicated to humanity and productive actions are offered to God. This study reconciles the complex challenge of achieving adequate moral knowledge with Spinoza’s claims that the path is rare, not difficult. If knowledge of what to do can be united with how to serve, divine love may be theoretically realised. The conclusion is that one may conduct ordinary secular transactions without contradiction yet generate a kind of affective currency as a channel for experiencing embodied liberation in a virtuous friendship with humanity via God.