Spinoza's path from bondage to freedom passes through understanding. The more clearly and distinctly we understand the causes of our emotions, the less those emotions torment us as passive states. The highest form of understanding — the third kind of knowledge, which grasps particular things under the form of eternity — brings the deepest freedom. To understand anything adequately is to understand it as necessarily following from the nature of God. In this understanding, the anxiety of the finite self is dissolved into the serenity of the infinite.
This love is not the love of a creature for a separate creator — a personal relationship with a distinct divine being. It is love that arises from understanding: when we understand ourselves and the world adequately, we see them as expressions of God's infinite nature, and in that vision there is joy — pleasure accompanied by the idea of God as cause. The more we understand, the more we see of God, and the more we love. Understanding and love are not separate activities but aspects of a single cognitive-emotional state.
The identification of the human mind's love of God with God's love of himself expressed through the human mind is Spinoza's most audacious claim. It dissolves the distance between the finite and the infinite: in the moment of adequate understanding, the human mind participates in the very self-knowledge of God. Blessedness — what Spinoza calls salvation or freedom — is not a reward granted after death but an achievement of understanding available in this life. It is not happiness in the ordinary sense but something closer to the Stoic's equanimity: a peace that comes from seeing things as they necessarily are, sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity.
The intellectual love of God is developed in the final propositions of Part V of the Ethics. The phrase amor intellectualis Dei appears in Proposition XXXII. The identification of the mind's love with God's self-love in Proposition XXXVI is among the most contested interpretations in Spinoza scholarship.