With the judgment of the angels and the sentence of the saints, we anathematize, execrate, curse and cast out Baruch de Espinoza, the whole of the sa… - Benedictus de Spinoza

2. The essence of things are from all eternity, and unto all eternity shall remain immutable; The existence of God is essence; Therefore...

[Nietzsche and Spinoza: Enemy-Brothers] Amor fati—love of fate—is the defiant formula by which Nietzsche sums up his philosophical affirmation. The term, never before used in philosophy, is clearly a polemical transformation of Spinoza's amor dei intellectualis, rejecting the primacy of the intellect and putting fatum (fate) in place of Spinoza's nature-God as the object of love. The pair amor dei and amor fati provides an apt verbal representation of the complex relationship between Nietzsche and Spinoza, the two enemy-brothers of modern philosophy. Perhaps no two philosophers are as akin as Spinoza and Nietzsche, yet no two are as opposed. If Spinoza initiated the modern philosophy of immanence and undergirds it throughout, then Nietzsche brings it to its most radical conclusion—and, as we shall see, turns this conclusion against Spinoza himself. Nietzsche explicitly recognizes his debt and kinship to Spinoza. Speaking of his "ancestors," Nietzsche at various times gives several lists, but he always mentions Spinoza and Goethe—and always as a pair. This is no accident, for Nietzsche sees Goethe as incorporating Spinoza and as anticipating his own "Dionysian" ideal.

The various critics who have assumed that Spinoza held a paramount position in Goethe's world view have much direct evidence from Goethe's own pen. In one of the Zahme Xenien Goethe calls Spinoza "the philosopher whom I trust most." From the 1780's onward numerous references to Spinoza appear in Goethe's work. How well Goethe knew Spinoza's philosophy before his arrival at Weimar is a matter of some uncertainty, but already in 1773 a book of Spinoza's, probably the Ethics, is mentioned as an object of his study. The letters of 1784-86 indicate that Goethe read and discussed the Ethics with Charlotte von Stein and that he disputed with Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi about Spinoza's concept of God/Nature. During that same period Goethe had written that although he did not himself share Spinoza's way of representing nature (seine Vorstellungsart von Natur), if he were to name one book that agreed the most completely with his own conception of nature, it would have to be the Ethics: doch wenn die Rede wäre ein Buch anzugeben, das unter allen die ich kenne, am meisten mit der meinigen übereinkommt, die Ethik nennen müsste. In a conversation with Boisserée of August 3, 1815, Goethe said: "I always carry the Ethics of Spinoza with me." The most extended references to Spinoza are to found in Goethe's autobiography Poetry and Truth.