# What 'in God' means in Spinoza

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH05.P023](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH05.P023/#char=667,751): "Thus the pantheist is forced to speak of God _in_ all things as if he were in a box."

Spinoza supplies a useful test of the container joke, although Chesterton does not name him here. The *Ethics* (first published 1677), inspected in Project Gutenberg's R. H. M. Elwes translation, actually puts the relation the other way round: things are in God. Part I, definition V defines a mode through its dependence upon something else for existence and conception; propositions XV and XVIII then make all things depend on God and deny any substance external to him. The relation concerns what things are and how they are conceived, rather than a deity packed inside a physical receptacle. [Spinoza, *Ethics*, I](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm)

This does not dissolve Chesterton's substantive disagreement. Spinoza's I, proposition XXV, corollary makes individual things modifications of God's attributes. That account differs sharply from Chesterton's poet and independently distinguished poem. Chesterton's stronger point is therefore the difference between those accounts of reality, not the suggestion that a rival philosopher has mistaken spatial containment for an explanation. This is a comparison, not evidence that Spinoza was the particular pantheist Chesterton intended.

## Sources

- [Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, translated by R. H. M. Elwes, Project Gutenberg 3800](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm), Part I, definition V; propositions XV, XVIII, XXV corollary; translator heading
- [Ethics (Spinoza), work heading](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ethics_(Spinoza)), Work date: 1677

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