Blessedness is virtue itself
Formal Statement
Whatsoever we understand by the third kind of knowledge, we take delight in, and our delight is accompanied by the idea of God as cause. The intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love wherewith God loves himself. Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; neither do we rejoice therein because we control our lusts, but contrariwise, because we rejoice therein, we are able to control our lusts.
In Plain Language
This is the summit. Recall where we started: nothing is contingent, will is not free, things could not have been otherwise. That sounded like a prison. But follow the thread: if you understand necessity rather than merely submit to it, that understanding is an adequate idea, which generates joy, which is an increase in power, which makes you the adequate cause of your own affects — which is what freedom actually is. And the deepest such understanding — grasping reality as a whole, under a form of eternity — produces a stable, self-sustaining joy that Spinoza calls blessedness or the intellectual love of God. This joy is not a reward handed out after the work of virtue; it is the work of virtue. Understanding is its own reward because understanding is joy, and joy is power, and power is freedom. The circle closes.
Why This Follows
This step gathers the entire path. Necessity (df-01 through df-03) is not bondage but the structure of reality. Inadequate ideas produce the illusion of contingency and the reality of bondage (df-04, df-12). Reason and adequate ideas overcome bondage through affects (df-06, df-13, df-14). The will/understanding identity (df-09, df-10) means freedom is cognitive. Civic virtue (df-17) means freedom is social. Blessedness is the name for what it feels like when all of this comes together: determined, knowing, joyful, free.
Blessedness is not the reward of virtue — it is virtue itself, the joy of understanding necessity.
Connected Concepts
Spinoza says we do not rejoice because we control our desires; we control our desires because we rejoice. What would it look like to build a life on that inversion?
Path complete!
You now understand Spinoza's liberating paradox: we become free not by escaping necessity but by understanding it. Reason transforms passive bondage into active joy.