At the beginning of the Appendix to Part i of the Ethics, Spinoza summarised his conclusions up to that point in one long sentence:

The first part of this summary – on the ‘nature and properties of God’ – has been discussed in the previous chapter. We must now turn to the second part: how God ‘acts solely from the necessity of his own nature’.

Once again, it is worth stressing at the start that we do not know the roots of Spinoza's motivation. If a question could be characterised in the abstract – without any reference to who asked it, when or why – it would be, how does God relate to the world in terms of action? This is a question which has appeared in innumerable forms in different religious traditions, for differing reasons; to the extent that there is an obvious risk of misrepresentation in thinking of a single, continuing question. We can see some of the contexts in which Spinoza was working in the 1660s and 1670s.