Baruch Spinoza inherited rationalism's confidence that reason could reconstruct reality's basic structure and used it to erase the distinction between God and nature that Descartes had carefully preserved. In the Ethics, built in the geometric style of definitions and proofs, Spinoza argued that there can be only one substance, infinite and self-caused, and that this substance is what people call God when they mean the whole of what exists and Nature when they mean the same thing under another name, Deus sive Natura, God or Nature. Everything else, every finite mind and body, is a mode, a way that single substance expresses itself, not a separate creation standing apart from its creator, which left no room for a personal God who chooses, intervenes or answers prayer, nor for a soul surviving the body as a separate substance, since every event follows from the necessity of God's own nature exactly as a theorem follows from a definition. The consequences arrived quickly. In 1656, before he had published any of this, the Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish community issued Spinoza a writ of cherem, excommunication, for opinions the surviving document calls abominable heresies, and after his death in 1677 Christian authorities across Europe banned his books and treated the word Spinozism as a synonym for atheism for more than a century, even as later Enlightenment readers increasingly found in his single, necessary substance the most rigorous thing rationalism had produced.