Deity, Existence, Life

In the 5th Meditation, in his version of the Ontological Argument, Descartes uses the phrases 'God exists' and 'There is a God' interchangeably.  So, when, by virtue of the definitions of Part I of the Ethics, Spinoza asserts that the essence of Deity entails its eternal existence, he is more than recapitulating the conclusion of that Argument.  Rather, he is anticipating III, vii, in which he proposes that the "endeavor . . . to persist in its own being is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question".  For, the latter proposition is more than a Psychological thesis--it is Theological, insofar as that persistence is a mode of the eternal existence of Deity.  In other words, when he attributes existence to Deity, he is asserting not that it 'is', but that it 'lives', just as does any of its modes.  In this respect, Spinoza is a forerunner of Bergson and other Vitalists.