This throng of causes, defined by Aristotle and by Plato, embraces either too much or too little.
For if they regard as "causes" of an object that is to be made everything without which the object cannot be made, they have named too few. Time must be included among the causes; for nothing can be made without time. They must also include place; for if there be no place where a thing can be made, it will not be made. And motion too; nothing is either made or destroyed without motion. There is no art without motion, no change of any kind.
Now, however, I am searching for the first, the general cause; this must be simple, inasmuch as matter, too, is simple. Do we ask what cause is? It is surely Creative Reason—in other words, God.
For those elements to which you referred are not a great series of independent causes; they all hinge on one alone, and that will be the creative cause.
Do you maintain that form is a cause? This is only what the artist stamps upon his work; it is part of a cause, but not the cause.
Neither is the pattern a cause, but an indispensable tool of the cause. His pattern is as indispensable to the artist as the chisel or the file; without these, art can make no progress. But for all that, these things are neither parts of the art, nor causes of it.
"Then," perhaps you will say, "the purpose of the artist, that which leads him to undertake to create something, is the cause." It may be a cause; it is not, however, the efficient cause, but only an accessory cause. But there are countless accessory causes; what we are discussing is the general cause.
Now the statement of Plato and Aristotle is not in accord with their usual penetration, when they maintain that the whole Universe, the perfectly wrought work, is a cause. For there is a great difference between a work and the cause of a work.
—from Seneca, Moral Letters 65
People will generally assume that philosophy is quite useless for everyday life, and yet I have found the exercise of philosophy, in the sense of a constant critical reflection on my own judgments, to be the most eminently practical tool at my disposal. How well I manage all the pesky little bits is entirely determined by how well I get my overall thinking in order.
One part of this is making sure that I can define my terms, or put more concretely, that I know what I mean, as precisely as I am able. The devil is in the details. So, if you ask me why something is so, I will first ask myself how to wrap my head around the nature of a cause, well before I go rattling off a long list of origins.
I admire the way Seneca questions the usual Platonic and Aristotelian premises, and thereby shows how he is making his own way. Sometimes we use terms far too broadly, in which case we include too much, and sometimes we use terms far too narrowly, in which case we include too little.
Perhaps we are so impressed by the seeming multiplicity of causes that we overlook the purity and the simplicity of a common source.
If a cause is anything that somehow contributes to the way something presents itself, then absolutely everything ends up being a cause. Plato and Aristotle would have to add far more components to their models.
And if we are so caught up in tabulating these many influences, we have neglected the necessity of a cause being a unifying principle, the ultimate instead of the proximate. Plato and Aristotle would have to go deeper to a common beginning.
Simply put, any quality or characteristic, or what the Ancients sometimes called a category, helps to describe an identity, and if a cause is what adds to that definition, then our list of causes grows longer and longer. We must now add time, place, motion, and so on, as further causes.
All the while, we are so busy with what Seneca calls the accessory causes that we have forgotten about a general cause. We are missing the forest for the trees. The artist, for example, lays out his plans with a pattern in mind, and he imposes a specific form on the matter, and he does so with a certain goal, yet while all of these are stages of the process, none of these are the agent that is actually doing the making or the creating.
In asserting the primacy of an efficient cause, Seneca is defending a distinctly Stoic view of the Universe, where the order to be found in Nature is the direct result of Creative Reason, of God. It is necessary to discern the presence of such a Grand Design, however imperfectly and indirectly, if we are going to make sense of our own parts within the workings of the whole.
Yes, it is good to speak of all the elements that go together in building the aspects of our world, as Plato and Aristotle rightly do, but it is even better to return back to the source. The relative must be measured by the absolute, the consequent must be judged by means of the precedent, and the tools must be placed in the hands of the craftsman. We do ourselves a disservice by focusing on the pieces without asking who arranged the puzzle.
I am disappointed when I see attempts at a “contemporary” Stoicism that denies the guiding role of Providence, simply because it happens to go against the intellectual fashions of the moment. We are then left with only a “life hack” for gaining the usual worldly vanities, and thereby divorce human nature from its Divine harmony.
Man without God, or a creature without a Creator, is really nothing at all. I return to the importance of perceiving the primary cause both in theory and in practice, since my view of what is great is what gives meaning to my appreciation of what is small. Seneca stresses the complete dependence of our mortal lives on God, so that we might more fully know who we are.
I probably refer to it far too often, but it once again reminds me of one of my favorite passages, from Book 7 of Augustine’s Confessions:
And I viewed the other things below You, and perceived that they neither altogether are, nor altogether are they not.
They are, indeed, because they are from You.
But they are not, because they are not what You are.
For that truly is which remains immutably.
The Stoic certainly does not need to be a Christian, or an adherent of any particular faith, but I think it no accident that Stoicism is also so compatible with all genuine religion, precisely because Stoicism is inherently theistic.
Though a more thorough reflection is best saved for another time, I will briefly add that the Stoic teaching of pantheism, or perhaps panentheism, depending upon how we are using our terms, is yet another aspect of this reverence for the totality. All that exists is reducible to the One, and it can only be said to be real insofar it participates in the One.
All sectarian bickering aside, I honestly believe that Augustine would agree, as would any lover of wisdom who is on a quest for the fountainhead.
—Reflection written in 7/2013
