A Bellowing Ox and a Roaring Lion - part three

Thomas Aquinas' Five Ways to Prove the Existence of God

The Second Way: Efficient Cause.

'The second way is taken from the nature of efficient cause. We find there to be in sensible things an order of efficient causes such that it is never found to be nor is it possible that something is the efficient cause of itself; for then it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Now it is not possible to proceed to infinity in efficient causes, because in all efficient causes that are ordered, the primary is the cause of the intermediate and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate, whether the intermediate causes are many or only one. Now, remove the cause and one removes the effect. Therefore, if there is no primary cause in efficient causes, there will be neither an ultimate nor an intermediate. But if one proceeds to infinity in efficient causes, there will be no primary efficient cause, and thus there will be no ultimate effect, nor intermediate efficient causes, which is evidently false. Therefore, it is necessary to posit some primary efficient cause, which everyone calls 'God'.'

- Thomas Aquinas, (1225–1274), 'Summa Theologica' 

This seemingly straightforward argument is anything but, complications abound over the nature of Aristotle's, (384 – 322 BC), efficient cause. Beginning with a presentation of the order in efficient causality, Thomas proceeds to consider the order in a series of efficient causes and thence connects the two together and denies an infinite regress of efficient causes thereby arriving at a primary cause, which we call God. Aristotle identified four kinds of causes, formal, (the essence of the object), efficient, (the source of the objects principle of change or stability), material, (that out of which the object is made), and final, (the end or goal of the object, or what it is good for), each supposedly answering a specific kind of why question hence they were posited as offering an explanation of some phenomena, for as Thomas said in his commentary on Aristotle's Physics: 'We do not take it that we know something unless we have grasped the why?, which is to grasp the cause'. An effect in the context of any of these four causes is taken to be derived from and dependent upon the cause in question and given that causal context the derivation and dependency of the effect on the cause is contextualized accordingly. 'Those things are called causes', said Thomas, 'on which things depend for their being or their becoming ... A cause is said as that from which something comes to be'.

Thomas' proof proceeds from a consideration of the nature of efficient causality, that is, to say, of the order that is followed in efficient causes and ascertains whether or not the logic of that order entails that there cannot be an infinite regress in efficient causes, and accordingly the order that is characteristic of efficient causes is such that the cause always precedes its effect, and this is because given the mode of causality the being of the effect is derived from that of the cause, so that it could never be the case that one could have the being of the effect without the cause from which it is derived. Having presented the order essential to efficient causality, Thomas then goes on to deny the possibility of proceeding to infinity in efficient causes that are ordered to each other, for what he means by efficient causes that are ordered is a series of efficient causes all of which operate in tandem so to speak to generate some effect, and in a finite ordered series of efficient causes the primary is the cause of the intermediate and the intermediate the cause of the ultimate thereby producing the effect, so all causes operate in tandem to produce the ultimate effect and such is the case whether or not the intermediate causes are one or are many.

Having presented the order obtaining amongst ordered efficient causes, Thomas then proceeds to connect the latter up with the nature of efficient causality itself, for in efficient causality the being of the effect depends upon that of the cause, so that the effect cannot precede the cause, but the being of the cause must precede that of the effect, from which it follows that in efficient causality without the cause there is no effect, (which may seem a trivial point but see below), that is to say, remove the cause and one removes the effect. And so in an ordered series of efficient causes the ultimate depends for its being upon the intermediate and the intermediate upon the primary, so that without the primary cause there is no intermediate and without the intermediate there is no ultimate, but in an infinite series there is no primary cause otherwise it would be finite. Hence if there were an infinite series of efficient causes there would neither be intermediate nor ultimate causes but this is evidently false hence there must be some primary efficient cause without which there is no intermediate or ultimate and this we call God.

'Development of a Bottle in Space', 1913, Umberto Boccioni 

Richard Dawkins answers that:

Richard Dawkins, (1941 - ), in 'The God Delusion', wrote: 'The five 'proofs' asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century don't prove anything, and are easily - though I hesitate to say so, given his eminence - exposed as vacuous. The first three are just different ways of saying the same thing, and they can be considered together. All involve an infinite regress - the answer to a question raises a prior question, and so on ad infinitum. ... [The second way]: The Uncaused Cause. Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect has a prior cause, and again we are pushed back into regress. This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call God'.

Edward Feser answers that:

Catholic philosopher Edward Feser, (1968), concurs that the first three ways end up in the same place with the Aristotelian conception of God as pure actuality with no potentiality but they start from a different place, the first way starting from the Aristotelian analysis of change as the actualisation of a potentiality an argument from change but the second starting from the Aristotelian efficient cause, the generating cause of the thing which is a more specific idea than the idea of change. Thomas does not quite say that every effect has a prior cause and atheists (which Feser seems to think are a homogenised collective) argue that with this kind of argument every effect has a cause is a trivial claim because why would you call it an effect unless you know it already has a cause? Thomas' claim is that things that come into being have efficient causes but he does not characterise it as everything has a cause and Dawkins' every effect has a cause is a straw man.

And how can we get to the divine attributes from the second way? Well, Feser notes that Thomas and other Scholastic philosophers frequently employed the principle agere sequitur esse ('action follows being'), the basic idea of which is that what a thing does necessarily reflects what it is, so eyes and ears function differently because they are structured differently and plants take in nutrients, grow, and reproduce while stones do none of these things because the former are living things and the latter are inanimate. And so on. The principle agere sequitur esse can be understood as an application, in the context of what Aristotelian philosophers designate formal causes, (see above), of the basic idea that the principle of proportionate causality (whatever is in an effect must in some way pre-exist in the total cause of that effect) expresses with respect to efficient causes. An efficient cause is that which brings about the existence of something or a change in something, and the principle of proportionate causality tells us that whatever is in the thing that changes or comes to exist must in some way have been in the total set of factors that brought about this change or existent, which is to say, the effect cannot go beyond the cause. A formal cause is the nature of a thing, that which makes it the kind of thing it is, for instance, being a rational animal is the nature of a human being (yes, truly) and the characteristic attributes and activities of a thing flow or follow from its nature, as, for instance, the use of language flows from the nature of human beings as rational animals. The principle agere sequitur esse in effect says that these attributes and activities cannot go beyond that nature, any more than an effect can go beyond its efficient cause, hence, a stone cannot exhibit attributes and activities like nutrition, growth, and reproduction, because these go beyond the nature of a stone, anything that could do such things would not be a stone in the first place.

The principle agere sequitur esse, like the principle proportionate causality, follows from the principle of sufficient reason, (everything must have a reason, cause, or ground or an explanation, in effect it is a demand for thoroughgoing intelligibility). If an effect could go beyond its total efficient cause then the part of the effect that went beyond it would have no explanation and be unintelligible, and likewise if a thing’s activities could go beyond its nature, if, for instance, a stone could take in nutrients or use language, then this activity would lack an explanation and be unintelligible, though of course, a thing can in a sense go beyond its nature if someone makes it do so, for instance, the bits of wood that make up a puppet can move when the puppeteer makes them do so even though they cannot move on their own, but the point is precisely that they cannot do so on their own, it is their doing so on their own which would violate the principle that agere sequitur esse.

The principle of proportionate causality Feser contends is implicit even in the argumentation of some naturalistic (all beings and events in the universe whatever their inherent character might be are natural and so all knowledge of the universe falls within the pale of scientific investigation) philosophers who are otherwise unsympathetic with the metaphysical views defended by thinkers like Thomas, and this is also true of the principle that agere sequitur esse, and Thomas himself deploys this principle when arguing that the human soul can persist beyond the death of the body, reasoning thus: intellectual activity, which is among the human soul's activities, is (so Thomas holds, on independent grounds) essentially immaterial but for a material thing to carry out an immaterial activity would violate the principle that agere sequitur esse so the human soul must be an immaterial thing and since immaterial things have, unlike material things, no natural tendency to decay the soul does not go out of existence when the material body does. A materialist may well disagree with the claim that intellectual activity is immaterial but the point is that even a materialist can agree that if intellectual activity were immaterial then the thing which carries out that activity would itself have to be immaterial.

For Feser the second way is reminiscent of the existential proof of Thomas' 'De ente et essentia' ('Being and Essence') whereby Thomas begins by arguing that the essence of a thing is really distinct from its being or existence, hence a further principle is needed to explain why the thing actually exists, and since the existence of something cannot be accounted for internally by its essence a suitable extrinsic principle is needed that can make the essence actually exist, which is to say, anything the existence of which is really distinct from its essence depends upon something else for its existence, such things need a cause of their being, but for Thomas what has essence from another ultimately depends upon what has essence in itself, otherwise a vicious infinite regress would follow, hence there must be something that is esse tantum, being itself, which is the primary cause of being for everything else, and this is what we understand God to be. The existential proof presupposes Thomas' doctrine of the real distinction between essence and existence in everything other than God and the proof seeks to show that nothing in which essence and existence are distinct could exist even for an instant unless there is something in which essence and existence are identical, something which just is ipsum esse subsistens, subsistent being itself conjoining its essence to an act of existence and thereby maintaining it in being. And understanding the second way in light of this approach suggests to Feser the following reconstruction of it (at least this time there aren't 49 premises, (see my article A Bellowing Ox and a Roaring Lion part two):

1. That efficient causation is a real feature of the world is evident from sensory experience.

2. Nothing can be the efficient cause of itself.

3. The existence of any natural substance S at any given moment presupposes that its essence is concurrently being conjoined to an act of existence.

4. If S itself were somehow conjoining its own essence to an act of existence, it would be the efficient cause of itself.

5. So there must be some concurrent efficient cause C distinct from S which is conjoining S’s essence to an act of existence.

6. C’s own existence at the moment it conjoins S’s essence to an act of existence presupposes either (a) that C’s essence is concurrently being conjoined to an act of existence, or (b) that in C essence and existence are identical.

7. If C’s existence at the moment it conjoins S’s essence to an act of existence presupposes that C’s own essence is concurrently being conjoined to an act of existence, then there exists a regress of concurrent conjoiners of essences and acts of existence that is either infinite or terminates in something whose essence and existence are identical.

8. But such a regress of concurrent conjoiners of essence and existence would constitute a causal series ordered per se, and such a series cannot regress infinitely.

9. So either C’s own essence and existence are identical, or there is something else whose essence and existence are identical which terminates the regress of concurrent conjoiners of essences with acts of existence.

10. So the existence of S at any given moment presupposes the existence of something in which essence and existence are identical.

The argument for an uncaused cause as understood by Feser essentially makes a separate argument of this second more concrete conceptualization of the actualizing of S which holds that S's essence and hence S itself is merely potential until that essence is conjoined with an act of existence. But if S or S's essence did this conjoining then S would be the cause of itself, which is impossible, hence the conjoining must be done by some cause C distinct from S, but the distinction between S’s essence and existence that this presupposes is as real after S first comes into existence as it was before, and for S or S's essence to conjoin S's essence to an act of existence even after S first comes into existence would be for S to cause itself, which is no less impossible after S already exists than before, hence the conjoining of S's essence and existence by a cause distinct from S must be maintained at any moment S exists.

'Obviously', says Feser, (forgetting that a philosopher should never say of anything that it is 'obvious'), 'the temporal language here ('until', 'after', 'before') is to be understood metaphorically, as implying relations of ontological rather than temporal priority or posteriority'. Very convenient, I am not sure what a metaphorical before and after amounts to though nor what is so obvious about it. But Feser believes the five ways thus understood can deal with the problem of existential inertia, a thesis that holds that once in existence the natural world tends to remain in existence without need of a divine conserving cause, as opposed to the doctrine of divine conservation against which it is frequently alleged that the defenders of said doctrine have failed to provide arguments in favour of it and against the doctrine of existential inertia, but according to Feser when properly understood the traditional theistic arguments summed up in Thomas' five ways can themselves be seen to be, or at the very least to imply, arguments against existential inertia and in favour of divine conservation.

I answer that:

The problem here is that despite the appearance of philosophical complexity and sophistication both Thomas and Feser have taken from Aristotle a conception of causation that is far too simplistic to say the least and that makes their arguments appear much stronger than they really are which is not all that strong in the first place. We need to go in deeper. Unfortunately, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, (1770 - 1831) never addresses the argument from efficient causation directly, (he only gives Thomas a brief mention in the 'History of Philosophy'), otherwise I could simply reproduce what he says here but instead I am going to have to do some work and apply what Hegel says about causation to Thomas' arguments. First, however, I wish I were better read in Aristotle because some things Feser says about efficient causation seem to go against what Aristotle seems to be saying and yet that may just be me missing something. The efficient cause is defined by Aristotle as the cause of motion or the initiator of change, the energy or moving force required to bring about change, and by motion Aristotle means not merely change of place but change of any sort, the efficient cause is the cause of all change, as Aristotle puts it the efficient cause is 'that whence comes the origin of change' or 'that whence the change comes', while the less complex phrase 'origin of change' may be applied to other causes besides the efficient cause. But Aristotle’s efficient cause can vary considerably, and something that can be employed to explain anything explains nothing. Sometimes it is a substance like the sculptor is the efficient cause of a statue but sometimes it is the art of sculpting itself, sometimes a raid is the efficient cause of a war, or hard work the efficient cause of fitness, or the soul the efficient cause of motion and the inner nature of a thing. In addition Aristotle's efficient cause is a correlate of change and not of being and he characterizes it as 'that from which movement originates' and it cannot be interpreted as 'that which gives existence', and yet for Thomas and Feser there is a primary (efficient) cause of being for everything else and this is what we understand God to be.

And of course to complicate matters further Aristotle merges the four causes, in effect reducing the four causes to two, that is to say, the formal and material causes, that is, the formal, efficient and final causes 'often coincide' and the emphasis is upon internal and immanent finality rather than external finality for according to Aristotle the formal cause of the thing is normally its final cause as well, the formal cause of a horse is the specific form of a horse and yet this is its final cause as well for the individual of a species naturally strives to embody as perfectly as possible the specific form in question, and such natural striving afterer the form means that the final, formal and efficient causes are usually the same, in virtue of the fact that it is the final cause itself which moves by attraction, and the same applies to that which is generated artificially given that 'from art proceed the things of which the form is in the soul of the artist'. As in the case of building of a house, the form, or design, of the house, if not the blueprint, must to begin with be present in the mind of the artificer prior to it being realized in the appropriate matter, the form in the mind of the artificer impels him or her to act and hence it is the efficient cause, the ideally conceived form of the artifact is the final and efficient cause in the artist's process of production, at one time the goal the impulse. In brief four principles are reduced to two, which is to say, to matter and form, and such a reduction occurs with the merging of formal, efficient and final causes to the single conception of form, thereby leaving only the material cause unreduced to any other, hence what remains is only one dyad of direct opposites, matter and form.

Hegel develops the concept of causality from out of the concept of substance, the 'original thing or matter' that passes over into its accidents, (the special way in which substance exists, and thus produces or posits an effect for the substance is in perpetual activity, generating and dissolving its accidents, hence substance is power, which posits and distinguishes from itself determinations which nevertheless belong to it and can be considered as transcended substantiality, hence substance is cause and its accidents effects, this is formal causality. 'Cause is primary in relation to its effect while the effect is posited and it is as cause that substance first has actuality but then the cause is manifested in the effect as whole substance since the actuality which substance has as cause it has only in its effect, hence we arrive at the necessary relationship between cause and effect, hence the cause is truly actual and self-identical only in its effect and the effect is necessary in virtue of the fact that it is the manifestation of the cause or is this necessity which is cause. Consequently, neither the effect nor the cause contains anything that the other does not, or to put it another way, there is nothing in the cause that is not also in the effect and conversely nothing in the effect that is not also in the cause which leads us to the implicit identity of cause and effect, that is, cause and effect are implicitly identical in two respects, logically and in reality, firstly, cause is cause only in so far as it has an effect, and likewise effect is efect only in so far as it has a cause, cause and effect as such imply each other hence the concept of a cause and of an effect are logically inseparable.

Secondly, there is a non-logical or real identity between the cause and its effect, for instance 'rain is the cause of wetness' whereby when rain makes the ground wet the wetness of the ground is not distinct from the rain that produced it, indeed it is merely the rain in a different form, and similarly the cause of a colour is a colouring agent, a pigment, which is one and the same actuality, and similarly if the motion of a body is considered as effect then its cause is a propulsive force. In all such cases the same fact presents itself once as cause and again as effect, once as something subsisting on its own account, and again as positedness or determination in another, hence through this identity of content such causality is an analytic proposition, indeed, the very distinction between a cause and its effect, formal causality, is the enterprise of a subjective understanding, and rather than there being any issue of the connection of two objects there is in actuality only a single fact or content which the understanding analyses into its constituent moments.

Cause and effect have in principle the same content, that is, the identity of cause and effect, consequently out of consideration is the causation of one event by another as dependent upon a causal law or rule, for cause and effect are not distinct but at bottom the same and no rule or law is needed to bring about their connection. Furthermore the application of the relation of causality to relations of physico-organic and spiritual life is not allowed for there the putative cause most assuredly manifests itself as having a different content from the effect, nonetheless that which acts upon a living being is independently determined, changed and transformed by it, in virtue of the fact that the living thing does not let the cause come to its effect, which is to say, it sublates (overcomes and assimilates) it as cause. For instance we cannot claim food to be the cause of blood nor certain dishes to be the cause of fever. And consider causality in history, (a series of efficient causes is historical after all) we can hardly grant that the Ionic climate was the cause of the works of Homer, (c. 8th cent. BC), albeit he derived inspiration from it, it was an external stimulus for him, he simply responded to it in his own peculiar manner. And the climate did not inspire everyone to compose an 'Iliad' or an 'Odyssey', nor was the ambition of Julius Caesar, (100 – 44 BC), the cause of the fall of the Republic in Rome, rather the Republic made the ambition the occasion of its downfall, as it might have used other objects or events to the same end had this not been available, given that in history spiritual masses and individuals are in play and in reciprocal determination with one another. for it is the nature of Spirit not to receive into itself another original entity nor let a cause continue itself into it but to break it off and to change its nature into something else.

The application of causality to the spiritual life is impermissible given the relation to the identity of cause and effect, in so far as the relation of cause and effect is granted albeit , although improperly the effect cannot be greater than the cause for the effect is nothing more than the manifestation of the cause, on the other hand it is a commonplace in history to assume great effects arise from small causes and to cite an anecdote as the primary cause of a comprehensive and profound event, but in fact the putative cause should rather be considered as a mere occasion, an external stimulus, of which the inner spirit of the event had no need or could have used a countless host of other such in order to manifest itself. Indeed, just the reverse is true, such a petty and contingent circumstance could be the occasion of the event only because the latter has determined it to be such, hence it is an error to regard relatively minor events as the causes of great ones for such minor events are only some of the factors or conditions of causation, or provide only the external stimulus or occasion for the great one. Furthermore, in the case of minds and societies such an external impact is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of what results from it, a person or a society may, in view of its will power and its creative inner nature, react in dissimilar ways to any given impact and it may well exploit different events or objects in order to achieve the same result, hence an impact is at best an occasion or an external stimulus and the inner spirit of a person or a society makes it into an occasion.

'Le forze della curva', 1930, Tullio Crali

The significant point to note in the context of this discussion on Thomas' second way is that the distinction between cause and effect is the work of the subjective understanding, a considerable problem for the second way if not the first also. How so? We need to dig even more deeply and alongside the notion of causality bring in that of reciprocity too. And further, causality is inapplicable to spiritual life so can God be an efficient cause albeit the ultimate one. And here Thomas and Thomists like Feser fudge the issue, God is the explanation of all the change that is occurring right at this very moment, an actual cause with no potential whatever that means. So let us keep on grinding away at causality and as we grind and grind the argument from efficient causation is ground into dust. Hegel's usual term for a cause's producing an effect is setzen, to posit, but his use of it is not restricted to causality and he distinguishes the relation from seemingly similar relations, ground and consequent, force and expression, condition and conditioned. Ground and condition have a logical as well as a real use for they refer to the entailment of one proposition by another, as well as to the dependence of one event upon another, and ground, as understood by Gottfried Leibniz, (1646 – 1716)'s usage, included the purpose or final cause of a thing while Hegel dinguished this sharply from efficient or mechanical causes (Ursache), which is to say, such relations have wider application than causality. Unlike a cause a force is conceived as general rather than as a particular event, and as underlying or hidden rather than overt, just as my flipping a switch causes a light to go on while electricity is the force that underlies, makes possible, and is expressed in, the production of this effect but which is also involved in many other events of diverse types.

And so the concept of causality develops out of that of substance, the 'original thing or matter', (Ursache, from out of or originating from the thing, sache) that passes over into its accidents and thus produces or posits an effect but cause and effect are implicitly identical for there is nothing in the cause that is not also in the effect and conversely nothing in the effect that is not also in the cause, hence what was first the effect is itself a cause and has an effect of its own, while conversely what was first the cause is itself an effect and has a further cause of its own, and so we move from the single substance producing its accidents to an endless series of causes and effects. Or to put it another way when the cause produces its effect the cause disappears entirely into the effect and the effect is thus not simply an effect but is itself the 'original matter', that is to say, the Ursache or cause which produces an effect, (Wirkung, which can mean either what is effected or produced or the effecting of it, in the sense of two or more substances interacting, reciprocally). A passive effect is at once active or productive in that once produced the effect is an independent actuality, capable of generating effects of its own.

The doctrine that neither the cause nor the effect contains anything that the other does not can be in two different ways. First, in virtue of the very concepts of a cause and of an effect a cause is not a cause unless it has an effect, and an effect is not an effect unless it is the effect of some cause and the concepts of a cause and of an effect are thus logically inseparable. And second, there is a non-logical or real identity between the cause and its effect, for instance as already noted when rain makes the ground wet, the wetness of the ground is not distinct from the rain that produced it but the rain in a different form and cause and effect are the same matter, (Sache), for instance, moisture, first in an original form, and then in the form of positedness. And hence, such an important point that Thomists miss, the very distinction between a cause and its effect is the work of a subjective understanding, a distinction introduced by us into an essentially homogeneous continuum, the causal series upon which Thomists depend are our own work whether they be essential or accidental used to establish an ultimate cause other than one which is also our own work. Immanuel Kant, (1724 - b1804), took causal propositions such as 'rain makes things wet' to be synthetic, (the truth or falsity of them is determinable by recourse to experience), but they are analytic propositions or tautologies, (necessarily true on purely logical grounds and serveing only to elucidate meanings already implicit in the subject. its truth thereby guaranteed by the principle of contradiction). Hold on a minute you may be thinking, it is not inconceivable that rain should leave things dry, there is no logical contradiction in claiming so, but in virtue the principle that an effect has the same content as its cause the dryness would not count as an effect of the rain albeit the rain would still not have made things wet. Perhaps what is analytic is not 'rain makes things wet' but 'if rain has any effect then it makes things wet' though then it may be objected that the principle that cause and effect have the same content is at best vague. Hegel concurs that such cases as a person's painting a canvas or the propulsion of one moving object by another are less amenable to the principle given that the painter and a moving object, unlike the rain, contain many features that do not pass over into their effects, but the painter and the object are only causes in respect of those of their features that do reappear in the effect.

The principle that cause and effect have the same content has two consequences for an account of causality. Kant was mistaken to suppose that the causation of one event by another is dependent on a causal law or rule since cause and effect are not distinct, but at bottom the same and no rule or law, as noted above, is required to govern their connection. Laws do figure in Hegel's account of appearance (Erscheinung), about which I need to produce a separate article, but not of causality. Furthermore, also as noted above, causality does not apply to all phenomena, in particular, it does not apply to living or to spiritual entities. 'He who will know fully the vanity of man', said Blaise Pascal, (1623 – 1662), 'has only to consider the causes and effects of love. The cause is a je ne sais quoi [Pierre Corneille, (1606 – 1684), and the effects are dreadful. This je ne sais quoi, so small an object that we cannot recognise it, agitates a whole country, princes, armies, the entire world. Cleopatra's nose: had it been shorter, the whole aspect of the world would have been altered. Vanity. -The cause and the effects of love: Cleopatra'. But Cleopatra's nose did not cause the fall of the Roman Republic, as a living and spiritual entity Cleopatra did not admit another original entity into herself (well apart from Caesar and Mark Antony, (83 BC – 30 BC) and no doubt many more less celebrated ones) or let a cause continue into her but she would break it off and transform it.

And so, what a living organism, a mind or a society makes of some external impact upon it differs too much in content from the external object itself to count as an effect of that object. 'Heaps of Pearl, Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels, All scattered in the bottom of the sea'. (William Shakespeare, (1564 – 1616), 'Richard III'). But a pearl is not the effect of the grain of sand. And furthermore, in the case of minds and societies, if not of living organisms generally, such an external impact is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of what results from it, for a person or a society may in view of its creative inner nature respond in different ways to any given impact and it may make use of different events or objects in order to achieve the same result and hence an impact is at most an occasion or an external stimulus and is made into an occasion by the inner Spirit of a person or a society. The Roman Republic made Cleopatra's nose the occasion of its downfall (although I would have thought it was some other part of her anatomy that was used on occasion). It could have used other object or event to the same end had it not been available but Cleopatra was certainly available nose and all.

Cause and effect are inseparable, in producing an effect, the cause makes itself into a cause and is thus the cause of itself and also the effect of itself, cause and effect thereby reverse their roles, the effect is a cause since only its occurrence makes the cause a cause, and conversely the cause is an effect since it is made a cause by its effect. But the understanding attempts somewhat contradictorily to separate the cause and effect as distinct events, and when they are thus separated the reciprocal relation of cause and effect expresses itself as an infinite regress and an infinite progression and any cause is the effect not of its own effect, but of some further cause, and any effect is the cause not of its own cause, but of some further effect. This false or bad infinity (bad because it can never be realised) is unstable, one cannot for instance fully explain an event if its causal antecedents regress to infinity and gives way to the relation of action and reaction, or, more explicitly, of reciprocity, in which two or more substances interact in such a way that the states of the one are both the cause and the effect of the states of the other. Cause and effect are thus brought into the intimate, reciprocal relation that their formal or logical relation requires, a relation closer to the circularity of true infinity than to the bad infinite regress, and the logical superiority of reciprocity makes it more fitting for the understanding of higher, which is to say, biological and social, phenomena than is unidirectional causality (such as the series of efficient causality. The different organs of an animal or the customs and the political constitution of a people more likely reciprocally affect each other rather than one is simply the effect of the other, but to explain x in terms of y, and y in terms of x, though correct as far as it goes, cannot provide a satisfactory explanation of either x or y, and what is needed for this is a third entity which embraces both x and y, namely, the concept of the entity, for instance, the organism or society, of which x and y are aspects.

'Aerial Machine', 1980, Tullio Crali

While the first way considered causal phenomena and relations from the point of view of the effect or body acted upon the second way considers the process from the end starting from the movers rather than the moved and so they are very different. Furthermore the second way takes within its consideration things that are not movers in the sense of the first way, the father of a child is not a mover of a child given that he does not change the child but brings him into existence, but while not causing a change in the child he causes a change in the world for he begets the child by giving a new form to pre-existing material. Aristotle believed in an ever-lasting material universe with no beginning and hence all efficient causality is describable as the initiation of change in pre-existing material and so as a movement. but for Thomas there was one efficient cause could act and by that very fact without being a mover, for god created the universe out of nothing.

What does Thomas mean by an order of efficient causes exactly? He makes it clear enough that there is nothing incoherent in the idea of a series going back forever, the series of ancestors of a particular man for instance: 'It is not impossible to go on forever per accidens in a series of efficient causes ... as a smith may act by using many different hammers, per accidens, if one after the other is broken. For it is not essential for any particular hammer to act after the action of another, and it is likewise not essential for any particular man, qua begetter, to be begotten by another man; for he begets qua man, and not qua son of another man ... Hence it is not impossible to go on forever in the series of men begetting men; but such a thing would be impossible if the generation of one man depended on another and on an element, and on the sun, and so on to infinity. It is the second series, man - element - sun, which is the series of efficient causes in themselves. 'Man and the sun beget man', said Thomas, following Aristotle. The series of causes in the second way like the series of movers in the first does not stretch backwards in time but stretches to the heavens simultaneously and it is this series which must terminate with God.

'Man and the sun beget man'. What does that mean? Catholic theologian Herbert McCabe, (1926 – 2001), who I refer to briefly in A Bellowing Ox and a Roaring Lion part one, explains it thus: 'It is not an adequate explanation of the coming to be of a man that there should be another man - if it is puzzling that there should be one man it is no less puzzling that there should be two - there is required a cause of higher order to account for the fact that there are men at all, a cause that there is such a species. Perhaps in modern terms we might substitute the whole order of nature, the course of evolution, and so on, for the sun, but it is in any case clear that it is one thing to ask how it happens that there is a particular species in the world and another to ask about the coming to be of a particular member of it'. Anthony Kenny, (1931 - ), agrees with McCabe's point but believes it to be doubly irrelevant to Thomas' second way, for the latter seeks to explain not the coming to be of a son but the begetting of a father, a furthermore the course of evolution is something in the past whereas the higher-order cause that Thomas means by the sun is a contemporary cause. Catholic theologian Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange, (1877 – 1964), recognised this and explained the passage by saying that without earth, water, air and heat generation life would be impossible: 'Science still agrees that the generation of a child depends upon the father and upon the heat necessary for the conservation of life on earth. This is the empirical basis of the argument'. But, retorts Kenny, this is to make the series of simultaneous causes simply a series of necessary conditions, and then it is no easy matter to see why Thomas should think the series cannot be an endless one for the series of ancestors also is a series of necessary conditions, had my grandfather not existed nor would I, and he grants that this can be infinite.

Thomas believed the sun to be more than a necessary condition of human generation, as he explains the human father in generation to be a tool of the sun. The active qualities of the elements such as heat and cold are insufficient to explain the rise of substantial forms and so there causation must be attributable, following Aristotle, to a mobile active principle 'which by its presence and absence causes the phases of generation and corruption of bodies here on earth'. Such are the heavenly bodies. 'And so whatever begets here below, reproduces its kind as an instrument of a heavenly body'. animal generation is more like a sufficient condition than a necessary one as far as animal generation goes and only where human freedom intervenes is it possible to predict the future from studying the heavenly bodies. Given that there is no bodily organ of intellect and will human behaviour is not entirely predictable from the stars but, as Thomas informs us, most of us do not resist our bodily passions and so astrologers can statistically foretell the outcomes of wars and like events which is why their predictions by and large come true, (I am just reporting what Aquinas says here).

And so, according to Kenny, and this is his reason for rejecting the second way (and not one addressed by Feser, he allows himself to be triggered by Dawkins rather than going for the higher hanging fruit, but then Kenny makes no mention of Hegel's thoughts on causality, perhaps the fruit is just far too high), the series of causes from which the second way begins is vouched for by medieval astrology. Like the first way the second way begins from a series of simultaneous agents and not from a series stretching back in time, but both ways use an equivocation between first meaning earlier and first meaning unpreceded to demonstrate that that series cannot be an infinite one, but whereas the first begins with an indisputable fact about the world the second begins with an archaic fiction.

After our workout with Hegel I hope that all of this, like the discussions conducted by Thomas and Thomists like Feser, (I need not mention Dawkins, reading whom is like reading 'Janet and John' anyway), will seem so superficial or beside the point and failing to get to the heart of the matter. However plausible a theory or doctrine might appear, keep digging, to unearth the prejudices, the presuppositions, the poorly defined concepts, the flaws of reasoning. Once you have read Hegel everything else in philosophy seems merely to be scratching at the surface.

Find out the cause of this effect,

Or rather say, the cause of this defect,

For this effect defective comes by cause.

- William Shakespeare, 'Hamlet'

To be continued ...

'Composizione', 1954, Mario Sironi