These influences were synthesized and refined by the Romans, who were largely eclectic in their philosophizing but who favored Stoic doctrines, particularly in the fatalistic aspects of their philosophies (see fate and fatalism). For him, motion in the cosmos is an effect of pure chance, stable enough for practical living, but prevented by the clinamen from being a rigid destiny oppressing men. Opposed to their view was the teaching of epicurus, who posited the clinamen, or principle of deviation within the atomic realm. Providence is the inexorable and immutable unfolding of the necessary laws of being of the Logos. Their God was a Logos whose fundamental attribute is providence but they described Him literally as the soul of the corporeal world, entering into composition with its effects. The Stoics assumed much of the terminology of their predecessors but used it in a basically materialist sense (see stoicism). Thomas Aquinas, however, as having conceived the problem of the universe in terms of the causality of its very existence ( Summa Theologiae la, 44.1 –2). Both Plato and Aristotle were seen by St. God is efficient cause of the movement of the first heaven from its movement the rest of the universe revolves, obeying in its processes the rigid laws of finality. Simply because of the divine perfection, providence is so impersonal as to be nonexistent there is no contact with the world, and the finalism averred is fatalistic. His causality is primarily final, since all tendency in nature is toward God as end. But the relations of such an intelligence to the material world are very remote. The life of this First Mover is described as the activity of subsistent intelligence contemplating itself ( Meta. Because such bodies are perfect and eternal, they require a First Mover who is the source of such perfection and thus is pure act.
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In his perception of the exemplarity of Ideas, however, and in the notion of efficient causality producing participations in the world of Ideas, Plato provided themes that were later to be fruitfully developed.Īristotle had an exalted concept of God, but one conditioned by (and perhaps derived from) his conception of the eternity of the heavenly bodies. The kind of efficient causality conceived is imperfect it seems to include a localized contact with effects, making God again a world soul and dependent on higher causes. This is the supreme efficient cause of the world of appearances, but it is subordinated to its exemplar in the world of Ideas and to the Idea of the Good as to a final cause. The demiurge seems to perdure in his explanation of the actual causality of the sensible world.
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The concept of God advanced by plato has been variously evaluated by historians. The concept of the demiurge is to be found too in socrates, for whom God is the organizer of the cosmos and the provident cause of ordered finality. While recognizing in such an Intelligence the source and continuator of order, however, Anaxagoras still thought in terms of a causal contact that was somehow physical and local his Nous was a kind of world soul, a demiurge. This philosopher's concept of the Nous, the intelligent source of the order in things, was a giant step beyond the theories of his materialist predecessors. Only with anaxagoras was a type of divine causality introduced to explain the universe. Early Greek philosophers simply assumed the existence of the world and attempted to explain it through material principles. Historically it is quite evident that until God was known through Christian revelation as the Creator, the divine causality was only partially and hesitatingly grasped. This article restricts itself to God's influence as the agent, or efficient cause, of the existence and activity of His creation and the relationship of secondary causes to His primary causality.Īntiquity. His causality has in fact been expressed in terms of all four causes, pantheists seeing God as immanent and identical with the world, others seeing Him as an extrinsic source affecting the universe through efficient causality and final causality.
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God, however conceived by those who speak of Him, is generally thought of as in some way the cause of the world.