The Metaphysics of Faith

Part 8, The Loss of Final Causes

Having shared the story about how Cartesian Dualism caused the loss of a participatory metaphysics, in this post I want to tell a parallel story.

Again, the purpose of these historical narrations is to bring the metaphysical assumptions of modernity into view so that we can clearly see the metaphysical loss we have undergone and what needs to be done by way of recovery.

I’ve written a lot about the origin of fact/value split. We’re going to revisit that history again, but I’m going to bring in some additional material we’ve not covered before. We begin with Aristotle’s theory of causes.

In his Physics, Aristotle describes four different causes that give us knowledge of the world. This vision of Aristotelian science was replaced by modern science during the Scientific Revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries.

So, what were Aristotle’s four causes? They were:

1. The Material Cause: What something is made of.

2. The Formal Cause: The essence of something and the blueprint, shape, or pattern that flows from and expresses that nature or identity

3. The Efficient Cause: What causes something to to come into existence.

4. The Final Cause: The purpose and goal for which something exists.

I expect that you don’t want a lecture on Aristotelian science, but we need to know enough to describe how Aristotle’s vision of causality was changed during the Scientific Revolution.

As you look at Aristotle’s list, two of the causes will seem quite plain and obvious to you--material and efficient causes. To know what something is made of and what caused it to come into existence is the very stuff of science. Material causality is what we mean by reductionism, breaking something down into smaller and smaller constituent parts. For example, the human person can be reduced from organs to tissues to cells to molecules to atoms to elementary particles. And each level of material reduction is its own branch of science, from biology to chemistry to physics.

Beyond material causality, we also understand efficient causality. Causes have effects and effects have causes. Scientific investigation involves teasing out this chain of cause and effect. Where material causality creates reductionism, efficient causality creates determinism. And our mechanistic imagination of the natural world, as described in the last post, flows from a combination of the two. Reductionism + Determinism = Mechanism.

Summarizing, modern science was created by focusing exclusively upon two of Aristotle’s four causes. Science only investigates material and efficient causality. Formal and final causality were left behind.

Why was formal and final causality lost, and what was suffered with that loss?

Getting your head around formal causality can be tricky. I’m not exactly sure I have it completely down. But the basic idea, as best as I can put it, is that if you know the identity or essence of a thing, you’ll know the form it has or will take. For example, if you know that an acorn is the seed of an oak you know what form that acorn will take as it grows. The acorn’s essence determines its form. The point for our purposes is that modern science abandoned the Aristotelian belief that natural things possess an inner essence or identity (“treeness” or “oakness”).

Final causality was also abandoned. This is the part of the story I’ve told before, how the loss of final causality (teleology) created the fact/value split. Specifically, if you know what something is for you can determine if something is good. But with a rejection of final causality, values were severed from facts. Normative judgments were no longer tethered to empirical observations.

Also, by restricting itself to material and efficient causality science turned toward the past, reasoning backwards in time from effects to prior causes. This broke with how Aristotelian science faced the future in its examination of the ends to which all things were moving. And while this gave modern science great power in answering our How? and What? questions, we lost our ability to answer existential Why? questions.

In short, in rejecting final causality modern science created both moral relativism and existential nihilism.

Now, this conversation has been about Aristotle. Where does the Neoplatonic, participatory metaphysics we’ve been discussing fit in?

Again, formal causality concerns the essence of things, their form and pattern. In Neoplatonic thought, these essences and forms of things are intelligible patterns that emanate from the One and reside in the Divine Intellect. These forms serve as the archetypes of things, and the visible world reflects them as imperfect images. In Christian Neoplatonic thought, the essences and forms of created things are ideas within the Divine Logos who provides the blueprint and rational order of creation. Simply put, created things are ideas in God’s Mind and these ideas give created things their identity.

Concerning final causality, recall how Neoplatonic and Christian Neoplatonic thought described a return to the One. Human persons are moving toward their purpose and goal, which is God. Divine participation is our telos. Theosis is our end.

Stepping back, we can see the impact of the loss of formal and final causality. We have lost the view that created things reflect and participate in the mind (Logos) or wisdom (Sophia) of God. We also have lost the view that our existence is purposive, that we have a meaningful future ahead of us. And while all this discussion about Aristotle might seem abstract and philosophical, this discussion helps us hone in on modern metaphysical assumptions that fragilize faith and promote disenchantment. Specifically, an exclusive focus upon material and efficient causality evacuates the world of sacred intelligibility, divine connection, and cosmic destiny. Given this, a recovery of a participatory metaphysics would involve two things.

First, we need to perceive created existence as reflective of and participating in the Logos. This is the vision of John 1 and Colossians 1. Through the Logos “all things were created” and in the Logos all things “hold together.” From the Russian sophiological tradition, we perceive Divine Wisdom flowing through and sustaining the world.

Second, we need to recover a teleological perspective. We aren’t a cosmic accident at the end of a long chain of random causal events and facing a blank future. Rather, we are future-oriented creatures. Our existence is purposive. We are moving toward our End. We are on the journey Home.