Formal Cause

(T)here is a spiritual dimension to formal causality, as there is to all acts of creation.

(Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Media and Formal Cause: ix)

I am trying to discover for myself what a spiritual causality is and how it works, using statements from the Bahá’í Writings and the four causes of Aristotle.  

The next step is to distinguish the four causes from each other, for there is much confusion about them.  As the giver of definition, formal causality is often called something like the image of the thing to be created conceived by the maker, inventor or artist.  Thus, it is like a blueprint showing how the final cause, the purpose of the thing, can be realized through the efficient cause working upon the material cause.  But it is a mistake to identify the blueprint with the formal cause, just because it seems to be what the builder works from.  The blueprint itself causes nothing.  It is rather the final picture of what is to be the result of many prior causes and actions.  Hence the blueprint idea is actually much closer to the final cause, what pulls the efficient work toward it. 

The final or manifest form in organic being is the end form of that formative process, which is also the fully manifest or mature form of the essential form in matter.  The interaction and union between the formal and final forms, the first or formative and final or teleological causes, provides, also, a regulative function.  That is, the goal of any work  helps decide what to do next, what parts to keep and which to have come to an end, as they move the whole of evolution towards its destined end.  Formal cause is the imprinted pattern to be realized.  It is the beginning of what will become a chain of events to the present.  Final cause suggests the future influencing the present in the sense that it is what a thing is to become that helps determine its present stage of development.  It is the organic constraints upon the spirit.

Because all other causes and forms are within the formal cause, there is, too, a reciprocal relation between the formal cause and the efficient cause, for the efficient cause must takes its direction and authority from the formal cause in order to realize the final cause, and the formal cause must modify and react to the work of the efficient causal agents in their own creativity.  The efficient cause is the work of all humanity responding to the “imperatives” of the morphogenetic form.  The material cause is the established organic forms of social and intellectual existence which must undergo transformation to be aligned with the new morphogenetic or archetypal form.  Now this process goes on at many levels simultaneously, it is a nested hierarchy of fields of development, all proceeding from the original, essential form and all finding coordinated expression in the final form.  In a nested hierarchy, a ground is both ground for other things and is itself but a figure in a larger ground. 

Yet, and it is a BIG yet, as container or ground of all other causes, formal cause is not a part of the order of development.  I said it was the beginning, true, but remember Baha'u'llah speaks of creation as having existed "from the beginning that hath no beginning, apart from its being preceded by a Firstness which cannot be regarded as firstness." (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 140) That is, formal cause does not begin any temporal sequence, for that is the realm of efficient cause moving toward the final cause.  Formal cause is spiritual.  The whole order of development is the realization in organic, temporal form of the formal cause.  One author put it thus: “The ultimate completion and perfection are accordingly not something to be worked out by a cause.  Rather, it is something that is there in its finished and complete perfection before there can be any question of a cause going to work….These effects preexist and are pre-contained long before the causes that produce them go into operation.” (Owens quoted in Media and Formal Cause:60)   The effects are possibilities within the formal cause itself. 

I mean that formal cause does not create results by knocking against anything, by being the first in a sequence of actions upon something other than itself.  Billiard ball metaphors do not capture how it influences creation.   That is efficient causality.  It does so, rather, by Being itself flowing through Its quality of creator and leaving an imprint of light, or code of information, upon creation.  It is a “vibrating influence” as in: “All that is known owes its renown to the splendour of Thy Name, the Most Manifest, and every object is deeply stirred by the vibrating influence emanating from Thine invincible Will.” (Selections from the Writings of the Bab:195)  Traditionally, form actualizes potential, making or forming something into the kind or type of thing that it is.  But existing forms must be trans-formed by further actualizing of their potentials. 

Though, as Baha’u’llah says, everything must have a cause and a builder, He is not speaking of an efficient cause, a cause within time and temporality.  This may be difficult to grasp, because it goes against what is generally considered to be how cause and effect works, which is what material science is based upon.  Material science seeks to establish a strictly physical sequence of causation for all phenomena, which being in time and organic flow this causation can only be linear, sequentially efficient causality, like the mechanized assembly-line that builds our cars.  Efficient causality works on the premise of A before B, where A is both necessary and possibly sufficient to cause B within time. 

Logos or the Word as cosmological formal cause is simply BE.  It starts from the assumption that an energetic, patterned and influential spiritual world precedes, not sequentially but formally, the material, quantitative world of effects.  Spirit is the plane of causation modulating into matter, the Word made flesh.  It is the first principles and laws of spiritual genesis flowing into laws of material generation of the new which is also renewal.  Spiritual causation is not linear and sequential, but formal and simultaneous; “Be and it is”. Like the image appearing in the mirror, the whole reality appears simultaneously and imprints its image upon the mirror.  Spirit is a resonant structure with a vibrating influence.  It is not like painting where the painter laboriously transfers the image in his mind to canvas.  

A closer analogy to spiritual cause is the imaginative causality characteristic of myth.  In myth the formative principle is “let this be”, the “And God said” of the Bible. This is similar to the kind of non-local everything is in everything causality science is now exploring in Quantum Mechanics (sometimes called “the science of possibility”), Chaos Theory, and Complexity science.  It is a fluid metamorphosis of one thing into another, as in a dream, or the everywhere–at-once power of a field to bring forth novelty.

Again, when considered closely, this first form, the Formal Cause, is the animating power animating the final cause and all other causes, for the active force and that which is its recipient are the same yet they are different.  This is the Glorious Structure of the soul’s mysterious relationship with the body at every level of being and every stage of growth.  That is, it is the relationship of the formal cause, (the innate character or imprint that is soul), with the final cause, (the inherited physical character), through the efficient cause, (the character acquired through education, knowledge and learning), to act upon and transform the physical and intellectual material of creation.

A direct link to my book, Renewing the Sacred is http://tinyurl.com/cndew5a It is now also in Kindle

The Eternal Cosmos

Know that it is one of the most abstruse spiritual truths that the world of existence -- that is to say, this endless universe -- has no beginning.

(Abdu'l-Baha, Some Answered Questions:179)

‘Abdu’l-Baha goes on from this statement to say that: “…as the Essence of Unity (that is, the existence of God) is everlasting and eternal -- that is to say, it has neither beginning nor end -- it is certain that this world of existence, this endless universe, has neither beginning nor end. Yes, it may be that one of the parts of the universe, one of the globes, for example, may come into existence, or may be disintegrated, but the other endless globes are still existing; the universe would not be disordered nor destroyed.   On the contrary, existence is eternal and perpetual. As each globe has a beginning, necessarily it has an end because every composition, collective or particular, must of necessity be decomposed. The only difference is that some are quickly decomposed, and others more slowly, but it is impossible that a composed thing should not eventually be decomposed.

It is necessary, therefore, that we should know what each of the important existences was in the beginning -- for there is no doubt that in the beginning the origin was one: the origin of all numbers is one and not two. Then it is evident that in the beginning matter was one, and that one matter appeared in different aspects in each element. Thus various forms were produced, and these various aspects as they were produced became permanent, and each element was specialized. But this permanence was not definite, and did not attain realization and perfect existence until after a very long time. Then these elements became composed, and organized and combined in infinite forms; or rather from the composition and combination of these elements innumerable beings appeared.

This composition and arrangement, through the wisdom of God and His preexistent might, were produced from one natural organization, which was composed and combined with the greatest strength, conformable to wisdom, and according to a universal law. From this it is evident that it is the creation of God, and is not a fortuitous composition and arrangement.

Then it is clear that original matter, which is in the embryonic state, and the mingled and composed elements which were its earliest forms, gradually grew and developed during many ages and cycles, passing from one shape and form to another, until they appeared in this perfection, this system, this organization and this establishment, through the supreme wisdom of God.” (Some Answered Questions: 179-183) 

In its essence Nature is also a metasensible creation: “For example, the power of intellect is not sensible; none of the inner qualities of man is a sensible thing; on the contrary, they are intellectual realities. So love is a mental reality and not sensible; for this reality the ear does not hear, the eye does not see, the smell does not perceive, the taste does not discern, the touch does not feel. Even ethereal matter, the forces of which are said in physics to be heat, light, electricity and magnetism, is an intellectual reality, and is not sensible. In the same way, nature, also, in its essence is an intellectual reality and is not sensible; the human spirit is an intellectual, not sensible reality.” (Some Answered Questions:83)

Thus there are actually two essential states without beginning, the Revelation and Creation, spiritual and material, first and final, whose eternal union forms what Baha’u’llah calls “the B and the E” in a formal sense.  That is the One Message and the one Matter in their primal, original states are locked in eternal embrace, BE; the former continually acting upon the latter, the latter continually receiving the former.

I said that Revelation imprints the first or archetypal form, the essential morphogenetic form, upon the cosmos.  This archetypal imprint of Revelation upon creation is what I call “the received Primal Form”.  Out from this imprinted form comes all life.  In the creational world of change and development, when the “B” and the “E” are joined and knit together that is the manifestation of the pre-existent relation and order.  Forms change and evolve so that past forms are related to present forms, but past forms are “not in the form thou seest today.” 

Last post I quoted Baha’u’llah’s statement that the complementary powers creating the world are the active force and that which is its recipient.  Baha’u’llah says of these two powers and conditions: “These two are the same, yet they are different.”  This is the “Glorious Structure”.  In the world of natural creation, the active force and that which is its recipient mirror the higher revelation/creation union, but with this difference: Active force and its recipient link not just into a formal relationship (these two are the same) but also into an efficient B and E cause and effect relationship of developing sequences in matter, (yet they are different) as the seed and the fruit are connected yet separate states of the same thing.  This is because every Revelation recreates the universe: progressive revelation is also the progressive unfolding of Nature.  No doubt the careful reader sees Aristotle’s four causes—the formal, final, efficient and material causes—at work here     

The formal cause is the active force or seed.  The final cause is the recipient, or fruit, the efficient cause is the tree itself and the material cause is the earth.  The formal cause is the first cause and final cause is the last cause.  The formal cause is inseparable from the final cause because, when considered closely, this first organic form of seed is both formal and final cause, for the active force and that which is its recipient are the same yet they are different.  As Eric McLuhan writes: “Nature and the four causes are one…Formal cause is the ground for the material, efficient and final causes; in that sense, it ‘contains’ all the other causes.”  The formal is the push to the final, the final, the telos, is the pull to itself, yet all comes from the formal because the final is contained within it as part of the ground plan of action, of regulation and coordination of efforts and effects.  Thus the formal is the hidden, archetypal laws of the cosmos—the received Primal Form.  But in the universality of life and definition all the causes are indispensable parts of a single Reality.  But the formal is the exemplar.  That is, formal cause “is not infinite but de-finite.” (Media and Formal Cause:128)  This is the natural cosmological structure.

But cosmological for human beings is not Nature but the union of an outer human social order, whose greatest form is civilization, with the universe within of human thought.  Revelation here is not just divine energy pouring into the molds of the natural world and driving them toward fruition, but divine consciousness enlightening human thought and behavior: i.e. not just energy but intellectual and social pattern.  This pattern is called the Kingdom of God on earth of Christianity. The “pattern laid up in heaven” is Plato’s image for the ideal city of his Republic (“In heaven, I replied, there is laid up a pattern of it, methinks, which he who desires may behold, and beholding, may set his own house in order. But whether such an one exists, or ever will exist in fact, is no matter; for he will live after the manner of that city, having nothing to do with any other.”—Book IX of The Republic).  Augustine had his City of God, Aeneas is said to have founded Rome, “the eternal city”, upon a divine pattern after fleeing Troy, and the construction of the human city upon some sacred pattern was behind the founding of civilization myths of the ancient world.

How Revelation interacts in the human world to build the divine civilization also revolves around Aristotle’s four causes as effects and instruments of spiritual causality, but with the addition of human creativity.

A direct link to my book, Renewing the Sacred is http://tinyurl.com/cndew5a It is now also in Kindle

Spiritual Causality: (Part I) Divine Creative Thought and Will

It is He Who hath called into being the whole of creation, Who hath caused every created thing to spring forth at His behest.

(Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, p. 193)

Last post ended with a brief look at the concept of emergence, stating that emergence is actually two movements; an emerging into the world of time and organic process of a spiritual power, so that an emerging of qualities that were latent and inactive can occur within the organic material world.  What is the spiritual cause of this?  Of course we cannot really know, as it is beyond our ability to grasp.  But we can, by analogy and metaphor, obtain some inkling of it.  “Oh that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a metaphor.”

One way to get a handle on the notion of spiritual causality is to look at what traditional theology calls Logos, the Word or Revelation of God, and its relation to the cosmos.  Theologically, Logos is the cause of the cosmos.  It is what changes the “without form and void” of pure primal matter, which is the One Matter of the alchemists, into forms and life.  But Logos is not something originating from or existing within time or temporal sequence.  It is not part of the cosmos that it forms.   “Know thou, moreover, that the Word of God--exalted be His glory--is higher and far superior to that which the senses can perceive, for it is sanctified from any property or substance. It transcendeth the limitations of known elements and is exalted above all the essential and recognized substances. It became manifest without any syllable or sound and is none but the Command of God which pervadeth all created things. It hath never been withheld from the world of being. It is God's all-pervasive grace, from which all grace doth emanate. It is an entity far removed above all that hath been and shall be.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah:140)

Logos as the manifest divine Utterance is the power to call things into being.  As power to create and then transform creation, Logos makes the thing into what it is essentially, and perpetually builds upon that metaphysical origin and pattern of information in a process of unfolding potentials and capacities.  Naming a thing is the act of spiritually defining it, meaning giving it essential spiritual structure and manifest material existence.  When uttered by the Manifestation, the name is the thing’s individual logos or reality.  Logos is the constitutive utterance.  It gives definition.  This definition is the potential for the thing to evolve as an integrated and progressively unfolding whole. 

The Reality of Logos is outside creation, likewise the “action” of Logos as spiritual cause is also not part of the order of development.  That is, it is not the first step in a linked series of actions or causes that bring things into being.  Baha’u’llah states: “His creation had ever existed beneath His shelter from the beginning that hath no beginning, apart from its being preceded by a Firstness which cannot be regarded as firstness and originated by a Cause inscrutable even unto all men of learning.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah:140)

It is a metaphysical power and action that has physical manifestations.   Spiritual causality is the appearance of eternal forms in temporal forms which unfold and manifest by degrees the potentials of the natural and human worlds.  Its action is associated more with ideas and images like the imprint of light, the reflection in a mirror.  (See the previous post titled The Divine Imprint, January 13, 2013) With the reconfiguration of eternal forms by the utterance of the Word the archetypal temporal forms of creation also reconfigure.  

As I said, the Word is the reality and it is first in importance, but it is not first in a sequence of actions connected on the same plane.  Rather the Word and what it creates are eternally co-existent and connected, but infinitely different.  “Verily, the Word of God is the Cause which hath preceded the contingent world—a world which is adorned with the splendours of the Ancient of Days, yet is being renewed and regenerated at all times.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah:140-141)  This precession is not in time but in importance.  The Word does not just precede any particular thing, but the whole contingent world.

The Manifestation knows essential forms, but He speaks existent forms.  Human intelligence has no access to the divine realm of essences, and we think and speak and create forms of existence after the image and likeness of His existent ones.  What are reflected in the mirror of creation are the forms of the Word as divine thought connected with the forms imagined and created by human beings.  “Praise and thanksgiving be unto Providence that out of all the realities in existence He has chosen the reality of man and has honored it with intellect and wisdom, the two most luminous lights in either world. Through the agency of this great endowment, He has in every epoch cast on the mirror of creation new and wonderful configurations. If we look objectively upon the world of being, it will become apparent that from age to age, the temple of existence has continually been embellished with a fresh grace, and distinguished with an ever-varying splendor, deriving from wisdom and the power of thought.”  (The Secret of Divine Civilization:1)

The forms of natural beings that every Manifestation speaks are the Will of God.  “Say: Nature in its essence is the embodiment of My Name, the Maker, the Creator. Its manifestations are diversified by varying causes, and in this diversity there are signs for men of discernment. Nature is God's Will and is its expression in and through the contingent world. It is a dispensation of Providence ordained by the Ordainer, the All-Wise. Were anyone to affirm that it is the Will of God as manifested in the world of being, no one should question this assertion.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah:142)

The essential relationships composing Nature are fixed and enduring, because they are an expression of the Will of God.  “God hath created a relation between the sun and the terrestrial globe that the rays of the sun should shine and the soil should yield. These relationships constitute predestination, and the manifestation thereof in the plane of existence is fate. Will is that active force which controlleth these relationships and these incidents.” (Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha, 198)

Nonetheless, though the essential relations are fixed, the forms they create through their interactions change with every divine utterance as these relations, which are the laws of Nature, themselves evolve and develop.  “In every age and cycle He hath, through the splendorous light shed by the Manifestations of His wondrous Essence, recreated all things, so that whatsoever reflecteth in the heavens and on the earth the signs of His glory may not be deprived of the outpourings of His mercy, nor despair of the showers of His favors.” (Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah: 61)

These forms developmentally link through time and history as the varied results of the reciprocal action of two complementary powers.  “That which hath been in existence had existed before, but not in the form thou seest today. The world of existence came into being through the heat generated from the interaction between the active force and that which is its recipient. These two are the same, yet they are different. Thus doth the Great Announcement inform thee about this glorious structure.  Such as communicate the generating influence and such as receive its impact are indeed created through the irresistible Word of God which is the Cause of the entire creation, while all else besides His Word are but the creatures and the effects thereof.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah:140)

        This discussion, abstract as it is, provides context for an examination of the varied interactions—“Such as communicate the generating influence and such as receive its impact”—between the two great creative powers in the world, the active force and that which is its recipient.  That examination can be carried on within Aristotle’s discussion of the four causes for any created thing: the formal cause, the final cause, the efficient cause and the material cause.  I am going to concentrate on the least understood of these causes, formal cause.

A direct link to my book, Renewing the Sacred is http://tinyurl.com/cndew5a It is now also in Kindle

Sciences of the Spirit

In addition to the material sciences, we shall need to teach the Sciences of Spirit.  What is this Science of Spirit?  That is for future man to ascertain and fervently apply to all life upon this planet.

(Stanwood Cobb. Thoughts on Education and Life: 55)  

Sacred science stretches the idea of knowledge to include again, besides the human relations with Nature and with each other in society, the relations of the soul with that which is Divine and transcendent, the invisible powers that govern and drive the universe.  The great enemy of symbolic thought is literalism, whether religious or scientific, for relationally all is metaphor.  The symbolist method of thought is essential for the creation of sacred sciences.  Symbolism says that the material manifest form is real and worthy of study, but that it is also linked with a higher, essential form of itself, a spiritual Reality, which working together in reciprocal interaction with the material create a sacred science.  Sacred science would connect these dimensions of creation within one symbiotic relation, so that the path to truth can be complementary, a reading the spiritual from the material, or, reading the material from the spiritual.  In this spiritual or sacred science the harmony of science and religion would be apparent and investigated by the one mind, for human consciousness in all its varied cultural forms and individual appearances is still one.  I am currently undertaking this kind of reconceptualizing of history, sociology and economics, the three disciplines that Shoghi Effendi encouraged youth to study.

He, for example, “advised young people to study deeply such subjects as History, Economics and Sociology as they are all related to the teachings and aid in understanding the Faith.” (Lights of Guidance: 629)  He also advised them to study “History, Economics or Sociology, as these are not only fields in which Bahá'ís take a great interest but also cover subjects which our teachings cast an entirely new light upon.” (Compilation on Scholarship:12)  These two statements indicate the reciprocal relation between the knowledge in these disciplines and the Bahá’í Teachings.  But these reciprocal relations must be brought out.  Hence: “Shoghi Effendi has for years urged the Bahá'ís (who asked his advice, and in general also) to study history, economics, sociology, etc., in order to be au courant with all the progressive movements and thoughts being put forth today, and so that they could correlate these to the Bahá'í teachings.” (Compilations on Scholarship:18)

To show something of that epistemological interplay between reason and Revelation—i.e. to study these subjects because they help to understand the Faith, to study them because the “teachings cast an entirely new light upon” these same subjects, and to correlate the two—is the goal of many scholars and writers.  To get a foothold in this new terrain however a spiritual perspective is needed.

The suggested interplay between the Faith and human knowledge hinges on the complex interplay between Divinity and humanity. That interplay operates through several relations, with different forms and is comprehended through various metaphors. One relation is between the eternal and temporal as dimensions of existence.  There is the creative interplay of Mind and matter as dimensions of creation.  There is the spiritual/organic interplay as rhythms of growth, and the sacred and profane as moral dimensions of spiritual principle and virtuous action.  The interplay between humanity’s two greatest means of generating knowledge, reason and faith, and their two large containing forms, science and religion, is the interplay of consciousness and being.  The sequential unfolding of an inner structure simultaneously enfolding into an outer structure that mirrors it and reflects back to it is the interplay. 

This unity in diversity, this movement of a diverse spiritual whole that is reconstructed into a differentiated organic whole in another and smaller plane, can be summed up in Aristotle’s four causes: the formal cause finding its mirror-form in the final cause through the interaction of the efficient cause upon the material cause.  But then there is a reply of the final cause back to the formal, so that interaction and interrelation occur, so that not just a one-way relation is shown but a relationship is formed.  One implication of that last statement is that there is a delicate and extensive connection between divinity and humanity that not only shapes perception, but also acts as a timing mechanism bring forth further stimuli and response from both: the interplay is an interaction.

One way to see this comes from reflecting on the phenomenon and nature of “emergence.”  I mean that in discussing novelty or when seeing something new or for the first time, or noticing, perhaps with surprise, a sudden added complexity of a phenomenon, we use phrases like “an emerging reality” or “an emerging pattern of life or society”, even calling the universe itself an emergent thing.  The word “emerging” is often coupled with another word “shaping.”  Hence we get complete phrases such as shaping the new emerging reality.  If asked the meaning of these kinds of phrases we generally focus upon the noun, “reality”, its shape and history, its now visible pattern, and so on.  But focus upon the adjective “emerging” leads me to ask: From where does the reality or pattern emerge?  From a spiritual perspective here are two answers to this.  First, something is emerging into the world or human consciousness and, second, something is emerging from the world and human consciousness, the second emergence dependent upon the first.  The too often one-sided discussion of emergence only focuses upon the second emergence from the world without seeing it as caused by a prior emergence into the world.

I mean that, if a pattern or power is emerging, it already exists somewhere, just not here in this world, or in our consciousness which alone can “see” it as a pattern.  The first power existed in a spiritual dimension and it emerged into our world.  It startled into activity or stimulated into action some latent power or capacity within the human reality, our idea of emergence conceptually registering this switch from quiet potential to active ability.  It emerges, that is, into awareness.  Powers, therefore, exist in both places and we know them to be there only when they move.  The causal sequence being, that is, “emerging into” so that something may be “emerging from.” 

A profound reconfiguration of the human intelligence is going on.  Faculties that I named in my book Renewing the Sacred as the sacred heart and spiritual mind are awakening.  Reconfiguration is necessary, for humanity is not merely at the end of an era, or a style of thought, nor is it just that nations have become entangled in political gridlock or government entered into final form of society called liberal democracy.  Neither have we arrived just at some temporary cultural impasse.  We are, in fact, at the end of days of humanity as we know that term.  If this is the end of history then nothing from the past or anywhere else in creation will navigate us through this new voyage, for all but the soul is trapped within the morphic field of intellect, and it is the soul that is voyaging, using the mind and body as its ship and oars.  The end of days is the edge of eternity.  We stand on the brink staring out over a shoreless ocean of divine thought which flows out from that center which is the beginning of all things.  We must not just be renewed but also made new.  The old forms have been retrieved, but enfolded within a new more comprehensive state called the Revelation of “spirit of truth”, the Most Glorious Manifestation of God, Baha’u’llah.