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