The Emergence of Created Being

nite meaning of its own, and whatever falls under this category is a substance, material or spiritual. But whatever falls under the category of accident is a special accident; it is one of nine accidents. Therefore, we have learned not to say “substance and accident” when asked for the categories, but “substance and the nine accidents.” We must contrast the categorical or predicamental accident discussed in the present Article with the categorematical or predicable accident discussed in the Chapter on The Logical Question (Chap. I, Art. 3, a). We have listed, defined, and exemplified the ten categories. We have added an important word on the meaning of subsistence.

a) Becoming

A created being, that is, a creature, emerges into being, comes into being. The Increate Being always was and always will be, or, more accurately, always is. The created substance has, as its name indicates, its first origin in creation. Creation is an action proper to Infinite Power alone, which produces a thing in its entirety out of nothing. The first beginning of all creatures is found in creation.

Spiritual creatures have no possible origin except creation in each case. Bodily substances, by the process of generation (whether vital generation or non-vital generation) come from other bodily substances, following a first creation. Bodily substances have their root-origin in creation, their proximate origin in generation. Accidents come into being along with the substances which they mark or affect. Substances are created or generated; accidents are co-created or co-generated.

The emergence of being is called becoming. Emergence of being by generation or co-generation is also motion or change. But creation is not motion or change. A created being in its root- emergence by creation is not changed from a former state, or moved from a former condition; it had no former state or condition, and hence in being created is not changed. For change requires a point or state from which to start, as well as a point or state towards which to tend and in which to find its completion or terminus. Similarly, annihilation, were it to occur, would be a total reduction of a thing to nothingness, and nothingness is not a state or a condition or a terminus; it is nothing; therefore, annihilation would not be change or motion since it would lack the terminus or positive goal which change or motion demands. Hence in motion or change (that is, in the becoming of creatures after their first creation) there must be a term from which (called terminus a quo), a term to which (called terminus ad quern) and a going over from the one to the other (called transitus). The actual change or motion or becoming is the transitus, but the transitus cannot take place without the terms. Further, motion or change requires a mover other than the thing changed, and, in case of bodily change or becoming, it requires some underlying support, some bridge, so to speak, over which the change or transit moves, and this bridge remains unchanged. We shall stress the last mentioned fact when we come, in our study of The Cosmological Question, to discuss substantial change in bodies and the substantial constitution of bodies.

Becoming, looked at in itself and statically, is a combination of the accidents called action and passion. When we speak of substantial change or substantial becoming we mean that the things changed are substances, and that one ceases to be while another emerges; we do not mean that the process of change is a substance. The process as such is an accident; a kind of composite or cooperative accident of action-passion.

Becoming or action-passion, considered in its termini, is a process of cause and effect. Beings that emerge by creation are caused beings, and are themselves the effects of creation. Beings which become by reason of change or motion are also caused be ings and are themselves the effects of the generation or co-

CAUSES OF BEING 53 generation which makes them emerge. The study, therefore, of the emergence of created being is the study of causes of which created beings are effects_.

A cause is anything that contributes in any manner to the producing or the maintaining of a reality. That which is within the being caused, that which is in it to constitute it and to hold it in being as such a thing, in its substance or its accidents, is an intrin sic cause or a sum of intrinsic causes. That which is not thus within the created thing, but which lends an influence or activity to the producing or maintaining of that thing is an extrinsic cause or sum of extrinsic causes. We shall next speak of these two types of cause.

b) Intrinsic Causes

Consider a carved wooden statue. Without some stuff (in this case, wood) of which it is made, this bodily thing could not exist. The stuff or material out of which a bodily creature is made is therefore a contributing factor to its being; it is a came. We call it the material cause. This cause is intrinsic, for it is right in the finished effect. Only bodily realities have material causes; spiri- ual substances are not made of any material.

The wooden statue is wood, before, during, and after the carving which made it a statue. For the carving has only changed the shape of the wood; it has not changed the wood substantially, but accidentally. Yet it has given the wood a certain determinateness as a statue,—an accidental determinateness. Now any determin ing factor is called, in the language of philosophy, a form. The carving has given the wood an accidental form. And the form constitutes or determines a thing as a reality; hence a form is a came. An accidental form is an accidental formal cause. The statue has many accidental points of determinateness; it is of a certain height, a certain weight, a certain color, a certain temperature (at any given moment), and so on. Each of these determina tions, down to the last and least, though it be but a quarter-inch scratch on the statue, contributes something to the making of the statue the precise thing it is in all particulars. Each of these determinations is an accidental form, and an accidental formal cause. It is manifest, then, that the accidental formal causes of a reality may be many and various.

But there is an underlying form and formal cause in the statue which makes it a statue of wood. This is the substantial form of wood, the substantial principle which makes wood wood and not any other substance, such as silver or marble. This substantial form is the substantial formal cause of the wood and of the statue made of the wood. There can be in any given unit of substance only one substantial form, only one substantial formal cause.

The formal causes (accidental and substantial) are right in the effect; hence we call them intrinsic causes.

The intrinsic causes are, therefore, the material cause (for bodily realities), the substantial formal cause (for substances, bodily or spiritual), and the accidental formal cause.

c) Extrinsic Causes

The wooden statue was produced by some activity. Now, that which by its activity produces an effect is called the effecting cause of the effect. Sometimes the effecting cause is called the efficient cause. In our example, the effecting cause is the man who carved the statue. He is not the effecting cause of the wood of which the statue is made; this is to be found in parent-trees and in the vital activity of the tree itself from which the wood of the statue was taken. But the man is the effecting cause of the statue, that is, of this accidental shaping of wood. It is evident that the effecting cause is not in the effect; we therefore call it an extrinsic cause.

The effecting cause is often served by tools or instruments. Each of these, inasmuch as it channels the effectiveness of the effecting cause into the effect is called an instrumental cause. An instrument used by an effecting cause is itself a subordinate effect ing cause; the person who uses the instrument is the principal effecting cause. The instrumental cause must have in itself a fit ness for the producing of the effect for which it is used, but it has

CAUSES OF BEING 255 no virtue or power of its own; it acts by virtue of the principal cause. The man carving the statue is the principal cause of the statue; the tools are the instrumental causes. Yet the whole effect comes from each cause. The statue in its entirety comes from the carver; it also comes, in its entirety, from the carving tools or instruments. But it comes from the carver as principal effecting cause, and from the tools as subordinate or instrumental effecting causes. An instrumental cause is extrinsic.

The effecting cause is sometimes served by a pattern or model which guides the effective activity, and thus contributes something to the effect itself. Such a model or pattern is called an exemplar-cause. The wind and rain which wear down the rough rock and make it smooth are effecting causes; they employ no instruments, they need no exemplars or models. But a human effecting cause needs a model. The man who carved the statue had some image before him (person, picture, plan, other statue) or at least in his imagination, even if, to start with, it were a very vague image. While the exemplar cause is more or less accurately reproduced or expressed in the effect, the exemplar or model itself is not in the effect Hence the exemplar cause, like the instrumental causes, is an extrinsic cause. The reproduction or expres sion of the exemplar or model in the effect constitutes therein an intrinsic accidental formal cause.

All creatural effecting causes are secondary causes. Only the First and Infinite Cause is Primary Cause.

In addition to the effecting cause, there is another extrinsic cause called the final cause. This is the end or the object or the goal or the purpose which the effecting cause tends to attain. The tree tends naturally towards fullness of growth and fruitfulness; thus it exhibits finality or tendency towards an end. In the tree this tendency is intrinsic, but the goal itself is not intrinsic; the full mature tree is not in the sapling; it is itself an extrinsic final cause. Man in many of his activities can choose or determine the end towards which his efforts are directed. The carver of the statue had some end-in-view which led him to the effecting activ- ity which produced the statue. Perhaps he wished to express his devotion; perhaps he merely wished to have pleasure in doing something he could do skillfully; perhaps he wished to sell the statue for money. In any case he had some end or purpose, and this constitutes the final cause of the statue. The final cause may be multiple; the man may have carved this statue to glorify the Saint whose image it is, and also to make his bread and butter, and also to please his customer. But the point we note is that the effect is owing to final causality, without which the effecting cause would not expend effecting activity. Among creatures, and most evidently among men in their freely chosen activities, the final cause invites or motivates the effecting cause to use materials and impose forms by its activity; thus the final cause is often called “the cause of causes.”

Ends or final causes run in chains or series. Thus we may say that the sculptor made the statue for money, he wished money to buy food, he wished food to live, he wished to live because life is desirable in view of everlasting Good. All chains or series of final causes run at last towards the Supreme Good or God, and the possession of the Supreme Good in endless beatitude. Even the sinner in his crime is looking,—albeit mistakenly and perversely, —for good, and for the Supreme Good; he is, however, looking in the wrong place.

To sum up the theory of causes. Causes are of these types:

‘material Intrinsic formal. Cause..

efficient.. served by. .. instrumental

Summary of the Article

In this Article we have considered the emergence of created being, substantial and accidental, by first creation and by subse-

CAUSES OF BEING 57 quent generation . The emergence of being is called becoming . Creation is absolute becoming without change or motion . Generation is qualified becoming and consists of change or motion or process of cause and effect_. We have studied causes, intrinsic and extrinsic, naming their most important types.