Maimonides explains in this chapter that there is disagreement between the philosophers and the mutakallemin about whether God is the First Cause (al-‘illat al-ula or al-sabab al-awwal) — as the philosophers maintain — or the Agent (al-fa’il) as the mutakallemin call him. The latter prefer to call God an Agent rather than a Cause because they believe that

the coexistence of the Cause with that which was produced by that Cause would necessarily be implied: this again would involve the belief that the Universe was eternal, and that it was inseparable from God. When, however, we say that God is the Agent, the co-existence of the Agent with its product is not implied: for the agent can exist anterior to its product.

However, despite Maimonides’ sympathies with the theological aims of the practioners of kalam, he considers their arguments quite lacking; a philosophically grounded person,

however, should know that in this case there is no difference whether you employ the term “cause” or “agens”; for if you take the term ‘cause’ in the sense of a mere potentiality, it precedes its effect; but if you mean the cause in action, then the effect must necessarily co-exist with the cause in action. The same is the case with the agens; take it as an agens in reality, the work must necessarily co-exist with its agens. For the builder, before he builds the house, is not in reality a builder, but has the faculty for building a house-in the same way as the materials for the house before it is being built are merely in potentiâ–but when the house has been built, he is the builder in reality, and his product must likewise be in actual existence. Nothing is therefore gained by choosing the term ‘agens’ and rejecting the term ‘cause.’

Knowing that the two terms al-fa’il and al-sabab are both equally appropriate at first glance, why do the philosophers — and Maimonides seems to agree with them — prefer to call him the Cause rather than the Agent? The answer lies in Aristotelean physics. Everything, according to Aristotle, has a ‘cause’ in four different senses of the word ‘cause’:

  1. substance or material cause
  2. form or formal cause
  3. agent or efficient cause
  4. purpose or final cause

If the Universe is considered as a single ‘organism’ or being (see GP.I.72), then for the Universe as a whole, God is “the agens, the form, and the final cause of the Universe”.

This chapter expounds one of Maimonides’ key themes, that of emanation or overflow (Arabic faid فيض and translated by Samuel ibn Tibbon into Hebrew as shefa’ שפע which seems cognate with Arabic sh-f-‘a).

it is through the existence of God that all things exist, and it is He who maintains their existence by that process which is called emanation, as will be explained in one of the chapters of the present work. If God did not exist, suppose this were possible, the universe would not exist, and there would be an end to the existence of the distant causes, the final effects, and the intermediate causes.

In addition, God is also the cause for everything that happens in the Universe; every event has a cause, and the cause has a cause, and so on until we reach the First Cause which is God. The idea of a ‘chain of causes’, in Maimonides’ system, works for each of the last three types of causes. For any existing thing or event, its ‘form’ itself has a form, which has a form, and so on until we reach God who is the “form of all forms”. Similarly, each event has an agent, and the agent has an agent, and so on until we get to God as the first Agent. If we inquire after the ‘final cause’ or ‘purpose’ of things, according to Maimonides, we will once again find a chain of causes or purposes, but eventually the final answer will either be “because it is the will (mashiyyat مشيت) of God” or “because it is the wisdom (hikmat حکمت) of God”. Which of these is more correct will be dealt with later in the Guide.

Commentary

  • It would seem from the discussion about Agent vs Cause that God does not pre-exist the Universe since “there is in Him at no time a mere potentiality” (GP.I.68); and for an Agent or a Cause to pre-exist the Universe, it would have to have existed in a state of potential agent-ness or potential cause-ness. Maimonides hints to the reader that his words seem to be leading in this direction because right at the point where this thought would occur to a reader, he says:

    You need not trouble yourself now with the question whether the universe has been created by God, or whether, as the philosophers have assumed, it is eternal, co-existing with Him. You will find [in the pages of this treatise] full and instructive information on the subject.

  • It is curious that of the four causes of Aristotle, Maimonides would explain in great detail how God is the ultimate cause of all things from the point of view of 3 out of the 4 causes, but remain entirely silent about the first item on that list: the material cause. Is God also the material cause of the universe, i.e., the ‘substance’ that ultimately gives rise to all substances? It is unclear on what grounds Maimonides excluded it without explanation; perhaps he considered it self-evident that God is not the substantial cause of things.
  • This chapter shows the careful synthesis of an Aristotelean God (the first cause, the intellect, the Prime Mover of the Universe) with a Neoplatonist God (pure being, whose emanation/overflow brings about the existence of the universe in a continuing process). Maimonides would have received the latter from `the Theology of Aristotle’, a work which was actually written by Plotinus and misattributed to Aristotle for centuries.