As a reminder to old readers, and a notice to the new, let us repeat Gornahoor’s purpose. We claim that there was a Primordial Tradition of the Indo-European peoples, which manifested in the Vedic civilization, Ancient Greece, and Medieval Europe, inter alia. We are not here to teach Aristotle’s four causes, which anyone can find on the Internet, but rather to demonstrate the intrinsic commonality of worldviews between the Middle Age and Antiquity, and ultimately ancient India. Specifically, the Medieval Tradition is closer to Pagan Antiquity than is any current form of neo-paganism.

First of all, all three worldviews held to some version of hylomorphism, as shown is these two sets of related terms:

Form, essence, idea, Purusha, potency Matter, substance, hyle, Prakriti, act

A cause is a principle on which something else depends for its being. Thus the cause has priority over the effect, not just temporally, but in the wider sense that we give it. Aquinas and Aristotle name four types of causes in two classifications, as shown in this chart:

Classes of causation Intrinsic Causes Extrinsic Causes Material Efficient Formal Final

The extrinsic causes are exterior to the being, while the intrinsic causes are what make it what it is.

Efficient cause That by which the effect is produced. Final cause That for which the effect is produced. Material cause That out of which the effect is produced. Formal cause That which makes the effect to be of a particular kind.

In Man and his Becoming , Guenon associates Purusha with essence of form and Prakriti with matter or substance. He writes:



The meaning of the word hyle, in Aristotle, is exactly that of substance in all its universality, and eidos corresponds no less precisely to essence regarded as the correlative of substance. Indeed, these terms, Essence and Substance, taken in their widest sense, are perhaps those which give the most exact idea in Western languages of the conceptions we are discussing [Purusha and Prakriti].

Again, we see the perfect correspondence between the Sankhya Hindu school and the metaphysics of Aristotle and Aquinas. In discussing the notion of cause, Guenon continues:

The unmanifested state … is identified with Mula-Prakriti, Primordial Nature: but in reality it is Purusha as well as Prakriti containing them both in its own undifferentiation, for is it cause in the complete sense of the word, that is to say both at one and the same time efficient cause and material, to use the ordinary terminology, to which however, we much prefer the expressions essential and substantial cause, since these two complementary aspects of causality do in fact relate respectively to essence and to substance in the sense we have previously given to those words.

This is clearly a slip of the pen by Guenon and it reads the same in French. I’m sure he means “formal cause” where he wrote “efficient cause”, otherwise, the whole conception makes no sense. So, let us recap his renaming of the causes:

Material Cause ⇒ Substantial Cause

Formal Cause ⇒ Essential Cause

Now we can recap the notion of causation, in the hope that readers will learn to experience and understand the world in this way.

The unmanifested is polarized (the Tao becomes two), the Purusha (essence) and Prakriti (primordial matter). These are the intrinsic causes of a thing: the formal or essential cause from Purusha and the material or substantial cause from Prakriti. Since no thing can create itself, there must be a connecting link, or extrinsic cause, between the idea and the thing, or potency and act. The Idea is, as Guenon points out, a possibility of being. There must be a Will, or efficient cause, to actualize the potential of the Idea. Since Will follows intelligence, there must be a reason, of final cause, for it to act.

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