“Grace That Shimmers on the Surface of Beauty”: Beyond Platonic-Aristotelian Form, a Stoic Vision of Primary Causality

Introduction: Beauty and a Unifying Stoic Theme

Plotinus the Neoplatonist speaks of the “grace that shimmers on the surface of beauty”¹ as being the divine Life that, when added to beauty, inflames love. By a natural movement, the soul ascends, thanks to the wings given to it by the giver of this gracious love. Along the way of ascent, the impetus to contemplate the giver directly is gradually bestowed. The vision of spiritual beauty in the audible and visible is indeed a premonition of what lies behind the world of Forms; but “form is only the trace of that which has no form,” says Plotinus.² The experience of the grace immanent in beauty is thus precisely what directs us to that transcendent source that both engenders form and also bestows the grace shimmering upon its beautiful surface.

I believe Plotinus’s distinction—between beauty and its immanent, animating grace—is not merely Neoplatonic, but a perennial philosophical insight that may also be found in Stoicism. This same insight is especially echoed in the distinction made by Scholastic metaphysics between secondary causality (the action of created things) and primary causality (the action of God immanent within created things). Secondary causality may be studied, and when scientists do so, they are quite capable of affirming the beauty seen on this secondary level of causality. Yet the Roman Stoic Seneca, for example, in his Letter 65, speaks of how beyond the much more apparent level of secondary causality, there is really only one type of cause; namely, primary causality—the activity of the first cause.³ I believe this Stoic theme (“there is really only one type of cause”) is also related to the perennial wisdom of the Scholastic distinction, in that the fundamental insight about primary causality is likewise being echoed. So let us now explore this theme.

In An Essay on the Unity of Stoic Philosophy, Johnny Christensen attempts a reconstruction of “the basic schema of Stoic philosophy.”⁴ He notes many apparent similarities between the approach of modern physics and of Stoic physics, but what I believe is missing from his account is the key role regarding beauty that I find in the Stoic vision. I argue that when beauty can be seen in all things (for example, in those meditations of Marcus Aurelius that contemplate themes of Stoic physics), then God is being seen as immanent in all things. Technically, I would describe this most fundamental, meditative experience of beauty as constituted by primary causality being caught sight of within the innermost operations of secondary causes.

From the standpoint of one who constructs mathematical models, like the modern physicist, it may seem that in the universe there is really only one type of cause—“nature itself, viewed primarily as structure”⁵—but this prejudice, which the habit of mind developed by the specialist in modern physics inevitably fosters, is different from Stoic meditations on causality. I think the Stoic approach seeks rather to distinguish the primary divine causality from secondary physical causality. Stoicism thereby affords insight into how meditations upon causes can, in turn, become visions of beauty. Let us study this at work in the example already mentioned of Seneca.

Seneca’s Causal Meditation on the Divine Immanence

Seneca, in Letter 65, discusses the controverted question whether there is really only one type of cause, but does not really deny that many different types of causes may be distinguished. Instead, the point of the exercise is to glimpse the way in which divine activity in the world must be seen as the primary causal action, in relation to which all other causes are secondary.⁶

The exercise begins with recognition of the asymmetrical structure of the world. Modern physics would speak of matter in asymmetrical relation to energy; metaphysics would speak of potency in asymmetrical relation to act; and Seneca does likewise, but of materia as inert in relation to the activity of causa:⁷

Dicunt, ut scis, Stoici nostri duo esse in rerum natura, ex...