Aristotelian Causes from the Perspective of Hellenistic Philosophers

The Stoic philosophers who promoted their views in Athens soon after Aristotle, accepted the causation theory and made it the major principle in their physical and ethical philosophy but not in an Aristotelian sense. Not only was their definition and conception of causation different, nor did they accept the four causes. Similar to the pre-Socratic philosophers, they believed in only material cause and considered God as a material being. In this tradition, prevalent in the Hellenistic period, only neo-platonic philosophers accepted the principle of causality as a rule which causes order in the universe. It is called emanation in the linear relationship between beings in the Descendant Arc. From the 6th century onwards, among the Christian philosophers the causation relationship changed into the inevitable relation between God and the world. The emanation view was absent among them and even in the 12th and 13th centuries one cannot find any trace of the physical and metaphysical theories of Aristotle among the followers of the Traditional Church.