Chapter 3

They were led into this error by their close study of pagan writers, who apply “from whom” and “through whom” to things that differ in nature. According to these writers, “from which” indicates the material, while “through which” indicates the instrument or, more generally, a subordinate cause.

Indeed, there is no reason not to take up their entire argument and briefly expose both its incompatibility with the truth and its inconsistency with their own teaching. The students of empty philosophy divide cause into many kinds and distinguish its several meanings. Some causes they call principal; others cooperative or contributory; still others they classify as indispensable conditions.

They assign a distinct expression to each. The maker is spoken of differently from the instrument. Of the maker they say “by whom”: a bench, for example, is made by the carpenter. Of the instrument they say “through which”: the bench is made through the adze, the drill, and the other tools. “From which” they assign to the material, because the object is made from wood. “According to which” indicates the design or pattern before the craftsman, whether he first forms the plan in his own mind and then works from the conception, or whether he looks to a model already placed before him and fashions his work accordingly. “For the sake of which” they reserve for the end or purpose, since the bench is made for human use. “In which” indicates time or place: when and where the work is done. These circumstances contribute nothing to the thing being produced, yet nothing can come to be without them, since anyone who acts requires both place and time.

These philosophers, then, make careful distinctions among all these expressions. But our opponents, after learning such distinctions from them, apply their language in a thoroughly inconsistent way to the divine doctrines. The very phrase that pagan writers reserve for lifeless tools or for the lowest kind of subordinate service—“through which” or “through whom”—they are not ashamed to transfer to the Lord of all. Christians, they say, may speak of the Creator of the universe in language appropriate to a hammer or a saw.