Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

Fifth argument: because it is free from matter.

1Natural philosophers reckon four causes of natural things: efficient cause, end, matter, and form. The efficient cause of man is universal nature together with man; his end is human happiness, his matter body, and his form soul. Whenever something is said to exist through itself, it is understood to exist without a cause; whenever it exists through another, it exists through a cause. God alone exists through himself in such a way that he has no cause. He is therefore wholly through himself, because he excludes from himself all four kinds of cause. A natural body is wholly through another, because it includes all four at once. Below God nothing can exist without an efficient cause and an end. For God alone is the maker and end of all things; hence nothing besides God will be found that can be said to exist through itself in such a way as to lack both an efficient cause and an end. Yet not everything below God ought to exist through another in such a way that it is wholly through another. These two—being wholly through oneself and wholly through another—stand at the greatest possible distance from each other. Between them, therefore, there must be a middle term resembling each.

2For since every agent acts from its own nature, the work made immediately by it, issuing as it does directly from the agent's nature, must appear as like that agent as possible. Therefore what God makes most immediately and, so to speak, by his primary intention ought not to turn out utterly unlike God. There are, then, certain things between God and body that are not said to exist wholly through another. Quality appears to be such a thing: unlike body, it comes to be not through four causes, but depends upon only three.