Dionysian causation

Milbank suggests that Thomas’s view on causation was more Dionysian than Aristotelian. That is, it was not external and prior to its effects, but rather is an “attribution to the original source of the ‘gift’ of the effect in its whole entirety as effect.”

On this view, “a cause does not really ‘precede’ an effect, since it only becomes cause in realizing itself as the event of the giving of the effect . . . . Inversely, an effect does not really come after a cause, since only the effect realizes the causal operation and defines it.”

Hume was quite correct in his deconstruction of the metaphysical understanding of cause, but a Dionysian understanding of causation bypasses Hume: “there is always a Humean surplus of purely inexplicable ‘succession,’ which is the apparenly random surplus of a new even over the event which precedes it, unless a cause is more than a cause, but rather the entire gift of the effect and the emanation of the effect, which itself defines the cause.”

Milbank sees the Trinity as the perfection of this conception of causation, and this perhaps helps to justify the Cappadocian use of “cause” in their Trinitarian theology.