  a. Auxiliary and true causes. From Middle Platonism onwards, various attempts were made to integrate the Aristotelian doctrine of causes within the Platonic philosophy (see Steel 2003). In Plato’s work, it was argued, one can find the four types of causality that Aristotle distinguishes, to wit formal, material, efficient, final, and, besides, the paradigmatic cause, which Aristotle wrongly rejected. This system of causes (with the addition of the instrumental cause as a sixth) became standard in later Neoplatonism.  In his commentary on the Timaeus, Proclus observes that Aristotle never rises to the proper level of causality. For the four causes, as Aristotle understands them, can only be applied to the explanation of processes in the sublunary world. In the Platonic view, however, the material and formal causes are only subservient or instrumental causes. Those causes are in fact immanent in their effects and constitutive elements of the thing they produce. As Proclus asserts in prop. 75 of the Elements of Theology, “that which exists in the effect is not so much a cause as an auxiliary cause (sunaition) or an instrument of the producer.” Causes in the proper sense must act upon their effects from outside, while transcending them. For a proper understanding of what the true causes are of all things, Proclus argues, one must follow Plato, who lifts us up to the level of the transcendent Forms and makes us discover the creative causality of the demiurge and the finality of the Good as the ultimate explanation of all aspirations.