 In keeping with Aristotle’s remarks in Metaphysics XII.7, Ibn Rushd suggests that God serves not as an efficient cause, but only as a final and formal cause. Efficient causality prevails among natural bodies, when one actually moving body brings another body from potential to actual motion. The heavenly bodies, however, are already actual, and eternally so, and so in this domain efficient causation has no place (PossibConj 14.86). The relationship of First Cause to the celestial spheres, then, is that of intelligible to intellect—that is, the eternal thoughts of the First Cause are the forms that serve as final causes inspiring the celestial intelligences (LongMeta XII.36 {1592}; XII.44 {1652}; LongCaelo IV.1.654; Incoherence I.14 {481}; Conjunction Epistle 1, par. 3-4). God, being wholly immaterial, cannot directly act on the sublunary material realm at all, but plays a causal role only through the mediation of the celestial spheres: “the temporal cannot proceed from an absolutely eternal being, but only from an eternal being which is eternal in its substance but temporal in its movements, namely, the celestial body” (Incoherence I.13 {467}). (Interpretation here is more contentious than this brief summary suggests. For various approaches see Kogan 1985 ch. 5; Davidson 1992, 227–30; Adamson 2019; Twetten forthcoming.)