the trinitarian economy and the doctrine of the sacraments are its eminent loci.
א The novelty and strategic importance of the concept of instrumental cause did
not escape Dante, who made use of it in a decisive passage of the Convivio to found the legitimacy of imperial power. To those who split hairs and affirm that the authority of
the Roman emperor was actually founded not on reason but on force, he responds that
“force then was not the moving cause, as the caviler supposed, but was the instrumental
cause, even as the blows of the hammer are the cause of the knife, whereas the mind of
the smith is the efficient and moving cause. And thus not force but reason, and moreover
divine reason, was the beginning of the Roman empire” (Dante 1, IV, 4).
7.5. Ivan Illich has drawn attention to the novelty implicit in the doctrine of
the instrumental cause (Illich 1, pp. 72–73). By theorizing for the first time the
sphere of the instrument as such and conferring on it a metaphysical standing,
the theologians are responding in their way to the extraordinary technological
change that characterizes the twelfth century, with the new horse harnesses that
allow the full utilization of animal power and the multiplication of mechanisms
that use water energy not only to cause mills to turn but to drive hammers
that break rock and hooks that prepare wool for spinning. Listing in detail the
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instruments of the seven principal technologies of his time (the production of
wool, the construction of weapons, mercantile navigation, agriculture, hunting,
medicine, and—curiously—spectacles) in his Didascalicon, Hugh of St. Victor
praises the human being who “by inventing these instruments, rather than pos-
sessing them as gifts of nature, has more brilliantly revealed his greatness” (I, 9).
Following up on the considerations of Illich, we can thus say that the dis-
covery of the instrumental cause is the first attempt to give a conceptual figure
to technology. While for antiquity the instrument is annulled in the ergon that it produces, just as labor disappears in its result, now the operation of equipment
is divided into a proper end and an extrinsic finality, and in this way it allows the
sphere of an instrumentality that can be directed toward any end whatsoever to
emerge. The space of technology is opened at this point as the dimension of a me-
diality and of an availability that is properly unlimited, because while remaining
in relationship with its own action, the instrument has here been rendered auton-
omous with respect to it and can be referred to any extrinsic finality whatsoever.
It is possible, in fact, that in the technical instrument, there is something
other than simple “serviceability” but that this “other” does not coincide, as Hei-
degger maintained, with a new and decisive epochal unveiling-veiling of Being
so much as with a transformation in the use of bodies and objects, of which
originary paradigm is to be found in the “animate instrument” who is the slave,
which is to say, the human being who in using his body is actually used by others.
7.6. In the Questiones disputatae de veritate, while treating the problem
“whether the sacraments of the new law are the cause of grace,” Aquinas insists
on the division of the operation implicit in the idea of an instrumental cause:
“Now although,” he writes, “the saw has an action which attaches to it in accor-
dance with its own form, that is, to divide, nevertheless it has an effect which
does not attach to it except insofar as it is moved by a craftsman, namely, to
make a straight cut agreeing with the pattern. Thus an instrument has two op-
erations, one which belongs to it according to its own form, and another which
belongs to it insofar as it is moved by the principal agent and which rises above
the ability of its own form” (Aquinas 3, q. 27, art. 4).
It is significant that the principal operation is here defined by means of the
concept of ars. In reality, the instrumental cause acquires its proper sense insofar as it is used in the context of a technology. What seems to define the instrumental cause is its indifference with respect to the end that the principal cause
puts forward. If the end of the carpenter is to make a bed, the axe, which acts
as instrumental cause, is used, on the one hand, simply according to its own
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function, which is that of cutting wood, but, on the other hand, according to
the operation of the artisan. The axe knows nothing of the bed, and yet this
latter cannot be made without it. Technology is the dimension that is opened when
the operation of the instrument has been rendered autonomous and at the same time
is divided into two distinct and related operations. This implies that not only the concept of instrument but also that of “art” now meet with a transformation
with respect to their status in the ancient world.
The instrumental cause is not, therefore, only a specification of the efficient
cause: it is also and to the same extent a transformation of the final cause and of
the function proper to a certain being—the instrument—which are constitutively
and necessarily subsumed by an external final cause, which in its turn depends
just as much on them to be realized. The appearance of the apparatus [It., disposi-
tivo] of the instrumental cause (which defines, as we have seen, the very nature of every “dispositive” action) coincides in this sense with a radical transformation in
the mode of conceiving use. This is no longer a relation of twofold or reciprocal
affection, in which subject and object are indeterminated, but a hierarchical re-
lation between two causes, defined no longer by use but by instrumentality. The
instrumental cause (in which the instrument—which in the ancient world seems
to be no different from the hand that makes use of it—reaches its full autonomy)
is the first appearance in the sphere of human action of those concepts of utility
and instrumentality that determine the way in which modern human beings will
understand their doing and making [It., il suo fare] in modernity.
7.7. In the sacraments, the character of an instrumental cause does not only
belong to the material element (water, consecrated oil, etc.): it first of all con-
cerns the celebrant himself. The minister is in fact fully an instrument (“the
definition of the minister,” one reads in Aquinas 2, III, q. 64, art. 1, “is identical
to that of the instrument”); in contrast, however, to the material elements that,
as inanimate instruments, are always and only moved by the principal agent,
the minister is an “animate instrument” ( instrumentum animatum), who “is not
only moved, but in a sense moves itself, insofar as by his will he moves his bodily
members to act” (q. 64, art. 8).
As we know, the term “animate instrument” comes from Aristotle’s Politics,
where it defined the nature of the slave. For that matter, the term minister orig-
inally means “servant.” Aquinas is perfectly aware of this when he writes: “the
minister comports himself in the mode of an instrument [ habet se ad modum
strumenti ], as the Philosopher says in the first book of the Politics” (q. 63, art. 2).
(In his Commentary on
Aristotle’s Politics, probably following the Latin transla-
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tion that he had before him, he uses the expression organum animatum, “ani-
mate equipment,” immediately specifying: “such as the assistants of a craftsman
and slaves in a household”; Aquinas 4, p. 23).
The assimilation of the celebrant to a slave—who does not have legal per-
sonhood and whose acts are imputed to the “person” of his master—is therefore
perfectly conscious, and it is in virtue of this awareness that Aquinas can write
that “the minister of the sacrament acts in persona of the whole Church, whose
minister he is” (Aquinas 2, q. 64, art. 8). This means that, by means of the para-
digm of the “animate instrument,” the sacramental priesthood is genealogically
and not only terminologically connected to slavery.
The connection between the instrumental cause and the figure of the slave
is, however, still more essential. It is implied in the very formula “the human
being whose ergon is the use of the body” and in the definition (which we have
seen to have an ontological and not a juridical character) of the slave as the one
who, “while being human, is by nature of another and not of himself.” The slave
constitutes in this sense the first appearance of a pure instrumentality, which is
to say, of a being that, while living according to its own end, is precisely for that
reason and to the same extent used for another’s end.
7.8. The peculiar “dispositive” efficacy that belongs to the sacraments thanks
to the double nature of the instrumental cause is developed by theologians by
means of a new scission, which in the sacrament divides the one working the
work ( opus operans, the action of the instrumental agent, in particular the cel-
ebrant) and the work worked ( opus operatum, the sacramental effect in itself,
which is unfailingly realized, whatever the condition of the celebrant may be).
Insofar as the minister is the animate instrument of an operation whose princi-
pal agent is Christ, not only is it not necessary that he have faith and love, but
even a perverse intention (baptizing a woman with the intention of abusing her)
does not remove validity from the sacrament, because this latter acts ex opere
operato and not ex opere operante (or operantis).
The distinction between the two works, which was devised in order to secure
the validity of the sacrament, in fact transforms it into a perfect mechanism,
a special apparatus, which unfailingly produces its effects. The “instrumental”
character of the sacraments, which they have in common with technologies and
artes—Aquinas defines them as instrumenta Dei (Aquinas 5, IV, 56)—allows one to consider them as the paradigm of a superior technology, a technologia sacra,
at whose center stands the most specialized action of the instrumental cause and
the inexorable efficacy of the opus operatum.
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They are in this sense a sort of prophecy of mechanization, which was only
achieved five centuries later. Just as the machine, materializing the dream of the
animate instrument, functions on its own and its maneuvers in reality do noth-
ing but obey the possibilities of command prescribed by the machine itself, so
also does the sacrament produce its effect ex opere operato, and the celebrant, of whom Aquinas says that “he is not merely a cause but also in a measure an effect
insofar as it is moved by the principal agent” (Aquinas 2, III, q. 62, art. 1), does
nothing but execute, more or less mechanically, the will of the principal agent.
The analogy can be extended: if the advent of the machine, as Marx had already
noted, had as a consequence the devaluation of the labor of the artisan, who in
losing his traditional ability is transformed into an instrument of the machine,
this corresponds point by point with the doctrine of the opus operatum, which by
transforming the celebrant into an animate instrument in fact separates him from
personal commitment and moral responsibility, which are no longer necessary to
the efficacy of sacramental practices and remain confined to his interiority.
7.9. It is not surprising that a few centuries later, at the end of Scholasticism,
the paradigm of the instrumental cause can be driven to the extreme, to the
point of the rupture of the necessary connection between the instrument’s own
operation and that of the principal agent, and to the consequent affirmation of
an unlimited “obediential” availability of the instrument to the intention of the
principal agent. In his treatise on the sacraments, Suárez can thus write that
in the divine instruments, the action connatural to the instrument precedent to
the action and to the effect of the principal agent is not necessary. The reason is
that . . . the divine instruments do not add a natural but an obediential [ obedi-
entialem] potential and moreover work beyond the limits of natural perfection,
so that we do not expect a natural connection between their action and that
of the principal agent. . . . Thus, while the diverse natural or artificial instru-
ments are directed to diverse effects, because the condition of the instrument is
adapted to this action and not to another, the divine instruments do not have
this determination, because they are assumed only according to an obediential
potential, which is indifferent to all that does not imply contradiction, because
of the unlimitedness of the divine virtue. (Suárez 1, p. 149)
It is legitimate to suppose that the absolute instrumentality that is thought here
constitutes in some way the paradigm of modern technologies, which tend to
produce apparatuses that have incorporated in themselves the operation of the
principal agent and can thus “obey” its commands (even if these are actually
inscribed into the functioning of the apparatus, in such a way that the one
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using them, in pushing the “controls,” obeys in turn a predetermined program).
Modern technology does not derive only from the dream of the alchemists and
magicians but also and more probably from that peculiar “magical” operation
that is the absolute, perfect instrumental efficacy of the sacramental liturgy.
7.10. The constitutive connection that unites the slave and technology is
implicit in Aristotle’s ironic affirmation, according to which if instruments, like
the legendary statues of Daedalus, could achieve their work by themselves, the
architect would have no need of assistants nor the master of slaves.
The relation between technology and slavery has often been evoked by histo-
rians of the ancient world. According to the current opinion, in fact, the striking
lack of technological development in the Greek world was due to the ease with
which the Greeks, thanks to slavery, could procure manual labor. If Greek mate-
rial civilization remained at the stage of the organon, that is, of the utilization of human or animal power by means of a variety of instruments and did not have
access to machines, this happened, one reads in a classic work on this argument,
“because there was no need to economize on manual labor, since one had access
to living machines that
were abundant and inexpensive, different from both
human and animal: slaves” (Schuhl, pp. 13–14). It does not interest us here to
verify the correctness of this explanation, whose limits have been demonstrated
by Koyré (pp. 291ff.) and which, like every explanation of that kind, could be
easily reversed (one could say just as reasonably, as Aristotle does in the end, that
the lack of machines rendered slavery necessary).
What is decisive, rather, from the perspective of our study, is to ask ourselves
if between modern technology and slavery there is not a connection more es-
sential than the common productive end. Indeed, if it is clear that the machine
is presented from its first appearance as the realization of the paradigm of the
animate instrument of which the slave had furnished the originary model, it is
all the more true that what both intend is not so much, or not only, an increase
and simplification of productive labor but also, by liberating human beings from
necessity, to secure them access to their most proper dimension—for the Greeks
the political life, for the moderns the possibility of mastering the nature’s forces
and thus their own.
The symmetry between the slave and the machine thus goes beyond the
analogy between two figures of the “living instrument”: it concerns the ultimate
achievement of anthropogenesis, the becoming fully human of the living human
being. But this implies a further symmetry, this time with respect to the bare
life that, being situated on the threshold between zoè and bios, between physis
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and nomos, enables, through its inclusive exclusion, political life. In this sense, slavery is to ancient humanity what technology is to modern humanity: both, as
bare life, watch over the threshold that allows access to the truly human condi-
tion (and both have shown themselves to be inadequate to the task, the modern
way revealing itself in the end to be no less dehumanizing than the ancient).
On the other hand, this study has shown that in Aristotle’s definition of the
slave, the dominant idea is that of a human life that unfolds entirely within
the sphere of use (and not in that of production). What was in question in the an-
imate instrument was, that is to say, not only liberation from labor but rather the
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