Aristotle’s own statements on this are clear in (Book Lambda), which contains his final discussion in the science of metaphysics (1), and elsewhere.

Aristotle and his early followers—along with all other rational people—maintain that a contingent being, which may either exist or not exist, can only be temporally originated, coming into existence after not having existed, and that anything produced can only be temporally originated. When they held that the celestial spheres were beginningless, they did not maintain that they were contingent, produced, or created. Rather, they said that the spheres move in imitation of the First Cause. Thus, [they stand in need of the First Cause] (2), which Avicenna and his peers call the Necessary Existent, insofar as their motion must involve imitation of Him. He therefore functions for them (3) as a final cause; in the view of Aristotle and his school, He is not their efficient cause.

This position—although it is among the doctrines most extreme in unbelief and misguidance and most contrary to what the great majority of rational people [among both the ancients and later generations] (4) maintain, and for this reason the later philosophers departed [from it] (5) and posited a necessitating cause and a necessitated effect, as Avicenna and his peers alleged,