thumb|upright=1.35|1579 drawing of the Great Chain of Being from , Rhetorica Christiana

The great chain of being () is a hierarchical structure of all matter and life, thought by the medieval Islamic world and medieval Christianity to have been decreed by God. The chain begins with God and descends through angels, humans, animals and plants to minerals.

The great chain of being is a concept derived from Plato, Aristotle (in his Historia Animalium), Plotinus and Proclus. Further developed during the Middle Ages, it reached full expression in early modern Neoplatonism.

Divisions

The chain of being hierarchy consists of God at the top, above angels, which like him are entirely spirit, without material bodies, and hence unchangeable. Beneath them are humans, consisting both of spirit and matter; they change and die, and are thus essentially impermanent. Lower are animals and plants. At the bottom are the mineral materials of the earth itself; they consist only of matter. Thus, the higher the being is in the chain, the more attributes it has, including all the attributes of the beings below it. The minerals are, in the medieval mind, a possible exception to the immutability of the material beings in the chain, as alchemy promised to turn lower elements like lead into those higher up the chain, like silver or gold.

The Great Chain

The Great Chain of being links God, angels, humans, animals, plants, and minerals. The Epistle to the Ephesians also lists several entities: "Far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come".

In the 5th and 6th centuries, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite set out a more elaborate hierarchy, consisting of three lists, each of three types:

  • Angels of presence, praising God
  • Seraphim – spirits of love
  • Cherubim – spirits of harmony
  • Thrones

In alchemy

Alchemy used the great chain as the basis for its cosmology. Since all beings were linked into a chain, so that there was a fundamental unity of all matter, the transformation from one place in the chain to the next might, according to alchemical reasoning, be possible. In turn, the unit of the matter enabled alchemy to make another key assumption, the philosopher's stone, which somehow gathered and concentrated the universal spirit found in all matter along the chain, and which ex hypothesi might enable the alchemical transformation of one substance to another, such as the base metal lead to the noble metal gold.

In evolution

thumb|upright|left|The human pedigree [[recapitulation theory|recapitulating its phylogeny back to amoeba shown as a reinterpreted chain of being with living and fossil animals. From a critique of Ernst Haeckel's theories, 1873.]]

The set nature of species, and thus the absoluteness of creatures' places in the great chain, came into question during the 18th century. The dual nature of the chain, divided yet united, had always allowed for seeing creation as essentially one continuous whole, with the potential for overlap between the links. Radical thinkers like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck saw a progression of life forms from the simplest creatures striving towards complexity and perfection, a schema accepted by zoologists like Henri de Blainville. The very idea of an ordering of organisms, even if supposedly fixed, laid the basis for the idea of transmutation of species, whether progressive goal-directed orthogenesis or Charles Darwin's undirected theory of evolution.

The chain of being continued to be part of metaphysics in 19th-century education, and the concept was well known. The geologist Charles Lyell used it as a metaphor in his 1851 Elements of Geology description of the geological column, where he used the term "missing links" about missing parts of the continuum. The term "missing link" later came to signify transitional fossils, particularly those bridging the gulf between man and beasts.

The idea of the great chain, as well as the derived "missing link", was abandoned in early 20th-century science, as the notion that embryonic development recapitulates "lower" forms was abandoned in biology, to be replaced by an evolutionary tree supplemented by horizontal gene transfer, as well as more complex web structures. The idea of a certain sequence from lower to higher complexity and fitness is still popular, as is the idea of progress in biology.

Political implications

Allenby and Garreau propose that the Catholic Church's narrative of the great chain of being kept the peace in Europe for centuries. The very concept of rebellion simply lay outside the reality within which most people lived, for to defy the King was to defy God. King James I himself wrote, "The state of monarchy is the most supreme thing upon earth: for kings are not only God's Lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself they are called Gods." In his 1977 book A Guide for the Perplexed, the economist E. F. Schumacher described a hierarchy of beings, with humans at the top able mindfully to perceive the "eternal now".

See also

References

Works cited

Further reading

  • "Chain of Being" in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas
  • The Great Chain of Being reflected in the work of Descartes, Spinoza & Leibniz. . Peter Suber, Earlham College, Indiana