Thegreat chain of being is a hierarchical structure of all matter and life, thought by medievalChristianity to have been decreed byGod. The chain begins with God and descends throughangels,humans,animals andplants tominerals.[1][2][3]
The great chain of being (from Latin scala naturae 'ladder of being') is a concept derived fromPlato,Aristotle (in hisHistoria Animalium),Plotinus andProclus.[4] Further developed during theMiddle Ages, it reached full expression in early modernNeoplatonism.[5][6]
The chain of being hierarchy has God at the top,[7] above angels, which like him are entirelyspirit, without material bodies, and henceunchangeable.[8] Beneath them are humans, consisting both of spirit and matter; they change and die, and are thus essentially impermanent.[9] 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.[10] The minerals are, in the medieval mind, a possible exception to theimmutability of the material beings in the chain, asalchemy promised to turn lower elements likelead into those higher up the chain, likesilver orgold.[11]
The Great Chain of being links God, angels, humans, animals, plants, and minerals.[3] The links of the chain are:
God is the creator of all things. Many religions, such asJudaism,Christianity, andIslam believe he created the entire universe and everything in it. He has spiritual attributes found in angels and humans. God has unique attributes ofomnipotence,omnipresence, andomniscience. He is the model of perfection in all of creation.[3]
In theNew Testament, theEpistle to the Colossians sets out a partial list: "everything visible and everything invisible, Thrones, Dominations, Sovereignties, Powers – all things were created through him and for him."[12] TheEpistle 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".[13]
In the 5th and 6th centuries,Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite set out a more elaborate hierarchy, consisting of three lists, each of three types:[14]
Humans uniquely share spiritual attributes with God and the angels above them,love and language, and physical attributes with the animals below them, like having material bodies that experienced emotions and sensations such as lust and pain, and physical needs such as hunger and thirst.[3]
Animals have senses, are able to move, and have physical appetites. Theapex predator like thelion, could move vigorously, and has powerful senses like keen eyesight and the ability to smell their prey from a distance, while a lower order of animals might wiggle or crawl, or likeoysters were sessile, attached to the sea-bed. All, however, share the senses of touch and taste.[3]
Plants lacked sense organs and the ability to move, but they could grow and reproduce. The highest plants have important healing attributes within their leaves, buds, and flowers.[3] Lower plants includedfungi andmosses.[3]
At the bottom of the chain, minerals were unable to move, sense, grow, or reproduce. Their attributes were being solid and strong, while the gemstones possessed magic. The king of gems was thediamond.[3]
The basic idea of a ranking of the world's organisms goes back toAristotle's biology. In hisHistory of Animals, where he ranked animals over plants based on their ability to move and sense, and graded the animals by their reproductive mode, live birth being "higher" than laying cold eggs, and possession of blood, warm-blooded mammals and birds again being "higher" than "bloodless" invertebrates.[16]
Aristotle's non-religious concept of higher and lower organisms was taken up bynatural philosophers during theScholastic period to form the basis of theScala Naturae. Thescala allowed for an ordering of beings, thus forming a basis for classification where each kind of mineral, plant and animal could be slotted into place. In medieval times, the great chain was seen as a God-given and unchangeable ordering. In theNorthern Renaissance, the scientific focus shifted to biology; the threefold division of the chain below humans formed the basis forCarl Linnaeus'sSystema Naturæ from 1737, where he divided the physical components of the world into the three familiarkingdoms of minerals, plants and animals.[17]
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 allmatter, 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, thephilosopher's stone, which somehow gathered and concentrated the universal spirit found in all matter along the chain, and whichex hypothesi might enable the alchemical transformation of one substance to another, such as the base metallead to the noble metalgold.[18]
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.[1] Radical thinkers likeJean-Baptiste Lamarck saw a progression of life forms from the simplest creatures striving towards complexity and perfection, a schema accepted by zoologists likeHenri de Blainville.[19] The very idea of an ordering of organisms, even if supposedly fixed, laid the basis for the idea oftransmutation of species, whether progressive goal-directedorthogenesis orCharles Darwin's undirected theory ofevolution.[20][21]
The chain of being continued to be part ofmetaphysics in 19th-century education, and the concept was well known. The geologistCharles Lyell used it as a metaphor in his 1851Elements of Geology description of thegeological column, where he used the term "missing links" about missing parts of the continuum. The term "missing link" later came to signifytransitional fossils, particularly those bridging the gulf between man and beasts.[22]
The idea of the great chain, as well as the derived "missing link", was abandoned in early 20th-century science,[23] as the notion ofmodern animals representing ancestors of other modern animals was abandoned in biology, to be replaced by anevolutionary tree supplemented byhorizontal gene transfer, as well as more complexweb structures.[24] The idea of a certain sequence from lower to higher complexity and fitness is still popular, as is the idea ofprogress in biology.[25]
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."[20]
The American philosopherKen Wilber described a "Great Nest of Being" which he claims to belong to a culture-independent "perennial philosophy" traceable across 3000 years of mystical and esoteric writings. Wilber's system corresponds with other concepts oftranspersonal psychology.[26] In his 1977 bookA Guide for the Perplexed, the economistE. F. Schumacher described a hierarchy of beings, with humans at the top ablemindfully to perceive the "eternal now".[27]
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