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=                        Great chain of being                        =
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                            Introduction
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The Great Chain of Being is a hierarchical structure of all matter and
life, thought in medieval Christianity to have been decreed by God.
The chain starts with God and progresses downward to angels, humans,
animals, plants, and minerals.

The Great Chain of Being (, "Ladder 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
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The Chain of Being is a hierarchy, with God at the top, above angels,
which like him are entirely in spirit form, without material bodies,
and hence unchangeable. Beneath them are humans, consisting both of
spirit and matter; they can change and die, and are thus essentially
impermanent. Lower still 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 unchangeability
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.


                            Subdivisions
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Each link in the chain might be divided further into its component
parts. In medieval secular society, for example, the king is at the
top, succeeded by the aristocratic lords and the clergy, and then the
peasants below them.  Solidifying the king's position at the top of
humanity's social order is the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings.
The implied permanent state of inequality became a source of popular
grievance, and led eventually to political change as in the French
Revolution. The hierarchy was visible in every structure of society:
"In the family, the father is head of the household; below him, his
wife; below her, their children."

Milton's 'Paradise Lost' ranked the angels (c.f. Pseudo-Dionysius the
Areopagite's ranking of angels), and Christian culture conceives of
angels "in orders of archangels, seraphim, and cherubim, among
others."

The animal division is similarly subdivided, from strong, wild, and
untameable lions at the top, to useful but still spirited domestic
animals like dogs and horses), down to merely docile farm stock like
sheep. In the same way, birds could be ranked from lordly eagles high
above common birds like pigeons. Below them were fish, those with
bones being above the various soft sea creatures. Lower still were
insects, with useful ones like bees high above nuisances like flies
and beetles. The snake found itself at the bottom of the animal scale,
cast down, the medievals supposed, for its wicked role in the Garden
of Eden."

Below animals came plants, ranging from the useful and strong oak at
the top to the supposedly demonic yew tree at the bottom. Crop plants
too were ranked from highest to lowest.

The minerals too were graded, from useful metals (from gold down to
lead), to rocks (again, from useful marble downwards), all the way
down to soil.


                             The Chain
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At its simplest, the chain of being runs God, Angels, Humans, Animals,
Plants, Minerals. These links of the chain are described in more
detail below.


God
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God has created all other beings and is therefore outside creation,
time, and space. He has all the spiritual attributes found in humans
and angels, and uniquely has his own attributes of omnipotence,
omniscience, and omnipresence. He is the model of perfection for all
lower beings.


Angelic beings
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In Christian angelology, angels are immortal beings of pure spirit
without physical bodies, so they require temporary bodies made of
earthly materials to be able to do anything in the material world.
They were thought to have spiritual attributes such as reason, love,
and imagination. Based on mentions of types of angel in the Bible,
Pseudo-Dionysios devised a hierarchy of angelic beings, which other
theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas adopted:

* Seraphim (seraph is the primate, or superior type of angel)
* Cherubim
* Thrones (Ophanim)
* Dominions
* Virtues
* Powers
* Principalities
* Archangels
* Angels


Humanity
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Humans uniquely shared spiritual attributes with God and the angels
above them, like love and language, and physical attributes with the
animals below them, like having material bodies that experienced
emotions and sensations like lust and pain, and physical needs such as
hunger and thirst.


Animals
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Animals have senses, are able to move, and have physical appetites.
The highest animals like the lion, the king of beasts, could move
vigorously, and had powerful senses such as excellent eyesight and the
ability to smell their prey, while lower animals might wriggle or
crawl, and the lowest like oysters were sessile, attached to the
sea-bed. All, however, had the senses of touch and taste.


Plants
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Plants lacked sense organs and the ability to move, but they could
grow and reproduce. The highest plants had attractive attributes like
leaves and flowers, while the lowest plants, like mushrooms and moss,
did not, and stayed low on the ground, close to the mineral earth. All
the same, many plants had useful properties serving for food or
medicine.


Minerals
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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 the diamond.


From Aristotle to Linnaeus
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The basic idea of a ranking of the world's organisms goes back to
Aristotle's biology. In his 'History 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.

Aristotle's non-religious concept of higher and lower organisms was
taken up by natural philosophers during the Scholastic period to form
the basis of the 'Scala Naturae'. The 'scala' 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 the Northern Renaissance, the scientific focus shifted to
biology; the threefold division of the chain below humans formed the
basis for Carl Linnaeus's 'Systema Naturæ' from 1737, where he divided
the physical components of the world into the three familiar kingdoms
of minerals, plants and animals.


In alchemy
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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, transformation from one place in the chain to the next
might, according to alchemical reasoning, be possible. In turn, the
unit of 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.


''Scala naturae'' in evolution
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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" in
relation to 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 of modern
animals representing ancestors of other modern animals was abandoned
in biology. The idea of a certain sequence from "lower" to "higher"
however lingers on, as does the idea of progress in biology.


                              Politics
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Allenby and Garreau propose the Catholic Church's narrative of the
Great Chain of Being kept the peace for centuries in Europe.  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."

The Enlightenment broke this supposed divine plan and fought the last
vestiges of feudal hierarchy by creating secular governmental
structures that vested power into the hands of ordinary citizens
rather than divinely ordained monarchs.

However, scholars such as Brian Tierney and Michael Novak have noted
the medieval contribution to democracy and human rights.


                  Adaptations and similar concepts
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The American philosopher Ken 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 of
transpersonal psychology. 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".


                          Further reading
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* Tillyard, E. M. W. (1942) 'The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of
the Idea of Order in the age of Shakespeare, Donne & Milton'. New
York: Random House


                           External links
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*
[http://xtf.lib.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId=DicHist/uvaBook/tei/DicHist1.xml;chu
nk.id=dv1-45;toc.depth=100;toc.id=dv1-45
'Dictionary of the History of Ideas'] - Chain of Being
* [http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/re/chain.htm The Great Chain
of Being reflected in the work of Descartes, Spinoza & Leibniz]
Peter Suber, Earlham College, Indiana
* [https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/Tillyard01.html The Chain of Being:
Tillyard in a Nutshell]


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