What Belief System Saw All Of Creation As A Continuum With Man At The Top Of The Animal World

Hierarchical construction of all matter and life

1579 drawing of the Slap-up Concatenation of Being from Didacus Valades [es], Rhetorica Christiana

The neat concatenation of beingness is a hierarchical structure of all affair and life, thought past medieval Christianity to have been decreed by God. The chain begins with God and descends through angels, humans, animals and plants to minerals.^{[1] [2]}

The bang-up concatenation of being (Latin: scala naturae, "Ladder of Being") is a concept derived from Plato, Aristotle (in his Historia Animalium), Plotinus and Proclus.^[3] Further developed during the Middle Ages, information technology reached full expression in early modern Neoplatonism.^{[four] [5]}

Divisions [edit]

The chain of being bureaucracy has God at the meridian, 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 substantially impermanent. Lower are animals and plants. At the lesser 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 heed, a possible exception to the immutability of the material beings in the chain, as alchemy promised to plough lower elements like atomic number 82 into those college upwards the concatenation, like silvery or gold.

The chain [edit]

St Thomas Aquinas classified all beings by rank.

The concatenation of being links God, angels, humans, animals, plants, and minerals.^[ii] The links of the chain are:

God [edit]

God has created all other beings and is therefore outside creation, fourth dimension, and infinite. He has all the spiritual attributes establish 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.^[ii]

Celestial beings [edit]

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 cloth globe.^{[2] [6]} They were thought to accept spiritual attributes such as reason, beloved, and imagination.^{[ii] [seven]} Based on mentions of types of angel in the Bible, Pseudo-Dionysios devised a bureaucracy of angelic beings, which other theologians similar St. Thomas Aquinas adopted:^{[2] [8]}

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

Humanity [edit]

Humans uniquely shared spiritual attributes with God and the angels higher up them, dear and linguistic communication, and physical attributes with the animals beneath them, like having material bodies that experienced emotions and sensations similar animalism and hurting, and physical needs such as hunger and thirst.^[2]

Animals [edit]

Animals have senses, are able to motion, and take physical appetites. The highest animals like the lion, the male monarch of beasts, could movement vigorously, and had powerful senses such as excellent eyesight and the ability to smell their prey, while lower animals might wriggle or clamber, and the everyman similar oysters were sessile, attached to the sea-bed. All, however, had the senses of impact and taste.^[ii]

Plants [edit]

Plants lacked sense organs and the power to motility, just 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 basis, close to the mineral earth. All the aforementioned, many plants had useful properties serving for nutrient or medicine.^[two]

Minerals [edit]

At the bottom of the chain, minerals were unable to move, sense, grow, or reproduce. Their attributes were being solid and stiff, while the gemstones possessed magic. The king of gems was the diamond.^[2]

Natural scientific discipline [edit]

From Aristotle to Linnaeus [edit]

The basic idea of a ranking of the world'due south organisms goes back to Aristotle's biology. In his History of Animals, where he ranked animals over plants based on their ability to motion and sense, and graded the animals past their reproductive way, alive birth being "higher" than laying cold eggs, and possession of claret, warm-blooded mammals and birds once again being "higher" than "bloodless" invertebrates.^[x]

Aristotle'southward non-religious concept of higher and lower organisms was taken up by natural philosophers during the Scholastic period to form the footing 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 partitioning 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.^[11]

In abracadabra [edit]

Alchemy used the nifty concatenation as the basis for its cosmology. Since all beings were linked into a chain, so that in that location was a fundamental unity of all matter, the transformation from one identify in the chain to the next might, according to alchemical reasoning, exist possible. In turn, the unit of measurement of the matter enabled alchemy to make some other cardinal assumption, the philosopher's rock, which somehow gathered and concentrated the universal spirit found in all matter forth the concatenation, and which ex hypothesi might enable the alchemical transformation of i substance to another, such equally the base metal lead to the noble metal gold.^[12]

Scala Naturae in evolution [edit]

The fix nature of species, and thus the absoluteness of creatures' places in the keen chain, came into question during the 18th century. The dual nature of the concatenation, divided yet united, had ever allowed for seeing creation as essentially one continuous whole, with the potential for overlap between the links.^[1] 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 similar Henri de Blainville.^[13] 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.^{[14] [xv]}

The chain of being connected 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 clarification of the geological cavalcade, where he used the term "missing links" well-nigh missing parts of the continuum. The term "missing link" afterward came to signify transitional fossils, specially those bridging the gulf between man and beasts.^[sixteen]

The thought of the great chain, besides as the derived "missing link", was abandoned in early 20th-century science,^[17] as the notion of mod animals representing ancestors of other modern animals was abased in biological science.^[18] The idea of a sure sequence from "lower" to "higher" however lingers on, as does the idea of progress in biology.^[19]

Politics [edit]

Allenby and Garreau suggest that the Cosmic Church'due south narrative of the great chain of being kept the peace in Europe for centuries.^{[ commendation needed ]} The very concept of rebellion only lay outside the reality within which most people lived, for to defy the Rex was to defy God. King James I himself wrote, "The state of monarchy is the nigh supreme matter upon earth: for kings are not only God'south Lieutenants upon world, and sit upon God'south throne, but even by God himself they are called Gods."^[14]

The Enlightenment bankrupt this supposed divine plan, and fought the last vestiges of feudal hierarchy, by creating secular governmental structures that vested ability into the hands of ordinary citizens, rather than in those of divinely ordained monarchs.^[14]

All the same, scholars such equally Brian Tierney^[xx] and Michael Novak^[21] have noted the medieval contribution to commonwealth and human rights.

Adaptations and similar concepts [edit]

The American philosopher Ken Wilber described a "Not bad Nest of Being" which he claims to belong to a culture-independent "perennial philosophy" traceable across 3000 years of mystical and esoteric writings. Wilber'due south system corresponds with other concepts of transpersonal psychology.^[22] In his 1977 book A Guide for the Perplexed, the economist E. F. Schumacher described a hierarchy of beings, with humans at the height able mindfully to perceive the "eternal now".^[23]

See also [edit]

• Figurative system of human knowledge
• History of biology
• The Ladder of Divine Ascent
• Level of organization
• Natural history
• Plane (esotericism)
• Sphere of fire

References [edit]

1. ^ ^{a b} Lovejoy 1960, p. 59.
2. ^ ^{a b c d e f thou h i j} Wheeler, L. Kip. "The Chain of Being: Tillyard in a Nutshell". Carson-Newman University. Retrieved 16 November 2019.
3. ^ "Nifty Chain of Being | Definition, Origin & Facts". Britannica . Retrieved April 1, 2021. {{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
4. ^ "This thought of a great concatenation of being can be traced to Plato'due south partitioning of the world into the Forms, which are full beings, and sensible things, which are imitations of the Forms and are both beingness and not being. Aristotle'due south teleology recognized a perfect being, and he likewise arranges all animals by a single natural calibration co-ordinate to the degree of perfection of their souls. The idea of the great concatenation of being was fully developed in Neoplatonism and in the Middle Ages.", Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy, p. 289 (2004)
5. ^ Edward P. Mahoney, "Lovejoy and the Hierarchy of Beingness", Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 48, No 2, pp. 211-230.
6. ^ Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica (PDF). p. 588 – via Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
7. ^ Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica (PDF). pp. 603–605 – via Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
8. ^ Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica (PDF). pp. 1189–1191 – via Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
9. ^ Ruse, Michael (1996). Monad to man: the Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology . Harvard Academy Press. pp. 21–23. ISBN978-0-674-03248-4.
10. ^ Leroi 2014, pp. 111–119.
11. ^ Linnaeus, Carl (1758). Systema naturae (in Latin) (10th edition ed.). Stockholm: Laurentius Salvius.
12. ^ O'Gorman, Frank; Donald, Diana (2005). Ordering the World in the Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 63–82. ISBN978-0-230-51888-9.
13. ^ Appel, T.A. (1980). "Henri De Blainville and the Creature Serial: A Nineteenth-Century Chain of Existence". Journal of the History of Biology. 13 (2): 291–319. doi:ten.1007/BF00125745. JSTOR 4330767. S2CID 83708471.
14. ^ ^{a b c} Snyder, South. "The Great Chain of Being". Grandview.edu. Archived from the original on 2017-07-28. Retrieved 2017-01-05 .
15. ^ Lovejoy 1960, pp. 325–326.
16. ^ "Why the term "missing links" is inappropriate". Hoxful Monsters. 10 June 2009. Archived from the original on 2 April 2012. Retrieved 10 September 2011.
17. ^ Prothero, Donald R. (1 March 2008). "Evolution: What missing link?". New Scientist. 197 (2645): 35–41. doi:10.1016/s0262-4079(08)60548-v. Retrieved 4 August 2018.
18. ^ Ehrlich, Paul R.; Holm, R. Due west. (1963). The procedure of evolution. New York: McGraw-Hill. p. 66. ISBN978-0-07-019130-3. OCLC 255345.
19. ^ Ruse, Michael (1996). Monad to man: the Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biological science . Harvard University Press. pp. 432–433, and passim. ISBN978-0-674-03248-4.
20. ^ Reid, Charles J. Jr (1998). "Book Review | The Medieval Origins of the Western Natural Rights Tradition: The Accomplishment of Brian Tierney" (PDF). Cornell Police Review. 83: 437–463.
21. ^ Novak, Michael (1 Oct 1990). "Thomas Aquinas, the First Whig: What Our Liberties Owe to a Neapolitan Mendicant". Crisis Magazine (October 1990).
22. ^ Freeman, Anthony (2006). "A Daniel Come to Judgement? Dennett and the Revisioning of Transpersonal Theory" (PDF). Journal of Consciousness Studies. xiii (3): 95–109. Archived from the original (PDF) on July 3, 2012. Retrieved July 3, 2012.
23. ^ Costello, Stephen (2014). Philosophy and the Flow of Presence. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 100–101. ISBN978-1-4438-6454-1.

Sources [edit]

• Leroi, Armand Marie (2014). The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. Bloomsbury. ISBN978-ane-4088-3622-iv.
• Lovejoy, Arthur O. (1960) [1936]. The Dandy Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Harper.

Farther reading [edit]

• Tillyard, E. Yard. Due west. (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 [edit]

• Dictionary of the History of Ideas – Concatenation of Beingness
• The Cracking Chain of Being reflected in the work of Descartes, Spinoza & Leibniz Archived 2008-08-28 at the Wayback Machine Peter Suber, Earlham College, Indiana
• The Chain of Being: Tillyard in a Nutshell

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being

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