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Great Chain of Being, conception of the nature of the universe that had a pervasive influence on Western thought, particularly through the ancient Greek Neoplatonists and derivative philosophies during the European Renaissance and the 17th and early 18th centuries.
The great chain of being is a hierarchical structure of all matter and life, thought by medieval Christianity to have been decreed by God. The chain begins with God and descends through angels , humans , animals and plants to minerals .
Professional papers in evolutionary biology continue to host expressions in agreement with the pre-evolutionary metaphor of the scala naturae (the great chain of being), when contrasting ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ representatives of a given branch of the tree of life.
For centuries the ‘great chain of being’ held a central place in Western thought. This view saw the Universe as ordered in a linear sequence starting from the inanimate world of rocks.
The hierarchical Great Chain of Being was the traditional structure that ordered all of Creation, starting with inanimate matter at the bottom and ascending through the living beings to angels and God at the very top. From: Pangolins, 2020
The medieval cultural conception of such a natural hierarchy is known as the “Great Chain of Being.” The French anthropologists Émile Durkheim (1858– 1917) and Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) famously observed that the way people organize nature replicates, in some fashion, their own social relations; that is, the way in which they organize themselves.
The Scala Naturae, also known as the Great Chain of Being, is a model or view of life formalized in ancient Greece first by Plato and then Aristotle (1910, 1912, for translations; Lovejoy 2011) and maintaining prevalence into modern times.
Overview. A prevailing idea through the ages is that of the Great Chain of Being, understanding the universe as a hierarchy of beings, an unbroken chain of existence, from the simplest forms to the most complex ones, from non-living matter to the most rational creatures (Lovejoy 1936).
Aristotle (384-322 BC) – Believed that all living organisms could be arranged in a “scale of nature” or Great Chain of Being. The ladder of life consists of graduation from inanimate material through plants, through lower animals and humans to other spiritual beings.
Lovejoy (Great Chain of Being, 1936) and others have clearly shown that ideas of perfection, vertical ordering and continuity long preceded Christianity. The Chain of Being infuses the teachings of Pythagoras (Sixth century BCE), and Paul Kuntz ( Jacob's Ladder , 1987) finds it common to most religious traditions.