The Great Chain of Being

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A man named Stephen MacKenna spent two decades in Dublin turning the Greek of Plotinus into English, and the sentence he labored over hardest describes a kind of pouring. The One, he wrote, “has overflowed, and its exuberance has produced the new.” From that overflow comes everything else, rank below rank, each level generating the one beneath it and none of them ever quite cut off from its source. Behind that single image of an inexhaustible fullness spilling downward lies one of the most durable structures the Western imagination has ever built: the conviction that all of reality forms one ladder, continuous from top to bottom, with every rung occupied.

The picture is easy to draw and hard to escape. At the summit sits God, or the Good, or the One. Just below come the ranked armies of angels; then humanity, poised between spirit and flesh; then the animals in their degrees, the higher beasts above the lower; then the plants; then the metals and stones; and at the very floor, formless matter, almost nothing at all. Nothing is missing and nothing is repeated. Every possible kind of thing that could exist does exist, slotted into its proper place, and the places shade into one another so finely that the eye cannot find the seam. The Latin schools called it the scala naturae, the ladder of nature. Later readers called it the Great Chain of Being.

Genealogy: from Plato’s generosity to Plotinus’s overflow

The chain has two parents, and they did not entirely agree.

The first is Plato, and the decisive moment comes in the Timaeus, where the dialogue’s speaker explains why the world exists at all. The maker of the cosmos, he says, was good, “and the good can never have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be.” A few lines on: “God desired that all things should be good and nothing bad, so far as this was attainable.” The reasoning is quiet but enormous. If the source of being is perfectly good and ungrudging, it cannot withhold existence from anything that could receive it. Goodness diffuses itself. A jealous god might make a small, sparse world; a generous one must make every world it can. Reality is therefore as full as it is possible for it to be.

The historian who named this idea called it the principle of plenitude, and it is the engine of the whole structure. Arthur O. Lovejoy, lecturing at Harvard in 1933 and publishing the result in 1936 as The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea, isolated three components that together compose the chain. Plenitude holds that everything that can exist does exist — the universe leaves no genuine possibility unrealized. Continuity holds that the kinds of things form an unbroken series, with no gaps, each shading by least differences into the next. And gradation holds that this series is ranked, ascending from the meanest to the most perfect. A cosmos that is full, seamless, and ordered top to bottom: that is the chain in three words. Lovejoy treated the idea as a “unit-idea,” a single conceptual atom he could track as it migrated across centuries and disciplines, and his book remains the classic study of where it came from and how long it lasted.

The second parent is Aristotle, who supplied the rungs Plato had only implied. Where Plato reasoned downward from the Good, Aristotle looked at living things and saw a graded series in the flesh. In the work on the soul he ranked the powers of life in nested tiers: plants possess only the nutritive soul, the capacity to grow and feed and reproduce; animals add the sensitive soul, perception and movement; humans add reason on top of both. Each higher form contains the lower as a step contains the one below it. And in the History of Animals he pressed the point toward continuity in a sentence that would echo for two thousand years. Nature, he observed, “proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of demarcation.” He pointed to sea creatures — the sponge, the sea anemone — that hover between plant and animal, refusing the categories. The boundaries were real but not sharp; the scale was continuous.

So the inheritance was double: from Plato, a metaphysical reason why all the possible degrees must be filled; from Aristotle, an observed ladder of actual creatures, ascending by imperceptible steps. The two would not be fully welded until a third thinker fused emanation to gradation.

That thinker was Plotinus. In the third century he took Plato’s generous source and made it dynamic. The One does not deliberate or choose; being perfect, “seeking nothing, possessing nothing, lacking nothing,” it simply overflows, and from its exuberance proceeds Intellect; from Intellect, Soul; from Soul, the sensible world down to its dimmest edge. This is emanation, and its grammar is the grammar of the chain. In the treatise MacKenna titled “The Origin and Order of the Beings,” Plotinus lays down the law of the descent precisely: “there is from the first principle to ultimate an outgoing in which unfailingly each principle retains its own seat while its offshoot takes another rank, a lower.” Each level stays where it is and yet produces the next; nothing is “completely severed from its prior.” Here continuity and gradation are no longer two ideas but one motion. The cosmos is a single graded outflow, and even the lowest thing keeps a thread back to the highest. The structure of Neoplatonism is the structure of the chain, and Plotinus’s pupils — Porphyry, Iamblichus, and above all Proclus, who systematized the descent into a lattice of triads — handed it on as the architecture of the real.

Integra naturae speculum artisque imago, the frontispiece to Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi historia (Oppenheim, 1617–19). Nature stands chained to God above and to the ape of art below — the chain of being rendered as a literal chain. — Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The Christian welding: angels, humans, and the order of charity

The chain entered Christianity through a forger of genius. Sometime around the year 500, an anonymous Greek author writing under the borrowed name of Dionysius the Areopagite — Paul’s Athenian convert from the Book of Acts — composed a small body of treatises that read Neoplatonic emanation as the inner logic of the Christian cosmos. The mask gave the work near-apostolic authority for a thousand years; the scholarly consensus now dates the corpus to around 500 and treats the apostolic ascription as the pseudonym it is, which is why the author is known as Pseudo-Dionysius. His most consequential contribution was to populate the upper reaches of the ladder with a fixed census.

In the Celestial Hierarchy, gathering scattered names from the letters of Paul — the powers and dominions and thrones of Ephesians and Colossians — he arranged the angels into nine choirs, grouped in three descending triads. Nearest to God: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. In the middle: Dominions, Virtues, Powers. Closest to the human world: Principalities, Archangels, Angels. Each rank receives illumination from the one above and passes it to the one below, a relay of divine light running down the orders. The word he coined for this arrangement — hierarchia, sacred order — has outlived every other part of his vocabulary. The chain had acquired its missing middle: between the bare divinity at the top and the human at the center now stood a graded, populous court.

From Pseudo-Dionysius the structure passed into the bloodstream of the Latin West, carried by Augustine’s sense of a creation ranked by degrees of being and clinched in the high Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas the chain was not merely an inventory but a proof of God’s wisdom: a maker who produced only the highest things, or only the lowest, would have made a poorer cosmos than one that produced every grade, so that the perfection of the universe lay precisely in its completeness, its descent from angel to ash. Each link existed for the sake of the whole. The same teaching ran through Christian Neoplatonism and, by parallel routes, through Islamic and Jewish Neoplatonism, where the emanative ladder structured the relation of God to the intelligences and the spheres. The chain was never the property of one creed. It was the shared map.

Distinctive teaching: fullness, continuity, and the ranked whole

Seen from inside, the chain is not a metaphor but a description, and its three principles lock together into a single claim about how the real is built.

Plenitude says the world is full. Because its source is good and ungrudging, every rung that can be filled is filled. There are no missing kinds, no possible creature that the cosmos simply failed to make. This is why the medieval mind expected a continuous spectrum of being and not a scatter of isolated types: a god capable of making a thing and declining to make it would be a god with a withheld goodness, and that was held to be a contradiction. The world’s sheer variety — its monsters, its intermediate cases, its abundance of nearly identical forms — was not waste but evidence. Fullness was a perfection.

Continuity says the world is seamless. The rungs are not separated by gaps but graded by least differences, so that the highest member of each kind nearly touches the lowest member of the kind above. The plant that almost feels, the animal that almost reasons, the human almost an angel: the chain has no jumps. This is Aristotle’s indeterminate boundary writ across the entire scale of being. Continuity also generated the doctrine of intermediate creatures — humanity itself the great middle term, the amphibian of the cosmos, body shared with the beasts and intellect shared with the angels. The Renaissance Platonists made this the seat of human dignity: Marsilio Ficino read the soul as the knot binding the higher and lower worlds, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, in his oration on human dignity, made man the one creature without a fixed rung, free to climb toward the angels or sink toward the brutes.

Gradation says the world is ranked. The full, continuous series is also a hierarchy of worth and reality, ascending from the dim half-existence of matter to the blazing fullness of God. Every position is a position relative to the source — nearer or further, more or less. And here the cosmic structure became a moral and political one. If the universe is a graded order in which each thing keeps its station, then so, by the logic of correspondence, is the kingdom, the household, the body. The chain underwrote the whole apparatus of microcosm and macrocosm: the king answering to God, the heart to the king, the lion among beasts, the sun among planets, the gold among metals, each the chief of its own rank, each mirroring the order above. To know one’s place was to know the structure of being itself.

Reception and afterlife: the master-image and its slow undoing

For something like a thousand years the chain was less a theory than the air educated people breathed. It organized the cosmology of Renaissance Neoplatonism, the emblem-books of the occult philosophers, the sermons of the divines. It surfaces wherever the period describes order at all.

Its most famous English statement is dramatic. In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses diagnoses the collapse of the Greek army as a failure of rank, and his speech is the chain set to verse: “The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre / Observe degree, priority and place.” Take away degree, he warns, untune that one string, “and hark what discord follows.” The twentieth-century critic E. M. W. Tillyard built an entire account of the age around such passages; his The Elizabethan World Picture of 1943 made the chain — angels, the four elements, the correspondences between the great world and the small — the unspoken backdrop of Elizabethan literature. Later scholars have argued he flattened a messier reality into a single tidy diagram, but the diagram he described was genuinely there to be found, repeated across the period’s poetry and prose.

The chain’s last great poetic monument is also its most untroubled. In Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man, published in 1733 and 1734, the structure becomes an argument for cosmic optimism. Pope surveys the “vast chain of being! which from God began, / Natures ethereal, human, angel, man, / Beast, bird, fish, insect,” down “from Infinite to thee, / From thee to nothing.” Every link is necessary; pull one and the whole collapses — “From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike, / Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.” The fullness that began as Plato’s reason for creation has become, for Pope, the reason this world is the best one possible. Whatever is, is right, because nothing in a perfectly full and continuous order could be otherwise without tearing the fabric.

And it was at exactly this moment, Lovejoy argued, that the chain began to change in a way that would dissolve it. The eighteenth century inherited a chain that was timeless — every rung filled from the first instant of creation, fixed forever. But thinkers of the Enlightenment began to ask what would happen if the principle of plenitude were stretched across time rather than realized all at once. Perhaps the gaps in the chain were not absences but stages not yet reached; perhaps creation was still filling in its rungs, ascending. Lovejoy called this the “temporalizing of the chain,” and named it as the great mutation of the idea in the period — a way of keeping plenitude and continuity while surrendering the static, completed cosmos. A ladder that fills itself over time is no longer a ladder. It is the beginning of a story of development.

That story arrived in full with modern biology. When species came to be understood as mutable, branching, and historically produced, the fixed scale of nature lost its rationale; the tree replaced the ladder, and the ladder’s missing links became ancestors rather than empty rungs. The political chain dissolved on a parallel timetable, as the doctrine of fixed station gave way to claims of equality that treated the ranked order not as the structure of reality but as a structure of power. The egalitarian and the evolutionary undoing were two faces of the same departure: the world ceased to be imagined as a thing with a top and a bottom.

Yet the chain did not so much die as disperse. Its vocabulary persists in every “hierarchy” and “higher form,” in the reflex that ranks the organism above the cell and the human above the worm, in the diagrams that still show life rising from microbe to man. The conviction that reality is graded, that there is more and less of being, proved older and more stubborn than any of the cosmologies built on it. What Plotinus’s overflow set in motion — a single descent from fullness to nothing, with every place between them filled — left its shape on how the West learned to see an ordered world, long after it stopped believing the world was a chain.

→ In the library: Plato, Timaeus (Jowett) — the creator without jealousy · Plotinus, Enneads V.2 (MacKenna) — The Origin and Order of the Beings · Plotinus, Enneads IV.8 (MacKenna) — The Soul's Descent into Body · The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker) — the Celestial Hierarchy

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Emanation · Plotinus · Plato · The One · Soul · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Proclus · Thomas Aquinas · Augustine Of Hippo · Marsilio Ficino · Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola · Angel · Renaissance Neoplatonism · Christian Neoplatonism · Islamic Neoplatonism · Medieval Jewish Neoplatonism · Infinite Cosmology Pluralism Of Worlds · Four Elements · Theosis · Subtle Body