great chain of being

• Great Chain of Being, Chain of Being

great chain of being (plural great chains of being)

1. (Christianity, historical) A hierarchical structure of all matter and life, descending from God through angels, humans, animals and plants to minerals, and thought in medieval times to have been decreed by God.
   • 1733, [Alexander Pope], An Essay on Man. […], epistle I, London: Printed for J[ohn] Wilford, […], →OCLC, page 235:

     Vaſt Chain of Being! which from God began, / Ethereal Eſſence, Spirit, Subſtance, Man, / Beaſt, Bird, Fiſh, Inſect! what no Eye can ſee, / No Glaſs can reach! from Infinite to Thee!

   • 1852 January – 1853 April, Charles Kingsley, Jun., chapter XXV, in Hypatia: Or, New Foes with an Old Face. […], volume II, London: John W[illiam] Parker and Son, […], published 1853, →OCLC, page 256:

     If the one spirit permeated all things, if its all-energising presence linked the flower with the crystal as well as with the demon and the god, must it not link together also the two extremes of the great chain of being?

   • 1903 [1820], Daniel Webster, “First Settlement of New England”, in A. J. George, editor, Select Speeches of Daniel Webster 1817–1845:

     […] ; ourselves being but links in the great chain of being, which begins with the origin of our race, runs onward through its successive generations, binding together the past, the present, and the future, and terminating at last, with the consummation of all things earthly, at the throne of God.

   • 1936, A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea, Harvard University Press, page 205:

     There was more than one way, however, in which the principles embodied in the cosmological conception of the Chain of Being could be used as weapons against social discontent and especially against all equalitarian movements.

   • 1996, David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, →ISBN:

     In Descartes’s hands, two thousand years later, this hierarchical continuum of living forms, commonly called “the Great Chain of Being,” was polarized into a thorough dichotomy between mechanical, unthinking matter (including all minerals, plants, and animals, as well as the human body) and pure, thinking mind (the exclusive province of humans and God).

   • 2012, Lydia Pyne, Stephen J. Pyne, chapter 5, in The Last Lost World, Penguin, →ISBN:

     Far from being a radical innovation without precedent, Darwinian evolution had itself evolved by fits and starts out of one of the hoariest concepts in Western civilization, the Great Chain of Being.

• In modern use, the term often omits reference to God and angels, and focuses exclusively on the notion of "higher" and "lower" lifeforms, with man at the pinnacle.