Great chain of being

The great chain of being is a hierarchical structure of all matter and life, thought by medieval Christianity to have been decreed by God.

[3] In the New Testament, the Epistle to the Colossians sets out a partial list: "everything visible and everything invisible, Thrones, Dominations, Sovereignties, Powers – all things were created through him and for him.

[13] In the 5th and 6th centuries, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite set out a more elaborate hierarchy, consisting of three lists, each of three types:[14] Humans uniquely share spiritual attributes with God and the angels above them, Love and language, and physical attributes with the animals below them, like having material bodies that experienced emotions and sensations such as lust and pain, and physical needs such as hunger and thirst.

The apex predator like the lion, could move vigorously, and has powerful senses like keen eyesight and the ability to smell their prey from a distance, while a lower order of animals might wiggle or crawl, or like oysters were sessile, attached to the sea-bed.

[16] 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.

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.

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.

[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 like Henri de Blainville.

[25]Allenby and Garreau propose that the Catholic Church's narrative of the great chain of being kept the peace in Europe for centuries.

"[20] 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.