Both academic and popular accounts of the European intellectual tradition often use the “great chain of being” as shorthand for a hierarchical cosmology in which each natural kind plays an allotted, rationally explicable role. This role is good for both the individuals that play it and the cosmic whole. An individual’s deviation from its role violates the natural law.
I disrupt this historiography of the “chain of being” by showing that one of this concept’s perceived champions, Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274), used it to argue the exact opposite: that God can radically upend the natural order. I do so by placing Aquinas’s articulation of the cosmic hierarchy in its ecclesiological and political context: the mendicant controversy raging at the University of Paris in the mid-13th century. This debate centered on whether the upstart mendicant orders could participate in the diocesan sacramental economy. William of St. Amour (c. 1200-1272), a secular professor, argued that the pope cannot permit the mendicants to preach and absolve sins universally. The immutable ecclesiastical hierarchy reserves that right to the local bishop. Two important responses engaged this argument: that of the Dominican Aquinas and the Franciscan Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1221-1274). Aquinas’s response formulates a juridical understanding of hierarchy. The pope, the church’s sovereign, can alter the ecclesiastical order, just like how God, as cosmic sovereign, can alter the natural one. Bonaventure’s response is different: for him, what St. Amour challenges is study’s combability with apostolic poverty. Bonaventure agrees that hierarchies are immutable but argues that, for the soul to ascend the cosmic one, moral and intellectual striving must go hand-in-hand. My analysis reveals what was at stake in this controversy is both the cosmic and ecclesiastical orders’ mutability and the extent to which they are tied to their soteriological function.
My paper has four sections. First, after outlining the historiography of the “chain of being” I problematize, I summarize the mendicant controversy and St. Amour’s position. The first decades of the 13th century saw the foundation of the Dominican and Franciscan orders in southern Europe. Their members claimed to live lives of apostolic poverty and pursued an evangelistic mission. By the mid-1200s, both orders had penetrated the nascent western European universities, including the preeminent University of Paris. This created conflict with the secular faculty, whose position St. Amour’s 1256 polemic De periculis encapsulates. The mendicants, St. Amour argues, spurn apostolic poverty by pursuing the idle luxury of study. Moreover, they financially support that luxury through predatory pastoral practices unapproved by the bishop of Paris. The mendicants’ claim that the pope has authorized them to dispense the sacraments universally is invalid. Bishops have an inalienable right to govern their dioceses. The ecclesiastical hierarchy is immutable, grounded in divine law.
Second, I describe Aquinas’s response to St. Amour in his 1256 Contra impugnantes and show its impact on Aquinas’s cosmology. Using a reading of Pseudo-Dionysius’s On the Celestial Hierarchy, Aquinas argues God can circumvent the “chain of being” in soteriological emergencies. Just like how God can send “angelic ministers” down through the heavenly ranks should the economy of salvation demand it, the pope can intervene in a diocese’s sacramental economy to achieve a salutary effect. Aquinas applies this doctrine of a “state of exception” to cosmology in his Sentences commentary (1252-56). When God commanded Abraham to kill Isaac, Abraham’s path of return to God was miraculously rerouted. The natural law is based on a rationally intelligible cosmic hierarchy. But because this hierarchy is one of an infinite number of circuits by which God knows and wills Godself, divine power can modify any creature’s metaphysical place within the cosmos in exceptional circumstances. Only God’s status as the final cause is stable. Aquinas maintains this cosmology in his Summae, introducing an inconsistency into the “chain of being” as classically understood. An individual’s cosmic function was thought to be its inalienable nature. But if God can invert an individual’s relationship to the natural order without destroying that individual, natures are extrinsic to individuals. Natural kinds thus cannot enjoy metaphysical primacy.
Third, I describe how Bonaventure, in his 1254 De scientia Christi, formulated a different answer to the seculars’ critique. For him, study's seeming incompatibility with apostolic poverty is the seculars’ central argument. Bonaventure responds to this argument through an ornate coordination of moral theology, Christology, and epistemology. He reasons backward from the vision of the uncreated Word the human soul of Jesus Christ enjoys in beatitude. This vision, consisting in all the possible good things God could ever have done, is ultimate science. But because Christ’s holy life is what merited this vision, ethical imitation of Christ – which Bonaventure calls wisdom – is interwoven with the scientific quest. Science and wisdom are both teleologically oriented toward God: the former, by contemplating God’s external effects; the latter, by experiencing God’s internal effects. They are two sides of the simultaneously moral and soteriological “chain” that pulls the whole cosmos toward God. The mendicants’ zeal for apostolic virtue therefore redounds to the university’s academic benefit. This metaphysical defense of mendicancy reflects the cosmology Bonaventure advances in his Sentences commentary (1250-1253), too. The cosmos is an optimally calibrated salvation machine. Since God’s will is to save, the only other possible cosmos is the sinless one God will eschatologically inaugurate.
Fourth, I suggest two contrasting concepts of salvation underlie Aquinas’s and Bonaventure’s divergent responses to St. Amour. Both mendicant metaphysicians think the cosmos, and divine action therein, aim at salvation. Aquinas’s concept of salvation is logical: it is the particularly human version of the return to God all creatures perform. A cosmos without humans would still have satisfied God’s intellect and will. Bonaventure’s concept of salvation is anthropic: the cosmos was built around the goal of saving humans. Any other possible world is suboptimal. I conclude by remarking that, in the later history of university theology, Aquinas’s concept triumphed. Thinkers like John Duns Scotus (1265/66-1308) made explicit the metaphysical individualism implicit in Aquinas, exacerbating the tensions inherent in his juridical interpretation of the “great chain of being.”
The mendicant controversy at the 13th-century University of Paris provides the backdrop for understanding how two mendicant metaphysicians, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas, interpret how ecclesiastical, angelic, and cosmological “chains of being” function. Faced with the seculars’ criticism that mendicants have no right to intervene in Paris’s sacramental economy and that their academic aspirations are incompatible with apostolic poverty, Aquinas and Bonaventure offer different responses. Aquinas assigns the pope the sovereign power to institute a “state of exception” and circumvent a local bishop’s authority, just like how God can suspend the natural law in soteriological emergencies. Bonaventure uses speculative Christology to argue that wisdom, which the mendicants instantiate through their pursuit of virtue, is metaphysically co-constitutive of the scientific knowledge the university aims at. These defenses of the mendicants’ presence in medieval academic life determine how these two thinkers frame the relationship between cosmology and soteriology.