The Great Chain of Being is perhaps the most distinctive aspect of what C.S. Lewis described as ‘The Discarded Image’. Is the modern age best considered as the rejection of the scala naturae that shaped the Western mind from Parmenides to Dionysius the Areopagite, Dante, and Shakespeare? Since Descartes, many philosophers have tended to view human minds as ‘ghosts in the machine’ and as radically dislocated from ‘nature’. Others have subsumed the human person into ‘nature’ challenging the aspects of human nature that resist reduction to the ‘physicalist’ paradigm, such as ‘consciousness’ ‘intentionality’ or a ‘sense of value’. Some have viewed this dichotomy between Cartesianism and materialism as one reason for the ecological crisis. Are there good reasons for viewing the human being as a ‘part’ of nature, and yet occupying a unique role and responsibility in the ‘chain of being’? What are the prospects for the idea of the ‘chain of being’ without theology? Papers are invited from both a historical and systematic perspective.
This paper challenges the common assumption that modernity has entirely rejected the idea of a scala naturae, or Great Chain of Being. Instead, I argue that this hierarchical concept, particularly in its Aristotelian form, remains deeply embedded in two major strands of modern thought: Darwinian evolution and phenomenology/philosophical anthropology. While a dominant interpretation of Darwinism historicizes the scala naturae, twentieth-century European thinkers retrieve aspects of the ancient Greek framework to affirm both evolution and human distinctiveness.
Despite concerns that such a hierarchy among species reinforces anthropocentrism, I propose that the scala naturae can instead foster an ethical vision grounded in continuity and kinship among living beings. Rejecting hierarchy altogether risks moral arbitrariness and a functional Cartesianism that ends up alienating humanity from nature. By reconsidering the scala naturae, we may find a constructive framework for mediating the longstanding tension between human exceptionalism and ecological belonging.
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.
It has been argued that as an ‘objective,’ systematic account of natura, John Scotus Eriugena’s (b. 815) Periphyseon lacks an ‘interior’ aspect. Borrowing much from his fellow Platonic predecessor, Maximus the Confessor, I aim to show, rather, that the Periphyseon develops a ‘personal’ program regarding the soul’s itinerary. I will focus on one component of a broader program running throughout the Periphyseon — mainly, Eriugena's understanding of the salvific function of natura. I will show how natura, for Eriugena, is a symbol of the Divine Logos. It is not simply a ‘stepping stone,’ but rather, constituted within the Divine Logos Itself. Eriugena’s concept of natura necessitates that any outflowing of the Divine into difference does not destroy its unity, but rather, is an articulation of Itself in a concretized form. Thus, all invisible and visible creatures are endowed with symbolic significance: they orchestrate the final return of all things into God.