THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING

By Richard Rohr, OFM

Francis called all creatures, no matter how small by the name of brother and sister; because he
knew they had the same source as himself. ~ Saint Bonaventure's Life of Francis

By this image the Scholastic theologians tried to communicate a linked and coherent
world (q.v. The Great Chain of Being, Arthur Lovejoy, [Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1936]). The essential and unbreakable links in the chain include the Divine
Creator, the angelic heavenly, the human, the animal, the world of plants and
vegetation, the waters upon the earth, and the planet Earth itself with its minerals. In
themselves, and in their union together, they proclaim the glory of God (Psalm 104) and
the inherent dignity of all things. This image became the basis for calling anything and
everything "sacred."

What some now call creation spirituality, deep ecology, or holistic Gospel actually
found a much earlier voice in the spirituality of the ancient Celts, the Rhineland
mystics, and most especially St. Francis of Assisi (1182 -1226). Women like Hildegard of
Bingen (1098-1179) communicated it through music, art, poetry, and community life
itself; scholars like St. Bonaventure (1221-1274) created an entire Summa Theologica based
on St. Francis' spiritual seeing: "In the soul's journey to God we must present to
ourselves the whole material world as the first mirror through which we may pass over to
the Supreme (Artisan)" (The Soul's Journey to God, 1, 9 [emphasis added]). The
Dominican Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) said the same: "If humankind could have
known God without the world, God would never have created the world."

The "Catholic synthesis" of the early Middle Ages was exactly that—a synthesis that
held together, for us, one coherent world, a positive intellectual vision not defined by
"againstness" or enemies but by "the clarity and beauty of form." It was a "cosmic egg"
of meaning, a vision of Creator and a multitude of creatures that excluded nothing. The
great chain of being was the first holistic metaphor for the new seeing offered us by the
Incarnation: Jesus as the living icon of integration, "the coincidence of opposites" who
"holds all things in unity" within himself (Colossians 1: 15-20). God is One. I am whole
and so is everything else.

Sadly we seldom saw the Catholic synthesis move beyond philosophers' books and
mystics’ prayers. The rest of us Catholics often remained in a fragmented and dualistic
world, usually looking for the contaminating element to punish or the unworthy

©2001 by the Center for Action and Contemplation. All Rights Reserved.
member to expel. While still daring to worship the cosmic Scapegoat—Jesus—we
scapegoated the other links in the great chain of being. We have been unwilling to see
the Divine Image in those we judge to be inferior or unworthy: sinners, heretics,
animals, things growing from earth and earth itself. Once the great chain of being was
broken, we were soon unable to see the Divine Image in our own species, except for
folks just like us. Then it was only a short time before the Enlightenment and modern
secularism denied the whole heavenly sphere unknown in any culture except the recent
West—and finally we doubted the Divinity itself!

As the medievalists predicted, once the chain was broken, and one link not honored, the
whole vision collapsed. Either we acknowledge that God is in all things or we have lost
the basis for seeing God in anything. Once the choice is ours and not God's, it is merely
a world of private preferences and prejudices. The cosmic egg is shattered.

Saint Bonaventure, who is called the second founder of the Franciscan Order, took
Francis' intuitive genius and made it into an entire philosophy. "The magnitude of
things clearly manifests the wisdom and goodness of the triune God, who by power,
presence and essence exists uncircumscribed in all things" (The Soul's Journey to God, 1,
14). "God is within all things but not enclosed; outside all things, but not excluded;
above all things, but not aloof; below all things but not debased" (V 8). Bonaventure was
the first to speak of God as one "whose center is everywhere and whose circumference
is nowhere." Therefore the origin, magnitude, multitude, beauty, fullness, activity, and
order of all created things are the very "footprints" and "fingerprints" (vestigia) of God.

“Whoever, therefore, is not enlightened by such splendor of created things is blind;

whoever is not awakened by such outcries is deaf; whoever does not praise God
because of all these effects is dumb; whoever does not discover the First Principle from
such clear signs is a fool. Therefore, open your eyes, alert the ears of your spirit, open
your lips and apply your heart so that in all creatures you may see, hear, praise, love
and worship, glorify and honor your God, lest the whole world rise against you” (1, 15).

It is hard to imagine how different the last 800 years might have been if this truly
catholic vision had formed more Christians. But instead, as Bonaventure feared, "The
whole world has now risen [in judgment] against" us. Our seeing has been very partial
and usually prejudicial, and often not seeing at all. The individual has always decided
and discriminated as to where and if God's image would be honored. Sinners, heretics,
witches, Moslems, Jews, Indians, native spiritualities, buffalo and elephants, land and
water were the losers. And we dared to call ourselves monotheists ("one God" tends to
move a people toward one world) or "Christ-like." (The union of the human and the
divine in one) The Divine Indwelling, subject to our whimsical seeing, seems to dwell

©2001 by the Center for Action and Contemplation. All Rights Reserved.
nowhere except in temples of our own choosing. We have always had a "pro-choice
movement," it seems. It did not start with the abortion debate.

Until we weep over these sins and publicly own our complicity in the destruction of
God's creation, we are surely doomed to remain blind. If not, we will likely keep
looking for "acceptable" scapegoats. We always think the problem is elsewhere, whereas
the Gospel keeps the pressure of conversion on me. As far as the soul is concerned, no
one else is your problem. You are your problem. "You be converted, and live" says the
biblical tradition (Deuteronomy 31:20; Mark 1:15).

Jesus tried desperately to keep us within and connected to the great chain of being by
taking away from us the power to scapegoat and project onto enemies and outsiders.
We were not to break the chain by hating, eliminating, or expelling the other. He
commanded us to love the enemy and gave us himself as Cosmic Victim so we would
get the point—and stop creating victims. But we are transformed into Christ slowly.

Our inclination to break the chain—to decide who is good and who is bad—seems to be
a basic control mechanism in all of us. We actually are a bit worried about the God that
Jesus believes in: "Who causes the sun to rise on bad as well as good, who lets the rain
fall on the honest and the dishonest alike" (Matthew 5:45). If we dishonor the so-called
inferior or unworthy members of creation, we finally destroy ourselves, too. Once we
stop seeing, we stop seeing. Like nothing else, spiritual transformation is an
all-or-nothing proposition. Like Jesus' robe, it is a "seamless garment." He wore it and
then offered it to us.

Saint Paul did for Jesus exactly what Saint Bonaventure did for Francis. He took the life
lived and made it into a philosophy/theology. The seamless garment is still intact in his
most-quoted analogy of the body:

If one part is hurt, all parts are hurt with it, if one part is given special honor, all
parts enjoy it ... and it is precisely the parts of the body that seem to be the
weakest which are the indispensable ones, and it is the least honorable parts of
the body that we must clothe with the greatest care (I Corinthians 12:26, 22).
Paul, the former mass murderer Saul, knew well religion's power to create hate and
violence toward other people and other links in the great chain of being. He left no
room for scapegoating in his teaching: "There is one God and Creator of all, who is over
all, who works through all and is within all" (Ephesians 4:6).

For those given sight by the Gospel, there is only one world—God’s world—and it is all
supernatural! We may no longer divide the world into sacred and profane. There is

©2001 by the Center for Action and Contemplation. All Rights Reserved.
cosmic symbolism in the tearing of the temple veil from top to bottom at the death of
Jesus (Matthew 27:51). In the one world liberated by Christ, our need to divide and
discriminate has been denied us and frankly, we don't like it. For some reason, we want
to retain the right to decide where God is, who we must honor, and whom we may
hate. A rather clever guise actually, for I can remain autonomous and violent while
thinking of myself as holy. But, as Jesus reminds us, any branch cut off from the vine is
useless (John 15:5). We either go to God linked or it seems we don't go at all. How easy it
is to avoid the searing and sacramental mystery: "Listen, Israel, the Lord your God is
One" (Deuteronomy 6:4). Jewish monotheism became the basis for one coherent and
cosmic world, where truth is one, and there is no basis for rivalry between the arts,
science and religion. If it is true it is true, regardless of its source. It is such truth that
will set us free (John 8:32).

In his brilliant contemporary synthesis, A Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilber sounds
like a post-modern Thomas Aquinas or Bonaventure. He concludes that "everything is a
holon."—something that is simultaneously whole within itself and yet also part of
something larger. He demonstrates at great length (see Sex, Ecology, Spirituality,
Shambala, 1995) that everything in the physical, biological, psychic, and spiritual
universe is a "holon.” It really is one connected universe of meaning. And in relation to
the arrogance of modernism and the cynicism of post-modernism, Wilber only adds
that "No epoch is finally privileged. We are all tomorrow's food." Agreeing with the
genuinely traditional Catholic, he reminds us that even our moment in time is a holon, a
small chain-link in something still larger. A "Great Catholic"—one who embraces the
whole Tradition—would call it the Cosmic Christ, before whom no institution, no
moment of time, no attempt at verbalization will be adequate. Virgil’s Aeneid ends with
Aeneas leaving burning Troy, carrying his father on his shoulders, with his son in one
hand and clutching his gods in the other. We all enter the future carrying our only past
and with the future and our God in our hands—or we do not enter the future at all.

Those who continue to look through microscopes and telescopes are surrendering to the
mysteries of an infinite, creative spectrum. The chain of being is even longer and bigger
than we church folks imagined—and we had best come to the telescope and microscope
with our shoes off and ready to live the emptiness of not knowing. Maybe we are just
beginning to. See how broad the "communion of saints" might be-and whether we
really want to believe in it.

©2001 by the Center for Action and Contemplation. All Rights Reserved.