Metaphor 3 - The Chain of Being

This metaphor comes with a decision. Before you consider this metaphor, you have to decide whether you believe Something can come out of Nothing or whether there must always be a Something (or rather a Someone) for anything to come out of. For before there was the Theory of Evolution there was the Chain of Being.

The churchmen of the middle ages, like us, were aware of design principles at work in the way all nature’s creatures were made, and so, with the assistance of ancient Greek thought, came up with this metaphor.

In the Chain of Being, there is always a Someone out of whom everything else came. There is a kind of similarity between The Theory of Evolution and the Chain of Being, but with a very big difference. Evolution works from the bottom (the slime), up (to man?), and has no purpose, no reason for anything. The Chain of Being starts at the top, with a designer and creator at the top, who then works from the bottom up, creating creatures of varying complexity of design and self-awareness in a metaphorical "Chain of Being" leading up to the Creator, who has a very specific purpose in doing so.

We ourselves are self aware beings. We perceive that there seems to be successive levels of design in the making of animals, successive levels of self awareness and, if we observe carefully, we perceive that each creature has a form of "happiness" peculiar to it, whether instinctive or learned.

Being that there are increasingly complex beings, we can perceive that there are increasingly complex forms of happiness that these beings can enjoy. Varying in complexity by the amount of time and energy required to enjoy them and learn how to enjoy them.

In animals, happiness is mostly the satisfaction of drives for hunger or procreation. Fish are made happy (in a sense) by gobbling up plankton and/or smaller fishes, and very likely, by being able to excrete. But we don’t know if they are made happy by their reproductive processes, other than that they innately know they have to perform them. Dogs are also made happy by food, excretion, and most obviously by procreation. But dogs also like to play games that, while related to their survival skills, are not just exclusively for that purpose. Monkeys and apes are known to get a form of happiness from relating to each other in a society, as scientific observation has revealed that they have grooming networks.

Human kinds of happiness vary in complexity as well. Enjoying music from other time periods is a more complex happiness than enjoying music from just your own generation, simply because of the time and energy required to recapture what it was that earlier people enjoyed about their music. The same can be said of movies, theater performances, and even television shows, and any of the other arts. Enjoying chess is a more complex happiness than enjoying checkers. Enjoying a game of Monopoly is a more complex pleasure than enjoying Candyland. And so on down the line.

Now that we are aware that there are different kinds and levels of happiness, we should go on to start thinking about our choices of which kind of happiness will best serve us. In a sense we are saying that only the best and most important kind will do, a kind that is suitable to our place in the Chain of Being.

In our sorting of the kinds of happiness, we can start with an old saw. It’s the old saw about there being three kinds of people: those who talk about things (possessions), those who talk about people (gossip), and those who talk about ideas.

As with talk, it is so with happiness. Things, people, or ideas are the basic choices ("places", i.e. vacations spots, can be considered a collection of "things"). As far as talk goes, ideas are certainly a better topic than gossip about people or talk of possessions, but in a sort of the kinds of happiness, ideas should, all things being equal actually come in the middle between people and things. For these reasons: 1.) Ideas are more important than things because ideas for creating things come before the things themselves and in fact shape their creation. And if your imagination is good enough, it is possible to enjoy many things in your mind with out having to have them in reality. 2.) People create things, and they conceive ideas. And like things, ideas can be good or bad, intelligent or stupid, worthy or worthless.

Our bloody centuries on this earth have revealed the consequences some people holding some ideas to be more important than other people. But there have also likewise been other people who have conceived ideas that increased the happiness of many people.

So with happiness, the order of what is best and most important comes down to people first, ideas second (for the most part), and things last. And so from there it then comes down to who is the best person and what kind of ideas that person holds.

So the next step in contemplating the metaphor of the Chain of Being is to think about the levels of being and happiness going up. Up from the level of human beings. This is where we come back to deciding about whether there has to always be something (Or Someone) in order for there to be anything. I.e., we come to the ideal of a Supreme Being.

If I am a human being, and I have various kinds of happiness to chose from, of varying levels of complexity (or lack thereof !), and some of these are light years above the appreciation of any animal (one hopes), then what does the primary and most important happiness of God consist of? And what would be the quality of that happiness as opposed to human happiness?

Let’s take the question of quality first. If we have a Someone who was always there, who has generated everything else, including time (which comes into being with the creation) then we have an eternal Being. At the top of the Chain of Being by virtue of being its Creator, and thereby perfect, this Being would have to be eternal in the sense of every moment in created time being present to Him at once without defect. (Footnote 1) Therefore God’s happiness is perfect and never fades. This is the quality of God’s happiness.

Now let’s turn to the question of what is the primary and most important happiness of God. In a perfect being, happiness would have to sort by what is most important, perfect and best. And what (or rather Who) in the Chain of Being is most important, perfect, and best? If you think about it carefully, you have to conclude that God’s best, most important, and perfect happiness comes from His ideas, His conception and contemplation, of Himself as a Person. (Footnote 2)

In the Chain of Being, indeed as the Creator of the Chain, God exists as a Person, who then has ideas, which translate into things, and into creatures which culminate in people. But the most signifigant, and the most worthy Object of happiness of such a Creator is Himself because all else derives from Him, whereas He exists solely from Himself. In fact, everything that He creates is a reflection of Him as if it were a kind of mirror.

If it sounds a little strange to you, think for a minute about what mostly gives you pleasure to think about when you’re not forced to be thinking about something else. Nine times out of ten, I believe it will be yourself that you are thinking about. We are all, after all, the main characters in our own stories, or the action heroes of our own internal movie theaters. We all have the kind of secret life Walter Mitty does.

It’s just that since God is perfect, and has some other attributes I’ll mention later, it is perfectly all right for God’s highest and best happiness to be centered in the contemplation of Himself and want to see Himself in all He has made.

Now believe it or not, we are now ready to answer Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s famous question: "What are people for?" The answer is in another question. If we have a self-existent Being, who creates, and who’s chief happiness is the contemplation of Himself, then how may that Being increase His happiness if He is perfect and ultimate, and thereby can never change into a greater form than that which He has always had? The answer is: by creating other persons, other beings, who are capable of that same contemplation of Himself.

Make no mistake. Let none deceive you. That is what people are for. God has created us for the very highest happiness there can be, which is to have Him as our Object. In a very real sense, we were all meant to be mystics. It’s just that the degree can vary from person to person.

So, God increases His high quality happiness by creating a Chain of Being, which culminates in beings capable of the contemplation, adoration, and praise of Himself. There are design criteria for such beings.

The first is whether the beings will be based on what I would distinguish as Fecundity versus Fullness. A being based on Fecundity will be a being that starts its existence as something next to nothing and then within the fabric of time grows up into whatever degree of maturity it was meant to have. This design principle implies that the finite number of members of this class of being will come into being by being distributed in the fabric of time. Earthly life, and human beings are based on this principle.

The contrasting principle is Fullness. A creature based on Fullness is one created complete as it is, with no need of either growth or reproduction, since all the members of this order of creation are created at once. Presumably, any messengers of God who pass between Him (in eternity) and His creation (in time) are of this design. (And just to clarify things, I’ll mention that the Greek word for messenger is "angelos"). They would be an intermediate link in the Chain of Being between humans and God. They would be "everlasting", but not "eternal."

The second design principle is, in a very real sense, "a killer." In order for the contemplation, adoration, and praise of God to be in any fashion authentic, the being performing it must have the key ingredient called "free will." Think, if you will, of all the millionaires who have ever wondered if they were really loved for themselves (what ever that might mean). This is what is implicit in God creating a race of beings whose purpose in life is to love Him and worship Him because of the excellency of Who is He is. Worship cannot be performed by either robots or Clockwork Oranges. (Foonote 3)

The only worship that is worth anything is the worship of a free being who has the capacity to refuse that worship and that high quality happiness which God has in Himself. In a word, worship can only be performed by a responsible being.

And so now we get to our next metaphor.
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(1) I am aware that the division of our species into male and female is a design principle of the creator and as such both states are reflections of His personality. (One of His names in Hebrew means literally "the breasted one," which indicates His nurturing nature). I use the "Him" because I will not call Him an "it" and my reasons for not calling "Him" a "Her" will become apparent later.

(2) I know that some people are in the habit of thinking of God as an impersonal "force" (an "it") because they think that is somehow better that being an icky "person." But think about this: human persons have learned how to manipulate and overcome some the impersonal forces of nature, like electricity, electro-magnetism, and even gravity. So thinking of the Supreme Being as an impersonal force is actually a way of demoting Him in our thinking. One is not after all accountable to an impersonal force, but one can be accountable to a person. I think C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity) has the right of it. If God is a person, then His personhood is of a Super Duper variety.

(3) In Anthony Burgess’ novel, A Clockwork Orange, there is a criminal anti-hero who is subjected to a behavior modification treatment that causes him to become immediately ill whenever he even conceives of committing a crime. Burgess is pointing out that this person is still basically a criminal because you have not really changed him, just his behavior. The impluses are still there. So you have a mechanically controlled organic being. A clockwork orange.