II
1. The Principle of Plenitude and Christian Theol-
ogy.
The idea of an inexhaustible divine productivity
which cannot but
create all possible forms, thus estab-
lishing a full and continuous chain of existing things,
was
transmitted to Christian philosophy from Neo-
Platonism, chiefly through the medium of Augustine
and the
Pseudo-Dionysius. And it gave rise immedi-
ately to a series of antinomies at the heart of Christian
thought.
The first of these (in order of importance) was
the question of reconciling
this divine self-transcen-
dence,
this constitutional inability not to create every
possible thing without
exception, with the divine at-
tribute of
liberty.
The problem is clearly presented, for example, by
Abelard (Intro. ad theologiam, III). The Good can
produce nothing but
good; to imagine there are good
things He might create, but does not, can
only be to
imagine a jealous and unjust God. Thus goodness be-
comes a necessary divine attribute, limiting
His free-
dom: being good, He could not have
failed to produce
the world, nor could He have produced a better one
than the one He did produce. To the objection that
God acts, then, out of
necessity rather than free choice,
Abelard answers that a certain necessity
is inherent
in His nature. His goodness is so great that He does
spontaneously what it is impossible for Him not to do.
The
“Spinozism” of this position has been clearly
pointed
out by Arthur O. Lovejoy ([1936], pp. 71-72);
the connection between this
problem and the theodicy
of Leibniz is no less evident.
Thomas Aquinas had to face the same problem, once
having accepted the
principle of plenitude. God wills
the multiplicity of things inasmuch as He
wills His own
essence and perfection, which indeed contains in itself
all things (Summa contra gentiles I, 75). And yet
it
cannot be said that He acts out of necessity—and here
Thomas introduces the notion of consistency: the divine
choice is such that
He chooses that which is consistent
with His perfection without, however,
His being con-
strained by it (ibid., I,
81). But now it is clear that
this idea of the contingency of creation,
which depends
on the divine choice, contradicts the principle of plen-
itude previously affirmed (ibid., II, 45;
III, 71; Summa
theologica, I, q. 25, a. 6).
It is not surprising, given these difficulties, that the
official teaching
of the Church tended to silence the
Platonic conception of a
self-transcendent deity com-
pelled to create
all possibilities. In general the “Chris-
tianization” of the Platonic doctrine of
participation
involved a denial of emanationism, for the quality of
liberty had to be attributed to the Creator; and the
multiplicity of the
forms of being flowing from the free
act of creation reflected, but did not
modify or condi-
tion the richness and
perfection of the Divine Being.
But if the idea of fullness, which requires the coinci-
dence of the possible and the real, involved
Christian
thought in the difficulties we have seen, the application
of
the idea of the biological continuum went far more
smoothly: it was in fact
used repeatedly in praise of
that interconnectedness of things (connexio rerum) by
which nature passes only by
steps from one kind to
another. The notion of continuity was amply used
even
in psychology. In the nature of man different grades
of being
meet: as microcosm, he recapitulates the
continuity of orders inherent in
the scale of nature.
He is a workshop of all created beings (creaturarum
omnium officina), and also stands as
the union of all
creatures (medietas atque adunatio
omnium creatur-
arum). Not
independent of any creatures (nullius crea-
turae expers), in common with the angels he
has intelli-
gence, with animals he shares
sensibility, with plants
the vegetable life, and with stones simple being.
These
are recurrent motifs in, e.g., Albert the Great, John
Scotus
Erigena, William of Conches; and also in
Thomas Aquinas, who places in the
human soul the
boundary between corporeal and incorporeal things
(Summa contra gentiles II, 68).
2. Gradation in Nature and in the Sciences,
(“scala
naturae” and
“scala scientiarum”). If the ascending
way
is placed before the Christian as an itinerary of
moral edification, the
same way is also, until the Ren-
aissance,
the route that science must follow in recon-
structing that universal plan expressed precisely in the
Chain
of Being. This methodical ideal of an upward
orientation is very evident, for example, in Raymond
Lully's
(or Lull) construction of the tree of knowl-
edge—hence it was transmitted, thanks to the con-
tinuity of tradition set by Lully, to
Renaissance ency-
clopedism, and to the
pansophic ideal of the first half
of the seventeenth century.
“The likenesses to the divine nature,” writes Lully
in
his Compendium artis..., (in Opera, Mainz,
[1721-24], III, 74), “are imprinted upon
every creature
according to that creature's receptive capacities,
greater or less in each case... thus every creature
carries, more or less,
the sign of its Maker.” Whence
the ideal of a way of knowing
that proceeds by signs
(per vestigias)
towards the reconstruction of the scale
of beings, of the hierarchies of
the cosmos: from stone
to plant, to animal, to man, to the heavens, to
the
angels, to God (cf. Liber de ascensu et descensu
intel-
lectus [1304]).
Whence also, the full construction of
the “trees” of
an encyclopedic knowledge that com-
prehends, in one organic picture of the universe, not
only sensible
nature but also the ethico-political life
of man, the structure of the
heavens, the divine hier-
archies, all the
way to the arbor divinalis, which is
the
culmination of the cosmic hierarchy. All things are
contained in Lully's
sixteen trees; and in them, taken
together, we have another example of the
continuity
of the Scale of Being—for every tree participates
in
the nature of all the preceding ones, so that each is
a kind of
compendium of the natures below it, and
contiguity is established between
preceding and suc-
ceeding orders.
This ideal of knowledge as an ascent through the
grades of perfection of
creatures is kept alive, and is
even renewed, through all of the
Renaissance. For
example, Giordano Bruno, in the De
umbris (1582), says
that all things have an orderly and
connected structure,
and for that reason man should keep this scale of
nature
clearly before his eyes, and make the effort to climb
from
multiplicity to unity. It is this ideal that animates
all Renaissance
encyclopedism, and is still quite alive
at the birth of the new
science—as the ideal of a
reconstruction of the universe that
shall exhibit the
qualities of comprehensiveness, gradation, and conti-
nuity—alongside the
experimental method and its col-
lection of
more or less unconnected and scattered
scraps of information. The program
of the Royal Soci-
ety, for example, as
formulated in 1669 by Thomas
Sprat (History of the Royal
Society, p. 110), is witness
to this symbiosis of the techniques
of experimental
research and the idea of a full and hierarchical uni-
verse. It is precisely the task of science
to retrace the
steps of this universe: the program proposed “to
follow
all the links of this chain [of the diverse orders of
creatures], till all their secrets are open to our minds.
...” The pages of the Philosophical
Transactions are
a body of minute experimental data, offered to
the
attention of men of science for no more than what
they are worth
as disparate experimental findings; and
yet, for example, the various
universal language plans
drawn up by certain eminent members of the
Society
(John Wilkins being among the most notable) are based
precisely on the notion of a hierarchical classification
that holds good
both ontologically and logically—for
nature as well as for
science.
