I don't see the great hierarchy of being as a "system" at all — unless by "system" you mean "universe" or "cosmos," and not its narrower sense of a philosophical doctrine. Rather, I see it as a simple description of the universal context in which human beings exist, thus comprehensively forming the irreducible bases of human experience.
On this view, to put it crudely, human experience only comes in these four "flavors," God, Man, World (natural world, physical world) and Society (community, polity). You can test the description for yourself by engaging in a simple exercise in self-awareness. Pick any ordinary day, just go about your regular daily routines; but while you're doing that, try to reflect on the types of experiences you are having involving any "other than yourself." If at the end of the day your experiences involved anything other than experiences of these four "partners" singly or in some combination, then I would dearly love to know what that was.
Of course, if you think the God partner is mystical and magical per se, then probably the description of the great hierarchy of being is senseless to you. But this result would be a function of your predisposition of unbelief.
Which brings us to the man "partner" and his relation to God. Perhaps the greatest insight of classical Greece and of Judeo-Christianity is that ultimately, it is the God–man relation that is key to the good order of man and thus of the justice of his relations with other men and with the other partners in being.
The French philosopher Henri Bergson spoke of the man who lives in "openness to God" as l'âme ouverte, or "the open soul." There is also the man who freely chooses to close his soul to God, the l'âme close. The idea here is that the man who closes his soul to God "deforms" himself. (I'll spare you the details for now and just mention that the good order of the soul in open existence under God was perhaps Plato's major preoccupation over a long and prolific life; and that the "turning around" of the soul (e.g., Plato's periagoge, or the Christian "born-again" experience) to Christ — the Way the Truth and the Life — is the divine remedy for such deformity.)
There are echoes of the great pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus in Bergson's insight. Heraclitus maintained there are only two types of men, the "public man" and the "private man."
The public man — the mature, wise man — is such because he acknowledges the Logos, or the universal order of being. He sees it as "one and common" and thus binding on all men as the true source of order not only of the individual human being but of the good society. Thus the public man is a man who is "awake" because he understands that the order of the real world is "one and common" for all men. But there are others — the private men — who, not acknowledging the Logos, are in effect "asleep, each turn[ing] aside into their private worlds." They live "as if they had a wisdom of their own."
The analogy to Bergson is that Heraclitus' private men are cases of l'âme close. WRT the private men, the "many," Heraclitus put it this way (Fragment 1):
Although this Logos is eternally valid, yet men are unable to understand it.... That is to say, although all things come to pass in accordance with this Logos, men seem to be without any experience of it.... My own method is to distinguish each thing according to its nature, and to specify how it behaves; other men, on the contrary, are as forgetful and heedless in their waking moments of what is going on around and within them as they are during sleep.The l'âme close, by not acknowledging the Logos, falls asleep into his own dream world, and thus becomes a private man. It is out of that dream world that all Second Realities arise....
Some things never change.
Exactly.. humans are to "that concept" merely primates.. or monkeys with instinct and habits..
Pity that they cannot see the only way for humans to evolve is to be "re-born" into another creature.. Or primates to evolve into something "else".. They miss the very deep scientific truth of the evolution of humans.. to fulfil the metaphorical evolution of other life forms all around them.. They miss the punch line.. or the point of being born again...
Could be in the future they will be told this.. only to look at "some angel that tells them this and then goes.. "Duuuugh!".. when it dawns on them..
Amazing that some people will hear what they want to hear.. and see what they want to see..
What fascinating insights from both Heraclitus and Bergson and how closely they match!
It is easy to discern the man who thinks he is Napoleon is tragically cut off from the Great Hierarchy of Being, living in a Second Reality of his own imagining - but truly, the man closed to God is likewise deformed.
The problem with the hierarchy of being system is that it reduces each of these domains (God, man, world, society) into separate entities.
What has occurred through history based on this system is gnostic notions of traveling from one domain to another. Thus, we see dualisms arise such that the spiritual (God) is good and all the other domains are bad. The spirit is good and the body is bad. World-fleeing becomes the norm. Grace/Nature dichotomies plague theology. The Scriptures, however, tell us the Creation was good.
Modal philosophies try to incorporate all the domains together so that we understand the way each domain is integrated into the other such that, i.e., the domain of man is not autonomous from God, nature, or society. It provides a more holistic approach to understanding. (A Christian modal philosophy will still maintain the asceity of God while at the same time acknowledging that no man is autonomous from God.)
A Christian modal philosophy avoids the error that man is autonomous in his thinking from God, nature and society. When man believes he is an autonomous domain distinct from God his theoretical thoughts become apostate and lead to antinomies. (The original sin)
Theoretical thought that arises from self-knowledge, dependent on the knowledge of it's origin-God, cognizant of it's relation to the world and society, is less likely to engage in apostate theoretical thought.
Prior to the coming of Jesus Christ,the manner in which men suffered can be catagorized by two broad categories: Stoicism and Dionysionism. Although the ancients knew nothing of free will, Stoics nevertheless exercised it, for their way of dealing with suffering might be summed up as, “Not thinking about it.” The reverse is true for the Dionysions. In their way of suffering, strong, dark impulses were ascribed to Dionysius. If they did not ‘give into’ those impulses, it was thought that they would go insane. Thus for the Stoics, whose suffering must surely have been greatly increased by the Dionysions, salvation from suffering came by ‘not thinking about it,’ while salvation for the Dionysions came by ‘giving into’ their base impulses.
In that Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Gluttony, Hate, and Envy are the fuel driving all base impulses, it becomes understandable why Nimrod—a Dionysion—declared himself ‘2 parts god, 1 part man” and tyrannized the people. Notice that by ‘giving into’ his strong impulses, Nimrod perforce, escaped into a ‘second reality,’ or a fantasy realm. In short, Nimrod’s impulses drove him to seek salvation by escaping reality. In effect, Nimrod was playing a ‘pretend game’ in which everyone else was forced into playing in order that his fantasy seem real. Salvation by escape from reality (very simply defined as God, moral conscience,guilt, and free will) is the ultimate cause of tyranny, mind-control, brainwashing, hate crime laws, speech codes, etc.
Dostoevsky tells us that we need to understand these two natures if we are to correctly diagnose the utopian irreligions-—Marxist Communism, Nat’l Socialism, Progressive Liberalism-—and their derivatives.
It is primarily the Dionysions, or the ‘terrible-willed’ as Dostoevsky calls them, who are the ones who freely ‘close their souls’ to God. For it is they who seek ‘salvation’ by usurping the throne of God. From Nimrod to Hegel, Comte, Marx, and Nietzsche, all were ‘terrible-willed’ men who sought salvation by escaping reality, empowering their will-to-power with hate, and usurping the power of the great I AM.
It’s not difficult to believe Marx’s affinity for Hegel, given his (Hegel’s) collectivist understanding of freedom and of Man (the individual). To propose that for Man to be left alone to make his own choices without interference by others is not to be free, but that Man is only free if his duty and his self-interest coincide, leaves me bereft of any defining word save one; that being ‘Orwellian’ (freedom is slavery).
But I wonder how much does Obama contemplate the mind-cracking dialectics of Marx and Hegel (William Ayers notwithstanding), or does he simply view their meanderings as a vehicle to exercise control of all our lives, our energies, and our wealth. I rather think the latter, but I’m open to persuasion.