Two weeks ago, I shared a heartfelt lament with my editor: “Woe to me if I do not philosophize.” Feeling my pain, she replied, “Just do it,” or words to that effect. And so, gentle reader, you now find me still contending with “the great chain of being.” It’s the concept, originating with Plato and refined by Plotinus, that the universe is chock full of every possible kind of existence, that these countless forms display a hierarchical continuity, and that in their dizzying diversity they express the Good. This speculative concept has had a pervasive, and controversial, influence over the centuries.

My current brief is to track its presence in politics, with the broadest of brushstrokes. Let’s first consider the place of kings and begin with Scripture. For a time, prophets guide the chosen people. Envious of other nations, they then ask for a king. Yahweh directs Samuel to anoint Saul. David, not wanting to kill the Lord’s anointed, lawfully succeeds him (1 Samuel 24:10). But even David needs the prophet Nathan to correct him (2 Samuel 12:7). The divided Hebrew kingdom collapses. And when the Messiah comes, a donkey carries him in fleeting triumph into Jerusalem. His kingdom is not of this world.

The Roman emperors struggled to sustain terrestrial kingdoms and often proclaimed themselves divinities. But in time even their kingdoms crumbled. Fast forward to the Middle Ages, and far less pretentious rulers emerge. They appeal, moreover, to natural law for their legitimacy. In his On Kingship (1266), Thomas Aquinas rejects absolutism and, instead, commends a limited monarchy drawing on popular support.

Only after the Reformation does a nationalized Divine Right of Kings move center stage. In England, King James I (1566-1625) insists that his authority comes directly from God and that he need only answer to God. In France, King Louis XIV (1638-1715) claims the same. Richard Filmer is England’s chief theorist of supremacy. In his Patriarcha (1680) he writes that “A proof unanswerable for the superiority of princes above laws is this, that there were kings long before there were any laws.” Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704) is France’s chief theorist. Preaching before the Sun King, he reveals that “Kings reign by Me, says Eternal Wisdom: and from that we must conclude not only that the rights of royalty are established by its laws, but also that the choice of persons [to occupy the throne] is an effect of its providence.”

But if such is the place of kings, what of the rest of us? We, too, have our assigned places. In his Essay on Man (1734), Alexander Pope expressly cites the “vast chain of being, which from God began.” We are not to alter it.

Order is Heav’n’s first law; and this confest,
Some are, and must be, greater than the rest,
More rich, more wise…

Indeed, the poet continues with an ominous conclusion:

And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, “Whatever IS, is RIGHT.”

The message is that we each have our station in life, and we are to act accordingly.

Royalists widely supposed that a great chain of being gave warrant to absolutism, but we need hardly do so today. To counter their confident assertions, we should first reconsider the character of their philosophical foundation. Even Samuel Johnson, a loyal Tory, questioned its coherence. It presents us, he observes, with “a scale of being descending, by insensible degrees, from infinite perfection to absolute nothing.” But if there were such a scale, there would always be a chasm between its highest finite member and infinity and another chasm between its lowest finite member and nothingness. Such a “Scale of Being,” he charged in a review written in 1757, “is raised by presumptuous Imagination” and is a logical embarrassment!

Nonetheless, it would be as wrong to dismiss a constructive and analogous order, whether in nature or politics, as it is to everywhere impose a static and distorted order. Creation itself evidences an order, an intelligibility, that grounds both everyday life and scientific inquiry. Thomists argue that the progressive perfection of that order comes in the activity of its participants at every level. They embrace the axiom that every entity realizes its fulfillment in action (omne ens perficitur in actu). And what is the political significance of this line of thought? Where does it lead? Again, to use broad-brush strokes (lest my editor urge “not getting into the weeds”), it might well lead natural law liberals to argue the democratic state, as the topmost agency of the people, is a worthy political framework. Jacques Maritain, a Thomistic personalist, praised the ideal of government by the people, of the people, and for the people. Such a government fosters energizing subsidiarity over stifling centralization.

But here there is a critical caveat. A natural law liberal sees the consent of the governed as a necessary but not sufficient condition for rightful governance. Indeed, a decisive majority of voters might support grave violations of the natural law. All too often modern democracies have legalized the intentional killing of the innocent, as with abortion and euthanasia; all too often they have stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. Well might we protest “no kings.” But democracy alone is a Trojan Horse.