Moral order of the Universe as the Chain of Being
THE MORAL ORDER OF THE UNIVERSE
THE CHAIN OF BEING
The metaphysical abstract, the moral order of nature, provides a platform for understanding the human condition in the Elizabethan mind and its works. Although the model may be medieval, ideas do not pass overnight, but devolve stubbornly as new ones take hold and grow. Just as the Elizabethans were moving into the rationalist and scientific Enlightenment with writings such as “Novum Organum” by Francis Bacon, their view of the world was still metaphysical and traditional. This grounding or motif shows up in more than one play; in fact, John Milton establishes it in Paradise Lost written sixty years after the death of Elizabeth I. To name a few, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear and the Tempest can be appreciated, indeed understood, from this perspective.
Nature in Shakespeare’s times was just beginning to be examined scientifically by the methods the modern world has taken for granted. In theses time, science was called natural philosophy, but it took many years to supplant the medieval view in which Shakespeare’s tragedies were immersed in the popular imagination.
Nature was a moral order, pyramidal, envisioning God at the top and all creation organized in descending degrees of perfection with the closer or higher in the pyramid being more perfect or closer to God and the more distant, less perfect. It was pyramidal, with the singular God at the apex (you work out the Trinity) broadening down through angels, humans, animals, plants and minerals. When Lucifer sinned, he created a reverse order, the upside down placing the devil most distant from God, vertically symmetrical to the “good” above. This was called the Chain of Being or the Moral Order of the Universe, as well. Every stratum or category had its own pyramid in its place from the highest which was closest to God, being most perfect to the lowest. The converse was true, evil being lowest and furthest. So, for example, in the animal stratum, the lion being the noblest animal atop the animal pyramid, and the shrew (of which there are many) at the bottom being the humblest. So also, it went for all strata, including the human in the feudal structure.
The human sphere had two prevalent hierarchies: church and state, both feudal in their cultures and structures. Both, it was thought, had been established by a divine order, so that class structure reflected the total moral order of the divine. Of course, the monarch was the singular entity at the feudal apex having been ordained by God and crowned by a high church prelate so that any murder or usurpation of a king was not just treason but sacrilege, an affront to God’s holy order. Hamlet and Macbeth come to mind immediately wherein two kings were hideously murdered. The pope had similar protection; although doctrinaire infallibility didn’t come until since 1870, the pope sat in St. Peter’s throne representing all of Christendom. However, the top men didn’t get a free ride. They had to rule as God would wish, for anything else was a betrayal of God’s holy order. Therefore, both feudal and ecclesiastical orders were rigidly hierarchical being blessed by divine will. Everyone had to play his or her role, although a woman with power, such as Elizabeth I was a rarity. In any case, fealty to the monarch prevented chaos. No wonder the rise of the liberalising merchant class was a threat. Some of the bourgeoisie were part of the French Revolution. The sans culottes, the poor workers, wanted the entire structure gone. In some cases, eradication of the order demanded violence. Hence, to eradicate this feudal model, the Reign of Terror was executed by the brutally egalitarian Jacobins to destroy the aristocracy. Wasn’t Napoleon a rascal when he took the crown from the pope and crowned himself, perhaps beginning the secular state? However, the hierarchy was well in place in his empire, without the Divine Right. But I digress.
So, when Macbeth kills Duncan, he condemns his eternal soul; Prospero has sinned by retiring to his study to learn the magic arts, as he arrogantly dabbles in magic and mystery to rise above his mortal station; such fascination allows his kingdom to decay. His attempt to rise beyond one’s place commits the sin of pride as he places his self above his station. Both in King Lear and the Tempest, to abandon God’s order for one’s own vain purposes is to abandon God’s plan, as with King Lear. It’s all hubris, such that when Lear abdicates the position expecting to retain the status for only self, things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Lear may be vain and foolish, but worse, he is guilty of the sin of pride. Lear has negated the only order that protects us from the animal: the divine. That’s the main plot. He sacrifices the stability of God’s order for his own pride where self becomes more important than assigned position. He loses the court and gains the heath with Tom.
Hamlet’s crisis is the product of the killing of his father, the king old Hamlet by a brother Claudius, as in Cain’s “primal eldest curse” on the innocent Abel. In all these dramas, it is not merely the sinner that must suffer, but the entire state must suffer since power and all that goes with it proceeds from the highest downward encompassing the whole. Furthermore, all are affected God’s power emanates through the highest mortals to the lowest, no level is unaffected. Even in Macbeth, a hawk was slain by a mousing owl, an apparent reversal of order. Each hierarchy follows the general pyramidal model, so that with the corruption at the top creating a vacuum, the lower orders can rise into the spaces provided. Note the plan for regime change in the Tempest when Prospero abnegates his position. So, in all four plays, evil is released throughout since the apex has been corrupted; the toxins spread downward and evil rises.
Therefore, respect and adherence to the grand order is necessary if God’s plan is to establish order and harmony rightfully. As mortals living within it, we are accommodated by such a structure, with everything in its place and a place for everything. The plan, then, is mortals’ ultimate accommodation for all nature, for God’s design accommodates us as the metaphysical support for virtue and wellness. It is that preservation of His design on which the human depends for peace, love, stability and harmony. If the man (as it always was in this patriarchal universe) at the top messes up, the result is social disintegration flowing downward: the good suffer, the evil rises, chaos ensues. Rosencrantz says it best:
The cess of majesty
Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw
What’s near it with it. Or it is a massy wheel
Fix’d on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortis’d and adjoin’d, which when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boist’rous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.
(Hamlet, III iii 15-23)
So, what was left when the divine order of nature descended into chaos? King Lear gives the working model: humans become bereft of grace. What is humanity if the ordained Nature were in shambles? Animal. The icon is Tom O’Bedlam, Shakespeare’s metaphor for the unaccommodated man. In his suffering, the guilty king recognizes a truth: “Thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, forked animal as thou art.” His initial sin has collapsed order: he wanders the heath in rags and ruin, two daughters have turned evil, the honest men are wandering in disguise, Gloucester is blind, Edmund is playing ugly, and the elements are raging as they stumble homeless with but rags on their backs. The culmination is Tom, the human animal with nothing for all has been corrupted. God’s order demands loving care. The ramifications are clear.The nature of the animal, without divine grace, is well represented by the Edmund a product of carnal lust showing all the signs of the lower order of moral being. In this play, Shakespeare uses Gloucester’s adultery as the release of the animal nature which can tempt us all. The only salvation is to return to God’s plan through obeying His will. Such is the subplot of Gloucester and his two sons, contrasting virtue and sin. Lear curses his daughters in crudely organic terms with body and face, as Goneril is a “child of spleen” to be cursed with “wrinkles in the brow of youth.” Therefore, the two plots make a nice pair showing the relationship between the moral order of nature and animal nature. Indeed, the notable icon is unaccommodated Tom O’Bedlam. All meet on the heath, unaccommodated, until the moral order is re-established through Albany, the highest in the aristocratic world.
However, there is no nice, neat binary code of order and chaos, divine and animal. The real issue of nature is to contemplate that which is in between: human nature. Clearly, that is where the author takes us in a decline from the ordered world of Lear’s high court, complete with rightful authority in Act One scene one line one to madness on the heath very far from that fortress of ordained kingship. In so many plays, when this author throws the human condition into ambiguity, he throws us out of the ordered world into a heath or in a witch’s cave or in a forest often in darkness or in a fairy land or on a mysterious island. There human nature is stripped bare of its trappings and must face itself, the elements, or the music as Ariel scolds as a harpy in The Tempest. So, the bard gives us “unaccommodated man” stripped bare without clothing without sustenance without shelter and without his capacity to reason facing nature in the raw. Indeed, it is at this point, we must ask, “What is a man?” (Sorry, ladies, this is the 17th century.) Isn’t it interesting that many animal species survive this way, but man can’t? Humanity must be accommodated by God.
In general, the carnage at the end of Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth are consequences of dismissal of the accommodation of the metaphysical order, and they must be re-built by one with credentials that could assume ascendancy: Albany, Fortinbras and Malcolm. There must be a noble rescue by a man of good faith. Albany has resisted corruption. In fact, in an earlier version, Edgar re-established order, but perhaps Albany would be the better choice. In Macbeth, since Macduff is no longer, Prince Malcolm by primogeniture and by his father’s choice fills the task the nation’s recovering. In Hamlet, Fortinbras has matured; he pops up Deus ex Machina as the highest aristocrat in the land and with dignity and solemnity carries out his first official duties in his new office. In each of the above, order is restored after carnage and catastrophe, a washing by blood. However, the Tempest is a comedy and avoids catastrophe, such that the original bad actor is restored himself: a happy ending. In the Tempest, Prospero is redeemed by mercy. Order is re-established with love and forgiveness. Relieved of his pride, Prospero makes amends with the antidote to chaos as his humility rebuilds the order that he has forsken. Mercy and forgiveness are the balm and curative:
Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be
Let you indulgence set me free.
(The Tempest V i)
The order must be restored. That may be as true today as then, for as Dame Margaret Thatcher announced: There is no alterative. TINA. There must be order or anarchy will prevail.