There is nothing more ordinary than order. The words are indeed etymologically connected: to be ordinary is simply to follow the normal order. We use the word “ordinary” to indicate something that does not warrant any special attention, because it means perfect conformity to expectations, and thus implies the absence of any surprise. Order may be useful, perhaps even necessary, but it is not very exciting. It generally does not provoke wonder or inspire great thoughts.
This, in any event, is how we most commonly think of order. But I want to propose in this brief reflection that, if we think this way, we have got it all wrong, and we are missing something of great, even fundamental, significance. There is more to order, so to speak, than meets the eye. Once we push beyond the surface of what appears to be just a regular arrangement, we will discover—or so I will try to show—that order always involves what we might call the “in-breaking of the transcendent,” and so warrants something like a reverent awe, however subtle may be in one instance or another. Order is always something of a miracle.
Let us start our reflections by observing that there are many kinds of order. Though it is perhaps the first thing to come to mind when one is asked to say what order is, the mere arrangement of individual things is a derivative form, dependent on a more basic, essential kind of order. The most basic kind is metaphysical, which is to say that it concerns the being of things, not just how they happened to be arranged. Evidently, even what seems to be an accidental arrangement of things can be an order at all only if there is something in them that permits their being intelligibly placed in a particular sequence or set. What is it about things that allows them to be placed in an order? What are the preconditions of order? Obviously, there cannot be an order unless there is more than just one thing at issue: order assumes multiplicity. But mere multiplicity is not yet order; the latter term means that the arrangement of the multiplicity has a kind of intelligibility; it is not just a juxtaposition of things, one after another. If the order “makes sense” at all, it is because the sequence follows some rule or principle. Here we come upon the classic definition: An order is a multiplicity that is governed by, or determined according to, a principle. As Aquinas puts it, citing the authority of Aristotle, “the terms ‘before’ and ‘after’ are used in reference to some principle. Now order implies that certain things are, in some way, before or after. Hence wherever there is a principle, there must needs be also order of some kind.”[1] We can also say that, wherever there is order, there is a principle.
Already in this as yet quite abstract description, we discover something mysterious. A principle is not itself one of the “items” arranged in the sequence; instead, it transcends the sequence precisely because it is the governing cause of the order, and it thus bears on all the items in the sequence to the extent that they actually belong to the order. In this respect, we have to say that the unity, the unifying principle, transcends the multiplicity of things it brings to order; the unity is simultaneously in and beyond the ordered things. This is what allows it to gather them up and thereby to make their arrangement something intelligible.
When we experience an arrangement as an actual order, then, even if we are not explicitly aware of it, our consciousness is opening up to a dimension beyond what is on the surface. We are grasping something transcendent, relative to what is before us. This may sound hyperbolic, but it is really quite straightforward: we see a number of items, and the moment we see these items not just as one thing coming after another without any connection, which is to say the moment we grasp them as belonging to an order, our awareness is by that very fact making reference to something beyond the items seen, something that bears on each of them, which means that this principle cannot but have an ontological status different from the items that depend on it and thus give expression to its causal principle.
All order is in some sense sacred order.
But there is more to say. The moment we realize that order implies a transcendent principle, we begin to see that not all orders are equal; one order can be more or less profound than another, insofar as the principle at its basis can be more or less transcendent and gather the things comprising order more extensively and comprehensively. A merely quantitative series, for example, is a fairly superficial order, though it is often taken to be the paradigm. According to the classical mind, the quality of order is not a matter of indifference. To the contrary, the more properly transcendent and comprehensive a principle, the better it is. Goodness orders; evil produces disorder. This is not an arbitrary assertion but is implied in the very meaning of the terms, which is to say that the statement is essentially tautological. We will come back to this point. Before we do, let us note that this metaphysical characterization of order also implies that the items in a sequence or arrangement that are ordered are also not simply equal, and that the relations that are established between and among them can be more or less complex. Items that are, so to speak, closer to the originating principle will have a different status from those items further away, and indeed that aspect of the items on which the order bears manifests something of the quality of the order. Something like a mere numerical sequence, an order governed by a simple quantitative rule, will be relatively simple and move more or less in a single direction. But a deep order can comprehend more of the aspects of the items in the relation and can relate them in more than one way. This is what makes the whole intelligible. The “movement” of a deep order can point in many different directions at once, depending on the particular aspect under consideration. The nature of the order determines the quality of the intelligibility: while a linear order can be registered immediately and calculated so that one can predict what comes next, the order of a complex whole can be savored, turned over and about, to reveal different aspects of the arrangement. In short, deep order invites contemplation.
The unequal status of the members of an order is what we call “hierarchy.” This word is a crucial one in our reflection. It was coined by the mysterious writer of the sixth century known as “Dionysius the Areopagite,” and means, literally, “sacred order,” or perhaps “sacred principle”: hieros = “sacred” and archē = “governing principle” (archē is, incidentally, related to the Greek word “to rule,” archein, as we see in the word “monarchy”; it is in this respect not unlike the English word “principle,” which is related to the word “prince”). Dionysius used the word “hierarchy” to describe the whole cosmos, considered with respect to its ultimate first principle, namely, God. It is not an accident at all that he designated the highest name of this first principle the “good-and-beautiful,” which indicates not just that this is a principle that also happens to have these traits, but that the absolute first cause is necessarily goodness and beauty itself, the very cause of all goodness and beauty anywhere. As we saw earlier, a principle is able to be a principle, which is to say able to gather a multiplicity into an intelligible order, precisely to the extent that it is good. That which gathers up absolutely everything—the whole cosmos—cannot be anything but absolute goodness itself. This principle establishes the most profound, comprehensive, and intricate order conceivable. Dionysius describes the order thus:
For from [the Beautiful and Good] and through It are all Being and life of spirit and of soul; and hence in the realm of nature magnitudes both small, co-equal and great; hence all the measured order and the proportions of things, which, by their different harmonies, commingle into wholes made up of co-existent parts; hence this universe, which is both One and Many; the conjunctions of parts together; the unities underlying all multiplicity, and the perfections of the individual wholes; hence Quality, Quantity, Magnitude and Infinitude; hence fusions and differentiations, hence all infinity and all limitation; all boundaries, ranks, transcendences, elements and forms, hence all Being, all Power, all Activity, all Condition, all Perception, all Reason, all Intuition, all Apprehension, all Understanding, All Communion—in a word, all, that is comes from the Beautiful and Good, hath its very existence in the Beautiful and Good, and turns towards the Beautiful and Good. . . .
And hence all things must desire and yearn for and must love the Beautiful and the Good. Yea, and because of It and for Its sake the inferior things yearn for the superior under the mode of attraction, and those of the same rank have a yearning towards their peers under the mode of mutual communion; and the superior have a yearning towards their inferiors under the mode of providential kindness; and each hath a yearning towards itself under the mode of cohesion, and all things are moved by a longing for the Beautiful and Good, to accomplish every outward work and form every act of will.[2]
Dionysius is here describing the cosmos, the totality of beings that fill the universe, as an order—and, more specifically, as a hierarchy, a differentiated array of properly distinctive kinds of being that relate to each other from above, from below, and indeed from every which way. It is an order precisely because it has a principle, an ultimate cause, and this dependence on the ultimate cause is revealed in the fact that there are superiors, inferiors, and (relative) equals; but notice, too, the direction of hierarchy is quite complex, the relations go in all directions, though they are all in themselves intelligible. There is no “chaos” here, though it is anything but a rigid arrangement. Note, finally, that this order is intrinsically and essentially sacred: this quality is not a mere accident that appears to coincide with the ordering principle; it is a transcendent, and ultimately divine, principle that orders, and it cannot give order to this most comprehensive whole except as being absolutely good. To experience order, which is to say, to experience things as hierarchically related, is to experience the multiplicity as making present the transcendent unifying principle, to experience the arrangement, in short, as a manifestation of God.
What is true of the cosmos as a whole is true, by participation, for every “microcosm,” which is to say for every intelligible being insofar as it is a unified multiplicity. There is no such thing as order that is not hierarchical: the more we merely juxtapose things side by side as equals, the less they show forth order, which is to say the less they make manifest a genuine transcendent principle that can bear on all of them in a differentiated way. This is just to say that all order is in some sense sacred order.
Let us take two examples to make this point a bit more concrete. First, the phenomenon of life. A living thing is nothing but a hierarchy, a “sacred order.” What characterizes life is a multiplicity, a variety of diverse parts, gathered up into a single whole, which is so clearly “one” as to be identifiable as the properly unified subject of the various activities of life: we say that the plant grows, that the wolf hunts, that the eagle flies, and not that a variety of pieces happen to be moved in the same direction in these different events. The depth of the ordering principle in organisms (the ancient tradition called it the soul) is what enables the parts to be intrinsically related to each other, and the relations that constitute the parts of an organism are marvelously multivalent. To remove the multivalence, to separate all the parts of an organism out and place them side by side on a table, is just to kill the living thing. All of the material parts are still there, but there is one thing that is now missing, namely, the life that animated them. This animating life is nothing but hierarchical order made actual. It is not an accident that the ancient mind experienced life as sacred, and this sense cannot help but haunt the modern mind, irrupting into consciousness and conviction here and there, even if that mind has tended to bind itself to notions that discourage any recognition of this reality. We will propose reasons why it does so in a moment. It is worth noting that those who wish to “demystify” life will invariably attempt to do so by saying “life” is nothing but parts that happen to interact in a certain way: they deny a transcendent principle, which is to say that they deny order in any significant sense.
The second example is marriage. Here we also have a multiplicity joined into a unity, but each of the “items,” so to speak, is himself or herself a supreme example of order already. In a marriage, two persons, through an act of freedom, bind themselves together in order to form what both the Church and the state recognize as a new order, an institution that has a certain reality of its own, irreducible to the mere sum of the parties that constitute it. As the traditional view has always recognized, a marriage cannot in reality be a unity without also being a hierarchy, which is the understanding behind the notion that the “husband is the head of his wife;” but it is no less true, though perhaps recognized more in practice than in explicit theory, that, again as an implication of the genuine and comprehensive unity that marriage is, the hierarchy can also move in a different direction, according to a different ordering principle: the woman can be higher than the man in the order of love, insofar as she is, for example, the one for the benefit of whom he is called to sacrifice himself.
If there is no hierarchy, there is no experience of God as manifest in the being of the world.
In a Christian context, the union of marriage is a sacrament, an effective sign of the union of Christ and the Church, which St. Paul calls the “mega mysterion,” arguably because it stands at the foundation of Christian existence. This unity transcends even what would otherwise seem to be the supreme authority in the Church: the pope himself cannot dissolve a sacramental marriage.[3] This is to say that a sacramental marriage represents an order to which the pope himself is subordinate. This supremely sacred character is not just a magic spell, a remnant of ancient superstition, but flows from the reality of marriage. If the person is, according to Aquinas, that which is most perfect in nature, the union of two persons, because the unity “transcends” each of the members of the union, might properly be called “supernatural.”[4] The depth of this unity is expressed in the act that it comprehends not just physical reality, like the unity of an organism, but spiritual being, and indeed the whole life of a person, gathering up both past and future in the vow. The point I want to highlight here is that what makes marriage an order, which is to say a multiplicity-in-unity, is also what makes it sacred: throughout human history, until perhaps the most recent times, marriage was recognized as sacred, so much so that Pope Leo XIII wrote that even non-Christian marriages ought to be recognized, in some sense, as sacramental.[5]
In short, life is sacred, and marriage is sacred, and what makes them sacred is also what gives them order. They are in other words sacred because order is sacred. To be sure, life and marriage (and the cosmos) are particularly high-level expressions of order, but because every order is a multiplicity gathered up into a transcendent unity, these examples simply serve to illustrate what is true of every order to the extent that it is an order. Every order is a hierarchy; every order is analogously sacred.
If this is all true, why do we no longer experience order this way? Why is it so rare to see hierarchy as sacramental in the sense described? It is not possible, of course, to do an in-depth historical study, or an intellectual genealogy, in the present context, which would trace the rich sense of the hierarchy of being that thoroughly pervaded the imagination in the premodern world, as Arthur Lovejoy has shown in his classic work, The Great Chain of Being,[6] to the present day. But I want to propose a particular interpretation of three familiar historical events, each of which is “revolutionary” in its own way, in the formation of the modern world that could be illuminating with respect to the way we typically experience hierarchy today: the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, the rise of the “new science” in the 17th century, and the French and American political revolutions in the 18th century. As we will see, if it is not already evident, these three major developments in the formation of the Western mind have something in common, namely, what we might call a “hierarchephobia.”
First, the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther did not of course eliminate hierarchy in society and the Church at a single stroke. But his particular understanding of the “priesthood of all believers” introduced a novel theological principle that was revolutionary with respect to the patristic and medieval tradition. The Catholic Church had always, at least implicitly, affirmed the “common priesthood,” but this was interpreted as a participation in the hierarchy—the sacred order—that essentially constituted the Church. In this respect, one’s “immediate” relation to God is always at the same time mediated through the Church and her institutional and hierarchical structure of ordained (from ordo, order) priesthood: it is an analogous extension of the “holy orders,” which is just another way of saying, “hierarchy.” What happens in Luther’s reinterpretation, even if the implications were not directly evident at the time, is that each individual as individual is reconceiving as having a direct relation to God, side by side with other individuals, and this immediate relation is essentially indifferent to one’s place in the Church. As it is sometimes put, the Protestant Reformation “democratized” the faith. We see the same move in Luther’s rejection of what the Church calls the “consecrated state,” expressed in the religious vows that constituted the monastic life. For Luther, and for Protestants generally, one is no “closer” to God in the monastery than in one’s own kitchen; God is equally present in every place. There is something profound and insightful in this notion, no doubt, but without further qualification it implies that place, time, and context are matters of complete theological or spiritual indifference. While the rejection of holy orders and consecrated life at least apparently has the advantage of bringing God into ordinary existence, it introduces the problem of rendering that existence “ordinary” in the conventional sense we spoke about at the beginning. It is not an accident that Protestantism does not as a rule have a “mystical” or “theophanic” sense of the faith, or a sacramental sense of the cosmos.
Second, there is the so-called “scientific revolution,” expressed perhaps most paradigmatically in figures such as Galileo. A common way to describe the transformation of the general experience of the world in the wake of the scientific revolution, when the old “Aristotelian” natural philosophy was supplanted by a more quantified, “empirical,” and experiment-based approach to the natural world, is “disenchantment.” This word was popularized by the sociologist Max Weber in the early 20th century to express the disappearance of what we have been calling the “theophanic” character of reality, but which he understood effectively as the displacement of magic and superstition from the natural world (note how these descriptors imply already the presupposition of a “mundane” sense of reality, into which something essentially “un-natural” intrudes). Weber’s thesis has increasingly been challenged, insofar as there is evidence that people are no less superstitious today than in the Middle Ages and are just as bewitched by magic in its various forms, but it is clear that these sorts of things are quite different from the “sacramental” sense of reality we have been discussing, which does not oppose the sacred to the natural precisely insofar as nature itself represents a kind of order. Setting aside the very thorny historical question about the extent to which figures like Galileo were in fact revolutionary with respect to their late medieval predecessors and the even thornier questions regarding the relative value or even necessity of the development of modern scientific thinking, I want in the present context to make a single point: at the heart of this new cosmology is what has been called the “democratization” of matter. What was indisputably revolutionary in Galileo is his rejection of the idea that the “heavenly” bodies were of a different order of being than earthly bodies, and indeed his denial that any material thing was of a different order than any other. All things are made essentially of the same “stuff,” and as such they are all thus subject to the same laws. To refer to a point made earlier, the method of the new science would eventually have difficulty acknowledging any difference between living matter and dead matter, insofar as the difference depends, as we pointed out, on the recognition of order which inescapably implies different levels of being. To subject all matter to the same laws is to flatten out these levels. So here is what I want to say: there is an essential connection between the elimination of a cosmological hierarchy, with its concomitant flattening of the analogy of being, and the “disenchantment” of the cosmos. If there is no hierarchy, there is no experience of God as manifest in the being of the world.
Finally, there are the political revolutions in America and France. It is clear that, however justified one might think their motivations, given the evident corruptions of their age, the revolutionaries sought to solve the social problems they faced by eliminating hierarchy. As we saw above, in the previous centuries, “sacred order” had been weakened or destroyed in the Church and in the natural world, and now it is eliminated from the specifically human world of the so-called “social” or “political” order. The great historian of the early American republic, Gordon Wood, has observed that the disappearance of hierarchy in social relations was the most immediate consequence of the American revolution, taking hold of the whole people almost overnight—“before the ink was dry” on the Declaration of Independence.[7] This elimination of hierarchy was no less radical in America than in France. It is obvious that “égalité” was central to the French Revolution; but de Tocqueville argued that, while Americans love both freedom and equality, if freedom ever comes into conflict with equality, Americans would rather sacrifice freedom. What we have in these revolutions is quite naturally the “democratization” of politics.
Once equality arises as the governing principle of politics and social relations, we are no longer able to experience authority as essentially sacred, which is the way all traditional cultures experience it. Instead, we reconceive authority as a special kind of power, specifically a coercive force that may be necessary to keep things in order (which is now understood as a wholly practical matter, no longer as theophanic) but that should be limited as far as possible. Hierarchy is, at best, a necessary evil. From the modern perspective, the person in power is ideally a “normal guy,” like the rest of us, who just happens to have the particular responsibilities he does. But this reduces authority to a form of power. Power is what authority becomes when it is reconceived as rising up and standing over against the flat level of the mere juxtaposition of individuals. The result is that we have lost the capacity to experience membership in the community—the political order—as theophanic or sacred, which was the normal experience, for example, in the Middle Ages. (To take an admittedly extreme, but revelatory, example, consider the way Joan of Arc described her duties to the kingdom of France). This elimination of hierarchy from the social and political order has come so completely to dominate the horizon of all of our thinking and doing—its totalizing character has with justice been referred to as the “tyranny of liberalism”—that, in spite of all the historical, philosophical, and theological evidence to the contrary, educated contemporaries take it as an obvious fact that the secularization of politics is the natural fruit of Christianity. But to concede this, to fail to grasp the difference between distinguishing the temporal order (which remains sacred, as an order, in its own distinctive way) and the spiritual/eschatological order, on the one hand, and emptying “this-worldly” politics of any genuine theological significance, on the other, is to put a final seal on the disenchantment of all things. It is no doubt just this that Nietzsche had in mind when he spoke of the “death of God.”
The modern mind is allergic to hierarchy, wherever it may appear, which is to say that hierarchephobia is the characteristic ailment of the modern age. But we suffer from this ailment because we have, so to speak, normalized the death of God. As has become evident to us all, the death of God cannot but entail the death of man. We cannot breathe (breath = pneuma = spirit) in a two-dimensional world. If there is no hierarchy, no sacred order, there is no reason, in a disenchanted cosmos, why human beings have any more dignity than the grass they walk on. But to say this does not do honor to the grass. A denial of hierarchy means that nothing has dignity, neither man nor grass. There is no reason why we ought to “save the earth,” just as there is no reason why we shouldn’t replace human beings with machines that prove more effective. The rejection of hierarchy in principle will ultimately bear the poisoned fruit of nihilism.
The proportions of this crisis might seem too grand to bear and threaten to eclipse any hope of doing anything in response. But, setting aside the cosmic dimensions for a moment, the heart of the matter is actually quite simple. Perhaps we should say that the proper response to the flattening of reality is to recover a sense of the ordinary as ordinary, as already in itself a real participation in the transcendent goodness of God. Yes, there is nothing more ordinary than order, but this just means that the opportunity to recognize the presence of God in the world, and to reorient ourselves around that presence, is offered to us constantly.
[1]Aquinas, ST 2–2.26.1.
[2]Dionysius the Areopagite, The Divine Names (London: The MacMillan company, 1920), 100–01.
[3]It is interesting to note that, in the wake of Nominalism in the late Middle Ages, in which God’s potentia absoluta (his unrestricted power to do anything at all, however absurd) was elevated above his potentia ordinata (i.e., the “established” or “ordered” power concerning the world as God actually willed it to be), there was some speculation among more radical theologians that the pope might possess something like a “potentia absoluta” himself, beyond his normal office, a power that was specifically described as the ability to dissolve even sacramental marriages.
[4]For a more detailed argument on this point, see my “The Natural Supernaturality of Marriage,” Communio (Summer 2022): 249–66.
[5]See Leo XIII, Arcanum divinae, 19. Leo cites texts from Innocent III and Honorius II in support of this statement.
[6]Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).
[7]Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1993).
