The golden chain: from Homer to the great chain of being

In the eighth book of the Iliad Zeus, irritated with the gods who wish to intervene in the Trojan War, issues a boastful challenge. Let them hang a golden chain from heaven and all cling to it, gods and goddesses: they will not manage to drag him down, whereas he, if he wished, could pull them up together with the earth and the sea. What in Homer was a boast of strength became, in the hands of philosophers, one of the most enduring images of Western thought: the golden chain that unites every level of reality.

The philosophers' interpretation

Already in antiquity the Homeric passage was read allegorically. Plato, in the Theaetetus, has Socrates say that Homer's golden chain is nothing other than the sun. The Neoplatonists went further. Proclus, in the fifth century, spoke of “chains” or series descending from each divine principle down to the lowest grades of nature, linking a god, its daemons, the stars, the stones and the plants akin to it.

It was Macrobius, however, at the beginning of the fifth century, who fixed the reading that the Latin Middle Ages would inherit. In his Commentary on the Dream of Scipio he explains that, from the supreme deity down to the last dregs of things, everything is connected by unbroken links, and that this is Homer's golden chain.

The chain in occult philosophy

For Cornelius Agrippa the image had an almost operative value in the philosophical sense of the term. If each thing is bound to the one that precedes it and the one that follows it, then the person who knows the intermediate links can climb from below to above. In De occulta philosophia the chain becomes an ordered hierarchy: lower things are ruled by higher ones, the elements by the heavens, the heavens by the intelligences and these by God.

In the Renaissance the expression was sometimes also used to indicate the succession of ancient sages, the prisca theologia, as though truth had been passed from master to disciple along a golden chain of enlightened minds. The two meanings, cosmic and historical, supported each other: just as beings are linked in space, so doctrines would be linked in time.

From magic to alchemy and the history of ideas

The image survived well beyond Agrippa. In 1723 there appeared in Germany an alchemical treatise entitled Aurea catena Homeri, generally attributed to the physician Anton Joseph Kirchweger, which described the transformation of matter as a continuous ladder from heaven to earth. The text circulated for a long time in German Hermetic circles and was also read by the young Goethe.

In 1936 the American historian Arthur O. Lovejoy published The Great Chain of Being, which grew out of the lectures he gave at Harvard in 1933. The study traces the history of the idea of an unbroken ladder of beings from Plato to the eighteenth century, showing how it shaped theology, science and literature. Thanks to that book, the “great chain of being” has become a key concept in the history of ideas.

From Zeus's boast to Neoplatonic metaphysics, from Agrippa's magic to eighteenth-century alchemy, the golden chain tells of the need to think of the universe as a continuous whole, without leaps or voids. In it each link supports the next, every creature finds its place, and the distance between the humblest stone and the divine mind can be travelled, at least in thought, step by step.