These elements can be described according to their qualities as: cold, moist, hot and dry. Like everything else in the universe, he is the blend of the four elements: earth, water, fire and air. Man is a link, in this chain, between the vegetative and rational realm, between beast and angel. In this order hot things are in harmony with cold, dry with moist, heavy with light, great with little, high with low so that there is no worm that crawls upon the ground, no bird that flies on high, no fish that swims in the depths, which the chain of this order does not bind in most harmonious concord God created as many different kinds of things as he did creatures, so that there is no creature which does not differ in some respect from all other creatures and by which it is in some respect superior or inferior to all the rest. A fine account of this chain of being is given by Sir John Fortescue in his Latin work on the law of nature: This deity is a completely self-sufficient absolute from which all things follow in a great chain of being and in continuous succession.
In Neoplatonism the organization of all beings into a coherent general scheme appears as completely organized for the first time and all creation is deduced from the presupposed existence of the “immovable-mover”. The medieval world picture complicated this whole system by adhering to an idea developed first by Aristotle, who suggested the arrangement of all animals in a hierarchy according to their degree of perfection. This Platonist spirit is mirrored in the fundamental Christian belief of man’s imperfection. The demiurge created the universe after the divine idea, but as it was only a copy, it was removed from the ideal realm and was thereby expelled from perfection.
Platonism coined Christian ethics, because it was the first philosophy that convincingly established a dualism of body and spirit. Morality and law are related, as positive laws are founded on moral values and principles that are universal. The real and the ideal worldįrom the earliest times, classical thinkers had recognized that law is rooted in an innate tendency of human beings towards social life and societal development. “Civilization is a movement and not a condition,Īrnold J. II.4 Philosophical and Moral views and values
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