Have you ever wondered why gods and angels are ‘above’, while devils and demons are ‘below’? And, why ‘stooping low’ and ‘falling’ are metaphors for something morally or spiritually bad, while doing something ‘uplifting’ and ‘rising to the occasion’ are good? 

While not exactly universal, placing beings and predicaments onto a vertical kind of spiritual and moral hierarchy is common to many cultures. Arthur Lovejoy’s fascinating classic, The Great Chain of Being, describes how the moral/spiritual hierarchy of being works in Christianity and Western thought. Beings perceived to be better and purer are higher up on the ‘great chain of being’, and those considered worse or impure are lower – in Christianity, God is of course on top and Satan at the bottom. In between are various beings and realities, material and spiritual, including angels, humans, animals, plants and non-organic elements, with humans placed somewhere between angels and beasts. But then, within humanity, some are regarded as closer to angels (saints, innocent children, those considered purer) and others are regarded as closer to animals, sometimes even dangerously blurring the border between humans and non-humans. Those who could land in this category most often are persons deemed to be indulging excessively in appetites and earthly pleasures, women, pagans and other non-Christians, and people of other cultures and races. 

Despite being heavily intertwined with metaphysical belief systems, the hierarchical chain of being is not merely – or even primarily – an abstract idea. Recent works in moral psychology and the cognitive science of religion and emotions (Jonathan Haidt, Mark J. Brandt, Christine Reyna, Tamer Soliman, Lawrence Barsalou and others) show that moral and spiritual hierarchies function as powerful pre-reflective background, normally closely tied to emotional attitudes and instinctive reactions. This helps explain the observations that ordering beings onto a vertical, moral/spiritual hierarchy is largely a cross-cultural practice. Between humans, positive moral emotions are associated with a ‘higher’ moral or spiritual status of the target person (saint, moral exemplar, person close to God or gods, half-god) while negative emotions indicate that the target is ‘lower’: less human, morally degraded, not spiritual.

Jonathan Haidt and his co-researchers argue that ordering beings on the vertical-spatial axis of morality/spirituality is related especially to the moral emotions of elevation and respect on the one hand, and contempt and disgust on the other. Haidt often takes examples from traditional Hindu practices and ideas according to which degrading or polluting influence – that which can pull you ‘down’ – comes from a variety of bodily and social activities, most often connected with food, sex or violence/blood. In Hindu religiosity, “the words of the holy scriptures must be protected from contamination or degradation by a diverse set of threats, many of which involve the human body and its biological processes. One must not even have holy words in mind while engaged in polluting activities” (Haidt and Keyes, 2003). While the traditional caste system in India which regulates society hierarchically and is religiously affirmed remains quite resistant even today, in some cultures the place on the spiritual/moral chain of beings is often less fixed, so that people can move up (sanctification, becoming more spiritual) or down the chain of being (dehumanization).

Other arguments for the claim that a central role of vertical-spatial metaphors in both religious and moral imaginaries come from the embodied cognition perspective. Studies in embodied cognition reveal various ways in which the moral and spiritual world is shaped by conceptual metaphors, prominent among which being the vertical-spatial metaphors. Brandt and Reyna propose a framework they call “social cognitive chain of being” which serves them to explain the perceptions and processes which help humans organize their moral and spiritual/religious universe. 

A number of experiments that show an implicit, pre-reflective association between God and ‘up’, and the devil and ‘down’, respectively, have been done predominantly on Western subjects. Nevertheless, the bodily positions and comportment in prayer in many cultures (kneeling, prostrating on the floor, bowing, looking up) physically manifest the perception that divine beings and saints as ‘above us’. This phenomenon seems to be linked to the pervasive connection between vertical height or position on the one hand, and power and status on the other, which is well explained by embodied theories of cognition. Divinities being regarded as ‘above’ or in the ‘heavens’ can therefore be explained by the fact that, in religion, power is associated with spiritual and moral superiority. However, this kind of superiority often does not correspond to the established social hierarchies – think of the “radical ethical outlook” of Hebrew prophets who, sharply criticising and ridiculing the leaders and kings, were sometimes considered to be ‘madmen’, or the message of the Magnificat, according to which God has “put down the mighty from their seat” and “exalted the humble and meek”. 

But what is the significance of all this? 

First, these studies help us appreciate just how thoroughly some of the most widespread religious concepts, ideas and behaviours are shaped by human embodiment. In other words, religion is “grounded in an integrated and dynamic sensorimotor complex (which includes the brain)”. People represent and order gods, humans and other beings along the vertical moral/spiritual hierarchy in accordance with certain kinds of pre-reflective emotional and bodily responses. Interestingly, religions often also possess a degree of internal critique of problematic implications of this phenomenon, such as the mentioned idea that God humbles the mighty and exalts the humble, which drives a wedge between social/political power and moral/spiritual power. Another source of internal critique of spiritual and ontological hierarchies are religious ideas that emphasize kinship between humans and animals, which emphasize different kinds of emotions than the ‘vertical’ ones: a ‘horizontal’ awe, being connected ‘as one’, cross-species compassion, and alike.

Second, and more critically, some religious perceptions of the spiritual reality and beings as above and superior to the bodily can be seen as a symptom of a problematic human tendency to escape the imperfections, limitations and vulnerability of the body. When the idea of spirituality and morality is closely tied to otherworldly disembodiment and to transcending all things bodily, damaging kinds of attitudes toward our bodies, sexuality, illness, death, as well as each towards other and animals, can become normalized. As George Lakoff and Marc Johnson argue in their book Philosophy Of The Flesh, a disembodied conception of spirituality “downplays one’s relation to the world, the natural environment, and all other aspects of embodied existence”. An alternative, embodied conception of spirituality “at least begins to do justice to what people experience.” 

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* Part of the research behind this blog article has been a part of Gorazd Andrejč's research project Creatures, Humans, Robots (ARRS J6-1813) funded by Slovenian Research Agency.