SCHOLARS, ESPECIALLY HISTORIANS of other eras, tend to consider the Middle Ages as a period whose outlook was intellectually focused on order and hierarchy. This pertains not only to a political ideology of society being arranged into stable orders and estates, but to a theory of cosmological articulation in which everything has a place in a great chain of being that incorporates all species from earthworms to angels. Within each element of that chain there are further hierarchies, such as within the clerical order or within a university or guild. The very angels themselves are arrayed in a ladder of status according to the model of celestial hierarchies established by Pseudo-Dionysius—nine angelic orders ascending from ordinary angels to seraphim. The circles of Dante's hell, purgatory, and paradise also follow spiritual hierarchical arrangements.

The third chapter of Johan Huizinga's influential The Waning of the Middle Ages is entitled “The Hierarchic Conception of Society” and it shows the extension of an ideology of levels of virtue and power into social conceptions of chivalry. Hierarchical ordering is the basis for several famous medievalist enterprises—the “political theology” of Ernst Kantorowicz that joins political theory to religious ideology, or Erwin Panofsky's linking of scholasticism and the Gothic architectural aesthetic. Huizinga himself emphasizes that the medieval conception of society was “static, not dynamic” and that hierarchy was legitimated by cosmic models rendering, in theory, resistance to change. If everything in God's creation is ordered according to ladders or chains of virtue, then disruption of that order is unthinkable, or at least bad. This transitory earth, subject to decay, is faced with disorder, but social change is unnatural, regarded in the traditional view as defiance of God and the order He has established.

The church was the main source of an ideology of order and the grand political theories of social cohesion in the Middle Ages were produced by clerics, from the liturgists of sacred investitures to the advisors of Charlemagne; from the canonists of the collections of decretals and the Decretum to the scholastic philosophers. Quarrels between church and state revolved around what Gerd Tellenbach referred to as the “right order in the world”—that is, whether the church as the supreme spiritual power could legitimately be ruled by the empire or a monarchy who were powers of inferior standing according to the divine ordering of creation.