The 20th-Century study of the great chain philosophy is Arthur Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being, originally published in 1936 and then again in 1964.  Lovejoy offers a history of this philosophical treatise: 

That the use of the term "the chain of being" as the descriptive name for the universe was usually a way of predicating of the constitution of the world three specific, pregnant, and very curious characteristics; that these characteristics implied a certain conception of the nature of God; that this conception was for centuries conjoined with another to which it was in latent opposition -- an opposition which eventually became overt; that most of the religious thought of the West has thus been profoundly at variance with itself; that with the same assumptions about the constitution of the world was associated an assumption about ultimate value, also in conflict with another and equally prevalent conception of the good -- the former manifesting its full consequences only in the Romantic period . . . (Preface vii)