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Contemptus mundi, the "contempt of the world" and worldly concerns, is a theme in the intellectual life of both Classical Antiquity and of Christianity, Contemptus mundi both in its mystical vein and its ambivalence towards secular life, that figures largely in the Western world's history of ideas. In inculcating a turn of mind that would lead to a state of serenity untrammeled by distracting material appetites and feverish emotional connections, which the Greek philosophers called ataraxia, it drew upon the assumptions of Stoicism and a neoplatonism that was distrustful of deceptive and spurious appearances. In the familiar rhetorical polarity in Hellenic philosophy between the active and the contemplative life, which Christians, who expressly rejected "the World, the Flesh, and the Devil",The phrase is late (the Book of Common Prayer but the triad draws on "For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world." (KJV) might exemplify as the way of Martha and the way of Mary, contemptus mundi assumed that only the contemplative life was of lasting value and the world an empty shell, a vanity.
In the early 12th century, when Adelard of Bath (c. 1080 - 1152) allegorized two contrasting figures to dispute De eodem et diverso; they were Philosophia and Philocosmia, "love of wisdom" and the "love of the world".It is noteworthy that while Fleming's interpretation comes from his view that contemptus mundi was an embedded practice in the study of medieval literature, Bridget K. Balint in her Ordering Chaos: The Self and the Cosmos in Twelfth-Century Latin Prosimetrum (2009) argues that Adelard in fact does not despise the world per se, see p. 56. Adelard's contemporary, Henry of Huntington, in the dedicatory letter to his Historia Anglorum referred in passing to "those who taught the contempt of the world in schools".Adelard ("very elegant but also commonplace") and Henry of Huntington are both noted in Fleming 2003.
An aspect of contempt for this world reflects upon the ephemerality of all life, expressed in the literary rhetorical question of ubi sunt. Even as worldly a pope as Innocent III could write an essay "On the Misery of the Human Condition", De miseria humanae conditionis, which Geoffrey Chaucer is reputed to have rendered in English, in a translation now lost. Companion. The theme had political ramifications within the Roman Church, as it was inextricably bound up with questions of apostolic povertyJan G. J. van den Eijnden discusses the controversial wealth of the Church in Thomas Aquinas' day, Poverty on the Way to God: Thomas Aquinas on evangelical poverty 1994:8 ff et passim. which was roundly condemned, in the instance of the Humiliati, as Heresy.
The waning of the dominant attitude of contemptus mundi that had informed elite culture, a development that gathered impetus during the second half of the 14th century, was a precursor to the emergence of the modern secular ethos, encouraging men to study material things with greater lucidity than before, as Georges Duby has observed, noting the turn taken in painting and sculpture toward the realistic delineation of aspects of material life.Duby, "Preface" in A History of Private Life: II.Revelations of the Medieval World (1988:x).
Contemptus mundi has been criticized as a pastoral of fear by the historian Jean Delumeau, Parish Missions and M. B. Pranger found the trope "Speaking of God after Auschwitz" to function as a "modern form of contemptus mundi".Pranger, The Artificiality of Christianity: Essays on the Poetics of Monasticism 2003:26.
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