Middle Ages to Renaissance Compare

Middle Ages to Renaissance

Compare and contrast Pope Innocent III's view of mankind and Pico della Mirandola's view of man. Reference the Great Chain of Being and its conception of the order of the universe to help you in the discussion.

Who is man and what is his place in the world? Many philosophers, scholars and religious leaders grappled with this question in the Middle Ages into the Renaissance. If they were not wretched already, people would become so after reading the works of Pope Innocent III, who had one of the most stringent concepts of humans and their debased nature. Pope Innocent III in 1152 had a completely non-humanistic view of humans that stressed the idea of reaching salvation-based mostly on the abjection of the bodily needs and on revulsion and guilt. Only Shakespeare, more than two centuries later, would match this idea of the "misery of the human condition," in which noble but self-oriented motives run tragically counter to the providential law of God.

Innocent's book, On the Misery of Human Life, started with the origin of birth until man's final end. He covered the putrid conception of the fetus where at this time of birth, when one cannot yet be corrupted by age, yet both male and female complain about their misery. Then, he continued at very considerable length with a detailed list of human burdens: fetters, sputum, streams of urine, mounds of excrement, the brevity of time, old age, the various pains and labors of mortals, their diverse preoccupations, the closeness of death, the many kinds of torments and the various other ills of this sort that afflict the human body. Man was "born to toil, dread, and trouble; and more wretched still, was born only to die. He commits depraved acts by which he offends God, his neighbor, and himself; shameful acts by which he defiles his name, his person, and his conscience; and vain acts which he ignores all things important, useful and necessary." It became the responsibility of man to scorn the present while making sure of the future with a correct set values. The soul God created is held by the malevolent flesh, and salvation is only possible only through holy living and good works and solely through the Church. At death, if the person's spirituality and belief was strong enough salvation will come. But nothing can help the damned.

Yet, for those who lived in the 1400s with the philosopher Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, human life was considered so much better. Based on the Great Chain of Being, there were but two classes of people: Nobles and Commoners with man gradations in between. The chain, which extended from God to the lowest forms of life, held the world together. Mirandola, in his work called On the Dignity of Man, praised human beings as capable of rising to the level of the angels through philosophical contemplation.