Contemptus mundi

Contemptus mundi, the "contempt of the world" and worldly concerns, is a theme in the intellectual life of both Classical Antiquity and of Christianity, 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", 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 classical canon, Cicero's Tusculanae Disputationes, essays on achieving Stoic stability of emotions, with rhetorical subjects such as "Contempt of death", was taken up definitively by Boethius in his Consolations of Philosophy, during the troubled closing phase of Late Antiquity. The Latin tradition of dispraise of the public world adapted by Christian moralists, focused especially on the fickleness of Fortune, and the evils exposed in the Latin satire became a mainstay of Christian penitential literature.

Among early Christians, Eucherius of Lyon, an aristocratic and high-ranking ecclesiastic in the fifth-century Christian Church of Gaul, wrote to his kinsman a widely read letter de contemptu mundi, an expression of the despair for the present and future of the world in its last throes. Contempt for the world provided intellectual underpinnings for the retreat into monasticism: when Saint Florentina, of the prominent Christian family of Hispania, founded her convent, her rule written by her brother Leander of Seville explicitly cited contempt for the world: Regula sive Libellus de institutione virginum et de contemptu mundi ad Florentinam sororem.

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