Christendom and the Renaissance Man: Duty in the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds

The word duty conjures up serene images of great Roman legions marching under red banners and citizen-politicians debating philosophical disparities as the late-afternoon twilight settles over the Roman Forum. In the study of the Western world duty is frequently associated with the Romans and their mentality for militarism, order, and legality, but this ideology of obligation is a sentiment that predates Rome and can be traced back to the earliest days of Western culture.

If Homer, oft considered the forefather of Western literature, is analyzed for examples of the theme of duty, then Odysseus’s decision to forgo immortality as consequence of his duty to his family is instantaneously brought to mind. Likewise, duty can be seen as a motif or theme of almost all of the classical authors, including: Sophocles, Thucydides, Herodotus, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Plato, and Marcus Aurelius. Furthermore, as these ancient authors contemplated this issue, writers of subsequent ages have also adopted and modified this Western sense of duty.

Hence the claim can be made that duty as an ideology has been passed from cultural generation to cultural generation, and in some instances the subsequent generation has altered the definition or conception of duty it inherited. The focus of this paper is to analyze such an alteration; more specifically, the purpose of this essay is to delve deeper into the changing perception of duty as Western civilization transitioned from the medieval Christian world into the age of the Renaissance and the Reformation.

In order to compare the medieval Christian perception of duty to the Renaissance conception of the same, a definition of duty as it existed in each of these worlds is necessary. Therefore, the most logical commencement point is the medieval Christian world. By the 3rd century AD the glorious and unified Roman dominion was beginning to collapse, and by 300 AD the Migration Period or Volkerwanderung (“wandering of the people”) had begun. The Volkerwanderung plunged Europe into the Dark Ages and destroyed virtually all of the remaining remnants of the Roman world. In the Dark Ages, the threat of a particularly destructive “barbarian” tribe known as the Norseman or Vikings would eventually give rise to the political and economic system of feudalism. Along side feudalism the Christian Church, which had survived the sack of Rome, began to centralize and develop, for all intensive purposes, into the exclusive religious institution of Europe. Under the guidance of these two systems Europe would gradually escape the Volkerwanderung and advance into the Middle Ages.