The Changing View of Man, The Cosmos and His Place

Throughout the middle ages, people have viewed the cosmos as a basis for the social order here on Earth. The celestial layers were representations of the medieval society and the church. The hierarchy of the Kings and Pope over their subjects was justified by the hierarchy of the heavenly bodies; it was considered natural and no one questioned it because it has been like that for so long. Medieval life was centered on God, abiding by the doctrines of the Catholic Church, and the strengthening of faith. Arts and literature in the medieval age featured divine and supernatural beings that promoted the power and influence of the church. Spiritual and religious themes were constantly the subject of paintings, sculptures, and literary†¦show more content†¦The transition of the pre-modern to modern outlook was shown in King Lear, one of the most famous of Shakespeare’s plays. Ever since, the king was at the top of the medieval society, after him the lords and nobles, knights, merchants, and peasants at the very bottom, but this will no longer be the case when Lear’s daughters decided that they wanted to be equal in power with the king. Traditionally, children were supposed to honor and respect their father and mother, but for Goneril and Regan, Lear’s wicked daughters, they were only interested in their own individual interests, a demonstration of very modern values. Cordelia was the only daughter who followed duties and kept to her proper place. The storm at the heath also represented chaos and instability because the natural order of things was disrupted with the king losing his rank and authority by being reduced to a crazy peasant. His journey to madness symbolized his own transformation and a change of perspective in the way he looked at life. Again, this shift in thinking follows through in Niccollo Machiavelli’s The Prince, on his idea that a person is responsible for his own destiny and can become powerful gaining himself a high position of power with the use of his own skill and intelligence. Those who become princes by virtue of their abilities acquire dominion with difficulty but maintain it with ease (Prince, pg.30). He favored the republic more than the monarchy due to his reasoning thatShow MoreRelatedThemes in Mircea Eliades The Sacred and the Profane1419 Words   |  6 Pagessupport his ideas as the the book itself is a brief introduction to religion as a whole, particulary the religions of primitive societies. Nonetheless, when looking to the past one can see that mankind’s desire to associate itself with the sacred has been occuring for thousands of years. 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