Triumph of Christianity by Tommaso Laureti (1530–1602), ceiling painting in the Sala di Constantino, Vatican Palace. Images like this one celebrate the triumph of Christianity over the paganism of Antiquity. (Tommaso Laureti (1530 – 1602): Triumph of Christianity. Sala di Costantino, Vatican Palace.)

With the decline of ancient Greek civilization and the final fall of the Roman Empire (476 CE), Western civilization entered an extended period of economic contraction, minimal trade and communication, and low literacy. Throughout these “Dark” or “Middle Ages” (as they were later called), Christianity became the sole unifying force that tied together the linguistically and culturally diverse peoples of the West. Latin, the language of the church, was the language of the literate across all of Western Christianity. Life became localized and culturally narrow. Preoccupation with worldly suffering, escape from such suffering through death, and elevation into heaven, were dominant motifs in the Christian art of the Middle Ages. The art reflected the pessimistic outlook on human life that permeated those times, depicting emaciated bodies and sorrowful demeanors.

In more recent times, as Christianity lost its previous control of Western cultural and intellectual life, more secular views of human nature have emerged. The new ideas have not necessarily replaced the old, however; for example, though framed in scientific language, Sigmund Freud’s vision of human nature is strikingly reminiscent of Augustine’s. Like Augustine, Freud saw human development as defined by intense conflict between sexual and other self-centered urges and conscience or, in his language, the superego (Lear, 2015). This more pessimistic view of human nature is also expressed in Thomas Hobbes’s (1588–1679) classic work Leviathan (1651) in which Hobbes describes human life as “nasty, brutish, and short” and human society as a “war of all against all” that is only held in check by government (Sorell, 2009). Finally, Charles Darwin’s (1808–1882) theory of evolution with his notion of “survival of the fittest” spawned a new view of the cosmos and, more particularly, a new field of evolutionary psychology that posits both aggressive and altruistic aspects of human nature driven by the evolutionary imperatives of survival and reproduction.