Core idea

One influential strand of Christianity describes mortal life as a pilgrimage through suffering, temptation, instability and death. Earthly goods can be real goods, but they are fragile and incapable of satisfying the deepest human desire. Because even the righteous remain vulnerable to pain, loss, sin and death, perfect or definitive happiness is impossible in the present life. It is found only in eternal union with God—the beatific vision or life of heaven.

The medieval phrase “vale of tears” captures this outlook. It comes from the Latin vallis lacrimarum and became famous through the Salve Regina: humanity appears as the exiled children of Eve, “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” The image also echoes the Latin rendering of Psalm 84:6. It is therefore a broad Christian motif, not a phrase invented by Augustine or Innocent III. (Dictionary of Hymnology; overview of the phrase and its biblical history)

Central proposition

No combination of health, virtue, friendship, pleasure, achievement or political peace can constitute complete happiness, because every earthly good is insecure and every mortal life ends. The righteous can possess hope, faith, love and a provisional peace, but not yet final happiness.

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What this doctrine does—and does not—claim

Strong form

The strongest ascetic version says that the world is principally a scene of misery and danger:

• Human nature is fallen and desire is disordered.
• Pleasure distracts people from salvation.
• Wealth, honor and political success are vain.
• The body is vulnerable, humiliating and destined to decay.
• Suffering should turn the soul away from the world and toward eternity.
• The apparent happiness of the prosperous is unstable or spiritually deceptive.

This is the atmosphere of the medieval contemptus mundi tradition—literally, “contempt for the world.”

More qualified form

The mainstream theological claim is subtler:

• Creation is good because God made it.
• Love, friendship, beauty, knowledge, marriage, work and civic peace are genuine goods.
• A person may experience joy and a limited or “imperfect happiness” in this life.
• These goods are not the highest good and cannot be possessed permanently.
• Christians should receive them gratefully without treating them as ultimate.

Thus, “perfect happiness is unavailable here” does not necessarily mean “all earthly happiness is false” or “Christians should make life miserable.” The tension between these two readings runs through Christian history.

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Foundations before Augustine

Biblical sources

The outlook draws on several New Testament contrasts:

• Matthew 6:19–21: earthly treasure decays; heavenly treasure endures.
• Luke 6:20–25: the poor, hungry and grieving are promised reversal, while the satisfied are warned.
• John 16:33: disciples will have trouble in the world.
• Romans 8:18–23: present suffering is contrasted with future glory; creation groans while awaiting redemption.
• 1 Corinthians 15: resurrection defeats the mortality inherited through Adam.
• 2 Corinthians 4:17–18: present affliction is temporary; unseen things are eternal.
• Philippians 3:20: Christian citizenship is in heaven.
• Hebrews 11:13–16 and 13:14: the faithful are strangers seeking a better homeland and a city still to come.
• Revelation 21:4: only in the renewed creation are death, mourning and pain finally ended.

These coexist with an equally biblical affirmation of creation, embodied life, feasting, marriage, work and resurrection. Christianity therefore contains both world-renouncing and world-affirming resources.

Classical alternatives

Augustine inherited a debate already centuries old. Greek and Roman schools generally located the human good within mortal life:

• Aristotle: eudaimonia is flourishing through rational and virtuous activity over a complete life, aided by friendship and sufficient external goods.
• Stoicism: virtue is sufficient for happiness; the wise person can remain happy despite misfortune.
• Epicureanism: happiness consists in freedom from disturbance and bodily pain, sustained by moderation and friendship.

Augustine’s distinctive move was to argue that these schools radically underestimated mortality, involuntary suffering, moral weakness and the instability of every human achievement.

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Augustine of Hippo

Historical setting

Augustine (354–430) wrote amid the political disruption of the late Roman Empire. After Rome was sacked in 410, pagans accused Christianity of weakening the empire. In The City of God, Augustine answered that no earthly political order—not even Rome—could deliver the supreme good. Empires rise and fall; the City of God alone has an eternal end.

This was not merely a reaction to Rome’s collapse. It followed from Augustine’s deeper doctrines of creation, the fall, original sin, grace and the restless human will.

The restless heart

In the Confessions, Augustine states the positive side of the doctrine:

“Our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

The problem is not that humans desire happiness, but that they try to secure infinite satisfaction from finite goods. Created things are good, yet none can bear the weight of being treated as the final object of love.

Augustine distinguishes between:

• Enjoyment (frui): resting in something as the final end.
• Use (uti): receiving something in relation to the final end.

Only God can be enjoyed without remainder. Other goods should be loved in the right order, not despised as intrinsically evil.

Why even the righteous cannot be fully happy

Book XIX of The City of God gives Augustine’s clearest argument. He defines eternal life as the supreme good and criticizes philosophers who seek blessedness “in this life and in themselves.” (City of God, XIX.4)

His reasoning is cumulative:

1. Bodily goods are insecure. Health, strength, beauty and sensation can be destroyed by illness, injury or age.
2. Mental goods are insecure. Memory and reason can be impaired by madness, dementia or physical disease.
3. External goods are insecure. Wealth, reputation, family and political peace can be lost through accident or violence.
4. Virtue itself reveals conflict. Temperance is needed because desire resists reason; courage is needed because danger and suffering remain.
5. No earthly peace is permanent. Families, cities and empires contain conflict, misunderstanding and domination.
6. Death makes possession provisional. Even an exceptionally fortunate and virtuous life ends.

The righteous are better described as blessed in hope than as possessing completed beatitude. They can live well through grace, but they still struggle against disordered desire and cannot guarantee their own perseverance.

In XIX.20 Augustine says that, compared with the eternal peace to come, present life remains wretched even when filled with bodily, spiritual and external goods. (City of God, XIX.20)

Augustine’s political implication

No state can become the kingdom of God. Earthly political communities can achieve a relative peace, and Christians should value and cooperate in it, but politics cannot cure pride, mortality or the divided will.

This yields two contrary legacies:

• Realism: distrust utopian promises and rulers who claim to perfect humanity.
• Quietism or fatalism: treat injustice as an unavoidable feature of the fallen world rather than a remediable human arrangement.

Augustine himself did not say that injustice should be ignored. The danger lies in how later readers can use his sharp separation between earthly and heavenly fulfillment.

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Contemporary reaction to Augustine

Classical philosophers were his principal target

In The City of God XIX, Augustine directly rebuked philosophical traditions that located the sovereign good in present virtue, pleasure, tranquility or natural goods. The Stoic claim that the wise person could remain happy under extreme suffering seemed to him proud and psychologically implausible.

Pelagius and the dispute over human capacity

Pelagius did not deny heaven or teach that earthly pleasure was humanity’s supreme good. His dissent concerned the extent of moral freedom:

• Pelagius stressed that God’s commands imply a genuine human ability to obey.
• Augustine held that the fallen will cannot heal or reliably perfect itself without prior grace.

This matters because Pelagian moral optimism weakened Augustine’s inference from earthly struggle to radical incapacity. Yet Pelagius was condemned, and Augustine’s theology of grace became dominant in Latin Christianity. Pelagianism is therefore only an indirect dissent from the “vale of tears” outlook, not a direct defense of worldly happiness.

A broadly shared eschatological horizon

Most late-antique Christians already believed that resurrection and eternal life, not Roman prosperity, completed the human good. Augustine’s novelty lay less in inventing heavenly hope than in the philosophical force, psychological depth and institutional influence with which he denied that virtue could make a person self-sufficiently happy here.

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Innocent III and the medieval intensification

On the Misery of the Human Condition

Around 1194–1195, before becoming pope, Lothar of Segni—the future Innocent III—wrote De miseria humanae conditionis (On the Misery of the Human Condition). The work became one of the most influential examples of contemptus mundi. It circulated in hundreds of manuscripts and was translated or adapted into several European languages. (Presses universitaires de Provence; McGill thesis record on its reception)

Its three books proceed through:

1. The misery of embodiment and ordinary life: conception, birth, labor, disease, aging and daily anxiety.
2. The futility of worldly ambition: wealth, status, pleasure and power generate fear, rivalry and dissatisfaction.
3. Death, bodily decay and judgment: the corpse exposes worldly vanity, while damnation gives sin an eternal consequence.

Innocent’s rhetoric is more graphic and disgust-centered than Augustine’s philosophical analysis. The human body is followed from humiliating birth to putrefaction; worldly success is exposed as anxiety disguised by splendor.

The missing companion volume

In the prologue, Innocent indicated that he might also write about the dignity of human nature—humanity made in God’s image and elevated by Christ. He never completed that companion work.

This is important. On Misery was intentionally one side of a contrast, but history received the dark volume without its planned positive counterpart. The result made Innocent’s anthropology appear more absolutely pessimistic than his full theology may have been.

Why it resonated

Its success cannot be reduced to medieval people being uniformly miserable. The book served recognizable religious purposes:

• It punctured aristocratic pride and clerical ambition.
• It prepared readers for confession, repentance and death.
• It made suffering intelligible within a providential story.
• It reminded rich and poor alike that status ends at the grave.
• It supported monastic and penitential practices of detachment.

The message could also be socially double-edged. It could criticize the vanity of the powerful, but it could console the oppressed without changing the conditions that oppressed them.

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Medieval qualifications and dissent

There was no single “medieval view.” Alongside contemptus mundi stood theologies of creation, sacrament, natural reason, human dignity and joy.

Thomas Aquinas: imperfect happiness here

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) retained Augustine’s conclusion but introduced a crucial distinction:

• Perfect happiness: the direct vision of God; impossible in mortal life.
• Imperfect happiness: a genuine but limited happiness available through virtue, contemplation, friendship and the goods required for human activity.

In Summa Theologiae I–II, question 5, article 3, Aquinas argues that unavoidable ignorance, disordered desire and bodily suffering prevent perfect happiness here. Yet his Aristotelian framework gives natural human flourishing far more positive content than a severe contemptus mundi spirituality does. (Summa Theologiae I–II, q.5)

Other world-affirming currents

• Franciscan spirituality could renounce property while celebrating animals, nature, fraternity and joy.
• Sacramental theology treated material things—water, bread, wine, oil, bodies and marriage—as vehicles of grace.
• Cathedrals, universities, guilds, festivals and civic government embodied confidence that earthly activity possessed real value.
• Aristotelian philosophy encouraged systematic study of nature, ethics and politics on their own terms.

These were qualifications more than outright denials. Most medieval Christians still placed complete beatitude after death.

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The Renaissance rebuttal: Giannozzo Manetti

The most direct answer to Innocent came before the Enlightenment. In 1452, the Christian humanist Giannozzo Manetti completed On Human Worth and Excellence (De dignitate et excellentia hominis).

Manetti did not reject Christianity or heaven. He attacked Innocent’s selection and interpretation of evidence:

• The upright human body is admirable rather than contemptible.
• The senses and intellect make knowledge, language and art possible.
• Human beings transform the world through craft, architecture, science and government.
• Pleasure is often natural and good, not merely a trap.
• Cultural progress displays human ingenuity.
• Being made in God’s image confers dignity in the present, not only after death.

Book IV directly criticizes Innocent’s On Misery. Modern scholarship emphasizes Manetti’s unusually practical idea of progress: improvement in living conditions, arts, technology and knowledge demonstrates human worth. (review of Brian Copenhaver’s edition, Renaissance Quarterly)

Manetti therefore marks a transition:

Human dignity is visible not only in the soul’s supernatural destiny but in embodied agency and the human capacity to improve this world.

This Renaissance humanism prepared part of the cultural ground on which Enlightenment ideas of progress and earthly happiness later grew.

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The Enlightenment reversal

From salvation to happiness

The Enlightenment did not produce one uniform philosophy, and many Enlightenment thinkers remained Christian or deist. Nevertheless, a major shift occurred: happiness in this life increasingly became a legitimate end of ethics and government, rather than a spiritually suspicious distraction from salvation. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Enlightenment”)

The new orientation emphasized:

• Reason and experience rather than inherited ecclesiastical authority
• Improvement through education, science and institutional reform
• Religious toleration and freedom of conscience
• Reduction of cruelty, disease, ignorance and arbitrary power
• Public welfare as a test of law and government
• The moral legitimacy of pleasure, sociability and ordinary affection

This was not always shallow optimism. Enlightenment writers knew that humans suffer and die. Their rebuke was directed at the conclusion that suffering should primarily teach detachment from the world.

David Hume: usefulness, pleasure and the “monkish virtues”

Hume judged character traits by whether they are useful or agreeable to oneself or others. He attacked celibacy, fasting, mortification and related “monkish virtues” because they neither improve society nor increase human enjoyment. (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Hume: Moral Philosophy”)

The rebuke is direct:

A practice does not become virtuous merely because it frustrates desire or makes earthly life harder.

In Hume’s account, benevolence, friendship, wit, justice and social usefulness are morally valuable partly because they make human life go better.

Voltaire: cultivate the world one actually inhabits

Candide (1759) primarily satirizes Leibnizian optimism—the claim that this is the best possible world—not Augustine’s pessimism. Yet its conclusion also rejects passive metaphysical consolation. After repeated catastrophe and religious hypocrisy, Candide turns to practical work: one must “cultivate our garden.”

The point is not that suffering is unreal. It is that speculative explanations of suffering are less valuable than concrete activity that reduces it. (Voltaire, Candide)

Political happiness

The language of the “pursuit of Happiness” in the American Declaration of Independence illustrates the changed moral atmosphere. Government was increasingly judged by whether it secured conditions in which people could pursue flourishing in this world. Later utilitarianism made the promotion of pleasure and reduction of suffering an explicit standard of legislation.

This reverses the social priority of contemptus mundi:

Limits of the reversal

The Enlightenment did not prove that complete happiness is attainable. Its confidence in reason and progress sometimes became naïve, Eurocentric or coercive. Kant made freedom and moral duty—not happiness—the center of ethics. Rousseau criticized civilization’s corrupting effects. The French Revolution showed that projects of earthly regeneration could generate new violence.

The deepest Enlightenment correction was therefore not “perfect happiness is easy.” It was:

The impossibility of perfect happiness does not excuse failure to pursue greater freedom, knowledge, health, justice and ordinary human joy.

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Nineteenth- and twentieth-century attacks

Karl Marx: heavenly consolation can preserve earthly misery

Marx described religion as both a protest against suffering and a consolation produced by suffering. Calling it the “opium of the people” did not mean only that religion was a cynical fraud. Like a painkiller, it could express real pain while making an intolerable condition bearable.

The political criticism of otherworldliness is that promises of reward after death may:

• Encourage the poor to accept exploitation.
• Reinterpret avoidable injustice as a spiritual trial.
• Redirect demands for structural change into private endurance.
• Give rulers a sacred vocabulary for maintaining hierarchy.

For Marx, criticism should move from the imagined compensation of heaven to transformation of the conditions that make such compensation necessary. (Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction)

Friedrich Nietzsche: Christianity as life-denial

Nietzsche’s accusation was psychological and cultural. Christianity, he argued, can turn weakness, resentment and inability into moral superiority; condemn strong earthly desires; and devalue this life by measuring it against a supposedly perfect world beyond it.

His alternative was life-affirmation: saying yes to becoming, conflict, embodiment and recurrence rather than treating existence as an error awaiting correction. The target is precisely the side of Christianity that requires repudiating earthly life as the price of entry to a superior realm. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Nietzsche”)

Nietzsche’s critique is powerful against the most disgust-centered forms of contemptus mundi, though it fits Augustine less neatly when Augustine’s affirmation of creation, love and rightly ordered earthly goods is included.

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The present-day response

Secular humanism

Modern secular humanism rejects reliance on a supernatural afterlife and holds that human beings must create meaning and improve welfare within the life and world available to them. Its characteristic answer is not that everyone can achieve permanent bliss, but that finite life makes the prevention of suffering more urgent, not less. (Humanists International, “What is humanism?”)

Contemporary culture also treats well-being as empirically investigable. Psychology, medicine, economics and public policy study life satisfaction, mental health, social connection, purpose and the material conditions of flourishing. This approach relocates happiness from theology and metaphysics into lived experience and public measurement.

The continuing secular critique

Critics still object that a “vale of tears” theology can:

• Normalize depression, deprivation or abuse.
• Romanticize involuntary suffering.
• Make pleasure, sexuality and the body sources of guilt.
• Encourage environmental neglect if the earth is merely temporary.
• Reward endurance more than resistance.
• Promise justice after death instead of demanding accountable institutions now.

These criticisms are strongest when the doctrine is used to tell other people to accept suffering, especially by those who benefit from the existing order.

Contemporary Christian correction: hope should intensify earthly responsibility

Mainstream Christianity has not abandoned the claim that definitive happiness lies in God. The Catholic Catechism still calls heaven the “supreme, definitive happiness” and teaches that no created good can fully satisfy the human heart. (Catechism §§1023–1029; §§1718–1724)

What has changed is the explicit rejection of escapist inference. Vatican II’s Gaudium et spes teaches:

• Created realities possess their own goodness and proper order.
• Human progress can serve genuine happiness.
• Expectation of a new earth should stimulate care for this one.
• Earthly progress is not identical with God’s kingdom, but just social order matters to that kingdom.
• Christians err if hope for a future city leads them to neglect earthly duties.

(Gaudium et spes §§34–43)

The resulting position is eschatological without being merely otherworldly:

Perfect fulfillment is God’s gift beyond mortal history, but love of God is tested through work for the neighbor, justice, peace and care for creation within history.

Liberation theology and other Christian dissent

Liberation theology emerged in the twentieth century partly against forms of Christianity that consoled the poor without confronting the systems producing poverty. It interprets salvation as including liberation from unjust social, political and economic conditions, while usually retaining a transcendent dimension. (Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Liberation theology”)

Similar corrections appear in:

• The Social Gospel, which treated reform of social conditions as a Christian duty.
• Black theology, which rejected religious legitimation of racial oppression.
• Feminist theology, which challenged demands that women sanctify submission or abuse.
• Creation care, which rejects treating the earth as disposable.

These movements argue that biblical hope is not narcotic resignation. The Exodus, the prophets, Jesus’s ministry to the poor and sick, and the resurrection can inspire resistance to suffering rather than passive acceptance of it.

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Balanced assessment

What Augustine and the tradition perceive correctly

• Fortune is unstable; wealth, status and health cannot guarantee security.
• Even morally admirable people suffer loss, illness and death.
• Desire can expand faster than possession and make satisfaction elusive.
• Political projects that promise final human perfection are dangerous.
• A meaningful life may require goods deeper than pleasure or consumption.
• Hope beyond present circumstances can give courage to people who cannot immediately escape suffering.
• The equality of all before death and judgment can puncture the pretensions of rulers and elites.

Where the tradition becomes harmful

• It can blur the difference between unavoidable finitude and preventable injustice.
• It can treat bodily life as degrading rather than vulnerable and valuable.
• It can praise endurance where resistance or treatment is needed.
• It can make human creativity and pleasure seem spiritually suspect.
• It can postpone justice to an unverifiable afterlife.
• It can become a tool by which comfortable people teach deprived people to accept deprivation.

Best synthesis

A defensible modern synthesis separates three claims:

1. Perfect, permanent and invulnerable happiness is not available in mortal life. This is existentially plausible even without Christian theology.
2. Real but incomplete flourishing is available now. Love, friendship, knowledge, beauty, virtue, health, meaningful work and political freedom matter precisely because life is finite.
3. Belief in heaven should be judged partly by its earthly fruits. If it produces courage, solidarity and resistance to injustice, it can be life-giving; if it excuses avoidable misery, the Enlightenment, Marxist, Nietzschean and liberationist criticisms land with force.

Final formulation

Augustine was right that no earthly arrangement abolishes fragility, moral conflict and death. Innocent III turned that insight into an extreme rhetoric of misery. Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment correctly insisted that finite goods remain genuine goods and that preventable suffering should be remedied. Contemporary Christianity increasingly tries to hold both truths together: ultimate beatitude is not manufactured by history, but hope for heaven does not absolve anyone from cultivating the earth.

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Chronology

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Primary texts and further reading

Primary texts

• Augustine, The City of God, Book XIX
• Augustine, Confessions
• Innocent III, De miseria humanae conditionis — Latin text
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I–II, q. 2–5
• Giannozzo Manetti, On Human Worth and Excellence, ed. and trans. Brian P. Copenhaver (Harvard University Press, 2019)
• David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
• Voltaire, Candide
• Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction
• Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et spes

Reference and scholarship

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Augustine
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Enlightenment
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Nietzsche
• Robert E. Lewis, trans., On the Misery of the Human Condition (University of Georgia Press, 1978)
• Brian P. Copenhaver, ed. and trans., On Human Worth and Excellence (Harvard University Press, 2019)
• Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Liberation theology