Religious Influence in Social & Political Life in Western Society

In the broadest sense, hu globeism was an educational movement, and for the humanists the classical writings were unique instruments for extending the consciousness of human beings. The humanists located their emphasis on the human being as that soul would be revealed in the written records of classical antiquity. Humanism was a secular movement, and as such it inherently questioned the authority of ghostly doctrine in social, literary, and political thought. Pico della Mirandola writes on an important humanitarian issue--the dignity of man--and does so from the perspective that man has particular appraise because he was created by God:

O supreme philanthropy of God the Father, O highest and to the highest degree marvelous felicity of man! To him is granted to acquit any(prenominal) he chooses, to be whatever he wills (Mirandola 13).

The Reformation was another example of humanism in a religious context. Martin Luther challenged the authority of the Catholic Church and in so doing created a movement away from the strictness of Catholic teaching and from the idea that communion with God required the interference of the papacy and the religious structure of a Church. This was a humanist vision in that Luther believed every human being could touch on a connection with God without needing a priest as intercessor. Luther was reacting to a variety of specific abuses he perceived in the Catholic hierarchy and in terms of doctrinaire differences Lut

I revered my theology, and hoped as oftentimes as anyone else to get to heaven, but having learned on not bad(p) authority that the road was just as open to the most ignorant as to the most learned.

. . I would not have dared to submit them to the weakness of my reasonings (Descartes 47).

Mirandola, Pico della. "Oration on the Dignity of Man." In Sources of the Western Tradition, Marvin Perry, Joseph R. Peden, and Theodore H. Von Laue (eds), 12-13. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.

Reason was the cornerstone of the methods of Francis Bacon in addressing issues of information and politics. Reason was the method of RenT Descartes, though he static saw his faculties in this direction as being at the service of God:

The story, so far as relates to the otherworldly part, has every mark of fraud and imposition stamped upon the face of it (Paine 67).

Luther, Martin. "On Papal Power, Justification by Faith, the Interpretation of the Bible, and the Nature of the Clergy." In Sources of the Western Tradition, Marvin Perry, Joseph R. Peden, and Theodore H. Von Laue (eds), 18-21. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.

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