" It became the responsibility of man to scorn the present while making sure of the future with a correct set values. The soul God created is held by the malevolent flesh, and salvation is only possible only through holy living and good works and solely through the Church. At death, if the person's spirituality and belief was strong enough salvation will come. But nothing can help the damned.
Yet, for those who lived in the 1400s with the philosopher Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, human life was considered so much better. Based on the Great Chain of Being, there were but two classes of people: Nobles and Commoners with man gradations in between. The chain, which extended from God to the lowest forms of life, held...
Mirandola, in his work called On the Dignity of Man, praised human beings as capable of rising to the level of the angels through philosophical contemplation.
As the Humanists, he focused on the human relationship to the divine.
The most important aspect, so different from Pope Innocent III, God had given human beings alone of all creatures the freedom to choose what they will become. He stated:
At last it seems to me I have come to understand why man is the most fortunate of creatures and consequently worthy of all admiration and what precisely is that rank which is his lot in the universal chain of Being -- a rank to be envied not only by brutes but even by the
