Anyone detect any similarity between the “liberation of the Bible” myth and the basic mindset described by Catholic Edward Feser in the following?
The core of the Enlightenment narrative - you might call it the “official story” - is that the Western world languished for centuries in a superstitious and authoritarian darkness, in thrall to a corrupt and power-hungry Church which stifled free inquiry. Then came Science, whose brave practitioners “spoke truth to power,” liberating us from the dead hand of ecclesiastical authority and exposing the falsity of its outmoded dogmas. Ever since, all has been progress, freedom, smiles and good cheer.
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The picture of the Middle Ages accepted by most people, including most “educated” people, is in fact little more than an ideologically driven construct, a holdover from the Reformation and Enlightenment eras and the various anti-Catholic propagandists active therein.
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Now as the philosopher David Stove has argued, the modern tendency toward hyper-skepticism seems largely to be the result of a massive overgeneralization from a mere handful of cases where common sense turned out to be mistaken.
tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=092006B
This seems pretty sound to me. Occasionally, there is a good and novel idea produced by differing from conventional wisdom. However, every lunatic, nutbar, fringe thinker, cuckoo, moonbat, and sociopath also differs from conventional wisdom. That is the rather humorous aspect of the famous Crackpot Index:
math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
I would argue that this bias is responsible for a great deal of Protestant hagiography contrary to the historical record. One sees, for example, that they take the
Athanasius contra mundum as a rejection of authority, when in fact, Athanasius himself was trying to uphold the authority of the tradition that had been handed down to him by Alexander. The Arians were the crackpot theorists who were advocating the cool new theory as against the old stuffy establishment, and it was precisely this sort of pseudo-intellectualism that encouraged the adoption of Arianism among a number of bishops who thought themselves smarter than both their predecessors and the laity. In that case, it was Greek dialectic philosophy gone wild rather than the Enlightenment ideal, but it turns out those are pretty closely related.
Wycliffe, Hus, Tyndale, and the like strike me as much of the same. Protestant hagiography points out their resistance to authority as if that was in and of itself a good thing, while neglecting to mention that the people in question were, from a Christian perspective, entirely nuts, advocating wild theological innovation that was every bit as off-kilter as the Arian nonsense of the 4th century. It’s that “they opposed authority, therefore, they must be good” attitude that completely ignores the question of whether they opposed authority for any good reason or, better yet, whether the authority was asserting itself for good reason.
Feser’s conclusion is worth reading, because it provides a good summary of why I find this sort of thing troubling. As Feser puts it, “no civilization can be healthy which nurtures such delusions, for they strike at the very heart of a society’s core institutions - family, religion, schools, political institutions, and so forth - and replace the (sometimes critical) allegiance we should feel for them with a corrosive skepticism.” Look at what Protestantism has done to its own structure if you want to see what it can do to a society at large.
