Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Protestantism: Reason is Devil's Greatest Whore

The arch-heretic Martin Luther wrote (Erlangen Edition v. 16, pp. 142‐148):
Reason is the Devil’s greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil’s appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom… Throw dung in her face to make her ugly. She is and she ought to be drowned in baptism… She would deserve, the wretch, to be banished to the filthiest place in the house, to the closets.
If by "reason" he means so-called "reason"—really vain philosophy and deceit (cf. Col. 2:8)—that contradicts the true faith, then he is correct, but this is not the way many have interpreted him, such as G. K. Chesterton.

This is one of many reasons why Protestantism is a heresy according to the Roman Catholic Church; Protestantism teaches the heresy of fideism, viz., that reason and faith are opposed to one another. The Catholic Church infallibly teaches the contrary in Dei Filius:
not only can faith and reason never be opposed to one another, but they are of mutual aid one to the other; for right reason demonstrates the foundations of faith, and, enlightened by its light cultivates the science of things divine; while faith frees and guards reason from errors, and furnishes it with manifold knowledge. So far, therefore, is the Church from opposing the cultivation of human arts and sciences, that it in many ways helps and promotes it. For the Church neither ignores nor despises the benefits of human life which result from the arts and sciences, but confesses that, as they came from God, the Lord of all science, so, if they be rightly used, they lead to God by the help of his grace. Nor does the Church forbid that each of these sciences in its sphere should make use of its own principles and its own method; but, while recognizing this just liberty, it stands watchfully on guard, lest sciences, setting themselves against the divine teaching, or transgressing their own limits, should invade and disturb the domain of faith.
"What about the Galileo affair?", you might object. To which I would reply, "The Lutherans, in agreement with their arch-heretic founder's calling reason the devil's greatest whore, excommunicated Kepler a hundred years before the Galileo affair. The Catholic Church, fighting their Counter-Reformation against the anti-reason Protestants, merely put Galileo in 'house arrest', which was nothing more than a paid retirement during which he composed his greatest scientific work, The Two New Sciences."

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