Protestant Enlightenment-ism

Hi

Like most, my childhood caricature of Protestantism (and in opposition to it, Catholicism) was that the former was an emotional, impulsive, and naive phenomena, while the latter was a somewhat jaded, objective, and rationalistic phenomena. 

Even then, I knew this was a caricature--but it seemed to be true in broadstrokes, even to the opposition. Protestants, for the most part, decried Catholics for their subservience to human reason and works, while Catholics decried Protestants for their fideism and forgetfulness concerning the human.

While this is absolutely true in the common egregore of Catholicism and Protestantism (and how can I fault anyone for paying lipservice to an egregore?) this is far from true concerning the historical Catholic/Reformed debate. 

Far from true.

I think, before getting into the deep, one must consider Catholic teaching on God/Revelation/Inspiration. The Church has continually maintained, sometimes to the surprise of Catholics, that all three of these subjects are absolutely unreachable in their respective ways. One cannot know God's essence. One cannot reason to most of Revelation. One cannot know uncreated things by created means. 

Alright so far. 

So lets take an example: Sola Scripture. A common (but flawed) "measured and reasonable" Catholic response to this is something like "how did you get a fallible canon of infallible books?" On face value (and for most protestants) this might be fine--but its lacking for a number of reasons. Reasons I will not get into right now. What I want to bring to your attention is a scholastic answer to the question of the Canon.

Catholicism, somewhat surprisingly (and in so many words), states that no system which does not allow for the fact of inspiration to be unknowable by human reason does not really admit inspiration to be a divine phenomena. (Obviously this would follow, for if you could reason to the fact of inspiration it would not be from a higher divine order, but from a lower order).

Okay. "Protestantism doesn't affirm that!" sort of. Truish. Classical Protestantism actually affirms that the books themselves attest (with apostolic or other authority) that they are Inspired. This does not seem to be true for all books (certainly some!). Certainly Hebrews does not claim that (and arguments which go something like "he writes like Paul, so it must be inspired" do not follow because even if by the off chance one could satisfactorily reason to the authorship, not everything Paul wrote is inspired. He would have to explicitly state that to be so through his authority, not our speculations).

No, the books in the existing canon do not all have a claim of inspiration (claims of infallibility do not equal inspiration, as an aside). And so Classical Protestants attempt to fill in some of these gaps. Arguments reveal a human-reason-leaning tendency which we would expect from Catholics, not Protestants. In addition to the one just mentioned, there are arguments which amount to "we can rationally determine that the style of writing befits the rest of scripture, etc, so it is logical that x book is inspired." 

In their defense, this is not the first attempt some Classical Protestants give. They would rather the books themselves have claims of their own Inspiration. But as this is not the case, some fall upon the arguments which amount to human arguments.

The Catholic instead, while attesting to the legitimate attributes which Protestants put forth about scripture, first and foremost attest that belief from apostolic authority is the only way to know the inspiration of a book in scripture. Paul, for example, is the only person who can tell us whether or not a particular work of his is inspired. If he tells us in the scripture itself, good. If he does not, we rely upon the Apostolic authority vested in the Church--Pope or pope and bishops. 

This seems awfully faith based and not reason based for the so-caricatured Papist.

I'm sick and losing my train of thought. See ya later, I'll write more later.

You'll have to forgive me for lack of citations. I'm going off of memory from 16th-18th century Protestant and Catholic Scholastic writings--what I hope is the best from both sides. I could go back and offer better citations, but perhaps you could help me in that way. Thanks to Christian Wagner for somewhat spawning these thoughts in me.