Rene Guenon on Protestantism:
Go visit Catholic Churches of the same vintage in Santa Fe. They are still functioning Catholic Churches.
Protestantism is a continual rejection of tradition. Confessional, musical, scriptural or theological interpretation or any other traditions within Protestantism will soon be washed away and replaced by something else.
Go visit the 400-year-old Calvinist churches in New England. Within one or two centuries they turned Unitarian and many have now become museums.Quote:
Religion is essentially a form of tradition, so the anti-traditional outlook cannot help being anti-religious; it begins by removing essential elements of religion and, when it can, ends by suppressing it entirely.
Protestantism is illogical: while doing all it can to 'humanize' and 'modernize' religion, it nevertheless retains revelation, which is a supra-human element. It does not dare carry its negation to the logical conclusion but, by subjecting revelation to all the discussions resulting from purely human interpretations, it does in fact reduce it to next to nothing; and seeing, as one does, people who persist in calling themselves Christian even though they deny the very divinity of Christ, one cannot avoid the supposition that they are much nearer to complete negation than to real Christianity, although they may not realize the fact. Such contradictions, however, should not occasion too much surprise, for they are in every field one of the symptoms of the disorder and confusion of our times, just as the incessant subdivision of Protestantism is one of the many manifestations of that dispersion in multiplicity which, as we have shown, is to be found everywhere in modern life and science.
Moreover, it is natural that Protestantism, owing to the spirit of negation by which it is animated, should have given birth to that destructive 'criticism' which, in the hands of the so-called 'historians of religion', has been turned into a weapon against all religion, so that, while claiming to recognize no other authority than that of the Sacred Books, the Protestant movement has in this way contributed very largely toward the destruction of this very authority, that is to say, of the minimum of tradition that it still retained. Once started, the revolt against the traditional outlook could not be stopped halfway.
Go visit Catholic Churches of the same vintage in Santa Fe. They are still functioning Catholic Churches.
Protestantism is a continual rejection of tradition. Confessional, musical, scriptural or theological interpretation or any other traditions within Protestantism will soon be washed away and replaced by something else.