HISTORY: YOU ARE BEGINNING TO SOUND VERY CATHOLIC | nationalsalvation.net
Back Bay Grouch: Hmmm, you are beginning to sound very Catholic. This is a common experience to intelligent men who, freed from the daily hubbub by age, turns reflective.
ME:
That depends entirely on which kind of Catholic you mean. I am rereading Lawrence Brown's Might of the West for about the fiftieth time, and he makes a critical distinction.
My own observation: Erasmus supported Luther at the outset, but turned against him as he began to attack the Western unity represented by the Medieval Church. But at his death, he refused all rites, something a modern Catholic would NEVER do. This puzzles the hell out of Mommy Professor.
But Brown points out, and C.S. Lewis*, who was an Anglican, indicated, that both the Reformation and the reaction to it, the Catholic Church hardened at Trent, were totally different from the united church in its Medieval form. Nobody raised on the Renaissance crap has the slightest idea what I am talking about.
The Medieval Church, as I said, regarded Renaissance witches as demented old women. They did not let Wordism blind them to reality. The Medieval Church would have had no problem with Galileo.
My interpretation of Brown and Lewis is that the Reformation got the entire church, both Tridentate and Reformation, tangled in the exact WORDS of the Bible and Tradition. Tradition is a living thing, not the locked-in Wordism of post-Reformation Catholicism.
In short, Tradition is Western. Neither the Reformation nor the Trent Catholics nor Mommy Professor has a hint of what that means.
Erasmus was a part of the West, part of the Medieval Church, so he did not feel he needed the hocus-pocus.
These are thought-points, not doctrine.
But it has a HUGE effect torchlight parade types cannot see.
*C.S. Lewis Died on November 22, 1963:
For forty years, we were constantly reminded that Saint John the Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Now that we know more about him, so this obsession has vanished.
C.S. Lewis also died on November 22, 1963. It was, of course, not even a footnote.
Shortly before his death, Lewis said, "It's in God's hands. I can live on or be called. But now I would rather be called." He was not concerned about fame anyway. He felt that death meant more for him than an obituary.