Protestant - Muslim intellectual links, an interesting speculation

Amici,

One of the problems Catholics have traditionally had when arguing with Protestants is that they are not – to put it politely, very logically consistent. Many examples exist, but their answers to how the Canon of Scripture was worked out and their defense of Sola Scriptura both come to mine, not to mention the problems raised by their various interpretations of Sola Fide in every day life and in theological questions of great import. 

Often times, I don't think our Protestant friends really do bother with answering those questions. Or rather, should one, as a Protestant, be inclined to ponder them in the first place, then one might very well find oneself becoming a Catholic! So, whence comes this tendency to avoid rationality in regards to Faith? To begin this meditation, let me quote Protestantism's founder: in one of his debates, Luther, brought up short by logical argument, shouted, "Logic is the Devil's whore!"

I guess Protestantism has carried that "genetic trait" down the generations. Or to put it another way, the Medieval Nominalists who were the precursors of Protestantism weren't too big on logic, either. They rejected Aquinas as being too rational, and they in fact rejected human rationality – at least when it came to things religious. I suppose they either re-created or were influenced by the strain in Islamic thought that had produced the Al-Asherites, and today the Wahabi-Salafist school of Muslim theology. These rejected/reject the idea that human thought can know anything of God, and that all we can know of God is of revelation – in fact, they were/are quite extreme that even any science, chemistry, biology, etc., is blasphemous, because it plumbs the mind of God.

So, with that background in Islam, and the influence of certain Medieval Muslims in Christianity (there was a flowering of Aristotle in the High Middle Ages, partly because of Aristotle's works translated from Arabic), I would guess that some of the Al-Asherite/Salafist sort of thinking came in, as well, with tracts and excerpts of actual Muslim thinkers being translated, not just Aristotle. The parallels between certain aspects of Protestantism and Islam are just too strong for it to be coincidental, unless there's some sort of human trait (that obviously not all humans have) that produces it.

Thus we can speak of "Protestant Anti-Intellectualism" in the same way we can speak of Islamic anti-intellectualism. A great book on that latter subject is Robert R. Reilly's The Closing of the Muslim Mind, How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis – well worth reading for itself, and the insights it gives into the recent murderous, savage behavior by a Saudi flight student at the U.S. Naval Air Station – and all such insanity, actually – but also for the insights it provides to Catholics trying to understand Protestant "thinking".

One of my favorite Luther quotes is, "Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God." That is unadulterated, pure Al-Asherite Wahabi-Salafism. Couldn't be purer.

Anyway, some speculation, of course, but also a pondering, a meditation, but after all, we Catholics, with our long tradition, derived from the philosopher Justin Martyr and formalized by Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, (died 524), famous author of The Consolation of Philosophy, who encapsulated the entire Western Christian intellectual program with his saying, "Insofar as you are able, conjoin Faith and Reason." That seems to be the antithesis of the Al-Asherites then, the Salafists today, and Protestantism from its inception. I for one know, from arguing with certain Baptists, that they are amazingly Salafist when it comes to religion, but not of course in any other field. Wahabi-Salafist Muslims extend that to all fields of human knowledge. 

An Préachán