Studying the subject lately, I get the sense that Catholicism is bourgeois and Protestantism is aristocratic.
Catholics believe in progress: the Church is infallible, so whenever theologians manage to develop doctrine such that a new dogma is defined, they continuously add to our previous understanding. Protestants believe in an original church that was good and which has horribly decayed, and to which we’re always imperfectly trying to go back. “Semper reformanda”: the church is not infallible, so it may always have to come back to some issue that it decided before.
Catholics believe in human perfection in this life, and deification in the next. We have help from God, through the sacraments issuing from Rome, to do perfect deeds that are pleasing to God, to become saints who totally fulfill the moral law, and then work wonders that no one has seen. New saints are still canonized, and new miracles are still ecclesiastically approved. In the next life, what happens (if we’re good) is we gain all the attributes that the pagan philosophers (not the vulgar pagans) allowed to the gods: invulnerability, bodily immortality, perfect knowledge of nature, a blessedness that cannot be interrupted.
Protestants believe that there is no perfection in this life. No matter how much we try, we still fall short of the ten commandments, and even divine grace does not change the fact that there is some measure of sin in every action we commit. We can go to heaven, not because our corrupt nature is made pleasing to God, but because God, in his mercy, chooses to count Christ’s perfection and merits as our own. We still get to be immortal, so we become what the vulgar pagans attributed to the gods: undying creatures who are still morally imperfect.
Catholics believe that we can understand the moral law philosophically, through our human reason. (This is Thomas Aquinas’s natural law theory.) “I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.” If man can understand the law with his reason, then he can criticize tyrants. The Church was the only institution outside the state with people learned enough to criticize it, and the fact that it existed only in the West was why liberalism arose within it, having had no equivalent in the East.
Protestants, insofar as they embody the Puritan principle, that nothing can be required when it is not clearly in the Bible, believe in divine command theory: something can only be immoral because the Bible says so. In this, they are the equals of Muslims and Jews. The more consistent ones see the Bible as the only source of political as well as of moral law, and hence want to copy what is essentially a bronze-age government. This led to oppressive theocracy in Calvin’s Geneva, and still has its defenders in the so-called theonomist movement – the one comprised of Rushdoony, Bahnsen, Gary North, and others, in which the virtues of stoning are extolled.
Catholics, through their philosophical interpretation of the moral law, found so many ‘just titles’ to interest that the Bible’s restrictions upon usury were reduced to a technicality; Protestants, while they ruled states (before they gave way to sceptical Enlightenment liberals), were much harsher on usury. Catholic Scholastics saw it fitting that we should enjoy our life in this world, and looking for how best we can do this, anticipated much of marginal economic theory; Protestant Calvinists, seeing work as a virtue and a sign of predestination, gave birth to the errors of Adam Smith, his labor theory of value and his idea of ‘unproductive labor’, which sees consumers’ goods as opposed to capital goods. This idea, which took a long time to be purged from economics, is that labor that contributes to consumption in the present does not add to wealth, only labor that increases our consumption deferred indefinitely into the future does. Only in the next life, for the Protestants, should there be enjoyment.
The Catholic Church, finally, is an international institution, indeed the only such institution that existed after the Roman Empire itself fell. It was against this institution that the Protestant revolution was fought. Protestants, early on and to this day, brought all power back to Europe’s petty local potentates, so that humans could be governed according to the accidents of their birth rather than according to their common nature. It is not to be wondered at that racism only reached its greatest horrors in Protestant countries.
