Religion:Traditionalism (19th-century Catholicism)

Short description: 19th-century Catholic theological viewpoint

Traditionalism, in the context of 19th-century Catholicism, refers to a theory which held that all metaphysical, moral, and religious knowledge derives from God's revelation to man and is handed down in an unbroken chain of tradition.({{{1}}}, {{{2}}}) It denied that human reason by itself has the power to attain to any truths in these domains of knowledge. It arose, mainly in Belgium and France, as a reaction to 18th-century rationalism and can be considered an extreme form of anti-rationalism.({{{1}}}, {{{2}}})

Its chief proponents were Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais.({{{1}}}, {{{2}}}) Their doctrines were advocated in a modified form by Louis Eugène Marie Bautain, Augustin Bonnetty, Casimir Ubaghs, and the philosophers of the Louvain school.({{{1}}}, {{{2}}}) The fundamental distrust of human reason underlying traditionalism was eventually condemned in a number of papal decrees and finally ruled out by the dogmatic constitution Dei Filius during the First Vatican Council in 1870.

See also

• Counter-Reformation
• Counter-Enlightenment
• Fideism

References

Bibliography

• Cross, F. L.; Livingstone, E. A., eds (2005). "Traditionalism". The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd rev. ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press (published 2009). doi:10.1093/acref/9780192802903.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-956671-6. 
• Homan, Roger (1998). "Traditionalism". in Wuthnow, Robert. The Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion. 2. Abingdon, England: Routledge. pp. 737–741. ISBN 978-0-415-19081-7. https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofpo0001unse/page/737. 
• McCool, Gerald A. (1989). Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism: The Search for a Unitary Method. New York: Fordham University Press (published 1999). ISBN 978-0-8232-1257-6.