More Evidence in Favour of Catholicism

I think it may be possible to evaluate various religious traditions objectively, and decide which religion is better than which other religion.

Here's how.

Premise: God is manifested by the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. These three are ultimately all one, and together are God. This is necessarily so: God as a perfect being must be perfectly good, perfectly real, and perfectly beautiful; for any being that was not all these things would not be perfect. An ugly being is self-evidently not a perfect being; an evil being is not a perfect being; and an unreal being, as Anselm pointed out, is not a perfect being.

All this seems self-evident and true of necessity.

But something important follows from this, does it not? It follows that any religion which fails to value and teach appreciation for any one of these three aspects is to that extent deficient, and to that extent inferior to a religious tradition that acknowledges all three. It does not fully reflect the true nature of the divine.

We can, then, proceed to make judgements:

Paganism, shamanism, animism, for example, tends to fail to fully acknowledge the good; it tends towards amorality. It is therefore an inferior religion, as history itself has shown: it has been mostly abandoned in practice. Buddhism and Hinduism also seem lower on the pole than the ethical monotheisms here. Confucianism also scores high.

Calvinism fails to properly honour the beautiful, standing opposed to beauty in almost all its expressions: music, visual art, female beauty, dance, drama. In this regard, it is simply wrong; a wrong turn in religious history. Possibly for this reason, Calvinist creeds tend to fade over generations. Wahhabi Islam can also be faulted here. Taoism scores high, on this one factor.

Buddhism falls relatively short on truth—it does not value metaphysical truth, but only “skillful means.”

Who comes out on top? Catholicism, it seems to me, as clearly as one might wish. I'd like to say “Catholicism/Orthodoxy,” as it seems to me they are very much the same on this score. But I cannot say “Christianity,” because, as noted, Calvinist Christianity is not at the same level. Catholic/Orthodox Christianity seems to stand out among the great word religions in most clearly valuing all three qualities: a rigorous and sophisticated metaphysics, a rigorous and sophisticated ethics, and a rigorous and sophisticated tradition of religious art.

This is perhaps confirmed by the accomplishments of Christian civilization. The cultural cultivation of the virtues of truth, morality, and beauty will naturally tend to manifest as accomplishments in philosophy and science, saintliness, and the arts. And surely Europe leads the world in all three spheres? Granted, there may be some Eurocentrism in such a claim—but really, the rest of the world basically concurs.

Some may argue, mind, that there is no clear superiority of Catholic and Orthodox over Protestant Europe in cultural accomplishment. In philosophy and science, Protestant Britain, America, and North Germany may have an edge over Catholic France and Italy and Orthodox Russia. But if so, it is not a huge edge.

As to ethics, it is hard to say a given nation is more ethical than another. Protestant nations tend to have more honest governments—and higher crime rates. But what of actual paragons of saintliness? Here, surely, the Catholics have the advantage.

In the arts, I think even most artists of Protestant Europe would award the Catholics the laurel. The terms “Romantic” and “Bohemian,” after all, both refer to Catholic cultures. You don't go from Paris to London in search of a life in the arts.