Fideism: the Heresy & Obedience : the extra bit about St Augustine of Hippo
I see belief in belief as being a heresy, a heresy called Fideism, as incoherent. Why would a church not belief in belief, not have faith in faith?
The non-protestant, and some protestant, Christianities, especially the Catholic and Orthodox churches, step toward this gap as an intercessory agent, as a shaman, flying between worlds, and throw into the gap of this apparent incoherence a virtue called obedience.
Apparently that is the most reasonable thing you can do.
This post looks into a little of how that came to be. And as such provides supporting material to the post on Cardinal Pell’s obedience in To build a better world, we should destroy the Catholic Church.
The structure of the church that becomes the Orthodox and later in an empireless Rome, the Catholic, was created by the choices of the Roman Emperors , and what they chose to include, as managers of an empire and their needs to manage people, is the work by writers like St Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE). While he was born after the Edict of Milan (313 CE) when Constantine’s choice was decriminalised, paganism was still an option. The peoples and regions of the Empire still practised its old customary rites and moral memberships of cities, while at a formal level Imperial Christianity replaced Imperial Paganism. St Augustine is an apparatchik and activist in this change process.
The divisions within Christianity that the Nicene creed was suppose to overcome continued anyway after the Edict of Thessalonica (380CE) (so fiercely interminable in disputations that its endlessness is sometimes given as one reason why Islam several centuries later was greatly welcomed in relief).
If you want to know more about early Christian denominations then UsefulCharts on youtube might be for you, see Christian Denominations Family Tree | Episode 1: Origins & Early Schisms
St Augustine of Hippo lives through this time, and provides the empire with a personal story of conversion, and he creates arguments and methodologies as an able Church administrator and writer, which will help promote a totalitarian integration of the new state religion across society and empire. It’s a curious thing that a program for consolidating power within an empire is regarded by some as what led to its decline. The trajectory was there ever since emperors were to be worship likely any local god. Be careful what you ask for I guess.
Part of this integration explains why Fideism is a heresy. See somewhere in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It’s there because of St Augustine of Hippo.
This choice, this heresy, Fideism, is rightly described as weighting faith over reason, and see Stanford for a discussion (at 5.3) of this type of thing. This however does not admit of why this rationalisation was chosen in the first place.
For what is chosen here over Fideism, over belief in belief, is obedience to the Church. Obedience requires “reasons”, not ‘to believe’, but in the reciprocal part of this relationship, i.e. the orders coming down from the top, if not God his-tri-self. Here orders are reasons. This type of reason over faith.
The Roman empire after all was built by controlling the army. It’s the model, here, faith, as loyalty, is only required once in acknowledgement, when initiated into the militaristic organisation, after that you just do as you are told. Faith is not a daily practice, but obedience is. That is what the Catholic and Orthdox churches are, obedience-machines of state, you sheeple.
Saint Augustine of Hippo. Engraving. [Bologna] (nel Pav[aglion]e) : Dal Salvardi, [1780?]
Faith in faith means you are loyal to faith, not necessarily the faith. Belief in belief means you are loyal to believing and not the church. This is why it is a heresy.
Faith in faith is a threat by virtue of given power to the individual. To what is targeted as the conscience. (In practice those who are called to a vocation in Holy Orders (monks, nuns, priests) must deal with obedience to the church, while the rest of us, the laity, get loaded with guilt.
Instead of you working out your own path of faith in faith, the state religion will act as shaman and interlocutor on your behalf. The church calls this interlocution ‘Reason’. It goes on to provide weekly community-building worship as before, but with the added methods of thought control by which individual consciousness are given a guilt-based conscience with free will to sin, but is very circumscribed in how it can avoid that sin without the intercession of the church.
Fideism threatens the monopoly of the Church to intercede on your behalf with the powers that be above us, temporal and spiritual. Here ‘reason over faith’ is used to put obedience to the church above the individual processes in the name of the state/religion. Whose reason? Whose rationality? The church decides what those reasons are, and as it has the authority and power (magical and temporal) to do this because St Peter founded the church in Rome, and the church has maintained those traditions of power, and thus it is the direct true successor. Though in actuality its power was created as a government department of an Empire, when a type of Pauline Christianity was chosen over all the other sects, and later refined in the Nicene creed and when ranks were given to obedience and loyal churchmen. This is the doorway from Empire to medieval feudalism.
(The whole medieval program of scholasticism where one argues everything from authority is an logical outgrowth of this method based on this type of authority, itself based on military practices.)
It is not just the belief in belief that is a problem, for belief in Scripture (belief in the word of god) itself is a heresy as well, both of these choices/heresies must be outweighed by the tradition and authority of church. Because reasons.
This authority over Scripture thus extends the Churches’ guardianship into/over the gap between reason and faith. This is the responsibility of the Church, not you and your children, and as part of that remit, for the Church decides what is a heresy. Usually this is whatever threatens obedience to the church. As a good Christian you must obey even if the Empire that gave form to all this is long gone and it’s language is dead.
The church’s main mission is to maintain primacy despite this ancient loss. Besides the repeated rites of magical bread/flesh ephiphany by the ordained priest in the mass using transubstantiation powers, the church as guardian of the tradition decides what those things mean such that your faith is determined by reasons the church controls, and your job as a good Christian conscience is to obey them, and not worry about what occurs in your idle little head. I hope you feel guilty now.
Parish priests are like well-dressed shamans crossed-dressed with thought-police.
Is this why only celibate men can be ordained? (Supposedly its because of the totally irrational magical belief that if a women were pregnant undergoing a priest’s ordination ceremony that would be a doubled abomination; mother and fetus babe as priest.)(Magic!).
Fideism as an active belief is thus often more associated with Protestants who champion individual consciences, which is, I view, is more coherent. Even if it leads to the narcissism of those soteriological practices which use devoteeist rites and rituals, as well as the ego-worship of religion seen as a set of personal beliefs.
Curiously it is these practices, soteriological or not, which might explain why Christianity originally spread, in the first place, out of its grouping as a Jewish messiah Sect (even with St Paul) before being co-opted by an empire When is was to be harnessed to the needs of practical power, and made to cohere with those practical concerns of power, and not with “belief” per se.
In the Catholic and Orthodox church “belief” is just there to infiltrate and infect consciousness with conscience, in order to save their souls. But belief is to do no more than that. This is also why there are harmonics between obedience and guilt, and why guilt is more important than belief in the lived experience of Catholics. Guilt a good emotion to use to whip people into line, or anything that can encourage akrasic disphoria, but mystic devotion for the masses??? Not-so-much. Things might get out of control. (See Max Weber on chiliastic social movements).
If fideism was not a heresy, we may have had many more devotee-ish forms of Christianity through the ages, practices which in our timeline were restricted to members of wealthy family members consigned to particular religious orders. For comparison, see Bhakti-ism in India, which often moved in anti-caste frameworks.
Under the influence of more recent Fideist Protestant Christian practices, wherein all logical difficulties can be over come by simply having faith in (maintaining a relationship with) the Christian tri-god, and not obedience to some jumped up government department gone rogue, we get to the point where Christian writers with pride repeatedly proclaim a semantic mondegreen “I believe, because it is absurd.”
Reductio ad absurdum if ever there was one. Here reason is the enemy to faith.
Here the gap between them, itself is believed as evidence, or, better put, experienced as the truth of their belief in belief.
There is always a gap, and we love to solve problems by throwing stuff into it, particularly stuff we are fond of. Particularly problems that have nothing to do with the gap like… or use the gap to paper over our lives or…
I’ve leave that thought incomplete for you for now to world with.
It’s really up to you. You cannot blame structures all your life. Just as you cannot take credit for anything you have done.
Revised from original post from a year ago in 2023 on substack.
