Fideism
Fideism (from Latin fides "faith") is an attitude of belief or a religious-philosophical epistemology, according to which faith and reason are in principle mutually exclusive and yet - contrary to reason - religious belief is to be adhered to. Faith is therefore given absolute priority over reason. Fideism was officially rejected by the Catholic Church, but it plays an important role in the Protestant tradition. Fideism as a concept of the philosophy of religion and belief goes back to Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald and was later developed by Félicité de Lamennais .
Important representatives of a fideistic religious philosophy include Tertullian (according to the winged word Credo, quia absurdum est ) and in the evangelical tradition Martin Luther (reason as a whore), Sören Kierkegaard (the absurd leap into faith, faith as an existential risk) and Karl Barth . Even Wittgenstein is understood frequently as fideist.
Rationalism , according to which all (including religious) knowledge is accessible to human reason, can be viewed as the opposite of fideism .
History of origin
Fideism was founded by Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald, then trained by Félicité de Lamennais ( Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion I – IV, 1817–1823). Something similar can also be found with Louis Eugène Marie Bautain . These theologians were of the opinion that the only source of faith and therefore the origin of religious knowledge was a supernatural revelation. Like Immanuel Kant, Bautain took the view that limited reason could not grasp the suprarational. Consequently every knowledge on religious questions must be gained by referring to revelation. Similarly, Lamennais advocated a theology that was initially skeptical, according to which God could not be known for man, only he had revealed himself to them and sources were left about it. The traditionalist argument is that in the writing and transmission of that revelation an access to knowledge about God is possible.
This doctrine, which accepted a limit of reason in supernatural questions and thus stands in opposition to natural theology , was opposed by the Catholic Church in the following period and officially condemned in 1838. In 1840, Bautain had to sign a declaration that was given to him by Pope Gregory XVI. was submitted. In it he had to acknowledge that, in addition to revelation, there could also be "on the path of a purely natural knowledge [a] certainty about the existence of God".
Fideism was particularly popular in France , but also in Germany and Belgium .
Rejection by the Catholic Church
The criticism, which ultimately led to the rejection of fideism as heresy , attached itself to the substantial pre-order of the knowledge of God in faith over that in reason . As a result, theology would lose any basis that can be argued.
Fideism is expressly rejected in the encyclical Fides et ratio (Faith and Reason) from 1998 by John Paul II . The Catholic Church advocates the possibility of natural theology .
Further developments
In the so-called symbolic ideism of the evangelical theologians Auguste Sabatier and Eugène Ménégoz (also known as the Paris School ), the strict pre-order of revelation and the salvific effect of faith were retained, but the individual dogmas, like all other religious terms, were now interpreted as symbols . This deliberate relativization was supposed to enable a mediation between orthodoxy and liberal theology , but remained an episode.
Web links
- Entry in Edward N. Zalta (Ed.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
Individual evidence
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↑ The philosopher Thomas Metzinger writes:
“Fideism in philosophy is the idea that it is completely legitimate to hold on to a belief even when there are no good reasons or evidence for it, even in the face of convincing counter-arguments. So fideism is the pure belief standpoint. It is legitimate for the fideist to hold on to certain beliefs, not only without any positive arguments or evidence for them, but even in the face of strong counter-arguments and strong empirical evidence against one's own beliefs. "
- Thomas Metzinger : Spirituality and intellectual honesty. - ↑ Essai sur l'indifferénce en matière de religion I – IV, 1817–1823.
- ↑ Theology Dictionary ( Memento of the original from October 24, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Website fernkurs-wuerzburg.de. Retrieved July 25, 2011.
- ^ Josef Neuner , Heinrich Roos : The faith of the church in the documents of the doctrinal proclamation , edited by Karl Rahner , Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 1965 (7th edition), p. 34.
- ↑ Fides et Ratio, para. 52 . Vatican website. Retrieved July 25, 2011.
- ^ The symbolic ideism in the Virtual Museum of Protestantism .
