Fideism & Obedience : the extra bit about St Augustine of Hippo

Belief in belief is regarded as a heresy called Fideism by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian Churches.

To me this appears… —odd.

Why would a church or religion not belief in belief, not have faith in faith?

Surely this is prior to belief in somepiece of dogma. 

But for most established Christianities, not only is it unrequired, it is banned.

A lack of requirement is one thing, it might just be assumed to be that's what we do, it's taken for granted and so there is no need to define it. So then it's the actual categorising of believing in belief as a heresy called Fideism that is totally incoherent. It actually polices the very behaviour that makes belief possible. Why would a church or religion do that?

This seems totally incoherent.

Believe what bits we tell you to believe, no more no less. This is code for obey, not necessarly for a spiritual life per se.

This post works through some of the ancient backstory as a follow-up for To build a better world, we should destroy the Catholic Church  which discusses Cardinal Pell’s obedience in protecting child abusers.

Why would a church or religion ban belief in belief, why is faith in faith a heresy

Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian Churches use this incorence, this… —gap to step in as an intercessory agent, as parish shaman, flying between worlds, as a control device between you and your devotional object, it's too dangerous for you to have a direct relationship with god, leave that to the experts as appointed by the Emporer.

Apparently that is the most reasonable thing you can do.

The structure of the Nicene Christian churches that become 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 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 communitis as 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 in any case 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 welcomed in relief). (Although it might be added— perhaps they just wanted to argue even more.)

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 imperial power within an empire is regarded by some as what led to its decline. 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.

This choice, Fideism, which is rightly described as weighting faith over reason, is perhaps a later description or argument. A rationalisation, if you will. See Stanford for a discussion (at 5.3) of this type of thing.

For what is chosen here over Fideism 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, require no acts of faith, even if following the orders is an emblem of membership of a faith. The Roman empire after all was built by controlling the army. It’s the model, here. While 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.

Faith in faith means you are loyal to 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 the power this act of will gives to the individual. Instead of this agency, the state will intercede with a religion that ordains some people as shamans and interlocutors on your behalf, while provide weekly community worship as before, but with the added methods of thought control in which individual consciousness are given a Christian conscience with free will to sin, but is very circumscribed in how it can avoid that sin. Belief in belief is one of those sins.

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, the church has maintain traditions, and it is the direct true successor. Though in actuality its power was created as a government department of an Empire, when Pauline Christianity was chosen over all the other sects, and refined in the Nicene creed.

(The whole medieval program of scholasticism where one argues everything from authority is an outgrowth of this method.)

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It is not just the belief in belief that is a problem for imperial cult christianities, for belief in Scripture (belief in the word of god) itself is too, both of these must be outweighed by the tradition and authority of church and condemned as idolatry.

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, the Church decides what is a heresy. Usually this is whatever choices threatens obedience to the church. The Church decides these things and not you and your conscience. As a good Christian you must obey even if the Empire that gave form to all this is long gone and it’s language dead.

With a bit of luck you might even be saved.

The church's main mission is to maintain primacy. This means power. In orthodox churches this means the emporer. In Catholicism, rebels that they are, it means the pope. Besides the rites of magical bread/flesh ephiphany by the ordained male priests in the mass (a pagan weekly routine now upcycled) using transubstantiation powers. Importantly, it is the church as guardian of the tradition decides what those things mean, not you, 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 with thought police. Is this why only celibate men can be ordained? The transgressive magical power of males wearing frocks is diminshed by women doing that? (Apparently it's 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.)(I suspect Jesus never talked about this issue.)

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Fideism as a positive position, and not a heresy, is thus often more associated with Protestants who champion individual consciences, which is, I view, is more coherent with a soteriological practice. Practices which might explain why Christianity originally spread, in the first place, out of its grouping from a Jewish messiah Sect (with St Paul) and out among slaves, and womenfolk, before being co-opted by an empire, and 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. But belief then is to do no more than that.

So then yes, guilt is more important than belief, guilt is a good emotion to use to whip people into line, so yes to guilt, anything that can encourage akrasic disphoria, but mystic devotion for the masses, no-so-much. Such chiliastic events might mean things might get out of control.

If fideism was not a heresy, we may have had many more devotee-ist forms of Christianity through the ages, practises which in our timeline were restricted to members of wealthy family members consigned to religious orders, mostly inorder to control them accosing to the lifestyle they were accustomed to. For comparison, see Bhakti-ism in India, which often moved in anti-caste frameworks.

Under the influence of these more recent Fideist Protestant practices, wherein all logical difficulties can be over come by simply having faith in (maintaining a relationship with) the Christian tri-god, and not some jumped up government department like the Catholic Church, 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 the gap itself is believed as evidence, or 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…

I’ve leave that thought incomplete for you for now to worldbuild with.

It’s really up to you.

Revised from original post from a year ago in 2023 on substack. And a version on medium.