A Presbyterian church down the road from where I live—one hooked, as many churches are, to posting one-liners on its marquee—recently put up a quotation that irked me the more I had to drive by it: “Where knowledge ends, religion begins.”
The line is attributed to nineteenth-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, but it captures a spirit of fideism—literally, “faith-ism”—that runs broad and deep in the Christian tradition. According to this view, faith is sharply separated from reason, and any kind of “natural theology” that would philosophically explore the things of God is ruled out as deeply flawed, if not wildly foolish. The life of the mind still has its place; it’s just far below the spiritual life.
Fideism, like Pelagianism, is one of those terms of abuse that gets thrown around all too casually in Christian discourse. But what great and serious Christians, if any, have been true fideists?
The short list usually begins with Tertullian (“What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”) and stretches up to Wittgenstein (“Faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence”).
But it would be hard to find a more complete fideist—or a more formidable and fascinating one—than Søren Kierkegaard. The melancholy Dane built on Tertullian (the “quia absurdum”: “I believe it because it is absurd”) and was admired by Wittgenstein (“Faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion”). For Kierkegaard, faith doesn’t just begin where knowledge ends; it actively stands against reason. It repels the reasonable man—like the episode in Genesis in which Abraham, the father in faith of all Christians (Rom. 4:16), wields a knife over his son on Mount Moriah out of religious obedience. It’s an inward and subjective plunge into an absolute paradox that laughs in the face of rational proofs. Kierkegaard was a brilliant philosopher, but used his gifts to put reason firmly in its place vis-à-vis authentic religion.
I first discovered Kierkegaard, together with the other great existentialists, during my years of aimless wandering as spiritual-but-not-religious, and his Papers and Journals—together with Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos—was one of the key intellectual catalysts in my reversion to the Catholic Church. There’s a deep tension in this—one not lost on the Percy, who himself converted to Catholicism from agnosticism with Kierkegaard as his guide.
And the tension is this: that the Catholic view of faith and reason contrasts sharply with Kierkegaard’s. The Church embraces the great tradition of natural theology, especially in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. It formally condemned fideism throughout the nineteenth century and declared—in keeping with Romans 1:20—that God “can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 36; Dei Filius 2).
Some have argued that Kierkegaard, who died at just forty-two, would have eventually become Catholic had he only lived longer, but the fact remains that his view of faith is, for the Catholic, highly problematic. There’s some truth to the critique made by the atheist J.L. Mackie: “What Kierkegaard himself is advocating is a sort of intellectual Russian roulette.” A faith so dramatically separated from and opposed to reason—a faith purely of the heart—opens us to the dangers of religious irrationalism and fanaticism.
Even so, I have always loved Kierkegaard. I agree with Walker Percy, who once wrote regarding the question of faith as a form of knowledge, “I tend to agree with Aquinas there [who said that it is], even though I am more sympathetic with Kierkegaard [who said that it isn’t]. I am on his wavelength, I understand his phenomenology, his analysis of the existential predicament of modern man.”
And the more I read Kierkegaard, the more I appreciate what it is that he got so right—namely, the “grave strenuosity of faith.” To really trust in God—not just to accept a set of external facts about him, but to stake one’s life on a spiritual relationship with him—is an existential move that abstract speculation can never yield of itself. Seen from a religious perspective, it’s a grace—a gift that can only be begged for and received, not calculated or seized.
Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript masterfully takes to task the rationalist seduced by the “quantitative siren song” of the mind. Before such a man can believe, he needs everything laid out on the table, tidy and clear: he has to see all the contours and implications of faith, all the associated evidences and probabilities—then, and only then, can he have faith. Except, as Kierkegaard sees it, what this comic figure lacks now is precisely that—faith: “Now he is ready to believe it; and lo, now it has become precisely impossible to believe it.”
Without at all denigrating a rational defense of religion, one has to admit that there’s something dead right and critically important about Kierkegaard’s fideism. This becomes especially clear when facing the opposite error of an over-rationalization of faith—an error we see in a new wave of atheists prominent online. These philosophers of religion don’t mock the Christian faith as irrational and ridiculous as Dawkins and Hitchens did—a posture that makes it easy to lean into the rational side of faith. On the contrary, they treat it with great respect and seriousness. They weigh Christian thinkers like Aquinas and Swinburne against atheist thinkers like Mackie and Graham Oppy. They restlessly sift, analyze, and weigh the arguments of both sides.
But as respectful and intelligent as such exchanges can be, one always leaves with the impression of a “bad faith,” or a tragic constriction—or at least, a missing of the forest for the trees. Religion is dealt with in thoroughly intellectual (and often pseudo-intellectual) terms—and either these atheists don’t see that faith can never finally be had in this way, or else they do see it, but are more than happy to remain there, spinning from one probability to the next, sunk in, as Kierkegaard put it, “the erudite, the anxious, the timorous contradictory effort of approximation,” which is “protracted indefinitely”; and they delay the decisive risk, the transformative event, which can only begin in the passionate commitment of the existing individual under the sway of divine grace: the absolute relation to the absolute.
They go right where Kierkegaard went wrong, but go wrong where he went right. And which is the more dangerous error: that which makes philosophical theology ridiculous, or that which makes saving faith impossible?
I recently challenged one such thinker on precisely this point. Summoning my inner Kierkegaard, I noted that faith cannot be given by the mind, and that faith, not reason, is what saves us. There’s at least an element of truth, after all, in the Presbyterians’ marquee, even as we can marshal lots of good proofs of God’s existence and good reasons for trusting him. I was met with a telling response: that this view lends credence to the critique that Christianity is more guided by revelation and faith-based concerns than rational and publicly accessible ones.
Just so—and any Christian worthy of the name should be eager to concede it. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine a line of thought more ripe for everything Kierkegaard—however much he missed the boat on religious knowledge—still has to teach us about the heart of faith.
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We read that “[the Church] formally condemned fideism throughout the nineteenth century and declared—in keeping with Romans 1:20—that God ‘can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason’” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 36; Dei Filius 2).
By the “natural light of reason” we can know THAT God is, but not WHAT or WHO He is. He has to tell us….Two thoughts….
FIRST, fideism spreads far beyond the contours of Christianity and is, shall we say, also at the “heart” of fideistic Islam.
A belief system claiming 1.5 billion often militant adherents in the 21st Century. The distinction being “belief” rather than the Christian understanding of “faith.” Our faith is not in an idea, but in the “person” of the incarnate Jesus Christ—the self-disclosure (!) of the Triune God—and is almost totally beyond human reason and yet coherently so. Islam studied and distorted Aristotle, but otherwise misses much of the intellectual history in the West. And, instead, points to an inscrutable, fatalistic and even arbitrary Allah. A remote and eclectic natural religion “dictated” (!) beyond the edges of the Byzantine Empire, and borrowing shards of the Pentateuch and the New Testament.
SECOND, so, how are the witnesses to Christ to dialogue more symmetrically with the followers of fideistic Islam? And, how really “to stake one’s life on a spiritual relationship with God”?
Balthasar surveys the widely recognized evidence of creation, and then the interreligious landscape:
“The responses of the Old Testament and a fortiori of Islam (which remains essentially in the enclosure of the religion of Israel) are incapable of giving a satisfactory answer to the question of why Yahweh, why Allah, created [!] a world of which he did not have need in order to be God. Only the FACT is affirmed in the two religions, not the WHY. The Christian response is contained in these two fundamental dogmas: that of the Trinity and that of the Incarnation” (“My Work in Retrospect,” posthumous 1993).
Not only that God IS, but then that “God is love” (1 John 4:8) through and through. The closest fideistic Islam gets to the self-donating Incarnation is the still remote “merciful.” The searching refrain recited throughout the Qur’an, at the head of all 114 surahs (chapters) except one.
When is all said and done it all comes to a leap of the will, as simple as a baby reaching out it’s arms!
Kierkegaard and existentialism generally seem to posit a false division between Faith and Reason. There does not seem to be anything praiseworthy in that. This false dichotomy arises out of the flawed foundation of Descartes’ effort to base all “knowledge” on the “clear and distinct ideas” of mathematics and logic. If that’s what “knowledge” is, then how can we ever “know” what a hylomorphic human being is, let alone the separated substances (angels) or pure being itself. The false Cartesian turn is the faulty foundation for modernism and existentialism. These are extraordinarily self-limiting modes of thought, flattening our understanding of what knowable reality is by confining it to mathematics and logic, and ultimately degenerating into the false modern religion of scientism. Catholic philosophy, on the other hand, is based on the metaphysics of Aristotle and Aquinas. It does not seek to reduce metaphysics to epistemology, or what can be known through experimentation and mathematics (as magnificent as these tools are). Aristotle’s conclusion in the Metaphysics that all motion must derive from a first mover to avoid the absurdity of infinite regress is not a religious argument. It is the deductive insight of a brilliant pagan philosopher, and it remains today one of the highest accomplishments of purely human cogitation. Had Kierkegaard been an Aristotelean, not a Cartesian, he would have had a more productive starting point for his thinking, which is to say, he would not have assumed that there is an impermeable barrier between material and non-material realities.
Yes! Very lucidly explained. Descartes messed up by assuming that he could evaluate reality from the outside. Giussani gives us this about such amputated solitude:
“. . . yes, religion is in fact that which man does in his solitude; but it is also that in which the human person discovers his essential companionship. Such companionship is, then, more original to us than our solitude [!]…Therefore, BEFORE SOLITUDE [as in the Garden…] there is companionship, a companionship that embraces my solitude. Because of this, solitude is no longer true solitude, but a cry calling back that hidden companionship [caps added],” (Luigi Giussani, “The Religious Sense.” Ignatius Press, 1990, p. 75.)
The Russian novelist Dostoevski, in his “Crime and Punishment,” also speaks of a “subterranean solitude” that is deeper than sin, and of a still deeper fellowship.
According to WIKIPEDIA at this time, in its concluding note on him, “Kierkegaard predicted his posthumous fame, and foresaw that his work would become the subject of intense study and research.” Why would he have converted but he was refusing Holy Communion when he was dying? Wittgenstein said he was a saint and even though he is hailed as THE “father of existentialism”, some existentialists deny it. Had he lived on he would have been just as busy with the same cause or causes, I think, “spinning ….. indefinitely” through what arguably could be “approximation” or arguably could not be “approximation”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard#cite_ref-330
I’m uneasy with the tension proposed between faith and reason, Pope St. John Paul II’s encyclical of same as well as Vatican I’s “Dei Filius”. Perhaps one ought to assume the position of Aquinas e.g., who built upon Aristotelian metaphysics with the presupposition of the Faith.
A suggested remnant of the influence of German Idealism and the Tubingen school upon key Vatican II Fathers can be documented…https://www.scribd.com/document/660922973/002114008705300102 …as well as it’s perhaps unintentional effects…https://www.catholicworldreport.com/?s=german+idealism+kasper…
The link between “early” Friedrich Schelling’s Idealism and Kierkegaard can also be documented… https://www.google.com/search?q=early+schelling+and+kierkegaard&oq=early+schelling+and+kierkegaard&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigATIHCAIQIRigATIHCAMQIRigATIHCAQQIRigAdIBCTExOTY1ajBqNKgCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8…
It is not then difficult to trace Pope Francis’ “Time is greater than space” concept of theological anthropology. Static, fixed doctrine (and liturgy!) cannot meet man for whom reality is always changing, always in flux.
As an antidote and a pushback against a sliver of the Communio crowd, some of who champion the “suppression” or “overcoming” of Neo-Thomism at Vatican II, one can enlist that presumed “prophet of doom”, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange as well as Fr. Benedict Ashley, O.P., Fr. Romanus Cessario, O.P., and the late Ralph McInerny, all gathered together here…https://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/05/400-neo-neo-thomism
Nova et Vetera (summer,2022) published a symposium on Dei Filius. Cajetan Cuddy: The “perpetual consensus of the Church has been that “there exists a twofold order of cognition” encompassing distinct principles and objects. “Natural reason and divine faith are really distinct principles by which human knowledge proceeds (comes to be).”
“Faith is a principle of human knowledge…distinct from and greatly superior to the knowledge of human reason.” Faith (as theological virtue) resides in the human intellect and is the supernaturally perfective disposition in the cognitive power of the soul. The act of faith is supernatural belief–“to think with assent” to the divine truth that is God because God reveals it. Reason is a natural principle of knowledge while faith is a divine principle of knowledge. (pp. 878-9)
Every principle of action involves an object. We see objects of sight. It is impossible to see without seeing something (an object of sight). It is impossible to know without knowing something (an object of knowledge). Objects of faith lie beyond the scope of natural knowledge. Natural reason knows many things, but divine mysteries of God are hidden in God and exceed the power of natural reason. (pp. 880-2).
Faith illumines and elevates reason. Reason illumined by faith attains, with God’s help, some understanding of God’s mysteries. (p.883)
Finally, objects of creation speak to us of both reason and faith. How did creation come to be? What is our relationship to objects of creation and to Him Who made them to be?
“What Kierkegaard himself is advocating is a sort of intellectual Russian roulette.”
Would you say the same thing of Pascal?
There’s an anomaly in this. Of sorts, in that faith does not begin with reason, rather by a dimension of epistemology called intuition, though intuition understood as an in depth apprehension of truth. As such, this intuition motivated more by passion, realized by the intellect’s inherent capacity becomes the rule for reason.
We often dilute the distinction between belief and faith. Belief that there is a God is the end of reason, whereas faith is a supernatural gift of the Holy Spirit. Yes, Becklo is correct, unlike Tertullian there indeed is a nexus between Athens and Jerusalem. Ironically it’s evidenced in the Apostolic faith brought by the Apostle to Athens that didn’t succeed at the Areopagus. So Paul would revert back to what inspires the gift of faith, the sensual dimension of love. From now on he says I will preach Christ and him crucified. Although we find in the great Apostle’s letters a most profound theology the result of his superb reasoning. Greece would take the lead, perhaps surpassed by the Macedonian element of Alexandria in Athanasius and Cyril.
Now “Kierkegaard takes to task the rationalist seduced by the quantitative siren song of the mind”. In effect Kierkegaard was right. Becklo in the previous paragraph acknowledges this, that faith, as articulated by the Danish philosopher and man of faith, is a gift . Consequently we may say that right reason may reach the ethereal heights of belief in the divinity, whereas faith is realized in our love of Christ.
1. I have seen the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (died 1936) described as a “Catholic existentialist.”
2. Unamuno was influenced by Kierkegaard.
3. Unamuno wrote philosophical books such as “The Tragic Sense of Life” and “The Agony of Christianity.”
4. Unamuno wrote that we were all in an inescapable conflict between our “heart” that desires eternal life and that believes that God can bestow on us an eternal life in paradise, and our “head” that tells us that there is no eternal life for humans. (Catholic authorities condemned this view in Unamuno’s lifetime. Nevertheless, the Church gave him a fully honorable Catholic funeral.)
4. Unamuno viewed the character of Don Quixote as a tragic but heroic figure who showed the right view of life.
5. Unamuno at first supported the Franco-led Nationalist rebellion against the elected government in Spain in 1936, but soon he ended up opposing it because of its reversion to pagan-like barbarism, savagery, viciousness, and brutal violence.
6. He was in attendance at a Nationalist rally at the university he led when the Nationalists broke into a chant, repeating “Long live death!” He denounced that slogan and gave a speech against the Nationalists, right to their faces (including Franco’s wife). The Nationalists put him under house arrest, and he died shortly thereafter. Some people think the Franco people murdered him.
7. I probably shouldn’t like Unamuno at all. But I do find some encouragement in his writings. Perhaps I like him for the same reason that the author of this article likes the writings of Kierkegaard. Unamuno’s writings spur me on to practice the virtues of fortitude, faith (even if it is somewhat in the form of fideism), and love of neighbor. Unamuno recommends a philosophy of ethics and service to others and God that is very similar to the “Do It Anyway” poem that is often attributed to Mother Teresa.
If I truly had faith I would have married Regina. K was enamored by Abraham because ultimately K did not have that faith. We are broken people and constantly need the sacraments to renew our covenant oath promises. It is the obedience of THE faith in the Dogma of the Catholic Church not some nebulous idea of faith. Ultimately K did not have the faith to enter into the covenant oath promise of marriage with Regina. He did not take his leap of faith like some of us did. It is by the grace of God that this covenant between 2 broken people continues.
Faith disposes us to a receptivity that is open to and informed by realities unknowable by reason alone – the Blessed Trinity, for instance.
Accordingly, while related to reason, faith is a higher instrument than reason in virtue of its content which transcends the powers of human reason – and in this respect faith is a form of knowledge: not a “leap into the dark”, but rather a leap into the light revealed in Christ.
My previous response, lengthy, addressed common misperceptions surrounding Tertullian. That response encountered a “Server Host” problem and disappeared.
I’ll sum briefly. Tertullian has been given a bad rap here, by the Dane, by Voltaire (whose misquote of ‘Credo quia absurdum’) and by others who have perpetuated error into our common knowledge base. One Prof. Peter Harrison, Australian Laureate Fellow and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland, details the problem with the ‘absurd’ statement in a 2017 issue of Church History, Vol. 86:2, Cambridge Univ. Press. “I Believe Because it is Absurd”: The Enlightenment Invention of Tertullian. The abstract is online.
Tertullian’s infamous question on the paradox of Athens and Jerusalem is found in Chapter VII of his treatise on heretics. Tertullian did not argue against REASON PER SE. He DID argue against men accepting wholesale systems of OLD PAGAN philosophies such as Platonism, Eicurianism, and Stoicism which developed prior to the Revelation of Christ and which were inferior to, because not accounting for or having knowledge of faith in Him.
In Tertullian’s time, the Gnostic heresies were in full bloom. One particularly egregious characteristic of those heresies was their incorporation of some elements of Christian revelation into a whole lot of nonsense about gods made of fire, air, wood or gods arising from another god in the plethora of gods in the pleuroma.
Tertullian did not oppose reason per se. He quotes Paul to the Colossians at 2:8 – “See that no one beguile you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, and contrary to the wisdom of Christ.”
What Kierkegaard is asserting as being of the heart is misleading. It is of a bad heart. From there he projects a type of validity in division of faith and reason, when actually 1. the two are not meant to be separated thus and 2. being able to identify the distancing does not itself produce a good.
I would compare Kierkegaard with Oscar Wilde not Pascal. Where Kierkegaard is master of the ego, Wilde is servant of the id. Existentialists who refuse to have Kierkegaard as “the father of existentialism”, are masters of super-ego.
You might say it is not right to impose the Freudian language back in time like that. I believe that the id, ego and super-ego are not originally Freud’s and his adaptations of them are the expressions of his own follies.
Among the above one can discern common features such as no prayer, varieties of bad disposition and dishonouring of rationality, humanity and religion.
Pascal is in another category. He was a conflicted Catholic and his apology for Jansenist was a protection for them. This reflects back on the clerics that surrounded him: crypto-Jansenists. With Pascal one sees wrong allegiance not merely divided (as opposed to absence of prayer), a stranded disposition and a dishonouring of faith.
Jansenism has helped bedevil France and propel Jacobinism and given cover for Gallicanism and its myriad mutations.
The Jesuits are able to combine faith and reason quite easily, Evangelical Biblical Fundamentalists not so much, the “Young Earth” people are especially egregious,
I don’t understand the Roman Catholic concept of faith. The priest will testify to the participants in the sacrament of Communion that the body of Christ has been given for them and the blood of Christ has been shed for them, for the remission of their sins (all sins, not just venial sins). And yet, their concept of faith informs them that those words are no longer valid the following Sunday, if they are not in attendance at that mass. That is, they will need to confess the sin of their absence to a priest, be absolved by the priest, and then perform his assigned penance before partaking of Communion again – as if the sacrifice of our Lord is not the basis for all forgiveness. Roman Catholic faith seems very ephemeral. And then pleading with Mary to intercede for them at the point of death – 53 times – in praying through a Rosary, testifies even more to the lack of faith in God’s word testified to them in every mass. If Christ’s body has been given for us, what exactly do you want Mary to intercede for? Has she not already interceded by bringing her Son into the world? The Roman Catholic concept of faith offers no assurance of salvation – therefore, all this astute struggling with the relationship between faith and reason. He who continues in Christ’s Word will know the truth and the truth will set him free (Jn. 8:32). These words are true – Christ’s body has been given for you, for the remission of sins. You are free. The intercession has been made. Here is the faith that saves. Here is the hinge pin of the door of your justification through faith. Believe what Christ has commanded your priest to testify to you in remembrance of Him.