FIDEISM. - A theory that exaggerates the importance and the role of faith, diminishing or even rendering almost null the rights of reason, to the point of denying to the human intellect the very capacity to attain any truth, even of the natural order.
Fideism is a philosophical and theological system depending on whether its application is extended to every kind of knowledge or is limited to the religious sphere. If by faith is meant the purely human act by which one believes a truth by virtue of the authority of one's parents and of the past generations that transmitted it, fideism often receives, or more precisely receives, the name of traditionalism (v.), whereas if one means the supernatural act of faith necessary for justification, one has fideism in the strict and rigorous sense of the term. Alongside absolute fideism, which proclaims the total and necessary inoperativeness of reason in the demonstrative process of the existence of God, of the other premises of natural religion and of the divinity of Christianity, there is also moderate fideism or semi-fideism, which admits the possibility and the usefulness of certain rational operations, whose value, however, does not exceed the degree of simple probability.
Fideism was arrived at by different paths. If fideism as a tendency to give too little to reason and too much to faith or belief had its origin in that distrust of the value of reason which, from the sophists of Greece to the modern critics, has never entirely disappeared from the history of human thought, as a system it appeared within Catholicism in the first half of the 19th century, as a reaction to the excesses of rationalism, and counts among its principal promoters and supporters A. de Bonald (d. 1840), F. de Lamennais (d. 1854), G. Ventura (d. 1861), L. Bautain (d. 1867), A. Bonnetty (d. 1875), F. Brunetière (d. 1906). They were moved by noble and sincere intentions, that is, by the lively desire to save the Catholic faith from all attacks and to defend it from all the objections of unbelievers and rationalists. But in reality, by taking away from faith the proof of reason and by affirming that it is faith that leads to faith, they contributed, without wishing to, to perpetuating the ancient calumny which, already launched by the pagan philosopher Celsus, is heard continually repeated down to the present day even on the lips of the most serious adversaries and those most benevolent toward Catholics. Therefore the Church intervened at once with great timeliness, affirming on various occasions the rights of reason, especially as regards the foundations of faith.
For the Church's teaching on the rational credibility of the Catholic faith, v. FEDE.
Bibliography6 works
Giuseppe Monti-Emanuele Chietini