1. Nielsen, Kai ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’, Philosophy, 42 (1967), 191–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar; reprinted in Kai Nielsen and D. Z. Phillips Wittgensteinian Fideism? (London: St Martin's Press, 2005) 21–38).

2. See McGovern, Ken and Szabados, Bela ‘Was Wittgenstein a fideist?’, Sophia, 41 (2002), 41–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. A few books have been written specifically exploring fideism.: C. Stephen Evans Faith Beyond Reason: A Kierkegaardian Account (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998); Terence Penelhum God and Scepticism: A Study in Scepticism and Fideism (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983); Richard Popkin The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2003) are the only book-length treatments I am aware of. Delbert James Hansen Fideism and Hume's Philosophy (New York NY: Peter Lang, 1993), and Sheila Delaney Chaucer's House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1972) each deal with fideism in connection with the primary figure of study. However, none of these books mentions the historical origin and development of the term. Paul Helm Belief Policies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) deals with fideism in its final chapter but addresses it in connection with the larger topic in epistemology, the idea of a ‘belief policy’.

4. This method is similar to that used by Richard Amesbury in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on ‘fideism’. There, he offers a brief history not of fideism but of ‘the term's (contested) usage within the philosophical literature’. See Richard Amesbury ‘Fideism’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2007 edn), URL=<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fideism/>.

5. While several scholars suggest possible sub-classes of fideism, few of these distinctions have caught on in the literature. I do not dispute that this approach could potentially be useful for certain philosophical or theological purposes. In an unpublished paper, ‘Understanding fideism as belief-policy: some remarks on reality, rationality and theology’, Olli-Pekka Vainio offers a taxonomy of varieties of fideism in Christian theology and philosophy in order to better understand post-foundational theology. While Vainio's strategy for clarifying the meaning of ‘fideism’ is different than that taken in this article, he is careful about avoiding pejorative or otherwise misleading classifications of theologians as fideists.

6. See Amesbury ‘Fideism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

7. Philip Quinn ‘Fideism’, in Ted Honderich (ed.) Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

8. William Hasker ‘Evidentialism’, in Robert Audi (ed.) Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

9. Richard Popkin ‘Fideism’, in Paul Edwards (ed.) Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York NY: MacMillan, 1967).

10. Nicholas Wolterstorff ‘Faith’, in Edward Craig (ed.) Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998).

11. Terence Penelhum ‘Fideism’, in Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro (eds) Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997).

12. Amesbury ‘Fideism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

13. Philosophical discourse does not always register this pejorative connotation of fideism. For example, Ralph Barton Perry's work on William James in the early twentieth century evinces nothing negative in representing James's thought as being fideistic. Furthermore, Robert C. Fuller's centennial essay on James's ‘The will to believe’ mentions James's thought in connection with fideism without any suggestion that the category might have a negative connotation. See Fuller, Robert C. ‘“The will to believe”: a centennial reflection’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 64 (1996), 633–650CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. S. A. Matczak ‘Fideism’, New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York NY: McGraw Hill, 1967). The correct date for Ménégoz's book is 1879.

15. ‘Fideism’, in J. D. Douglas (ed.) The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church (Grand Rapids MI: Zondervan Publishing Co., 1978).

16. Alan Richardson and John MacQuarrie ‘Fideism’, in Alan Richardson and John Bowden (eds) The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology (Philadelphia PA: Westminster Press, 1983).

17. R. K. Johnson ‘Fideism’, in Walter A. Elwell (ed.) Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (Grand Rapids MI: Baker Book House, 1984).

18. Karl-Heinz Neufeld ‘Fideism’, in Jean-Yves Lacoste (ed.) Encyclopedia of Christian Theology (New York NY: Routledge, 2005).

19. See John Paul II Fides et Ratio (1998), §52.

20. Ibid., §53.

21. Ibid., §55.

22. Ibid.

23. See Tertullian Apologeticus and De Spectaculis, T. R. Glover and G. H. Rendall (trs) (New York NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1931), 201f.

24. See Geoffrey D. Dunn Tertullian (New York NY: Routledge, 2004), 31.

25. Eric Osborn Tertullian, First Theologian of the West (New York NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 58.

26. Popkin The History of Scepticism, 3.

27. However, note that this does not apply to Penelhum's thought on fideism in general. Like many other philosophers, Penelhum points to figures as early as Tertullian as expressing a fideistic attitude on the relationship between faith and reason (see his article ‘Fideism’ in the Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Religion).

28. Penelhum God and Scepticism, ix.

29. Ibid., 15.

30. Ibid., 15–16.

31. The final section of the book addresses what Penelhum considers to be the fideism of Alvin Plantinga and D. Z. Phillips. Not surprisingly, given the confusion surrounding the meaning of ‘fideism’, both Plantinga and Phillips have rejected the term to classify their own thought. C.f. Alvin Plantinga ‘Reason and belief in God’, in Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (eds) Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 16–93; D. Z. Phillips Belief, Change and Forms of Life (Atlantic Highlands NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986); idem Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Phillips and Nielsen Wittgensteinian Fideism?

32. Richard H. Popkin The History of Scepticism: From Erasmus to Descartes (Assen, 1960), xv.

33. Eugène Ménégoz Reflexions sur l'évangile de salut (Paris: Librairie Fischerbacher, 1879); reproduced in Publications diverse sur la fidéisme et son application a l'enseignement chrétien traditionnel, I (Paris: Librairie Fischerbacher, 1900–1921), 36.

34. Technology allowing for the digitization of texts has enabled term-specific searching, and I have thus found uses of ‘fidéisme’ in Catholic theological sources before the years of 1879–1880.

35. L'Abbé Robitaille ‘Qu'est-ce que le traditionalisme?’, L'Ami de la Religion, 16 September 1854 (Paris), 661–667.

36. Léon Ollé-Laprune De La Certitude Morale (Paris: Belin, 1880), 226–227.

37. See Ménégoz ‘Le pragmatisme’, Publications divers sur le fidéisme, II, 494–499.

38. American theologian Stevens, George B. noted the awkward name for the school of theology in his ‘Auguste Sabatier and the Paris school of theology’, Hibbert Journal, 1 (1903), 553–568Google Scholar. Ménégoz and Sabatier accepted the name but did not invent it themselves, and tended to stay away from it in their publications. However, it is noteworthy that James Hastings (ed.) Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1908–1927), having no entry for ‘fideism’, includes one written by Ménégoz for ‘symbolo-fideism’.

39. Eugène Ménégoz Religion and Theology: I. The Triple Theological Distinction … II. Pardon and Righteousness (London: Williams and Norgate, 1908), 7.

40. Ibid., 35–37.

41. Ibid., 7f.

42. Ibid., 8.

43. Auguste Sabatier Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion Based on Psychology and History (New York NY: J. Pott and Co., 1902), xii.

44. Ibid., xiv–xv.

45. Ibid., 12f.

46. Sabatier writes, ‘There are hours when the heresy which suffers, and which seeks and prays, is much nearer the source of life than the intellectual obstinacy of an orthodoxy incapable, as it would seem, of comprehending the dogmas that it keeps embalmed’; Ibid., 26f.

47. Ibid., 30.

48. Ibid., 84.

49. Ménégoz Religion and Theology, 8f.

50. See Darrin McMahon Enemies of Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2001).

51. Gerald A. McCool Catholic Theology in the Nineteenth Century: The Quest for a Unitary Method (New York NY: Seabury Press, 1977), 18.

52. Pope Pius X's encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) condemns primarily the modernist theology of Alfred Loisy; however, fideism is also criticized, understood in a way reminiscent of the symbolo-fideism of Sabatier and Ménégoz. See §7.

53. Walter M. Horton The Philosophy of the Abbé Bautain (New York NY: New York University Press, 1926), 289–290.

54. Norman P. Tanner (ed.) Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 804f.

55. See Leo XIII Aeterni Patris (1879), §18.

56. Ibid.

57. Horton, Walter M. ‘The theology of Eugène Ménégoz’, Journal of Religion, 6 (1926), 174–194CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and idem The Philosophy of the Abbé Bautain. Horton writes in a footnote to The Philosophy of the Abbé Bautain: ‘The “fideism” of Bautain and other Catholic thinkers should be carefully distinguished from the “fideism” of Eugène Ménégoz, the friend and colleague of August Sabatier, which consisted in the doctrine that man is saved “by faith, independently of beliefs”.’ See, in Publications diverses sur le fidéisme, ‘The two fideisms have nothing in common but their anti-intellectualism’, 168.

58. An anonymous reviewer suggests that ‘impropriety’ or ‘inutility’ of natural theology is a common theme running through the thought of all those characterized as fideists (both in this article and elsewhere in philosophical discourse). Perhaps this is so, but this characterization would need qualification in order to apply accurately to individual cases. It seems to me that the qualifications and subtle distinctions that would follow on such an initial characterization would ultimately be little different from the suggestions I offer here on seeking perspicuity about traditions of usage of ‘fideism’ as well as the social and historical context of thinkers under study.

59. I do not mean to imply that these are the only uses of the term, but on the basis of this preliminary study, these seem to be the primary traditions of use. Sometimes philosophers distinguish between moderate and extreme variants of fideism. I have not included these modifications because as yet such distinctions have not caught on widely in the literature and rely in some unspecified sense on one or more of these traditions listed. Future work identifying such connections would be helpful.

60. I do not categorize the Catholic modernists as fideists. They did not use the term to describe their own theology, and in the context of Catholic theological discourse, fideism is a charge to be avoided rather than a neutral term of classification. In addition, Ménégoz was at pains to distinguish his theology from modernism. Nevertheless, similarities between the thought of turn-of-the-century French Catholic modernists and the Protestants Ménégoz and Sabatier merit further study and could conceivably complicate the picture I am drawing in this essay. In particular, there is need for further research on what influence Ménégoz and Sabatier may or may not have had on Alfred Loisy, leader of the modernist movement. I am thankful to Professor Han Adriaanse for helpful discussion on this matter.

61. I am indebted to many individuals for helpful comments on various segments of this article. I would like to thank in particular Professors Han Adriaanse, Ingolf Dalferth, Juliet Floyd, and Alan Olson for constructive criticism of earlier attempts to gain perspective on the nature of fideism. Helpful suggestions were also offered by an anonymous reviewer, and I believe the paper is stronger for them. All errors and infelicities are mine.