Fideism, reason and the gap that is always there

Arnold Lunn. The Revolt against Reason. Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1951.

IN the last fortnight or so, I posted To build a better world, we should destroy the Catholic Church and Fideism the Heresy & Obedience, and today while cataloguing away I discovered the following from Arnold Lunn’s The Revolt against Reason. So on-topic I thought!

(American edition available sorta at internetarchive.org):

Arnold Lunn. The Revolt against Reason. Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1951, page x.

I’m reading that pronounial “who affirm” as referring to the “fideists” not “catholic theologians”. Though I guess such theologians would agree the act of faith is important— where it is in obedience to the church’s shamanic authority over the divine revelation. (Because St Peter…)

No mention here by Lunn of heresy, as that would mean using the terms as a broader heresy with reference to disobedience to the Catholic Church.

Fideism here is not a choice among many then, but a direct refusal of reason.

In Lunn’s framework reason/faith structurally define each other, and have done so ever since they were sent off so-entangled across the universe by St Augustine of Hippo, if not earlier. The direct refusal here disobeys Lunn’s reasonable structure, rather than the church. You should obey because it makes the world (safe).

Dropping one side of reason/faith is therefore unhinged. Lunn describes dropping the faith-defined reason as follows:

Arnold Lunn. The Revolt against Reason. Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1951, page xi.

(A Pyrrhonist might agree with some of this, but not in order to throw something else into the gap. (Yet again, oh the eternal recurrence of the cycle of reincarnation.) A Pyrrhonist is likely to remain suspended above it.)

For Lunn, the dropping either of faith or reason means you have nothing good to throw into the gap, because of the original structural definition they are only good in relation to each other. Fideists deconstruct that “good thing”, the horror.

It’s structural because it structures the framework Lunn uses to worldbuild/live/dream by. To attack someone’s framework, is to attack their world, to attack their world is to attack them!

The sky is falling.

But the gap is always there. And many of us feel it must be filled— otherwise the centre cannot hold, and the universe would collapse.

The gap, the gap, the gap.

The gap… —or bust.

Of course a Fideist throws belief-in-belief or faith-in-faith into the gap. This appears more “coherent” to me than Lunn’s entangled pair (faith-reason), or is it reason-faith? Do they differ? Tell me in the comments.

Which one is St Augustine of Hippo using to create the City of God?

And remember, mind the gap.