Medieval Civilization: Millennia in Microcosm Week 175

Kenneth Smith argues that Christian fideism represents a collapse of philosophical culture into irrational dogmatism, encouraging a dreamlike subjectivism that replaces disciplined understanding with emotional reassurance, blind faith, and moral complacency. He contends that this refusal to critically know human nature and reality—mistaking familiarity for truth—produced a culture of passivity and conformity that undermines genuine spiritual life, turning faith into mechanical obedience and obscuring the real sources of human evil within ourselves.

E. Faith Understood as a Vice

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