Pisteology (pronounced pi-stol-uh-jee)
(1) In theology, the branch dealing with the place and
authority of faith.
(2) In philosophy, a theory or science of faith.
Circa 1870s: From the German Pisteologie, the construct being the Ancient Greek πίστις (píst(is))
(faith) + -eo- (faith) (akin to peíthein
to persuade) + -logie. The English
form is thus understood as píst(is) +-e- + -ology. The
Ancient Greek noun πίστις (pístis) (faith)
was from the Primitive Indo-European bheydhtis,
the construct being πείθω (peíthō)
(I persuade) + -τις
(-tis); πεῖσῐς (peîsis) was the later formation. Although in English constructions it’s used
as “faith” (in the theological sense), in the original Greek it could impart
(1) trust in others, (2) a belief in a higher power, (3) the state of being
persuaded of something: belief, confidence, assurance, (4) trust in a
commercial sense (credit worthiness), (5) faithfulness, honesty,
trustworthiness, fidelity, (6) that which gives assurance: treaty, oath,
guarantee, (7) means of persuasion: argument, proof and (8) that which is
entrusted. The suffix -ology was formed
from -o- (as an interconsonantal vowel) +
-logy. The origin in English of the
-logy suffix lies with loanwords from the Ancient Greek, usually via Latin and
French, where the suffix (-λογία) is an integral part of the word loaned (eg
astrology from astrologia) since the
sixteenth century. French picked up -logie from the Latin -logia, from the Ancient Greek -λογία (-logía).
Within Greek, the suffix is an -ία (-ía)
abstract from λόγος (lógos) (account,
explanation, narrative), and that a verbal noun from λέγω (légō) (I say, speak, converse, tell a story). In English the suffix became extraordinarily
productive, used notably to form names of sciences or disciplines of study,
analogous to the names traditionally borrowed from the Latin (eg astrology from
astrologia; geology from geologia) and by the late eighteenth
century, the practice (despite the disapproval of the pedants) extended to
terms with no connection to Greek or Latin such as those building on French or
German bases (eg insectology (1766) after the French insectologie; terminology (1801) after the German Terminologie). Within a few decades of the intrusion of
modern languages, combinations emerged using English terms (eg undergroundology
(1820); hatology (1837)). In this
evolution, the development may be though similar to the latter-day
proliferation of “-isms” (fascism; feminism et al). The alternative spellings
are pistology & pistiology. Pisteology is a
noun and pisteological is an adjective; the noun plural is pisteologies.
The
early use of pisteology was in the context of theology and it appears in an 1880
essay on the matter of faith by the Congregational
minister Alfred Cave (1847–1900). The
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) refers to the word as exclusively theological
but in later editions noted it was also used to mean “a theory
or science of faith”, reflecting its adoption in academic philosophy although
the embrace must have been tentative because pisteology was (and remains) “rare”,
listed as such by those lexicographers who give it a mention though what is
clear is that it seems never to have been cross-cultural, remaining implicitly a
thing of Christendom. In a sense, it’s
surprising it hasn’t appeared more, especially in the troubled twentieth
century when matters of “faith and doubt”
were questioned and explored in a flurry of published works. Perhaps it was a division of academic
responsibility, the devoted studying belief and the scholars the institution,
the pragmatic settling for the Vatican’s (unofficial) fudge: “You don’t have to
believe it but you must accept it.”
While clearly the universities got involved and the
intersection between pisteology epistemology (the study of knowledge and
belief) does seem obvious to the point when the former might be thought a fork of
the latter, its roots and concerns remained theological and Christian,
exploring how faith functions in religious traditions, doctrines, and human
understanding of the divine and many famous thinkers have written works which
may be thought pisteological
landmarks. Saint Augustine of
Hippo (354–430) wrote so widely it’s probably possible to find something which
tracks the path of some direction in Christianity but underling it all was his
famous admission: “I believe in order to understand”, more than a
subtle hint that faith is a prerequisite for true comprehension of divine truth. Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) lived
800-odd year later and was better acquainted with the philosophers of the
Classical age. Aquinas is sometimes said
to have “integrated” Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology and while
this is misleading, he understood the spirit of reasoning from Antiquity was
compelling and in a way that’s influential still, he argued faith and reason
complement each other, defined faith as a virtue by which the intellect assents
to divine truth under the influence of the will. A central figure in Reformed theology, John Calvin (1509-1564) explored faith extensively in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. He
described faith as a firm and certain knowledge of God's benevolence toward us,
founded on the promise of the gospel and revealed by the Holy Spirit. Martin Luther (1483–1546) probably thought this
not so much a fudge as a needless layer, arguing that it was faith alone
(rather than a virtuous life of good works) by which one would on judgement day
be judged. Faith then was the cornerstone
of salvation in his doctrine of sola fide (faith alone), a rigor which would
have pleased John Calvin (1509–1564). The
philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was not a theologian but his writings
had an influence on theological thought and in a nod to Aquinas highlighted the
paradox of faith and what he called “leap of faith” as essential to authentic
religious life and although he never explicitly discussed the “You don’t have
to believe it but you must accept it” school of thought, it does seem implicit
in his paradox.
Friedrich Schleiermacher
(1768–1834) is often styled “the father
of modern liberal theology” and to him faith was an experiential
relationship with the divine, rooted in a “feeling
of absolute dependence.” More
conservative theologians didn’t much object to that notion but they probably
thought of him something in the vein William Shakespeare (1564–1616) in Julius Caesar (1599) had Caesar say of Cassius:
“He thinks too
much: such men are dangerous.”
John Henry Newman (1801–1890) was one of those conservatives (albeit
something of a convert to the cause who had a strange path to Rome) and he
wrote much about the development of doctrine and the role of faith in
understanding divine truth but it was the Swiss Protestant theologian Karl
Barth (1882-1968) whose Kirchliche Dogmatik (Church Dogmatics (in English
translation a fourteen-volume work of some six-million words and published
between 1932 and 1967) that appeared the modern world’s most ambitious attempt
to recover the proclamation of the word of God as the place where God's message
of salvation meets sinful man: faith as an act of trust and obedience to God's
self-revelation. Barth’s contribution to
pisteology was a rejection of natural theology, emphasizing faith as a response
to God's revelation in Jesus Christ; it wasn’t exactly Martin Luther without
the anti-Semitism but the little monk’s ghost does loom over those fourteen
volumes. Pius XII (1879-1958; pope
1939-1958), a fair judge of such things, thought Barth the most important
theologian since Aquinas.
Barth
though was a formalist, writing for other theologians who breathed rarefied intellectual
air and he didn’t make pisteology easy or accessible and although Albert Speer
(1905–1981; Nazi court architect 1934-1942; Nazi minister of armaments and war
production 1942-1945) claimed to have read all fourteen volumes while serving the
twenty year sentence (he was lucky to receive) for war crimes and crimes
against humanity, (he had more time than most to devote to the task), he did
acknowledge the conceptual and textual difficulties. Barth seems not to have done much for Speer’s
faith in God but, being Speer, he took from the six million works what suited
him and decided he was atoning for his sins: “There is much that I still cannot
comprehend, chiefly because of the terminology and the subject. But I have had a curious experience. The uncomprehended passages exert a
tranquilizing effect. With Barth's help
I feel in balance and actually, in spite of all that's oppressive, as if
liberated.” Speer continued: “I owe to Barth
the insight that man’s responsibility is not relieved just because evil is part
of his nature. Man is by nature evil and nevertheless responsible. It seems to me there is a kind of complement
to that idea in Plato’s statement that for a man who has committed a wrong
‘there is only one salvation: punishment.’
Plato continues: ‘Therefore it is better for him to suffer this
punishment than to escape it; for it sustains man’s inward being.’”
For
those who want to explore Christocentric pisteology, Barth’s Kirchliche Dogmatik really isn’t a good
place to start because his texts are difficult and that’s not a consequence of
the English translation; those who have read the original in German make the
same point. Nor will those tempted by
his reputation to try one of his shorter works be likely to find an easier path
because his style was always one of dense prose littered with words obscure in
meaning to all but those who had spent time in divinity departments. When writing of German Lutheran theologian
Isaak August Dorner (1809–1884) in Protestant
Theology in the Nineteenth Century (1946) he wrote: “The assertion of a receptivity in man, the
Catholic-type conception of the gratia preveniens which runs alongside this
receptivity, the mystical culmination of this pisteology, are all elements of a
speculative basic approach which can even be seen here, in Dorner.” Is it any wonder some might confuse pisteology
with piscatology (the study of fishing)?