The collection Writings of the Fideists gathers eight thinkers, Iamblichus, al-Ghazālī, Pascal, Hamann, Shestov and others, examines the limits of rational inquiry and the authority of revelation and inherited practice. Working from pagan, Islamic and Christian traditions, they share the conviction that reason finds its place only within a life grounded in something prior to reason itself. Religious truth, on this older view, is received rather than discovered. The same structure of prior commitment appears wherever human understanding actually operates.
Fideism in the narrow sense holds that certain religious truths are not established by reason and that reason itself depends on a prior act of trust or acceptance. The writers in the collection press this further: pure reason, left to its own devices, cannot generate the starting points it needs. Al-Ghazālī argued that philosophical demonstration reaches its limits and that certainty about God and revelation requires a different mode of knowing. Pascal observed that the heart has reasons the intellect does not know, and that the wager of faith is not a conclusion reached by calculation but a practical commitment that makes further reasoning possible. Hamann treated reason as inseparable from language, history and revelation; it does not stand outside tradition and then judge it. Shestov insisted that the biblical God is not subject to the criteria of Greek rational necessity. Across these differences the common claim is that reason is a capacity exercised inside a form of life, not a self-sufficient tribunal that invents its own foundations.
George Santayana's Scepticism and Animal Faith supplies a parallel outside confessional theology. Santayana shows that radical scepticism, pushed consistently, dissolves into the solipsism of the present moment: one can doubt the external world, other minds, the past and the future, but one cannot live or act on that basis. Knowledge of ordinary objects, of other people, of the continuity of experience, rests on what he calls animal faith, an unargued trust that the world continues and that our perceptions are not pure illusion. This faith is not a conclusion of reason; it is the condition under which reason can begin. Scientific practice exhibits the same pattern. Experiments presuppose the reliability of instruments, the regularity of nature, the competence of other investigators and the meaningfulness of mathematical description. None of these can be proved from a position of total doubt. They are accepted so that inquiry can proceed. When anomalies appear, the response is usually to revise particular claims while retaining the broader framework, not to abandon the enterprise.
The same priority appears in political and moral life. No constitution or legal order is deduced from pure reason and then imposed on a blank population. Institutions rest on inherited practices, shared narratives and a willingness to treat certain procedures and persons as authoritative. Attempts to reconstruct society from first principles alone have repeatedly discovered that the principles themselves require prior agreement about what counts as a person, a right or a legitimate end. Everyday practical reason is no different. A person deciding whether to trust a doctor, a mechanic or a neighbour does not first construct a complete rational demonstration; he relies on reputation, habit, partial evidence and a background disposition to treat certain signs as reliable. The disposition is corrigible, but it is not itself the product of a prior chain of proofs that begins from nothing.
The fideist writers do not claim that reason is useless or that criticism is impossible. They claim that reason operates within limits set by something it does not create. Revelation, tradition, animal faith or the simple necessity of acting in the world supplies the ground. Once that ground is in place, reason can refine, correct and extend understanding. Without it, reason either stalls in scepticism or pretends to a self-sufficiency it cannot sustain. The collection recovers an older understanding in which faith is the foundation of human understanding rather than its conclusion, that understanding is not confined to religious doctrine. It describes the ordinary condition under which any sustained inquiry, including the inquiry that calls itself rational, actually takes place.
https://imperiumpress.org/shop/writings-of-the-fideists/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fideism/