FAITH
by Fr.Ur (Deacon, 2006)

[Note: This text is only an extract from a much longer essay titled "Christian Gnosticism and Primitive Christianity", which will be available to members of EGA in a church-intern publication.]

I want to make one final observation which measures again the distance between Gnosticism and Christianity. Christianity is called a 'confession', that means 'having faith in something', and this faith is put in a god, that is the warrant of faith by an historical event: the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus, interpreted literally. This faith is the identity of Christianity.
Both, Cicerone and Agostino used in their writings the word 'fides' but the same word had a totally different meaning for each author. For the pagan Cicerone, 'fides' was a concept like 'loyalty' and 'pact'. The same 'loyalty' as needed in a pact for peace in war or between two allied nations. By this pact, granted by the 'fides' both of the god to the worshiper and of the worshiper to the god, the god gave help to the man and the man did ritual action and sacrifices to the god. 'Do ut des'. Things asked for were usually of a mundane character. This kind of relation between god and man was very similar to the one the Jews had (particularly before the diaspora) with their god (whom some scholars have described as very similar to the pagan gods, even if only one) as they were the people that he should take care of.

Completely different is 'fides' for Agostino, who even though using the same Latin word meant exactly what the Roman church means with 'faith': the confidence of obtaining eternal life in paradise based on a revelation and on an historical event. (...)
We usually apply the term 'faith' in our Christian meaning to other cultural environments because it is entered into the common use of language: for example, some anthropologists said 'shamans believe' or 'shamans have faith in various spiritual beings'. No. Shamans have no faith at all, at least not in the Agostinian meaning of 'fides'. Shamans see, speak and negotiate with various spiritual beings. It is not faith; it is truth and verification through direct experience. We could discuss then for a long time what spiritual beings exactly are but the problem of their existence does not exist for people who deal with them every day.
Coming back to Gnosticism: what is 'faith' for Gnostics? The intuition of something that drives us into research and asks intensely to be verified and actualized as a state of awareness here and now. Faith in spiritual beings and the striving to contact them (exactly as for shamans and in some way for pagans) is a way of organizing and dealing magically with our psyche and our world. And it is subject to verification: it is not blind expectation which is principally impossible to verify - because if the 'gods' do not manifest themselves, the Gnostic did not continue to have 'faith' in them but asks himself what was wrong in his operative practices.

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