What am I allowed to ignore ? Faith, ignorance and the acceptable limits of orthodoxy

The aim of this paper is to examine the role played by the problem of the excuse of ignorance in medieval reflections on the status of faith and unbelief. By means of an archaeological investigation, the aim is to identify when and how the phrase fides falsa ceased to be an oxymoron. Schematically, we can say that, while the Scholastic system of faith is organized around two poles, fiducia and discretio, the question of ignorance in turn raises the problem of the relationship between the interiority of the believer and the social regulation of acts, in their exteriority, by the Church. The investigation will begin by examining the elaboration of the notion of invincible ignorance by Pierre Abélard (1079-1142), then offer a cavalier view of the casuistic uses of this concept in the ^13th century. We will then focus on the radical positions of Robert Holcot (fl. 1333), which are symptomatic of an upheaval in the conception of faith: the fiduciary dimension of faith is given greater weight, but at the same time, it is inscribed in a perspective that could be called internalist, where it is no longer the Church as an institution but the commandments of conscience that regulate this trust in divine support. In this way, we hope to lay the foundations for an intellectual genealogy of the Reformation.