An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent

by John Henry Newman

This, however, is not the main point of the objection; the real difficulty lies not in the variety of religions, but in the contradiction, conflict, and change of religious certitudes. Truth need not be universal, but it must of necessity be certain; and certainty, in order to be certainty, must endure; yet how is this reasonable expectation fulfilled in the case of religion? On the contrary, those who have been the most certain in their beliefs are sometimes found to lose them, Catholics as well as others; and then to take up new beliefs, perhaps contrary ones, of which they become as certain as if they had never been certain of the old.

In answering this representation, I begin with recurring [pg 243] to the remark which I have already made, that assent and certitude have reference to propositions, one by one. We may of course assent to a number of propositions all together, that is, we may make a number of assents all at once; but in doing so we run the risk of putting upon one level, and treating as if of the same value, acts of the mind which are very different from each other in character and circumstance. An assent, indeed, is ever an assent; but given assents may be strong or weak, deliberate or impulsive, lasting or ephemeral. Now a religion is not a proposition, but a system; it is a rite, a creed, a philosophy, a rule of duty, all at once; and to accept a religion is neither a simple assent to it nor a complex, neither a conviction nor a prejudice, neither a notional assent nor a real, not a mere act of profession, nor of credence, nor of opinion, nor of speculation, but it is a collection of all these various kinds of assents, some of one description, some of another; but, out of all these different assents, how many are of that kind which I have called certitude? Certitudes indeed do not change, but who shall pretend that assents are indefectible?

For instance: the fundamental dogma of Protestantism is the exclusive authority of Holy Scripture; but in holding this a Protestant holds a host of propositions, explicitly or implicitly, and holds them with assents of various character. Among these propositions, he holds that Scripture is the Divine Revelation itself, that it is inspired, that nothing is known in doctrine but what is there, that the Church has no authority in matters of doctrine, that, as claiming it, it condemned long [pg 244] ago in the Apocalypse, that St. John wrote the Apocalypse, that justification is by faith only, that our Lord is God, that there are seventy-two generations between Adam and our Lord. Now of which, out of all these propositions, is he certain? and to how many of them is his assent of one and the same description? His belief, that Scripture is commensurate with the Divine Revelation, is perhaps implicit, not conscious; as to inspiration, he does not well know what the word means, and his assent is scarcely more than a profession; that no doctrine is true but what can be proved from Scripture he understands, and his assent to it is what I have called speculative; that the Church has no authority he holds with a real assent or belief; that the Church is condemned in the Apocalypse is a standing prejudice; that St. John wrote the Apocalypse is his opinion; that justification is by faith only, he accepts, but scarcely can be said to apprehend; that our Lord is God perhaps he is certain; that there are seventy-two generations between Adam and Christ he accepts on credence. Yet, if he were asked the question, he would most probably answer that he was certain of the truth of “Protestantism,” though “Protestantism” means these things and a hundred more all at once, and though he believes with actual certitude only one of them all,—that indeed a dogma of most sacred importance, but not the discovery of Luther or Calvin. He would think it enough to say that he was a foe to “Romanism” and “Socinianism,” and to avow that he gloried in the Reformation. He looks upon each of these religious professions, Protestantism, Romanism, Socinianism and Theism, merely as [pg 245] units, as if they were not each made up of many elements, as if they had nothing in common, as if a transition from the one to the other involved a simple obliteration of all that had been as yet written on his mind, and would be the reception of a new faith.

When, then, we are told that a man has changed from one religion to another, the first question which we have to ask, is, have the first and the second religions nothing in common? If they have common doctrines, he has changed only a portion of his creed, not the whole: and the next question is, has he ever made much of those doctrines which are common to his new creed and his old? and then again, what doctrines was he certain of among the old, and what among the new?

Thus, of three Protestants, one becomes a Catholic, a second a Unitarian, and a third an unbeliever: how is this? The first becomes a Catholic, because he assented, as a Protestant, to the doctrine of our Lord’s divinity, with a real assent and a genuine conviction, and because this certitude, taking possession of his mind, led him on to welcome the Catholic doctrines of the Real Presence and of the Theotocos, till his Protestantism fell off from him, and he submitted himself to the Church. The second became a Unitarian, because, proceeding on the principle that Scripture was the rule of faith and that a man’s private judgment was its rule of interpretation, and finding that the doctrine of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds did not follow by logical necessity from the text of Scripture, he said to himself, “The word of God has been made of none effect by the traditions of men,” and therefore nothing was left for him but to profess what [pg 246] he considered primitive Christianity, and to become a Humanitarian. The third gradually subsided into infidelity, because he started with the Protestant dogma, cherished in the depths of his nature, that a priesthood was a corruption of the simplicity of the Gospel. First, then, he would protest against the sacrifice of the Mass; next he gave up baptismal regeneration, and the sacramental principle; then he asked himself whether dogmas were not a restraint on Christian liberty as well as sacraments; then came the question, what after all was the use of teachers of religion? why should any one stand between him and his Maker? After a time it struck him, that this obvious question had to be answered by the Apostles, as well as by the Anglican clergy; so he came to the conclusion that the true and only revelation of God to man is that which is written on the heart. This did for a time, and he remained a Deist. But then it occurred to him, that this inward moral law was there within the breast, whether there was a God or not, and that it was a roundabout way of enforcing that law, to say that it came from God, and simply unnecessary, considering it carried with it its own sacred and sovereign authority, as our feelings instinctively testified; and when he turned to look at the physical world around him, he really did not see what scientific proof there was there of the Being of God at all, and it seemed to him as if all things would go on quite as well as at present, without that hypothesis as with it; so he dropped it, and became a purus, putus Atheist.

Now the world will say, that in these three cases old certitudes were lost, and new were gained; but it is not [pg 247] so: each of the three men started with just one certitude, as he would have himself professed, had he examined himself narrowly; and he carried it out and carried it with him into a new system of belief. He was true to that one conviction from first to last; and on looking back on the past, would perhaps insist upon this, and say he had really been consistent all through, when others made much of his great changes in religious opinion. He has indeed made serious additions to his initial ruling principle, but he has lost no conviction of which he was originally possessed.

I will take one more instance. A man is converted to the Catholic Church from his admiration of its religious system, and his disgust with Protestantism. That admiration remains; but, after a time, he leaves his new faith, perhaps returns to his old. The reason, if we may conjecture, may sometimes be this: he has never believed in the Church’s infallibility; in her doctrinal truth he has believed, but in her infallibility, no. He was asked, before he was received, whether he held all that the Church taught, he replied he did; but he understood the question to mean, whether he held those particular doctrines “which at that time the Church in matter of fact formally taught,” whereas it really meant “whatever the Church then or at any future time should teach.” Thus, he never had the indispensable and elementary faith of a Catholic, and was simply no subject for reception into the fold of the Church. This being the case, when the Immaculate Conception is defined, he feels that it is something more than he bargained for when he became a Catholic, and accordingly he [pg 248] gives up his religious profession. The world will say that he has lost his certitude of the divinity of the Catholic Faith, but he never had it.

The first point to be ascertained, then, when we hear of a change of religious certitude in another, is, what the doctrines are on which his so-called certitude before now and at present has respectively fallen. All doctrines besides these were the accidents of his profession, and the indefectibility of certitude would not be disproved, though he changed them every year. There are few religions which have no points in common; and these, whether true or false, when embraced with an absolute conviction, are the pivots on which changes take place in that collection of credences, opinions, prejudices, and other assents, which make up what is called a man’s selection and adoption of a form of religion, a denomination, or a Church. There have been Protestants whose idea of enlightened Christianity has been a strenuous antagonism to what they consider the unmanliness and unreasonableness of Catholic morality, an antipathy to the precepts of patience, meekness, forgiveness of injuries, and chastity. All this they have considered a woman’s religion, the ornament of monks, of the sick, the feeble, and the old. Lust, revenge, ambition, courage, pride, these, they have fancied, made the man, and want of them the slave. No one could fairly accuse such men of any great change of their convictions, or refer to them in proof of the defectibility of certitude, if they were one day found to have taken up the profession of Islam.

And if this intercommunion of religions holds good, [pg 249] even when the common points between them are but errors held in common, much more natural will be the transition from one religion to another, without injury to existing certitudes, when the common points, the objects of those certitudes, are truths; and still stronger in that case and more constraining will be the sympathy, with which minds that love truth, even when they have surrounded it with error, will yearn towards the Catholic faith, which contains within itself, and claims as its own, all truth that is elsewhere to be found, and more than all, and nothing but truth. This is the secret of the influence, by which the Church draws to herself converts from such various and conflicting religions. They come, not to lose what they have, but to gain what they have not; and in order that, by means of what they have, more may be given to them. St. Augustine tells us that there is no false teaching without an intermixture of truth; and it is by the light of those particular truths, contained respectively in the various religions of men, and by our certitudes about them, which are possible wherever those truths are found, that we pick our way, slowly perhaps, but surely, into the One Religion which God has given, taking our certitudes with us, not to lose, but to keep them more securely, and to understand and love their objects more perfectly.

Not even are idolaters and heathen out of the range of some of these religious truths and their correlative certitudes. The old Greek and Roman polytheists had, as they show in their literature, clear and strong notions, nay, vivid mental images, of a Particular Providence, of [pg 250] the power of prayer, of the rule of Divine Governance, of the law of conscience, of sin and guilt, of expiation by means of sacrifices, and of future retribution: I will even add, of the Unity and Personality of the Supreme Being. This it is that throws such a magnificent light over the Homeric poems, the tragic choruses, and the Odes of Pindar; and it has its counterpart in the philosophy of Socrates and of the Stoics, and in such historians as Herodotus. It would be out of place to speak confidently of a state of society which has passed away, but at first sight it does not appear why the truths which I have enumerated should not have received as genuine and deliberate an assent on the part of Socrates or Cleanthes, (of course with divine aids, but they do not enter into this discussion,) as was given to them by St. John or St. Paul, nay, an assent which rose to certitude. Much more safely may it be pronounced of a Mahometan, that he may have a certitude of the Divine Unity, as well as a Christian; and of a Jew, that he may believe as truly as a Christian in the resurrection of the body; and of a Unitarian that he can give a deliberate and real assent to the fact of a supernatural revelation, to the Christian miracles, to the eternal moral law, and to the immortality of the soul. And so, again, a Protestant may, not only in words, but in mind and heart, hold, as if he were a Catholic, with simple certitude, the doctrines of the Holy Trinity, of the fall of man, of the need of regeneration, of the efficacy of Divine Grace, and of the possibility and danger of falling away. And thus it is conceivable that a man might travel in his religious [pg 251] profession all the way from heathenism to Catholicity, through Mahometanism, Judaism, Unitarianism, Protestantism, and Anglicanism, without any one certitude lost, but with a continual accumulation of truths, which claimed from him and elicited in his intellect fresh and fresh certitudes.