‘Grammar of Dissent’: Conceptualising Religious Faith in the Works of John Henry Newman and Semyon Frank

Abstract

This article examines the engagement of the Russian philosopher Semyon Frank with the thought of the English theologian John Henry Newman. While both thinkers pursued a philosophical account of religious faith, their approaches diverged significantly. Newman centred his theology on the notion of assent — the acceptance of dogmatic truths through religious imagination and non-abstract, personal knowledge. Frank, by contrast, emphasised mystical religious experience as supra- rational and supersensual, yet carrying its own distinctive certainty. This contrast reflects the broader divergence between Western and Eastern Christian theological traditions, which may be traced, in part, to Aristotelian and Platonic intellectual lineages respectively. Although Frank did not associate Newman with the modernist currents he criticised, his early writings engaged critically with the "new religious consciousness" of Dmitry Merezhkovsky. Despite their differing epistemological frameworks, both Newman and Frank advanced a form of Christian philosophical apologetics that sought to reconcile faith with intellectual integrity in the modern world.