Many of this volume's essays offer specific instances and analyses of doubt in assorted contexts; several home in on individuals. This essay looks more broadly at the concept of doubt, and how it fits into medieval Catholicism between c.1100 and the Reformation. It suggests that doubt and insecurity were much more accepted among the faithful than is usually recognized, and were actually acknowledged as part of the process of attaining faith.
The originating stimulus is indicated by the question in the title: the possibility that doubt – whatever that may be – is the prelude to faith, or even that only someone experiencing and coping with doubt can be said to be faithful. The questioning Latin is a deliberate misquotation. The Decretales of Pope Gregory IX, issued in 1234, contained a blunt statement which remained part of Catholic canon law until 1918: ‘Dubius in fide infidelis est’.Footnote 1 An obvious – but potentially questionable – translation would be: ‘Someone of doubtful faith is an infidel'. The text appears among statements about heresy; it became something of a tag in subsequent discussions of the distinctions between truth and falsehood, heresy and orthodoxy.
Dubius in fide appears a straightforward foundational text to justify disciplinary action in place of debate, reconciliation and acceptance, but becomes problematic when set in the fuller context of the pre-Reformation Western Church. Even on a superficial reading it challenges interpretation. What is this ‘doubt’, or this ‘faith’ being doubted? How much doubting of how much of the faith constitutes infidelity? And then questions begin to spiral: who (or what) has (or is) the authority by which faith is defined and doubt contested – or vice versa? Ultimately, where does truth lie, and with it the determination of faith and faithlessness: who are sheep and who are goats? The traditional caricature of the medieval Church and Catholicism obliterates much of the uncertainty: this was a Church in which doubt was not allowed or acceptable; it was a case of believe or burn, with official indifference epitomized in the massacre at Béziers in 1209: ‘Kill them! Truly God will know his own!’Footnote 2 In recent, and more subtle, scholarly formulations, fear of the challenge of doubt, and concern to protect their own authority among those commissioned to defend the faith, lay at the root of a persecuting society; while similar fears created or allowed the invention of heresy.Footnote 3
The over-simplification of the traditional caricature does the medieval Church a massive disservice. Doubt, and the response to it, was no simple matter, nor was it necessarily a burning issue (in either sense).
The problem of doubt is inherently part of the problem of belief and credibility. Within Christianity, it has obvious biblical origins in the case of doubting Thomas, and the need for his doubt to be resolved by personal experience (even if Christ's response stresses the greater merit of those who believe without experience).Footnote 4 More subtly, there is the uncertain doubting ascribed to John the Baptist,Footnote 5 and the more radical potential for doubt in Christ's own self-questioning, specifically in the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane: a fundamental anxiety about his own place in salvation history and his relationship to divinity which, without a resolution that necessarily had to be based on conviction or resignation, could have become despair. In Trinitarian terms, this becomes the question of whether divinity could doubt itself, something best left to the scholastics.Footnote 6 A crucial point is that the ambiguity inherent in doubt leads in different directions, evident in the dual thrust of the title for this volume. ‘Doubting Christianity’ makes doubt a verb, in active engagement with the noun and seemingly presupposing questioning and rejection. ‘The Church and Doubt’ makes doubt a noun, implicitly requiring reaction from a monolithic Church; yet how it reacts – positively or negatively, to resolve or dissolve, or to reject by ejecting and contesting – is left an open issue.
The openness of the questions which circulate around doubt and doubting precludes easy answers. An avowedly tentative exploration of the period between c.1100 and the onset of the Reformation reveals the potential for doubt, and locates it not as a fixed state of mind, but within the process of attaining conviction and certainty by achieving faith.
Locating Doubt
Within modern mindsets, religious doubt largely invites attention as rejection, challenging; it actively opposes certitude and belief. A presupposition that doubt resists and rejects, and so leads to ‘unbelief’ and ‘scepticism’, is seemingly wired into modern readings of religious doubt.Footnote 7 It has produced at least one index entry, ‘doubt: see scepticism’, where the text treats ‘the nature of doubt’ accordingly.Footnote 8
Here, though, there are two significant traps. The first is a linguistic problem: when using medieval texts, how do we get from the Latin of dubietas and its variants to the English ‘doubt’? While medieval authors clearly understood the dubius in fide tag as referring to challenge and doubt, the nature of the dubiety can be nuanced (and, indeed, the application of the tag to actual doubt be questioned).Footnote 9 In their specific contexts, translation of the Latin lexicon around dubius to the equivalent vocabulary rooted in English ‘doubt’ often seems inappropriate: nuancing makes it more fitting to read ‘uncertain’, ‘questionable’, ‘imprecise’, and so on. This clearly affects meanings: ‘Anyone who doubts the faith is an infidel' carries very different connotations from ‘Someone of uncertain faith lacks faith’; yet both are valid translations of the dubius in fide tag. The real challenge is to select the most appropriate meaning for the specific context.
The second trap lies in assuming that along the broad spectrum of possible modes of believing or accepting Christianity – from utter rejection to absolute acceptance of its claims – there is a fixed tipping point into doubt and doubting; a movement away from rather than towards ‘faith’. Doubt undercuts certitude; but the blunt bipolarity of belief and unbelief (the former as required certitude, the latter as a manifestation of doubt) can be challenged. Both states – belief and doubt – are best seen as medial. Medieval writers often adopt this stance when discussing a spectrum of attitudes to the faith and doubt. This spectrum does not require movement, yet does imply a latent trajectory of movement, an increasing commitment to Christianity or truth.
An early but imperfect theological statement of that trajectory appears in the De sacramentis of Hugh of St Victor, written in the early twelfth century. He incorporates doubters into his spectrum, but omits a crucial part of the argument. His list works from deniers at one extreme through ‘second the doubters, third the conjecturers, fourth the believers, [and] fifth the knowers’. His more detailed analysis bypasses the doubters: they must fit between those who ‘straightway repel with the mind what is heard and contradict those things which are said' (the deniers) and those who, when presented with opposing claims, ‘believe one of the two as more probable, yet they do not presume to assert whether it itself is still true. These are the conjecturers’ (perhaps better labelled as ‘the unconvinced').Footnote 10 Presumably the doubters cannot decide either way – as they cannot in Aquinas's echo of Hugh's scheme.Footnote 11
An equivalent and clearer spectrum appears in some canonistic works. While canonists’ concerns technically differed from those of theologians, dealing with absolute legal proof rather than the indubitability of concepts, their basic goal and sense of a trajectory towards knowledge of the truth was essentially identical.Footnote 12
For William Lyndwood in fifteenth-century England, perhaps reflecting a common canonistic view, doubt is the first stage on the route to certainty. Things which are indubitable have the highest level, that is, faith. ‘Doubt’, as the departure point, has the mind wandering between possibilities, without inclining more fiercely to one than the other. As it advances, the mind veers to one side more than the other – this is ‘suspicion’: it starts to balance evidence and argument. Then comes ‘opinion’, an inclination to one side, but not without doubts (matching Hugh of St Victor's ‘conjecture’). The final level is ‘credibility’, which is faith and firm belief – presumably equivalent to ‘beyond reasonable doubt’.Footnote 13 Lyndwood's concern is with judicial proof, his stages those by which a judge reaches a decision. The stages can, however, be transferred beyond the legal arena, to apply to almost any evolution towards intellectual conviction, apart from immediate inspiration or revelation.
In lived Catholicism, the trajectory becomes a journey, a pilgrim's progress, whose goal lies in the afterlife. The journey requires choices, decisions and commitments to select the appropriate route. These may well entail uncertainty and insecurity – doubt – which prevents further movement until those doubts are alleviated, even if not resolved. True or false guides and guidance will offer ways to resolve those doubts, and will help to determine choices, to consolidate, corrupt or corrode faith. Whether the final state is one of sufficient faith, specifically correct faith, will only become known at death, the final opportunity to choose and declare commitment.Footnote 14
Finding Faith
The uncertainty of the route to salvation is the basic problem. As a process of enquiry and transformation, an intellectual endeavour, the journey to faith requires choice along the way, decisions and commitments which declare allegiance and accept or reject the alternatives on offer. Usually (in this medieval context) the alternatives are proffered by different purportedly authoritative institutions or individuals, ultimately by ‘the Church’ and those whom it conceives or perceives as its rivals or rebels. At any point the pilgrim may encounter questions, decisions and choices, which shape understanding without necessarily providing the understanding which the authorities would consider correct. After all, heresy is, etymologically, a faulty exercise of choice, and for the authorities which championed and defended orthodoxy, it was the determined choice of a false faith.
However, a simple spectrum from doubt to certainty is inadequate. Hugh of St Victor indicates the problem with his ‘deniers’. He places them before doubt, as first in his sequence; but realistically they are on the other side of doubt, at the first stage in a sequence which he does not detail, going in the opposite direction. From them the spectrum can be traced, in reverse, to an alternative faith which can also inspire certitude. In a process of movement away from faith, at some point the havering of doubt becomes the starting point for alternative conviction, but still a journey towards faith. Where there are actively competing religions or denominations / confessions, that becomes a process of conversion, and the doubt-defying (maybe self-doubt-defying) assertiveness and conviction of the converted. Where there are variants within one broad tradition, the journey may lead to heresy, with authoritarian resistance and repression as its punishment.
The transition and evolution through to faith is therefore critical. Essential is the move beyond doubt, beyond the total uncertainty between two equally viable alternatives into a decision-making process in which doubts about one alternative increase commensurately with a sense of assurance about the other. That process – undergone by individuals or by the Church – may not reach a firm conclusion, leaving the individual still undecided and the Church still debating, and anxious.
‘Belief’ could be equated with faith, but neither of them was absolute knowledge: each remained open to question. Even though writing as a canonist rather than a theologian, John Acton (d. 1349) was perhaps thinking theologically and doctrinally when he commented that ‘to believe is midway between two extremes, that is to know and to be ignorant, which pushes towards one side by fear of the other’. Knowledge, as an absolute, is positively beyond belief: ‘To know truly is to have knowledge of something as indubitable.’Footnote 15 Implicitly, therefore, belief is always to some degree insecure, perhaps because it is there to be argued over, and dissected. Hugh of St Victor shares elements of that view, but not all of it. For him, as for St Paul (Heb. 11: 1), ‘Faith is the substance . . . of things to be hoped for’; but its objects are terrestrially unknowable.Footnote 16 It cannot be proved by reason.Footnote 17 For Hugh, faith is
. . . a kind of certainty of the mind in things absent, established beyond opinion and short of knowledge. . . . [W]e have called faith certainty, since when there is still doubt, there is no faith. . . . [T]hat certainty . . . which we call faith was established beyond opinion or conjecture and short of knowledge. Since without doubt to believe something is less than to know, so also is to think more than [to] conjecture.Footnote 18
Yet, if faith is imperfect knowledge (as Hugh concedes),Footnote 19 the possibility of doubt must exist.
Here, reason must be brought into the conjectures; for just as reason resolves doubt and uncertainty to build faith, so it also undermines faith by raising questions and challenging conviction. Unquestioning acceptance within a consensual or default faith community was not universal; questioning, reasoned doubting, could lead to firmer acceptance or equally firm rejection. Polarization between faith and reason – which, if faith is reasoned, clearly is not a polarization – is often represented by contrasting two twelfth-century intellectuals, Abelard and Anselm. Anselm – monk, mystic and saint – stands as the advocate of faith: ‘I do not seek to understand so that I may believe, but I believe so that I may understand; and what is more, I believe that unless I do believe I shall not understand.’Footnote 20 For him faith is the starting point for understanding, which allows everything to fall into place. Meanwhile Abelard – the argumentative academic, flaunting his intellectual daring – revels in argument almost for its own sake, but as a rational balancing of propositions which lead from uncertainty to enlightenment: ‘By doubting we come to enquiry; and by enquiry we perceive the truth.’Footnote 21 Yet, despite the apparent contrasts, their contradiction may be exaggerated by scholarly tradition. Regardless of methodological differences, both accept the power of argument. Abelard clearly advocates a version of the trajectory from uncertainty to knowledge (possibly even to theological truth, if the truth he seeks is the Truth which is Christ).Footnote 22 Moreover, his Sic et non, which provides his comment on doubt, includes the patristic quotation on which Anselm based his statement.Footnote 23 Anselm's writings show that his faith left room for questions (not least Why did God become Man? – Cur Deus homo?).Footnote 24 Anselm's understanding may build from faith, but it provides answers which presume questions, which must presume the questionable, and so the dubitable.
Anselm, moreover, stops short at understanding, before that true scientia of the wisdom which passes all understanding. Nevertheless, the search for understanding reinforces a sense of medieval Catholicism as a conscious attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible, the inconceivable. Seekers had to rationalize, argue, question and doubt, as they sought salvation and proximity to God. Yet, as Alan of Lille (d. 1202) recognized in his Anticlaudianus, that was not enough to achieve the goal. Reason, theology and questions had to yield place to a faith beyond reason (and so beyond reasonable doubt) in the progress towards God.Footnote 25 The desired state passed beyond the doubts and uncertainties which always darkened St Paul's glass, to the point where the truths of the faith were not merely indubitable, but beyond question, because no valid questions remained to be asked. For Hugh of St Victor, accordingly, faith remained only an image in a darkened mirror, because it was not true knowledge.Footnote 26 That true knowledge, though, was for another world: the Church militant had to accept doubt and uncertainty, and trust in the assertion of its own divinely authorized authority, with its members wandering pilgrims in an uncertain world.
Doubtful Church; Doubtful Christians?
Much of the preceding comment has been at an abstract level. However, correct Christian faith had to be not only in God, but in the Church and its claims to authority in matters of faith, and so in the definitions of faith which it provided. That generated its own problems. In the abstract, ‘faith’ is a state of mind, something equally attributable to those ‘outside the faith’; but ‘the faith’ is a set of precepts and points to be believed.Footnote 27 The negativity of doubting presupposes dogmas and practices which can be doubted.
The myth of medieval Catholicism obviously provides the demanded uniformity for those who wish to promulgate it. It was indeed promulgated among contemporaries, as in Boniface VIII's Unam sanctam of 1302, asserting ‘That there is one, holy, catholic and apostolic church . . . and outside this church there is no salvation or remission of sins.’Footnote 28 Generally, however, the Church failed to provide a fixed standard. It provided creeds, sometimes in detail; but the most widely distributed, those that people were expected to know (especially the Apostles’ Creed), were mere lists of unexplained statements. These needed interpretation to clarify their meaning, and so were open to question. While built on the Bible and authorized by the Church, the faith was not a monolith of clarity, but an amalgam of opportunities for uncertainty and disagreement – opportunities without which there would have been no need for scientific theology.
Accordingly, consideration of ‘the Church and doubt’ raises the question of the character of that Church, as structured institution, and as a congregation of the faithful who could be labelled as Catholics (whatever they actually believed). No matter how impersonally ‘the Church’ is conceived, it was run by and consisted of people. That alone was enough to make the mythic monolith unachievable; the practicalities of contemporary society made it even more so. The reality of late medieval Catholicism is best conveyed by the twelfth-century idea of ‘diversity without adversity’,Footnote 29 envisaging a unity which could accommodate seemingly incompatible differences. That need to accommodate did, however, necessitate a blurring of definitions, an uncertainty over boundaries, over what could and could not be accommodated. This is perhaps most striking at the boundary of heresy, in thirteenth-century references to ‘Waldensians or heretics’, and fifteenth-century ones to ‘Lollards or heretics’: the ‘or’ can amalgamate or differentiate, an interpretative conundrum which bedevils modern scholarship.Footnote 30 The overall imprecision – which made the Church an amalgam of local or communal certainties – could produce and reflect doubts and uncertainties at almost any level. Some might be on specific doctrinal issues, like the long-running debate over the Immaculate Conception.Footnote 31 Some were highly localized, in challenges to the sainthood of specific individuals and their alleged miracles (as voiced over some of Thomas Cantilupe's pre-canonization miracles).Footnote 32 Especially at local levels, official doubts were raised about unauthorized activities of questionable standing. Officials tried to quash cults and practices; but the inertia or determination of devotees could offer effective resistance.Footnote 33
Considerable complexities arise here, as doubt and uncertainty creep in through the cracks. The faith had to be not only declared, but taught; and that required interpretation, maybe the resolution of doubts by resolving discordances. Interpretation brought questions, their answers meant to give security and knowledge – provided they could be answered. Theology itself was predicated on questions and interpretation, with academic disputations designed to force thought but channel it towards the right conclusions. Heresy among academics reflected that uncertainty; yet, as rival intellectual systems produced incompatible understandings with partisan adherents, the ground was laid for fundamental challenges which eventually produced reformation.Footnote 34
The propositions within the formulations of the faith, and the theologizing which validated practices, invited – or received – responses across the spectrum of allegiance. This was important. As in a graph, an axis of actual adherence had to be correlated against one of demanded adherence: not every component of Catholicism had equal importance to identify a Catholic and draw the line between orthodoxy and heresy. Specific practices, specific beliefs, might take centuries to become entrenched as ‘universal' components; until then they could be legitimately debated, differently understood and licitly doubted (as was ‘transubstantiation’, long after 1215).Footnote 35 That uncertainty, and evolutions which moved some doctrines from ‘optional' to ‘mandatory’, was implicitly acknowledged in the concept of error, a category of flawed belief which was not heresy. ‘Error’, as ‘contrary to the truth and shared determination of the learned',Footnote 36 did not contradict proclaimed and acknowledged truth; it challenged an ecclesial consensus which was not dogmatic and therefore might not be right.
The ambiguity which the notion of error brings into the discussion is compounded when calibrating demanded and actual adherence against each other. Where, then, does opinion fit as ‘less than faith’? Is it sufficiently distinguishable from faith to count as ‘doubt’? At what point on the highly delicate spectrum of belief does orthodoxy shade into doubt and dissent? The question resonates with modern scholarly anxieties about where boundaries lie, and the insecure overlap between present assumptions and medieval experiences. In current work on fifteenth-century English Lollardy, scholars increasingly accept (and expand) a ‘grey area’ between heresy and orthodoxy. Explicitly between, inherently unstable, it remains neither one nor the other, yet shades into both.Footnote 37 This grey area is visible through texts, yet existed in lives, as individuals believed on and at the borderlines of the acceptable, possibly wavering repeatedly across it during a lifetime.Footnote 38
Ideally, the practised and experienced faith would be stable and firm; but instability was more likely, and impacts on the interpretation of devotional experience. Yet the divisions which occur when moving away from a stable faith are not those encountered when doubting on the road to faith. John Acton again identifies the problem. Questioning in search of security can be done pertinaciously and rashly, with a mind already to some extent made up. That is heresy. Yet if the questioning is done with no decided goal, motivated only by scruples of conscience, the outcome is more a punishment than a fault, a weakness of personal imagination rather than sin. Such doubting scrupulosity had to be curbed and crushed, yet was not actually deviance, not heresy.Footnote 39
However, the doubts generated by scrupulosity could be as corrosive of individual faith as any heresy. The precise background to the obscure encounter between Archbishop Alexander Neville of York and Agnes Mawson when they talked on the north Yorkshire moors in 1375 is unknown; but she was in spiritual turmoil, feared a loss of faith and needed guidance. They talked, and Neville thought that he had resolved her doubts and uncertainties. He also appealed for help, granting an indulgence to all who prayed to reinforce her faith.Footnote 40 This vignette of a bishop firmly engaging in the cure of souls, resolving doubts and reinforcing Catholicism, is matched by Margery Kempe's talks with other bishops, described in her Book.Footnote 41 It was presumably matched at parish level as priests talked with their parishioners; probably also in discussions between parishioners, engaged in mutual consolation and enhancement of their faith via the Spiritual Works of Mercy.Footnote 42 The evidence is limited, but suggests that such doubt-resolving discussion was not uncommon, with debates attempting to bring alleged heretics back into the fold part of the same process.Footnote 43
Potentially, scrupulosity might be the most extreme and paradoxical form of doubt, soul-destroying not by eroding faith in God, but by destroying the believer's self-confidence, undermining hitherto firm adherence to the faith. As anxiety over one's own fitness for salvation, exposing the raw nerve of uncertainty otherwise obscured by hope (a state less certain than belief), scrupulosity could get carried away with itself. On the deathbed it could generate despair, a refusal to accept any possibility of divine mercy: self-damning, and therefore to be taken seriously. Hence the deathbed's communal character, as set out in fifteenth-century ars moriendi literature, with friends and neighbours clustered around to coax the soul through to purgatory, reassuring of divine mercy and urging trust in God.Footnote 44 Hence also the horror of Albert ter Achter's deathbed in Deventer in 1492. A member of a devotio moderna community, despite his exemplary life he fell into ranting despair in his last days, and could ultimately be consoled only with great difficulty and a vision of his own merciful judgement by the Virgin and Christ. Even so, it was unclear whether he finally died fit to be saved. All a witness could comment was this: ‘His death, most horrible in its external appearance and without any precedent that we can recall was, we sincerely hope, not injurious to him.’Footnote 45
Like anxiety about salvation, scrupulosity could strike at any time. Institutional responses encouraged mechanisms to eliminate it, but perhaps increased it. Conformist rigour among observant regulars was reinforced by ever-increasing regulation and minute prescription.Footnote 46 This in turn provoked anxiety about whether those rules were being sufficiently observed. It was not faith per se that was undermined, but the assurance of salvation that should have accompanied it. It was perhaps no accident that the birth of the Reformation is ascribed to an overly scrupulous Augustinian friar, seeking a way out of this terrifying impasse.
Unavoidable Doubt?
On the road to salvation, doubt-resolving decisions were choices, of routes and paths, of guides and guidance, occasionally matters of reasoned (or even inspired) guesswork. Making an accumulation of binary choices – yes / no, accept / reject – each Christian sought to progress through to faith and to certainty. Those choices were also decisions about the credibility of the Church's definitions and prescriptions for the faith, accepting or rejecting its claims to authority. The end result could be a fatal one, heresy, the term itself acknowledging the power and perils of choice. It was far easier, far safer, from the Church's point of view, for the flock to misbelieve the details but accept its authority, to be heretical without being formally heretics because they wanted to believe as the Church believed. Even if of dubious faith they then still counted among the fideles; such permitted wrong-headedness did not entail infidelity.Footnote 47
Ultimately, theological faith was something earth-bound, perhaps quintessentially human. It was not theological knowledge, which would be achieved only after death; therein lay its main limitation. As the end of a progression from doubt and uncertainty, arguably faith could never entirely eradicate questions and uncertainty. Before entry into the afterlife, the strongest hope could be destroyed by a nagging final uncertainty – as Albert ter Achter discovered on his deathbed. Hugh of St Victor said that faith went beyond and eradicated doubt,Footnote 48 but he was manifestly wrong, at least at face value. Durand of St Pourçain or Porcien (d. 1332/4) was more on the right path. For him ‘knowledge cannot have doubt mixed within it in any way; faith, however, can have doubt mixed within it in some way’.Footnote 49 Perhaps faith needed doubt to prove itself.
As the requirements of the faith became increasingly defined, the diversity tolerable within medieval Catholicism became increasingly limited. Moreover, as uncertainties – or doubts – gave way to differing certitudes, so diversity became rigid divergence. The partisan fifteenth-century philosophical chasm indicated by the statement that ‘One cannot dispute with those with whom one disagrees on first principles’ easily transferred to theological stances.Footnote 50 In the sixteenth century, divergence moved a stage further, to division and Reformation. By that point, moreover, the ‘crisis of authority’ which pervaded the higher levels of the Church had reached a tipping point with Erasmus's retranslation of the Bible, producing a text critically different at crucial points.Footnote 51 The implications were fundamental, although not always followed through: if the Western Church had actually got its Bible wrong, authorized itself on false foundations, where was the authority for its faith? What, indeed, was now ‘the faith’?
Ironically, the ambivalent and ambiguous reality which the medieval Church lived with may not have achieved clear expression until after the Reformation. In that doctrinal and spiritual free-for-all the quest for faith remained; but so did the problem of doubt. Doubt, though, could now be openly acknowledged and validated as part of the quest, and dealt with (at least in England) without having to match vernacular and Latin vocabularies. In the early 1630s, responding to doubting Thomas's eventual declaration of faith, the obscure William Austin commented: ‘No Faith stronger then [ = than] what is gotten after a doubt. For hee that never doubted scarce ever well-beleeved.’Footnote 52 He was echoing others, notably William Perkins.Footnote 53 A stance only implicit in the pre-Reformation centuries was at last openly formulated.
Conclusion
In the pilgrim's progress to salvation, with all its uncertainties and choices, doubt was necessary and unavoidable. In the late Middle Ages, for those who moved outside the Catholic faith and Catholic structures, to be of doubtful faith was to be faithless, at least from the inside looking out. Even for those within, the fortress of faith was not impregnable; doubt and uncertainty, the possibility that the blind were leading the blind into a ditch, was everywhere. While not a truth universally acknowledged, many in the pre-Reformation centuries would perhaps have concurred with Austin and Perkins. Their words merely gave explicit recognition to a longstanding reality, that to be questioning and uncertain about the faith could be a prelude to greater faith, because without the resolution out of doubt there was no resolution into the fullness of faith.
