An Outline of an Anglican Life (Tarsitano, 1994)/Appendix II

APPENDIX II THE VIA MEDIA

Adapted from a paper presented to the Anglican Society, University of South Carolina, February 28, 1989.

What follows is a brief history of the Thirty Nine Articles of Religion of the Anglican Church, organized around a discussion of Article XIII and the doctrines of grace connected with it.

Many people do not understand the vast amount of spiritual and intellectual effort behind the Articles, or behind such terms as the via media. Others assume that the work of theology is done in isolation from the problems of real life. The purpose of the inclusion of this essay is to begin to correct both errors.

The Latin text of the Article is given here, and a few Latin terms are used, because Latin was the international language of scholarship at the time of the Reformation, and because the Articles were addressed by the Church of England as much to the world, as to her own members. But a knowledge of Latin is not needed to make sense of the essay.

Article XIII: Of Works before Justification

Works done before the Grace of Christ, and the inspiration of His Spirit, are not pleasant to God, forasmuch as they spring not of faith in Jesus Christ; neither do they make men meet to receive grace, or (as the school-authors say) deserve grace of congruity; yea rather, for that they are not done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done, we doubt not but they have the nature of sin.

De Operibus ante Justificationem Opera quae fiunt ante gratiam Christi et Spiritus ejus afflatum, cum ex fide Jesu Christi non prodeant, minime Deo grata sunt; neque gratiam, ut multi vocant, de congruo merentur; immo cum non sint facta, ut Deus illa fieri voluit et praecepit, peccati rationem habere non dubitamus (Browne 331).

The Hypocrisy Problem

From a Christian point of view, "religious" people (along with every other member of the human race) will always be hypocrites, will always remain justly liable to charges of "saying one thing and doing another," until the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Even the "faith" described in the phrase "the Christian Faith" is, in itself, an act of trust that the God who has acted on mankind's behalf in history is not like us, will not disappoint us in his future fulfillment of his promises, is not a Confidence Man on a cosmic scale abusing our credulity. We Christians firmly believe that the pea is really under the walnut shell, if God tells us that it is.

All human beings, because we are fallen into sin, engage in "bait and switch" behavior: "Yes, my dear, I know that I promised you my love and loyalty, but what I am actually giving you is really much better, if you will only look at things from my point of view."

Fallenness is, above all else, about inconstancy and undependability. Even fallen angels, known colloquially as "devils," operate in this manner. In the Garden, Satan offers Adam and Eve "god-hood," knowing all the while that he cannot deliver on his promise (see Genesis 3:1-7). Throughout history, he continues this deception, arguing, even to Christ in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11), that death and rebellion against God are not only "just as good" as divinity, but even better than eternal life in union with the Father. Satan's claim, even today, is the cynical argument that serving him in hell is better than ruling with God in heaven.

No religious person, to be specific, no Christian can ever be as good as his own publicly confessed standards, precisely because those standards are not really his own. As the first of the Anglican Articles of Religion (used in their present form since 1571 by the Church of England and other Anglican national Churches for settling basic religious controversies) informs us, God is "of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness" (see the 1928 American Book of Common Prayer, 603). None of us, as finite beings, can compete with an infinite person; and since the Fall has attenuated our connection with God's power, wisdom, and goodness, we cannot hope to meet his standards on our own. So what are we to do?

Rejecting the Faith

One common expedient, when Christian hypocrisy is either admitted or discovered, is to reject the entire Christian enterprise. While this approach is, as I said, quite common, it is at heart not very reasonable. No human being lives up, or even lives down, to the standards of life and behavior he sets for himself. Even the outright libertine never has as much fun as he intends. And the suicide must act definitively and in self-contradiction in order to pursue his fantasy of a meaningless, agentless, powerless existence.

The careful, pristine atheist must still bear in his efforts to live according to his own standards the same burdens of "sin" and "justification" as everyone else, Christians included. For "sin" is, in the end, only a failure to maintain a standard, a failure to reach a goal, a "missing of the mark" as the Greek term hamartia implies; and pagan Greek philosophers, the New Testament writers, and the Christian Church Fathers all used the word hamartia, "sin," to describe the human predicament. "Justification," on the other hand, is the attempt to deal with sin: an effort to vindicate a standard unfulfilled and to close the gap that yawns between human aspiration and performance.

Balancing the Books

Another approach to lifting the twin burdens of sin and justification, common among Roman Catholics and many modern American Christians of various denominations, is to try to "balance the books." If we fail today, perhaps we can make it up tomorrow. While this endeavor at "goodness in arrears" is at least reasonable, from a human perspective, it is yet a failure from the divine perspective.

God is not limited by time and space: they are his creatures. God tells Moses from the burning bush, "I Am Who I Am" or "I Am That I Am" (Exodus 3:14), intimating more than immortality, but also eternity. Given the weaknesses of human language, bound by time and space, the closest we can come to expressing eternity is "a permanent, unchanging state of now-ness," an unbroken present. Thus God is not a human bill-collector: we may have to wait for tomorrow to come, hoping to keep a step ahead of a day of reckoning; but tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow are already present to God, and all our accounts are irremediably past due.

Fatalism and Determinism

A third option for dealing with sin and justification is an appeal to some species of fatalism or determinism. If human beings are not structurally free to choose their own actions, then their choices no longer matter. If I "miss the mark," if I am inadequate in meeting the objective standards of good behavior, it is the fault of the power or powers that control me. Chessmen receive no credit or blame for the actions of the chess master. This view is found among the more extreme adherents of Jansenism and among the followers of the most distorted forms of Calvinism (although not in the Calvinism of the Institutes), who tip-toe their way to accepting the Islamic principles of Insha'Allah ("as Allah wills") and kismet ("fate," "portion," "lot"), an undigested bit of outright paganism often found in that religion.

Less mystical sounding, but of a piece with the doctrines of the "religious" fatalists, are the teachings of the modern philosophical and psychological determinists. The American behaviorist B. F. Skinner, for example, called his most famous book Beyond Freedom and Dignity.

We could develop, of course, a long list of fatalists and determinists, but what interests us here is the fact that the fatalists are as prone to preaching as anyone else. Their approach to life must be inarguable, if it is to be true; but they persist in arguing it, as if the assent of a mankind without a will of its own were necessary, thus disproving their own theory by the very act of espousing it. What may not be apparent yet, however, is that each of these approaches to dealing with human fallibility, even when God is explicitly mentioned or named, remains focused on how we may please ourselves, on how we may cope personally with the variance between what we might wish to be and what we are. None actually addresses the more important issue of how we may please God.

Pleasing God

However charming or neighborly the people who take these positions are, their religion is faulty because it centers on themselves, functionally if not by conscious intention. If "religion" is understood as "that set of beliefs upon which a human being relies (from Latin religare) to make sense of the world and to order his life," then a theistic religion must center on God, and a Christian religion must center on God the Father, through Jesus Christ the Son of God (in whom the Father is "well-pleased": 2 Peter 1:17), and be under the power and teaching of the Holy Ghost. In the case of Christian religion, God must be pleased, and he must set forth the standards for our behavior. The test must be Christ, who is both God and man; and his standard is a remarkable one: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect" (Matthew 5:48).

"Uh-oh," we say to ourselves. We are right back where we started. We might try to fall back on "love," looking for our perfection in a vague "ethic of love," as did the mid-twentieth century "situationalists," but Christ also tells us, "If ye love me, keep my commandments" (John 14:15). And we already know that consistent, perfect obedience is illusory, even obedience to our own whims.

The Middle Way

The obstacles in our path to justification appear insurmountable, but there is an answer: not over the obstacles, but around them. The English expression of historic, Scriptural Christianity has a name for such a route "around the obstacles," and it is, as is the case with so many important English terms, drawn from a foreign language, in this case Latin.

The religion of the Church of England and of the various national churches founded by missionaries from the English Church is known as "Anglicanism," from the phrase "ecclesia Anglicana," the "English Church," used in Latin documents from the time "Britannia" became "Angle-land." For example, in 1215, Magna Carta guaranteed "we will and firmly command that the English Church [ecclesia Anglicana] be free" (Bettenson, Documents 166; OED). Anglican Christians call their path around the obstacles the via media: the "middle way." The via media is not an average or a compromise, however. Obstacles cannot be overcome by averaging them out: adding nine mole hills to Mt. Everest and dividing by ten does not make Mt. Everest more passable. Nor should the words via media be translated in the crudest, school-boy way as "middle of the road."

Ovid and Phaeton

I would suggest that the use of the term via media began as a literary allusion, obvious to the educated in the generations of the English Reformation and the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, to Ovid's Metamorphoses.

This mention of Ovid in the middle of a discussion of justification may seem odd to us, but we are not speaking of our sensibilities, but of the mental furniture of a previous era. From the Middle Ages on, a tradition of interpreting Ovid's pagan tales of transformation as moral fables developed among the educated in Western Europe. This "moral" method of reading Ovid is often called Ovide Moralise, after a fourteenth century work of that name, consisting of 70,000 octasyllabic lines interpreting the Roman poet's work in a "moralized" way (see Wilkinson 186).

In sixteenth century England, this interest in Ovid became a "vogue" (Wilkinson 200). In 1529, for example, Cardinal Wolsey included the Metamorphoses and the Fasti in the curriculum for Ipswich School (Wilkinson 200). It even became common at Elizabethan dinners for selected scenes from the Metamorphoses to be presented in confectionery (Wilkinson, note 201).

The specific passage that interests us is found in the story of Phaeton, the son of Apollo, the sun god. Phaetons tale begins at the end of Book 1 of the Metamorphoses and continues into Book 2. Phaeton, in an effort to prove his paternity, tricks Apollo into permitting him to drive the chariot of the sun. Before the fatal ride, Apollo gives Phaeton this advice:

To allow earth and heaven to share equally in your warmth, do not go too low, nor yet force your way into the upper air: if you drive too high, you will set the dome of heaven on fire, and if you are too low you will scorch the earth. The middle way is safest [medio tutissimus ibis] (2: 134-137; Innes 53).

Phaeton, impetuous, weak, and mortal, strays from this "middle way" and perishes, causing great harm to the earth in the process. What is clear, however, is that the "middle way" is no compromise, but a path through dangers and obstacles: the only path that is right and "works."

An awareness of the literary tradition of a "middle way" is necessary to an understanding of the Anglican via media. No movement is without its enemies and opponents, and the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, the attempt to bring religious peace and order in England in the midst of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, is no exception to this rule. It was common in the sixteenth century, and remains so, to deride the via media as a mere path of political expedience, splitting the difference between Rome and Geneva. For some, the "middle way" is a term of contempt, as William Clark noted and countered in his famous book The Anglican Reformation:

It has been sometimes charged against the Church of England that she takes what is called the Via Media, meaning by this that she makes a compromise between the party who clung to the traditional beliefs and those that advocated revolution. Even if this were the case, probability would be on her side. But it may be said with some confidence that history will not bear out this theory. The English reformers, taken as a whole, were neither eclectics nor were they mediators between extremes. They acted and they intended to act upon the principle laid down in the Ten Articles [an earlier version of the 39, given in 1536], that the faith of the Church must be determined and tested by the Scriptures and the Creeds, then by the Fathers and the early Councils of the Church. Here is a clear principle upon which the Church of England professes to base her action, and she has never departed from it (104).

If we are fair, we see exactly this principle at work in the writing and living of the Anglicans. For example, in 1632, in his A Priest to the Temple, almost a century after the Ten Articles, we read George Herbert, Anglican priest and poet, whom The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church identifies as a significant spokesman for the via media (see that entry), explaining the duties of a country parson in the maintenance of his church building in these terms:

And all this be doth, not as out of necessity, or as putting a holiness in the things, but as desiring to keep the middle way between superstition and slovenlinesse, as following the Apostle's two great and admirable rules in things of this nature: the first whereof is, 'Let all things be done decently and in order;' the second, 'Let all things be done to edification (I. Cor xiv 11:13 (Herbert 242-243: Chapter 13).

Unless the kindly Herbert is using "superstition" and "slovenliness" as code words for Rome and Geneva, a highly dubious claim in or out of context, the "middle way" is not a political trade-off of religious principle for civil peace, but a religious principle in and of itself: our sought after path through the obstacles of sin and justification.

The History of the Articles

Thus we come finally to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, "agreed upon by the Archbishops and Bishops of both Provinces, and the whole Clergy [of the Church of England], in the Convocation holden at London in the Year 1562, for the avoiding of Diversities of Opinions, and for the establishing of Consent touching true Religion" (title in English BCP: Mant 749). These Articles were drawn up in Latin only, but they were accepted by Parliament in 1571 in both Latin and English versions and made a matter of clerical subscription thereafter (Clark 301; Mant 749).

Until the time of the Reformation, the only formularies used by the Church of England were the three Creeds: the Apostles', the Nicene, and the Athanasian (Daniel 551). But in the sixteenth century, as had been the case during the time of the Christological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries (which had produced the Creeds in the forms that we have them), a need developed for a statement of faith (Kidd 1). The English Articles of Religion, in their various versions, were not meant to be a comprehensive creed (since such already existed), but to be a guide through the controversies of the time (Kidd 29).

The main stages of the development of the Articles are the Ten Articles of 1536 ("to establish Christian quietness and unity among us and to avoid contentious opinions") (Bicknell 10); the Forty-Two Articles of 1552-1553 (mainly the work of Cranmer and Ridley) (Mant 749); and the Elizabethan Thirty-Nine Articles of 1562-1571 (edited from the Forty-Two, which had been repealed by the Romanist Queen Mary) (Mant 749).

Our particular Article, "On Works before Justification," number XIII, the text of which is given in English and Latin at the beginning of this essay, remained unchanged between 1552 and 1571 (Kidd 140). It was chosen for our examination as an example of the whole, and as an illustration of the true via media through the obstacles of human sin to Christian justification before God.

Works, Grace, and Goodness

Article XIII is part of a series within the Articles that deals with the nature of man and his salvation, ranging from Article IX, "Of Original or Birth-Sin," and ending with Article XVIII, "Of Obtaining Eternal Salvation only by the Name of Christ."

We began this discussion by examining the obstacles to justification: the attempt to ignore God completely; the attempt to bargain with God by balancing the books; and the attempt to blame God for human failure by making him solely responsible for the actions of his human puppets. We saw how each of these must fall of its own inconsistency; and here in Article XIII we see the alternative, the middle way around these failures.

"Works," what we would call "good works," are declared unpleasing to God, unless they follow "justification," which is here defined, not as a human action, but as a divine outreach to man: the gift of "the Grace of Christ and the inspiration of His Spirit." This statement means, above all, that "good works" are only good in that they satisfy God's infinite standard of goodness, himself, and not our own ideas about goodness. "Goodness" is not an abstraction, but the life of God himself. Only those actions which take place within that life can be called "good," which was in fact the quality of all of Adam's actions before he broke away from unity with God by sinning. Christ's life and works are "good" and "well-pleasing" precisely because they take place in the context of the life of God.

This definition of "goodness" solves the problems of standards, and explains why fallen men cannot adhere to any standard of goodness, accurately stated or not: because man, even before the Fall was not God. Man never was capable of being good on his own. The effort to define goodness personally and individualistically is the Fall of man. One may attempt to deny the Fall as a real event, of course; but one may not reasonably deny the phenomena associated with it. And those who deny the Fall must provide another explanation for the various phenomena of "fallenness" that all men experience. The approach of this Article alone provides both an explanation and a workable solution for the problems of human fallibility.

A second implication of the Article is exactly that "workable solution": the grace of God and "faith in Jesus Christ." Human will is damaged, since we cannot do what we want to do; but faith in Jesus Christ, by the grace of God, reunites man with God, so that man's actions may take place within the life of God, according to God's standards. We saw that Christ commanded, "If you love me, keep my commandments." And while we know that we are incapable of keeping the commandments consistently, inside of a relationship of divine love, failure is forgivable, not through a weakened standard of abstract goodness, but through the mercy of divine love itself, which is also goodness itself, because both love and goodness are expressions of the one divine life of God.

Christ, who is sinless and innocent, takes to himself and suffers in his own body the results of sin. Christ who is never in arrears in his relationship with the Father can "make up the difference" of justice for us, and pay the debt that we as permanent debtors have no hope of repaying. This is not hypocrisy on Christ's part as our sovereign and good God, any more than it is hypocrisy when we forgive and love ourselves or our fellow human hypocrites. Forgiving love is the cure for hypocrisy, and not hypocritical at all, since fault must be acknowledged before it can be forgiven. Christ's death on the cross, made effective in our lives by his gifts of grace and the Holy Ghost, is an utterly realistic act of love, taking us as we are, and not as we might like to think of ourselves as being.

We discover in contemplation of this Article that the perceived obstacles to justification and good action are simply the wrongheaded establishment of our too-narrow observations of the human predicament as the principles of "religious" or ethical systems. Human beings are hypocritical; we do owe God an infinite debt for our failures; we are not as free as we could wish to be. But each of these realities is only an experience of our predicament, and not an insight into its solution. Only by moving around these barriers to good living are we able to live well and to be justified in our action.

Merit, Intention, and the Nature of Sin

Article XIII attempts to deal with one other confusion which may get in the way of our good living. There are actions of which a Christian may approve that are performed by those who are not united by grace and faith to Christ. The medieval explanation of this fact, called here the teaching of the "school authors," was that all "good" human actions have "merit" attached to them. This merit comes in two forms: merit de condigno, the grace that God "owes" to those who obey his commandments (denied in Article XII), and merit de congruo, grace that God gives, not as a matter of debt to the faithful human being, but out of his recognition of the "fittingness" of some humanly determined action (denied here in Article XIII) (Bicknell 274).

But the whole idea of human "merit" for doing "good" is silly. God created mankind to be, and to do, good. When we act well, we do only what we were created to do. Our failures are our abnormalities, at least in terms of our creation. As Christ said, "When ye shall have done all those things which are commanded of you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do" (Luke 17:10; see also Article XIV). The idea of merit is an attempt to return to human standards of goodness, but as St. John Chrysostom points out, quoting St. Paul in Romans 8:33, "It is God that justifieth" (quoted in Browne 286). And as St. Augustine argued, from St. Paul in Romans 1:17, "Quantum non est ex fide, peccatum est: "What is not of faith is sin" (Browne 332).

Intention is the final obstacle to justification. What we intend when we act, whether to please God or to please ourselves, is the moral fact that makes us able to say that we doubt not that works ". . . not done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done . . . have the nature of sin." Why we act is as important as how we act. A burglar who breaks into your home to loot it, and in the process awakens you to a fire and saves your life, has a slim chance indeed of receiving a medal for his accidental "good deed." You may benefit from his act, but this benefit was unintentional on his part.

We may benefit, as well, from the actions of those who act to please themselves instead of God, but that benefit does not transform the basic sinfulness of actions separated from the life of God into goodness. This observation is not even unique to formal Christianity. The central character of Albert Camus' existentialist novel The Fall, Jean Baptise Clamence, a respected philanthropist who acts for all the wrong reasons, is a case in point.

But Article XIII is moderate, as befits the via media, in its rejection of such actions. It claims only that actions not performed to please God have the "nature," the "ratio," of sin. What lies behind self-pleasing actions is the "cause," the "reckoning," the "motive" of sin. As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the native English word for "nature" is "kind." The Article leaves it to God to judge the individual action "a sin" and the doer "a sinner," contenting itself with the observation that such actions, done to please ourselves, are the very stuff of sin; that all self-will is of the same kind.

Conclusion: The Courage of Moderation

The "middle way" of Anglicanism, as represented by Article XIII, is an aggressive attempt to deal with the problems of human failure. It is not a compromise, but a principled endeavor to avoid the most common sorts of mistakes in living and thinking.

One hesitates, in periods of revolution, whether in the sixteenth century or in our own, to appear too moderate, lest moderation be interpreted as weakness and draw down upon itself the wolves of competing parties dwelling at the fringes. For this reason, moderation may well be more courageous than the extremes, and the center more a place of isolation than anywhere else.

Contemporary Anglicans have been tempted by the call of the extremes, and many have yielded to that call. But Anglicans are human beings, and as fallible as anyone else. What remains secure is the truth and the validity of the via media, both in its practical effort to avoid the obstacles of partisan human life and in the necessary attempt to obey and please God. This is a pastoral path, and not a polemical or political one, as pastor George Herbert noted so long ago: "A pastor is the deputy of Christ for reducing man to obedience to God" (217: Chapter 1).

And the via media is the peculiar invitation and call made by the Anglican branch of Christ's Church, by Christ's Anglican deputies, for all mankind to do as Christ did, and to be what Christ is. Thus, passing around the obstacles with Christ, rather than clinging to them, God's human creatures can experience the negation of sin and the fulfillment of justification, living by grace within the eternal life of God.

Editorial Notes

Source: Louis R. Tarsitano, An Outline of an Anglican Life (Classical Anglican Press, 1994). Reproduced on AnglicanWiki by permission of Classical Anglican Press.