The following post is adapted from chapter 12 of my book Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright. One of the most predictable and wearisome objections launched by conservatives against traditionalists is that the latter “make an idol out of the TLM.” You’ll find a large number of Catholics on social media who say something like: “I’m not a liberal but I’m certainly not a trad, either. I take a middle path, the magisterial one.” This balloon needs to have a bright, sharp pin stuck into it.—PAK
The ancients liked to say: “Nothing in excess.” Make sure you strike a balance. Give a little, take a little. Don’t go overboard. Life is full of compromises. Whatever you do, avoid the extremes. The Bible says it, too: “Do not swerve to the right or to the left; turn your foot away from evil” (Prov 4:27). The via media, the middle way, the “golden mean,” is a legitimate concept. As Aristotle explains, every moral virtue consists in a mean between extremes, as courage is a mean between cowardice and rashness.
Problems arise, however, when the concept of the via media is applied to the realm of ideas, where it can become a substitute for real thinking, for the hard work of clinging to the truth even when it is so unpopular or so unrecognized that it looks extreme. There are times when the middle way is the wrong way. There are times when the middle way is the broad path that leads to destruction.
How easily the via media logic can be abused! “Believers are too credulous, atheists are too assertive in the opposite direction, so the via media is agnosticism.” “Sedevacantists go to one extreme in their rejection of the reigning pope, while most traditional Catholics are too flaccid in their acceptance of him; the via media is the SSPX.” “The Eastern Orthodox have a rich tradition but are separated from Rome. Roman Catholics have largely given up on tradition but are still in union with Rome. The via media, then, is to be a Byzantine Catholic.” Or, to take a real historical example, the position that John Henry Newman believed and defended for many years: “Roman Catholicism is ancient but overgrown with superstition; Protestantism is free from superstition but cut off from antiquity. The via media is Anglicanism.” One could play this game for a long time, and always come out wrong.
Then it dawned on Newman, as he studied debates in the ancient Church, that sometimes the three parties—two extremes and a middle—were ranged in such a way that the orthodox faith, the true doctrine, stood at one of the extremes. For example, at the time of the Arian crisis, there were Arians, Semi-Arians, and Nicaeans. In the political battles and regional councils, the Semi-Arians were able to position themselves as holding the reasonable middle ground between the extremists who denied any likeness of nature between Father and Son (the Anomoeans) and the other extremists who, in their view, conflated the Son and the Father by identifying them both as God, “consubstantial” (the Homoousians). In holding their false view of the subordinating “similarity” of the Son to the Father, they showed that they did not grasp—or did not wish to grasp—the Nicaean faith of St. Athanasius and other orthodox fathers, who, though a beleaguered minority, valiantly confessed the truth and ultimately prevailed.[1] The Holy Spirit did not validate the via media; He led the Church to reaffirm what looked like an extreme to nearly everyone at the time. It was pondering the implications of episodes like this that led Newman to relinquish his via media theory.
I once saw a bulletin from England in which the pastor stated that there is a via media between progressivism and traditionalism. An interesting claim! What kind of a mean is it, I wonder? No doubt we can have too much of the wrong kind of progress, or too heavy a dose of that liberalism condemned by Leo XIII and other pontiffs; but, considering that Catholicism is entirely a religion of tradition (the Greek word parádosis and the Latin word traditio mean “handing down”: even our Scriptures and the Magisterium are part of what is handed down), can we have “too much” tradition? Can we receive too well, embrace too heartily, live too fully, love too ardently, and pass on too carefully the sacred inheritance of the Church?
The same pastor then claimed that there is a mean between “liturgical silliness or corruption” and “liturgical snobbery.” Perhaps we know what he means by the latter, but the way it’s phrased supports my general point: it’s easy to mold the description of one’s opponents in such a way that one ends up comfortably as the via media. Maybe we should concentrate less on persons or trends, and more on the truths we should adhere to with all our mind, the goods we should aspire to with all our heart, the beauty we should long for with all our soul, the holiness we should pursue with all our strength. In this way, we will be the right kind of “extremists.”
I couldn’t help thinking of Newman when I read an article, “Tradition is the Democracy of the Dead,”[2] penned by another Anglican clerical convert, the popular author Fr. Dwight Longenecker. Fr. Longenecker assures us that he is a lover of tradition—but not excessively. He says, rightly, that one should be or become Catholic for the sake of its 2,000-year-old tradition—or, more accurately, its 4,000-year-old tradition, since the law, prophecies, and worship of Israel are fulfilled in the Church. But he also says that, since tradition is not static or unchangeable, we need to be willing to change with the times, according to the judgment calls emanating from Rome, and not make an “idol” of the past. (One can certainly live free of fear that today’s Rome will make an idol of the past; one might rather fear its making an idol of the present or of the future.)
