The Middle Way
THE late Robert Keable, whose apostasy was a shock to many readers of his early books, returned before his death to the Christian faith. Like many of his fellow countrymen and ours, as well as many Frenchmen and Germans, when he began to examine the historical basis of Christianity he discovered it to be, as he thought, unsound. Thereupon he abandoned the ship as unsea worthy, scuttled by the pirates of higher criticism. Later, observing her still afloat, he boarded her again in the hope of discovering some treasure overlooked. He found things in better shape than he had expected. The old vessel seemed worth saving, after all. Penetrating deep into the hold, he satisfied himself that the pumps were functioning, and then gallantly offered to man a pump handle. Thus he resumed his station in the Ship of the Church.
His recent papers in the Atlantic Monthly describe this spiritual Odyssey. Many of us know every step of his way, and can follow him back on deck and down into the very bowels of the boat. We too would offer our strength to keep her afloat.
But shall we choose the pump he chose? Its name is the ‘theory of valuism.’ It leaks.
The theory that a historical Jesus who has been invested by credulity, aspiration, and human need with supernatural beauties and powers and deified into an object of worship, when stripped by critical research of these qualities, can no longer be, in his historical character, an object of worship; but that his mythological avatar is worthy of the deepest devotion of the heart, although the mind at the same time recognizes that this Christ is a fact in the realm of values only — such a theory does little to keep Christianity afloat.
If the beautiful old ship is to see service on the stormy seas of the twentieth century, instead of foundering or being moored to rot in a Roman lagoon, she must be reconditioned.
I
We require a new technique of faith. Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant, need what Dr. Sperry calls ‘that prerequisite for all doctrine which is indicated by that strangely moving word that was the earliest designation of the Christian life, a “way.”’ We need a middle way between the old blind allegiance to the religion of authority and the new blind allegiance to the agnosticism of scholarship. The Catholic says, ‘I believe because the Church tells me to do so,’ while the typical Protestant utterance too often is only, ‘I seek.’ The Christian must find a via media. He must continue to believe, but not on the old grounds; and he must continue to seek while believing.
But what must he believe? Men who claimed the dear name of Christian have waged bloody war under the banners of their definitions. The name smokes with the stench of martyrdom.
Instead of venturing to define it, let us inquire whether it is possible — and if so on what grounds — for the Christian to-day to believe the Nicene Creed. That creed finds the fullest and most dramatic development of its implications in the Catholic Mass, which corresponds to the Communion service in the Book of Common Prayer with a verbal faithfulness which might disconcert members of the Protestant Episcopal Church who were unaware of the common history of the two churches. The fact that good Protestants can repeat the Nicene Creed and take part in the Communion service without making the commitments implied in the Mass is a paradox of that history, for those commitments are definite, unequivocal. The Mass is the Creed dramatized; it is an allegory of the birth, life, and death of Jesus, teaching that he was miraculously born of a virgin, that he did miracles, that his death on the cross was ‘for’ us (mysterious preposition — stumblingblock to how many!), and that by partaking of the Mass the believer is endowed with supernatural life and grace.
But that anyone can or does or must believe all this is to many modern minds astounding and incredible. In the Mass we have what Professor Kirsopp Lake calls the ‘Christian myth.’ He says that, while all sacramental religions have their basis in myth, ‘ far the nearest approach to history is the Christian myth, which as found in the Mass tells of the incarnation and passion of a divine son of God, who instituted the Mass in order that his followers might share the glory which was his. Behind this there is history in the sense that the founder of Christianity lived and died; but not in the sense that he did so in the manner implied by the Mass.’
Here is the heart of the modern indictment of traditional Christianity.
The man who seeks grounds for holding the Nicene Creed appears to be faced by an inescapable dilemma. He must choose impalement either on the horn of valuism or on that of fundamentalism. He must either ignore history and retreat to the realm of values, forgoing any factual basis for his faith, or he must continue to assert the reliability of records proven unreliable. The latter alternative is what Professor Lake terms the sin against the Holy Ghost.
At first glance, the retreat to valuism seems to offer the Christian some hope. Must there be a historical basis for his faith? Why bother with the complex questions raised by Biblical scholars? What possible bearing has the modern historical method of dealing with ancient manuscripts upon the vivid realities of inner experience? In the ardor of worship one does not stop to assure one’s self that the person worshiped did really live in an actual geographical place where one may see today the very hills that he saw. Need the Christ of experience be the Jesus of history?
No, replies the valuist. Religion belongs to the realm of values, where postulations are, as it were, in the conditional mood. ‘God would be like this,’ he muses. ‘He would die on the cross “for” us; it is of the essence of his nature as I conceive it, in the light of my native presuppositions, that he would redeem us in exactly this manner.’
Is such a mood congenial to our Christian? Yes, on one condition: if his inner life has been touched by that reality which he can call only the Son of God. If he has never felt the imperious charm of that reality, he remains indifferent to the entire problem, he seeks no middle way. But if, fleeing from the City of Destruction, Christian has indeed laid down his burden at the foot of the cross, then incontrovertibly he knows that for him the deadly chain of cause and effect has been broken, broken by divine intervention.
Thus, to the man who brings to this quest the presupposition that he has actually been ‘saved,’ the conditional mood of valuism is congenial. To him it seems not only possible, but intensely reasonable, that God was made man and died for him; he would do so.
But such a mood exposes the believer to the danger that the next obvious step into unreality be taken, and that the mind tuned to the conditional mood adopt the ‘ contrary-to-fact’ inflection, ‘he would have done so,’ with its perhaps suppressed corollary, ‘but whether he actually did do so does not matter,’ or even ‘of course he did not really, actually, historically do so.’
The seeker is keenly aware of these suppressed corollaries. He rejects at the outset a view which by implication separates the Christ of experience from the Jesus of history, and which contents itself with the anæsthetic admission that the former is ‘a fact in the realm of values only.’
Possibly to students of philosophy this phrase implies an attitude which has some justification. To the mind of the ordinary person it implies nothing more elevating than self-deception. It seems to mean that while one knows that the ‘Christian myth’ is a myth, that while Jesus died on the cross he did not do so in the manner implied in the Mass, — that is, ‘for’ us, -— nevertheless one is justified in shutting one’s eyes to this inconvenient fact and by a kind of self-hypnotism screwing up the plane of feeling and perception out of the level of self-respecting sanity to a plateau of morbid unreality, where a strange code of truth and honor holds sway and where it is justifiable to postulate anything one wishes to believe, and then to say, I do believe it,’ and behold, the trick is turned and faith ensues! At any rate, some sort of legerdemain certainly characterizes the process.
Perhaps those who breathe the rarefied atmosphere of the realm of values are to be envied; for them these problems have been banished to a more mundane plane of existence. But our seeker craves a harsher climate. Intellectual honesty forbids him to rest content with the conditional mood in regard to religious realities.
He admits that if the adherents of the value theory mean merely that the unbeliever should recognize the value for other people of beliefs which seem to him, the unbeliever, fallacious, and that therefore he should not interfere with their faith, there is some virtue in their counsel. But they seem to mean more than this. They seem to claim that a pragmatic theory of values can replace historical guaranties for Christianity, and that thus the whole vexed question of historicity can be avoided.
II
It cannot be avoided. Either Christianity is a historical religion or it is an idle dream. The quest for a middle way is no striving with invulnerable nothings; Christians have always gloried in the fact that their faith stands or falls with its historical guaranties. Thus he who would be a Christian seems impaled on the other horn of his dilemma — fundamentalism.
For these guaranties have been discredited. They were of two sorts: the authority of the Church, and the documentary evidence found mainly in the Bible and the patristic writings. As the guarantor of the historicity of Christian belief, the Church has lost the respect of the Protestant half of the world. Too often she has denied facts which it knows to be incontrovertible. The Roman Church has maintained its authority only by dint of a tyranny insupportable to men drunk with the nineteenth century’s heady draft of intellectual freedom — a potage not purveyed in the Eternal City. The fate of George Tyrrell, only twenty years ago, leaves no doubt as to the official attitude of the Vatican toward the protestants in its fold. There can be none.
Protestantism has won a costly freedom. Yet the seeker for a middle way eagerly admits that the further a man progresses in saintliness, the deeper kinship he feels with the pronouncements of ’sanctified common sense,’ with the writings of the saints, the decisions of the councils, the policies of religious orders, the insight of consecrated people — and the greater the authority he ascribes to the voice of the Church. The rebels overstated their case. But a generation has arisen which insists that ‘sanctified common sense’ is a purely valuistic standard of truth; that while the authority of the Church may represent the best to be known of valuism, and may have an indispensable contribution to make to the discovery of historical truth, it cannot arbitrate questions of historical fact. The doctrine of the third person of the Trinity involves a value standard; the distinction to be made is one between the kinds of truth which the Church has authority to judge.
To a devout man it seems reasonable to believe that the Holy Ghost has led the Church to right judgment in interpreting facts — that is, in the field of spiritual truth. But it cannot seem reasonable to any modern man, devout or undevout, that the Church should claim sole authority in the field of historical truth — that is, in establishing what the facts are. And because earlier generations have not made this distinction, to-day many a loving child of Mother Church is sad.
The other guarantor of the historicity of Christianity has been the Bible. For Catholics the authority of the Church guarantees the Bible itself and in its downfall would carry the Scriptures with it, but of course this is not generally true of Protestants, whose religion has traditionally been ‘the Bible and the Bible only.’ And this Protestant fundamentalism is now doomed. The humblest student of the situation knows that the whole theory of literal inspiration has been discredited; that we lack the kind of historical guaranties for traditional Christianity which exist for the general outline of secular history; in short, that security is gone. It is the price we have paid for freedom.
The only article of the Creed for which we can claim historical certainty is the actual existence of Jesus at a fairly definite time and place. Not since the panic started by Renan abated has his personal existence been seriously questioned. We can therefore assert his existence as a historical fact attested by proofs such as we find acceptable in other fields of intellectual inquiry.
This is the meaning of Professor Lake’s statement that behind the Christian myth there is history in the sense that the founder of Christianity lived and died. But unless there is also history behind it in the sense that he lived and died ‘in the manner implied by the Mass,’ — which the indictment denies, — is not fundamentalist Christianity doomed?
Such a conclusion seems unavoidable. Let us, then, consider whether the indicative mood, discredited so far as it applies to the traditional guarantors of Christianity, the Church and the Bible, has a legitimate application to the subject of faith.
III
The man who finds in his Bible historical proof for the traditional dogmas of Christianity is an interesting rarity, although not as rare as he ought to be. Most of us feel we must accept the dictum of qualified students of the documentary evidence. For the modern mind has given hostages to the historian.
But scholars do not agree! The bewildered seeker for the precious distillation of fact from the strange brews of tradition, for that ultimate residue of truth which will destroy or confirm his hopes, finds only disagreement and confusion. In desperation he asks, ‘What is historical certainty?’
It may hearten him to learn that the whole concept is under fire. The modern ‘historical method’ for a time swept all before it, but after the ruin it wreaked began to be estimated its premises were brought under severe scrutiny. To-day many thoughtful scholars, notably Benedetto Croce, are revaluating it. An illuminating comment is offered by the late John Neville Figgis, an Anglican monk whose scholarship and insight commend him to seekers for the middle way. ‘Nothing is clearer,’ he observes in an essay on ‘The Historic Christ,’ ‘than that all the results of historical investigation tend to confirm the view that of all extraordinary facts the belief, and of all ordinary facts the interpretation and the causal connections . . . depends on our presuppositions at least as much as on the documentary evidence.’
To the ‘presuppositions’ of scholars must be ascribed their divergence of conclusions about the same documentary evidence. Then is there no absolute standard of historical truth? And therefore no hope of reaching certainty about the historicity of Christianity?
To answer this question we must first understand its meaning. Exactly what is involved in the conception of ‘the historicity of Christianity’? Of what Christian claims must we have ‘historical proof’ before we can believe them? And of what sort of historical proof are they susceptible?
History ‘ proves ’ that Jesus was born, that he lived and died. But as to how he did these things the record is equivocal. The early Church held that he did them in a certain way, and that belief is enshrined in the Creed. What Croce calls the memory of humanity attests its truth. But of other proof we have none — and what could we have? That is the fundamental question.
In the nature of the case, are the major claims of the Christian faith demonstrable by ordinary historical methods? Consider the virgin birth; what historical proof or disproof could we have of such a thing? None, surely, save Mary’s own testimony. Whether or not she influenced Luke’s account directly is a question still in the realm of speculation. We have proof of the beliefs of other writers about it, but these beliefs vary. Of the fact itself we have neither proof nor disproof. Could we have?
‘He was crucified,’ — we have documentary evidence of this,— but ‘for us’? What proof could we have of such a thing? There is none that Jesus himself thought he was dying for us, claim some scholars; but absence of proof does not constitute disproof. ‘And the third day he rose again.’ We have testimony for the resurrection which in the case of an ordinary event would be deemed adequate to establish its historical truth. But if one approaches that evidence with the presupposition that ‘miracles do not happen,’ what proof coidd convince one?
Professor Lake finds a difficulty in the fact that spokesmen of traditional Christianity like Dean Inge claim as the central doctrine of Christianity something not taught by Jesus himself — his divinity. This was not even taught by those apostles who most surely knew him.
But is this a real difficulty? The fact that he did not teach it seems reasonably certain, although open minds concede the possibility that future research may alter this conclusion. Also the fact that he did teach an eschatology wholly repugnant to modern ideas seems fairly well established. He spoke in the language of his times, as the parables strikingly witness. Whatever solution is ultimately reached of the vexed problem of the Fourth Gospel, in which alone the thesis of Jesus’ divinity is developed, it can be confidently asserted that lack of proof does not constitute disproof; the fact that Jesus does not, on the face of present evidence, seem to claim divine sonship does not mean that such sonship was not actually his in the sense asserted by his most ardent devotees — does not even mean that he himself did not so believe.
However, such an assertion in itself affords no basis for the Christian’s conviction that Jesus was the son of God. That conviction arises, whenever it does arise, from precisely the same facts and conditions to-day as gave it birth in the days when the author of the Gospel of John wrote his incomparable mystical record. It arises and always will arise out of a unique personal experience. The life untouched by an undeniable mystical contact with Jesus cannot achieve faith in his divinity. In short, such faith is created by a deeply biased reaction to historical evidence. It is based (and thus Christianity is ‘historical’) on one great fact of history, the life of Jesus, and on another fact of individual experience, the impact of that life on human hearts.
The conviction that he was the son of God is created by faith out of the raw material of fact and of experience. Faith is born of the union of fact with personality. Faith is interpretation.
Why is there difficulty in the natural fact that successive ages have achieved different interpretations? Is it merely fantastic to suggest that men who had the evidence of several centuries before them might be better able to estimate such a personality than the simple men who were his closest companions? Professor Lake himself admits that the historian ‘has to record the fact that just as Origen, by assimilating Neoplatonism, made Christianity possible for the educated men of the third century, so it is conceivable that an institutionalist who will do the same with science may render Christianity possible for the educated men and women of the next generation.’
If it was true for Origen that the only explanation of this personality was postulation of his divinity, it is equally true for many living men that their sense of incalculable debt to Jesus today can be explained on no other hypothesis. This is probably as near the ‘historical truth’ as we shall ever arrive. Just as long as he continues to touch men’s hearts, the allegiance of their minds will follow their instinctive confession that he is the son of God — will follow through the whole Creed. And just as long as there are hearts he fails to reach, so long will human minds balk at faith for lack of ‘historical proof.’
IV
The justice of the skeptical indictment must be admitted. Behind Christianity ‘there is history in the sense that the founder of Christianity lived and died; but not in the sense that he did so in the manner implied by the Mass.’ Of course; for how could there be historical proof of such matters? Or disproof? There is a historical element in Christianity; of that the believer has proof, although he concedes that disproof is at least imaginably possible at some future time, and that such disproof would destroy Christianity. But there is another element, which the indictment fails to distinguish — faith and its true nature, recognition of which affords the believer escape from his dilemma.
For, denied asylum in valuism with its conditional moods and miasmas, he refuses also to rest in the deceptively clear air of the indicative with its historical tense. He cannot ignore history; he cannot rewrite it; he transcends it. History must be transcended if we are to have religion at all. History is merely the raw material of faith. And the believer knows this; resting not in the valley of the historical dilemma, he mounts the hill of his synthesis, his via media, whence he sees a middle way of regarding the whole problem of religious certainty. And it is a ‘way,’a mode of spiritual activity. Neither Protestant nor Catholic, it is the way of the Christian.
The middle way removes the problem out of the conditional as well as the indicative mood into the imperative. For faith is ultimately a matter of the will. The faith of Protestantism tends to be loo much a matter of the mind. Faith belongs not only to the realm of the mind, but also to that of the intuitive faculties, and not merely to these, but essentially and finally to the realm of the will. Only in the imperative mood can we achieve faith in Christianity, or even in God’s or our own existence.
For in the last analysis these cannot be matters of intellectual certainty. The layman groping in the philosophers’ world encounters the truism that nothing can be asserted without risk of refutation, save that states of consciousness exist. That their existence proves one’s own does not follow; cogito, ergo sum is a valorous defiance of reason and all its works. The further deduction that one of these states of consciousness is the consciousness of an actually existing God is equally unfounded. Such an assertion is separated from the one ‘ knowable’ fact by countless assumptions which no conceivable logic can certify as true.
But life is larger than reason. Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas. (The heart has its reasons which the reason does not know.) Need we be paralyzed into inaction by the limitations of mind? Every movement, every action, declares the contrary. For our wills set us free to live, to act, to be.
One need know nothing of philosophy to feel that the will is the ultimate essence of personality. We seem to achieve reality through action, to be real in the degree in which we function. Not what we think, not what we feel, but what we do — that we are, that is our reality. Our wills are our true selves. There is much to recommend the conviction that the immortality in which humanity loves to believe is a persistence of our wills rather than of our minds, or our feelings, or our bodies, a persistence of the volitional aspect of our personalities. Our wills are our capacity to exist and to persist. Their activity is the only reality we can achieve in time or eternity.
Our minds, on the other hand, are our mortal enemies. Reason is a corrosion eating our vitality like rust. Its essence is of death. Admittedly, in its superficial activity it is benevolent, for the will of the normal man imposes limitations on its corrosion and yokes it usefully with the instinctive faculties. Without its help none but the most primitive faith might be possible. For when the weight of its influence is thrown on the side of belief it may prove the deciding factor in the struggle. Likewise with extreme agnosticism; probably the dam of unbelief would never be brimmed, the waters of life never overflow it, but stand stagnant forever, did not the mind channel into it the tributary streams of intellectual despair. Then the demonstrated vanity of the hope of intellectual certainty may prove the very rivulet that swells the standing waters till they roar over the brink.
But when the vanity of this hope has been proven to the average Protestant by his mind, he is prone to close the sluice, to give up. His last word is what Carlyle calls the Everlasting Nay. For he regards his own mind with awe and refuses to check its corrosive activity. But the man who accepts as final the pronouncements of reason on the problems of religious certainty, and solely on that ground abandons himself to agnosticism, falls into graver error than our fundamentalist friends, who at least believe, though they mistake the kind of proofs which faith requires.
For not the mind, but the will, is the ultimate judge of those proofs. The quest of the mind for intellectual truth is but one aspect of the soul’s quest for reality. The problem of truth in the largest sense is moral, not intellectual. The relentless corrosion of thought is not in itself a virtuous or useful activity; Teufelsdröckh, Carlyle’s gallant Protestant, is slightly melodramatic when he cries, ‘Truth, though the heavens crush me for following her!’ Confronted by a charge of intellectual insincerity, one is accused not by the mind but by the will. The soul’s conscience resides in the will. For our duty is to harmonize all our faculties, — that is, to live effectively, to achieve reality, — and to ignore dissensions among them is to incur moral guilt. The obliquity lies not, however, in defying ‘sacred’ obligations to the mind. The mind can itnpose no obligations more sacred than those imposed by other faculties. To set up the supreme court of an ‘intellectual conscience’ may be heroic, but certainly is mistaken; it is to misconceive the problem of living. That problem requires the resolution of inner strife for the achievement of reality by means of the exercise of will. The will must respect the findings of the mind, not because they are ‘sacred,’ but because it must harmonize all the faculties.
When we act we demonstrate our conviction that it is possible to act. This conviction is a matter of faith, not of logical proof; the only proof is action. Faith in our own existence is a matter of will. Likewise, faith in the existence of God — the first article of the Creed — and all subsequent articles.
V
Is faith, then, within reach of the will? Can we ‘will to believe’? Can a mere act of the human will secure satisfaction for the great primal need of the human spirit?
If so, why does the search continue? What explains the quest for a middle way? Why is there a religious problem at all?
The believer replies in a paradox: faith is at once a matter of willing and of non-willing. Let the mind do its best and its worst, worrying the dry bones of controversy and examining the subjective grounds of beliefs, evaluating experience and instinct; let the spirit respond to all the influences of beauty, truth, and goodness; then let the will set its teeth into that conclusion which best meets the test of general congruity, which best fits in with those presuppositions which are the scaffolding of personality. In the last analysis, there remains a choice. The whole framework of the Creed rests on the primal claim that Jesus was the son of God; granted this assumption, the rest follows. This primal assumption cannot be proved by the historical method, but only by the witness of the soul which experiences it. And the soul cannot of its own volition experience it. True, the act of will is necessary; but it must be followed — and this is the paradox—by an act of surrendering the will. It is not enough to cry, ‘Lord, I believe! Help thou mine unbelief!’
Everyone who has sought faith must have had the experience of reaching at last a sort of paralysis. He weighs in the balance the alternative solutions, to believe or not to believe. Then he concludes that a simple choice must be made; but he is unable to make that choice because he is willing it so strongly! His will has so firm a grasp of the two balances that their equilibrium cannot be disturbed.
‘Let go,’ cry those who have gone before, ‘and let the grace of God tip the scale!’
Such a letting go is impossible to some temperaments; to others, deeply sensitive, it seems a temptation to sin. But fortunate indeed are they who are able to do it without reserve and to throw themselves on the love of God. These let themselves experience Jesus as the son of God — and that experience creates a presupposition which tips the balance. By the act of relinquishing their wills they draw very near Jesus’ own experience. Not only must they pray, ‘Help thou mine unbelief!’ but they must relinquish even that prayer and merge all needs and all their being in one act of self-surrender, of will-surrender, ‘Not my will, but thine!’
The birth of faith is a supernatural event. Therefore it is incomprehensible to reason and inaccessible to will.
Down the ages seekers have had to learn that only when the will has toilfully raised up its cathedral against the dark sky of doubt, and then laid the uttermost oblation — itself— on the cold altar, does God light the fire there.
VI
Belief in the essential Christian dogmas resolves itself, then, into a simple question: ‘Shall I, or shall I not, let God give me the gift of faith?’ And into one other question: ‘Will He?’
Admittedly the whole problem is so fraught with difficulty that the modern man often asks himself if the prize is worth the struggle. The solution, if attained at all, must inevitably for a long initiatory period require the maintenance of a delicate equilibrium in one’s spiritual life. One may well be daunted by the demands it makes on time alone; in the rush of life it is easy to let solutions go by default. For example, the difficulties raised by the irreconcilability of the evolutionary conception of truth and the traditional view of ‘ the faith once delivered to the saints’ seem insuperable, unless one submits to a sort of tension between the ideas of immanence and transcendence; God came down from Heaven and was made man, yes, but man is also growing up toward Heaven, aided by the man who died on the cross for him. Each conception supplements the other. But such a tension is not a source of peace.
However, if the intellectual difficulties are forever a thorn in the side of the believing Christian, the spiritual difficulty seems a far more troublesome thorn in the seeker’s side. Teufelsdröckh may not admit that the Christian has the better of the argument, nor does the latter claim to have; but he does know that the Christian has the better of the facts — especially those Christians whom Professor Lake calls ‘institutionalists,’ who desire to remain in a Church whose sacraments and traditions are priceless to them, but who feel the intellectual difficulties too poignantly to remain on the old terms.
Another objection to a Christianity phrased in the imperative mood is the universal human hunger for certainty; we crave the indicative mood. We seek a more comfortable good than faith. Who better than the embattled believer knows the terrible pang of wistfulness for certainty, for some shred of proof that Jesus was what faith hopes he was? Millions of souls hungering for this certainty have pilgrimaged to the shrines of Christendom, longing to recreate for themselves the reality, the homely human reality, of the infinitely (and perhaps to be eternally) mysterious events of that young Syrian’s life and death. The great chalice of Antioch with its antique portraits overwhelms the devout heart with the thought that these may be real portraits, that perhaps the young Syrian did look like this. The thought is insupportable. Not because it would alter the content of our faith, but because any new shred of evidence would bring God so near man that we should have to do something about Christianity at last. Ah, that would be a day of wrath!
There remains the worst enemy of faith, the doubt in the believer’s own heart. Sometimes he feels that the solution of the middle way, the postulation of faith in the imperative mood, belittles the reason by its undeniable reductio ad hominem. Even after conversion, the intellectual difficulties of faith are forever a thorn in his side. The Church is a hard mistress. Often he wonders how he could possibly have arrived at this middle way! On the plane of ordinary healthy living, where a reasonable degree of adjustment to life obtains, where problems lose their urgency, perhaps he does not feel the need of a spiritual attitude so alien to the prevailing temper of ‘healthy-mindedness’; but on the plane of spiritual need, where the starker realities of sin and loss loom before the solitary soul, that soul knows full well that the thing which meets its need is a fact, its need has been met, it has been saved, and the believer trusts his God to help him surmount the rational difficulties raised by that fact.
The middle way for Christianity does lead to a reductio ad hominem. But it is savingly ad Hominem!