The Vindication of Tradition

Continuing from old class ed email conversations…

Here’s a tantalizing little quote from the Jaroslav Pelikan book, The Vindication of Tradition, p. 53 ff.

To begin at the beginning, in fact with our own beginnings: tradition derives some of its vindication from the sheer fact of its existence, ‘just because it’s there,’ as the cliche about mountain climbing says. Coming to terms with the presence of the traditions from which we are derived is, or should be, a fundamental part of the process of growing up. Obviously, that ought to include a knowledge of the contents of those traditions. As I have suggested earlier, we do not have a choice between being shaped by our intellectual and spiritual DNA and not being shaped by it, as though we had sprung into being by some kind of cultural spontaneous generation. Some teenagers (including certain teenagers well past their teens) seem to wear their clothes as though they had invented sex; yet their very presence here is an indication that someone must have thought of it before.”

! LOL

He continues:

We do, nevertheless, have some choices to make. One, to which my first lecture was devoted, is whether to understand our origins in our tradition or merely to let that tradition work on us without our understanding it, in short, whether to be conscious participants or unconscious victims. Once understood, the tradition, unlike our biological DNA, does confront us with a further choice, discussed in my second lecture: the choice between recovery and rejection, with a range of possibilities that combine partial recovery with partial rejection. That choice, too, is real. But to base recovery on ignorance and implicit faith, as some previous generations have done, or to base rejection on ignorance and bigotry, as many in our own generation have done, is not worthy of a free and rational person. We do well to recognize as infantile an attitude toward our parents that regards them as all-wise or all-powerful and that is bind to their human foibles. But we must recognize no less that it is adolescent, once we have discovered those foibles, to deny our parents the respect and reverence that is their due for having been, under God, the means through which has come the only life we have.

Maturity in our relation to our parents consists in going beyond both a belief in their omniscience and a disdain for their weakness, to an understanding and a gratitude for their decisive part in that ongoing process in which now we, too, must take our place, as heirs and yet free. So it must be in our relation to our spiritual and intellectual parentage, our tradition. An abstract concept of parenthood is no substitute for our real parents, an abstract cosmopolitanism no substitute for our real traditions. Jerusalem truly is “the mother of us all,” or perhaps more precisely the grandmother of us all, with Athens as our other grandmother (since everyone is entitled to two grandmothers). The tension and the complementarity between Athens and Jerusalem has been a recurring theme, a sort of melodic counterpoint, of our tradition. And it must still be, for us as descendants of those two grandmothers, with that melody that we learn to sing, and from that counterpoint that we go on to compose melodies of our own. To be tone-deaf to the tradition is, therefore, to be unable to hear the voices of the past or the present — or of the future.”

And now for two other notions that collide with genuine tradition:

It is, then, a mark of an authentic and living tradition that it points us beyond itself. To describe that quality of tradition, it may be helpful to invoke a distinction from tradition, specifically from Eastern Christian tradition. In the course of the iconoclastic controversies, the vigorous debates of the eighth and ninth centuries over the propriety of the use of images, the distinction evolved between a token, an idol, and a true image or icon. An idol purports to be the embodiment of that which it represents, but it directs us to itself rather than beyond itself; idolatry, therefore, is the failure to pay attention to the transcendent reality beyond the representation. A token, on the other hand, does point us beyond itself, but it is an altogether accidental representation that does not embody what it represents. An authentic image, which came to be called icon in Greek and then in other languages, is what it represents; nevertheless, it bids us look at it, but through it and beyond it, to that living reality of which it is an embodiment. Applied to the question of how we may respect a tradition about which historical research has disclosed the embarrassing “true story,” this distinction, which is I grant a bit abstract (it is, after all, the product of Greek thought and language), serves to identify a characteristic of genuine tradition that makes it a kind of icon and that sets it apart from tradition falsely conceived.

An idol, I said, purports to be the embodiment of that which it represents, but it directs us to itself rather than beyond itself. Tradition becomes an idol, accordingly, when it makes the preservation and repetition of the past an end in itself; it claims to have the transcendent reality and truth captive and encapsulated in that past, and it requires an idolatrous submission to the authority of tradition, since truth would not dare to appear outside it. Such was the conception of the authority of tradition that Luther and the Reformation, but then even more Jefferson and the Enlightenment, perceived (whether accurately or inaccurately) in medieval thought, and against which they protested.

What the Enlightenment tended to substitute for it was the definition of tradition as a token, a purely arbitrary representation that does not embody what it represents. The universal truths and values in the name of which Jefferson and the Enlightenment defied the idolatry of tradition did not depend for their validity on any of the specific traditions, whether or Jerusalem or Athens. Hence it was not essential to cultivate and transmit those traditions once the universal values had been achieved; they were, to use a metaphor familiar from the history of mysticism, the ladder which one climbed to reach the window, but which one no longer needed once the window of universal truth was open. That view of tradition seems to assume, however, that the tradition will not be replaced by something far worse, and that the universal truths and values, once attained, no longer need the tradition to sustain them — an assumption for which the history of the past two centuries does not provide any great reassurance. For, as Clifford Geertz has pointed out, ‘It is, in fact, precisely at the point at which a political system begins to free itself from the immediate governance of received traditions… that formal ideologies tend first to emerge and take hold.’

Tradition qualifies as an icon, by contrast with both of the other views, when it does not present itself as coextensive with the truth it teaches, but does present itself as the way that we who are its heirs must follow if we are to go beyond it — through it, but beyond it — to a universal truth that is available only in a particular embodiment, as life itself is available only to each of us only in a particular set of parents.

Oofta. (Read that one again.)

Athens and Jerusalem are both human cities. Neither of them is, as such, the City of God ‘undimmed by human tears,’ that civitas Dei of which Augustine, and before him the seers of the Bible as well as Plato, all caught a vision. Yet it is to the traditions of Athens and Jerusalem that their spiritual descendants must turn, over and over again — not to linger there permanently, but to find there, for each generation of descendants, what we for our part shall not recognize elsewhere (though it certainly is elsewhere, if God is one, as the Shema of Judaism and the Nicene Creed of Christian orthodoxy confess) unless we have first seen it here. That is how tradition as an icon sets itself apart from both the idol and the mere token. In so doing, it vindicates itself by managing to be as universal as the theorists of the token rightly insist that it must be, and yet at the same time as particular as the devotees of the idol correctly sense that it should be. But it refuses to choose between the false alternatives of universal and particular, knowing that an authentic icon, a living tradition, must be both.”

I haven’t read this in several years (my email archive shows I originally excerpted it in 2002). It bears rereading… and serious reflection.