Remembering Tradition

The Imaginative Conservative ran a profoundly insightful post today from Josef Pieper. The topic is tradition. Among other things, the distinction Pieper draws between learning and tradition is crucial. That he distinguishes the two does not mean that the two are irrelevant to each other; it is that the former must take its cue from the latter as all cultural matters should.

The first point to underscore here is that we receive tradtion, we do not control it. What we do is in service to tradition; tradition gives life to what we do. Teachers and school leaders would do well to ponder this passage:

"Whoever truly wants to hand something on must not speak of tradition. Rather he must take the pains to see to it that the contents of tradition, the old truths, are made ever present through a living language, through creative translations, through constant confrontation not only directly with the present but above all else with the future. With this, it becomes clear that the “act of tradition” itself is an exacting business, and that the living process of handing on a?traditum?is a dynamic matter."

All those matters—each one, an example of exercising tradition, is the stuff of leading students out into the world and its future by way of what our forebears gave us and by way of what now give to our students.

Tradition, argues Pieper, is personal and a matter of belief. By personal is not meant something hyper-subjective: "my truth," or "my personal tradition." Rather, tradition denotes our truth, our heritage. It carries the sensibility that we are bound together: we, the dead, the living, and the yet to be born. In turn, we accept tradition, not because we first verify it as true but because we accept it on personal grounds, that is, from those whose authority we trust:

"I do not accept the tradition simply because it is 'tradition,' but rather because I am thoroughly convinced that it is true and valid. Now, admittedly, I cannot prove its validity, and here I am fundamentally in the same position Socrates was with the mythical wisdom about a judgment after death. If it were otherwise, then I would not need to receive the message from someone else; then I would already know it myself. What all this means is that the offer and the reception of the tradition have the structure of belief. Indeed, it is belief since in the final analysis, belief means nothing other than to accept something as true and valid, not on the basis of one’s own insight and experience, but rather insofar as one trusts someone else. We are not yet dealing with the religious concept. It is rather the quite common concept of belief, as we normally use it."

Who is it we trust? The founders of our culture, from Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome and the keepers of our culture who, generation to generation, have judged our culture, preserved it, and advanced it both by further developing it and by handing it on. Here, we speak of patrimony, that is, in the most important sense, our forebears who gave us the foundation and bearings of our culture, tradition, and the specific form of what they gave us, the content of tradition. In particular, Pieper invokes two major sources of normative authority: revelation and philosophy. He moves seamlessly between the two as inherently related to one another and as the two chief foundational sources from which springs the tradition we accept.

If we speak of fathers, as in patrimony, and as in the tradition that is given us, we also speak of apostles and of apostolic authority, since tradition is very much rooted in what God revealed and is, in turn, the responsibility of those he commissions. An apostle speaks and acts with the authority of the one who sends him, namely Christ. Apostolic authority rests in each of Christ's representatives, whether the original twelve, their successors, or each baptized Christian. Each one's authority must cohere to what Christ revealed in himself and empowered by his Spirit. Revelation meets tradition in the one who responds faithfully to Christ and thereby plays his role in passing on through tradition what Christ revealed.

The intrinsic relation between tradition and revelation has vital implications for our times. In face of the current societal-wide divisions that mark our times, we do well to contemplate Pieper's claim regarding the possibilities of unity:

"True unity among men must have its roots in the commonality of?the?tradition—in that common participation in the holy tradition reaching back to an utterance of God Himself." Culture is downstream from revelation. Tradition encompasses both and makes possible a life together.

In other words, unity is achieved by cohering our lives to what God revealed and to the tradition that hands down that revelation. We need no less than a renewal, then, of apostolic consciousness and responsibility. It is no time for Christians to be insular, nor to devise ways to live in the world that are of the world, even if those ways are of the highest levels of learning.

Let's come back full circle to our roles as teachers and school leaders. Pieper rightly says that learning and tradition are not the same. The former must takes its bearings from the latter in order to be authentic and in order to serve the liberal purposes, classically construed, that education is meant to serve.

Andrew J. Zwerneman is co-founder and president of Cana Academy. He blogs weekly at www.canaacademy.org and is the author of History Forgotten and Remembered (2020) and The Life We Have Together: A Case for Humane Studies, A Vision for Renewal (2022). Andrew hosts Cana Academy’s The Best Books and is the narrator for the forthcoming series of films, HISTORY250?.