History and Tradition

Tradition is man’s making of man. It is totally engaging and forming from our earliest years even if we reject some part of it. The Church sees tradition and scripture as together forming the source whence flows the Word of God into our hearts. When it comes to history a method is involved in checking some truth or developing an understanding of some event. When it comes to tradition we are dealing with what has already shaped us and so to dismiss some part of tradition is to dismiss some part of ourselves. It is only something one would do with a very good reason – but the Cross which we take up as Christians means dismissing parts of our tradition shaped as it may be by human folly. So an imperialist must give up certain ideas to live in a more fraternal world or someone brought up with uncles replacing uncles has got to reshape his or her life if the sacramental bond of marriage is to reshape their life. Surely it is a great thing if, over a lifetime, a person recognises a fault in their tradition and manages to reverse it.

What is transmitted by tradition is not just a way of life but a set of meanings and values that inform a way of life. The Enlightenment, excited by scientific discoveries, especially Newton’s Mechanics and revolted by religious wars and persecutions, though that reason alone was sufficient to replace tradition. Without realising it the Enlightenment was echoing the dismissal of tradition by the ‘Sola Scriptura’ of the Protestant Reformation, which dismissed the tradition of the Church when it came to Revelation. For some strange reason, for which I suppose we should be grateful, the Protestant movement for the most part did not dismiss the Councils of the Church in the first millennium. Luther though dismissed St James’ epistle as an epistle of straw because of its doctrine on works and the Protestant world felt able to dismiss the Apocrypha, various texts, not strictly in the ancient ‘Law and Prophets’, which the Church found useful for teaching and recognised as ‘inspired’, and so part of the Bible. To someone in this tradition, I suppose the question might arise: is St John’s Gospel inspired? On the positive side it is worth noting that a strict Baptist, who would hold that most of the Bishops at Nicaea were not Christian since they were baptized in infancy, nevertheless holds the doctrine of Nicaea as true. Maybe they would hold that the divine nature of Christ is obvious from Scripture anyway, so it is not because of Nicaea that they hold the Nicene doctrine.

By disregarding tradition, the Protestant world got rid of the need for a Church, and yet has endlessly to define things to give a meaning to the term. By disregarding tradition the Enlightened world has got rid of community except in the enlightened groups who would define what community is and according to their power impose with sanctions and promote with rewards what community is. So community is – the communist vanguard and those who are with them, the Nazi leadership ditto, the capitalist world with those who have sold their soul to the mighty dollar, the permissive world (with the one exception of child abuse) which regards itself as making ‘a civilised society’ (Roy Jenkins). Bend a little here and child abuse will become part of the growing up of every little one into ‘civilised society’. Or, community is – the construction of State Benefits and the only requirement is to fill in countless forms correctly. The world of reason alone proves itself to be the world of reason without a major promise and so it is a world of conflicting world views in which Truth appears to be a matter of power.

Actually, the task of the theologian is not to disparage reason which with corresponding affection is the greatest natural gift of God to man. When I write in with natural affection I am drawing on St Augustine’s work on the Trinity. Man is made in the image of the Trinity. When he understands something true he expresses it. When he expresses it, he loves it. Truth then is not for any subject a mere series of punctilio expressions of what is, like a telephone directory, but it is such that when it is expressed, it cannot but be loved. So someone making up the telephone directory, collecting data from this source and that, and typing in the correct number against the correct name will have a certain satisfaction which is a proportionate emotional experience, a proportionate love. In a day’s work done to perfection, the fact of limitation belonging to the task may be overcome by a great satisfaction. So in the Trinity the eternal expression of the Word, expressing all that the Father is, even unto personhood, grounds the eternal expression of the Spirit, of love, of personhood, who proceeds from the Father and Son.

Man working is not man consuming but man constructing and in constructing an object he constructs his own self. His love grows not just for what he has made but for his own self as maker. In this way work is an erlebneis, an experience which somehow not only gives identity as appreciated but opens to the infinite.

Last week, I suggested that erlebneis might be not just individual – an individual unit of meaning – but also collective – I instanced the Second World War – so that meaning is expressed and satisfaction is experienced by a multitude. If insights coalesce in an individual they can be shared by the group. There is a contagion too of feeling. There is a development of identity. So one gets an historical event, erlebneis, which is communicable to the next generation.

If one can identify such an erlebneis, such an event, one has perhaps a carrying wave of meaning moving into the future, and it is on such a wave that the gospel too, a distinct erlebneis, can be carried.

There is a task here for while a secular event may engage the extreme of love and self sacrifice it is also mixed with frailty and fault. So Evelyn Waugh’s Trilogy on the Second World War finds faith as a thread mingling with absurdity and infidelity.

The genuine values of the carrying wave therefore need to be discerned from so much else, but in that discernment, the values become values not just for one people but for all mankind. Maybe the notion of human rights is a sort of varying wave emerging from the Second World War, but it needs enriching to include the unborn and the frail and it needs broadening to include duties. So by its consistency, by its comprehension and by its sacrifice around this notion the Church bears witness to divine truth but also to a natural truth.

The erlebneis which gives a collective identity may be sad of course – so the Irish Potato Famine or the persecution of Catholics in these islands, but I think with the endurance of trials, there is always a positive side to be found. Those who simply raise the sword and triumph have I think, a problem, for the message can hardly be universalised

I think the notion of a collective erlebneis is part of the Second Enlightenment which is reversing the positions of the eighteenth century Enlightenment for it restores the idea of tradition and helps us understand how we have all been shaped in ways beyond counting and analysis by the history of our people, by the histories of our peoples. I recall an American saying that an undoubtedly good thing in history was the American Declaration of Independence. I did point out it looked different from the English perspective! The carrying wave emergent has to satisfy both sides. Maybe here the carrying wave is the doctrine of subsidiarity. Those in authority should not be too heavy handed. A part of what philosophy can do is to translate a particular good which has been experienced at a particular time by this people or that into a more general proposition acceptable to all people of good will. It belongs to the Church to insist on the goodness and power of reason. She does not generate the contemporary ‘carrying wave’: that emerges from history: she can though promote what is good and point out and condemn what is evil. Rather as a surf boarder used the waves, she may use the carrying wave to express yet higher truths. So the rights of man point to the rights of God and so to sin and righteousness.