Paradosis: The Living Memory of the Church

Holy Tradition begins not as a body of information but as an act — paradosis, the handing-over of the whole life of grace from person to person and generation to generation within the Church. This file recovers the New Testament and patristic sense of the word, and states the governing thesis of the modern Orthodox account: that Tradition is the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church, not a heap of ancient customs venerated for their age.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Word and Its Weight

The Greek noun paradosis derives from the verb paradidomi, “to hand over, to deliver, to transmit.” In the New Testament the word cuts both ways. It can name the merely human tradition that nullifies the commandment of God — “you leave the commandment of God, and hold to the tradition of men” (Mark 7:8; cf. Matthew 15:3, 6) — and it is this negative usage that the English word “tradition” too often calls first to mind. But St. Paul uses the same word in a wholly positive and constitutive sense for the apostolic deposit itself: “I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions (tas paradoseis) even as I have delivered them to you” (1 Corinthians 11:2); “So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter” (2 Thessalonians 2:15); “Now we command you, brethren… that you keep away from any brother who… does not live according to the tradition (paradosin) that you received from us” (2 Thessalonians 3:6). The Gospel itself is described in the vocabulary of transmission: “I delivered to you (paredoka) as of first importance what I also received (parelabon), that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3).

Two things are decisive in this Pauline usage. First, Tradition is not opposed to Scripture; it is the very mode by which the apostolic message — including the Scriptures — is delivered and received. St. Paul can speak of a tradition transmitted “by word of mouth or by letter” (2 Thessalonians 2:15) as one thing handed on in two manners, not two competing sources (Ware, The Orthodox Church, new ed., Penguin, 1993, pp. 195–196, on the New Testament sense of paradosis). Second, what is delivered is not merely propositions but a person and a life: Christ crucified and risen, received in the Spirit. Tradition, in this original sense, is paradosis — the act of handing over the Gospel, which is finally the handing-over of the life of God to human beings.

Not the Veneration of the Past

Because the English word “tradition” so easily connotes old custom, the modern Orthodox theologians have taken pains to say what Holy Tradition is not. It is not, first of all, the sum of ancient practices, however venerable. Fr. Georges Florovsky insisted that “Tradition is not a principle striving to restore the past, using the past as a criterion for the present. Such a conception of tradition is rejected by history itself and by the consciousness of the Church”; Tradition is rather “the constant abiding of the Spirit and not only the memory of words” (Florovsky, “The Catholicity of the Church,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, Collected Works vol. 1, Nordland, 1972). To reduce Tradition to the antiquarian preservation of the past is, on this account, precisely to lose it: what is handed on is a living thing, and a living thing cannot be embalmed.

Kallistos Ware sharpens the point with a phrase that became a commonplace of the modern discussion: “Tradition is not only kept by the Church — it lives in the Church, it is the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church.” The outward monuments — Scripture, the Creed, the councils, the Fathers, the canons, the Liturgy, the icons — are the forms in which Tradition is expressed, but Tradition itself is the Spirit-given life that produced them and continues to interpret them (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 196–198). Tradition is therefore better described as the Church’s living memory than as her archive: memory, because it is the continuous self-identity of the one Body across time; living, because it is not the recollection of a dead past but the present activity of the Spirit who “will bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:26) and who “will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13).

The Pneumatological Ground

This is why the modern Orthodox definition of Tradition is pneumatological before it is historical. Vladimir Lossky’s celebrated formulation states it: “The pure notion of Tradition can then be defined by saying that it is the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church, communicating to each member of the Body of Christ the faculty of hearing, of receiving, of knowing the Truth in the Light which belongs to it, and not according to the natural light of human reason” (Lossky, “Tradition and Traditions,” in In the Image and Likeness of God, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974, p. 152). On this reading, Tradition is not primarily the content transmitted but the very power of transmitting and receiving — the Spirit’s gift by which the Church is able to recognize the truth as her own. It is, in Lossky’s phrase, “the critical spirit of the Church” — the faculty by which she discerns what is authentically hers from what is alien (Lossky, “Tradition and Traditions,” 1974, pp. 156–157).

The scriptural warrant for this pneumatological reading is the Lord’s own promise of the Spirit as the abiding presence who continues His work: “the Counsellor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things” (John 14:26); “he will guide you into all the truth… he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (John 16:13–14). The apostolic decree of the Council of Jerusalem — “it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28) — is read by the tradition as the paradigm of how the Church knows and hands on the truth: not by antiquarian retrieval nor by private ingenuity, but by the Spirit dwelling in and guiding the whole Body (Florovsky, “The Function of Tradition in the Ancient Church,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, 1972). St. Irenaeus in the second century had already tied the two together inseparably: “Where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and every kind of grace” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies III.24.1; trans. ANF I).

What Is Handed On

If Tradition is the Spirit’s life in the Church, then what it hands on is nothing less than the whole of that life. St. Basil the Great, in his classic appeal to the unwritten Tradition, listed the sign of the cross, the eastward orientation of prayer, the words of the epiclesis, the blessing of the baptismal water and oil, the triple immersion, and the practices surrounding Pascha and Pentecost — all received “from the tradition of the Apostles, in the mystery,” none of them written in Scripture, yet all “of the same force for piety” (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 27.66; trans. Anderson, SVS Press, 1980). Basil’s point is not that these customs are a second revelation competing with the Bible, but that the apostolic faith was never handed on as bare text: it was handed on as a whole way of life — worship, prayer, the manner of the sacraments, the very posture of the body — of which the written Scriptures are the supreme but not the isolated part.

Thus Tradition, rightly understood, is comprehensive. It embraces the Scriptures (as its written core), the Creed, the dogmatic definitions and canons of the councils, the Liturgy and the sacraments, the writings and the phronema of the Fathers, the iconographic and hymnographic inheritance, the ascetical and monastic experience, and the lives of the saints — not as a checklist of items but as the many facets of one life (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 196–197; and the topical article Holy Tradition, on the outward forms). To “keep the Tradition,” on this understanding, is to remain within that living communion — to receive the faith not as an inherited object but as a life continually given by the Spirit and continually handed on. The distinction between this one living Tradition and the plurality of its outward forms is the theme of the companion file.

See Also

• Tradition and Traditions — Lossky’s distinction of the one Tradition from the many traditions
• Scripture within Tradition — Scripture as the written core of the one living Tradition
• Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi — the Liturgy as the handing-on of the whole life of prayer
• Tradition as Life, Not Archaeology — the same thesis worked out for the spiritual life
• Holy Tradition — the topical article this collection expands

References

• Lossky, Vladimir. “Tradition and Traditions.” In In the Image and Likeness of God, 141–168. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (The pneumatological definition, p. 152; Tradition as the critical spirit of the Church.)
• Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. Collected Works vol. 1. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (“The Catholicity of the Church”; “The Function of Tradition in the Ancient Church.”)
• Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (The New Testament sense of paradosis; Tradition as the life of the Holy Spirit; the outward forms.)
• Basil of Caesarea. On the Holy Spirit 27.66. Trans. David Anderson. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980. (The unwritten apostolic traditions.)
• Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies III.24.1. Trans. ANF vol. 1. (The Church and the Spirit.)
• Scripture: Mark 7:8; Matthew 15:3–6; 1 Corinthians 11:2; 15:3; 2 Thessalonians 2:15; 3:6; John 14:26; 16:13–14; Acts 15:28.