Tradition and Traditions

The single most influential distinction in the modern Orthodox doctrine of Tradition: Vladimir Lossky’s separation of Tradition (capital T) — the one life of the Holy Spirit in the Church — from the traditions (small t), the plural customs, rites, and formulations that are its vehicles. This file expounds the distinction, the “vertical” and “horizontal” dimensions Lossky assigns to it, and how it lets the Church honor her inheritance without absolutizing every part of it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Problem the Distinction Solves

Everyone who speaks of “Orthodox Tradition” faces an immediate ambiguity. Does the word name the fasting rules, the calendar, the chant, the architectural styles, the national customs — the vast accumulated deposit of Orthodox practice? Or does it name something deeper and single, of which all these are only expressions? The answer of the modern Orthodox theologians, given its sharpest form by Vladimir Lossky in the essay “Tradition and Traditions” (1957, in French; English in In the Image and Likeness of God, 1974), is that both are called “tradition” but they are not the same, and that failing to distinguish them is the source of endless confusion — both the confusion that would canonize every custom as untouchable, and the confusion that would dismiss Tradition as nothing but a pile of customs (Lossky, “Tradition and Traditions,” in In the Image and Likeness of God, SVS Press, 1974, pp. 141–145).

Lossky’s move is to reserve the capital-T word for the one thing and to speak of the many things in the plural and lowercase. Tradition (capital T) “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” (Lossky, 1974, p. 152). The traditions (small t) are the concrete deposits and usages: the text of Scripture, the dogmatic formulas, the canons, the liturgical rites, the iconographic types, the local customs. The traditions are borne by Tradition and interpreted by it; Tradition is not one more item in the list of traditions but the living principle that produced them and that alone can rightly read them.

Not Content but the Power to Receive Content

The subtlety of Lossky’s account is that Tradition, in the capital-T sense, is not itself a content set alongside the contents of the traditions. It is, rather, the “faculty” or “power” of knowing the truth — the very capacity by which the Church recognizes her own faith. Lossky writes that Tradition “is the manner of receiving the Revelation, a manner in which the whole Church, in the period of the ecumenical councils, recognized the eternal value… of the homoousios.” Tradition is “not the content of Revelation, but the light that reveals it; it is not the word, but the living breath which makes the words heard at the same time as the silence from which it came” (Lossky, 1974, pp. 151–152). This is why Tradition cannot be exhaustively written down or reduced to a canon of texts: a light is not one of the objects it illumines, and a faculty of hearing is not one of the sounds it hears.

From this follows Lossky’s striking claim that Tradition is “the critical spirit of the Church” — but a critical spirit that is the opposite of rationalist criticism, because it judges not by the “natural light of human reason” but by the light of the Spirit (Lossky, 1974, pp. 156–157). It is Tradition, in this sense, that enabled the Church to receive some writings as canonical Scripture and to refuse others; to embrace the term homoousios, which is not in the Bible, as the faithful expression of the biblical faith, while rejecting the Arian slogans; and, in every age, to recognize the authentic development of her worship and to reject the corrupt. Tradition is the Church’s Spirit-given discernment, and the traditions are the material on which that discernment continually works.

The Vertical and the Horizontal

Lossky frames the distinction with a spatial image that has become standard. There is a horizontal line — the transmission of the “traditions,” the deposit handed down through time from the Apostles, teacher to disciple, generation to generation. And there is a vertical line — Tradition proper, the direct communion of each member of the Church with the Holy Spirit, the “perpendicular” descent of the Spirit that makes the horizontal deposit live in the present (Lossky, 1974, pp. 152–155). Without the vertical, the horizontal would be mere historical succession, a chain of inherited data; without the horizontal, the vertical would be individualist enthusiasm, each believer claiming a private inspiration. The two are inseparable: Tradition is the vertical presence of the Spirit that continually re-actualizes the horizontal deposit, so that the faith of the Apostles is not merely remembered but known anew and from within in every generation.

This is why Lossky can say that Tradition is at once the most conservative and the most free thing in the Church. Conservative, because it guards the identical faith against all novelty; free, because it is not the slavish repetition of formulas but the living knowledge of the same truth, capable of expressing itself in new words (the homoousios, the theotokos, the Palamite distinction of essence and energies) precisely in order to say the same unchanging thing against new errors (Lossky, 1974, pp. 155–158; and The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, James Clarke, 1957, ch. 1, on Tradition as the horizon of the Church’s knowledge).

Discriminating Among the Traditions

The practical payoff of the distinction is the freedom — indeed the duty — to discriminate among the traditions. Kallistos Ware makes this the pastoral heart of the matter. “Tradition,” he writes, “must not be confused with ‘traditionalism.’… Not everything received from the past is of equal value, nor is everything received from the past necessarily true”; the Church has “an inner criterion” enabling her to “distinguish between Tradition and traditions” (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, pp. 197–198). Some things handed down are the very dogma of the faith, defined by the councils and binding on all; some are theological opinions (theologoumena) held by weighty Fathers but not defined; some are venerable and near-universal customs (leavened bread in the Eucharist, the infant’s chrismation and communion, standing for prayer); and some are local usages, disciplinary details, or cultural accretions that have varied and may vary again — fasting rules in their specifics, chant styles, the calendar’s computation, vestment traditions (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 197–199; and the topical article Holy Tradition, on the outward forms and their gradations).

[Disputed: the exact placement of particular practices along this scale is itself a live and unavoidable question. Some Orthodox — often characterized as "traditionalist" — treat a wide range of received customs (the Julian calendar, specific fasting disciplines, established rubrics) as effectively untouchable expressions of the faith, warning that the appeal to "discrimination" opens the door to modernist erosion; others, invoking precisely Lossky's and Ware's distinction, argue that to absolutize the small-*t* traditions is to fall into the "traditionalism" that mistakes the vehicle for the life. The Tradition/traditions distinction is agreed in principle across the tradition; where a given custom falls is contested in practice, and this compendium reports the framework without adjudicating each case. See Ware, *The Orthodox Church*, 1993, pp. 197–199; Florovsky, "The Ethos of the Orthodox Church," in *Aspects of Church History*.]

The danger the distinction guards against runs in both directions. To collapse Tradition into the traditions is traditionalism — the “dead faith of the living,” in Jaroslav Pelikan’s phrase, in which the outward forms are clung to precisely because their inner life has been lost (Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition, Yale University Press, 1984, p. 65; see Tradition as Life, Not Archaeology). But to despise the traditions in the name of Tradition is the opposite error — a disincarnate spiritualism that forgets that the Spirit works through concrete forms, that the vertical descends only upon the horizontal, and that there is no access to the living Tradition except through the customs, texts, and rites in which it has clothed itself. The right relation is neither confusion nor divorce but order: the traditions are honored as the true vehicles of Tradition, and Tradition is honored as the life that alone gives the traditions their meaning.

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 definition, p. 152; Tradition as light and faculty, pp. 151–152; the critical spirit, pp. 156–157; the vertical and horizontal, pp. 152–155.)
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1957. (Ch. 1, Tradition as the horizon of ecclesial knowledge.)
Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (Tradition versus traditionalism; the inner criterion; the gradations of the traditions, pp. 196–199.)
Florovsky, Georges. “The Ethos of the Orthodox Church.” In Aspects of Church History, Collected Works vol. 4. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1975.
Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Vindication of Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. (Tradition versus traditionalism, p. 65.)