Tradition and the Life of the Church

Tradition is not only believed and confessed; it is lived. This file treats the disciplines of the body and the year — fasting, the calendar, the ascetic and monastic life — as the embodiment of Holy Tradition, the faith made a manner of life. It shows how these practices hand on the faith through the flesh and the clock, why they belong among the small-t traditions that bear the capital-T life, and it treats the calendar question soberly as a live example of the discrimination of the traditions.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Faith as a Way of Life

A recurring theme of this compendium is that Tradition is the handing-on not merely of doctrines but of a whole life of grace (see Paradosis: The Living Memory of the Church). Nowhere is this more evident than in the disciplines by which the Orthodox faithful order their days and years: the fasts and feasts, the seasons of the Church’s calendar, the rhythms of prayer, and above all the ascetic and monastic tradition. These are not add-ons to the faith but the faith embodied — Tradition inscribed in the body and the clock, so that the believer receives and hands on the Gospel not only with the mind but with the stomach, the knees, and the calendar (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, pp. 300–303, on the ascetic and disciplinary life; Ware, The Orthodox Way, SVS Press, 1995, on the practical life of the faith). St. Basil’s appeal to the unwritten apostolic traditions — the sign of the cross, the eastward turn in prayer, the postures and practices of worship — already located much of Tradition precisely in such embodied customs, “of the same force for piety” as the written (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 27.66; trans. Anderson, SVS Press, 1980; see Paradosis: The Living Memory of the Church).

Fasting as Embodied Tradition

The fasting discipline is among the clearest cases of Tradition embodied. The Orthodox Church keeps four major fasting seasons — Great Lent before Pascha, the Apostles’ Fast, the Dormition Fast, and the Nativity Fast — together with the weekly fasts of Wednesday and Friday and certain fixed days, observed by abstention from certain foods and, more deeply, as a discipline of the whole person ordered to prayer and repentance (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 300–302; and the ascetic tradition treated in The Desert Fathers). Fasting is a paradigm of the small-t tradition that bears the capital-T life: its specific rules have varied considerably across centuries and regions — the exact foods, the degrees of strictness, the days of dispensation — and thus belong to the mutable disciplinary layer rather than to unchangeable dogma; yet the reality of fasting as an integral part of the Christian life is ancient, near-universal, and rooted in the Lord’s own teaching (“when you fast,” Matthew 6:16–18, presupposing that his disciples will) and practice (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 300–302; and the topical article Holy Tradition, on fasting rules as a case of variable tradition). To fast is to receive the faith as a bodily discipline and to hand it on the same way — the child learns Great Lent as a season of the year before he can define repentance.

The purpose keeps the discipline from degenerating into mere dietary rule. Orthodox teaching insists that fasting is ordered to prayer, almsgiving, and the freeing of the soul from the tyranny of the appetites, and that fasting from food without fasting from sin and without works of mercy is empty — the Lenten hymns and the Fathers say so repeatedly (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 301–302; and the ascetic teaching in The Desert Fathers). The discipline is the vehicle; the life of repentance and love is what it carries. This is the whole doctrine of Tradition rendered in the register of the body.

The Calendar and the Rhythm of the Year

The liturgical calendar is Tradition inscribed in time. The Church’s year, with its cycle of feasts and fasts around Pascha and the fixed festal calendar, hands on the whole economy of salvation as a lived rhythm: the believer passes annually through the Incarnation, the Baptism, the Passion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and Pentecost, and through the commemorations of the Theotokos and the saints, so that the faith is received as a recurring pattern of time and not merely as a set of truths (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 300, 304–305; and the liturgical cycles treated in The Divine Liturgy). The calendar teaches by repetition what the catechism teaches by definition; it is Tradition’s way of writing the Gospel into the year.

The calendar is also the site of a genuine and sometimes painful modern controversy, which serves as a sober example of the discrimination of the traditions taught in this compendium. [Disputed: the calendar question. In the early twentieth century several Orthodox Churches (beginning with Constantinople and Greece in 1924) adopted the "Revised Julian" calendar for the fixed feasts, bringing them into alignment with the civil (Gregorian) reckoning, while others (notably the Russian, Serbian, Georgian, Jerusalem, and Athonite Churches) retained the older Julian ("Old") calendar; the date of Pascha continues to be computed by the older reckoning across most of the Orthodox world. The change provoked lasting division: "Old Calendarist" groups in Greece and elsewhere separated from the official churches, treating the calendar as a matter touching the integrity of the faith, while the churches that adopted or retained either reckoning regard the calendar as a disciplinary and pastoral matter within the Church's competence, not a dogma. (a) The Old Calendarist position treats the received Julian calendar as an inviolable part of Tradition whose alteration is a betrayal; (b) the mainstream Orthodox position treats the calendar as a small-*t* tradition — venerable, weighty, not to be changed lightly, but not itself the faith — and regards the disciplinary question as distinct from communion in the one faith. This compendium reports the dispute and its named positions and does not adjudicate it; it notes only that the calendar is a textbook instance of the difficulty, discussed in [Tradition and Traditions](../01-what-tradition-is/tradition-and-traditions.md), of discerning where a given custom falls on the scale from dogma to variable usage. See also the topical article [Holy Tradition](../../orthodoxy/02-sources-of-theology/holy-tradition.md).]

The Ascetic and Monastic Life as Lived Gospel

At the summit of the embodied Tradition stands the ascetic and monastic life, which the Orthodox tradition has long regarded as the living heart of the faith — the place where the Gospel is lived at full intensity and from which its spirit radiates to the whole Church. The desert Fathers and mothers, the great monastic founders, and the hesychast tradition are not a specialist appendage to Orthodoxy but a primary bearer of its Tradition: the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, the ascetic writings gathered in the Philokalia, and the continuous monastic life of Athos and the Orthodox lands have handed on the experiential knowledge of God — repentance, the guarding of the heart, unceasing prayer, the war with the passions, theosis — that is the inner substance of the faith (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 38–40, 300–303; and the compendia The Desert Fathers and Orthodox Monasticism). Here Tradition is embodied most fully: the monk hands on the faith by living it, and the lives of the saints become, in the phrase of the tradition, “the Gospel lived” — Tradition in the flesh (see the topical article Holy Tradition, on the ascetic tradition and the lives of the saints as embodied Tradition).

The Point for the Doctrine of Tradition

The disciplines of the body and the year drive home the central thesis of the whole compendium: that Holy Tradition is a life before it is a system, and that it is handed on through embodied, repeated practice as much as through text and definition. The fasts, the calendar, the postures of prayer, the ascetic labor — these are the small-t traditions in their most tangible form, and they show both the necessity and the peril the compendium has traced. Necessary, because there is no access to the living Tradition except through such concrete forms: the Spirit sanctifies through the body and in time, not around them. Perilous, because these very practices can be absolutized — clung to as though the custom were the faith — and so turned from vehicles of the living Tradition into the “dead faith of the living” (see Tradition as Life, Not Archaeology). The right relation is the one the whole guide commends: to keep the disciplines wholeheartedly as the vessels of the life they carry, honoring them for the sake of the Gospel they embody, and never mistaking the vessel for the treasure.

See Also

References

  • Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (Fasting; the calendar and its controversy; the ascetic and monastic life, pp. 38–40, 300–305.)
  • Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Way. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995. (The practical and ascetic life of the faith.)
  • Basil of Caesarea. On the Holy Spirit 27.66. Trans. David Anderson. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980. (The unwritten, embodied apostolic traditions.)
  • The Philokalia. Trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. 5 vols. London: Faber, 1979– . (The ascetic transmission of the experiential knowledge of God.)
  • Scripture: Matthew 6:16–18.