Tradition as Life, Not Archaeology

The practical heart of the whole doctrine: Holy Tradition is living experience, not the veneration of the past. This file draws the crucial distinction between tradition and traditionalism — given its classic epigram by Jaroslav Pelikan, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living” — and expounds what it means to live in the Tradition as a member of a Spirit-bearing communion rather than as the curator of a museum.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Danger the Whole Doctrine Guards Against

The theology of Tradition expounded in this compendium carries within it a permanent danger, and the modern Orthodox theologians have named it insistently: the danger of confusing the living Tradition with the mere conservation of the past. Because Tradition clothes itself in venerable forms — ancient texts, old rites, inherited customs — it is perpetually tempting to identify the life with its clothing, to treat the preservation of the forms as the whole of fidelity, and so to turn the living Tradition into a dead traditionalism. Georges Florovsky put the warning at the center of his account: “Tradition is not a principle striving to restore the past, using the past as a criterion for the present…. Tradition is the constant abiding of the Spirit and not only the memory of words” (Florovsky, “The Catholicity of the Church,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, Nordland, 1972). To make Tradition into archaeology — the veneration and reconstruction of the past for its own sake — is precisely to lose it, because the thing to be handed on is not the past but the Spirit-given life that once produced those forms and still produces them.

Pelikan’s Epigram

The distinction received its most memorable modern formulation from the historian of doctrine Jaroslav Pelikan (himself received into Orthodoxy near the end of his life). In The Vindication of Tradition (1984) he wrote: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name” (Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition, Yale University Press, 1984, p. 65). The epigram compresses the whole matter. Tradition is the living faith of the dead: it is the faith of the Fathers and saints, still alive, still handed on and received as a living thing, so that to stand within it is to be in communion with the whole company of those who have believed. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living: it is the clinging of the present to the outward forms after the inner life has departed — the veneration of custom as custom, the preservation of the letter without the Spirit. The two can look identical from the outside; both keep the old forms. The difference is whether the forms are held as the living vehicles of a present communion, or as relics venerated for their age.

Pelikan’s contrast is the exact application, to the register of lived faith, of Lossky’s distinction between Tradition and the traditions (see Tradition and Traditions). To keep the traditions (small t) as bearers of the one living Tradition (capital T) is faithfulness; to keep the traditions after they have ceased to bear the life, as ends in themselves, is traditionalism. The same forms serve both; only the Spirit-given life within them makes the difference.

Living in the Tradition

What, then, does it mean positively to live in the Tradition rather than to venerate it? The answer follows from the whole compendium. It means to receive the faith not as an inherited object to be guarded but as a life to be entered — to pray the Liturgy, receive the sacraments, read the Scriptures with the Fathers, keep the fasts and feasts, venerate the icons, and struggle in the ascetic labor, not as antiquarian re-enactment but as one’s actual communion with God in the Spirit here and now (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, pp. 196–198, 204; Ware, The Orthodox Way, SVS Press, 1995, on the living appropriation of the faith). The forms are indispensable — there is no access to the living Tradition except through them, for the Spirit sanctifies through the concrete and not around it (see Tradition and the Life of the Church) — but they are indwelt, not merely preserved. The one who lives in the Tradition is not a curator standing outside the exhibit but a member inside the Body, receiving its life and handing it on.

This living appropriation is also what makes genuine faithfulness creative rather than merely repetitive. Because Tradition is a life and not a script, those who truly possess it — the Fathers, the councils, the saints — were able to confess the one faith freshly in each age, coining new words (homoousios, Theotokos) to guard the old faith against new errors, precisely because they had the living thing and not only its former expressions (Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, 1972; and see The Fathers and the Mind of the Church). Traditionalism, by contrast, can only repeat; it is sterile because it holds the letter without the life that once made the letter fruitful. The living Tradition is at once more conservative and more free than traditionalism: more conservative, because it guards the identical faith with its whole life; more free, because it is not the prisoner of any single past expression of that faith.

The Peril in Orthodoxy Especially

Honesty requires acknowledging that this peril presses on Orthodoxy with particular force, precisely because Orthodoxy is so deeply and rightly traditional. The very reverence for the inherited forms that is Orthodoxy’s strength can curdle into a traditionalism that absolutizes custom, mistakes the calendar or a fasting rule or a chant style for the faith itself, and resists the living discernment that the tradition itself demands (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 197–198, on the danger of confusing Tradition with traditionalism; and see the calendar controversy in Tradition and the Life of the Church). Kallistos Ware states the corrective bluntly: “Tradition must not be confused with ‘traditionalism,’” and the Orthodox Christian is called not to a blind repetition of the past but to a discriminating, living fidelity that “distinguishes between Tradition and traditions” and holds the forms for the sake of the life they carry (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 197–198; see Tradition and Traditions). The remedy for traditionalism is not less Tradition but more — the recovery of the living faith of the dead, which alone gives the venerable forms their meaning and their power.

The Living Faith of the Dead

To live in the Tradition, then, is to belong to a communion that death does not break — to hold the same faith, in the same Spirit, as the Apostles and Fathers and saints, and to hand it on alive to those who come after. It is to receive the Scriptures as the Church’s own book, to confess the Creed as the whole faith in little, to pray the Liturgy as the enacted Gospel, to venerate the icon as Tradition made visible, to keep the fasts as the faith embodied — and in all of these to be, not the keeper of a museum, but a living member of a living Body, animated by the one Spirit who is the very life of Tradition (Lossky, “Tradition and Traditions,” in In the Image and Likeness of God, SVS Press, 1974, p. 152; Florovsky, “The Catholicity of the Church,” 1972; Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition, 1984). This is the difference between veneration and life, between archaeology and communion, between the dead faith of the living and the living faith of the dead. The whole doctrine of Holy Tradition exists to keep the Church on the living side of that line.

See Also

References

  • Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Vindication of Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. (Tradition versus traditionalism; “the living faith of the dead,” p. 65.)
  • Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. Collected Works vol. 1. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (“The Catholicity of the Church” — Tradition not the restoration of the past; “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers.”)
  • Lossky, Vladimir. “Tradition and Traditions.” In In the Image and Likeness of God, 141–168. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (Tradition as the life of the Spirit, p. 152.)
  • Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (Tradition versus traditionalism; the discriminating fidelity, pp. 196–198, 204.)
  • Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Way. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995. (The living appropriation of the faith.)