The Tradition Is Always Wiser Than You
July 29, 2005
Doug LeBlanc posted a note today about an essay by Anthony Grafton on the Holy Father.
I have read a little of Grafton’s work, and as a renaissance scholar he certainly seems to understand and appreciate the “pre-modern” or “ancient” mentality behind orthodox Judaism, Islam, Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism as well as small splinters of “classical” confessional Protestant traditionalists for whom “catholic” is not a bad word and, as Grafton once wrote, “the tradition is always wiser than you” [the individual].
I forgot where I read that remark, but when I read it I thought that I detected in it, if not sympathy and respect, an absence of condescension from the usual standpoint of modern liberal individualism which situates the individual as the privileged authority over against the past and tradition. (The best account of this that I have seen recently in relation to the papacy is an interview with Eamon Duffy for PBS.)
The significance of the deposit of faith features prominently in the Ratzinger Report (which Grafton apparently discusses), and it is precisely this concept and way of life that is the main scandal of the church in the modern world, dividing professing Christians as well between modernist-accommodationists and those who would rather bend modernity to submit to much wisdom of the past. In the latest issue of First Things, while remarking on the book, The Evangelical Moment, Fr. Neuhaus suggests this is also what divides Evangelicals into more and less authentic Christians.
I imagine it is just a matter of time before the mainstream media picks up on this wedge and categorizes all religion in terms of anti-modern traditionalists (i.e. reactionaries) and comparatively harmless religious moderate rubes like Jim Wallis who may have to be tolerated until they mature into full blown liberal secularists. (Well I suppose this is already a dominant news-writing paradigm.)
If there is any way to complicate this biased dualistic portrait aside from looking more cloesly at what different kinds of people actually say and do, it is probably to point out, as Tracey Rowland did in her recent Zenit interview, that the supposed fuddy-duddy traditionalist types cannot be dismissed as ignorant reactionaries–and perhaps are not so much in Europe–because continental philosophers or “postmodernists” have so fully dismantled the “Enlightenment Project,” which is to say the political religion of secular liberalism.
In the US, the practical political import of that critique has not been felt, not even in the arcane academic worlds where people study this stuff. Even well-established indigenous critiques of Liberalism by American legal and political scholars seem to have very little practical impact on the media which seems to have no way to understand “fundamentalist reaction” as anything other than the stupidity that phrase connotes. I wonder why that is.
This is The Tradition Is Always Wiser Than You in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Jon Stewart, Pantagruelist | Next: A Couple of Words on the Death Penalty | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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