… And what there is to conquer, has already been discovered, once, twice, or several times, by men and women we could never hope to emulate, but there is no need to emulate: there is only the fight to recover, what has been lost. And found and lost and found and lost again and again: which now are under conditions that seem unpropitious. … But perhaps there is neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. Home, what is familiar, is where one starts from.
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
EAST COKER (No. 2 of ‘Four Quartets‘)
A tradition, in its simplest form, is what is handed down. If you have received your grandmother’s wedding ring as a keepsake from your mother, and she from her mother, and so forth, you are participating in a family tradition. But tradition is much more than the passing down of family heirlooms. In a larger sense, when a recipient receives something of value, the recipient is entrusted with a great responsibility: to preserve memories the tradition represents, and deliver or hand down its contents relatively intact. This presupposes continuity in an unbroken chain of custody, from generation to generation. But a tradition’s contents are much more than receiving keepsakes or heirlooms. Traditions exist in time, over time, but are not frozen in time.
The word tradition is derived from the Latin word tradere, which has several meanings: to deliver, entrust, hand over, transfer, or transmit. It may also be related to the Latin word dare (“to give”), which implies a relationship between two parties, in which an elder freely gives to his heirs or successors something of value. What constitutes value is more than the appraised value of an item in gold or silver. It may include items that reflect mementos, reminders, or relics of a descendant that reflect the sentimental sepia of a bygone era; or include an Impressionistic work of art; a limited issue early edition of a Mark Twain novel; a Queen Anne furnishing for the country cottage; or a rare signature of Abraham Lincoln, or Tobacco company-issued baseball card with the likeness of Honus Wagner. Although they may have an appraised market value, their true value lies in what they represent: the impressionist painting as tangible evidence of Fin de siècle France; Huckleberry Finn and his companion novels about life in a peaceful antebellum America; a time of transition from England to its Union with Scotland into a larger whole; the tangible feel of the very same man who signed the Emancipation Proclamation; and the unlikely partnership of the tobacco weed sponsoring the national pastime. Though products of a past time, they are present in their identity and their content. These memorabilia represent a time no longer with us, but is nevertheless with us. This paradox of time overcomes our temporal condition, by an eternal simultaneity that occurs in the present moment as past memory, the present through sight and touch, and the future – what can be appreciated and learned from the past to steer a future course. Such memorabilia, being pearls of great price for the fortunate custodian, are not “priceless”, due to their value in cash, but for the cultural, historical, and religious meanings they hold for the owners and beholders. Still, there is a tradition that reflects a more excellent way.
Before there were mementos, memorabilia, heirlooms, or works of gold, silver, or stone made by the product of human hands, human societies formed into small tribal and societal groups, often not much more than a large extended family, sharing a common experience, and usually descended from a common ancestor. They lived in a small, encircled environment, encountering the elements of the raw forces of nature, such as violent weather, dangerous wild animals, and food scarcity, in which life was precarious due to continual subjection to famine and pandemics, and to hostile neighboring tribes, later nations, competing for a share of limited resources. To survive in this state of nature not only benefitted the stronger, more numerous, and better organized, but also it was those societies that developed a set of beliefs, conveyed through stories, told and retold, upon a shared understanding of a mysterious cosmos. With the sharing of stories, first, among the living members of a society, and then to the next generation and succeeding generations, begins the human custom of oral tradition.
ORAL TRADITION
The sharing of stories orally, before writing them down, is the first, primal mean of communication in primitive* societies. This entails passing down knowledge in the forms of stories, songs, and history of a family, a people, and their place in the cosmos, conveyed in myth, legend, and tales of lore from living memory back “to the ancient times, to the days of yore”, of time immemorial. This does not mean that these stories are frozen in time, to be mechanically transmitted as an unalterable custom in a fossilized form. The best storytellers in the oral tradition want to convey to their listeners a salience and relevance to the pith and moment of the times in which they live, elaborating and slightly altering where necessary, while faithful to the accumulated wisdom of their people. Oral tradition has not died with the invention of writing. As long as stories are told – about family life, a soldier’s war experiences, the gambol of childhood – oral tradition will have a place in our collective lives.
*Primitive does not mean, in any way, as lacking in intelligence, nor are primitive people any less diminished in possessing the principal faculties of the human mind or human intelligence – cognition (understanding), memory, perception, and reason. The memories possessed by sages and bards in reciting the genealogy and history of a people and its heroes are the stuff of legends. Through the imaginative use of poetic meter, mnemonic devices, and clever rhyming schemes, and often improvising as the narrative proceeded, they knew how to employ picturesque language to accelerate the pace of the action, spell-bounding their listeners. With their eye for detail and the skill to convey that detail in meaningful patterns, they were second-to-none in the faculties of perception and reason.
WRITING IT DOWN
Perhaps the most common understanding of tradition lies in the transmission of knowledge, in writing, produced over generations as the organic offspring of custom. The primary custom of a people involve developing a corpus of practices – to appease the forces of nature, and to curry favor with spirits, gods, or chthonic powers, lurking in every tree, behind every rock. The most common request from these mysterious, cosmic powers, were success in war; good fortune; and fertility of family and the land in the race of life. As societies grew, attaining a measure of relative stability, the custodians of the nation’s memories – lawspeakers in Germanic oral tradition; bards, Brehons, filí, and ollamh in Irish oral tradition – despite their ingenious mnemonics and ornate metrical patterning, could no longer recall everything. The practice of “writing it down” begins here, which is the beginning of officially recorded documented history, and the inchoate beginning of a tradition known as humane letters (which will be the subject of a future post).
Early historical accounts are replete with anecdotes, dialogues, and parables expressing common themes – the primary theme being how to live spontaneously aligned with the natural world, especially in a cosmos of constant warfare, famine, and widespread death from disease and anarchy. As societies grew, writing became the province of a civil bureaucracy and a priestly caste of a chosen few dedicated to overseeing a complex array of rites and rituals dispensed to rulers and ruled alike. The rules of ritual were written in an arcane, often symbolic language, so as to monopolize direct relationship with the gods. The civil administration learned the same “tricks”, in which a large bureaucracy learned to ambiguate and obscure knowledge to maintain power in a web of secrecy. Even before the Common Era began, the author of Ecclesiastes issued a warning in his own time: Beware. Of the making of many books there is no end, and in much study there is weariness for the flesh.
The transmission of knowledge, practice, and wisdom presume and presuppose continuity. Tradition can have various forms of expression and of manifestation, conditioned by different circumstances, and these forms can often be mutable. When a tradition no longer resonates to answer questions about meaning in life and purpose in nature, it is never quite rejected, nor is proven to be wrong or irrelevant. Like old soldiers who can no longer fight, old traditions never die; they simply fade away. As traditions accumulate into a body of doctrines, as canonical text, precedents, precepts, principles and standards that form the collective conscience of a people, there arises new forms of expression that overlap, contradict, and invalidate old traditions. The body of tradition begins to take on an appearance of a monstrous Hydra, in a miscellany of “schools, sects, parties, and factions” contradicting old traditions, and often contradicting each other. When traditions “lose their way”, questions abound: what happened to bring about this state of affairs? Who did this to us? What is to be done? Asking such questions leads to searching thought, from which a mega-tradition of enquiry and inquiry arises.
As societies grow, adapt, and transform themselves in response to change, traditions themselves adapt to new circumstances, transforming themselves in the process, and they grow, grow, grow – without platelet resistance to slow down or stop the continuing march of growth before it morphs into a form of unwieldy and unrestrained gigantism. Bards, chancellors, curators, ecclesiastics, headmasters, rectors, sages, superintendents, trustees, and other worthies, who serve as custodians and upholders of the sacred flame of a tradition, attempted to restate tradition into a manageable code of orderly content. But to accomplish such a feat, they needed to account for the complex interweaving of loyalties and overlapping jurisdictions of cantons, cities, communes, fiefdoms, hundreds, manors, provinces, shires, urban boroughs, and villages. To transmit tradition in a more manageable way, required a new approach.
A TRADITION OF INQUIRY
Every vital society undergoes continuous change, while constants remain. These constants provide societies an unchangeable nature, which cannot be safely ignored, for they represent the “deep soul” and conscience of a people. Constants in a tradition, formed by the customs of a people, may equip them to face new challenges. But without adequate resources in their own tradition to draw upon to face a crisis in which the “old answers” fail to meet the challenge, healthy societies will seek to learn from other societies, and assimilate what is useful in that tradition. If no other society in known history has faced such a crisis of first instance, and conclude that their tradition cannot provide answers to meet a new challenge, a healthy society will rise to the occasion by institutionalizing the questioning of existing practices, through enquiry, and then establish a system of methods for formal investigation. This “formality” is known as inquiry, and became the method of evaluation of traditions (small ‘t’), Sacred Tradition, the scriptures themselves, and the consubstantial unity of the Trinity itself, which became the basis for the study of Theology.
As Europe was recovering from the barbarian invasions that impoverished the European landscape, scholars and religious seekers that were blown across Europe like thistledown under windy conditions, sought refuge far from the madding crowd to the uttermost ends of known civilization in far-off Ireland and in the Hebrides and Shetland islands. These distant places returned the favor several fold, through the evangelization and preaching by the likes of Saints Columba, Columbanus, and John the Irishman, (better known as Dun Scotus). With this new infusion of ardor, Europe flourished under the Carolingian Renaissance, laying the foundation for the rise of Medieval Scholasticism, as faith based on reason, giving rise to “collegial” institutions such as universities, built on the four pillars of learning housed in faculties of medicine, law, theology, and the liberal arts. Also, the dissemination of knowledge was becoming more widespread. The invention of books and book-binding had numerous advantages over the continuous scroll. For the first time there existed a ready and growing market for a reading lay public, in which reading a book, became an activity that could be done in the home, solitarily. This became a way of life for passing through the long and lonely nights, it is said, “curled up” to a book.
In fairness to all who have journeyed with me so far on the trajectory of traditions, weariness of the eyes issues in fatigue of the mind, forcing me to stop at this juncture. Some topics of traditional interest, such as the wisdom traditions, might be the subject of an entire post, or covered under multiple installments over time. Additional developments in the history of tradition (and of Traditions), such as canonical tradition, Reason as Tradition, Sacred Tradition, the Tradition of Humane Letters, traditional symbols, traditional values, and the role of Orders such as Knightly and monastic orders in preserving traditions – I will address them as time permits and the season warrants in future posts. And I am always open to your suggestions for matters worthy of treatment and for comments, critiques, and corrections to errors of fact and in any statements made. Thank you.
