Heritage and Junk Sculptures

 Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.  Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.

GK Chesterton, Ethics of Elfland

 This is another way of saying what I was trying to say yesterday; still another is the way Dietrich von Hildebrand says it.    I left it on an unresolved note, though.   Trying again.. 

People inherently stand on tradition; it's as unavoidable as time itself.    Continuity is as built into the state of material things as change is.   The Greeks pondered this extensively and through Aristotle developed the insight that change was the movement from potency to perfection of actuality.     A baby has the potential to be a grown human, innate in its being, a code that is unlocked over time in successive changes.   The baby doesn't become an alligator though.    Newman was being an Aristotlean when he wrote, though of living ideas:

It changes with them in order to remain the same. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.

Now ideas are an interesting middle ground, because they seem to have to do with our concept of what is in Reality.    Particularly we are talking about revelation, about divine things which are unchanging in themselves.  But our relationship to these, and our understanding, can change -- both as individuals and as a Church.    So ideas are comparable in that way to material life forms.

I'm getting away from the main point, that we stand inevitably upon tradition considered as the wisdom of our predecessors.   It's just as unavoidable as is our genetic and environmental influences from our parents and our families in general.  

What seems to be different across peoples and philosophies is the attitude towards this heritage.    There are many legitimate ways to approach our intellectual and spiritual legacy.    This is pointed out in a book by Jean Leclerqc called Love of Learning and the Desire for God.   I'm going to quote from an address by Benedict XVI that summarizes the point -- he's talking about the 12th century:

.. This intense theological activity took place in two milieus: the monasteries and the urban Schools, the scholae, some of which were the forerunners of universities, one of the characteristic "inventions" of the Christian Middle Ages. It is on the basis of these two milieus, monasteries and scholae, that it is possible to speak of the two different theological models: "monastic theology" and "scholastic theology". The representatives of monastic theology were monks, usually abbots, endowed with wisdom and evangelical zeal, dedicated essentially to inspiring and nourishing God's loving design. The representatives of Scholastic theology were cultured men, passionate about research; they were magistri anxious to show the reasonableness and soundness of the Mysteries of God and of man, believed with faith, of course, but also understood by reason. Their different finalities explain the differences in their method and in their way of doing theology.

The monastic approach, deriving from St Benedict, was to preserve the past with great honor; it made sense in light of the Benedictine charism to reverence the old good things, and to apply them to their own lives and work, for Benedictines were practical in their contemplativeness.    They kept old manuscripts, copied them, studied them, tried to derive eternal verities even by analogy from antique pagan works.   

The Scholastic project was not incompatible, but it was different, as Pope Benedict XVI points out.   They were consciously integrating faith in revelation with reason, so their approach was more analytical, distinguishing concepts and weeding through objections to arrive at truth.

With both methods, truth was the object of thought, but in different ways.   The early Jesuits had a still different approach, which was basically formed by the early modern "turn to the subject" and involved a concept of the whole, integrated man that drew from classical humanist as well as medieval models -- it has been summed up as "eloquentia perfecta" -- integrity and development of all intellectual, spiritual, psychological and physical faculties.  Newman put it this way (quoting from Ian Ker on Newman and doctrinal continuity):

"St Benedict had come as if to preserve a principle of civilization, and a refuge for learning, at a time when the old framework of society was falling, and new political creations were taking their place ... when the young intellect within them began to stir, and a change of another kind discovered itself, then appeared St Francis and St Dominic."

Finally, Newman concludes, "in the last era of ecclesiastical revolution" the charism of St Ignatius Loyola was given to the Church to meet new needs: "The hermitage, the cloister ... and the friar were suited to other states of society; with the Jesuits, as well as with the religious Communities, which are their juniors," the "chief objects of attention" were new kinds of apostolate, such as teaching and the missions.

Newman also wrote:

Benedict, Dominic, Ignatius:—these are the three venerable Patriarchs, whose Orders divide between them the extent of Christian history. There are many Saints besides, who have been fruitful in followers and institutions, and have multiplied themselves in Christendom, and lived on earth in their children, when they themselves were gone to heaven. But there are three who, in an especial way, have had committed to them the office of a public ministry in the affairs of the Church one after another, and who are, in some sense, her “nursing fathers,” and are masters in the spiritual Israel, and ruling names in her schools and her libraries; and these are Benedict, Dominic, and Ignatius.

Again I'm getting a bit away from the topic of what we inherit and how we think of it, but that divergence was to show several of the past legitimate ways tradition was approached.   Let me also point out that all three of these Patriarchs are still very much with us.   None of the basic methods have been superseded or become vain or useless.  In our post-modern days, there isn't really a successor, as far as I can see.    Whoever it is will have to be a saint and a saint who can combine intellectual method with eminently holy life.    

What these methods hold in common, though balanced in different ways, is an interest in truth, not just in rationalistic form but personally and in relation:  with the Way, the Truth, the Life.  

The characteristic of our postmodern times is to mine our cultural legacy in the way of scavengers.   We can't ignore it, because it's all we have.  But we make our own mash-ups of it.   Modern rationalism prided itself on its superiority to its forefathers -- it felt free to critique, historicize and dissect what came before.   Postmodernism seems like the disinherited grandchild, brought up in this critical milieu by its parents, and now the rationalists are fair game for deconstruction too.   And indeed, why not? 

But modernists and postmodernists can still find common ground in despising their origins even while dependent on them.  This is puzzling to me, because it seems like a step backward in thinking -- a new kind of fundamentalism or naive literalism, where you grab a concept here, a myth or convention there, and make a kind of philosophical junk sculpture that you then try to compel people to admire as if it were an improved golden calf.