AN OPEN LETTER ON TRADITION
by James S. Cutsinger, published in Modern Age, 36:3 (1994)
A TRADITIONALIST asked to write about tradition is faced with a daunting
task. Not only must he find fresh words for a familiar topic so as to say
something new about something old. Any writer on any subject must do the same
if he would capture attention and sustain concentration. But the traditionalist
must go further. If he is true to his principles, he must insist in this case
that the old really is the new: that the antiquity and continuity of tradition
are reasonable means of genuine transformation.
Explaining what is meant by this paradox in words intelligible to fellow
traditionalists is one part of my aim in what follows. But in order not to be
accused of preaching only to the converted, as I often am by liberal academics,
my hope is to go somewhat deeper than the familiar political, moral, and even
theological expositions of conservative theorists. Little will be said
explicitly about the Western intellectual heritage or religious doctrine as
such, and nothing at all about social theory or culture. I leave it to the
other symposiasts to cover these bases. The approach here will instead by
strictly metaphysical. I use this word knowing of course that it may be
misunderstood. Some will hear it and suppose that I intend to engage in remote
and rarified speculation. What I mean on the contrary is that I shall be trying
to cut straight to the essential heart of our topic in order to consider some
very down-to-earth, practical questions: What exactly is the point of
tradition? What is to be gained from tradition in contemporary life? Before
going any further I should perhaps explain that I have in mind as I write a
very specific audience. I have mentioned my liberal colleagues. This article is
something of an open letter to them. It represents one more attempt to break
through all the hackneyed responses to the dinosaur in their midst. A
conservative journal may seem an odd forum in which to continue that conversation,
and yet the method has three advantages. By speaking indirectly to those who
take a very different position from our own, it may help to keep the
participants in this symposium from merely talking shop with each other. It may
also prove a useful aid to fellow traditionalists in their own real life
conversations with liberal academics. And who knows? It might even succeed in
its most important purpose and actually get through to the modernist and
postmodernist mind.
Contributors to this discussion will no doubt have defined the key term
in somewhat different ways. My own definition of tradition requires that it be
paired with revelation. The former, we might say, is horizontal, while the
latter is vertical. Where revelation is the projection of God into space,
tradition is the extension of revelation through time. A stone is dropped into
a quiet pool of water. Its descent toward the pool and its contact with the
surface provide an image of what I mean by revelation. The centrifugal movement
of concentric waves radiating from the point of impact is an image of
tradition. The distinction of space from time is too simplistic, of course. In
entering space, God also enters time. And in their extension through time, the
modes by which tradition carries the force of revelation—be they words,
gestures, symbols, saints, shrines—take up a certain space. But however one
pictures it, revelation and tradition are to be seen, I suggest, as two parts
of a single movement from God to man.
This way of looking at the matter is consistent with the usual meaning
of the word tradition. Tradition, we are told, is the action or result
of handing down or transmitting. But at the same time it is important to
clarify that not everything handed down is traditional in the sense at stake
here. The passing along of a thing received also accounts for mere custom and
habit. This, of course, is the concern of the critic: that the conservative is
simply nostalgic for the way things were done in the past, irrespective of
their truth or adequacy. One would perhaps be justified in replying to this
observation by pointing out that the very length of a given usage almost
certainly implies a correspondingly deep human need. But this is not my
response here. I prefer to admit instead that a greater precision is called for
than is afforded by etymology and that our liberal colleagues are right in
demanding it. The Thessalonians were exhorted to stand fast and to hold the
tradition they received from
But wait just a minute. My critics are impatient to speak. It will be
objected that I am begging the question. For all I have done is to deflect
attention from one idea to another. The difference between true tradition and false, I have said, is the difference between
what is and what is not revelation. But where does that get us? How are we to
know a revelation when we see one, even supposing such a thing and its Source
really exist? Does it come labeled as such? Anyone can claim a revealed
authority. This in fact is precisely what the history of human thought is all
about. It is a history of competing and mutually exclusive claims to truth, a
history of men seeking to dignify their wishes and struggles for power by
calling them divine. We too, says the liberal, are subject to such wishes and
struggles, but at least we know we are, and this knowledge affords us a
critical distance on the past. It permits—in fact requires—us to recognize the
ideological roots of tradition. All tradition is in fact the tradition of men,
I covered a lot of ground in that paragraph and may have skipped a step
or two. But such in broad strokes is what I am constantly hearing from the
majority of the academics around me. What are we to say in response to such
charges? Surely the first thing is to agree that traditional forms can be
abused and too often have been. Religion in particular has in many cases been
the means for perpetuating the very attachment to self-interest and enlargement
of ego that it purports to oppose. One must admit that asseverations as to
divine inspiration and spiritual insight have sometimes been used for sheerly
political purposes. But these historical facts, however odious, are irrelevant
to the existence of that insight itself and hence to the true significance of
revealed tradition. The fact that my claim to have seen something may be used
to guarantee my privileges and to bolster my power is no proof against the
existence of eyesight, even my own, nor does it follow that we should all
deliberately blind ourselves to prevent such exploitation. The critics are
correct to a point, but all this shows is that men are fallen, not that there
is no revelation. Whether we call their criticism a case of
throwing out the baby with the bathwater or not seeing the forest for the
trees, the sad fact remains that too many so-called intellectuals no longer
seem to be using their intellects. So distracted are they by the
accidents of the many data they study, and so intent on putting forward certain
political theses, that they no longer seem capable of thinking metaphysically
with respect to essentials. For if they were, they would be obliged to concede
that even if all tradition were the tradition of men—even if in the whole of
our past authentic revelation had not once broken through the barriers of
pride, greed, indifference, and hatred—it had nevertheless finally done so in
their case. This is a very important point. Let me circle round and come at it
this way.
We are often told that traditionalists are romantics. We idealize and
idolize the past. We speak in terms of broad generalities and neglect the
complexity and concrete messiness of real life. The picture we paint of our
ancestors is a fiction of our own imagining. We should wake up and come to
grips with the fact that folks are folks. Socrates, for example, was just
another academic—not in his disciple’s but in our sense of the term. He taught,
we are told, that the soul is divine and inwardly free from the bonds of
becoming, and he may even for awhile have believed it. But like the modern
scholar, he was basically in the business of solving various mental puzzles and
problems. Even when he claimed to be doing something other and higher—when he
claimed that it is possible for a man to discern the eternal forms with a disciplined
intellect—this was itself simply another stratagem to circumvent certain
conceptual difficulties, which were themselves rooted in the existential need
he shared with all of us to cope with “real” life. The same must be said of all
the other sages, saints, and prophets whose teachings are comprised by tradition.
None were any better than we are. In fact, if you think about it, they must
have been worse. Insofar as they were sincere in their claims, they were naïve and
unself-critical, and therefore intellectually our inferiors. Insofar as they
were not sincere, they were demagogues and petty tyrants, and therefore morally
deficient and worthy of censure. I am going a little too far with this, I
realize. I have not actually heard a modern or postmodern critic categorically
state that all earlier thinkers were beneath him. But consistency demands that
he suppose they were—if not all the time or in all particulars, then to the
extent at least that they took revelation seriously, which is to say on that
one point which was for them most important. For all tradition, remember, is
the tradition of men. And all men, according to my liberal colleagues, are
inevitably conditioned by their situation in history, whatever may be their
claims to the contrary. What they can know is necessarily colored and
restricted: inwardly by their psychological make-up, and outwardly by the
environment they occupy. Absolutes are therefore out of their reach, and those
who purport to transmit a teaching of unconditional value—who suppose
themselves links in a true tradition—are either simpletons or frauds. Contributors
to this symposium are almost certainly in the latter category. For unlike the
ancient thinkers they laud, they have plenty of eager colleagues who are ready
at the drop of a hat to diminish their foolishness by reciting the many
skeptical mantras about what it means to be caught in the web of relativity. We
are therefore without excuse. I am perhaps especially blameworthy. It would be
rather different had I spoken only about the concept or the problem of God, or
had I stopped short with the observation that such-and-such a historical figure
had alleged that revelation is a divine descent into space and that tradition
is its radiation through time. But no. Not content
with historical or phenomenological description, I have gone and played the
metaphysician and spoken as though certain things can be said that just can’t
be. A single movement of God to man? What
extraordinary pretension!
The reader will observe that I have thus far carefully avoided making
use of the various technical terms that might otherwise have facilitated my
descriptions of these critics’ position. If he has
nonetheless noted the empiricism, nominalism, pragmatism, and evolutionism
implicit in their commentary, so much the better. But I have found
through long experience that it does no good to employ such words if one really
wants to get somewhere in arguing about these issues. Names for schools of
thought or philosophical positions are simply too unwieldy, too fuzzy around the
edges. Nobody is going to accept a label which he is convinced is the name for
an error, and if he is not yet convinced, the label itself will not help. The
metaphysician will therefore wish to get behind all the party loyalties, all
the likes and dislikes, all the historical associations and influences and
eponyms, so as to get directly at the error, and thereby the corresponding
truth, itself. By briefly recounting some of the arguments I hear against the traditionalist
point of view, my aim is to encourage if possible a more precise assessment of
the essential problems we face than a mere listing of –isms allows for. And I
hope by this means to have helped in exposing the fundamental illogic at the
root of the liberals’ position. Take a quick look back at the last page or so. The
illogic or the contradiction I am referring to may not be immediately obvious. I
have left it for the most part embedded in the ambiguities and half-truths in
which it usually comes packaged. There is one sentence, however, where it was
allowed to emerge into the clear light of day. According to the critics, I
reported, all men are inevitably conditioned by their situation in history.
My report is hardly unique. We have all been force-fed this maxim hundreds of
times. But I suspect that its very repetition may have dulled us to its full
enormity. All men are inevitably conditioned by their situation in history.
When all the competing slogans are put to one side, it is this more than
anything else which seems to typify the modernist mentality, whatever the
peripheral nuances. And it is this which accounts for the liberal scholar’s
sometimes patronizing, sometimes hostile attitude toward those who put stock in
revealed tradition. Quite apart from all the rhetoric about abuse and
injustice, and leaving aside all the lamentations about our need for
pluralistic perspectives, the bottom line has to do with a complete
misunderstanding about the nature of man himself and about what can and cannot
be known. And here, of course, is where the contradiction comes in. Who is
there to know what the rest of us can’t?
An image may be helpful. What we are dealing with basically are crabs in
a barrel. The experienced chef is confident that he has nothing to fear in
leaving the barrel uncovered as he goes about preparing to cook the creatures. For
as soon as one of them gets close to the rim, the others are sure to pull him
back. And so it seems with our critics. Let anyone try to get past the rim of
history and contingency—let anyone even take seriously the possibility that
some men have succeeded—and they are sure to cry foul. Certain of the cognitive
police would pull us down sooner. The world is a construction of language! All
theory is ideology! Others would allow us to crawl a bit higher. All ideas
follow from impressions of sense! Concepts without percepts are empty! But,
either way, what these particular crabs do not seem to realize is that in their
efforts to bring everybody else back down into the domain of the relative, they
are themselves obliged to create leverage by reaching over the edge.
In order meaningfully to claim that all men are inevitably conditioned
by their situation in history, the critics must for a split second at least
have escaped their own law of gravity. Either they have ceased to be men
altogether or as men they have ceased to be subject to the conditions in
question. If the first were true, if these apparent men were gods, then their
dictum, we might suppose, could be salvaged. I suspect, however, that they will
confess they are not. If, on the other hand, the second and only other
possibility obtains, then the rule collapses, the possibility of revelation is
vindicated, and Socrates and company are free once again to teach the truth. This
is what I had in mind earlier when I accused the critics of tradition of not
using their intellects and for not thinking consistently. As I explained, even
if they suppose all tradition to be the tradition of men, they are compelled to
make an exception in their own favor. Even if there were no revelation before, and therefore no contact with something higher than
the rim of the barrel, there must now be in their case. And this, of course, is
the illogic I speak of. For if no one could know more than the relative, no one
would be left to proclaim this was so. Make no mistake. There is clearly
nothing new in these comments. I have myself been over much the same ground
countless times, as I am sure my fellow contributors have. And like me, they
will doubtless have heard the many excuses for the unthinking at work here,
some more and some less sophisticated. We are told about tricks of language,
performative contradictions, the subtleties of self-reference, and
incompleteness theorems, while distinctions within distinctions are drawn
between various degrees of relativism, as if a man could be “sort of” dead or a
woman “rather” pregnant. I used to try putting up arguments against these
dodges, but I have come to believe that the real problem is not a lack of proof
or clarity, but a lack of attention. The only other, even less charitable,
hypothesis is sheer perversity. It seems instead there are minds, otherwise
fairly supple and clever, which can nevertheless not sustain a thought long
enough to ponder its implications. I do not know why, but some apparently
intelligent people simply cannot look at their looking so as to see what
conclusions must be drawn from their seeing. Try as one might
by the grip of sound logic to pin their gaze and to keep their heads from
twisting and turning, they are still going to blink.
But the point of this paper is not to engage in more wrestling. I return
to the modern illogic only because I think it is crucial for the whole question
of tradition in contemporary life. I would argue, in fact, that diagnosing this
malady can help us understand what is decisive about tradition in any period,
past or present. For the role of tradition, as defined at the outset, is today no
different from what it ever was. In season and out, the extension or radiation
of revelation through time always serves the same essential function, which is
to recall men from their attachment to time itself. In the midst of all the
many changes both within us and out, the point of tradition is to provide us
with openings onto the eternal—moments in which all movement is taken into
itself, places where all of space becomes centered, and where we are brought
face to face with what truly abides beneath the shifting surface of
contingency. A ritual gesture, the implacable face in an
icon, the poise of a spiritual master, a place of pilgrimage, the chanted words
of a sacred text, a flower. These are all modes of tradition. These are
the echoes and reflections of God.
Conceived in this way, tradition is there to remind us of who we are. Created
in the image of God, man is meant to be a pontifex. Made of both the real and
the unreal, he is fashioned as a bridge between the infinite and the finite,
the absolute and the relative. He is himself a projection of God into space, a
kind of living, breathing revelation, from whose touch there should flow to all
creatures the reverberations of their origin. But man constantly falls away
from this calling. Taking his definition from the creatures beneath him, he
spends his whole life resisting the fact that he is made for eternity. He gives
way to what changes and is drawn further and further into its sphere. What
fails to abide also fails to demand, and man is soft. He finds it so much
easier to flow with the currents around him than to resist and be broken. So
much the better, of course, if he can manage to convince himself that
everything flows, that everything is relative, that all is woven from the
threads of history. For then he has no cause to feel bad or inadequate. His
torpor excused as if it were a consequence of the very nature of things, he can
then turn the tables on those who would speak of the gods, charging them with
fantasy.
No one doubts of course that men have always cherished their excuses. I
certainly do. There is nothing at all new in our wish to avoid the discipline
that must accompany all contact with God. The absolute by its very nature
requires all that I am. It is satisfied with nothing less than the complete and
constant conformity of my entire being. And in this sense folks really are just
folks. No one likes to have his ego killed. Sanctity has never been easy, and
those who think otherwise really are just romantics, and not traditionalists. What
is new about the modern mentality is not its weakness but its smugness. The
position which the modernist espouses is unprecedented, not because men never
made excuses before, but because they never dreamed of elevating individual
laziness to the level of a universal fatality. What is unique to our day is the
interest on the part of the critics in applauding man’s failures and
translating them into the language of maturity and strength. Ignorance has
given way to agnosticism, sin to sickness, and virtue itself of vice must
pardon beg. And this is why any serious acceptance of tradition is bound to
provoke the reactions it does, whether quiet amusement or smoldering
indignation, or at best a feigned interest in the psychology or phenomenology
of old-fashioned ways of thinking. Whatever else they may tolerate, those for
whom everything changes and change is everything simply cannot abide the
thought that there was something in the beginning, which is now, and which ever
shall be, unto the ages of ages. It cramps their style.
It is time to back off just a bit. As I approach my conclusion, I
realize that I must admit in all candor that part of
the problem we face in dealing with liberal academics may well be the result of
a genuine misunderstanding. This is not to take back what I have said. I
continue to think that attention is the real key to this matter. But there may
be more, and for this reason, one final effort in the direction of clarity will
perhaps not have been wasted. Part of the problem, I suggest, is that tradition
remains confused in some quarters with things that are simply chronologically
old. On this showing, all traditionalists would be reactionaries. This is why I
was at pains early on to insist that we focus here only on transmissions
beginning in God. My metaphysical definition of tradition as such, as distinct
from a doctrinal exposition of any given tradition, was meant to underscore the
fact that age in itself is not the issue, and to encourage us in prescinding
from all the many interminable historical arguments about local apostolic successions.
Of course what I am calling tradition as such cannot but be old, nor
would it be possible to discover an era without its expression. But this is
simply owing to the nature of the God who reveals Himself, who cannot but be
infinite, and whose infinitude means both originality and perpetuity on the
plane of becoming. To put the point otherwise, there has never been a time without
God, nor a place into which He has failed to descend. His
eternal power and Godhead have always been manifest in the things that are
made, and the particular traditions are so many palimpsests of a script written
into the substance of creation itself. It is not surprising,
therefore, that we should find signs of tradition wherever and whenever we
look. But the universality and antiquity are accidental from the metaphysical
point of view. They are the results of tradition and not its causes. This of course
is what accounts for my opening paradox, and it is this that makes the
traditionalist’s task so difficult, so easily confused at first glance with
exclusivist dogmatism or fundamentalism. He must defend what is old, not as old
but as true, as the temporal expression of something which is always springing
fresh from eternity, without father, without mother, without descent, having
neither beginning of days, nor end of life, but made like unto the Son of God.
I do not, however, wish to leave my reader with the wrong impression. I
am not suggesting that we conservatives are altogether alone in our quest of
the truth. We are simply conscious about what we are doing, and one hopes
conscientious as well. Had they eyes to see, the liberals would realize that
our innate nobility obliges all of us to think metaphysically, for no man can
escape his nature, not even by denying he has one. There is no getting around
the fact that we are made for the absolute or else we are nothing, and that to
be man in the fullest sense of the word is to know it. Even in their duckings
and dodgings, the modernists and the postmodernists must attempt to speak
truly. They must say what they suppose to be so, not only here and now but as
such. And they cannot therefore avoid being metaphysicians, whether they like
it or not, and be they good ones or bad. The illogic of their supposals stands
as indirect proof this is so. For it is precisely when their position implodes
that they attest quite in spite of themselves to the underlying point of
tradition, which is to transmit what we need in order to become what we are.
They confess with us all that in abdicating his vocation as a projection of God,
man now stands in need of an outward assistance. He is dependent on symbols of
the truth that he has buried within his heart. Of course most of my fellow
academics will still resist my talking this way. They will object that this
letter has ignored their demands for criteria and their protests that
revelation is far from self-evident. They will complain that my approach
remains too abstract, too pretentious, and out of touch with the times. They
will say, in short, that I am still preaching to the converted and not taking
them seriously. And perhaps they are right. But throughout this additional
rhetorical flurry, they will not have changed either. They will still be necessarily
speaking as men—fallen men who like me long for the truth that makes free, whom
tradition in contemporary life may yet make whole.