Tradition: The Democracy of the Dead
“Tradition means giving a vote to the 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.” -G.K. Chesterton
We’ve discussed at length the danger of tradition when it becomes traditionalism, a frozen idea or a rhetorical tool used for power, control, self-possession, or coercion. I hope that, by now, I am in less danger of being regarded as a so-called ‘based trad.’ In the space created by our honest look at the benefits and pitfalls of tradition in the Church, then, I’d like to use this final essay to explore how it is that obedience to sacred tradition restores the fullest sense of our Christian identity as a member in the Body of Christ, the ‘blessed company of all faithful people.’
In part two, we talked about the general problem of secularism, how it disintegrates us from continuity with the generations before and after us, from God above us and the Creation below us. We spoke of how tradition begins to restore us to a sense of obligation to ancestors and descendants, and how stabilizing that sense of life can be for the individual. I remember in my years as an English teacher when I would lead students through the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, how we would pause near the middle of the poem to examine the good king Hrothgar’s admonition to Beowulf, then in his warrior prime. Hrothgar advises the thane: “O flower of warriors, beware of over-waxing pride…remember that as you now are, so I once was.” Characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry, Hrothgar’s speech engages a motif of remembrance articulated often in the Latin rhetorical question: “ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt? Where are those who have gone before us?” Again, I can remember at the outset of Plato’s Phaedrus when Socrates asks his soft-minded and much-enamored interlocutor: “Phaedrus, my friend, where have you been and where are you going?” So much of our sense of the present depends on how we answer those questions. By engaging them, we are beginning to retrieve tradition from a theoretical concept and apply it in practice.
G.K. Chesterton’s quote at the beginning of this piece helps us to see tradition from yet another unfamiliar angle. In his typical fashion, he demystifies tradition through a return to common sense. Most people who have lived are not currently alive. We act as though they still matter and only the most callous person sees this as mere sentimentality. Regardless of our view of the afterlife, most peoples have honored their dead and continue to act as though they have a place among the living, as evidenced by liturgies of death and burial, and the memorializing of places of repose. It is only more recently in human history, and even then only in very modern places, that the dying, dead, and buried are so sequestered from the rest of us that we are left to struggle to remember them. As a parish priest in Irvine, CA, I am astonished at how well this city hides its graveyards and funeral homes. I am also annoyed at the impossibility of getting a permit to construct a church-yard on the parish grounds. There is something lost in the spiritual imagination of a Christian when they do not have to walk past at least some graves to enter church on Sunday. It will always make death more theoretical, and the dead an idea as well. They are off in their carefully zoned environment; we are here where things are still real. And we persist in this illusion with great ease…until, of course, it is our turn to be hidden away.
Tradition is a facet of a full humanity, one that is neither fragmented nor delusional enough to think that we really make ourselves or that we are made only for ourselves. To look at the interdependence of human beings in their generations–apart from the artificial ways they become compartmentalized–is to observe tradition in its natural form: a common sense conclusion that we needed our elders and so their voice should continue to matter, that our children need us and so we should give them good things. This is no sophisticated matter. If you allow the generations to spend significant time together, tradition begins. I wonder sometimes if this is not why (perhaps even unconsciously) that churches who are antagonistic to tradition are also churches that tend to segment the age groups so narrowly. As soon as elders and their juniors get over the initial awkwardness, they become mentors and spiritual parents pretty quickly.
From this naturally occurring tradition, though, we might draw a more contemplative inference that the ease with which tradition occurs among communities points to the eternity for which we are created. Secularism, seen in this sense, is really the declaration that death should make us forget the dead, but that never sits right even for secularists. We are discontent with the vain imagination that the living are all that matters. Even when we have been persuaded of perma-death, we still attribute existence to the supposedly non-existent enough to remember them. It takes great, unnatural vigor to combat this tendency. Churches are liable to become secular when they stop remembering the departed in regular, formal ways that guide the informal and spontaneous memorials. People will not stop remembering and honoring their obligation to the departed. The Church has been illumined from the beginning to guide them, if they will.
In Christian practice, Tradition is the incarnate expression of our communion with the whole Church. We too often confess creedally that we believe in the communion of the saints, but are content to retain a kind of gnostic view of them as though they are merely ideas in the mind of God. What else is tradition but to say that the wisdom of our elders, some of whom walked with the Lord Jesus on the earth, still obtains for us. Is it not common sense to suggest that if there is a plethora of assent over many generations to a practice or belief, that we ought not at least to privilege it above the novelties of our own time? Surely, some long-standing traditions have been found to be corrupt or incomplete, but does not the fact that these exceptions exist also highlight that there are some things that twenty centuries of Christian practice have found to be continually good? Or are we so enamored of ourselves that we feel confident to say ‘every generation before mine has gotten it wrong.’ Even if we turn out to be right in some way, should not a later generation still judge us for the hubris of that perspective, even if it incidentally yielded some insight?
It is under the weight of these questions that I am grateful for our Anglican tradition of common prayer. We cannot get anywhere in our prayers as a Church without encountering many who have come before us, who prayed these prayers, who wrote these prayers, whose words inspired the writing of these prayers. Common prayer, of course, means among the living that both laity and clergy can come together in a rule of prayer, that they are not on wholly segregated planes of the spiritual life. But beyond the edges of any age, common prayer and its poetic formality is the only way we can actually pray together in common rather than just proximally and simultaneously. If distinct persons are really going to be joined by intention and expression–praying together–they are required to give themselves to a language of prayer not unique to them. And if we are going to try to pray with those beyond our age in the communion of the saints, we must do so by receiving and preserving the prayers they prayed. The Psalms, the Lord’s Prayer, the Lucan canticles, the heavenly songs of Revelation, the ancient collects, the canon of the Mass–these are the prayers of the family; they are one of the main ways we recognize the family.
As with family lore, however, we must be wary of nostalgia. Much more than a given set of cultural and generational memes, however, nostalgia is a tendency. My colleague and co-conspirator David Woods once taught me that nostalgia is etymologically suggestive of a kind of disorder: nostos referring to homecoming and the suffix -algia referring to a pain or ache. The problem of various -algias, of course, is that they are misfirings of the nervous system, creating sensations of pain that are misaligned with factual external stimuli. There is no hot pan on the fingertips but the nerves still report burning. Nostalgia, viewed by the ancients, is a kind of ache for home that cannot be requited because it imagines a home that no longer exists and never really existed as imagined. It is the desire to go back to a point in the timeline before the catastrophe that made home no longer feel like home. Under the influence of nostalgia, we could be returned to the exact place and people and it would still not be sufficient because what we really want is the time back before we knew that such awful change was possible.
When tradition becomes nostalgic, it looks unrealistically at the past, which seeps into the present and future. The past is often glossed over and imagined as much better or more intact than it was. The present with all of its complications can never be that satisfying, and the future slowly becomes a field of opportunities to be disappointed that the idealized past is not waiting ahead of us. We fail in our obligation to the living and to our children when we refuse to see the past in its complexity–its good and bad. Tradition cannot be a retaining of the past to the resentment of the present or future. If we believe our generation and those before us had it figured out and everyone after us are collectively a disappointing decline, then we are living nostalgically and not traditionally.
Instead, tradition looks with charity to those who come after, imagining them more capable than they are at present to bear important things. It is like my grandmother bestowing her beloved spaetzle recipe to me at age seven, insisting that I memorize it and never write it down, knowing it would take twenty years to become proficient at preparing it. Tradition makes us act in hope and wonder into the future through the bestowal of what was preciously received from the past. Tradition cultivates humility and trust that God has guided and will continue to guide, and that it does not all rest with us. By practicing tradition, we are led to let go of ourselves in a healthy way and to entrust ourselves to the family. We learn to practice interdependence again through the humble honoring of the past and through responsibility and generosity to the future. And there, in the middle, we are refined by charity in the present. We are not enough of ourselves to help ourselves, after all. We need our Lord and His promise to remain God-with-us until the end of the age. And He is faithful to keep His Word in and through His Body in the world, among whom and with whom we are saved as we remember, as we hope, and as we persevere to the end.