The Recovery and Renewal of Tradition

Christianity can seem soft and feeble to many men today, a sentimental palliative that answers none of the deeper questions of life. It's become something of a nursery religion that looks to make people behave nicely to each other rather than something that addresses absolutes and can overcome death and darkness. The fire has gone out of it, and managers and consultants are raking over the ashes making the Christian religion just another form of liberalism.  What we need is a return to Tradition but I use the capital to make clear that it is the spirit behind Tradition we must rediscover not any particular form it might have adopted in the past

Tradition isn't an idea or an ideology and to think of it in those terms is to see it through the eyes of secular modernity. It isn't a system or a codification of some intellectual analysis or argument. Though it may have those elements within it, they are secondary and used to express the ideas behind it. They are not the source of them. The real source of Tradition is insight into the reality behind outer appearance, and this may either come from revelation or mystical experience which is to say it derives from the spiritual world which is primary. For Christianity and the West in general, the revelation was obviously Christ, the descent of the Logos into human form. Therefore, to restore the Christian vision we should go back to him as the source.

 

However, tradition in the Western world was based on Christ but not just Christ. Greek philosophy and thought, Roman law and military strength and the Northern European sense of the individual all determined the form it took. These coalesced into a spiritual ethos that shaped the world until it lost touch with the transcendent and collapsed into modernity which in turn collapsed into whatever we have now when not only the spiritual but more recently the rational too have been rejected.

 The rediscovery of Tradition does not mean going back to the past as it was because we are not the same people we were, and the experiences of the last few centuries have marked us indelibly. What it requires is the recognition of the transcendent and the divine principles rooted in that. At the same time, the forms Tradition took in the past were highly effective means of communicating those principles and until we have anything better we would be well advised to understand and appreciate them because they still have power when understood as receptacles for spiritual truth. We should not limit spiritual truth to the forms it took but nor should we neglect those forms since few of us are able to fully intuit spiritual reality directly. We usually need an outer vessel to convey its essence for us and there is still much to be learnt from the vessels that were built up by wise and inspired men over many centuries.

That having been said, our main goal should be to become aware of God ourselves, and the best way to do this remains through the figure of Jesus Christ. But which Christ? The unfortunate reality is that we have built our own images of Christ which reflect our own prejudices so how can we circumvent these false Christs and discover the true one? Obviously, there are the Gospels, especially that of St John, but there is also Western art and I would suggest that the image on the Turin Shroud is of particular relevance in this respect. It really does seem authentic not just in the sense that scientific analysis has, so I believe, confirmed that the cloth is of the right time and place, but also the image itself, the method of creation of which we still cannot explain. If I were told this was how Jesus looked I would not be disappointed. The face has such nobility and power and inner strength that it exceeds any artist's representation of what the Son of God might look like.

These are outer approaches to Jesus and we cannot do without them. But there is also the inner approach. This is the quest to find Christ within our own heart. I am not referring here to any concept of our own Christ nature or an abstract or Cosmic Christ. There is no inner, no abstract, no Cosmic Christ without the real person of Jesus Christ. That is the reality and the others merely borrow from that reality. But I do believe we can find Christ within ourselves through prayer and meditation on his holy self, and that by this means we can start to know something of God and eventually blend our being with his. Then we are in touch with the true source of the Christian Tradition.

This is how we rediscover Tradition today. We go back to the source but we also look for it within ourselves. Each is required for the whole approach. Tradition is made up of both body and soul, the body to preserve it and the soul to renew it.