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 has 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 liberal humanism.  What we need is a return to Tradition using the capital to make clear that it is the spirit behind Tradition we must rediscover rather than any particular form it might have adopted in the past.

Tradition isn't a theory or 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 meet 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 unite our being to 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.

The Fight Against Evil

 Early on in my spiritual instruction I was told that the more progress I made the more I would be assailed by evil in all its forms. We know from the lives of the saints that as they advance on the path towards God they are increasingly attacked by the demonic forces, and we can conjecture this is so because every person who escapes the dominion of those forces weakens their power. The general populace can be corrupted by general corruption but those seeking release from the net of this world require special attention. God allows this to take place because it tempers the soul. Unto the pure all things are pure. Evil can only work on us by bringing out our own weaknesses, but when they are brought out into the open they can be dealt with if we are honest, alert and true, and if we turn to God for help.

Greater progress equals increased attack. How does this work? One might think that evil thoughts and desires that arise in one's mind show one's own sinful nature, and they might do. But they might also be put there. In dreams, for instance, we might encounter horrible things but this does not necessarily mean these things arise from our own subconscious and are somehow unresolved parts of our own nature. They might be, but they might also be a demonic assault. Attack might come from outside and other people, but it more often comes from within our own mind and we must learn to recognise it and see it for what it is. Then we just don't react to it. We don't fight it because that gives it energy and attention. We simply ignore it.

Evil in all its forms, they said. Evil has many forms. Obvious evil is obvious. We can easily recognise it, but the devil is a trickster. He can lure us down a path of sin through apparent good. How many people have thought they were fighting for God and truth when they had been deceived into following their own desires or had adopted an idol of their own making as God? The devil has corrupted whole religions in this way, not to mention political ideologies, and he can certainly corrupt us on an individual level if we are not alive to the possibility. We might think we are serving God when we are really just serving ourself.

Evil attacks at our weakest points, and these are often aspects of our character of which we are unaware. In a way, the whole spiritual path is the fight against evil which really means against our own fallen nature. The temptations that came to Christ on the mountaintop will come to all of us eventually though perhaps not in such a dramatic fashion. The way to deal with them is as Christ did. Submit yourself to God and keep him as your only goal.

What makes a real saint is conquering evil. Imagine a saint who never knew evil, who was always sweetly loving. Isn't that rather a shallow thing? What gives depth and wisdom and nobility is fighting and conquering evil within oneself. Someone who has never known evil can never be a saint. Does this mean evil is part of God's plan? I don't know but I do know he uses it to make good even better. He's clever that way.

Of Lions and Lambs

 We are living through the end times when spirit is obscured by matter as a result of which even when the spiritual is acknowledged it is often perceived through the distorting lens of modernity.

One of the characteristics of the end times is that the whole era returns as part of a general summing up of the age, but it does so in a form that is misrepresented by the reigning characteristics of the zeitgeist. Thus, we now have access to spiritual traditions of the past in a way undreamt of not long ago, but what we have access to are really only the bones on which we frequently put modern flesh.

An example of this is paganism which appears to be making a comeback in various forms. One particular form has come about in response to the feminisation of modern Christianity and the perception that it is a Jewish religion. The idea is that adopting a foreign religion has weakened the West as a whole and men in particular, and if you look at the Christian religion as it is today you can see there is truth in this. The new Archbishop of Canterbury makes it almost comically obvious. However, if you look more deeply the picture changes somewhat.

To begin with, despite appearances, Christianity is not a Jewish religion. See here and here. Obviously, it was born in a Jewish setting but Christ transcended that which was why the Jews rejected him. And then when the religion took root in the West it was transformed by its host to reflect the sensibility of Western thought and behaviour. The supposed feminine nature of Christianity is only because it shows the way to go beyond the egotistic self. Christianity has become feminised over recent years but that is not its real nature. There is nothing feminine about Christ nor his disciples who all fought and conquered the world but did so through force of spirit rather than force of arms.

Nonetheless, because Christianity has become a bland non-judgmental religion with its idea of love, originally fiery, become wet and soggy, it is not surprising that a more masculine mindset rejects it. Yet those who do reject Christianity for its supposed weakness are not seeing it as it is, only as it has become. Reacting against the soft and sentimental side of modern Christianity, some men adopt hard pagan beliefs in which self-mastery is key. Your mind must master your emotions, they say, if you are to be the master of yourself. They are right. The mind must master the emotions or you remain a slave like most of humanity. 

And yet, is this spirituality or is it self-development? Are you going beyond the self or are you reinforcing it?  It is easy to mistake self-development for spirituality. There is overlap but the former is only a preliminary phase, and problems arise when it is seen as an end in itself.

The resurgence of masculinity often goes with bodybuilding and working out at the gym but then these become ends in themselves, narcissistic ends. Its advocates want success and achievement and to make a mark in the world, and while these are part of human development, especially male development, they are not spiritual things. The self should be strong but it is an error to regard that as a spiritual state. It is only a foundation and it needs refinement and to learn sacrifice or it will degenerate.

Action and reaction are always equal and opposite. We should not allow the absurdities of the left, of feminism, of anti-racism and all the rest of the crazy catalogue of errors Western man has built up over the years, to lead to an excessive response. There are signs this is happening and I suspect the only thing that can keep us on the straight and narrow path, the razor's edge of true spirituality that combines both lion and lamb, is the risen Christ. Happy Easter!

della Francesca's Resurrection of Jesus