The Test of Time and the Augmentative Power of Tradition

Elevated by the Past: The Normative Role of Tradition in Life (Part 2)

St. Paul’s Cathedral, London: photo by Hieu Vu Minh (source)

Earlier this week, I introduced my subject by establishing that Catholicism is a religion of tradition—and then asking why it should be this way, what is the good of it, and how does it relate to human nature. The central question, I suggested, is as follows: Why should the fact that “X” (meaning any traditional practice) was done for a long time be an argument that we should do it now?

Lack of tested alternatives

The first point that occurs to any traditionalist is something like this: If X was done for a long, long time, then it clearly worked, and it worked in a lot of very different circumstances. Precisely because X was done for so long, no alternative to X has been tested anywhere near so thoroughly. Of the options, X just makes the most sense.¹

That’s a decent argument. But the objector thinks that modernity is so radically different from every previous set of circumstances that he doesn’t think X has actually been tested over a wide enough variety of situations. Compared to modernity, he thinks, all of antiquity and all the Middle Ages put together are just one giant situation called “the old days” or “way back when.” He thinks like this: We have had two situations, modernity and everything-before-modernity, so the fact that X worked for one of the two situations is no argument that X is best for the other. This mentality is perfectly conveyed in a memorandum from the Consilium in charge of the liturgical reform, dated September 9, 1968:

It is often impossible to preserve either orations that are found in the [current] Roman Missal or to borrow suitable orations from the treasury of ancient euchology. Indeed, prayer ought to express the mind of our current age, especially with regard to temporal necessities like the unity of Christians, peace, and famine… In addition, it seems to us that it is not always possible for the Church on every occasion to make use of ancient orations, which do not correspond with the doctrinal progress visible in recent encyclicals such as Pacem in terris and Populorum progressio, and in conciliar documents such as Gaudium et spes.²

There are many other such memoranda in the archives of the various groups of the Consilium and in the articles published by their members, but they all amount to the same claim: Modern Man™ is so different from Man of any other age that he might as well be a different species; the food of the past is not the food of the present or of the future.

Concerning the text I just quoted, Matthew Hazell comments:

Half a century on from the liturgical reform and the optimism of the “conciliar age,” it is difficult to believe that liturgists really considered “modern man” so unique that, for example, the prayers for peace contained in older missals and sacramentaries were deemed entirely unsuitable for the modern age. Of course, advances in military technology mean that particular ethical considerations are more prominent in our day, such as whether the use of nuclear weapons in any way can ever be morally licit. However, if there is anything we should have learned in the last century, it is that “modern man” is fundamentally the same as man ever was—sinful, wretched, and in dire need of the salvific grace of God.³