1-7-23 Bulletin

Holy Tradition in the Orthodox Church is a heritage of faith that remains both potent and compelling. And this is because the connecting point, the “synapsis” that pairs together what is old with what is new, is no less than the Holy Spirit Itself. As the noted Orthodox theologican, Vladimir Lossky writes, ”Holy Tradition is the life of the Holy Spirit within the Church” (“Mystical Theology”).

Orthodox Christians understand the need for Holy Tradition because no single generation, of its own accord, can understand and experience the fullness of the gospel. Science, as an example, has a tradition of dynamic knowledge in this identical sense: that no single generation of scientists can claim to know what they know by themselves, within the span of several decades, or even a single century. Rather, each scientist makes progress by building step-by-step, through trial and error, on the work of previous generations. Thus, we know how Aristotle was updated by Galilei, and how Galilei was updated by Newton, and how Newton was updated by Einstein, and how Einstein was updated by Max Planck, the father of quantum physics. In each of these cases, progress was made because an inheritance of dynamic knowledge was preserved and passed down, in effect “traditioned,” to succeeding generations. Were every scientist to dismiss previous centuries of work and discovery, with the assumption that nothing from the past is trustworthy, we humans would still be in the Stone Age. The Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, assumes the same, that past generations have something necessary and vital to be gifted to the faithful living in each time and place, and that the contemporary faithful should take heed lest they be deceived by their own prideful presumptions – that they need not listen to their own history.

In this manner, Holy Tradition can also be understood as a shared form of communal knowledge carried forward “exponentially” from history and deposited into the present. As a form of communal and shared knowledge, Holy Tradition is thereby able to offer every Christian in his own time a reserve of wisdom that could not, in any way, be discovered by any one person—left to himself with his own limited “stock” of knowledge.

This is especially true of how the Church has dealt with questions that pertain to fallen human nature. Fasting (a central feature of Holy Tradition) is not only found in the scriptures, but is also given to every Orthodox Christian as a gift of medicinal healing. Through the liturgical year, the Orthodox faithful are privileged to observe and experience the fast, not as a punishment for sin, but as a type of spiritual therapy that helps to overcome the carnality of eating and drinking to excess, and without which prayer is virtually impossible. Similarly, the faithful also are given the gift of Holy Confession not only so that they might be cleansed of their sins but also so that they might find good spiritual counsel from their priest; for as the saints like to say, “The man who has chosen himself as his own spiritual guide has chosen a fool.” In this case, the priest or the spiritual father offers counsel not from his own “store” of ideas or opinions about how to live the Christian life, but from the collective knowledge that has been traditioned down through the centuries from the lives of the saints.

Now it is this common knowledge which is a summing up of the learning and teaching of previous generations—of epochs even—that gives Holy Tradition its veracity and reliability. In this way, custom becomes heritage, convention becomes manners, ritual becomes respect, and ceremony becomes liturgy. That is to say, instead of the Church doing things merely “for the sake of rote habit,” i.e., because this is the way these things were done in the past, the Church transforms its Sacred Tradition from being “a democracy of the dead,” (as Chesterton famously wrote) into a commonwealth of the living.

Finally, too, Holy Tradition is to be discovered most notably in the Eucharistic mystery of the Church. For if the essence of Christianity is that “Jesus lives,” and if the gospel promises that by following Him we can be changed from the old into the new through His death and resurrection, then the most concrete expression of the Church’s Tradition is the Eucharist. For the Eucharist is what the apostles passed down most carefully and succinctly to their successors, the bishops. Holy Tradition is truly the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church, and its purpose is not so much that the past might be stringently and forever preserved, but that the fullness of faith might be received and lived by every believer in every place and generation.

Fr. Paul Jannakos