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Tradition and Authority in the Western Church 300-1140
By Karl F. Morrison PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1969 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07155-8
CHAPTER 1
Tradition as a Safeguard of Cohesion
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A. INTRODUCTION: CONSTANTS AND VARIABLES
Teaching and ruling are only two aspects of religion; and religion itself is but one element among several that claim equal priority in the history of any civilization. When a mediaevalist thinks of tradition, he normally has in mind one specific category of religious authority, a small element in Church history, a drop in the great stream of the Middle Ages. Still, it has broader implications. Strictly defined, tradition concerns only the transmission of sacred knowledge; but as such, at least by implication, it stands at the hub of theological enquiry and of other issues to which theology was fundamental, such as Church order and political thought. The doctrine of the Incarnation, directly and by extension, runs like a scarlet thread through the grey fabric of religious and political thought in the early Middle Ages. Tradition was the needle that carried the thread, working out theology's complex and often elusive pattern.
Everyone has some concept of tradition. Art historians speak of various traditions — the Siennese, the Mannerist, the Impressionist, for example. Students of literature recognize, among others, the classical and romantic traditions. The "American way of life," the "honor system" at Princeton University, the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, celebrations around the Christmas tree are all traditional. Anthropologists and sociologists use the term more precisely, each in his own way. A distinguished sociologist has described mediaeval society, with its relatively slow change in ethical values and its emphasis on family and tribe, as "tradition-directed." An eminent student of political forms has written about The American Political Tradition. Kidnapping and rape, we are told, are still part of "a Sicilian tradition of convincing a girl to marry"; and a violated girl recently made herself an outcast among her own people when she refused to honor the tradition by marrying her abductor. Tradition in these senses indicates accepted ways of doing things, conventions sanctioned by old usage.
But for the theologian this is not tradition. Tradition for him is a bond which unifies the Church and separates it from the rest of the world. It is the idea that the true faith exists only within the Church as a community; that the faith and perhaps also the authentic order of the Church was given by Christ to the Apostles; and that it has been handed on unimpaired by subsequent generations of believers. "Tradition" is that "handing on" in its entirety, the preservation and continuance of the faith, the warrant of the Chinch's existence, the great wall between believers and the outside world.
A fifth-century writer, Vincent of Lérins, composed the classic definition. "The tradition of the catholic Church," he wrote, was one of two necessary canons of orthodoxy, the other canon being Scripture itself. Tradition alone could establish the one true meaning of Holy Writ. It was easy to detect authentic tradition, for it had been believed "everywhere, always, and by everyone. That is truly and properly catholic, as is shown by the very force and meaning of the word, which comprehends everything almost universally. We shall hold to this rule if we follow universality, antiquity, and consensus. We shall follow universality if we acknowledge that one faith to be true which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity if we in no way depart from those interpretations which our ancestors and fathers manifestly proclaimed; consensus if in antiquity itself we keep following the definitions and opinions of all, or surely almost all, bishops and teachers." Vincent wrote that universality might in itself be an insufficient measure of orthodoxy, since the whole Church could conceivably be infected by heresy. Antiquity too might fail, if no oecumenical councils had considered questions at issue; one might unwittingly mistake an ancient heresy for true belief. Only the consensus of the Fathers was decisive, the judgment of men who had lived in all ages and places, and whose authority was acknowledged. "And whatever [the Christian] finds to have been held, approved, and taught, not only by one or two, but by all equally and with one consensus, openly, frequently, and steadfastly, he may consider tenable without any reservations."
Nothing could be simpler, or more straightforward. What difficulties are there? Does one not exaggerate the problems, in studying this idea, to see change, variety, and inconsistency? Perhaps not. Vincent composed his definition to refute what he considered the dangerous novelties of that Doctor of the Church, St. Augustine of Hippo. And the concept of tradition has always been a focus of debate. During the Reformation of the sixteenth century, men were eager to establish the precise nature of tradition; there is now a renewed interest in the same problem. The Second Vatican Council devoted part of a decree to it, and it periodically rises to vex the World Council of Churches. Beyond a general agreement with Vincent of Lérins about function, enquirers have never reached any common understanding about the degree of correspondence between Scriptures and tradition, about the content of tradition, or about the manner in which tradition is conveyed. Tradition is thus a kind of authority which men understand in clear, but widely different, ways.
This diversity arose in large part through the essential nature of theology. Christian thinkers have to describe a great mystery — the Word made flesh. The Deathless One was born to die. Wisdom became an ignorant child. Power became a feeble child. The Ancient of Days, the Eternal One, was born. This was accomplished so that man might change his inherent nature and be saved by being exalted to reign in and with God, participating in the nature of Divinity. Rationalizing this mystery was yet more complex. Christian doctrine, in contrast with Jewish, depends upon a testament, instead of a covenant. It derives from perceiving truth by unique revelation in Christ's mission, self-sacrifice, and resurrection, rather than from achieving knowledge of divine truth by the cumulative experience and reasoning of an entire people. Both theology and the whole system of moral values which broadly defines Christianity thus rest on a cornerstone of complete, virtually instantaneous, and unrepeatable revelation. Consequently, there is great scope for diversity in interpretation.
Grave differences also arose from another quarter. Vincent of Lérins showed the flaw in his all-too-clear definition when he said that universality could deceive if the whole Church fell into heresy. His ultimate canon was universal consensus; his argument was in fact tautological. Interpretations of Scripture vary, he said; consequently tradition must act as a check on the exegesis both of scripture and of patristic texts. The social and political influences — and that most erratic element, personal conviction — which produced different schools of scriptural interpretation likewise affected patristic studies, and conditioned different and sometimes antagonistic standards of conformity among ecclesiological schools. The appeal to tradition was not, as mediaeval thinkers believed, an appeal to a timeless, abstract standard, but to various modes of thought formed by particular circumstances of time and place. That was the fundamental difficulty of our concept, the danger in the sort of certainty that John Knox displayed to Mary, Queen of Scots.
The Queen spoke for many ordinary, perplexed persons in her encounter with Knox. She complained that his doctrine tended one way, and that of the pope and cardinals, another. Whom could she safely follow? Who might judge? Knox represented the self-confidence of most doctrinaire theologians when he answered unhesitatingly that she must follow him. "Ye shall believe God, that plainly speaketh in His Word, and further than the Word teaches you, ye neither shall believe the one or the other. The Word of God is plain in the self; and if there appear any obscurity in one place, the Holy Ghost, which is never contrarious to Himself, explains the same more clearly in other places, so that there can remain no doubt, but unto such as obstinately remain ignorant."
Knox divided the world between himself and his followers, who understood the Holy Ghost, and the others, who were stubbornly ignorant. His attitude was matched in every religious grouping of the period with which we are to deal. Nicene, Arian, Nestorian, Monophysite, and all the rest argued that they held the unchanging truth, the doctrine of salvation. And yet, vast changes did occur in doctrine and in the concepts of the Church, of man's relationship to God, and of how sacred knowledge was properly transmitted.
The very nature of tradition, as early mediaeval thinkers understood it, contained the seeds of diversity, and set the idea apart from the conventional techniques and the clear definitions of historical criticism. For it maintained that the cohesion of the Church depended both on permanent and on transitory elements, and on conservatism and renewal. Though it exalted antiquity as a prime virtue, it never had the antiquarian character of traditionalism. Vincent of Lérins described this necessary interplay of the eternal and the mutable, when, after discussing the antiquity and universality of tradition, he wrote: "But perhaps someone is saying: 'Will there be, therefore, no development in the Church of Christ?' Obviously, there may be even very great development; for what man is so hateful to men, so odious to God as to strive to deny it? But, to be sure, it must truly be a development, and not a transformation, of the faith. The quality of development is the elaboration of anything, preserving its own character; that of transformation, the change of something from one thing into another. With the passage of the years and the ages of individual men and of everyone, of each man and of the whole Church, understanding, knowledge, and wisdom must grow and develop greatly and powerfully, but [each must grow] only in its own kind, in the same dogma, the same sense, the same meaning." Vincent continued to compare this growth with the development of human bodies, and with plants which, in the "elaboration" of their forms, preserve their original natures.
Vincent's statement was an early acknowledgment that the idea of Christian tradition, a theological concept in origin, also had intrinsically historical and institutional characteristics. The dualism of conservatism and renewal, and the simple passage of time, which removed successive generations of thinkers increasingly far from the Apostolic Age, forced temporal aspects upon a concept whose essence was eternal verity. Conservatism required that tradition be immune from the attrition of time; renewal declared that knowledge of it was subject to mutability, to neglect and corruption, and to correction and recovery. To admit this was to open the door to divergent interpretations and to conflict.
The difficulties in defining the idea of tradition are, therefore, that it meant different things to different people, that these meanings were inconsistent and sometimes contradictory, and, fundamentally, that the ways men understood it were subject to change by circumstances of time and place. Men used the same words, but meant different things. Instead of a unitary, immutable, and universal idea, we have to deal with many ideas of tradition.
In discussing the idea of tradition, we shall be concerned to sketch the history of these variations. But the major question we must treat is this: Historically, tradition was a constantly open question for which men framed — as they still do — many different answers. Thinkers who wrestled with this issue saw it, each in his own way, as a concrete matter about which right-minded men could have no doubt. For them, it was a timeless control on the authenticity of rules and official acts in the Church; and it was, at the same time, independent in origin, authority, and ultimate purpose from law and office. We have seen that Vincent of Lérins considered it in effect an abstract principle of right to which, above all, the universal consensus of believers witnessed. In the following essay, we shall try to show the effect of this idea on the way men thought of legitimacy within the Church and of relations between the Church and the world outside it. We shall discuss tradition both as it related to diverse historical contexts, and as men thought it to be.
After a background sketch of how people thought about tradition when the Roman Empire persecuted the Church, the main body of the essay begins with the conversion of Constantine and the slow establishment of the Christian Empire. It traces stages of development through three great crises in the West — the aftermath of Constantine's conversion, the Iconoclastic Dispute, and the Investiture Controversy — before the time of Gratian's Decretum, the great systematic book of law that fundamentally changed men's understanding of authority in the Church.
B. TRADITION IN THE AGE OF THE APOLOGISTS
Any religion that seeks to teach the same doctrine over a long period of time has a concept of tradition. It preaches that, as truth is immutable, each generation has handed on its body of sacred knowledge to the next without essential change; it honors a succession of authentic teachers, men having special gifts as expositors of doctrine, bearers of tradition. Above all, it holds that tradition unifies the faithful and separates them from men outside the religious body. Tradition exists only among the faithful; only they have the doctrine of salvation. But, like a Damoclean sword, there always hangs over believers the danger that even they may lose or corrupt the words of truth and life, and thus suffer the fate of the infidel.
These two limitations heavily influenced the attitudes of the apologists toward Roman society, which had no part in Christian tradition, and toward the Synagogue, which, to their minds, had first received tradition, then lost it through corruption and infidelity. From the fourth century onward, Greek and Latin writers tended to think of society as Christian. For them, the standards of personal conduct and just government to which society nominally adhered were those preached by the Church. In fact, this harmony of religion and social order was never complete; before the conversion of Constantine, it was utterly unknown. Society, epitomized in the Roman imperial government, repudiated Christianity and persecuted its followers; Christians rejected the pagan value systems. Christianity and society withstood one another, lacking a basis for consensus, which would have united them, and for close communication, which would have sustained the union.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tradition and Authority in the Western Church 300-1140 by Karl F. Morrison. Copyright © 1969 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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