PRACTICING CATHOLICS.

Inventing Catholic
Tradition
Terrence W. Tilley
Orbis Books, $24, 200 pp.

Terrence Tilley's main purpose in this book is to develop and defend a general theory of tradition, a theory intended to capture, descriptively, what traditions are like and how they work. His secondary purpose is to apply this theory to the Catholic tradition, and in so doing to show how a good theory of tradition might be used to find a way through some of the intractable disagreements that divide Catholics at the moment.

A tradition, claims Tilley, is best understood as a complex set of enduring (but not changeless) practices. This is an understanding that focuses attention upon traditio, the act of handing something (or things) on or over to someone else, rather than upon tradita, the things handed on. Thinking about tradition as a set of practices by which things are handed over suggests that knowing a tradition is a learned and rule-ordered skill, a matter of knowing how rather than knowing that. A traditional person, in this reading, is a skilled player: she knows how to go on playing that game, as the philosopher Wittgenstein (whose influence is everywhere in Tilley's book) would say.

Paying primary or exclusive attention to the tradita, thinks Tilley, will lead to thinking that the important thing about traditions is what they hand down (creedal confessions, scriptural texts, ritual actions, institutional arrangements, and so on) and not the practices by which these things are handed down. It will also often lead to thinking that in order for the tradition to maintain its identity, it must keep the things it hands down the same. This in turn may lead to the kind of traditionalism whose main concern is with invariance: verbal invariance in confessional formulae, perhaps, or gestural invariance in liturgical performance, and it will suggest that the traditional person is a knowledgeable (rather than a skilled) person, one who is in possession of what the tradition hands on.

Tilley prefers the tradition-as-skilled-practice position for two main reasons. First, he thinks it is a more satisfactory description of how traditions (religious, linguistic, artistic, and so on) actually work: one becomes a good Catholic principally by learning the complex skill of behaving and thinking like one, not by taking possession of some unalterable items of information or some fixed patterns of behavior. Second, he thinks that understanding a tradition as a malleable set of practices extended over time permits solution of some conceptual difficulties that are hard to handle within the tradition-as-invariant-tradita view. Chief among these is the fact that a formally unvarying traditum (a creedal confession whose words remain the same, for instance) will inevitably change in meaning as the context for its use changes. This makes incoherent the conservative traditionalist's desire to preserve the identity of the tradition by maintaining the formal invariance of what it hands on: such an attempt won't and can't work. Of course, there may be other pressing reasons to work at preserving the tradita unchanged; but maintaining the identity of the tradition can't coherently be thought important among them.

About all this Tilley is correct, and his analysis of recent work on tradition by philosophers, historians, theologians, and scholars of religion is accurate and perspicacious, if not exactly novel. The book provides a thorough, useful, and suggestive application to the Catholic case of the best recent thought on what traditions are and how they work, and for that reason alone it ought to be widely read. There are, however, some problems, among which I'll note two.

Tilley's opponents include not only those who'd like to think of the Catholic tradition's identity as given by the invariance of its tradita (we might call them crass invariance theorists), but also those who like to think of its identity as provided in large part by its telos, the goal at which it aims. These people, the developmentalists (John Henry Newman among them), are mostly happy to do as Tilley does, which is to think of the Catholic tradition as constituted by a complex set of practices extended through time. But they also think that these practices are going somewhere, which is why they like metaphors of development (flowering, unfolding, blooming, and so on).

Tilley rejects developmentalist views because, he says, we have no practice-independent place from which to make or give content to such an assertion, which means (I think he thinks) that we don't and can't know where the tradition is going, and so we'd better not claim that it's going anywhere. But even by Tilley's own theoretical standards, this is not a proper criticism of developmentalism. Tilley is usually careful to say that constructivist theories of practice--theories that emphasize the contingency and malleability of the rule-governed practices that make up a tradition--don't entail antirealism. This means that you can perfectly well think what Tilley thinks about what the Catholic tradition is, and also think that becoming a skilled practitioner of it provides access to the way things are. But then it's also perfectly coherent to understand the Catholic tradition descriptively as Tilley does, and yet at the same time to see it as unfolding toward a final goal. It remains unclear (in an otherwise very clear book) why this option is to be rejected.

There is a second and deeper problem. It comes to the surface at various points in the book, but most clearly when Tilley discusses authority. Suppose we ask: Is the rule-ordered set of saint-making practices that (on Tilley's view) constitutes the Catholic tradition founded on an authoritative gift external to itself? Tilley's answer is no, and in saying this he means that we have no access to God's founding gift other than in and through the practices of the tradition. And this is so. But it is also (descriptively) true that among the more important practices of the Catholic tradition is constant reference to an authority external to itself, and that this practice does conceptual and practical work of a kind systematically occluded by Tilley's book.

It is no accident that the penultimate paragraph of the book quotes with approval one of Marty Haugen's liturgical songs, in which what is celebrated is not God but the worshipping congregation. The upshot of Tilley's fine book accords with this celebration: the reader's gaze is displaced from the Catholic tradition's constant struggle to develop practices that point away from themselves and itself, and is turned inward to precisely those practices and their practitioners. Even as a meta-traditional account of tradition, this will not quite do. Full confidence in his own method should have led Tilley to an acknowledgment that the practices that constitute the Catholic tradition are fundamentally and essentially exocentric and teleologically self-transcending. Or, if you prefer that in English, they point their practitioners away from themselves and are aimed toward a final goal that will make them irrelevant. Tilley's account of the Catholic tradition ignores or mutes these central aspects of the grammar of the faith, and as a result it is importantly inadequate in spite of its other great virtues.

Paul J. Griffiths is director of the Catholic studies program at the University of Illinois, Chicago.