Pass it on.

When I was in college I remember one of many late-night conversations with friends, the kind you don't have at any other time in your life. This night we were talking about what had first drawn us to books and reading and the later love of learning, to the quirky things that kids enjoy independently of the officially sanctioned subjects parents and teachers recommend, and in some cases enjoy in defiance of them. We were all males (this was Notre Dame, mid-sixties), and our list had some uniform aspects. Everything involved the gigantic ancient eras in geology, millions of light-years in astronomy, huge dinosaurs, and the outsized figures of Norse mythology-- this last was my own love. It, whatever it was that drew us, was always bigger then we were, and vaguely or definitely scary; but we could know something about it and feel that, because of our knowing, we were part of it, and had some control over it. (Knowledge is power, especially when you are a little kid.) It was also, always, older.

For most of human history the invocation of the ancient was a way of establishing credentials. Philosophers and occultists traced their arts back to Hermes; the Greeks tried to show that their philosophy had its origins in the truths of ancient Egypt, and Neo-Platonists invoked the earlier spirit of Pythagoras. The whole of the Bible is established on the patriarchs, who also have connections with Egypt and Ur of the Chaldees, and go back farther, to a beginning in which human beings were meant to live in communion with God; but something happened that estranged us, and the estrangement explains the obviously broken world in which we live.

The authority of the ancient is not established on the fact that ancient things are very old (although age and wisdom are clearly allied in traditions from every part of the world, probably for the simple human reason that it takes time to learn things), but because what is ancient is seen as closer to the origin, the beginning, the source; and the fact that something comes to us from ancient times is a sign of its solidity. In a way, the ancient is seen as something fresher than anything later, because it has proven itself less prone to decay. The recent is more likely to be thin, untried, and shallow than something close to the source, to the beginning of the tradition, which after all these years is still with us.

Our culture has managed to turn that understanding on its head. We are not inclined to believe in a source of revelation, a unique time. An earlier time is only that, a time no more or less meaningful than our own, just earlier, and because it is older it is probably less relevant than something more recent. And there is certainly a share of truth in this (although the role of market capitalism, and not any insight into reality, has a lot to do with this desire for the new). Though the Greeks recognized the greater antiquity of Egyptian culture and were somewhat cowed by it, we find something odd in their obeisance, and it strikes us as strange that the fathers of the church would look to the Greek philosophers as precursors of Christian revelation.

What these efforts show, however, is a desire to find a consensus, through ages and cultures. Saint Justin Martyr, in looking for the "seeds of the Word" in pagan as well as Hebrew antiquity, was making a case for the fullness of revelation: it was not confined. God had made something of himself known everywhere, before Christ as well as after, to pagans as well as to Jews. It was this harmony of understandings that indicated, at the very least, that Christians were not irrational in their claims. (Justin was, after all, a defender of a religion which was illegal and had been accused of irrationality.)

This sense of consensus is also an important facet of tradition. The word tradition means, in its root, something handed on. You hand something on for use, but the sense of tradition is that the thing handed on, from one person and community to another, reaches back to a source and finds its life there. In Christianity that source is the teaching of the Apostles, the witnesses to Christ's life and Resurrection, and apostolic succession means both fidelity to that teaching and a direct continuity with it. This sense of something ablaze at the beginning, and not an air of antiquity, a mustiness, is what tradition is meant to be. The romantic, exotic sense of antiquity with which we surround the idea of the ancient entered Western culture at the same time any serious understanding of the ancient, and tradition, began to decline.

So did a certain decadence in traditionalism itself. Those people who defend the sonorities of the King James Version of the Bible against any later translations, to take one of many examples, are not really defenders of tradition so much as they are esthetes. The koine Greek of the New Testament is much less even in its quality than the English of the KJV, and there is much to be said for the translations of various books of the Bible done by the novelist Reynolds Price (in A Palpable God), or the poet Peter Levi (who translated The Holy Gospel of John), or Richmond Lattimore, the translator of Greek classics (who has translated the four Gospels).

In all of these cases, the translators are people who understand the holiness of words, and that this is honored by rendering them with a sense of their freshness, the understanding that a word properly seen is always saying something new, for the first time. These translations are attempts, by artists, to restore the sense of freshness to words which have become too familiar to us; by presenting them new they can bring us to a fresh appreciation of what lies at the source of our faith. Peter Levi (The Holy Gospel of John, Morehouse-Barlow, 1988) offers a translation which tries to capture the shifting tenses and the rushing quality of the Greek original: "Early morning had already come, when Jesus stood there on the beach. So Jesus says to them, 'Boys, have you got anything to eat?'"

This isn't the sort of translation I would use all the time, but it is helpful: it can be bracing to get a sense of the urgency that informed the Gospel writers. This is still the center of what tradition means at root. I know Orthodox priests who think of themselves as quite traditional because they dress like nineteenth-century Russian village priests; I know Catholics who believe that by insisting on the Council of Trent as the touchstone of all true Catholicism they are being traditional. This isn't tradition at all, but only the veneration of frozen moments, fragments of a long but still new story. A genuine sense of tradition sees what truly is changeless, genuinely ancient, and present right now is the Christian message, and when it comes across most powerfully it comes across as fresh. I think of Hopkins's line: "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things." And another: "He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him."