The Tradition I Wish to Conserve

It is the essence of culture that it is communicated and acquired, and although it is inherited by one generation from another, it is a social not a biological inheritance, a tradition of learning, and an accumulated capital of knowledge and a community of folkways into which the individual has to be initiated.     —Christopher Dawson

It is fitting at the outset to acknowledge that I am not a scholar. I have no credentials in theology, philosophy, nor other sciences. I have met, however, many scholars, in a host of disciplines, during a long association with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. What knowledge I have was acquired through conversations with those scholars, listening to their lectures, reading their books and the writings of other minds greater than my own. Whatever is good in this essay I attribute to them. The errors are my own. The best that I can say about myself is that I try to be a good generalist. Not a bad approach in responding to “Is religious faith a necessary ground for conservatives?”

Religious faith has been a part of my life since childhood. Thinking about this essay brought to mind one of my earliest encounters with the notion of God. My father was a sculptor. As a child I made frequent visits to his studio. During those visits I watched as he was either modeling in clay or carving in limestone or marble. During one of those visits he told me that while he could make an excellent likeness of an individual out of existing materials, he could not give it life. It was simply a lifeless image. “Only God can give life. Man makes and God creates. God is Almighty.” Simple—yes, but “awesome” as my grandson Marcus, who is six, about the age I was then, would say. As I recall that experience, I am reminded of my father’s gentleness and his humility while telling me this and how I, too, saw the difference between God and me. Needless to say, I believed. I had it on good authority: my father who I knew loved me. Some years later I would read in a sermon by Cardinal John Henry Newman, “this attribute of God [Almighty] is the only one mentioned in the Creed. ‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty.’ . . . Why is this? It is plain why, because this attribute is the reason why we believe. Faith is the beginning of religion, and therefore the almightiness of God is made the beginning and first of His attributes.” How nice of my father to lead me to that belief. It would become the cornerstone of my intellectual and spiritual growth and my life.

I would eventually learn that man was God’s special creation. For in Genesis we read that God “formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils and man became a living soul.” When I first read these words I thought back to that earlier encounter with the notion of God in my father’s studio. How different He was from us. He had no need to model man in clay nor carve him in limestone. The thought and the act were one. And in this creation is man’s true worth. He is a soul, a breath of divinity, destined for immortality. This is his primary essence. Nothing I have read and learned over the years has shaken this simple belief in the almightiness of God and man as His special creation.

Chesterton once stated that “a Christian means a man who believes that deity or sanctity has attached to matter or entered the world of the senses.” I am a Christian, a Catholic, and the ground of my belief is in the testimony of Saint Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and after that to the eleven. . . . After that he was seen by James, then by all the apostles. And last of all, as by one born out of due time, he was seen also by me.

These beliefs are also a part of the tradition I wish to conserve. Does it follow then that a conservative must be a Christian. No. Russell Kirk lists the first of the six canons of conservative thought as a “belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.” This canon is well chosen, since God is the supernatural and transcendent and thus implied in the canon. This is the ground and foundation of conservatism.

Jacques Maritain writes that, in response to the question what is man, “we may give the Greek, Jewish, and Christian idea of man as an animal endowed with reason, whose supreme dignity is the intellect; and man as a free individual in personal relation with God, whose righteousness consists in voluntarily obeying the law of God; and man as a sinful and wounded creature called to divine life and to the freedom of grace, whose supreme perfection consists of love.” Maritain held that the “prime root” of this idea of man is the concept of the soul.

Having a soul, man can know truth through divine revelation, inspiration, and intuition. He can know the truth of his senses through the organs of sense perception. And with his reason he can derive valid propositions through logic and dialectic. Consequently man is capable of knowing.

In addition to reason, Aristotle said that man, unlike other animals, was endowed with the gift of speech. Speech was followed by the ability to write. The former enabled him to bridge the gulf between minds and the latter enabled him to overcome space and defy time, thus making it possible to communicate knowledge and experience from one generation to another through the centuries, expanding man’s spiritual and intellectual heritage. Man has always sought and preserved the true, the good, and the beautiful. And in that sense he has always been a conservative or conservator. There are no histories of man in search of error. The recognition and the acceptance of this concept that he had a soul and could reason was critical to man’s growth. Suppose that man had followed not Aristotle but the Sophist Protagoras who believed that everything was disputable and as much to be said for one side as for the other? There were other schools of thought at the time that held that man was incapable of knowing anything. Potentiality would thus have succumbed to impotence. Unfortunately, there is much evidence to suggest that both schools of thought are alive and well in the academic community today.

Pitirim Sorokin held that “Any great culture, instead of being a mere dumping place of a multitude of diverse cultural phenomena, existing side by side and unrelated to one another, represents a unity or individuality, whose parts are permeated by the same fundamental principle and articulate the same basic value.” Christopher Dawson said that religion has inspired and informed every historic culture, and that value is God “the true-reality value.” And this major premise or value is articulated, each in its own way, through the culture’s philosophy, literature, law, and its political, economic, moral, and social life, with the important parts being integral and “dependant causally.”

This is somewhat similar to what Cardinal Newman regarded as the unity and wholeness of knowledge concerning man. Newman noted that if we view mankind as “physiologists, or as moral philosophers, or as writers of economics, or politics, or as theologians . . . in all these relations together, or as the subject at once of the sciences I have named, then we may be said to reach unto and rest on the idea of man as an object or external fact. However if we are only physiologists, or only politicians, or only moralists, so is our idea of man more or less unreal.” How unreal depends on the importance of what is left out. There is a unity, integrality, of knowledge in the sciences, “one corrects another for purposes of fact,” and singly “they cannot dogmatize, except hypothetically and upon its own abstract principles.” Newman believed that “not even theology, so far as it is relative to us or is the science of religion,” is exempted from the “imperfection which ever must attend the abstract when it would determine the concrete.”

José Ortega y Gasset, writing on a similar theme, defined extremism as trying to live in one area of vital life to the exclusion of all the rest. Extremism in this sense is characteristic of the temper of our time. It is fostered in the main by the elective system in the schools. In 1865, Francis Wayland, president of Brown University, said that students should be able to study what they wanted. The result was a dismantling of the core curriculum. This wreaked havoc on order in the intellectual realm with the consequence being that nothing is basic and nothing superficial. Without a core the opportunity of the sciences correcting one another is forfeited. The lack of intellectual broadness in the academy makes the comprehension and appreciation of truth and wholeness of tradition difficult for most youth.

In order for a tradition to be a living tradition in the future, it has to be communicated to and enculturated in the young, so that they may experience it as truth in mind and soul, and make it their own. It is a pity to see youth rejecting a patrimony that they neither know nor understand. For truth, as related to man, has a way of imposing itself on the consciousness of man through experience, not with the immediacy of the law of gravity, but over time.

James Bryce in The American Commonwealth said that “morality with religion as its sanction” has always been “the basis of social polity.” However, “Suppose men ceased to believe that there was any power above them,” that nothing existed “but what their senses told them of . . . [W]ould the moral code stand unshaken?” Bryce wondered if custom, the perceived benefits of stable government, and “orderly self-restraint” would be sufficient to restrain violence and “the self-indulgent impulses of the individual.” I think not, but time will tell since it is no longer mere conjecture. I attended a public school for the first five of my school years and we began each day with a reading from the Bible. Since then we as a nation seem bent on removing every vestige of religious belief from schools and public gatherings.

C. S. Lewis declared that if you noticed that students could “not get the answer to sums” and then “discovered that schools had for some years ceased to teach arithmetic . . . you would know both the cause—ignorance—and the remedy.” Lewis was writing about the decline of Christianity in Great Britain, but the analogy is brilliantly precise.

“Is religious faith a necessary ground for conservatives?” I would say yes. Tradition is more than mere custom; it is grounded in a transcendent order. “He who sets to work on a different strand destroys the whole fabric.” We must know and love God as the Creator first, and the rest follows.