Truth and Tradition: Seeing the Future in the Light of the Past

As William Ralph Inge, Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, said, "Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next."

From Crisis

By Joseph Pearce

To exclude the past, and with it tradition, is to exclude God who stands outside of all time.

Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. 
—G.K. Chesterton

There are two spirits at work in every generation of the ages of man. There is the Holy Spirit and there is the Spirit of the Age—the Heiliger Geist and the Zeitgeist. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of all ages; He is the unchanging Spirit which enlightens every time with the timelessness of truth. The Spirit of the Age is the passing spirit of each passing age; it is the ever-changing spirit which reflects the fads and fashions of particular periods. 

The Holy Spirit is not of an age but of all ages because He is omnipresent. It is not so much that He is present in every age, though He is, but that every age is present to Him. There is no past and there is no future for God. All is now. And here lies the paradox which enables us to understand our own age in the light of all ages. Here lies the connection between truth and tradition; here lies the means by which we can see the present and the future in the light of the past.

The past needs to be present to us because it is present to God; it shines forth His presence in time. The future cannot be present to us in the same way as it is present to God, but we know that He is present in the ages to come as He is present in the ages that have been. In the words of the well-known Gospel song, we know not what the future holds, but we know who holds the future. 

This knowledge of the omnipresence of the Holy Spirit liberates us from the Spirit of the Age. It enables us to see the latest fads and fashions, the latest ideological movements, the latest twists and turns in politics, in the light of timeless truth. Fashions come and go. Fads fade. The truth remains. 

G.K. Chesterton saw the connection between truth and tradition in the metaphorical form of a tree, rooted deep in time, growing through the centuries, alive and essentially the same in all ages. In this sense, we can see the Holy Spirit as the Tree of Life. Chesterton contrasted this tree of truth and tradition, this Tree of Life, with what he called the philosophy of the cloud, the Spirit of the Age, which has no roots in terms of either truth or time, which floats formlessly through the ages, blown about by whatever winds of change are in the air at any particular time.

Returning to Chesterton’s definition of tradition as “the democracy of the dead,” we can see that it is the wisdom of the sages speaking through the ages. It is the Great Conversation, conducted in the pages of the Great Books; it is the magisterium of the Church, teaching timeless fidelity to the doctrines of Christian orthodoxy; it is the Sacred Continuum of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It is also seeing the past in the light of the presence of God and seeing the future in the light of the past. It is seeing history as a chronological map in which we can see where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.

Ultimately, the light of history is the light of the Gospel because the template of history is to be found in the Gospel narrative. Caesar is present in every generation. He is the spirit of the world; he is the ruler of the City of Man who wars with the City of God; he is the political power of the Spirit of the Age. Christ is also present in every generation, of course, and so are His disciples. As He promised, His disciples have been persecuted through the ages by Caesar and by Caesar’s servants. The followers of Christ are always relatively powerless in political terms because Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world. 

Ultimately, the light of history is the light of the Gospel because the template of history is to be found in the Gospel narrative.Tweet This

Judas is present in every generation. He is the enemy within the Church; he is the traitor who betrays the Mystical Body of Christ with the kiss of concupiscence that corrupts the flesh or with the curse of heresy that poisons the spirit. He is the modernist who betrays the Holy Spirit because he owes his true allegiance to the Spirit of the Age.

The Cross is also present in every generation; it is in the hearts of those who choose it and in the hearts of those who refuse it. Those who choose it are crucified; those who refuse it crucify others. 

After the crucifixion comes death, which is also present in every generation. Death is the end of history for each and every one of us; it is the end of our own personal story in the larger story called history but also the beginning of God’s eternal story which is His Story. It is in this sense, this deepest and eternal sense, that we should live our lives in the presence of the truth of tradition. It is in this sense, this deepest and eternal sense, that we should see our own future in the light of the past. 

Pictured: "Allegory of Time and Space", print from 1880