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Tradition and Continuity: Rethinking the Practice of Christian Remembering
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 March 2013
Abstract
A significant point of contention in contemporary construals of continuity and discontinuity centers on the veiled logics of power/interest at work in human constructions of knowledge. In this paper I explore how the insights of anthropologist Mary Douglas might contribute towards a rethinking of memory and tradition within the ecclesial community. I argue that Douglas' perspective on the covert processes that create the social goods of both community and knowledge offer an important heuristic guide towards a more transparent analysis of tradition and how it functions in a globalized world. If continuity is both a claim and a practice that peoples make from shared histories for shared futures, the ecclesial claim and practice of continuity must enact a gospel reflexivity that is both critical and counter-intuitive in its hermeneutical retrieval of the memoria Christi. I conclude this paper with a detailed exploration of two dimensions such a critical, counter-intuitive hermeneutic might include.
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References
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7 While the idea that institutions do the thinking for people smacks uncomfortably of Orwellian flights of fancy, some have linked Douglas to post-structural thinkers (notably Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas) who share a curiosity about the relational dynamics among symbols within traditions. See Robert Wuthrow's discussion of the similarities and contrasts in the post-structural approaches of Douglas, Foucault, Michel, and Habermas, Jürgen in his Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 50–65.Google Scholar
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13 “There was clearly one true auctor, one absolute auctoritas, God; but all that to which God gave the gift of being true, as expressing his truth and his will, became thereby an auctoritas whose exact position in time there was no need to plot with exactitude; the essential thing was that part of divine truth that it incorporated for us” (Congar, Yves, Tradition and Traditions [San Diego: Basilica Press, 1966], 90).Google Scholar
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30 “Looking back on it now … I see that my intentions with regard to sociology of religion were subversive and with the times. I wanted to free it from subservience to confessional loyalties embedded in ancient institutions. At the same time my intentions with regard to anthropology were distinctly reactionary. Instead of turning over the old order, the aim was to rehabilitate an old theoretical approach, Durkheimian, and make it available for our understanding of ourselves. In one sense the book was counter-cultural, since I was less interested in attacking forms when they have lost their meanings and suffocate the people involved in them before they die, and much more interested in discovering how they ever get any meaning at all in the first place” Douglas, , Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, 2d ed. (London: Routledge, 1996), xii–xiii.Google Scholar
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37 Ibid., 45.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
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42 Ibid., 48. “Here, it is assumed that most established institutions, if challenged, are able to rest their claims to legitimacy on their fit with the nature of the universe. A convention is institutionalized when, in reply to the question, ‘Why do you do it like this?’ although the first answer may be framed in terms of mutual convenience, in response to further questioning the final answer refers to the way that the planets are fixed in the sky or the way that plants or animals naturally behave” (ibid., 46).
43 Ibid., 55.
44 Ibid., 59.
45 Ibid., 47.
46 Ibid., 55: “Nothing else but institutions can define sameness … On the one hand, the emotional energy for creating a set of analogies comes from social concerns. On the other hand, there is a tension between the incentives for individual minds to spend their time and energy on difficult problems and the temptation to sit back and let founding analogies of the surrounding society take over.”
47 Ibid., 60.
48 Ibid., 63.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 112.
51 Ibid., 69. Douglas notes “that Merton has made a back door approach to the problem [of social amnesia]. He is not asking ‘How do people think about the constraints the social order imposes on their thoughts?’ He asks ‘How are they prevented from thinking? What are the impossible thoughts?’” (ibid., 76).
52 Ibid., 69–70. See also anthropologist Corinne Kratz's discussion of tradition and innovation in Okiek ceremonies. She notes that one of the five rhetorical techniques employed in the traditioning process is “canonization through silence.” Silence “is an effective and versatile way to deemphasize and eventually erase ceremonial change. As alternatives drop from memory, silence canonizes change as enduring tradition.” (Kratz, Corinne, “‘We've Always Done It Like This … Except for a Few Details': ‘Tradition’ and ‘Innovation’ in Okiek Ceremonies,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35.1 [1993]: 54).Google Scholar
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65 “God communicates himself to us, makes himself active in us and thus enables us to perform actions of ‘Christ in us’. … This is not the case of God replacing us … God's substance does not take the place of our substance. There is a communication of dynamism or of an active faculty and we continue to act. … It has to be recognized that we are and will be the subjects of a quality of existence and activities which go back to God's sphere of existence and activity. This is the ultimate context of the promise and the real fruit of the Spirit and the principle of our eschatological life.” Ibid., 1: 31–32.
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72 “Dangerous memory” is used here in the Johann Baptist Metz's sense of memoria passionis, mortis, et resurrectionis Jesu Christi. Richard Gaillardetz, speaking of the notion of dangerous memory, notes that “Metz wishes to recover not so much a realized eschatology that simply speaks of God's presence in the world today, but an apocalyptic eschatology that sees the future as ‘interruption,’ shocking Christians into political action.” “A People Sustained by Memory” in Ecclesiology for a Global Church: A People Called and Sent (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008) 208–48, at 231.
73 From The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, quoted in Oliver, Mary, Thirst (Beacon Press: Boston, MA, 2006), frontispiece.Google Scholar
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