Thinking and Tradition
October 9, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 577 THINKING AND TRADITION HILDREN have, we confess, a disturbing habit of piling up questions until you are faced with the necessity of appealing to a...
...An ancient Greek, however, knew and desired nothing higher than custom...
...It was as much opposed to mere routine as it was to the procedure of the Sophists, for whom all intellectual gardening was simply a matter of sceptical argument--a kind of annual setting out of trees which they destroyed again once the season was over...
...It has absorbed with gratitude the power of the Greek "just man" to assimilate without fatuity the moral and scientific accumulations of antiquity...
...In a fashion incomparably more sublime, the Saviour dealt with the tradition of His own people...
...When the young mind comes on the scene, eager for knowledge, it is informed that no amount of acquisition will do--that something like intelligent reflection is the only course on the menu...
...All this is Greek to the overwhelming majority of us, however, while a hasty and really somewhat petulant remark about "the survival of the fittest" has caused a rumpus even in Tennessee...
...They accepted custom not as a dead stump but as a living root out of which growth might proceed...
...No tree has ever yet sprung mysteriously out of rock...
...Even though the death of Socrates was necessary so that this truth might become quite clear to a large number, the shining light of Attic intelligence never acceded to any other view...
...Once again He proved organic that which had been in real danger of being mistaken for a tomb...
...Like all of the civilizations which stood in immediate contact with the primitive world, Greek culture had a very deep respect for foundations...
...And yet the experienced realize full well that thinking per se will never do anybody any good...
...it was the ultimate tribunal...
...He would feel that tradition or custom alone was scarcely enough...
...At all events, the candles will be arranged neatly for your burial, and there you are...
...He made it evident that custom had become, for a myriad scribes, hardly more than an ossified forest in which the soul itself could change to stone...
...They permit specialists to do it for them, and oftener than not clutch not at the processes of the guide (which are frequently interestmg and sometimes valuable) but at his more or less random ejaculations...
...You may become a more than usually abstruse philosopher...
...And it may be well to add that our rather thoughtless regard for thought may be any number of things, but that it is certainly not Greek...
...Nor can it well be credited, in our time, that continued exploration of the long way the race has gone will end suddenly in a place where the human becomes inhuman, or the authority of custom a purely mechanical law...
...Ultimately one gets below the ground to a place where even candles will not burn...
...Today it may confidently hope that culture will never supplant the Socratic attitude, that the shrubs of the Sophists will wither in their day, and that the age-old co6rdination it has cherished between its own spiritual source and the origins of civilization will endure...
...And though the flower of man is placed in an earth which its tendrils have stirred for more years than we can ever know, the beginning of it was dearly some mysterious, ecstatic seed flung joyfully by the Sower's hand in the morning...
...Long before Matthew Aronld, it seems to have clung to affection for the "best that has been known and thought in the world...
...And yet He found all the roots infinitely precious, and nursed with infinite care the prophetic sap which had coursed through Israel's soul...
...In Mr...
...And there, of course, you can sit until doomsday, thinking and thinking and thinking...
...Or you may give it up and play golf...
...Even while it regarded as its most important task the custodianship of a grace which He had promised should never fail, it nursed with marvelous patience, in a thousand scholarly doses, the plants of human wisdom...
...Here is a favorite modern educational trick...
...Chesterton would say that a Greek was committed to seeing something grand in a grandfather...
...to him this needed no higher sanction...
...In more ways than one, Catholic Christianity is the heritor of the method of Socrates as well as of the Divine method of Christ...
...F. R. Earp's stimulating book, The Way of the Greeks (published recently by the Oxford University Press) we are definitely in.formed: "There are many moderns whose code of morals rests in fact on tradition, usually the tradition of a class...
...Of course the Hellenes at their best understood this relationship with tradition perfectly...
...And as in ethics, so in many other matters...
...Its sole value lies in the circumstance that it is an incentive to digging deeper...
...The value of Aristotle's doctrine may be said to lie in the number of things it has culled, discerningly of course, from the writing8 of other men...
...October 9, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 577 THINKING AND TRADITION HILDREN have, we confess, a disturbing habit of piling up questions until you are faced with the necessity of appealing to a first principle...
...Socrates was both the great innovator and the great conservative, even as life itself is...
...Normally speaking, mature human beings are too busy for much thinking...
...and it did not mind being termed old-fashioned if it could be reasonably sure it was right...
...We are all able to supply a fairly lucid explanation of why a little boy should refrain from jumping out of the window...
...Darwin found out a great deal about the habits of the smaller fry in the animal kingdom...
...Now to what extent ought this inquisitiveness be carried ? One notices that President Lowell, addressing the freshmen of Harvard College, let it be known that they were expected to think rather than to learn...
...and so that His authority to do this might never be doubted, He set the victory of His transmutation of death into life, as a seal for all...
...But if called on to justify his conduct a man would usually, in some vague way at least, endeavor to produce some general principle...
...but concerning the causes of the injury here implied, and of the general unfriendliness of the law of gravity, we are at sea with an audience which does not patronize works of reference...
Vol. 10 • October 1929 • No. 23
