5:00 a.m.

Good words on tradition from two brothers in the faith—one gone to Glory, the other still soldiering on: 

“Being faithful to tradition most definitely does not consist…[in] literal repetition and transmission of the philosophical and theological theses that one imagines lie hidden in time and in the contingencies of history. Rather, being faithful to tradition consists much more in imitating our Fathers in the faith with respect to their attitude of intimate reflection and their effort of audacious creation, which are the necessary preludes to true spiritual fidelity.”

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, Presence and Thought: an Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa (Ignatius, 1988), p. 12.   

“In his essay, ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’ (in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, Cambridge UP, 1986), the 20^th-century German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer states that tradition is not so much a matter of conservation as transmission, and that every act of transmission necessarily involves a corresponding act of translation. The conservative mood is therefore not necessarily the best mode for continuance of any given tradition and in fact may undercut or truncate that tradition by its very refusal to ‘translate’ it into meaningful terms for a current generation of participants. In other words, hanging on too tightly to a particular iteration of a tradition will cause it to arrive stillborn in the next generation.”

—Bruce Herman, Lothlorien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts, Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts. From “Teaching in Tongues: Christians, Art Pedagogy, and Postmodernity,” a paper presented at the conference, “Art Education, Religion and the Spiritual,” at the School for the Visual Arts, New York, October 2007.