Welcome to my blog!
I guess I suck at finding catchy, self-explanatory titles. The following is an attempt to clarify. Believe it or not.
One thing will probably become clear as (if) I post on this blog: I like to think in terms of 'tradition'. But I mean by that word a number of things, things that might seem contradictory, and it is this the blog title is getting at. The latin word traditio (‘handed over’) is the common root of such different words/concepts as surrender, translation, and betrayal.
Surrender
Traditio carries within itself the seed of a universal order of things, a home, tounge, and life common of all. Importantly, it recognizes the validity of such an order, even while recognizing it as ‘merely’ human. There is always an order of things – there can be no break away by any autonomous individual from order-as-such. If order-as-such is evil, we are damned. Perhaps a common understanding of tradition (also why we love to hate it) is that it is precisely such a set of practices and structures.
We always stand firmly within a world, structure, set of circumstances, concrete and abstract, that makes us who we are. All innovation is in this certain respect imitation - we cannot break out. There is no 'out'. Within this perspective, not only does the 'old' speak to the 'new', as if we could pick and mix as we prefer from the past - but the 'new' is indeed only a surface movement on the 'old', a particular trajectory of a past that remains forever present.
Translate
I belong to several worlds – cultural, political, denominational, academic, etc – and there is no me apart from these worlds. My thoughts are a strange mix of pietist leanings, Reformed Christian ‘rational’ apologetics, postmodern theory, general interest in classic texts, historical ‘broad-brush painting’, pentecostal confidence, a taste for the inappropriate and anarchical, fascination for the radicality of orthodox dogmatism, for cross-disciplinary fusions, interruptive events, paradoxical relations, and the ‘in-between’. Whenever any aspects of my cumulated background meet (or something new is introduced) – in other words, constantly – translation is taking place, both changing everything and making sure my sense of self remains (more or less) stable throughout the interaction. As a result, I am still me, but I can never be the same again, and without having to do these translations, [the] I would not be at all.
Traditio carries the seed of translation within itself. The church founded on Pentecost was founded on translation of a single message (well, actually probably several – the canon alone gives us no less than four) into 15-20 languages. If you were there, and knew all the languages, would you not pick up differences in nuance in each sermon delivered by enthusiastic apostles, messengers, mercuries? The church never sought to replicate the ‘eternally unchangeable’ in changing circumstances – it translates itself. Translation is its DNA, its foundation if it ever had any. Translation is thus a recognition that relationship first is constitutive – it makes the participants who they are – and secondly goes ‘all the way down’.
Betray
On the ‘dark’ side of every tradition and translation there is an element of treason, of betrayal. Judas handed over Jesus to the romans, and Pilate handed over Jesus to be crucified. For me, this side of traditio is where I am constantly made to realize that all my fancy names for the nameless, all my own-made forms into which I seek to conform what is beyond all form, all my expressed orders of things (see above, under surrender) fall short, are false, made-up, violent. Betrayal is the fidelity expressed by iconoclasts, correct practice, with or without correct confession.
But rather than a reaction against traditio, betrayal becomes an essential element of its inner dynamic. The aspect of traditio that commands surrender to identity-giving structures and orders, can meet its counterpart – and its fulfilment – in the betrayal of these very same structures. Being an element of traditio rather than its negation does not mean that the extent of betrayal is limited. Quite the opposite - betrayal becomes betrayal only as part of traditio.
An English bishop once visited a cathedral school on Holy Saturday (between the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ), and asked the pupils "what do you think Jesus did on Holy Saturday?" One of the boys answered, "He went to see his friend Judas".
