Tradition’s ever-fresh appeal

26 Jul 2013

By Robert Hiini

Tradition 2013 conference attendees fraternise and browse texts written by some of its stellar line-up of international and Australia-based philosophers.
PHOTO: Robert hiini

In 1488, Pope Innocent VIII distributed 100 Moorish slaves as gifts to his favourite cardinals and aristocrats, having himself received them as a gift from King Ferdinand II of Aragon.

Numerous popes in the Holy See’s long history of statecraft powered the galleys of their ships with Muslim slaves; and from the seventh century onwards, pro-celibacy synods threatened to enslave the wives of clergy, and their children.

These were just some of the litany of sins and omissions committed by popes, bishops, priests and lay people cited by the Bishop of Parramatta Anthony Fisher OP in his address at the University of Notre Dame Australia’s Tradition 2013 conference, earlier this month.

They were matters of historical fact, he said, often levelled by those suggesting modernity’s ‘allergy’ to tradition – the attitude that traditions are a threat to rationality, autonomy and freedom – was easily justified.

Perhaps more critically, they were often wielded as proof that the Church’s understanding of its own Sacred Tradition as a body of unerring, albeit developing, doctrine and teaching was ultimately indefensible.

According to the American theologian John Noonan, Bishop Fisher said, the Catholic Church did not officially condemn chattel slavery until the 20th century, more than 1900 years after the birth of Christ.

In his hour-long paper, it was a claim Bishop Fisher tackled head on, using the contentious issue of slavery to demonstrate how the Church understands the development of its own Tradition.

“To talk of mutation, rupture or about face regarding slavery, is that really adequate?” Bishop Fisher said.

“Several writers have contested the claim. They point out that no magisterial source ever supported or tolerated all that goes by the name of slavery.

“Early Christian writers such as Paul tolerated slavery but made no general defence of the institution, apparently regarding it as an intractable part of the corrupt social order that was, in any case, passing away.

“Christians were not only commanded to treat slaves justly and kindly but to regard them as their equals before God – a radical, almost treasonous claim in the ancient world,” Bishop Fisher said.

“Noonan himself admits that it was long established Catholic moral doctrine that slaves should be treated humanely; it was good to give slaves freedom; and that slaves should be allowed to marry.

“Origen favoured the Jewish practise of liberating slaves after seven years. St Gregory of Nyssa denounced slavery in the strongest terms.

“Popes St Pius I, Pope St Calixtus, and the Bishop St Patrick were all, like many clerics, themselves former slaves.

“To be able to rise to such a rank suggested that Christianity was subverting the order presumed in the ancient world,” Bishop Fisher said.

In 1435, Pope Eugene IV condemned the enslavement of people in the newly colonised Canary Islands, something Noonan dismissed as half-hearted.

But Bishop Fisher rejected Noonan’s characterisation, saying a proper examination of the text revealed the pope had not only condemned the practice of slavery but had commanded that every slave be released and compensated for their work.

“While it is true that the very next pope, Nicholas V… condoned the enslavement of Moors in a just war, it was Eugene’s text that passed into the tradition,” Bishop Fisher said.

In 1537, Pope Paul III applied the same principles as Eugene to people of the West and the Southern Indies.

“Paul III actually said that “Christ directed the Church to preach to all nations without exception, since all are capable of faith. But the Devil stirred up his allies out of avarice to enslave the Indians and treat them like, or worse than, brute animals but that Indians are true men and not beasts and that the pope, by his apostolic authority decrees that, reducing anyone else, even those outside the faith, to slavery, is null and void”.”

Despite some backsliding by several subsequent popes and bishops, Bishop Fisher said, the teaching of Eugene IV and Paul III increasingly became the official position of the popes and was restated by popes in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

“Without doubt many Church leaders were weak or half-hearted in the face of power or slaveholding interests, and sometimes complicit in them.

“Nonetheless, a clear and consistent teaching against chattel slavery emerged in the Age of Discovery and came to prevail in the Catholic Church.”

In fact, the movement to abolish the slave trade in Britain was emblematic of traditions’ value, he said. Opponents of slavery were far more likely to cite religious motivations and arguments, rather than rationalist ones.

“Secular liberalism did not do the heavy lifting in the fight against slavery any more than it did with respect to segregation,” Bishop Fisher said.

According to Joseph Ratzinger, differing attitudes to the phenomenon of tradition mark a deep rift that runs through the whole modern age, Bishop Fisher said, “with those who count tradition as a prerequisite to humanity on the one side, and those who count modernity’s abandonment of tradition as essential to rationality and progress on the other”.
Modern political philosophy had tended to treat tradition as being, at best, “an ultimately dispensable aid to human reason”, and at worst, “a repository of superstition and a threat to autonomy”.

The bishop noted a debate in the influential US journal First Things last year on the future of liberalism, in which writers from various traditions argued that the democratic experiment in ordered liberty “required a heritage of anthropological and moral assumptions even live-and-let-live toleration is impossible without… let alone a fuller flourishing of individuals and communities”.

“As gratitude to the past and obligations to the future are replaced by the near universal pursuit of immediate gratification, the postmodern self, especially the young self, is left rudderless with no basis for ordering passions, rationality and law, and so to choose amidst a smorgasbord of options modernity offers,” Bishop Fisher said.

“The failure to grasp the need for a long evolved heritage of ideas and practices to sustain liberal democracies is surely behind the comic tragedies of attempts to impose liberalism in the Middle East and Afghanistan. And recent fiascos close to home might suggest that genuine democratic culture has not yet taken root in Australia either.

“Meanwhile, the social agenda of liberalism becomes ever more strident, uncompromising and moralistic; increasingly unable to argue for its reforms and increasingly inclined to various forms of bullying.”
The current push to impose a redefinition of marriage on the West, was a case in point, Bishop Fisher said.

Without traditions, individuals and communities in self-styled tolerant societies were just as likely to manifest nihilist and despotic ideological tendencies.  Catholicism too, had not been immune from the strong, anti-tradition stance typical in the modern age.

“The Second Vatican Council wanted to return to the sources for all theology and especially a renewal of moral theology by revisiting Scripture and Tradition, received in faith and interpreted by the Magisterium, and by restoring the connection of the moral to the sacramental and spiritual and pastoral.

“But the new morality that came soon after was very different,” Bishop Fisher said.

“Many recent moralists effectively cut ties with Sacred Tradition and the Magisterium, regarding the traditional as unhelpful in the humanisation of morality and the dialogue with modernity…

“[Many] sought to rewrite moral theology more horizontally, drawing upon experience in the human sciences and the philosophies in vogue. Radical openness to the world and hostility to tradition and authority yielded a kind of secular Christianity which accommodated the fashions of the age.

“As John Paul II would demonstrate in Veritatis Splendor in 1993, such assumptions and conclusions are irreconcilable with the Sacred Tradition and thus with the vocation of the Catholic theologian, but by then, the damage had been done amongst pastors and the ordinary faithful and amongst many in the surrounding culture.”

Bishop Fisher summarised German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper’s notion of ‘traditioning’ at some length, saying tradition required a living language for their transmission and reception, as well as reasons for their existence.

To have lost touch with tradition, Bishop Fisher said, echoing Herbert McCabe, was to be “crippled as an amnesiac that just doesn’t remember who he is”.

Traditioning, however, needed to be a dynamic process if it was to be capable of being received through others’ ponderings, interpreting and critiquing.

“Real traditioning requires a living language through creative rejuvenation and sloughing off the old skin like a snake so to speak through a continuing confrontation with the immediate present and above all with the future.”