Jack Clarke ◦ Network Actor

Sunday 17 December 2023

The Remainder

article

TRADITION! cries the fictitious shtetl of Anatevka in answer to every question posed of their immiserated livelihood. Why, Yente, does the matchmaker arrange the marriages? Tradition! Why, Golde, must the women run the home? Tradition! Why, Tevye, is there a fiddler on that roof? Tradition! To every question a simple, singular answer. Such traditions are – in Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics at least – the ways in which we as societies “keep balance” (and for oneself to know what “God expects him to do”). Indeed, the success of Fiddler on the Roof – and in particular its opening number – was attributed by its first director Hal Prince to the universalism of traditions themselves.¹ However the song Tradition forebodes their imminent upheaval – for both Anatevka at the turn of the c20th and us here in the 21st – as new concepts, new tools, and renewed prejudices move, over the course of history, from East to West and back again.

In its deepest etymological roots tradition is derived from the Latin noun trāditiō and verb trādō. Unsurprisingly, both terms designate a fuzzy set of senses related to the contemporary idea of trade (trādō likely influencing the Old English trada through its inflection trādēre),however trāditiō places a particular emphasis on this act of giving or handing over as a kind of surrender. In fact, trāditor, to which trāditiō is strongly related, translates into English quite directly as traitor, used in Tacitus’ c1st Historiae through the phrase ‘interfecto traditore’ (the betrayer slayed). More surprising than this, however, is the fact that along with this sense of betrayal, trāditor also translates into teacher, and trāditiō into instruction or teaching.

In Ecclesiastical Latin this second concept is particularly pronounced, as in the phrase ‘traditio seniorum’ meaning the ‘tradition or handing down of the elders’. In Saint Bede’s unusually detailed preface to his Ecclesiastical History of the English People – compiled in the c8th – this phrase recurs in discussions of his research methodology. For example, Bede writes of how he turned to Abbot Albinus of Canterbury when sourcing those liturgical traditions of old Southern England, and how Albinus knew of these by way of written records, or the traditions of his predecessors:

uel seniors traditione cognouera

While this sense of traditione appears somewhat uncomplicated by the terms more ‘traitorous’ roots, these begin to resurface with the emergence of Middle English and its new trā̆diciǒun. In Wycliffite’s Bible of 1384, Colossians epistle reads:

Se ȝe that no man disseyue ȝou by philosofye and veyn fallace, or gilouse falshede, vp the tradicioun of men. [Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.]

Here – in the c14th and c15th – references to the ‘vain’ or ‘deceitful’ traditions of men were often made in critical discussions of Jewish history and practices. So much so that an early definition of the Middle English trā̆diciǒun is given as a ‘system of beliefs’ based on a ‘rabbinical exposition’ of the Mosaic law, ² as can be seen in a c15th translation of Higden’s Polychronicon:

The firste men were callede Pharisei..thei were diuidede in conuersacion..from the rite and consuetude of other peple..makenge a determinacion of the tradicion of Moyses in theire statutes. [The first men were called Pharisees. They were distinguished in their way of life from the right and custom of other people, making a determination of the tradition of Moses in their statutes.]

This anti-Judaic connotation – which upheld a particularly insidious concept of the traitor within tradition – morphed, during the reformation, into an anti-Catholic one. In Lancelot Ridley’s Commentary of 1540, for example, the clergyman advocated for an ‘unlearning of tongues’ related to ‘the olde Catholyke Doctours of the Churche’, arguing that their heretical doctrines sought to:

make mānes traditions lawes or ceremonies inuented of man equall with goddes lawe

Insofar as the Protestant Reformation resembled a ‘return to scripture’, it did so in opposition to the concept of tradition – understood as a set of practices handed down over generations – as such. Instead tradition became an exegetical exercise, seeking explicit instructions from holy scripture. Interesting here is a specific sense of tradition given by the oed only for the period between 1450–1565 – the height of the reformation – as an instruction or an ordinance. This last point is best evidenced in Thomas Stapleton’s translation of the German theologian Friedrich Staphylus’ Apologie, which speaks very pragmatically of replacing the eyesore tradition with these newer terms:

In like maner bicause traditions are a great eye sore to all newe ghospellers, they putt out of S. Paule the worde Traditions, and put in his place sometime Ordinaunces sometime Institutions, as ofte as S. Paule biddeth thē to be kept. In other places, when the traditions of the Jewes are reprehended, then they kepe the worde gladly.

Nevertheless, in spite – or perhaps by virtue – of its lacking popularity, the term tradition began to soften as the reformation itself morphed into a new kind of secular ‘enlightenment’. From 1600 one could reasonably speak of a tradition as any practice or custom that had been accepted by some kind of social group and which, in some way, was handed down from generation to generation. In Shakespeare’s Richard II we can perhaps see the effect of this loosening, with the King himself, in a moment of defeat, imploring his audience to throw tradition away altogether:

With solemn reverence. Throw away respect, Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty, For you have but mistook me all this while. I live with bread like you, feel want, Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus, How can you say to me I am a king?

And so uses of the word tradition, now unmoored and relativistic, stood in for all manner of vague activities. To the parliament of 1651 Peter Chamberlain wrote, for example:

That you have made the Earth to shake, and the Seas to tremble under you: (even Earthly men, and Seas of their Traditions)...

In 1705, prefacing his poem The Oculist, William Read wrote of the fallible traditions within the newly-formed sciences:

For considering the infinite Variety of Tempers and Constitutions attended by so many various Incidences, Causes and Circumstances in corporal Infirmities, even the best recorded Golden Rule of Art, may prove but a fallible Tradition, if Book-work Knowledge were the Physicians only Guide.³

And in 1818 – in her Passages from Autobiography – Sydney Lady Morgan writes of the waning traditions of post-revolutionary France:

The duke is a tradition of the grands seigneurs of the courtly times of France, a tradition fast wearing out; but he is a good patriot and an honest, unswerving politician.

While each of these cases speak of traditions across a wide range of fields and activities, what unifies them is precisely the idea that each is at risk of, as Lady Morgan writes, ‘fast wearing out’. Over the course of the 1800’s this challenge to traditions of all stripes gave rise to a set of new political philosophies in the UK, broadly captured in the binary between conservative ‘Traditionalists’ (such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and John Henry Newman) and modernising ‘Progressivists’ (such as Robert Owen, Jeremy Bentham or the Chartists). Those who upheld the practices of their forebears and those who sought to betray them!

Today, questions of tradition are no less fraught, and follow much the same ‘Trad’ versus ‘Prog’ opposition. If anything, these debates have intensified in recent years, with the emergence of newly minted Internet slang denoting various traditionalist positions and characters: the Tradwife of Instagram and TikTok, the Trad Girl of 4Chan and the TradCath of Twitter and Reddit. When viewed in the long arc of the term's etymology, these recent calls to ‘embrace’ the ‘traditions’ of the 1950s read as particularly ironic, harking back to a political and cultural conjuncture that the original Traditionalists would have, in many ways, fought against.

Of course there are many subtler uses of the word which have emerged over the c20th and c21st as well. From 1900 on, for example, the term has come to be used as a stand-in for a given artistic method or style, as in the ‘tradition of Oscar Wilde’ or, perhaps, ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic. In our post-postmodern period these traditions are truly unmoored anew, and span from the most profound practices of Intangible Cultural Heritage to the half-hearted resolutions of a new year.

This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

Tradition

Footnotes