Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
What is the role of tradition in renewing Western civilization?
What is the role of tradition in renewing Western civilization?
Apr 26, 2025 12:43 AM

Does tradition harm progress? Acton’s director of research, Samuel Gregg, in a recent article for Library of Law and Liberty, describes “tradition” as the handing down of beliefs, cultural molds, and historical ways of thinking and living, but also as a means to promoting human flourishing in renewing civilization. He affirms that valuable wisdom that can be found in looking to past traditions, including traditions on either end of the political spectrum. In his search to define tradition and answer these questions, Gregg looks to the prolific writer and great German philosopher Josef Pieper. From the article:

A rather different and more creative understanding of tradition is found in the writings of the German philosopher Josef Pieper (1904-1997). Perhaps most famous for his book Leisure as the Basis of Culture (1948), Pieper spent his life engaged not only in lecturing at the University of Münster, but also educating teachers in teacher-training colleges. This was not—and is mon in German academic culture.

…Pieper’s conception of tradition is the focus of 25 essays and speeches published in 2015 under the title, Tradition as Challenge. From the first page, it is clear that he did not see tradition as an alternative political agenda to, say, liberalism or modern socialism. For him tradition did not entail rejecting technological development, or even promoting particular programs such as distributist economics. Indeed, Pieper avoided sponsoring anything resembling policies let alone political manifestos. His interest was in correctly understanding the tradition that underlies what he conceived of as Western civilization, and understanding how we restate particular moral and mitments embodied in this tradition amidst changing conditions.

Gregg and Pieper share a unique perspective on what makes tradition valuable. Gregg argues that a true respect for tradition has little to do with the accidental qualities of particular cultural practices or the promotion of a specific political ideology, but rather a “particular moral and mitment” to upholding the values prise what monly call Western civilization.In-turn, he shares mon conception of Western civilization with Pieper:

What must be resisted are efforts to obliterate or relativize the kernel, which for Pieper is more or less the Christian West. The words “Christian” and “West” mean much more for him than the geographical space of Western Europe. For one thing, “West” is that which is distinct from the dominant cultures of the Middle East. But above all, Pieper regards the “Christian West” as a distinct set of philosophical and mitments. Core to this tradition, he argues, is that which is sacred because it takes “its origins from a ‘Divine’ utterance.” Thus the “Christian West” concerns Revelation, of which, he specifies, the Hebrew Scriptures are a central part. There is no Christian West, Pieper emphasizes, without the Jewish canon.

At the same time, the kernel also contains what is frequently described as “the wisdom of the ancients.” On one level, this wisdom, found in the Platonic dialogues, for example, consists in the Greek emphasis on rationality. But, Pieper observes, the very same wisdom was understood by Plato as “knowledge which e down from a supra-human source, a theios logos, a divine saying.”

…Acknowledging patibility of reason and revelation is not “conservative”; nor is it, for that matter, “liberal” or “Progressive.” Pieper’s point is that splitting reason from revelation (or vice versa) is the antithesis of what it means to be Western. This is why, to Pieper’s mind, Islam can only be foreign to the West’s unique synthesis of faith and reason. The politically incorrect character of this argument does not detract from its saliency. In a 1957 article, Pieper even said that modern Turkey’s secularization was essentially “artificial” precisely because that country’s religious-philosophical design could never really modate such a development in a manner similar to that of the Christian West. At a distance of 60 years, that argument seems even more on point than ever.

As Gregg notes, the roots of Western civilization are found in Jewish revelation and Greek wisdom. Gregg goes on to examine Pieper’s Tradition as Challenge; he concludes:

In this sense, Pieper’s reflections continue to be an important resource for those who regard tradition as that which, over time, holds together different insights into the truth of things. Tradition, in Pieper’s understanding, provides us with a powerful light that can expose those ideas that, in the name of progress, actually facilitate profound regression.

This, I’d suggest, reminds us of how much we rely on tradition to ensure that civilization endures.

To read the full article from Library of Law and Liberty, click here.

Image: Public domain

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Obamacare’s Religious Rubes
The White House has a plan to mobilize prayer vigils in front of the Supreme Court in defense of Obamacare. It was reported that the administration met with leaders at non-profit organizations and religious officials who support the new health care law. The court takes up the constitutional test of the health care mandate in a couple of weeks. The mandate has now been challenged in 26 states. Cue the same stale big government religious prophets who confuse statism and...
How to Love Liberty More Than a Libertarian Economist
I have a deep and abiding love for liberty—which is why I find myself so often in disagreement with libertarians. Libertarians love liberty too, of course, but they tend to love liberty a bit differently. I love liberty in an earthy, elemental way. I love liberty because I need it—like I need air and food—for human flourishing. In contrast, the libertarians I’ve encountered tend to love liberty primarily as an abstraction. Indeed, the most ideologically consistent libertarians I know seem...
Italy’s Tax Man Takes Aim at the Vatican
Kishore Jayabalan, the Acton Institute’s Rome office director, was interviewed by the Zenit news agency in an article titled, “Is Taxing the Church a Real Solution for Italy?” In the article, Jayabalan discusses the history of the Italian state and its imposition of property taxes on the Roman Catholic Church’s land holdings, residences and non-profit businesses. Sometimes in the past, particularly under Napoleonic rule and before the Lateran Pacts, the institution of property tax was often a subject of state...
How to Steal a Bike in New York City
Edmund Burke didn’t really say it, but it still rings true: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. In a test of this maxim, filmmaker Casey Neistat tries to steal his own bike in several locations around New York City and finds that most people do nothing about it—even when it’s done right in front of a police station. I recently spent a couple of days conducting a bike theft experiment, which...
Constitutional Cases and the Four Cardinal Virtues
Should virtue be a consideration in judicial decisionmaking? Indiana Law Professor R. George Wright makes an intriguing argument for why the four cardinal virtues could be useful in interpreting constitutional cases: Judges typically decide constitutional cases by referring to one or more legal precedents, rules, tests, principles, doctrines, or policies. This Article mends supplementing this standard approach with fully legitimate and appropriate attention to what many cultures have long recognized as the four basic cardinal virtues of practical wisdom or...
Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Threat to Freedom
Over at the Liberty Law Blog, there is an excellent post titled “Ronald Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Dialogue of Liberty” by Alan Snyder. Snyder delves into the influence Chambers had on Reagan and how their worldviews differed as well. Many conservatives and scholars felt Chambers’ prediction that the West was on the losing side of history in the battle against Marxism collapsed after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union. For many, the ideas of Chambers...
Lord Acton and the Power of the Historian
Looking through my back stacks of periodicals the other day I ran across a review in Books & Culture by David Bebbington, “Macaulay in the Dock,” of a recent biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay. The essay takes its point of departure in Lord Acton’s characterization of Macaulay as “one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious.” As Bebbington writes, “Acton, a towering intellectual of the later 19th century, was at...
Integral Human Development
The Journal of Markets & Morality is planning a theme issue for the Spring of 2013: “Integral Human Development,” i.e. the synthesis of human freedom and responsibility necessary for the material and spiritual enrichment of human life. According to Pope Benedict XVI, Integral human development presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee this development over and above human responsibility. (Caritas in Veritate 17) There is a delicate balance between the material and the...
Let’s Change Hearts and Minds (and Laws, Too)
Few clichés are so widespread within the evangelical subculture, says Matthew Lee Anderson, as the notion that our witness must be one of “changing hearts and minds.” In careful hands, the idea is at best ambiguous. At worst it reinforces the sort of interior-oriented individualism that allows for and perpetuates a blissful naivete about how institutions and structures shape our dispositions and thoughts. In less than careful hands, the phrase drives a wedge between law and culture by attempting to...
Is Work a Curse?
Is work a curse, a result of mankind’s fall from grace? Not according to the Book of Genesis. As Hugh Whelchel, Executive Director of the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, explains, what Adam was called to do in the garden is what we are still called to do in our work today: Humanity was created by God to cultivate and keep God’s creation, which included developing it and protecting it. You see, we were created to be stewards of...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved