Tradition and Innovation

What role does tradition play in shaping spiritual life and practice? If one considers the crucial founding moments of the great spiritual traditions, one could argue that tradition is the necessary ground out of which the new and transformative experience of Spirit always arises. And yet, the experience itself often challenges the tradition radically and profoundly, calling into question many of its fundamental assumptions. Tradition here appears as foil, again necessary, but also destined to be surpassed by the new thing that is now emerging. Or is it simply that the tradition is always evolving and developing, fulfilling a promise that was present all along, but hidden from view until the impetus for change appears? The position one takes in response to such questions often depends on how one understands tradition in the first place. Is it a solid thing, coherent and stable, impervious to change? A reliable container for cherished values and practices whose very existence is constantly being threatened by emerging (and ever-more-relative) values and practices? Or is tradition fluid and dynamic, partaking in and influenced by shifting cultural patterns and social mores—a living thing? Such a simple juxtaposition hardly does justice to the complexity of the question. But it points to a tension inherent in the question of what it is to participate in a spiritual tradition, what it means to be faithful to that tradition, and how one can remain simultaneously faithful to the ancient ground and open to the new and often-unexpected manifestations of Spirit.

The essays in this issue of Spiritus grapple in different ways with these questions, revealing how challenging it is to remain faithful to a tradition without succumbing to the dangers of traditionalism. John McGuckin’s essay on a little known Russian saint, Fr. Paisius, reminds us of just how difficult (but crucial) it can be to retrieve from one’s own tradition the fundamental sources of spiritual inspiration and how fierce the resistance to such a project can be on the part of those who have heretofore defined the shape of that tradition. As McGuckin demonstrates, the work of translating a tradition for a new generation and retrieving its fundamental vitality requires not only ingenuity, but courage and tenacity. Amy Slagle’s essay on the reception of Orthodoxy on the North American continent, with its focus on the saints who bridged the cultural and geographical distance to make this happen, reveals an unexpected openness on the part of these exemplary figures to the new cultural reality in which they found themselves. Faced with a choice between defensiveness and insularity on the one hand (often a successful short term strategy in such circumstances), and openness and adaptation on the other, they often chose the latter course, even if it proved more challenging and difficult. Orthodoxy took root in the new world, Slagle argues, in no small measure because of these unexpected attitudes toward tradition.

One sees a similar tension in Michael Aaij’s thoughtful analysis of the continued vitality of devotion to Elizabeth of Hungary in contemporary Europe. An avalanche of books, pamphlets and devotional materials, wildly diverse in their aims and intended audiences, appeared on the occasion of her 800^th anniversary. What can account for this? How and why does this figure continue to appeal so strongly to both religious and secularized persons, Catholics and Protestants? How can a spiritual tradition (embodied in a particular figure) be made to speak in so many different ways? And what is at stake in the contested spaces that have opened up in the wake of these different ways of ‘reading’ Elizabeth? Aaij’s careful analysis of this phenomenon leads one to the conclusion that nothing less than the meaning and continued viability of the tradition itself is at stake. Dorian Llywelyn’s examination of the life and work of the remarkable Welsh mystic and hymnographer Ann Griffiths reveals a different, but related set of tensions. Griffiths became controversial, both in her own day and beyond, in part because of her unconventional reading of the Calvinist theological tradition. But this was less a result of any conscious attempt on her...