The Catholic Studies Reader

5. Catholic Studies and Religious Studies: Reflections on the Concept of Tradition

5 Catholic Studies and Religious Studies Reflections on the Concept of Tradition ann taves Although most of the chairs and programs established in Catholic Studies in recent years have been established in Catholic colleges and universities, an increasing number are appearing in non-Catholic institutions both private and public. Some of the latter have been established as interdisciplinary chairs or programs without any special relationship to religious studies; others, such as the new chairs at Hofstra and UC Santa Barbara, are located in departments of religious studies alongside endowed chairs in other religious traditions, such as Tibetan Buddhist Studies, Sikh Studies, and Jewish Studies. At UCSB, where the Department of Religious Studies has been organized on an areastudies model (for example, Religions of South Asia, Religions of North America, Religions of the Mediterranean World), the endowment of a series of chairs in particular traditions sparked a yearlong faculty discussion of how the study of traditions might relate to the study of religions in areas or regions. In reflecting on those conversations, I was struck by the need for more sustained reflection on the concept of ‘‘tradition’’ within the context of religious studies. In those conversations, I used ‘‘traditions’’— perhaps naively—as a loose synonym for ‘‘religions’’ as in ‘‘religious traditions’’ or as a way to refer to variants within a religion, as in, for example, Christian or Buddhist or Islamic traditions. Although I was not assuming that the boundaries of ‘‘a tradition’’ were clear-cut or undisputed, colleagues and doctoral students raised questions that seemed to equate studying traditions with advocating for a tradition or promoting traditionalism. In contrast to other concepts routinely used by scholars of religion, such as sacred, myth, ritual, and religion, I realized that we apparently had less scholarly distance on the concept of ‘‘tradition.’’ 114 ann taves A search of the literature revealed that this is indeed the case. The concept of tradition has not been the focus intense discussion among scholars of religion in the same way that, say, myth or ritual or experience has been. Recently, however, there has been renewed interest in the term.1 This new work evinced a fairly high level of frustration with defining the term beyond the bare etymological meaning of ‘‘things handed down.’’ The best of the new work on the subject suggests these difficulties arise because the term is ‘‘an object of intense partisan struggles and ideological distortion,’’ a conclusion that will surprise few Catholics. Claims regarding tradition, these scholars suggest, mark a site of struggle. If this is the case, and I think it is, then we can anticipate that there will be no easy way to separate the normative and descriptive aspects of tradition and that any attempt to do so will presuppose a point of view.2 Although ‘‘tradition’’ is a site of struggle, we can gain greater clarity if we distinguish between several different ways we use the term and, thus, several different kinds of sites where struggle can take place. The sociologist Edward Shils makes the helpful distinction between a tradition as a thing that is handed down from the past to the present and a tradition as a ‘‘chain of transmitted variants, as in the ‘Platonic tradition ’ or the ‘Kantian tradition.’’’3 We can distinguish, in other words, between references to particular traditions, such as apostolic succession , and the Catholic tradition as distinct from (say) the Protestant tradition. Tradition in either sense can be a site of struggle, as various parties argue over what counts as apostolic succession or over what counts as Catholic tradition. We can also distinguish between tradition in either of these senses and explicit appeals to tradition as a means of legitimation, alongside or in opposition to appeals to scripture, reason, science, and so forth. Here the struggle is more likely to be over what counts as a means of legitimation. We can distinguish these three senses of tradition as traditionT (T ⳱ things handed down), traditionL (L ⳱ lineage or chain of variants), and traditionA (A ⳱ source of authority or legitimation). These distinctions can help us to clarify similarities and differences between Catholic Studies in the context of religious studies departments in secular universities and Catholic Studies in the context of Catholic universities. First, Catholic universities are related in some catholic studies and religious studies 115 way to the Catholic Church and, thus, are positioned within the Catholic traditionL. Although...