Saturday, January 29, 2022

What Tradition Does

GKChesterton's preface to Ballad of the White Horse has this:

...Alfred has come down to us in the best way (that is, by national legends) solely for the same reason as Arthur and Roland and the other giants of that darkness, because he fought for the Christian civilization against the heathen nihilism. But since this work was really done by generation after generation, by the Romans before they withdrew, and by the Britons while they remained, I have summarised this first crusade in a triple symbol, and given to a fictitious Roman, Celt, and Saxon, a part in the glory of Ethandune. I fancy that in fact Alfred's Wessex was of very mixed bloods; but in any case, it is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment; to see all ages in a sort of splendid foreshortening. That is the use of tradition: it telescopes history....

GKC also refers to Tradition as  'the democracy of the dead.'  And he refers to the Jesuit iconoclast in Rome:  

Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

"Small and arrogant" fits.

HT:  Grim

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