A review by theologiaviatorum
The Vindication of Tradition: The 1983 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities by Jaroslav Pelikan

informative fast-paced

4.0

 This is Pelikan's Jefferson Lectures in Humanities from 1983. These four lectures, a short 82 pages, are a brief apologia in defense of tradition. Pelikan reminds us that "we do not have a choice between being shaped by our intellectual and spiritual DNA and not being shaped by it, as though we had sprung into being by some kind of cultural spontaneous generation" (53). We are traditioned creatures and cannot escape it, so we have some choices to make: "whether to understand our origins in our tradition or merely to let that tradition work on us without our understanding it, in short, whether to be conscious participants or unconscious victims" (53). Acknowledging tradition, however, is different from traditionalism. "Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living" (65). So we are not mere slaves of the past, but students of the past, participants in the present, and artisans of the future. To quote Goethe, as Jaroslav does, "What you have as heritage, take now as task; for thus you will make it your own."