What is the purpose of tradition?

September 23, 2025

What is the purpose of tradition?

Tradition demands constant conversion. It's no easy task! Tradition requires a perpetual effort. And indeed, the most important effort of all: that of not forgetting. Tradition is of little use for remembering; its primary purpose is to prevent forgetting. It loses its certainty when it becomes beholden to memory.

Tradition is like the condor when memory flits about on the wind like a butterfly. Like the condor, tradition lives with unwavering loyalty. Like the condor, tradition can die of love. Like the condor, everything it generates needs time to take flight and establish itself. Like the condor, it demands lofty perspectives from thought.

Tradition exists in a pendulum-like movement, swinging from the meaning it has transmitted since its origin to the understanding of that meaning filtered through the lens of the present. It is full of gems. Tradition always inaugurates a new intimacy. It gives birth to a revealed secret.

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Modern World , Notes

intimacy , tradition

Posted by:

Emmanuel L. Di Rossetti

An answer to “What is the purpose of tradition?”

Benoît YZERN

September 27, 2025 at 8:00 am

It is important to distinguish between the notion of tradition in general and any particular "regional" or "sectoral" tradition, as well as between a tradition, as a structured and structuring whole, and the traditions within it, as elements, articulated and hierarchically ordered, which enhance and convey this whole.

Within Catholicism itself, a healthy relationship with Tradition is conducive to the acquisition and then the strengthening of an optimum of humility, lucidity and holiness; overall, this is about the humility of the heirs respectful of an entire heritage of which they are the servants and transmitters, the lucidity of those who are built up by contact and by means of what inspired and guided the building up of those who preceded them, and the holiness thought and lived in Jesus Christ.

From this, we can easily understand what follows: the pillars of any tendency towards resentment towards Tradition and of any desire to destroy Tradition are
– pride, conducive to ingratitude, obliteration and flight forward,
– error, even extravagant and presumptuous lies,
– the replacement or transformation of holiness in Christo by an imprecise, imprudent and indefinite “sympathy” ad extra et in mundo.

Let us add one last aspect of things: faced with the effects of intensification of the present moment which characterize the atmosphere which serves or takes the place of culture in our time, at least since 1914, recourse to Tradition is equivalent to recourse to an “anthropological-civilizational” accompanying effect which contributes to keeping alive the Christian sense of duration, depth, primacy of inner life and solidarity, especially liturgical and spiritual, between the various generations of Catholic faithful.

Reading the foregoing, one better understands the objective of those who have continued the work of those who were, or wanted to be, the assassins and then the gravediggers of Tradition, as well as their hatred of Tradition. For them, Tradition is enslaving, whereas in fact it is liberating, provided it is properly understood, well thought out, and well lived.

In this line of thought, it is rather amusing that so many reformist Catholics, who disdain or even hate Catholic Tradition, also warmly and positively appreciate almost all non-Christian religions and belief traditions.

There is a relationship to things, or a way of looking at things, which leads one to think that this attitude stems from or is part of a quasi-scam.

Answer

SALVE

Emmanuel L. Di Rossetti was a journalist for twelve years. He was an officer in the French Army's 2nd Foreign Infantry Regiment. He is an entrepreneur. This travelogue is the fruit of his reflections on journalism, literature, and the Catholic religion. It is placed under the benevolent and enlightened authority of Georges Bernanos.

We understand absolutely nothing about modern civilization if we do not first admit that it is a universal conspiracy against all forms of inner life. France Against the Robots (1946). Georges Bernanos

Against the Robots