Books in Brief: The Vindication of Tradition

The Vindication of Tradition, by Jaroslav Pelikan (Yale, 93 pp., $10.95)

Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and one of the most distinguished humanistic scholars in the world today, Jaroslav Pelikan delivered the 1983 Thomas Jefferson Lecture sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This short, magisterial volume is the result. Pelikan is a scholar of the history of Christianity and author of the highly esteemed The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (four volumes to date) and many other books. His concise Vindication (93 pages, including notes) ought not to be missed, as it embodies a restoration of concentricity and sanity after the “incessant autobiography” and intellectual promiscuity of the 1960s and their aftermath. Pelikan provides a fine contrast to the fecklessness and sheer nuttiness of a good deal of modern literary scholarship, especially that emanating from the English Department at his own university, where every man is his own Messiah and the critic-heroes melodramatically wrestle with “the anxiety of influence” and busily “deconstruct” literary meaning, coherence, and canon. In contrast to this mock-Promethean “dissidence of dissent,” the bitter end of secularized Protestantism and Judaism, romanticism, existentialism, and “spilt religion” generally, Pelikan, a Lutheran, has rediscovered true, ecumenical Catholicism. His real hero, in this volume and two other recent ones, is that great, deep, antiseptic thinker John Henry Newman, “the nineteenth century’s principal exponent of the recovery of tradition.” Like Eliot, especially in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and After Strange Gods, Pelikan judiciously analyzes the importance, sanity, and vitality of orthodox tradition in its various kinds of subdivisions, distinguishing it from both “pedantic traditionalism” and “arbitrary subjectivity,” and insists that by “including the dead in the circle of discourse, we enrich the quality of the conversation.” (It is revealing that at crucial junctures in his argument Pelikan quotes lovely phrases in explication and defense of the nourishing truth of tradition from a writer not named in the text, G. K. Chesterton, who said of himself: “I am the man who, with the utmost daring, discovered what was discovered before.”) In its defiance of our noisy, nihilistic modern American amnesia, this short, eloquent book brings great credit to its author, his university, and the Godly and humane tradition he represents, the tradition of Arnold and Newman: of the best that has been thought, said, and done, within and beyond the world.

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).

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The Vindication of Tradition, by Jaroslav Pelikan (Yale, 93 pp., $10.95)

Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and one of the most distinguished humanistic scholars in the world today, Jaroslav Pelikan delivered the 1983 Thomas Jefferson Lecture sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This short, magisterial volume is the result. Pelikan is a scholar of the history of Christianity and author of the highly esteemed The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (four volumes to date) and many other books. His concise Vindication (93 pages, including notes) ought not to be missed, as it embodies a restoration of concentricity and sanity after the “incessant autobiography” and intellectual promiscuity of the 1960s and their aftermath. Pelikan provides a fine contrast to the fecklessness and sheer nuttiness of a good deal of modern literary scholarship, especially that emanating from the English Department at his own university, where every man is his own Messiah and the critic-heroes melodramatically wrestle with “the anxiety of influence” and busily “deconstruct” literary meaning, coherence, and canon. In contrast to this mock-Promethean “dissidence of dissent,” the bitter end of secularized Protestantism and Judaism, romanticism, existentialism, and “spilt religion” generally, Pelikan, a Lutheran, has rediscovered true, ecumenical Catholicism. His real hero, in this volume and two other recent ones, is that great, deep, antiseptic thinker John Henry Newman, “the nineteenth century’s principal exponent of the recovery of tradition.” Like Eliot, especially in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and After Strange Gods, Pelikan judiciously analyzes the importance, sanity, and vitality of orthodox tradition in its various kinds of subdivisions, distinguishing it from both “pedantic traditionalism” and “arbitrary subjectivity,” and insists that by “including the dead in the circle of discourse, we enrich the quality of the conversation.” (It is revealing that at crucial junctures in his argument Pelikan quotes lovely phrases in explication and defense of the nourishing truth of tradition from a writer not named in the text, G. K. Chesterton, who said of himself: “I am the man who, with the utmost daring, discovered what was discovered before.”) In its defiance of our noisy, nihilistic modern American amnesia, this short, eloquent book brings great credit to its author, his university, and the Godly and humane tradition he represents, the tradition of Arnold and Newman: of the best that has been thought, said, and done, within and beyond the world.

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).