{"id":2053,"date":"2026-09-17T15:17:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T15:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/classicalchristian.org\/classis\/?p=2053"},"modified":"2026-09-17T15:17:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T15:17:00","slug":"the-dynamics-of-a-living-tradition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/classicalchristian.org\/classis\/the-dynamics-of-a-living-tradition\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dynamics of a Living Tradition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally published in\u00a0Classis<\/em>
\nVolume XXXII, No. 2<\/p>\n

Junius Johnson, PhD<\/p>\n

While on vacation with my wife in the Canadian Rockies, we visited a glacier. As we drove towards this massive field of ice, the tour guide explained how glaciers are formed by regular annual snowfall that fails to melt. Over time, as additional snow falls on it, it gets packed harder and harder until it becomes this mountain of ice, slowly finding its way downhill in a leisurely search for the lowest point. As we stood upon the glacier, he pointed to the many streams that marked its surface and a pond that lay several hundred feet below. \u201cThe glacier is melting,\u201d he said. \u201c In twenty years, this glacier will not be here any longer. There will be a new lake down there where you see the pond now, and that lake will likely bear the name this glacier now bears.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was struck with sadness. The glacier was so beautiful, and it seemed like such a shame to lose such beauty. Was this the result of the way humans have interacted with the world, yet another casualty to chalk up to the destructive will-to-power that has marked mankind since Eden? But then I was reminded of the many glacial lakes we had already seen on the tour. These deep bodies presented to the eye a color blue I had never seen in water before, the result of rock sediment dissolved into the water that changed the nature of its reflective properties. Over time, this rock sediment will precipitate out and settle to the bottom of the lake, rendering it a more usual color of blue. The lake will not become unbeautiful, but it will lose the particular beauty unique to glacial lakes.<\/p>\n

And so I found myself faced with a dilemma: would I rather have the glacier or the lake? But that was the wrong question. The realization that came upon me very quickly was that there have always been glaciers and there have always been glacial lakes. This particular glacier is dying, but new glaciers are being formed. I suddenly saw in my mind a time-lapse of the Earth, and I saw glaciers growing and receding across its surface, not uniformly\u2014as if all glaciers grew together and then died together\u2014but growing here and receding there, and then receding here and growing there. In this imaginary fast-forwarding of history, I saw the same spot grow glaciers, lose them, and grow new ones over and over again. And I was struck by the fact that this process, perhaps influenced by human agency, is not a product of human agency. The growth and melting of glaciers is a natural cycle of change that is, in many ways, just our planet breathing. This ebb and flow, this transition from solid to liquid and back again, is part of what it means for our little globe to be alive, an expression of the fact that however it may seem to us that certain things in this world have a type of permanence, nothing in its present form has been promised to us, and things are always changing. Even if the latter generation does not find the Earth much changed from the previous one, there will eventually come a generation for whom the Earth will appear so strange and new that it will be like visiting another planet.<\/p>\n

I want to apply this notion of a changing and breathing Earth\u2014understood as the rise to prominence and fall to obscurity of various elements within a coherent or organic whole\u2014to the body of Western literature. To the student of history, it is quite simply evident that this has happened. While the books that we read today contain many of the same books that previous generations have read, our reading list does not look like any other generation\u2019s reading list. They have books on their list that we do not have on ours, and vice versa. This is not simply a product of texts that we have lost and which they possessed, nor of new texts that we now have but were written since their time, though, of course, these things play their part. It is also a product of the fact that we are choosing to read different books than the ages that came before us, and that every age before us made different choices than other ages before and after them.<\/p>\n

Therefore, we may meaningfully divide the realm of change in the syllabus of books to be read into three main dynamics: 1) texts that are unavailable, 2) texts that are new, and 3) texts that are, by a particular age, neglected or favored. Each of these dynamics plays a role in creating for each age the list of desirable books; it will be worthwhile to consider each briefly.<\/p>\n

Of Texts Unavailable<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In the realm of unavailable texts, the European Middle Ages quickly comes to mind for two reasons: first, because there are many works of the classical age that were unavailable to the Western Middle Ages, but, as I demonstrate later, were available both to the age preceding them and to the ages following. Second, many works available to medieval readers are unavailable to us. One recent study suggests that the literary manuscripts from the Middle Ages represent about 68% of the stories produced during the Middle Ages. In other words, it is not only true that many of the texts we read today were not available in the Middle Ages; it is also true that many of the texts the medievals were reading are not available to us now. It is nearly impossible to determine just how different their syllabus was from ours, but we get some sense of this by surveying the recent history of medieval scholarship. Just to consider the range of books on medieval theology: for most of the last century, our understanding of which authors were being read, and when, and where, has changed about every five years. Some names that were unknown at the beginning of the twentieth century to all but the hyper-specialized have become central to the story we tell about the intellectual formation of major figures like Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure.<\/p>\n

Of Texts New and Recently Found<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Furthermore, it is important to think about the dynamics of new texts. One of the fundamental reasons why we continue to read the old texts is that they form part of a conversation. But a conversation does not proceed by simply revisiting the initial statements over and over again; new things are said, and these new things send the conversation off in new directions, some fruitful, some harmful. The great Western conversation unfolds across centuries and millennia, which means that very important figures in that conversation, like Homer, Plato, and Augustine, did not have a chance to hear some of the most important statements. The Middle Ages may not have had much Plato, but they had The Song of Roland<\/em>, the Arthurian legends, and The Divine Comedy<\/em> in recompense. We may not have the second book of Aristotle\u2019s Poetics, the Greek epic poem about Achilles, the poems of Taliesin, and various works by major authors, including Boethius, Alcuin, Bede, and Bernard of Clairvaux, but we have Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Jane Austen, and Dostoevsky.<\/p>\n

Of Texts Favored or Dismissed<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

But it is the third dynamic that I especially wish to focus our attention on, because it has attracted much less discussion, even though it is no less important. This is the dynamic whereby some ages just prefer to read certain books and not others. To some extent, this accounts for why some books are lost to time: scribes do not often put energy into copying down what no one wants to read. But sometimes it is not a question of availability but of external societal factors. Indeed, this will increasingly be the main dynamic guiding the development of our syllabi in the future, because we are more insulated against textual loss than any age before us. We lament the destruction of the library of Alexandria because we have good reason to believe that many texts have not come down to us because of it; later ages will not bemoan the loss of texts from our age, but rather the neglect of texts which, though present, lie untended on digital shelves, gathering metaphorical dust.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most famous example of this is Beowulf<\/em>. Written sometime during the tenth century (probably), it does not seem to have been especially popular, as only one manuscript survived the Middle Ages (though even here we must speak in terms of probability and perception, and not necessary conclusions: perhaps the depredations of the later Viking Age or some other external cause are to blame for the scarcity of manuscripts). It is a safe bet that the text was not widely read after about 1200. I will not here rehearse its miraculous escape from the Ashburnham fire of October 23, 1731, because, entertaining as this story is, it does not make a big difference in the poem\u2019s story: it remains an obscure text read only by those studying the Anglo-Saxon language even after the publication of the first printed edition in 1815. No, its story begins in 1936 with J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s essay \u201cBeowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.\u201d This was when Beowulf<\/em> first began to appear on syllabi. The fact that all of our students read Beowulf<\/em> is a distinctly twentieth-century phenomenon.<\/p>\n

But other works have dropped off of our syllabus that were essential reading from the Renaissance to the mid-twentieth century: The Pseudo-Homeric mock epic, The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice<\/em>, which was the first book printed in Greek in the Renaissance and which was used to teach schoolchildren Greek for centuries, has become so obscure that even very educated people today have never heard of it. Statius, the other great Roman epic poet, wrote two poems that were absolutely central to both medieval and Renaissance canons: the Achilleid<\/em>, his incomplete tale of the life of Achilles, and the Thebaid<\/em>, which tells the story of a war nearly as important in ancient mythology as the Trojan War. But even though this author was so important to Dante that he took over from Virgil as guide in Purgatorio<\/em>, the works of Statius lie nearly unknown and neglected today. Dante was once seen as the head of a great Italian tradition of epic poetry that was beloved all over Europe and inspired innumerable works of art. His successors include Boccaccio (whose Decameron<\/em> inspired The Canterbury Tales<\/em> and whose Il Filostrato<\/em> inspired Chaucer\u2019s other great work, the Troilus and Criseyde<\/em>, itself neglected today), Ariosto (who wrote a pair of fierce epics on the life of Roland, the eponymous hero of The Song of Roland<\/em>), and Tasso, whose Liberation of Jerusalem<\/em> has inspired more art than any other single work aside from the Bible; but all of these are nearly unknown today, and even where there is some knowledge (of Boccaccio), he is not read.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the differences between our syllabus and that of an intellectual as recent as C.S. Lewis are so drastic that he might well be expected, upon hearing that we are not reading the aforementioned works, to cry out in exasperation: \u201cThen what are<\/em> you reading?\u201d Judging from our syllabus alone, he would likely consider us uneducated.<\/p>\n

One possible response to this situation is chagrin and shame: how have we let ourselves fall so far? Must we not immediately take action to rectify the situation? That is analogous to my initial reaction upon hearing about the glacier’s disappearance, a reaction of grief and guilt. And it is not unwarranted: the loss of a beauty is certainly worthy of grief, even if that loss is a part of the natural process of generation and decay. And any part that we play, however indirect, in the loss of a beauty, is worthy of a level of guilt and shame. But it ought not to ground the attempt to halt the natural processes of a living planet. I do well to grieve the passing glacier, as such grief is a tribute to its beauty. I do not do well to attempt to freeze this moment that the glacier may become eternal, although it means that I have done greater violence to the larger world. We must not cling too tightly. It is not only the risen Lord who says noli me tangere<\/em>;1<\/a><\/sup> it is also His creatures who say the same, when we would hold them beyond their allotted measure and force on them an eternity that is not life but the shadow of death.<\/p>\n

Should we, therefore, rejoice in the passing of these texts from our reading lists, breathing deep of the freedom gained, a freedom born of fewer total unread pages to plague our idle hours? Let bygones be bygones, as it were? That is to embrace the lake at the expense of the glacier. It is not wrong to love and embrace the lake, but anyone who has seen a glacier can tell you how much one loses by loving only<\/em> the lake.<\/p>\n

Rather, I recommend the same conclusion I reached regarding the glaciers: namely, we recognize that it is natural and a normal part of a living tradition for texts to come and go in favor. Nevertheless, we are to love both the glacier and the lake; that is to say, we do not despise that which has passed out of favor, nor unduly elevate that which is currently in favor.<\/p>\n

A Final Lesson from Lewis<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Indeed, I might hazard here a daring application of Lewis\u2019s injunction to read old books:2<\/a><\/sup> namely, that just as our age has blind spots that are deepened and ossified by only reading contemporary books, so there are also blind spots when it comes to our understanding of the great conversation, and these blind spots will be exacerbated if we hold ourselves to only reading the great books that are currently in favor. How can we know whether we have judged well or poorly if we never read outside the syllabus formed by those judgments? In what way will we be able to tell whether or not these neglected classics have something urgent to say to our current cultural moment if we continue to neglect them?<\/p>\n

And so, in the end, this is a call to return to the Library of the Ages and browse the shelves once more, stopping over titles that have become unfamiliar but tug at our hearts with the promise of adventure. I have listed several places to start and might add many more. I could easily recommend a return to the novels of Walter Scott, beginning with Ivanhoe<\/em>, and to his delightful ballad, The Lady of the Lake<\/em>; I would point to you to the Gothic novel tradition begun by Horace Walpole\u2019s The Castle of Otranto<\/em>, a novel so daring he was afraid to publish it as his own, but pretended he was only translating a manuscript; I would draw your attention back to Christopher Marlowe\u2019s Doctor Faustus<\/em>, a play that deserves a great deal of attention and discussion; I would remind you of the anonymous Quest of the Holy Grail<\/em>, one of the most medieval of medieval romances. I will not go on; if you would like to know more, pay attention to the footnotes of the great men of the past. Following allusions and references in C.S. Lewis led me to innumerable riches of texts now neglected in our age.<\/p>\n

On the other side of this great literary adventure lies a particularly thorny prudential question, namely, how is one to make room on the syllabus for the many treasures one will discover on this journey? As with all prudential questions, I cannot give you the answer a priori: It is something each teacher must wrestle with on her own. Contributing factors to your decision will include your geographic location, the specifics of your school and community, and the particularities of the students who come through your classroom. I can only offer this reminder: while it is unsettling and distressing to find oneself in the position of looking for a way to incorporate yet another amazing book, it is, in fact, a good problem to have. Our classrooms only remain living and vital to the extent that our souls do, and the best way to ensure the freshness of a pool of water is to add new water to it constantly.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Notes<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
    \n
  1. \u201cDo not touch me,\u201d the Vulgate version of John 20:17, which is usually rendered from the Greek as \u201cdo not hold on to me.\u201d\u00a0\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. C. S. Lewis makes the argument in \u201cOn Reading Old Books, originally published as the introduction to an edition of Athanasius\u2019 On the Incarnation<\/em>, but now also available in Lewis, C.S. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics<\/em>. Edited by Walter Hooper. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1970), 200-207.\u00a0\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Originally published in\u00a0Classis Volume XXXII, No. 2 Junius Johnson, PhD While on vacation with my wife in the Canadian Rockies, we visited a glacier. As we drove towards this massive field of ice, the tour guide explained how glaciers are formed by regular annual snowfall that fails to melt. Over time, as additional snow falls […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":2055,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10,9],"tags":[77],"class_list":["post-2053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-article","category-classis","tag-junius-johnson"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Dynamics of a Living Tradition - Classis<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/classicalchristian.org\/classis\/the-dynamics-of-a-living-tradition\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Dynamics of a Living Tradition - Classis\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Originally published in\u00a0Classis Volume XXXII, No. 2 Junius Johnson, PhD While on vacation with my wife in the Canadian Rockies, we visited a glacier. 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