Mr. Devine is correct that my main, underlying concern in Mr. Meyer's essay was what I considered a diminution of the reality of the Incarnation and its subsequent significance in Western civilization and culture. It may have been the amateur theologian in me, but I found the phrase "flash of eternity in time" to be a curious one, in that all occasions of revelation in the Old Testament might be considered the eternal God acting in history. The Incarnation was, is, substantially more than that, as the word itself suggests, and so it seemed to me that the idea of a "flash" minimized both the radical newness of the condescension of God and did not do justice to its permanence and its everlasting accomplishment.

Of course, I should not, and do not, expect a comprehensive history of all of the legacies of Christendom in one essay, but if the roots of our civilization and our philosophical tradition are Athens and Jerusalem then Christendom is the new soil in which they were planted and flourished and that ground requires more attention if preservation and restoring the things that are lost, insofar as that is possible, have a chance at succeeding. If Mr. Meyer intended to give it due attention, then I have no complaints, though I am still not entirely convinced that he and I are arguing for the same sort of thing.

I had not meant to set up Mr. Kirk against Mr. Meyer, though I seem to remember that Mr. Meyer would on occasion worry that even Mr. Kirk's view of balance between the two was not quite balanced enough. But on the distinction between tradition and authority, which Mr. Devine cites indirectly from Mr. Kirk, I suppose I must reveal my hand and say that I do not see them as being quite so distinct. That is to say, Mr. Kirk is setting up a voluntary tradition as opposed to an authority, which I assume is directing people to follow said tradition in a less than entirely voluntary manner, but I see tradition as being by its nature inherited and something that claims itself as an authority based either on its revealed truths or long-established experience. If Mr. Kirk is saying that the one doing the "formal indoctrination" here is the state, and the state should not be coercing belief as such, then there is no disagreement on my part. If he were saying this against a church authority (though I doubt he would have said this), as more than a few individualists do, then this is perplexing, since some church authority is part of the society that is always replenishing the tradition and remembering it.

But what do I mean by tradition? In this context, it seems reasonable to assume that we are referring to inherited religious beliefs and practices on the one hand, and more general time-honored customs and habits on the other. These are not necessarily antagonistic, and often are quite the opposite. Almost all of these possess some inherited wisdom, and it is on account of that wisdom that these customs survive through the intuition and common sense of ordinary folks. These customs and rituals into which we are
born are not usually voluntary at first, and even when we come to a point when we can choose to set them aside we have already been defined by the community that maintains those traditions. Returning to the question of the balance between such tradition and liberty, I recall an insight used against some early theorists of a version of the "social contract" in the seventeenth century, which was that chartered rights and liberties protected under the law--the very precedents that established in time the constitutional liberties that we hold dear--must be governed by precedent and inherited, or else they would not properly exist (at least as a matter of law). The point of that observer was that those liberties could not be
defended or advanced in ways contrary to the laws through which they existed, but that is perhaps more debatable. But by that same token of inheritance, habits and virtues necessary to the creation and preservation of these liberties are inherited and developed over time and gradually give rise to the practices for which people then seek protection, which become the protected customs that are inviolable under law, and which we call liberties.

I suppose this leaves me with my basic disagreement, which may put me out of step with both Messrs. Kirk and Meyer, and this is that 'tradition,' broadly speaking, must be prior to liberty in time, logic and importance, because it engenders the conditions necessary for liberty and transmits the protected liberties themselves. Part of our current predicament is that liberty is taken as a given, as if it sprang full-grown from the ground without consideration to its origins or its means of recreation--thus it is today that we can have ostensibly conservative people speak of liberty as a kind of slogan with no concrete meaning, no historical context and no practical definition. Some of this is the corruption of the language, but much of it is the loss of historical perspective and a sense of the specific rootedness of the American political system. The loss of that sense of being rooted to a long, English constitutional tradition allows people to be easily seduced into many dubious enterprises by siren calls uttering "freedom."

Mr. Kirk was already seeing this deterioration then. He writes in The Problem of Tradition, "Our reservoir of tradition will be drained dry within a very few decades, if we do not deliberately open up once more the springs of tradition." Those springs are those traditional authorities, which I would say include, for conservatives, the Bible, the writings of the Fathers, the English political writers and legal precedents and the writings of our republican founders, though obviously these are but a beginning (I have neglected a number of classical authors who would always be invaluable in such a list). Neither Mr. Kirk nor Mr. Meyer would disagree with these authorities, but regarding their emphasis on maintaining a balance between tradition and liberty I am unsure that the two things are equal and can be weighted equally.

Much of what I have said has been said many times before much more effectively by many other abler writers, but I hope this helps explain my earlier article. Some of this may seem to some like the splitting of so many hairs, but I believe these definitions are vital to having a coherent conservatism that does value both traditionalism, limited, constitutional government and the liberties that go with them. I would say that I am a "paleoconservative" who believes that a synthesis of tradition and liberty is certainly possible and highly desirable, but on the basis of thinking even more critically about the work of those great conservative minds whose tradition we have received and are now seeking to pass on anew. That is the
kind of positive, creative thinking by men such as Kirk and Meyer that drew the best ideas from traditional sources and sought to divert, as I recall Mr. Kirk quoting Burke (more or less), the flood of change into the channels of order. I'm sure I have mangled that quote, but that's the spirit of it.

THE EDITOR RESPONDS

I am afraid that all Mr. Larison has done is to confirm my conclusion from the last issue, that there is no real difference between him and the authors we are discussing, at least at the theoretical level. First, on my contention that Frank Meyer did give due attention to the importance of Christianity in the Western tradition, Mr. Larison basically accepts my claim when he says, "If Mr. Meyer intended to give it due attention, then I have no complaints," because Meyer did and Larison should have none.

Secondly, he tries to draw Russell Kirk into the too-libertarian camp by noting that Kirk said that tradition has to be accepted voluntarily rather than by authority, contrasting voluntary with inherited. But Kirk thought that tradition was both inherited and had to be accepted by the individual voluntarily. It is taught by family, church and, perhaps, community but the individual has the freedom to accept or reject it at some stage in his life. The "authority" that Kirk would not accept as one to inculcate tradition was the state, which Mr. Larison accepts by saying, "If Mr. Kirk is saying that the one doing the 'formal indoctrination' here is the state, and the state should not be coercing belief as such, then there is no disagreement on my part." Again, where is the difference?

Mr. Larison gets to his main point when he says: "I suppose this leaves me with my basic disagreement, which may put me out of step with both Messrs. Kirk and Meyer, and this is that 'tradition,' broadly speaking, must be prior to liberty in time, logic and importance, because it engenders the conditions necessary for liberty and transmits the protected liberties themselves." But Meyer and Kirk and M. Stanton Evans in his classic piece in this edition do believe this, as do even non-theological believers in fusionism like F.A. Hayek and Karl Popper. Hayek goes so far as to say: it seems paradoxical but no less true that a society that values freedom must always be based upon tradition. All also accept that the tradition is under stress today and that great effort is needed to save both liberty and tradition. I conclude, again, where is the difference?