So, tradition, on Pelikan’s view, has to be rooted in transcendence. He says that the Enlightenment’s claims of universal rights grounded in Reason saw itself as not depending on Tradition at all to arrive at the truth. The problem with this, he says, is that we find that it is very difficult to hold on to these supposedly universal truths without having grounded them in the tradition that produced them. And this is something proved simply by reading the daily newspaper.
One question raised around the table: Can a tradition that’s conscious of itself do what a tradition must do? The question is closely related to Charles Taylor’s point about religion in a “secular age” — that it is impossible in our time and place for religious belief to be unconscious of itself as anything other than chosen. That’s not to say that particular religious claims (or claims for tradition) are untrue, so much that our relationship with them is unavoidably contingent, because we can’t escape awareness that we could live and believe otherwise.
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