First, I thought Spengler’s review was excellent and zeroed in on many of the key issues. However, I think he got the relationship between tradition and conversion slightly wrong. Tradition and conversion are two sides of the same coin which is, essentially, faithfulness to the truth about us, God, and reality. Or rather, they should be two sides of the same coin. I don’t think either is less important. When one is emphasized above the other, the result tends to be bad. Conversion brings people to the truth, tradition keeps them rooted in it. “Reformational” and modern tendencies reestablished the importance of conversion over and against a calcified tradition, but the pendulum has swung too far the other way into an endless fascination with conversion — from one thing to the next to the next.

The purpose of a functioning tradition is in fact to renew the original conversion. Tradition is the symbolic reenactment and therefore communication of the original engendering experience of conversion. The symbols, rites, and rituals of tradition become, in Voegelin’s words, “luminous for the truth” of the originary experience of conversion. In Plato’s terms, this is the work of anamnesis; a specific manner of remembering that recapitulates and recalls to consciousness the truth that is thereby made luminous.

If this were not necessary, once converted, one could just go on about one’s business and never give it another thought. Why go to church? Why “do this in remembrance of me”? The existence of a tradition is a concession to the real problems of human consciousness existing in time — lots of good Eliot on that subject — and is a recognition that conversion must be “consolidated;” it must be rooted in renewing “good” soil per Jesus’ parable. Otherwise, when the next snake oil salesman rolls into town, the first conversion experience is forgotten and it is off to seek a new one.

This is generational work. That is one of the most important things to keep in mind; though it is so easy to lose sight of it in a culture which rarely thinks past the weekend. As John Senior used to say, it takes three generations to make a farmer. It may take many more to make one a native to a chosen religious tradition. This is generational work. But it can be done.

On the other hand, sometimes a tradition is so rotten that it must be abandoned, even by a traditionalist, though always with sadness, regret, and a profound sense of loss. Mostly, however, there are always imperfect traditions that must be renewed and tested from within. This is why the endless quest for a new conversion experience is so dangerous, for it depletes traditions’ own source of renewal. And the Gnostic denial of original sin (which is present in groups across the spectrum, from Puritans to secular utopians) is the source of this wandering spirit; a spirit which “lusts for a massively possessive experience” to use another of Voegelin’s terms; a spirit which is unsatisfied with the vagaries of faith and is incapable of living with a humble acceptance of a certain amount of evil, with sadness, but for the sake of a greater joy.

It is fascinating to me to observe the internal feedback loop of the American soul cut adrift from an Augustinian conception of reality. The Puritanical conservative sects and the universalist liberal sects are at separate ends of the same spectrum of belief in man’s perfectability in the here and now. And each has fixated his gaze on the other as that which is to be most feared and loathed; as that mirror image — one of the other — which each is terrified of becoming. And the irony is, of course, that the Puritans did become universalists, and the universalists have now become the new Puritan kill-joys, propagating all kinds of puritanical regulations on human happiness (anti-smoking campaigns come to mind) in the name of progress and continuing enlightenment.