Duffy on Ratzinger on Williams on tradition

“An insistence on the subversive potential of tradition is valuable in a culture where self-styled ‘traditionalism’ is more often than not invoked in the service of reaction. But there are problems about privileging the notion of unsettlement as much as Williams does.
“Tradition on this account can seem a never ending argumentative seminar, constant upheaval without any point of rest or leverage. Yet if unsettlement is built into the vocabulary of Christian self-understanding, there is also a venerable Christian vocabulary of solidity, dependability, confidence in a faith once revealed to the saints, tradition as a rock. Argument has its limits. The believer is not always to be at the mercy of the scholars, and there must be ways of deciding when at last a particular problem has reached resolution, an argument has come to an end.
“In Rowan Williams the see of Canterbury has its best theologian since St Anselm. As it happens, the new Pope is probably the best theologian to hold the see of Peter since almost as long. Like Archbishop Williams, Benedict XVI is steeped in patristic thought and much given to reflection on the religious value of the past. In his new role, however, Joseph Ratzinger embodies a quite different set of emphases and affirmations, an understanding of tradition precisely as settlement, his office an embodiment of the Church’s confidence that the voice of Christ is, at least occasionally, heard in answers as well as questions. Ratzinger on Williams on the past: now what a seminar that would be.”

     Eamon Duffy, reviewing Why study the past? The quest for the historical Church, by Rowan Williams, Times literary supplement no. 5340 (5 August 2005): 25.  Cf.

     "But to set kinesis and 'unfixed. . . . dynamic flow' in this direct fashion over against the 'cathedral' of tradition is problematic in two ways.  In the first place, Christianity often does indeed affirm the old—not as the old, but as the given. . . .  In the second place, should we imagine the cathedral as 'multiple heterogeneous spaces'?  Yes, at times. . . .  But a cathedral is built for liturgical movement and liturgical stillness; that movement is certainly diverse, encompassing many different kinds of liturgical events at the high altar, and many different kinds of liturgy and private devotion at side altars, but this range of movements shapes us as individuals within ancient and given patterns.  The movement through tradition to which the theologian is called is one ordered in many ways:  by the Church’s teaching tradition, by particular spiritual disciplines, by our own particular journeys intellectual and spiritual, and through this movement newness comes upon the reader as I described above.  Tradition in this sense most certainly is the foundation for life and thought, but it is so because God gives it, and uses it within us to bring forth the confession and practice of Christian faith in each generation."

     Lewis Ayres, "Seven theses on dogmatics and patristics in Catholic theology," Modern theology 38, no. 1 (January 2022):  57-58 (36-62).