Saint Basil on the Nature of Unwritten Tradition

Many non-Catholics are confused by the Catholic notion of “tradition.” They often want to know where to get “it” or where they can read “it.” However, tradition is by its nature unwritten. It is a collection of rites, patterns, attitudes, phrases, terms, and actions.

I’m reading through Yves Congar’s well-known book The Meaning of Tradition for a doctoral course entitled Philosophy of Religion. He makes a nice observation from Saint Basil:

“In the the last third of the fourth century, St. Basil who put forward some profound ideas on the nature of tradition, said that it is agraphos, unwritten; simultaneously with the actual transmission of written doctrines, it adds something else to them, something of itself, a new modality other than Scripture. Understood thus as a means of communication, tradition is the transmission of the whole of Christianity, without distinguishing or favoring any on of its elements” (Meaning of Tradition, 20).

Congar also notes that the Eucharist was celebrated for about thirty years without written texts giving instructions for how it should be done. How did the Apostles know how celebrate the Eucharist? They had watched Jesus Christ perform it and they copied him. It was a tradition. The way the Apostles performed actions were then copied by those after them. This is apostolic Christianity. It is the source of tradition. The sign of the cross, the prayers, the attitudes, the adoration of Christ, the special love for Mary – all these passed on to the successive generations without ink.