Invention of tradition

It is by now old news that most things we think venerably old are newer versions of old things, if not indeed brand new. I suppose I'm postmodern enough that this doesn't bother me, and pragmatist enough that I actually find it reassuring: How could one live with a past which resisted appropriation, reinterpretation, reimagining? Fundamentalists imagine (and unreflective skeptics believe them) that it is possible and indeed desirable to let the past assert itself in this way. It is certainly possible, and sometimes desirable, to allow oneself to be interrogated, challenged, stopped in one's tracks by an ancient text (or a modern one), but the best way to do this is to recognize that it is, ineluctibly, a dialogue. As Hans-Georg Gadamer made clear once for all, you won't learn from a text if you don't admit to yourself that you're asking it questions: the learning is, in part, the revising of your questions. But that can't happen if you pretend you're not part of the exchange at all. Ancient texts - in part surely because they were parts of still primarily oral cultures - don't hide the dialogical nature of understanding. The fundamentalist fantasy seems the ultimate in humility but is really hubris: it's a fantasy of not being human, imperfect but perhaps perfectible.

Pardon the digression about fundamentalists and those who fervently believe in fundamentalists! My (not entirely unrelated) point today is that many texts we think are old turn out not to be. This needn't be a problem, if you're not a fundamentalist. The occasion for these rhapsodies was the news that one of the 20th century's favorite medieval prayers is, indeed, a 20th century prayer. The "Prayer of Saint Francis," inspiration to millions (and text, as you know, to one of my favorite hymns), was written less than a century ago in 1912 (in French), and popularized by Pope Benedict XV as an expression of hopes for peace during WWI in 1916. The prayer didn't claim to be the work of Saint Francis, but presumably came to be associated with him because it was frequently printed on the back of cards with his image on them.

So, does it matter that these words never passed Saint Francis' lips? Not really, since we have to live now, where both his name and the prayer can pass our lips. Indeed, if we're inspired by these words, we might be even more so, since the source is closer to us - not a saint - and responding to conditions more like our own. But the revelation of its non-antiquity and its non-canonized authorship does bring a little sense of sadness. The postenlightenment - especially the postenlightenment religious - imagination has so much invested in an image of the middle ages which, we're only gradually realizing, is a modern projection rather than a saving missive from a simpler, purer time. But this gives me a chance to put my money where my mouth is. Do we really want to know what Francis and his world were like, now that it's clearer and clearer that he wouldn't recognize his image in our eyes?