Previous
NextArticles
The Analogy of Tradition: Toward a More Radical Ressourcement
John R. Betz
Issue 3
Volume 1
pp. 519 - 582
https://doi.org/10.65172/Xs7NSVAMKiUI7Yqx
Abstract
Betz argues that a “new ressourcement" must reach beyond historical retrieval to the primordial divine tradition: the Father’s eternal self-gift to the Son. Only by grounding secondary traditions in this primary source can the Church avoid sterile traditionalism and manifest living, transformative continuity. Such a ressourcement is radically forward-moving, capable of renewing the Church and the world by allowing the original divine life to flow anew, generating authentic development and spiritual vitality.
Citations
Gnostic Return in Modernity Return in Modernity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001).
Augustine, Ennarationes in Psalmos 109.20.
Augustine, De vera religione 20.42–43.
Aristotle, Metaphysics 12.9.1074b34.
Sämtliche Werke, 2:140f.
After Enlightenment, 242–57
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur” and Other Poems (New York: Dover, 1995).
Anne Carpenter, Nothing Gained Is Eternal: A Theology of Tradition (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2022), 91.
Jean Daniélou, “Current Trends in Religious Thought,” Communio 50 (Spring 2023): 164–85.
Yves Congar, True and False Reform in the Church, trans. Paul Philibert, OP (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2011), 52.
The Poems of Edward Young (Chiswick, UK: C. Wittingham, 1822), 1:79.
Athanasius, Life of Antony (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1979), 32–33.
Hans Robert Jauss, “Modernity and Literary Tradition,” trans. Christian Thorne, Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 329–64.
Augustine, Enarrat. in Ps. 102.27.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 10, a. 2 ad 1.
Charles Péguy, Temporal and Eternal [An adaptation of Péguy’s Notre Jeunesse and of Clio I], trans. Alexander Dru (Carmel, IN: Liberty Fund, 2001), 91.
Cassiodorus, De Orthographia 1241D.
Christ, the Life of the Soul (Bethesda, MD: Zaccheus, 2005), 354f.
Péguy, Temporal and Eternal, 104:
Symbolism, or Exposition of the Doctrinal Differences between Catholics and Protestants as Evidenced by Their Symbolical Writings (New York: Herder & Herder, 1997), 6.
Christ, the Logos of Creation: An Essay in Analogical Metaphysics (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2023), 284–94.
John R. Betz, After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann (Wiley-Blackwell: Oxford, 2009).
Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Die Zeit (Munich: Kösel, 1954).
Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Schriften zur Philosophie (Munich: Kösel, 1964), 2:353–79.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 181–82.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel “Allwill,” ed. and trans. George di Giovanni (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 519.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves,” Communio 24 (1997): 351
Joseph Ratzinger, Theology of History in St. Bonaventure (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan, 1971).
Erich Przywara, Vier Predigten über das Abendland, with a foreword by Hans Urs von Balthasar (Einsiedeln, CH: Johannes, 1948), 42f.
Guigo II, The Ladder of Monks: A Letter on the Contemplative Life, trans. with an introduction by Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1981)
John Betz, “Enlightenment Revisited: Hamann as the First and Best Critic of Kant’s Philosophy,” review of Oswald Bayer, Vernunft ist Sprache: Hamanns Metakritik Kants, in Modern Theology 20 (2004): 291–301.
“The Usurpation of Reason,” in John Henry Newman: Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford, ed. James David Earnest and Gerard Tracey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 48
Hamann, Briefwechsel, ed. Walther Ziesemer and Arthur Henkel (Wiesbaden, DE: Insel, 1975), 6:108.
Augusto del Noce, The Crisis of Modernity, trans. Carlo Lancellotti (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 3.
Johann Georg Hamann, Sämtliche Werke, 6 vols., ed. Josef Nadler (Vienna: Herder, 1949–57), 2:211.
John Henry Newman, Essay on the Development of Doctrine, with a foreword by Ian Ker (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, Seeing the Form (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1982).
Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian, ed. and trans. Tryntje Helfferich (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2013), 41.
Jean Paul, “Rede des toten Christus vom Weltgebäude herab, daß kein Gott sei,” in Siebenkäs in Sämtliche Werke, Abteilung 1, vol. 2 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987), 270–75.
Francis Martin, Baptism in the Spirit: Reflections on a Contemporary Grace in Light of the Catholic Tradition (Petersham, MA: Saint Bede’s, 1998).
Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Tradition,” in Explorations in Theology, vol. 5, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2014), 362.
John Milbank, The Suspended Middle, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014).
John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006).
Charles Kingsley’s preface to The History and Life of the Reverend Doctor John Tauler with Twenty-Five of His Sermons, ed. Susannah Winkworth (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2000), 15.
Boyd Taylor Coolman, “‘In Whom I Am Well Pleased’: Hugh of St. Victor’s Trinitarian Aesthetics,” Pro Ecclesia 23, no. 3 (2014): 331–54.
David Bentley Hart, Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2022).
Philipp Rosemann’s review in the Irish Theological Quarterly 87, no. 4 (2022): 370–73.
Yves Congar, The Meaning of Tradition (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2016), 10.
Congar, Tradition and Traditions: An Historical and a Theological Essay (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 268.
Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994).
David Fagerberg, Liturgical Mysticism (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2019).
The Anatomy of Misremembering: Von Balthasar’s Response to Philosophical Modernity (New York: Crossroad, 2014).
David Fagerberg, On Liturgical Asceticism (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013).
David Fagerberg, Consecrating the World: On Mundane Liturgical Theology (New York: Angelico, 2016).
David Fagerberg, Liturgical Dogmatics: How Catholic Beliefs Flow from Liturgical Prayer (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2021).
John R. Betz, “Pope Francis, Erich Przywara, and the Idea of Europe,” First Things, May 12, 2016.
Francis MacNutt, The Healing Reawakening: Reclaiming Our Lost Inheritance (Grand Rapids, MI: Chosen Books, 2005).
Kevin Grove, Augustine on Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), for a wonderful discussion and interpretation of Augustine’s reading of the figure of Idithun in the Ennarationes in Psalmos, who moves us to “leap” with the “leaping psalmist” as fellow members of the one body of Christ (87); then we will not get stuck in ourselves but be able to leap toward our end in Christ (87–88), and ultimately in the Trinity (197f.).
Erich Przywara, Vier Predigten über das Abendland (Einsiedeln, CH: Johannes, 1948).
Erich Przywara, Idee Europa (Nuremberg: Glock und Lutz, 1955).
Aaron Pidel, Church of the Ever-Greater God: The Ecclesiology of Erich Przywara (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020).
Karl Rahner, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 24 (Freiburg: Herder, 2011), 526.
Balthasar, Razing the Bastions: On the Church in this Age (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993).
Contact us at [email protected] or (866) 928-1237
Word on Fire © 2026 - All Rights Reserved
Word on Fire Catholic Ministries is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit ministry.