St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary- Summer Institute

2003 Summer Institute
Preparatory Readings

John H. Erickson
JAROSLAV PELIKAN: THE LIVING LEGEND IN OUR MIDST

When the faculty of St Vladimir’s Seminary selected “Living Tradition” as the theme for its 2003 summer Institute of Liturgical Music and Pastoral Practice, the choice of keynote speaker was obvious. Seminary trustee Jaroslav Pelikan has devoted much of his scholarly career precisely to the subject of tradition. His goal has been the “vindication of tradition,” as the title of one of his many books puts it. As he now approaches his 80th birthday, he not only is eminently qualified to speak on the subject of “Living Tradition.” In many ways, he himself exemplifies this tradition, particularly for those of us living in the West.

Jary – as his friends at the seminary are now bold enough to call him – traces many of his academic and religious interests to his Slovak background. His grandfather, Jan Pelikan, was born in Slovakia – that remarkable meeting-place of cultures and religious traditions – and after coming to the United States became one of the founding fathers of the Slovak Synod of Lutherans.

Jary’s father, also a Slovak Lutheran pastor, once told him that “he combined German Lutheran scholarship and Slavic Orthodox piety – and fortunately not the vice-versa.” One result of this happy coincidence of qualities has been Jary’s remarkable academic career. After receiving both the B.D. and the Ph.D. degrees in 1946, at the ripe old age of 22, he went on to teach at Valparaiso University (1946-49), Concordia Theological Seminary (1949-53), the University of Chicago (1953-62), and Yale University (1972-96), where he also served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1973-1978).

Jary retired from his responsibilities at Yale in 1996, his title changing from Sterling Professor of History to Sterling Professor of History Emeritus, but this did not mean an end to academic appointments. Since then he has held a succession of chairs at Boston College, the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, and the Library of Congress, where he inaugurated the John W. Kluge Chair for Countries and Societies of the North. He now serves as Scholarly Director for the Institutions of Democracy Project of the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands.

Also remarkable is Jary’s record of publication. In addition to serving as editor for several major series, he is the author of over thirty books. One of the most recent of these, Divine Rhetoric: The Sermon on the Mount as Message and Model in Augustine, Chrysostom, and Luther, was published by SVS Press in 2001. And the list keeps growing! Credo: Historical and Theological Introduction to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition has just appeared in January 2003.

For this scholarship Jary has been recognized by learned societies and academies, libraries, colleges and universities from around the world with diverse awards, medals and citations, including (at last count) forty-one honorary doctorates. In 1983 he received the Jefferson Award of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the highest recognition conferred by the Federal Government on a scholar in the humanities. In 2000, in the course of celebrations for the 200th anniversary of the Library of Congress, Jary was officially named a Living Legend, along with General Colin Powell, publisher Katherine Graham, violinist Isaac Stern, and – as he notes with a twinkle in his eye – Barbra Streisand, Gloria Steinem and Big Bird.

Jary’s interests and areas of expertise are as wide-ranging as the honors he has received. They cover everything from philosophy, literature, political and legal theory, the visual arts and music to education, the natural sciences and even sailing. The titles of his books give some hint of this: Bach Among the Theologians (1986), Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons (1990), Eternal Feminines: Three Theological Allegories in Dante’s “Paradiso” (1990), The Idea of the University: A Reexamination (1992), Faust the Theologian (1995), What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem? “Timaeus” and “Genesis” in Counterpoint (1997)…. And whether he is lecturing on Aristotle’s Rhetoric to the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, curating an exhibit on visual depictions of Jesus through the centuries, critiquing productions of Wagner’s Ring cycle, or just discussing the flora and fauna of the parklands near his home in Connecticut, he brings the same matchless style and wit that readers of his books have come to expect and relish.

By his own admission, Jary is above all a historian. As he puts it, “Everybody else is an expert on the present. I wish to file a minority report on behalf of the past.” But for him the study of the past has not been simply an academic exercise. This is especially evident in his magnum opus, the five-volume Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (1971-89), which is the first – and to date still the only – major history of Christian doctrine to take seriously the Orthodox East. In a 1997 lecture on “The Predicament of the Christian Historian,” presented at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton and co-sponsored by the local Orthodox Christian Fellowship (available online at http://www.ctinquiry.org/publications/pelikan.htm), Jary touches on some of the challenges that he faced when writing that monumental work. On the walls of his study, he observes, there are only two conventional portraits. One is of Fr Georges Florovsky, whom he describes as “the last of my mentors and the one to whom I owe the most.” The other is of Adolf von Harnack, “who, as the author of the greatest history of Christian doctrine ever written (completed in 1889, precisely one hundred years before I completed mine in 1989), has been my lifelong role model.”

Both Harnack and Florovsky wrestled with a question that anyone who tries to be both a historian and a Christian must confront: What is the relationship between universal truth and its particular embodiments? The answer, Jary suggests, is to be found not in reductionism (cf. Harnack’s attempt to identify the “essence of Christianity”) but rather in a living tradition that mediates between past and present. Thus, when asked on another occasion about those two portraits on his study walls, Jary replied with another of his one-liners: “Harnack showed me what it was to be a scholar. Florovsky showed me what it was to be a scholar and a Christian at the same time.”

The most memorable and most often quoted of Jary’s one-liners has a direct bearing on the theme of the seminary’s 2003 summer Institute, “Living Tradition.” In an interview in U.S. News & World Report (July 26, 1989), he said: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.”

When he gave that interview, Jary had already elaborated upon the difference between tradition and traditionalism in his book on The Vindication of Tradition (1984). There he adopts a distinction between icon and idol that developed in the Byzantium in the course of the iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries. An icon “does not present itself as coextensive with the truth it teaches, but does present itself as the way that we who are its heirs must follow if we are to go beyond it… to a universal truth that is available only in a particular embodiment” (p. 56). An idol, on the other hand, is “the embodiment of that which it represents, but it directs us to itself, rather than beyond itself.” Thus, when tradition becomes traditionalism, it becomes idolatrous; “it makes the preservation and the repetition of the past an end in itself” (p. 55). The truth is at once universal and particular; it refuses to choose between these two alternatives, “knowing that an authentic icon, a living tradition, must be both” (p. 57).

In addition to recalling his debt to Florovsky, Jary likes to speak of his friendship with two other former Deans of St Vladimir’s Seminary, Fr Alexander Schmemann and Fr John Meyendorff. A long-time supporter of the seminary, Jary was invited to give the 1975 commencement address, in which he spoke on “Continuity and Creativity” (available online at http://www.jacwell.org/articles/1998-SPRING-Pelikan.htm). In introducing him, Fr Schmemann noted that “the hardest thing for me to say about Professor Pelikan is why he is not Orthodox.” But that was to change. On March 25, 1998, on the feast of the Annunciation, Jary was chrismated by Metropolitan Theodosius, primate of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), and received into the Orthodox Church. His wife Sylvia joined him in embracing Orthodoxy a few months later, and together they worship regularly in the seminary chapel.

In a conversation shortly after his entrance into the Orthodox Church, Jary likened his path to Orthodoxy to that of a pilot who kept circling the airport, looking for a way to land. Orthodox Christians can be thankful that he landed before running out of fuel. Since then, in addition to serving on the seminary’s Board of Trustees, he has addressed a number of Orthodox gatherings, including the OCA’s 12th All-American Council in Pittsburgh (1999), and he now also serves on the OCA’s Department of History and Archives. St Vladimir’s is fortunate that he consented to serve as keynote speaker for this year’s Institute before his schedule became totally booked. In the months leading up to his 80th birthday in December 2003, Jary will be honored at a series of lectures at academic institutions with which he has been associated: St John’s University in Collegeville MN, Yale University, the University of Chicago, Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology, the Speros Basil Vryonis Center for the Study of Hellenism, the Library of Congress, and - on September 14, 2003 - St Vladimir’s Seminary, where the lecturer will be Fr John McGuckin, Professor of Early Christian History at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Byzantine Christianity at Columbia University. Those unable to hear Jary at the 2003 summer Institute will want to consider how they can at least meet and honor this Living Legend at one of his birthday celebrations.