[Both] sides in the Reformation and post-Reformation controversies seemed to conceive of tradition as something comparable with Scripture, either complementing it or a rival to it. Both Scripture and tradition are objectified: they are that which we seek to understand, there is a distance between them and us who seek to understand them. There are a good many hidden assumptions behind all this: the idea, for instance, that what is revealed is a collection of truths, so that if tradition supplements Scripture, what we mean is that in addition to the apostolic witness that was written down in the Scriptures, there are other truths which have, as it were, been whispered down the ages, and not written down [n.b.: this suggests a parallel to the concept of the “Oral Torah” in rabbinic Judaism]. These truths are objective, independent truths, which we who seek them will, if we go about it the right way, come across and recognize. The problem of how we know at all, what it is that is taken for granted when we seek to understand God’s revelation, has not been broached with any very searching intensity.

— Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay in the Nature of Theology, ch. 4. One perhaps tangential question regarding this immensely perspicuous point, which perhaps Louth will go on to address: is this hypothesized “deposit of unwritten truth” not exactly the sort of thing that advocates of “Sacred Tradition” (whether Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox) often appeal to today in their (anti-Protestant) apologetics — a deposit, to be specific, left unwritten by the apostles but codified within just a few generations (unlike the rabbinic notion of Oral Torah, transmitted unwritten for over a thousand years!) in the writings of various Fathers? Sacred Tradition is presented as filling the temporal gap between what can be found in the New Testament writings and the full emergence/documentation of Christian culture and doctrine, in such a way that its acceptance is quite on par with the acceptance of the New Testament itself (e.g., the names of St. Peter’s successors as Bishop of Rome, the continuity of the papal office, and the essential nature of the doctrine of the papacy to salvation). Not to put too fine a point on it, but is this not how (say) St. Irenaeus speaks about the “rule of the truth” which he firmly accepts as apostolic in a sense precisely complementary to Scripture? I take Louth’s main point to be correct, both substantively and as a matter of the history he is discussing: but if so it has, shall we say, rather broad ramifications.

Addenda: Well, perhaps I should not be surprised to find that, at least in the period of the Fathers, Louth does go on to address my question.

Whereas tradition understood in a human sense is perhaps the continuity of man’s search for the truth, and whatever progress there is in such a search, tradition in the sense of the tradition of the Church is the continuity of the divine sending, the divine mission, which the Church has received from her Lord and which she pursues in the world. … The Church’s sending is in the power of the Spirit: the heart of the Church’s tradition, Holy Tradition, is the life of the Holy Trinity, in which the Church participates through the Holy Spirit.

Well and good. What about the content of the tradition? Louth goes on to quote a number of passages from St. Irenaeus, precisely on the point I questioned above, to this effect:

Irenaeus speaks of the character of the Church which is preserved through the succession of bishops… not just the articles of faith handed down by the apostolic succession of bishops, but the whole character of the Christian community, its rites, its ceremonies, its practices, and its life. … [For] Irenaeus the tradition of the Church is not, like the traditions to which the gnostics appealed, simply some message, truth, or ideology, but a life, something lived. … The rule of truth, then, is the faith, the fundamentals of Christian belief… This is the tradition which has been handed down from the apostles and is received in baptism: the fact that it is received is almost as important as what is received — tradition is not something we make up, but something we accept.

To inhabit and appropriate “Sacred Tradition”, then, is to be part of the Church that transmits the tradition that is Christianity — the “tradition” of the whole of Christian life. Finally Louth comes to St. Basil the Great, and returns to the question of the “unwritten traditions”:

The examples Basil gives of such unwritten traditions are all liturgical practices: the sign of the cross, prayer toward the East, the epiclesis at the Eucharist and indeed most of the rest of the Eucharistic prayer, the blessing of water in baptism, of oil, and so on. The secret tradition is not a message, but a practice, and the significance of such practice. We come back to the fact that Christianity is not a body of doctrine that can be specified in advance, but a way of life and all that this implies. Tradition is, as it were, the tacit dimension of the life of the Christian[.] … What this seems to suggest is that ultimately the tradition of the Church is the Spirit, that what is passed on from age to age in the bosom of the Church is the Spirit, making us sons in the Son, enabling us to call on the Father, and thus share in the communion of the Trinity.

That’s a pretty effective rejoinder to my question. This is what it means that the Christian tradition is “living:” that it is, perhaps, the outward expression of the presence in the Church of the Spirit, who is Lord and Giver of Life.

Understood like this, tradition is not another source of doctrine, or whatever, alongside Scripture, but another way of speaking of the inner life of the Church, that life in which the individual Christian is perfected in the image of God in which he was created. Speaking of it as tradition brings out the fact that it is received, that it is participated in, that it is more than the grasp that the individual has of his faith.

I remain curious to see how Louth deals with more contemporary advocates of Tradition who, presumably, remain trapped within the post-medieval object-subject division.