Hope and Tradition (1962)

From the article by Jaume Bofill y Bofill (Barcelona, ​​​​1910-1965) in the magazine Christendom (b. 381, 1962). Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of the death of this philosopher, jurist, professor, and industrialist. He was the son of Jaume Bofill Mates, politician, journalist, and poet (with the pseudonym Guerau de Liost). Bofill y Bofill, professor of metaphysics, founded and directed a reference magazine at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters: ConviviumA leading Catalan exponent of the Thomistic school, Bofill invited European professors of the caliber of Gadamer and Rheiner, among others, to teach courses in Barcelona. He welcomed philosophers who had been subjected to repression, such as Josep Maria Calsamiglia. In 1969, the Bofill Foundation was created in his honor.

[...] Tradition is the "memory" of peoples, if by memory we connote the energetic, tenacious, strong, active dimension. It is (if it is permissible to paraphrase a famous phrase of Aristotle's) a "continuing to be what one was," as a predetermination, we might add, of what will be. Tradition is not "logical" or "rational"; it is not an "argument," but a "force." It is instilled in mother's milk, it is transmitted in that first smile that will open the child in Virgil's Pollio [a poem about a birth that prophesies a future of peace and prosperity] to the possibility of future coexistence with the gods and goddesses. It is inscribed—through fables, aphorisms, nursery rhymes, festivals, and rites—in the subconscious depths of the individual and the community. It perpetuates attitudes, constitutes lineages. It is rooted in the generative force itself; It binds itself, with an oath sworn with the hand under the father's thigh, to the land and to the lineage. It maintains fidelity to loves and hatreds; it binds men to life and death by their genealogical community. It does not tolerate rationalist reason, sugar-coating philanthropy, since both dissolve it: it lives on an authority that binds generations; that makes possible all the delicacy of friendship between the elderly and the child, the dialectic between the father and the son who was received, at birth, on the knees, in recognition of his "genuineness." That is why tradition, insofar as it is a version in the past and delves into history insofar as it finds there the foundation of futurity. Tradition is hope. […] In several passages of his book Waiting and hope And, specifically, when speaking of Saint Augustine, Laín Entralgo brings memory and hope closer together. [...] Saint Augustine's "memory of the future" is founded on a preconscious that is "hope" itself, ontologically understood. [...] Hope, understood in its original core, is a transcendence (by its own or borrowed virtue) of temporal contingency; it is tradition as projected into the future. It masters the past; but not through an argument, which could be none other than an (inconclusive) argument of analogy: but because the past has given me awareness of a force that I still feel operating and young within me (that "tranquil force" that Costa y Llobera speaks of in his ode to Horace) and it makes me face the a with serenity. This is the "magisterium" of History.magistra vitae"That is the message of the velluria; since the mission of the elderly is to comfort hope in the young. Where reason fails to conclude, hope waits. Moreover, hope overcomes not only the lack of reasons, but also reasons that might oppose it, accusing it of recklessness or madness. Hope waits against all hope: it is the response of fidelity to fidelity. [...]