Bishop Maxim Vasiljevic on Tradition

Orthodox Tradition is a custom-dominated (cultural) rather than reason-dominated tradition, which means that it addresses the whole person (and not just their intellect) at the level of morals and daily life.  There are other cultures, on the other hand, such as the Western, which require intellectual explanations, a continual catechesis. How did the Orthodox people survive under the rule of the Romans, the Franks and the Turks without catechesis?  As Christos Yannaras has observed, ‘even when the Greeks [and, I would add, the other peoples of the Balkans] were enslaved, uneducated and poor they did not cease to produce culture and active alterity, a proposal able to reach out to peoples. From the time they became nation states, they simply imitated.’

From his History, Truth, Holiness

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