ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the identity of tradition, arguing that traditions as contemporarily conceived cast themselves as an end rather than as a means. This takes place through a consideration of the writing of MacIntyre before turning to a non-philosophical interpretation of tradition as a kind of theological decision centred on the question of a power principle. The chapter explains the concept of weaponized apophaticism, which describes the way in which traditions cast themselves as an end through a process of theological claims to authority that are ultimately made all the more powerful through a process of deferral. It concludes with a discussion of gnosis as a kind of non-tradition, a generalized form of tradition which escapes being "hallucinated" as an end because gnosis is cast as prior to origin. Gnostic refusal is found in the impossibility of tradition as a real end by way of a more radical weaponized apophaticism, this time turned upon the idea of principle itself.
