The dichotomy between tradition and insight breaks down under the weight of history itself. A “leap of progress” is not a standing broad jump, which begins at the line of where we are now; it is a running broad jump through where we have been to where we go next.
…The growth of insight — in science, in the arts, in philosophy, in theology— has not come through progressively sloughing off more and more of tradition, as though insight would be purest and deepest when it has finally freed itself of the dead past. It simply has not worked that way in the history of tradition and it does not work that way now.
Jaroslav Pelikan
The Vindication of Tradition