Genuine fidelity to a tradition

Genuine fidelity to a tradition is not the same as literalist traditionalism and is in fact incompatible with it. It consists in preserving not simply the tradition but the continuity of the tradition. As fidelity to a living and hence changing tradition, it requires that one distinguish between the living and the dead, the flame and the ashes, the gold and the dross […] Within a living tradition, the new is not the opposite of the old, but its deepening: one does not understand the old in its depth unless one understands it in the light of such deepening; the new does not emerge through the rejection or annihilation of the old, but through its metamorphosis or reshaping. "And it is a question whether such reshaping is not the best form of annihilation." This is indeed the question: whether the loyal and loving reshaping or reinterpretation of the inherited, or the pitiless burning of the hitherto worshiped, is the best form of annihilation of the antiquated, i.e., of the untrue or bad.

Leo Strauss. in "Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion"