A philosophical reflection on the tensions between progress and tradition and their resolution through continuity
All too often, the notions of progress and tradition alike are swallowed into the ideologies that make of them principles both absolute and opposed to one another. Put otherwise, when progressivism and traditionalism come to prevail, we often lose not only the true goods of progress and tradition alike, but so too all sense of proportionality or fittingness in terms of preservation or advance. “Traditionalism” often turns tradition into a tomb and a monument; whereas “progressivism” rejects progress that is not also egress—that is, it discards improvement for mere change, becoming forgetful in the process.
Of the two errors, the former—traditionalism—is no doubt closer to the virtuous mean. But it commits one to a certain vice of excess nonetheless: namely, an excessive desire for things temporal to be everlasting. In his Confessions (Book IV, c.4-10), St. Augustine recounts the death of a beloved friend and how he came to hate everything he saw that lacked the beauty of that friendship. This poisoned perspective seems at work in the heart of more than one traditionalist: feeling slighted if not outright offended by any departure from that loved as the most beautiful (not only in matters such as liturgy, but home and family, government and civil society). Thus “grief had penetrated me so easily and deeply”, Augustine writes, because “I had poured out my soul on to the sand by loving a person sure to die as if he would never die.” (IV.8).[1]
Natures of Tradition and Progress
This Augustinian remonstration, however, does not demand that we handle tradition as dead; only that, like human beings, we recognize where and how it continues and where and how it does not. A living tradition, that is, resides not in things or appearances. Such objects may be important signifiers but alone they do not constitute tradition itself, the vitality of which does not stem from its exterior forms, but through real communication of human persons, from one generation to the next.
Indeed, we must ask: what is tradition? The Thomist philosopher, Josef Pieper, in his “Tradition in the Changing World”, writes that:[2]
In normal parlance [the word “tradition”] always has two meanings: on the one hand, the process of handing on, tradere, and, on the other hand, the content of what is handed on: the traditum or the tradendum.
In tradition, put otherwise, there must always be a relation by which it is constituted: for one thing to be handed on requires both one who first has, another who is to receive, and a that-which is transferred between them. This relation, fundamentally, consists in communication—the recipient comes to share commonly in that held by the one handing-down. As Pieper goes on:
Tradition as an historical process takes place between two partners, an older and a younger one, a father and a son, between two generations. To be precise, it is not a dialogue, not an exchange not a mutual communication but, so to speak, a “one-way communication”. One partner, the one handing on, speaks, and the other listens – when and insofar as it is a question of the tradition process… Tradition… does not simply mean handing on something, but rather, handing on something which has already been received as handed on. Quod a patribus acceperunt, hoc filiis tradiderunt; what has been received from one’s fathers is passed on to the sons. This sentence from Augustine designates the structure of the process with complete precision.
This passage contains much we might wish to contemplate: for instance, if tradition always is the handing on of what one has received otherwise, how and where does it begin? What are the sources of tradition? This question is too large for us here. But Pieper goes on to explain that, always, tradition begins with a kernel of something sacred—whether that be from divine revelation or some other sacred use of language. Invariably, however, tradition grows only from something held in reverence: a place, a time, a person, an action, something imbued with irreducible cosmic significance. It is little wonder that the most tradition-minded of cultures are those that keep the sacred in mind.
Contrariwise, we can best understand the true nature of progress by considering its absorption into a religious principle—such that “progress” itself becomes an (oft-implicit) object of worship. Put otherwise, we know progressivism better than we know progress properly speaking, for we have often seen progressivism at work: in “scientific rationality” (that is, scientism); in the industrial and later computer revolutions; and the “end of history” that believed in an absolutized global liberalism. In the previous century, the faults of unchecked industrialism and centralized state power were made manifest. Despite these errors, the unthinking appropriation of all things into the forms of technological thinking were left unchecked, and the spread of liberal democracy became the chief aim of many Western leaders. At the same time, a sneering disdain for non-scientific disciplines and learning still governs much within higher education. Such progressivism frays the threads of continuity by which tradition may be preserved.
Though many reserve the term commonly to the political, the worship of progress continues to boil beneath the surface of a great many movements today, such as those of radical postgender ideology or accelerationism (both “left” and “right”) or “posthumanism”.[3]
Tensions of Tradition and Progress
Because this progressivism does not always receive explicit articulation by those who adhere to it, it does greater damage. Often, it lies hidden in the background—a presupposition or enthymematic premise. Such progressivism, in fact, fails to realize a meaningful reality of progress, which must always be proportionate to that which progresses. In other words, “progress” demands a stable nature which progresses. Progressivism renders progress inauthentic.
But so too, a common strand of conservatism adopts tradition in an inauthentic manner. As Pieper writes:[4]
There is no doubt that there are forms of conservatism which, on the contrary, actually hinder tradition – because they cling to the chance external form in which the tradendum appears in history, whereas it can only, if at all, be passed on to the future under new external forms.
Implicitly but importantly, we encounter here a central point: the relation between an external form and (what is unstated), the internal form. By “external form” we mean the aforementioned appearances, the perceptible vehicles by which we signify the deeper realities. External forms may be important—and discarding them merely for something new—but they are not tradition itself. Thus, the “cult of tradition”, as Pieper later calls this clinging sect, adheres to these external forms, the appearances, even when they cease to signify any deeper reality. Most damagingly for genuine tradition, ideological traditionalists refuse to see the tradition received in any differing external form, for they have confused the external with the internal.
Conversely, the worshipper of progress wants to see continual change in the externals—to the point of rebelling against even the existence and perdurance of form itself. Progressivism becomes an insatiable monster that devours its young before they reach any maturity. By contrast, as Christopher Dawson argues in his Progress & Religion: An Historical Inquiry, properly understood, progress consists in developing towards a rightly-proportioned maturity.
Thus, we see a tension. Progress often inclines towards the newer external form, regardless of its suitability and disregarding even that new form’s own stability. Tradition at times becomes stuck in its adherence to the old, failing to recognize that they “no longer hold up”.
During the 20th century, this tension between progress and tradition became quite clear throughout much of society but perhaps especially within the Catholic Church. Indeed, the tension led to the Second Vatican Council, interpretations of which have since demonstrated what happens when we lack the principles by which we may affect a resolution of the two.
Hermeneutic of Resolution
Concerning the controversial implementations and adaptations following the Second Vatican Council, from which we can take instruction regarding many other issues as well—including education—Pope Benedict XVI had this to say (emphases mine):[5]
[Why has it been so difficult?] Well, it all depends on the correct interpretation of the Council or – as we would say today – on its proper hermeneutics, the correct key to its interpretation and application. The problems in its implementation arose from the fact that two contrary hermeneutics came face to face and quarreled with each other. One caused confusion, the other, silently but more and more visibly, bore and is bearing fruit.
On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call “a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture”; it has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the mass media, and also one trend of modern theology. On the other, there is the “hermeneutic of reform”, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God.
The hermeneutic of discontinuity risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church. It asserts that the texts of the Council as such do not yet express the true spirit of the Council. It claims that they are the result of compromises in which, to reach unanimity, it was found necessary to keep and reconfirm many old things that are now pointless. However, the true spirit of the Council is not to be found in these compromises but instead in the impulses toward the new that are contained in the texts.
These two hermeneutics—oft associated with Benedict’s teaching in general—pertain not only to the liturgy (or matters of religion), but are common ways in which human beings interpret the transmission of teaching. Both the progressivist and the traditionalist adhere to a hermeneutic of rupture: the one finding it desirable, the other reprehensible. The one seeks out the rupture, wanting change in external form ultimately to destroy the internal. The other recoils from anything which appear as signs of rupture, such as the disappearance or rejection of external forms. By contrast, the hermeneutic of reform sees a need for both tradition’s preservation—tradition in its internal forms—and for a suitable progression of external forms: not with wild and unthinking preference for the new precisely as new, but precisely as suited to the new reception of tradition.
Tensions and Reforms Today
Some reluctant minds may hold that the hermeneutic of continuity and reform exists only because we must respond to deviations; that a truer conservation of tradition would not need any such hermeneutic. But this is not true. We must not love the external forms of our traditions as though they are the internal; we must not conflate the undying truth with the mortal vessels in which it lives. We may see this necessity for the hermeneutic of continuity also expressed in the words of Josef Pieper:[6]
On the other hand, there is undoubtedly a real passing down in the true and finest sense, of which undiscriminating, fundamental conservatism of the so-called “cult of tradition” variety Is not aware – precisely because the traditum is presented and received in a changed historical form.
The mind bound by slavish adherence to traditionalism would see in Pieper—and perhaps indeed even in Benedict XVI—a modernist argument that we ought to embrace the change of form as such. But this is untrue. Both thinkers recognize that for tradition to be handed on and thus to truly be tradition, we must have the humility to accept its external forms have a life—and thus, too, a natural and even inevitable death. As Pieper further writes:[7]
…whoever takes on the real task of handing on tradition will soon become aware that, much as tradition implies preservation, it deals primarily not with conserving but much more with enlivening, imposing a new shape, finding a new formulation – something which cannot be achieved without direct involvement in the current problems of the age.
We, of course, confront no shortage of current problems—and the response to them cannot simply be to flee into antiquated external forms if we are to preserve our traditions.
Here at the Lyceum Institute, we are particularly concerned with preserving the traditions of learning. On the one hand, we see the conventional external forms of higher education collapsing in on themselves. In contradistinction, on the other hand, one might observe a growing movement of auto-didacts: independent learners discovering literature, history, philosophy and more from the vast but chaotic realm of digital information.
This information search-and-retrieval methodology of the autodidact, however, only imitates genuine tradition. The speaking and listening by which the tradendum moves from one mind to the next—when it is not conveyed by one living mind to another, when students have no teachers but only sources of information—inevitably becomes garbled by noise. Small misinterpretations of texts or ideas without correction snowballs into great error.
This chaotic digital environment does not constitute a suitable external form by which genuine tradition may be transmitted and received. Put otherwise, we have, as of yet, not seen the progress of the digital culture attain anything like maturity. It remains today mired in adolescence.
Continuity at the Lyceum Institute
We are now, in other words, in the midst of important developmental years. In these years, we may shape most profoundly the future of the external forms through which education is handed down. Our faculty have been the inheritors, that is, of traditions extant for thousands of years—the medieval artes liberales, the Greek παιδεία—and which have already been transitioned through countless external forms: be they academies or lyceums, monasteries or cathedral schools, universities scholastic or enlightenment. Today, the tradition of this teaching appears imperiled by the decline of our modern university and various advances of technologies.
But through the Lyceum Institute, we are attempting to hand on learning received from John Senior, from the French Scholastics of the Leonine Revival, the traditions of River Forest Thomism, the thought of Jacques Maritain, the cultural and technological insights of Marshall McLuhan, the Thomistically-infused semiotics of John Deely, the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies and the Center for Thomistic Studies, and so much more—the Trivium, classical languages, and indeed the specifically-human pursuit of wisdom. Through our labors, the real work of tradition may be continued—a genuine living wisdom that demands new forms.
[1] Augustine c.395, Confessionum S. Augustini, lib.4, c.8: “Sed illa mihi fabula non moriebatur, si quis amicorum meorum moreretur.” Translation by Henry Chadwick.
[2] 1960: “Tradition in the Changing World” in Tradition as Challenge, 9-10.
[3] Some on the “right” might argue that their accelerationism aims ultimately at establishing a stable and enduring “new” polity through the destruction of a society founded upon ultimately faulty principles—but this utopian end, too, could only ever prove to demand further change, further pursuit of some “perfection”.
[4] 1960: “Tradition” in TC, 12.
[5] Benedict XVI, 22 December 2005: “Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia”. Retrieved 9 May 2025.
[6] 1960: “Tradition” in TC, 12.
[7] 1960: “Tradition” in TC, 16.
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