Religious, philosophical, and cultural traditions have been getting a bad press since the dawn of modernity. Bacon’s recommendation to smash the idols of the past and Descartes’s doubt prompting him to do away with every established certainty except for that of the cogito have cast all “received knowledge” in a negative light. For the philosophers of early modernity, tradition was the realm of stagnation, a suffocating and mystifying veil that had to be torn and destroyed for human emancipation to stand a chance. Against traditions of every stripe, they sought to start afresh from a blank page unburdened by the past, from what is given and received solely by and from oneself.