4
she thinks are endlessly receding, unfixable, and arbitrarily selected bits of experience),
then not one stone is left upon a stone. When the mind becomes its own place, which in
itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven, then indeed Frost's apples do get
over and eat the cones under his neighbor's pines. Then we do not even have the
dignity of living in such an ordered and civilized place as the Hell in which Milton's
Satan makes such exalted claims for his mind; for Chaos has come again.
The believing Church, as the most forthright denier that the mind is its own
place and the strongest contender for an alternative view, bears the brunt of the attack,
but what is under attack is something even more basic: the very legitimacy of the larger
human conversation of which the Church has been a part. What is questioned is
anyone's right to assert that anything is true. Nay, more than questioned: any
"totalizing" or "centering" discourse, that is, any claim to have a viewpoint that is more
than blatantly rationalized self interest, is denied as illegitimate at the outset.
This is more than the old modernist Relativism: Truth is not merely denied as
illusory, as in late relativist Modernism; it is now redefined as evil. Truth for the Post
Modernist is and can be nothing more than a disguise for the exercise of raw power.
Only an ironic infinite regress of questions, never leading to answers, is allowed. One
therefore questions everything and affirms nothing, except that all affirmations are
illegitimate. This is really the ultimate form of intellectual rebellion against authority,
especially the authority of God. Therefore, Christian civilization in general and the
Church in particular are singled out for special attention in the application of this
intellectual acid that eats away at the foundations of all claims to meaning and
authority.
Hence, one of the things that post-modernist scholars love to question is the
unique value, the superiority, and hence the authority of our Western, Greco-Roman,
Judaeo-Christian civilization. They question the legitimacy of giving its history, its
philosophy, its literary canon a "privileged" place in the academy. Now, we have
traditionally viewed this civilization as the result of a providential blending of elements
from Greek, Roman, Hebrew, and Christian sources that produced a unique and
precious set of values: the primacy of truth, the rule of law rather than of men, the