Richard Tarnas, “The Passion of the Western Mind,” Ballantine, 1991.

“As time passed, the Protestant doctrine of justification through the individual’s faith in Christ seemed to place more emphasis on the individual’s faith than on Christ – on the personal relevance of ideas, as it were, rather than on their external validity. The self increasingly became the measure of things, self-defining and self-legislating. Truth increasingly became truth-as-experienced-by-the-self.” (p. 243)

“Modern man’s self-understanding was emphatically teleological, with humanity seen as moving in a historical development out of a darker past characterized by ignorance, primitiveness, poverty, suffering, and oppression, and toward a brighter ideal future characterized by intelligence, sophistication, prosperity, happiness, and freedom. The faith in that movement was based largely on an underlying trust in the salvational effect of expanding human knowledge: Humanity’s future fulfillment would be achieved in a world reconstructed by science. The original Judaeo-Christian eschatological expectation had here been transformed into a secular faith..” (p. 321)

“Only whereas the modern mind’s conviction of superiority derived from its awareness of possessing in an absolute sense more knowledge than its predecessors, the postmodern mind’s sense of superiority derives from its special awareness of how little knowledge can be claimed by any mind, itself included. Yet precisely by virtue of that self-relativizing critical awareness, it is recognized that a quasi-nihilist rejection of any and all forms of “totalization” and “metanarrative” – of any aspiration toward intellectual unity, wholeness, or comprehensive coherence – is itself a position not beyond questioning, and cannot on it sown principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself. Such a position presupposes a metanarrative of its own, one perhaps more subtle than others, but in the end no less subject to deconstructive criticism.” (p. 401-2)