School

Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible – that ideas were deathless and truth immortal.

But that was true only in the subtlest sense, and not superficially true at all.

There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the non-moral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God’s and not Man’s, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind & speech & culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they became valid in a human sense within the culture.

A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) by Walter Miller