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with which all other societies were to be compared,
and to which they were to be converted. (320-3)
Yes, the loosening of Christianity’s apparent hold upon the
Western world without a doubt had theological consequences;
however, in terms of epistemology or even ideology, I do doubt
the severity of those consequences. For me, Science was not the
successor of that “Christian world view” but its inheritor,
because they both seem to have had the very same “god”:
certainty. The certainty that Western Science sought out and
sought to cultivate was no less “absolute and unshakeable,” no
less “supreme,” than what was worshipped by the Christian Church
in the form of the Word of God and the resurrected living Logos
of Jesus Christ. This “scientific” certainty guaranteed the
same things: order, stability, authority, and control. It was
that certainty that allowed the new god Science to usher the
West unto “modernity” and almost every aspect of that “modern”
world of the West was affected by it. And rhetoric and what
would become known after the nineteenth century as “composition”
was no less influenced than any of the other so-called “social
sciences.” The phenomenon that Robert Connors wrote wherein,
again, “a 2,500-year-old intellectual tradition adopts an almost
completely new base of theory, a variety of novel pedagogies, an
almost completely changed audience and constituency, and a
wholly new cultural status in less than eighty years” (24), was,
I believe, the natural result of an America whose perspective
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