At the end of the sixteenth century John Donne writes:

This is a striking image that identifies truth with religion, but one that today does not resonate with us. Donne stands near the beginning of a path that will lead, some hundred and fifty years later, to an Enlightenment that would retain his image of Truth standing on the ‘huge hill, cragged and steep’, but which would break the link between truth and religion. With the Enlightenment truth becomes identified with reason (logos) and religion becomes identified with story (mythos) and, as de Certeau reminds us, from an Enlightenment perspective the history of religion becomes the history of error. Truth becomes the truth of reason rather than of faith. The story continues, as we know, with reason itself being held up to scrutiny, particularly by those masters of suspicion Nietzsche and Freud, and this suspicion continues into the late modernity of our present age. Reason comes to be seen by some, not as the means of accessing truth, but rather as part of story, part of mythos.

A second, contrasting, image is offered by Walter Benjamin's angel of history.