Story Is Fundamental
Fiction, Creation, and Incarnation
God did not reveal Himself to us with syllogisms, but with story: In the beginning. In His earthly ministry, our Lord told the people stories. When He sat down on the mountains, He told them about a Shepherd and His sheep. He told them about pulling in nets of fish, building towers, and harvesting wheat. He told them about a threshing floor, a barn, and a very hot bonfire. He told them about a woman sweeping for a coin.
Story & Science, or, Fiction Is More Real Than Gravity
In a sense, we can say that Story is fundamental. It may seem strange to call it fundamental; it is easier for us moderns to say that the law of gravity is fundamental. But the law of gravity is just part of the setting of the story, it is not a story in itself. It is just the “Once upon a time, when the gravitational constant was 6.674×10−11” of the story in which we find ourselves. Stories require characters and plot, and men find themselves thrown into life as a character, in media res.
We all experience life as a story. When men tell stories, they are in a different class altogether from the material sciences. The laws of physics describe things in God’s world, and every story has rules. But rules can’t make a story.
But, under an atheistic worldview, your life is not a story. What we call “your life” and even what we call “you” is an illusion; “you” are just what pond scum does after this many billions of years.
“DNA just is. And we dance to its music” (Richard Dawkins, Out of Eden)
In the atheist’s story-less universe, every good thing and every wicked thing man has done is just determined by the initial temperatures of earth’s primordial soup and the second law of thermodynamics. The most beautiful love poem and the rape of an innocent child “just are.” Those actions are not good or bad, they are only part of the dance to DNA. The concept of good guys and bad guys, knights and dragons, belongs to the Christian cosmos. Only a storied universe is a moral universe.
Faerie Stories & The Primary World
I recently finished reading Tolkien’s incredible essay, On Faerie Stories. You can download a PDF of it here:
Tolkien calls this world the Primary World. He describes the stories that men tell in it as a sub-creation. When we say in the Apostle’s Creed,
I believe in God the Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth
We confess that God is Creator. We can use the analogy of “Author” along with the book of Acts1, but God is more than an author in the way we are authors. We tell stories, happening in far off times; our God created time. We tell stories, imagining far off places; God stretched out the heavens themselves.
Story is about the doctrine of Creation, because it must use the creation that we experience. We must read the book of Creation in order to make sub-creations. Even wicked stories must open that book, to their great dismay. Even Satan appeared as a serpent.
Fiction for Faithfulness
Fiction is catechesis. A 10-year-old can tell you all of the characters in the Marvel universe. He can list all of Spiderman’s abilities, enemies, and history before he can tell you about the last 100 years of U.S. history. What does that show us? That shows us that fiction is a powerful teaching tool. It is mightier than math textbooks. It is often stronger than the Sunday school lessons the kids get at church. We give children 40 minutes of information in Sunday school, only to saturate them in 3 daily hours of television. Whoever tells the better stories wins.
This is why a robust, classical education2 has always included massive amounts of literature (stories we told) and history (stories we lived). This is not just because teachers like pupils to struggle over archaic language. This is because they know the power of story. Lectures change what we know. Stories change what we love.
I believe in the benefit of studying what has been called the Great Books3 of Western Civilization. Much of that canon is what we would today call fiction. We are what we love4, and we can be formed to love goodness, truth, and beauty by good story. In our day, despite the sea of information at our fingertips, we are surprisingly malnourished, to our moral detriment. We haven’t read the stories about dragons, so we don’t know that you shouldn’t sleep on their pile of gold.
Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair, but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons. (C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader)
C.S. Lewis reminds us that the point of learning is not only information: “we do not need clever devils.”5 Fiction has the ability to expose our blind spots. We see this with the story that Nathan the prophet tells to King David after his adultery with Bathsheba and murder of Uriah. Nathan tells David a fictional story about a rich man stealing the sheep of a poor man. David is moved by the story and calls for judgement on the rich man.
Nathan said to David, “You are the man! (2 Samuel 12:7).
David was brought to the most important repentance of his life by means of a story. Story can place before us the mirror of the law of God. I have had a similar experience reading the novels of Dostoevsky: no other fiction author in recent history can put darkness and sorrow and existential crisis before your eyes for 700 pages, and have you walk away thinking, “I love Truth, Goodness, and Beauty found in Jesus Christ.”
The Incarnation & Story
It is easy enough to say that the philosopher is generally the more rational; it is easier still to forget that the priest is always the more popular. For the priest told the people stories; and the philosopher did not understand the philosophy of stories (Chersterton, The Everlasting Man).
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob -- not of the philosophers and scholars…Joy, Joy, Joy, tears of joy… Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. May I never be separated from him (Blaise Pascal).6
Only in Christ do we see the headiness of the philosopher meet the heartiness of the storyteller. We see the Word become flesh. We see the Storyteller enter His story; the Creator enters His creation. The popularity of stories amoung the common man represents his groping in the dark toward something divine. Man wrote mythologies fumbling for something more real, super real, supernatural.
Again and again, as with so many topics, we find ourselves arriving at the Incarnation. It is fitting that we celebrate Advent every year. The logos, the Word, who was the object of the philosopher’s dark search, could not ultimately be found by them. The myth-writers crawled the wrong way in darkness as well; it was to the holy family in Bethlehem, not the quarreling family on Olympus, that the Light of the World came.
Story is ours, my brothers, because Truth is ours, and we are His.
There is such a thing as a divine story which is also a human story; but there is no such thing as a Hegelian story or a Monist story or a relativist story; for every story, yes, even a penny dreadful or a cheap novelette, has something in it that belongs to our universe and not theirs. Every short story does truly begin with creation and end with a last judgment (Chesterton, The Everlasting Man).
What are some of your favorite works of fiction?
Acts 3:15: The author of life you put to death, but God raised him from the dead; of this we are witnesses.
Often, we must self-educate in these Great Books of the past. If you didn’t receive that as a child, you can start somewhere.
This concept comes from James K.A. Smith’s book, “You Are What You Love”
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
Blaise Pascal’s work Pensees has some great insights on many of the ideas expressed in this post.
This is an absolutely wonderful read. It actually ties in quite closely with a lot of writing I've read from Carl Jung - who shared this view on mythology being a fundamental part of the human psyche (and, by extension, the human soul too)
So I agree with you wholeheartedly with the importance of stories too. And love the way you weave this article so intricately through so many different reference points.
Amazing work.
I’m a little late to this post (which is excellent by the way) and I’ll answer question about favorite works of fiction:
- the count of Monte Cristo (dumas)
- the ransom trilogy (CS Lewis)
- the Richard Hannay series by John buchan (the 39 steps, mr standfast, etc)