How We Lost Our Story

Yesterday I shared a thought inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien concerning religiosity and lore, making the observation that we've become a people, in the post-Christian West, who have lost our story.

Those reflections put me again in mind of the widely discussed 2010 essay by Robert Jenson "How the World Lost Its Story." 

As argued by Jenson, the ancient world understood itself through story. This assumed that the cosmos itself had a story. And if a story, then a Storyteller. Life was narratable. 

Given its deep Jewish and Christian roots, modernity maintained this belief in a narratable world but attempted to sever it from the Storyteller. We wanted the cosmos to retain its meaning but independently of any metaphysical Source of meaning. Eventually, as Jenson recounts, this project failed. Without the Storyteller our story soon dissipated into the fog of post-modernism. Here's Jenson:

[M]odernity has supposed we inhabit what I will call a “narratable world.” Modernity has supposed that the world “out there” is such that stories can be told that are true to it. And modernity has supposed that the reason narratives can be true to the world is that the world somehow “has” its own true story, antecedent to, and enabling of, the stories we tell about ourselves in it.

There is no mystery about how Western modernity came by this supposition. The supposition is straightforwardly a secularization of Jewish and Christian practice—as indeed these are the source of most key suppositions of Western intellectual and moral life. The archetypical body of realistic narrative is precisely the Bible; and the realistic narratives of Western modernity have every one been composed in, typically quite conscious, imitation of biblical narrative...

If there is little mystery about where the West got its faith in a narratable world, neither is there much mystery about how the West has lost this faith. The entire project of the Enlightenment was to maintain realist faith while declaring disallegiance from the God who was that faith’s object. The story the Bible tells is asserted to be the story of God with His creatures; that is, it is both assumed and explicitly asserted that there is a true story about the universe because there is a universal novelist/historian. Modernity was defined by the attempt to live in a universal story without a universal storyteller.

The experiment has failed. It is, after the fact, obvious that it had to: If there is no universal storyteller, then the universe can have no story line. Neither you nor I nor all of us together can so shape the world that it can make narrative sense; if God does not invent the world’s story, then it has none, then the world has no narrative that is its own. If there is no God, or indeed if there is some other God than the God of the Bible, there is no narratable world.

Moreover, if there is not the biblical God, then realistic narrative is not a plausible means for our human self-understanding. Human consciousness is too obscure a mystery to itself for us to script our own lives.

This was my point in yesterday's post reflecting on the role lore plays in The Lord of the Rings. Like many of those in Middle Earth, we've become a people who have forgotten our story. Worse, as Jenson points out, we've become a people who deny that stories about our lives even exist, at least true stories about our lives. This creates our modern crisis of meaning, which contributes to our mental health crisis. As Jenson says, "There are now many who do not and cannot understand their lives as realistic narrative," for we "inhabit a world of which no stories can be true."