Fiction, Fact & History

Some fiction moves beyond fiction. It reveals to us the depth of human nature: that some part of us is grounded in Transcendence. Experiencing fiction can be one of the ways in which we come to believe in the divine. It is one of the religious experiences I have written on in my apologetics project. We feel, when watching some television shows and movies or reading certain books, that our consciousness of our self is elevated. We learn something about who we are and our place in the universe.

The human imagination is not only a mode of creation, it is also a mode of discovery. It plays a role in the model-building that takes place in science. But the general, unspoken assumption seems to be that the imagination must be focused on some aspect of sense data to actually act as a mode of discovery. Otherwise, it is simply creation. It is like the part we call 'imagination' only gives fuel to the fire of our senses. Why must this be so? Why can't the imagination itself be a part of the very discovery, rather than a tool of it? People fear flights of fancy, and rightly so. But just because it can easily lead us astray doesn't mean it must do so. Perhaps some flights of fancy are, in and of themselves, a kind of discovery. There are certainly some encounters with fiction that seem to us to act just this way.

I recently watched a TV show called CARNIVALE (not for youth or children, BTW). It was this big cosmic story about forces of light and darkness, being played out in the very grit and grime of human life. In the end, it was more than a piece of entertainment. It felt like something important was learned, along the way. I felt my soul enlightened. One could, no doubt, just attribute this to wishful thinking. And it does seem to me that my ability to trust this experience is in some sense in my hands. I can choose to ignore it. But I feel like something important would be lost, something I can't quite put my finger on.

Perhaps the difference between good fiction and science is one of precision and scope. Science seeks precise truths about particular entities and events abstracted from the world as a whole. But there may be some truths that cannot be precisely given, and have to do with the world as it is in all of it's complexities, beyond abstraction or isolation of particulars. There is this underlying ideas some scienticians (believers in scientism) have that all we have to do is gather up all the particular things and gain knowledge about them, and then when we add them up all together you get a picture of the whole. It is a view of the world as an aggregate, as a kind of heap of 'things' which we can know individually. But I think that while this methodology is useful and gives real truth, it can never give us a complete picture of the whole. I am a believer in the idea that the whole is more than the sum of it's parts, especially in complex systems and even more so when we are talking about 'reality as such' or 'being', ie, just the whole complete picture of everything. Ideas about that scope cannot always be said, they must be shown, and I think that is where this transcendent experience of fiction comes in.

Some stories are more than stories. Their lessons are bigger than the content of their narrative. They are lived out in the mind, and in that living out, something important is learned. Perhaps the same thing is true of history. History is more than just a series of events, it ties together in a narrative. All good historians must have something of the storyteller within them. History is not atomized, it is whole cloth. Perhaps their are some historical events that point beyond themselves into deeper truths. These truths are found 'in the telling' (a la the film RADIO FLIER, or BIG FISH). Some things happen in history that point to the fact that history is grounded in Transcendence. Which makes sense, given the inevitable connection between history and human nature. Further, the insight about fiction and the insight about history inform one another. Some fictions may be told about history, some history may be 'fictionalized' so that the deeper truths about them may be more fully known. It becomes incumbent upon people in positions like mine, I think, to be able to disentangle all of this to help people become fully aware. But in the disentangling the original goals must be maintained. There is the event, the telling of the event history, and the fictionalization. The event has it's own truths, and is influenced as all things are by deeper truths. In the telling those deeper truths become more apparent, in the fictionalization they become the entire point. This is the challenge of the theologian, and I think it should also be the challenge of the pastor. If we are to help the Holy Spirit guide people 'to all truth' it becomes imperative that we be sure what kinds of truths we are leading them to, and what path they are walking on.