The latest edition of Discworld Monthly popped into my email inbox recently. One of the letters included various quotes from Terry Pratchett on stories and narrative, which are very interesting:

• “Narrativium is powerful stuff. We have always had a drive to paint stories on to the universe. When humans first looked at the stars, which are great flaming suns an unimaginable distance away, they saw in amongst them giant bulls, dragons, and local heroes”
• “Humans think in stories. Classically at least science itself has been the discovery of ‘stories'”
• “Science takes on the aura of magic because the design of a civilization proceeds by a type of narrative imperative it makes a coherent story”
• “Storytelling is the opposite of reductionism; 26 letters and some rules of grammar are no story at all”
• “Concepts like gods, truth and soul appear to exist only in so far as humans consider them to do so… But they work some magic for us. They add narrativium to our culture. They bring pain, hope, despair, and comfort. They wind up our elastic. Good or bad, they’ve made us into people”
• “Humans add narrativium to their world. They insist in interpreting the universe as if it’s telling a story. This leads them to focus on facts that fit the story, while ignoring those that don’t”

I agree that telling stories to make sense of the world around us is a defining feature of what it means to be human. If there’s one thing that really sets us apart from the animals, that makes us in the image of God, it’s our capability for language and all that flows from that – storytelling, abstractions like truth and the soul and so on, which allow for art and science and culture and relationships. We are homo narrativus, storytelling man.

But unlike Pratchett, I don’t believe that we just paint meaning onto a meaningless universe. We are made in the image of the logos, the Author of Life. The Christian God is a storytelling God. The gift of language is a gift from God that connects us to the realm of ideas. Goodness, Beauty and Truth are not just necessary inventions, but realities that are somehow spiritual and transcendent, as well as immanent in the world around us.

One of philosophy’s perennial questions is that of the relationship between the upper and lower stories, between nature and grace. Francis Schaeffer summarises each of them as follows:

Grace, the higher: God the Creator; heaven and heavenly things; the unseen and its influence on the earth; unity, or universals or absolutes which give existence and morals meaning.Nature, the lower: the created; earth and earthly things; the visible and what happens normally in the cause-and-effect universe; what man does on the earth; diversity, or individual things, the particulars, or the individual acts of man.

For Pratchett, only the lower is real, while the higher is just invented and projected on the universe by human beings. If you start at the bottom, with the particulars and with man as the measure of all things, as both modernity and postmodernity do, then you do indeed end up with a meaningless universe, where we are just part of a cosmic machine. Again, Schaeffer puts it well: “We can think of it as the individual things, the particulars, gradually and increasingly becoming everything and this devouring all meaning until meaning disappears”.

But the conviction of Christianity is that meaning has meaning, and we don’t have to start with the lower. For us within the realm of nature, of the particulars, to have answers about the realm of grace, of the universals, we need something or someone from the realm of grace to communicate truth to us. Biblical Christianity is based on the conviction that God reveals himself in Jesus Christ, recorded in Scripture. We are able to receive true knowledge about the meaning of life and of the universals. We don’t have to make up our own story to explain the universe, because its maker tells us the true story, and it’s a story that we can be part of.