Alasdair MacIntyre writes:
...man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?' We enter human society, that is, with one of more imputed characters - roles into which we have been drafted - and we have to learn what they ae in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be constured. It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kinds, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the dram into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words. After Virtue, p. 216
This is even more so of being a follower of Christ, yes?
3 comments:
I'd say yes, except that knowing it was actually the youngest son who wasted his inheritance ... oh, ok, sure. I won't quibble (much).
Sorry - overcome by temporary bout of tall poppy syndrome. Something to do with Australian stories!
Yes, I thought that as I was typing it: surely MacIntyre isn't getting the prodigal son story all wrong? But no, I think he is just referring to the fairy story pattern. Which makes me wonder if the prodigal son is even more of an inversion of our expectations.
I was going to say the same as Anthony. But then had the same thought as Michael. But then I went back to Anthony - can you name a fairy story in which the older brother squanders his inheritance and then goes into exile to live with the swine? It must be a very Jewish fairy story for swine to be seen as unclean and themselves symbolic of exile. I reckon he just stuffed up and his editor missed it.
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