MacIntyre and stories

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?

A word on scripture in theology

A word as to hermeneutical method deployed is needed at this point [ie in my thesis!]. The early martyr-acts and the patristic discussions of martyrdom are richly drenched in scriptural references and allusions. This was possible and meaningful because (despite the variety of methods of interpretation used) the scriptures were held to be a unity cohering in Christ, the one whose death provided the template for Christian martyrdom. The texts of scripture had particular import for these individuals facing a terrible death, and as it is reported, gave them particular inspiration and solace.[1] Scripture ought to have particular prominence and authority in any theological account of martyrdom, therefore. More than this: a reading of the canonical scriptures which highlights their salvation-historical – and so Christological – shape is the appropriate complement to the subject at hand, because theological reflection on martyrdom has always had this perspective in one way or another. We attempt to read scripture, therefore, with an eye to its unfolding disclosure of a history of redemption as well as to the theological concepts that it generates.[2] The readings of scripture we attempt here are necessarily selective, but in each case the selections of texts are neither arbitrary nor irrelevant. The salvation-historical nature of the material necessarily plunges us into the business of narrative analysis; but it also the case that the scriptures provide the frame, or chart the trajectory for a theological discussion they themselves prompt but do not provide.

[1] Brad S. Gregory says the same about the martyrs of the Reformation era. Gregory, Salvation at Stake : Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe, p. ??
[2] We hope to take heed of Oliver O’Donovan’s stern warning not to ‘dip into Israel’s experience at one point … and to take out a single disconnected image or theme from it’ which would be ‘to treat the history of God’s reign like a commonplace book or a dictionary of quotations.’ Oliver O'Donovan, The Desire of the Nations - Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 27.

The Unity of the Bible?

All this talk in Chris Wright and Graeme Goldsworthy about 'overarching frameworks' and such makes me want to ask: in what does the coherence of the Bible lie? How can it be properly described?

Narratives cohere (often) around a central character or set of characters. Or, as in a saga, like D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, several generations of people living in the same place provide the threads of interconnection between the succesive stages of the novel. One novel I read, Annie Proulx's Accordian Crimes, coheres around an inanimate object (an accordian) as its finds itself in successive sets of hands. In Anna Karenina two plots are interwoven though there is little connection between them - they are connected in that the characters share in family relations of a somewhat distance kind.

Ultimately, it is the collecting of the elements together in the single work that unifies them, though usually there are more elements of formal coherence than that. Think of a painting in an art gallery: it is the framing and placing of the elements within the frame and on the wall that invites us to consider them as a unity, even if the elements of the painting are quite discordant. If they are discordant, we tend to ask why they have been juxtaposed and wrestle to discover what relation there might be or that we might find between them.

These formal coherences - often unimportant in themselves - invite the reader to consider and discover thematic coherences as suggested by the stories. Sometimes these are quite surprising, granted. Sometimes the formal coherences do not account for all the elements in the work, at least not obviously. But the human love of comparing and contrasting, and of finding patterns, makes for the most enjoyable part of engaging with narrative art forms.

The other aspect of our apprehension of coherence when it comes to narratives is of course time. We experience time in narratives through emplotment. No matter how many post-modern novels cut and paste their narratives, the narrative form relies heavily on a succession of events and invites us to consider (or tells us) what the relation between the events consists in. EM Forster famously wrote: 'The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then the queen died of grief is a plot.'

The canonical Bible has a coherence in a formal sense in the first instance in that it traces the history of Israel with its God in a roughly chronological order. The New Testament claim is that it continues and indeed completes this history. However, there are things that are collected within the lists of Law, Writings and Prophets that are not obviously part of the main succession of events. Very few clues are given as to why Job, for example, has been placed within the canon: which is for us readers an invitation to consider what it does contribute. It is almost as if it has been placed there by intuition: (from the human side) by an editor not quite knowing what he was yet looking at but sure that what he had was of inestimable value, and recognising in it the divine voice.

I suppose what I am leaning towards saying is this: the formal unity of the Bible consists of the collecting of these books together as Scripture; and its relation to salvation-history. The Bible describes a series of events that were connected to one another over time, in place, and by a people connected intergenerationally. This formal unity allows then for multiple strands of thematic coherence to be discerned, some of which are more prominent and others less so, and which have complex relations to one another. Of course, some of these coherence is quite obvious, as the authors of scripture deliberately cite each other, and play with and develop - even critique - the themes and other content of other scriptural books. This is also why it is inadequate to read any passage of scripture without due consideration to its relationship to salvation-history and without relation to how the particular themes within it are treated and developed within the canon.

Hauerwas on Narrative theology

A key question for narrative theologians is this: 'how may the claims of a story to shape our lives be judged?'

Stanley Hauerwas offers four “working criteria”, without claiming for his list completeness or absolute clarity:

First, a story must display the power to release us from destructive alternatives.
It must, secondly, it must display ways of seeing through current distortions.
Thirdly, it ought to allow room to keep us from having to resort to violence.
Lastly, it should show a sense for the tragic: how meaning transcends power.

This list of criteria appears to be a little arbitrary, or linked to Hauerwas’ own ethical preferences (for non-violence, for example). Has he at this point reintroduced some abstract ethical ideas having previously disavowed them? Perhaps this is the weakness of the narrative turn that Hauerwas advocates: are these criteria prior to, or the result of a narrative understanding of discourse? Even despite his protestations about the provisionality of his criteria, there is no clear answer given (in this essay) as to how these have arisen. One proposal at this stage would be for an appeal to a master-story – namely the one that Christians tell about Jesus Christ and his Father - that narrates these criteria as the ones by which subsidiary stories ought to be evaluated (and adopted or rejected); and I suspect this is what Hauerwas has in fact done (and does do in practice) but appears to conceal somewhat. Towards the end of his essay, he more explicitly suggests that it is the acceptance of certain stories as “canonical” that marks religious faith. What this means in effect is that through these stories recognized as canonical we “discover our human self”, and are able to judge the adequacy of “alternative schemes for humankind”. Again, we need to ask “why are these stories canonical?” Isn’t this shifting the plausibility problem rather than answering it?

Further, Hauerwas’ criteria appear to ask which narrative works best, leaving him open to the charge of pragmatism. He freely concedes that there may be a plurality of narratives that meets his criteria. However, if these narratives make contradictory, even inimical claims about the world, and God, but work equally well to (say) steer us from violence, are we not able to make further discrimination between them? Are the differences between them merely irrelevant in that case? For those who inhabit these competing stories, it is unlikely to be an easy matter to cast off some parts of the narrative as unimportant.

There are many stories that do not exhibit these criteria and yet have claims to shape our lives. In our time as in the ancient world, stories of violent vengeance make powerful and popular appeal to the ideal of individual, extra-legal action to resolve outstanding moral business. Violence is essential for a feeling of justice in the resolution of these tales. This is even now advocated by Peter A. French, The Virtues of Vengeance ([Lawrence]: University Press of Kansas, 2001), who analyses the pursuit of vengeance in Western films like The Searchers and Unforgiven. Hauerwas would, no doubt, say that these are “bad” stories...But then, he already decided this on - well what grounds exactly?

Narrative Logic: sequence vs pattern

Temptation is part of the ‘narrative logic’ of martyrdom.

What do I mean by 'narrative logic'? ‘Narrative logic’ indicates the ‘patterns of order which are proper to story rather than to discursive reasoning’ Richard B. Hays, "The Faith of Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11" (Thesis (Ph. D.), Scholars Press, Emory University, 1981., 1983), p. 223

Stories are composed of actions and events order to one another by reference to time. To view the story as a unity, each subsequent event must be intelligible in relation to what preceded it. It can be surprising; or the intelligibility may not be obvious immediately; but the events must show some kind of fitness. Ricoeur’s way of putting this is to say that narrative conclusions must be, rather than deducible, acceptable. The follow a ‘particular directedness’ that propels them forward to a conclusion – though of course we need to follow it to the conclusion because it is only from that point of view that we can ultimately judge the acceptability of the sequence. Paul Ricoeur, "The Narrative Function," Semeia no 13 1978 (1978): p. 182

That is not to say that there isn’t a ‘logic’ to the way stories proceed, of course. Rather, it is almost a truism to say that successful narratives do possess an explanatory power that resonates – profoundly so – with the human experience of events.

Ricoeur goes on to develop his analysis of the logic of narratives by claiming that all narratives combine two aspects, one of which is chronological and one of which is non-chronological. The first he calls the ‘episodic dimension’, by which he means to indicate the way in which narratives throw up the question of ‘and then’? – that is, ‘what happened next’? Simultaneously, however, telling a story is also about construing ‘significant wholes out of scattered events’, attempting to grasp the series of events as a unity – its ‘configurational dimension’, as Ricoeur labels it. Ricoeur, "The Narrative Function," p. 183-4 Ricoeur observes then that narratives combine both sequence and pattern – though, it must be said that these two elements exist somewhat in tension with one another:

‘this structure is so paradoxical that every narrative may be seen as a competition between its episodic and its configurational dimensions, between its sequence and its pattern.’