"I am not in your land, but in my own"

 True education is a kind of never ending story — a matter of continual beginnings, of habitual fresh starts, of persistent newness. -- JRR Tolkien 

 Wherefore those that would give their minds to philosophical studies are not obliged to avoid poetry altogether, but rather to prepare themselves for philosophy by poems, accustoming themselves to search for and embrace that which may profit in that which pleaseth them, and rejecting and discarding that wherein they find nothing of this nature. For this discrimination is the first step to learning.  -- Plutarch

I've written before about narrative as a power move, but of course, the reason narrative or Story has become subject to power moves is because it is such a key mode for learning in humans.  

This is a large subject and so the purpose of this post is to bring up the topic and mention that Pope Francis has recently written a letter on the role of Literature in Formation.   He writes:  

In this regard, I would agree with the observation of one theologian that, “literature… originates in the most irreducible core of the person, that mysterious level [of their being]… Literature is life, conscious of itself, that reaches its full self-expression through the use of all the conceptual resources of language”. 

He quotes authors Proust and CS Lewis:

 Even more, reading prepares us to understand and thus deal with various situations that arise in life. In reading, we immerse ourselves in the thoughts, concerns, tragedies, dangers and fears of characters who in the end overcome life’s challenges. Perhaps too, in following a story to the end, we gain insights that will later prove helpful in our own lives.

18. In this effort to encourage reading, I would mention two texts by well-known authors, who, in a few words, have much to teach us:

Novels unleash “in us, in the space of an hour, all the possible joys and misfortunes that, in life, it would take us entire years to know even slightly, and of which the most intense would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them”. [11]

“In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do”. [12]

Pope Francis is talking about Literature and reading, not Story as such -- but in the terms of what he is describing here, the words overlap.    

When God set out to reveal himself to the humans made in his image, He chose to work through Story -- not only history, in the mode of working through time and event, but explicitly in the "telling of story" -- where his people learned to transmit his Revelation through recounting of those events, drawing out and amplifying meaning from symbol and figure.

Stories are the first mode of discursion for small children, and though we build up a capacity for conceptualization as we mature, the fundamental narrative structure seems to remain.   To put it another way, Tolkien has said, responding to a claim that mythology was a disease of language:

Mythology is not a disease at all, though it may like all human things become diseased. You might as well say that thinking is a disease of the mind. It would be more near the truth to say that languages, especially modern European languages, are a disease of mythology. 

My hypothesis is that even the most esoteric of physicists and philosophers rely more than they are always consciously aware on a kind of mythology, a kind of narrative structure in their train of thought.

The point here is that it is good to be aware of it.    Traditionally, the teleology of a humane education -- that is, a literary one -- was to ground oneself in the process of reflection, discernment and sympathy that Pope Francis is sketching out in his Letter.

This is a very typically Ignatian theme, by the way -- literature as formation.    Ignatius himself thought his followers should be thoroughly educated in the humanities, especially literature as it was understood in that time (broadly).  

Again, I'm sketching out the merest outline here, because it's such a big theme it tends to be presumed rather than mentioned.  

The Apostles Creed is a Narrative, a Story; and so is the Angelus.   

I know that because a large part of our modern political/theological/academic turmoil is about competing narratives, that this is a somewhat tricky subject.    It seems to turn away from objective truth and into subjectivities, but I would argue that it doesn't, essentially -- this is just a relic-narrative of our Enlightenment mythology.  

 In fact, it seems true to say that Story and Law came about almost in the same time and in the same way.   .... that stories are deeply intertwined with meaning and human action, which are inescapably tied to our understanding of the significance of our actions.