One of the common features of our modern era is that Story is subsumed by character. What this means is that we commonly build stories around characters in our modern literature and cinematic offerings as opposed to submitting a given character’s place and purpose into the story in adherence to the nature and dynamic structure of the story itself.

C.S. Lewis forecast this tendency as early as 1947. What he decried was the attempt to make sense of a world through a character rather than making sense of a character through the world in which that character was situated. The former never seems to work (either in real life, or as a literary habit) and this may explain why so many individuals in our era describe feelings of being perpetually lost, depressed and devoid of purpose; they have been attempting to explain the world to themselves through their subjective experience rather than having themselves explained through the ordering principles that have always guided humans into health and wholeness; they lack a proper regard for the nature and dynamic structure of the story they inhabit. To glimpse the nature of the broader story of which one is a part is to look beyond oneself to what is ‘written’ both in the heavens (the ordered nature of the cosmos) and the earth (the ordered dynamics of creation) and observe that both exist in a manner that reveal design or authorship. In this vein, Calvin observed,

“Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other. For, in the first place, no man can survey himself without forthwith turning his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves; because it is perfectly obvious, that the endowments which we possess cannot possibly be from ourselves; nay, that our very being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone.” ((1545) Institutes of the Christian Religion. Italics added).

Thus, the Modern Self perpetually commits an inversion of the rational order. Modern man (humanity) looks to explain God, his or her environs, and the cosmos, through the dynamics at play in his or her own internal world, rather than looking outward to discern God and the world in which humanity has been placed as explanatory predicates for the nature and purpose of man.

There is a grand story that makes sense of our world that is repeated in the great epochs, both spoken and written, throughout human history. These epochs involve unremitting tension; between good and evil in the cosmos on the one hand, and between virtue and vice in the individual on the other. The working out of this Odyssey is the hero’s quest—the journey required of each of us. Our modern world has forgotten—often shunned—the universal in exchange for the personal, the subjective and the temporal; what is truly meaningful for what is merely stimulating or engrossing. Thus, in place of heroes, the modern self must settle for celebrities: those who have exchanged the Odyssey for a myopic parody that can scarcely be called ‘life’. Roman poet, Juvenal, (AD 100) in reflection upon the demoralized condition of a battered citizenry, lamented,

“...if the old Emperor had been surreptitiously Smothered; that same crowd in a moment would
have hailed Their new Augustus.
They shed their sense of responsibility Long ago,
when they lost their votes, and the bribes; the mob that used to grant power, high office,
the legions, everything,
Curtails its desires, and reveals its
anxiety for two things only, Bread and
circuses.
I hear that many will perish.
No
doubt,
The furnace is huge.”

Juvenal observed that the populace had lost its moral core amid Roman oligarchical oppressions—had lost the plot. They had exchanged the aspiration for moral coherence in lives of meaning and purpose for base desires and distractions that allowed them reprieve from their collective lot.

The grand narrative that makes sense of our lives is thus replaced by short stories and correspondingly ‘thin’ experiences. Driven by the quest for self-fulfillment, the Modern self makes compulsive movements in the direction of temporal happiness. The closest that most people come to grand narrative as they participate in modern society is to brush past it during the borrowed aspects of timeless myth that are offered in the most recent Marvel movie or the piecemeal and disintegrated espousals of virtue and adventure that are cast by the self-help industry. The latter epitomizes the modern West’s self-granted permission to wrench human life from moral coherence and to be sated by frequent experiences of excitement, which are sought in place of the pursuit of true joy. In short, in just about every conceivable domain of life in the West, comfort is chosen over habituated virtue. Thus, the average Westerner likens fulfillment in their imagination with a foggy notion of ‘happiness’ without ever looking in the direction of acquired wisdom that produces both true freedom and true joy. Adventure, in the form of learning to navigate life through routine engagement and deployment of The Good, is subsumed by ‘thrills’ of one kind or another.

Without a clear sense as to how one is part of a larger story, addiction—in the various pursuits of sensation and thrill mentioned above—continue to abound. The fruit of such a misguided life-trajectory is that most people are compelled most of the time by ‘ever increasing craving for ever diminishing pleasure’ to quote Lewis once again (through his herald, Uncle Screwtape).

The Christian canon, the teachings of the Church, the inspired wisdom of the saints throughout time and the inspired wisdom of the local body of believers, each exist as the ordained and inherited fruit of the life of Jesus; each are cast for us as the Grand Narrative of which we remain apart. Our freedom as human beings—freedom defined as the ability to engage life (nature, the spiritual realm, social and familial relations, work-as-calling)—is contingent upon our proper apprehension and harmonious engagement with the Grand Narrative that Jesus presents to us through his very life. We take this world to be as he both claimed and proved it to be. He is to us the ultimate revelation of both what is hidden from our perceptual senses and what is presented to us in plain sight. As the author of Hebrews exclaims:

God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom He also made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become so much better than the angels, to the extent that He has inherited a more excellent name than they. (Heb 1: 1-4).

Thus, to the degree that we understand him, we understand the Grand Narrative of which we are a part.