The Grand Narrative of Conviction One reveals again and again a great Telos. Telos means evidence of a final cause, or the endowment of purpose in the nature of things such as they have been established. It means that no material, no person, no object exists without the endowment of purpose. This is so because everything we see is the result of someone’s thought. The order and nature of the universe are the ‘products’ of a prior consciousness; a mind in which they were conceived (whether the chair upon which you routinely sit or the child you hold as your own—each were first conceived of as an idea by one who wished it (or, them) to exist). Everything is, thus, endowed with purpose according to its nature. That purpose is conferred by the one (or One) who conceived of it. In the case of humans, we are granted the unique status of ourselves having the capacity to endow matter with purpose—our co-creation mandate from Eden. It was against this remarkable and miraculous backdrop that Pascal exclaimed for example, “God has instituted prayer so as to confer upon his creatures the dignity of being causes.” (More of that below).

The story is that things have a nature unto themselves that confer to us an understanding of their purpose. The apple tree bears nurturing fruit, and is, in its nature, of a different sort of benefit to humans than is a rock or a bat or a wrench. We know the nature of a thing both by what (or, whether) it consumes and what it yields. That there is order to this all is plain enough. This sentiment is foundationally declared in the book of Romans in the first chapter written by St. Paul,

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened (1: 19-21)

Notice how Paul’s understanding of humanity’s blindness to the nature of the Grand Narrative of which they are a part precedes Juvenal’s lament over the Roman citizenry and our observations (both above) of Modern Man in the contemporary era. What we all struggle to submit to, for various reasons and in varying degrees is the obvious nature of things—what St. Paul describes simply as, “plain.” That is, the most rudimentary of glimpses into the matter reveal the ordered genius of the cosmos to us. This proves to us to be hard to accept (more ‘sin’ discussion below). We daily contend more with the frank order of things in their natural state than with disorder. Whatever is disordered in the world is very difficult to distinguish from the effects of disordered human minds and hearts. That is to say, if one observes most any aspect of disorder in the natural world or in relational life, one can most often trace it back to a very obvious causation stemming from a human mind and heart at some point prior. In the main, we swim in a perpetual revelation of the ordered nature of the universe, of God and ourselves. We do not awaken each day to any burden associated with whether the Fraser River will this day still flow west, or whether the apple tree will begin to yield cats. We live in a grid of ordered meaning which, by the remarkable grace supplied to us, we take for granted.

Each worldview conviction here, taken as part of a coherent whole, is reciprocally contingent on the other, without which the worldview conviction being reviewed cannot exist as a truth. They exist, as do all things in creation, only as a unity. Each one possesses distinction, but requires the other in order to retain its functional and ontological coherence. Thus, the order in the universe: that it is self-replicating according to its kind; that it involves hierarchies of sentience, of consciousness, of authority and capacity (atop which humanity sits under God); that it involves distinction between consciousness in humans and instinct in animals; and, that this colossal difference confers moral responsibility to the former and not to the latter, speaks to the Grand Narrative and the Grand Narrative gives meaningful articulation—as opposed, merely, to descriptive or empirical articulation—to the nature of things.