Trinity and Story

The proposition: We tell stories only because God is Triune.

The argument:

1) A story depends on an initial breach. There must be something to separate from, and something separating. There must be some move that takes hero from the father�s house and into his own adventures.

2) Otherwise, what we have is stasis and not story. There is no story if the hero doesn�t DO something. And once he does something, there is a move away from the origin.

3) If this original movement is necessarily a fall, then we are gnostics. If every move from the origin is a painful breach from the origin, then creation itself is a painful breach from the origin. If we are going to be anti-gnostic story-tellers, there must be a possibility of peaceful breach with the initial situation, the possibility for the son's pilgrimage or quest that is not an estrangement from the father. And this possibility is rooted in the Son's movement from the Father through the Spirit that is not an estrangement from the Father but is equally and simultaneously a return to the Father in the same Spirit.

4) To take it from another direction: Stories require an eschatology. And this too is rooted in the Triune life.

5) Beginnings for human beings are always "fiction" (Eliot: a �make-believe�E. A beginning is a fictional break in continuum of a life; we pretend that we are beginning with X, when in fact by the time we do X we have already begun. Adam's story begins with God breathing into his nostrils, but before that God has already planted a garden for Adam; and if Adam's story begins before he is, how much more does Eve's and Abel's and Seth's and so on.

6) What makes us construe X as a beginning? I submit that it is because of an aspiration to move away from X. There must be some yearning to go to Y, and as we are going toward Y we construe X as "where we came from." Beginnings depend on the sense of an ending, the desire for an ending that is different from the beginning. There must be an eschatology to get a story off the ground, somewhere to go, somewhere better to get to, that justifies separation from where we are.

7) Eschatology is rooted in the trinity. Only a Triune cosmology is telological. There may be an emanation from a unitarian God, but at best that emanation will return where it began. The Trinity means that where you go is different from where you started, but also means that where you go is not less than where you started. It is equal in power and glory. Y can actually be a glorification of X, just as the Son is the glory of His Father. (For more on this point, see my article "Surplus at the Origin" in the October 2004 issue of the International Journal of Systematic Theology.)

8) Therefore, there must be a Trinity for a story even to begin: there must be surplus at the origin if we are going to have a story.

9) Finally, stories require repetition with difference. Three little pigs who do EXACTLY the same thing do not make a story, at least not a good one. But three little pigs who do marginally but crucially different things make a classic.

10) The Trinity is the background for the repetitions with difference that are necessary to stories, for in the Trinity God is repeated in three ways while always remaining One God.

11) To put it on a larger scale: history is possible only because God is Triune. History is the story that God tells, so all the arguments above apply to history as well as to story.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, November 02, 2004 at 07:08 AM

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