Serendipitous Synthesis

Anthony here again. I've been preparing for a Tolkien class that I hope to teach this summer (need a few more kids to sign up yet). At the same time, I've been talking about evolution. And I've been running a creative writing club at work. All of these things suddenly collided in my mind today in a surprising and kind of awesome way.

In my writing club yesterday I was trying to explain to the kids that to make their writing satisfying they need to make sure everything that happens in the story has an explanation within the world of the story. If, for instance, the author needs a character to do something for the plot, that character has to have his own reasons for doing it that make sense to him. Otherwise the reader will feel like the author is cheating, imposing his will from without, and the character ceases to seem like a real character with his own desires, motivations, and free will but instead is only a marionette manipulated by the author.

In the evolution post I wrote yesterday, I talked about how God’s causality is different from natural causality, and a mistake that both atheists and some religious people make is to assume that if a process like evolution is completely natural God had nothing to do with it. Actually God underlies the entire natural order and makes it what it is. It relies on him at every moment for its very existence. So we should expect a natural process to be explicable entirely in terms of natural cause and effect, even though the natural order itself requires something outside of it to explain it.

It stuck me that this is basically the same sort of thing that I had been talking about when I had said that elements in a story need to be explainable within the story itself. Even though the story is created by an outside author, everything within the story must make sense in terms of its own series of internal causes and effects.

And that made me think of Tolkien’s philosophy of subcreation. Tolkien believed that our ability to create stories is one way that we are made in the image of God. As God created the world, so we are able to sub-create our own imaginative worlds. By making stories we are, in our lesser, analogous way, mimicking what God did when he created the universe. We have something like the immanent yet transcendent relationship to our creations that God does with his.

All those things hit me at once today, and suddenly I got God’s relationship to his creation in a way I hadn't before. I’d already understood these things intellectually, but now it went home on some deeper, more fundamental level. I understood God’s complete independence of creation, and how far above it he is. And yet I also understood his love of it and his intimate involvement with it. And I understood creation’s complete dependence on God, and how much creation glorifies its Creator in its beauty and perfection. And I was amazed in a new way at the knowledge that God entered into his story – his-story – and become one of the characters, so to speak, bounded by his own creation of natural cause and effect. The author stepped into his work.

I’m doing a poor job putting into words what hit me in one wordless moment. But I love it when disparate things suddenly come together and give you a moment of understanding that is greater than you could get from any of the things alone. I haven’t had a moment like that since my undergrad, when I was studying C.S. Lewis and Thomas Aquinas and Big Bang cosmology all at the same time.