In The Three Uses of the Knife¹, pages 73-75, David Mamet explains how, in his view, people reframe every time-sequence they find into a story, integrating each new fact of it by adjusting the story’s whole to fit: he avers that men, in reviewing what has passed, whether for themselves or others, chronically fit it to a thesis-antithesis-synthesis framework. This framework, he assumes, forms the central structure of the traditional three-act story, even the underlying idea of drama in general. The historically or culturally astute reader, however, will recognize that this trio- thesis, antithesis, synthesis- is hardly Mamet’s own construction; it is, in fact, the work of one George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German philosopher whose influence on modern culture is horrifically impressive, not the least through his influence on Marx, Lenin, and Foucault. This origin identified, you, like me, may have some questions; the general idea- that mankind orders his world into stories- seems sound, but two elements seem suspicious: first, the framework’s terminology and second, the underlying skepticism regarding this perception’s accuracy. These suspicions are well founded.

The truth is, the world is a story made, like all complex stories, out of stories by, as with all stories, an author- except in this case He’s the Author; the sub-stories man perceives, therefore, while prone to falsity by virtue of his fallibility and finitude, are grasping for a real phenomenon. To the Christian, furthermore, these attempts to find the true story do not seek for a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. They seek instead for what I have termed ‘desire, conflict, and revelation’.

Creation, that which we live in and are a part of, is fundamentally a story. The protagonist is God, particularly Christ. The setting is the physical and spiritual world He has created. The conflict is of ultimate good versus inveterate evil. The goal of this story, in the end, is the glorification of God (Psalm 19:1-4). This story is too big for man to comprehend in its whole; even in eternity, the redeemed of God will still be finding new aspects of God’s part in it to marvel at. Yet we each have our own small parts we see, our lives, and we are, by the grace of God, given the means to see the central thread of it all. This central thread is the story of the Bible, the story of Christ’s coming and of His victory.

The Bible is the central story of creation. In the Bible we find the origin of all things, good and evil (Genesis 1-3). In the Bible we find the start of the conflict between good and evil (Genesis 3), the grand battle plan of history (Gen. 3:15), the long time of preparation for the coming of Christ (Is. 40:3; Matt. 3:3), the coming of the second Person of the Trinity in the flesh and nature of man (John 1:14), the great struggle and climax of the tale (1 Cor. 15:3-7), the greatest and most decisive eucatastrophe of history² , and the promise that final triumph has been accomplished and waits only for the perfection of the stage to manifest (Matt. 28:18-20; Rev. 21:1). The inciting action, the rising action, the climax, all these are encompassed in the Bible; the denouement, the conclusion of the story, is begun, and the ending is prophesied. The Bible tells us the backbone story of creation.

The Bible, however, does not contain every story which is contained in the world already past or yet to come. Even regarding Christ, stories played out upon the earth which did not come into the sacred record (John 21:25). That the rest of the world is made out of stories, in some sense, is easily seen. Now, the components necessary to a story are a matter of some debate, but essentially any definition will concede that a narrative (a causally linked series of events), a character or set of characters (persons) engaging in that narrative, and a conflict (a meeting between two opposing forces- desire and reality, good and evil, etc.) are together sufficient to form a story.

Consider, then, that the world is a causally linked series of events, in which an uncounted (save by God) myriad of sub-sections can be distinguished, if only partially separated. These narratives are occupied by men, by angels, by daemons, and, in the most solitary examples, by God, their Creator and Author (who, though He may be a character, is always greater than the story He creates). In particular, our lives definitionally fulfil this requirement: we are the (secondary) protagonists in our lives, in a sense, when we consider them on their own³. Finally, conflict is in this world inevitably present. Sin, the great antagonistic quality, infects us all at our root; against sin, God and His servants strive, restoring and re-making creation, including us, to righteousness, while damning all those sinners from whom sin is not removed, to whom it becomes after their death all-of-their-all, damning them to perdition. In every story between man and his fellow man, between man and God, a conflict between good and evil plays out, though the good is so little as the common grace given of God to man.

The world man lives in, then, is a world of stories, stories of man, stories ultimately of God, whose creation cannot be separated from Him as can He from it. Mamet’s framework for the stories man lives is be ‘thesis, antithesis, and synthesis’. In this framework, assuming some similarity to its Hegelian namesake, the story starts in one position, is confronted with a contradictory position, and ends finally in a merging of the two. While this model is not entirely incorrect, the emphases it possesses are dangerous to accept. Such a model presupposes that neither position possesses superiority, either in truth or morality. Instead, they must be merged to reach the final result.

Metabolizing the world in such a way, ordering your perceptions into an understood whole by means of this schema, is dangerous. Why? The Hegelian dialectic- thesis, antithesis, synthesis- is a system without an objective morality or truth. In this model, two contradictory ‘truths’ meet, one hybrid ‘truth’ leaves, only to encounter its own contradiction. Neither side is right or wrong. This is not reality. In reality, in a real-life story, both sides will possess elements of right and of wrong, mixed in different proportions according to the individual circumstances. They will both be complex. They will not, however, be devoid of morality; they will not be gray. They will be, figuratively speaking, painted in differing proportions of black and white; to the human eye, moreover, entire swathes of the canvas will be entirely invisible, sometimes not even noticed to be missing.

The Biblical conception of a story’s essence, then, it’s beginning, middle, and end, is this: desire, conflict, and revelation. In desire, the story begins. A position, the human position, the desire or intent or want of the character, however perceived or hidden, exists, and so the plot begins. The desire is expressed into the world. Frodo desires to preserve the Shire; John desires to walk to the Island; Gawain desires to triumph before Arthur’s court⁴. Note that, when you’re writing a story, this desire isn’t necessarily the first thing the reader sees. We don’t learn the desire which drives the Dread Pirate Roberts for a fair few pages of The Princess Bride, though an accurate guess is far from implausible. No, this desire is what drives the conflict from the author’s perspective, a perspective the reader should come to agree with over time. Neither must the desire be an individual character’s desire. A kingdom can desire conquest; a people can desire revenge; a church can desire purity. The desire must not even be evil. Frodo’s quest is righteous in its essence. John’s is flawed in means, not ultimate end. Many a story has been written upon the basis of a righteous desire, like that of a wife to possess a worthy husband (hullo, much of Pride and Prejudice– though, of course, no character in that work is blameless in desire, however pure the core). No, the delineating requirement for this ‘desire’ is that it produce the next element: conflict.

Conflict is the meeting of desire with reality. In this stage of the story, its meat, the desire which incited the story meets reality, and they clash. Frodo’s desire to save the Shire clashes with the sheer physical and spiritual toll of the journey. John’s desire to reach the Island clashes with his insufficient means to find or enter it. Gawain’s desire to triumph over the Green Knight clashes with the Knight’s strange magic and the temptation of the kirtle’s safety. Put simply, reality expresses its disagreement with desire. From this conflict flows the final stage: revelation.

Revelation is the realization of reality; in a comedy, the one who desires and the audience alike come to this realization, and in a tragedy, the audience alone so comes⁵. Warning: spoilers. Frodo saves the Shire but loses it in the same blow. John reaches the Island, but not by his own strength. Gawain triumphs, but not as he had hoped. Sometimes, the desire was so essentially contrary to reality that it could not be fulfilled, as in the case of Sauron’s story, in which he desires God-like domination and, being other than God, cannot reach it; sometimes the desire is reached, but its consequences are so ill that the desire’s fulfilment pales in comparison, becomes as naught, becomes even a curse in itself (Oedipus, who desires truth and gouges out his own eyes when that desire is fulfilled).

This realization is proportional in moral character to first the character of the desire and second the character of the author. Think of it as a puzzle with only two pieces. The desire is the first piece. Insofar as it is a good desire, the revelation should endorse it (though not always by fulfilling it); insofar as it is evil, the revelation should reject it. A desire may be of a different moral character in its different parts, too. As noted above, John’s desire for the island is righteous, but his desired means- his own ability- is not. Thus, though the first part will be endorsed, the second part must be repudiated. So too Frodo desires to save the Shire, and with virtue, but he must face the realization that having saved the Shire he cannot retain it for himself. Reality destines him for other goods.

The second half of the puzzle is the author. The revelation’s character depends upon the author’s moral character because it depends on his view of the world. If the author sees the world rightly, the desire’s conflict with reality will produce a revelation accurate to its desire’s character, as the author will have fitted his words to God’s will. If the author does not see the world rightly, insofar as he does not, the puzzle will be malformed. Virtue may be denied, and vice may be uplifted. Man’s finitude here too will play a role, and his fallibility in places other than moral. The revelation may be misshapen from its ideal correspondence to the ultimate Author by the mistakes, omissions, or obliviousness of its human creator.

Unlike the Hegelian dialectic story of Mamet, the synthetization of two opposing realities which posits no real truth, merely an assigned narrative⁶, this desire-conflict-revelation model honors the objective, God-based nature of truth and of reality. A story so founded can speak with authority on moral matters, in reliance on the Word of God; it can present a world where, as Tolkien wrote, good remains forever destined to triumph, though the road may be hard and weary, for none so much as the sinless Son of God, who died on the cross for the sins of His people. In that great story, the desire of the protagonist, God, met the desire of the antagonist, all who sin⁷; the conflict was and is great, as befits its end. Yet in the end, the revelation will come; the triumph of God, already achieved on the cross, already begun with the destruction of the unfaithful bride in A.D. 70, will be revealed to man and to angel and to demon, to the glory of God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, to Whom be glory forever, amen.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – An interesting, if limited and flawed, book, quite short and not at all Christian.

2 – While catastrophe is a sudden and overwhelming downfall, eucatastrophe is a sudden and unstoppable bettering of the world- the destruction of the Ring, the poisoning of the mastermind, the imbecilicization of the scientific magician (all examples are from real books). The term is derived from Tolkien’s coining of it in his excellent essay On Fairy-Stories, found online here and well worth your time.

3 – God is the primary protagonist; in some stories, we are the antagonist, in some the secondary protagonist acting according to our own agency as it is given to us and directed by God.

4 – The second example is Pilgrim’s Regress by C.S. Lewis; I highly recommend it. The third is from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, of which Tolkien made an excellent translation. Also, I haven’t read The Princess Bride recently, so please pardon me if I’ve misremembered in the next sentence

5 – Meaning a happy ending, though I speak here in generalities and ideals; a happy ending with an incomplete realization of reality could be written, though a complete failure to realize reality, combined with an ending purported happiness, would read as delusion, not happiness. It’d be the tale of a lunatic who thinks himself at home in bed when his entrails are being plucked through by the augurs. To him, perhaps, it is a happy ending; as the reader or author, I cannot consider it but a tragedy.

Perhaps ‘good ending’ would be a more fitting way of defining comedy here, though I think the above clarification worth the detour.

Additionally, note that a tragedy could include the protagonist recognizing the truth- just, generally speaking, entirely too late to avoid his destruction. I reference an example of this later in this paragraph.

6 – Note that positioning narrative as a replacement (but not a form of) truth is an important part of postmodern philosophy.

7 – Yes, this is slightly different from the model I’ve described. Why? Because, ultimately, God is the ultimate and originative form of reality. His desires do not conflict with reality because they are reality. Instead, His desire was to create a world in which the desires of sin would conflict with reality, would conflict with Him, that He might be revealed in the conflict and in the conflict’s end.