Stories are not intellectual didactism.

“Too often critics… have treated the Chronicles [of Narnia] as if they were principally works of propaganda and have exchanged their poetry for a pot of message,” write Michael Ward on page 22 of Planet Narnia, and I quote in near-full for two reasons: first, to bring the point to your attention; second, to highlight the absolutely wonderful pun that is exchanged… for a pot of message, a beautiful play off of the classic KJV ‘mess of pottage’ for which Esau longed. And like Esau, when we read stories into being intellectual didactism, we trade away a birthright properly ours.

The distinction I draw here requires explanation. What difference lies between story and not-story which makes treating one as the other a grave error?

The didactic and the narrative deal with people by different means. The didactic teaches by explanation: the writer (or speaker) orders reality and develops its connections, its nodes, its structure. He lays out relationships in the recipient’s eye, providing dictums and implying consequences. He says, ‘This is true, and this is not.’

The narrative- which, in this use, includes and possibly summits in the poetic- teaches by experience. Rather than crystallizing a truth into a summary, he extends the truth into action-and-perception. The poet does not lay out the nature of a summer day; he just brings the reader into the experience of that day.

Both of these methods of learning have a proper place and are necessary to well-balanced wisdom. Scripture uses both for a reason; Romans or John 1:1-17 or the law (didactic) is no less important or more important than Job or Genesis or most of the gospels (narrative).

Moreover, we rarely find them fully separate from each other (though perhaps didactic has the easier task here, as the narrative necessarily includes factual statements and didactic implications, such as a belief in reality). Great didactic works run red with metaphor, anecdote, and ascension towards poetry; C.S. Lewis’s works are a prime example here. Great narrative, meanwhile, often deal with not only the incidental but the directly didactic; while a story very rarely ought to teach the reader as a didactic work does, very often a story must deal with its participants learning.

Further, the application of the didactic is in the lived-out, in narrative; the ingraining of the narrative is, as a rule, only fully matured when it partakes of the didactic. I must take what I am taught by the didactic work and apply it to life, or it is worthless, even damning. I must consider what the narrative work has laid out of the world’s nature, understanding truths in relationship, in order to thoroughly test and then thoroughly apply what survives that test. The didactic provides meaning to the narrative, ultimately, and the narrative provides reality to the didactic.

These two are not foes, but they are different, and to treat a work as if it contains only one is to mutilate that work in the interpretation. The error is bad enough when the work is reduced to its primary mode. A reading of Romans 7 which does not acknowledge Paul’s autobiography has ripped out its own heart and knocked out its own teeth, as is a reading of any chapter of Romans, or of the book which denies the greetings in its final chapter. All the worse when we reduce a book to its secondary mode. Reading the gospels with an eye shut to the narrative, to the human experience and living therein, is like burning food to ash before eating it. Both perversions are an exchange of our birthright, whether for a “pot of message” or a meaningless experience, it matters little to the scale of the damage.

(Note: I speak a didactic truth via narrative means.)

In terms borrowed from C.S. Lewis, the didactic is Contemplation: considering something from outside of it; looking at a light beam which crosses the world before our eyes. The narrative, meanwhile, is Enjoyment: entering into something; looking down the beam of light. (If you have not read Lewis’s “Meditations in a Toolshed,” from God in the Docks, I highly recommend you do so.) These two are not so cleanly divided as the metaphor implies, taken simply (what ever is!), as we have already seen, though a moment remembers that to see a light beam from without is to experience its off-cast rays and to enjoy it from within is to align to the direction of its relationship with the outside world.

Both sides of story and of teaching must stay with us in interpretation. When we read a story with eyes merely experiential, we miss much of its weight and deny that experience its fullness; when we read a story with eyes merely seeking explanation, we deny that explanation vitality and refuse to see the experience which communicates it, thus losing much of the explanation. These twain are twins properly inseparable, though we stand in one to see the other or endeavor a double-barrel.

God bless.