Hildegarde

John asks if it’s possible for someone to make science a religion, and of course it is–it’s even more possible for someone to take science on faith, like the guy on one of the Internet forums I contribute to on and off who, after several days of  declaring anyone who took intelligent design seriously to be “stupid” (and several years of declaring everybody who took religion to seriously to be stupid), suddenly said that he didn’t actually understand how evolution worked, but that was different, because that was science.

But science by definition–the search for natural explanations for natural phenomena–is not faith-based.  It requires material evidence, and usually direct evidence, to be valid.

But that said, let’s turn to another issue, one that isn’t often encountered in Protestant denominations, at least as part of religion.  I do know of secular instances of what I’m about to talk about, though, like the story of George  Washington and the Cherry Tree, so it isn’t something you have to be Catholic to run into.

There’s a traditional Irish Christmas carol usually referred to as the Cherry  Tree Carol that goes like this:  Mary, pregnant with  Jesus, sits down ounder a cherry tree.  It’s been a long, hot day.  She’s had a lot of traveling to do, and other work, and she’s exhausted.  She looks up and sees that the tree is full of fruit, and she desperately wants a few cherries, but she’s too exhausted to get up and get one for herself.  Then, from within her womb, Christ commands the tree, and the fruit falls into her lap.

Now, there was a point in the nineteenth century when the Church hierarchy in Ireland had a fit about this carol.  The story was not true, it had no place in scripture or tradition, and therefore had to be heretical.

They calmed down after a while, which was a good thing, because I doubt if anybody had ever considered the story to be true in the sense of a factual account of events that had really happened.

It was nearly infinitely true theologically, though, as an illustration of the dual nature of Christ as always and eternally true God and true Man.  If Christ is alwas and eternally both true God and True Man, then he is so in the womb as well as anywhere else, and as capable of commanding creation.

There’s a lot of this sort of thing in the early Christian tradition, as there is in the tradition of any narrative which comes to serve as an overarching framework for a good many people.  When it’s written about Star Trek or Harry Potter, we call it fan fiction.  What it is is an attempt by adherents–let’s not call them fans, for the moment–to put themselves into the story and to make the story itself clearer and more fully understood.

I  think that any narrative that has the potential to become the overarching framework for a culture is going to have a lot of fan fiction, and that, no matter how hard everybody tries, some of that fan fiction will end up being considered canonical.

What’s more, once that fan fiction becomes canonical, it becomes nearly impossible for the experts, or the hierarchy, or the guys who hold the copyrights, to convince the adherents that it is not.

Lymaree says Bill’s grandmother’s relationship to St. Anthony was a kind of bargaining, but it wasn’t, really.  Bill’s grandmother didn’t worship St.  Anthony.   She didn’t think St.  Anthony was better or stronger or more powerful than she was.  She didn’t supplicate him. 

She treated him, instead, the way she’d have treated one of her brothers or her nephews, a regular, ordinary guy around the house, her equal or inferior, not her better.  When she needed something found and he didn’t find it, she reacted just the way she would have reacted if one of her sons had failed to do his chores.

There was no bargaining about it.  She expected St. Anthony to do as he was told, for the same reason she expected her children to.

I think that this sort of relationship with figures in the narrative is a form of fan fiction, too, just not structured and consciously executed fan fiction.   There’s a lot of it in traditional Catholic societies, and a fair amount in Orthodox ones, and the phenomenon was a staple of life in the Middle Ages. 

It’s also fairly apparent in the big fan societies that exist now, in spite of the fact that we’re all close enough to the origination of the narratives so that nobody at least outwardly admits to thinking that they’re not fiction. Not only Star Trek, Star Wars, and Harry Potter, but the various vampire narratives have large organized groups of people writing fan fiction and role playing relationships in their spare time.

And sometimes not so spare time.

So I want to throw in one more possibility, one more thing I think it takes for a narrative to become the framework for a culture:  the narrative in question must inspire active participation in itself.

I don’t mean that the narrative must inspire people to go out and do things it commands–like feeding the hungry and clothing the naked–although it has to do that, too.

I mean that a successful narrative must generate in people the inspiration and foundation to continue to story on their own.

I am really, really putting this badly.

I think what I’m trying to say is this:  there’s a tendency to look down on fan fiction and on the people who write it as pathetic losers who need to get a life. 

I think instead that the existence of fan fiction–and of informal fan relationships like Bill’s grandmother to St. Anthony–is an important indication of whether a narrative can successful function as the franework for an entire culture, never mind an entire civilization.

And that is why I think Marxism failed as a narrative, why I think the general run of “Movement” narratives will fail as well–because at the best they’re only skeletal narratives, there are no people in them.

And there’s no fan fiction.