If I worried myself all those days, wondering whether Napoleon would have done it or not, I felt clearly of course that I wasn’t Napoleon.

— “Rodion Raskolnikov” from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”

Many of the stories I have been most formed by are those which, in the spirit of Solomon, struggle vehemently with the curse of vanity that suffuses human life — stories from authors like Conrad, McCarthy and Dostoevsky that stare down the mortal despair of self-consciousness. The opening of Man and Woman’s eyes at the Fall introduced the ubiquitous haunting of the Reaper, and the stories which get my blood flowing tend to be those which dare to enter conversation with that creeping reality, throwing down the gauntlet at the feet of despair. I am convinced that our Lord would have us seek light not in fleeing that pain but by diving through it in faith that He establishes solid ground beneath the depths. In my view, a fatalistic perspective is not just demoralizing, but also invigorating. It is precisely comprehension of the grim that realizes the potential of hope.

No man is great, that is, no man is sufficiently great to overcome his role as a mere instrument in the hands of fate. There is not a moment unfettered from the foreordaining of the Divine. In that sense, every man is great, because every deed, from the crossing of the Alps to the swatting of a gnat, is itself the unfolding of destiny. Absolutely everything, from the motions of the stars to the positions of electrons, from the course of a civilization to the course of a workday, is inevitable.

The difficulty in parsing through history is in the art of drawing narrative thread out of the tangle of events, because this delicate enterprise necessarily entails pruning the overwhelming majority of facts and the selective preservation of an infinitesimal set of those deemed relevant. Herein also lies the insidious strength of postmodernism. Given the frailty of what little substance remains in an historical narrative, it is astoundingly easy to keep the hedgeclippers of irrelevance chopping away until nothing discernible remains. It is far easier to topple myths than to build them. Hence, the annoying modern phenomenon of “um-actually-ism” in which the most trivial historical data become capable of dismantling national and cultural stories, perspectives and identities.

There are two possible remedies to this onslaught of devouring skepticism. First, it may be hypothetically possible to simply reinforce stories to the point of invincibility. This possibility seems more tenuous, given that the ammunition of alternative stories and preferential facts is infinite. The other, more promising possibility is that the narrative under fire can become more flexible.

This latter option demonstrates viability because of the simple truth that relevance is relative, or more precisely it possesses a certain relativity. A subject’s position within the world of facts dictates which objects make contact with him. It may be true that the forecast for tomorrow in Chattanooga shows a high chance of rain, but that fact is so many degrees removed from the situation of an individual facing famine in eastern Afghanistan as to be completely irrelevant. The story of Bulgaria’s involvement in the Second World War may greatly concern Bulgarians and their neighbors, but does not factor into the low-resolution arrangement of the war’s timeline for American culture. 

Essentially, no story can be divorced from its storyteller. Cosmically, therefore, all that does not exist is outside of the realm of what God was pleased to consider, and therefore make, meaningful. Everything that does exist has it’s being rooted in the perspective of the cosmic Storyteller, therefore every detail that is included exists. He separates the light from the darkness. Every single fact of existence shares in this one reality, one shape of destiny.

Therefore, it is not obvious that the facts which bear upon one’s own perspective necessarily possess any cosmic priority. Not everything is created equal, but everything is equally created. Definitionally, everything is real (A fact I hope to elaborate on at another date). Stories can only give direction if they start somewhere particular. In this way, they are inherently limited.

I am confident nonetheless in generally rejecting postmodernism, because limits by no means suggest uselessness. Further, meta-narrative is real, but it is only divinely revealed. The grand spiritual story that encompasses and incubates all the visible happenings of the world intrudes upon the visible through revelation, and it indicates that the tapestry into which the threads of every possible fact are woven is far too magnificent to behold. John of Patmos peered behind the veil to bring us only a dizzying glimpse of that story in its natural brilliance, and even that sliver induces a feverish astonishment. 

This has critical implications for the moral dimension of storytelling. Good stories may  not all have a didactic moral, but any good story has what Ursula LeGuin perhaps sloppily called “moral resonance.” Stories are good when they accord with reality, and to accord with moral reality is to align with value, which is by definition the function of a good story. So, in order for a story to do its job, it must point from the mouth and eyes and mind of its teller toward the sweeping current of the spiritual and moral Truth. But because position is relative, at least relative from the objective perspective of the meta-narrative, stories with the same telos must have different shapes. It is only by the activity of the Spirit within the visible that stories in the material stratum can aspire to confluence with the invisible current in which they are nested.

All that is to say that the little logos of human stories cannot attain to the moral authority necessary for the aforementioned invincibility. The character of every man and woman is suspect, not only capable of being impugned before humanity but fundamentally condemned before God. What is to spare a story’s nature from that of its teller? Any old fop can destroy even the greatest of men with the endlessly accessible barrage of peccadilloes and shortcomings. And if the mob does not tear down the great man’s statue, then time will do it for them. Look upon Ozymandius and despair, ye mighty.

This is why one of the key revelations of John is the final subjugation of the universe, of time, of life and death, of all humanity to the Hero. Even Moses does not get to enter the promised land. No participation in the archetype can rob Him of His uniqueness. No narrative of history can arrive by earthly means at the spiritually discerned and divinely realized conclusion. Relatively, they are vanity upon vanity. Everything is flattened uniformly by the weight of spiritual truth into a single homogeneous episode of futility. It is the difference between the Atlantic’s infinite regress over the horizon from the shore and its puny invisibility from beyond the galaxy. 

I have often summarized the narrative structure of Ecclesiastes according the pattern that nothing matters, God matters, therefore everything matters. Everything is a vapor, but it exists anyway. “What is man that you are mindful of him?” The way a given culture sifts through history and chooses to explain it is relevant, just not uniquely so. 

This question of relevance is what drives one’s metric of “greatness” in the first place. Why is Napoleon so great? Without his mother he would not even have existed! How much greater she must be! Perhaps Napoleon’s tactics should be eschewed in favor of studying the daily routine of his dear old mother. Why do you pray to the Christ, O Protestant, and not to His mother? The answer is relevance. 

In light of this, it cannot be ignored that every man generally touted as “great” is in one of two conditions: dead or dying. The only man who has never fallen is the one who will soon. Napoleon’s legacy is ultimately that he failed at Waterloo. History was made those fateful days in 1815 not by one man’s brilliance, but by the snap-decisions of petty officers, the resolve flowing in each heartbeat of peasant soldiers, the minutes lost by tired warhorses, and by each drop of rain that shaped the field of battle. Alexander’s admirers may selectively draw attention to the uniqueness of his campaigns just as easily as a detractor might choose to focus on the common, pedestrian, pathetic nature of his pitiful demise. Relevance is the arbiter of which story is “good” because it tethers the subjective to the objective, the personal to the cosmic.

The Christ is the only Man who can apply relevance universally, who can appropriate fate because He was there when it was decided. The moral valence of His story, which we call “gospel,” is infinite, because He is God, His life is Life. The narrative of Jesus is not self-contained, it is a summative appearance of the relevance of the narrative which has undergirded and dictated every nanosecond of every corner of existence. 

It is through contact with history that the Divine sanctifies it and imbues it’s whole expanse with meaning. He is the moment every other moment is purposed to build toward. He is the moral of the story. Therefore, He is great, and His glory is unmatched. And yet, because He alone is glorified, all are glorified in Him.

Napoleon was famously fond of calling himself “the man of destiny.” Given the things his eyes beheld, it is not hard to imagine why. But he was wrong. Destiny did not belong to him any more than it belonged to his mother, his father, his forgotten ancestors from millennia prior, or to each of the faceless quarter-million Frenchmen whose lives were cut short in the frozen battlefields of Russia — and destiny did not spare him any more than it spared those same men. No moment of what we might call greatness is independent of the infinite moments that create it. The highest tower may dwarf its neighbors, but from heaven it looks just as small.

Therefore, “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might,” because greatness is not above on the pedestals hallowed by human acclaim. It is below, within, the sacred depth of quality breathing in the hurricane as much as in the flap of a butterfly’s wing. Within Christ, Christ is within you. The holiness of His every step is now the holiness of yours. You can’t do anything great, so go do everything great. Only one Man was great, and the rest is history. The relevance of my opinions is no doubt relative as well, but His relevance is inescapable.

Behold, thou hast made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is as nothing in thy sight. Surely every man stands as a mere breath! Surely man goes about as a shadow! Surely for nought are they in turmoil; man heaps up, and knows not who will gather! — Psalm 39:5-6 (RSV)

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. — 2 Corinthians 3:17-18 (RSV)