Storytelling, prophecy, and character agency
A response to Zinger bringing up an interesting question from a new angle
The other week I was chewing over a blog post by Aaron Zinger of Outlandish Claims.
From one angle, it might seem like he's superficially comparing four stories with very different ways of storytelling and different worldviews (Lewis's Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe; Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Rowling's Harry Potter, and Duane's Young Wizards). I showed it to my sister, who even said that it sounds like he has an ax to grind against Lewis.
I don't entirely disagree with that reading, but I'm convinced he's hit on an interesting question:
Certain tropes in fantasy are tricky to execute without robbing your characters of free will. Prophecies. Time travel... It gets even trickier the more Christian, or Abrahamic, your fantasy is. If there’s an omnipotent God-analogue in your story... and if God is also omniscient, you’ll find that whichever choice you made was All Part of the Plan.
This is a deep question; philosophers have been writing back and forth over it for centuries. But, I think viewing it from the angle of story can give some useful insights.
Zinger's quite right that, for a good story, characters need agency. In the real world, most of us agree that it's intolerable to think of life without having free will. As I wrote earlier about stories about a multiverse - and (as I mentioned there) as Niven wrote before me, if our choice is meaningless, life is meaningless.
Can this agency coexist with God? With even (as Zinger mentions) prophecy?
It seems clear to me, yes.
Prophecies, in themselves, don't ordain or manage events. I'm reminded of one Christian fantasy series1 I read ages ago where the author staged a prophecy epically wrongly. He gave a prophecy that these henchmen of the villain would repent and turn to good - and then they do, with absolutely no justification even after the fact, aside from the prophecy. That’s a poor modeling of prophecies - out of tune with how prophecies are handled in the Bible and most other religions, and out of tune with logic.
But beyond this, consider how a good author foreshadows events. When he's already written the first draft of his story, he knows what will happen at the climax. Being a good author, he'll go back at some point to rewrite the beginning. Being a good author, he'll sprinkle themes and imagery around to foreshadow the climax. He's already seen it. He's outside the timeline of the story, ducking back into it earlier knowing what will happen.
If he's a good author, that doesn't diminish the characters' free will inside the story. They'll get to the climax through their own characters, without the author forcing them. The author knows what will happen when he sets up the foreshadowing - but that isn't in itself the cause that brings them there. If the author chooses to be more explicit and give an ambiguous prophecy (or even a clear prophecy!) of the climax, that doesn't change this.
So, things can work out in theory. Free will can be saved.
How do things work in practice?
Zinger's absolutely right that Lewis was clumsy in Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe in giving his characters agency. But, that's on Lewis not on Lewis's worldview. I don't even need to point to Tolkien (who, as Zinger acknowledges, does it better) - look at Lewis's own later books, especially Silver Chair and Horse and His Boy. The characters there go through adventures more visibly on their own, even though Aslan is sometimes nudging them. Their decisions are their own; their choices have meaning. Lewis learned to have Aslan show up only to nudge our characters to look in a given direction. Even later, in Last Battle, Lewis learned to have our characters' actions feel meaningful (and be commended by Aslan afterwards) even if they turn out futile amid the end of the world.2
Zinger might reply that they aren't truly meaningful if Aslan will save the day anyway regardless of what choices they make. On one level, this objection sounds like the kid in Asimov's short story3 who whines that stories aren't exciting if the good guys always win. That never rang true to me - it's still exciting to watch how they get there! And I did, and still do, enjoy the beauty of Last Battle even if most of the plot turns out insignificant in the end.
But on another level, will Aslan truly save the day to just as great an extent anyway? In Narnia, Aslan says once, he never says what would've happened. In Middle-Earth, millennia before Lord of the Rings, the Valar did defeat Morgoth - but after many deaths, and much of the continent destroyed. Or even in the Bible, as Mordecai says to Esther, if she refuses to step up then God will still carry out his plan but she and her family may perish. People's choices can and do matter. Even if it seems to you they shouldn't, there's a long tradition of writers concluding in fiction, and religious people concluding in real life, they do.
Zinger's right that good writing needs to show a real choice, real agency. He even has some good points about how a Divine plan can seem compelling to the reader while allowing for agency from the characters. But that isn't incompatible with a more traditional level of Divine omniscience and omnipotence.
When Zinger praises stories where "characters should constantly have reason to question their devotion" to God, he's saying more about himself than good writing.
A few years ago, I wrote about how Tolkien told a good story with a different sort of difficult moral choice than many modern writers. There're even more good ways to show interesting moral choices even without characters questioning their loyalty to God. Just pick any moral dilemma, put it in front of your protagonist, and have him question what is the right choice; what is the choice God would want?
Zinger might answer this isn't bringing God sufficiently into the story.
It's very hard to actually bring God in as a character in the story and do it well. But Zinger isn't talking about that; half of the works he cites don't do it! He's talking about writing a "Christian, or Abrahamic... fantasy"; somewhere with "an omnipotent God-analogue in your story" somewhere. To pick Zinger's own examples - Tolkien and (perhaps) Rowling were writing stories in a world assuming God existed - even (implicitly) in a world where God occasionally inspires prophecies - without actually having Him show up in their stories.
This was a very conscious choice on Tolkien's part. Zinger points out that Gandalf's "sacrifice and resurrection don't have the same feel" as the sacrifice of Christ; Tolkien would've wholeheartedly agreed and said that was on purpose. Much more, he said, would be “an infinitely greater thing than anything I would dare to write.”4
And he wasn't wrong. But the story he wrote is a "still very Christian" story which shows us one way Zinger's criticism is invalid.
The rest of Zinger's post points out some Christian themes and ideas that can often be reflected in good stories. He's exaggerating when he says they have to be present; you can see how he forces some of the quotes and cites them in different orders in different books. But he's not wrong that showing these ideas ("call", "devil", "fall", and "sacrifice", to reorder them a bit) is helpful in writing a good Christian fantasy.
Repeating them many times makes it even richer. In addition to Zinger's quotes about characters accepting the "call," I could also cite Frodo's call when he chooses to leave the Shire, Harry's call when he accepts admission to Hogwarts, Nita's call when she begins her ordeal, or Susan and Lucy's call when they choose to stay and watch Aslan's death, or many more.
There's much more that I could say about these rich themes, or others. They speak deeply to our imaginations, and I'm convinced they do for a reason. When told well, they can give depth to stories. Even when told clumsily, they can still echo with potential.
Zinger's blog post might be clumsy, but he's interacting with significant ideas and questions. My blog post here might also be clumsy (despite my efforts), but I hope I've done something at least somewhat worthy of these deep questions of free will and prophecy - and also, how stories can be told well in a Christian worldview.
The Binding of the Blade, by L. B. Graham. It’s got widely oscillating quality, but I did enjoy it as a teenager.
If Tirion had sat back and done nothing, what would have really been different in the end? Hardly anything; in fact, the Friends of Narnia might’ve still been alive on Earth… but Aslan commended him for standing strong.
“Someday,” reprinted in Asimov’s Complete Robot. When I first read this as a kid, I boggled in incomprehension at this protagonist. In retrospect, it wasn’t the story I understood the least… but it was definitely the story I felt I understood the least.
Letter #181, from 1956 - a very rewarding letter that also includes very here-on-topic exploration of how Frodo and Smeagol gave into temptation.
I'm from a religious tradition that doesn't believe in predestination (we believe in foreordination). Despite this I recently came across the following metaphor about predestination that I really liked:
We're all dogs tied to a wagon. We don't get to decide where we're going, but we can decide whether to get dragged through the dirt by our necks, or whether to trot proudly alongside.
I have been a determinist since I was in college back around 1970, and I still am. But I think the idea that determinism is incompatible with agency is a misunderstanding.
There's an argument put forth by C.S. Lewis (and also by J.B.S. Haldane, a Leninist whom he argued with, and Nathaniel Branden, a disciple of Ayn Rand): If my beliefs are biochemical states within my brain (or some other physically describable reality), then we cannot suppose that my beliefs are based on apprehension of truth, and thus we cannot say that I believe in determinism because I see that determinism is true; we can only say that I have been determined to have that belief by some chemical process. So all truth claims evaporate in the determinist worldview.
But I think that reflects a confusion. It's not the case that causality is something outside me that somehow compels my brain to do this or that, to believe this or that. It's that causality is an antecedent process that brought my brain into being, as a system that functions in a certain way. It's not that the biochemical processes CAUSE my beliefs; rather, they CONSTITUTE my beliefs. (It's not surprising that Lewis seems to be working with a dualist model of human beings; it's much more of a surprise with Haldane, and even with Branden, a disciple of Ayn Rand, who denounced the dualist view of man.)
Causal processes, for example, give rise to the connections within a honeybee's brain and sense organs, through which it recognizes flowers, traces the path back to the hive, and dances to inform other bees of where the flowers are. But that doesn't mean that the causal processes arbitrarily reached in and MADE the bee dance in a certain way that has nothing to do with the flowers or the flight. The causal processes operating within the bee are so configured that the bee acts in a way that reflects the realities around it; they constitute the bee's perceiving, learning, and communicating. The fact that those processes exist doesn't invalidate the bee's actions.