> speaks volumes towards the cultural failures of today's storytellers to offer a true alternative to Judeo-Christian frames. What stories need is conflict, not to collect all virtues into one character and all vices into that character's antagonist.
What you describe better fits a dualistic Manichean view of the world than a Christian one. In an authentically Christian world view, which presupposes a natural law view knowable by unaided reason and one which predates Christianity, evil is the privation of the good, not something in its own right. When there is conflict between good and evil, it is not a conflict between two equal adversaries. Satan is not the evil God opposed to the good God. There is but one God, which is synonymous with Goodness itself; to be anti-God, anti-Christ is to be anti-Being, and one's own greatest enemy. Satan (and the other fallen angels) is rather a finite creature, more similar to Man than he is to God, who, out of his pride and disgust with the idea that God would become incarnate and suffer and die for the sake of His creation out of perfect love, that a human—which is to say, a spiritual animal—would become Queen of Heaven, that he, a superior angelic intellect and vastly more powerful being than any Man, would need to bow before such an animal exalted by God to better manifest His own divinity through them, chose to reject the meaning of his own being, his own purpose, rather than serve. "Non serviam!" Pride made one of the brightest creatures one of the most foolish by a free act, for there is nothing more stupid than refusing to submit to the truth because it goes against your own inflated self-importance.
And because all human beings are morally compromised and mixed, and the thin line between good and evil runs down the middle of every human heart, the Christian narrative can become arbitrarily complex, without falling into relativism and nihilism. We can tell stories with very clearly defined heroes and villains, yes, and these serve a purpose. But we can also entertain arbitrarily complex characters whose narrative gravitas depends on tragic flaws juxtaposed with flickers of virtue and demonstrations of moral progress and virtue. Man cannot save himself, and dies a sinner and a fool, but within his crippled state, yes, we can see his capacity choose good over evil, to make moral greatness with divine assistance. This is one of the most inspiring elements, and it resonates very deeply for a reason. Take a look at the Divine Comedy. Is Dante presented as a hero opposed to some great villain? No! Rather, the story begins with the Inferno, where Dante himself can be seen as the villain, the prodigal son. It is the story of repentance, the moral journey of recognizing one's own moral failings, one's own sinfulness, and turning away from it toward the good. And the journey, symbolically, is not an easy one. He must pass through Hell and Purgatory before he can arrive in Heaven. It is the story of the villain making his way back to the light, which is compounded. The ultimate villain in the Christian view is one's own sin. It is the pagan world that was wracked and obsessed with scapegoating the other to appease the guilty conscience. It was the Crucifixion that took that scapegoating impulse and transfigured it. It is the figure of Christ that achieves what all the scapegoating sought in vain through the only possible perfect sacrifice, and through it, an eternal life of participation in the inexhaustible divine nature, what is known as the Beatific Vision.
Man, born into sin, is reconciled with his Creator. The evil of creatures is permitted by God to manifest still greater good.
I mean, from a narrative perspective, you cannot do better that that. Denying it denies the human spirit, and produces a sickly and bland anthropology that inspires no one. Hence, the banality of modern attempts to construct all sorts of silly myths, all of which lead to death. To riff on Zygmunt Bauman, Nazism and Bolshevism were not aberrations, but where modernity leads. And to borrow a Voegelinian phrase, they attempt to immanentize the eschaton, because that is what modernity is forced to do, futile as it is, lest it collapse into frank and unvarnished nihilism. An honest, world-weary, postmodernist cynic could at least admit that the only way this deep and intrinsic human telos ordered toward divinity, toward deification, can be sublimated is through Christ. The only other alternative is to accept the absurdity of human nature, the futility and pointlessness of our existence, a road that ends only in death and despair.
So that's why, as the residual and imperfect hold of Christianity fades from the Western imagination, storytelling will become increasingly boring. No great works await us. Without telos, there is no story, only absurdity.
> if you really want to imagine post-Christian storytelling, you need to get away from heroes and villains entirely, and reframe the conflict in terms that aren't good and evil-focused. When I look that up in the encyclopedia in my head, it lands on romance. The conflict here forces both main characters to develop positive character traits, and gets completely away from good and evil.
"Positive traits" is just another way of saying "good qualities and virtues", and therefore a matter of morality again. You cannot escape morality. Every decision, no matter how trivial, is by its very nature a moral act. You can choose what you see as the objectively good, or you can choose something other than what you know you should. And the virtues are the habits that allow us to choose better and to do so consistently.
> What you describe better fits a dualistic Manichean view of the world than a Christian one.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. The morality play was invented by Christians, by the time that happened, Manichaeism was long gone. Personifying evil had long been in the imagination of the peoples of the near-East and it shouldn't be so surprising that it would crop back up in culture.
> Denying it denies the human spirit, and produces a sickly and bland anthropology that inspires no one.
I would argue that the constant drumbeat of Christ-like figures in fiction inspires more eye rolls than attempts to incorporate non-Western moral frameworks into stories. Black Panther is probably the most interesting MCU franchise as a result. Precisely because it reimagines an African nation on technological and economic parity with the West, we get an opportunity to re-examine morality that isn't Christian.
> No great works await us.
I think this is unnecessarily pessimistic and overstates the importance of the divine sacrifice to fiction. If you've just landed on one set of works as the only works to bother trying to enjoy, all you're really accomplishing is snobbishness. The story of Jesus' sacrifice is indeed a great one, and it's mined for fictive influence all the time, but you know what else gets the same treatment? Job. Most of these imaginings of evil God doesn't ultimately stem from gnostic cosmology, but rather from Job. The difference is that in the end, all the adversary's scheming and machinations result in elevating and improving the protagonist.
> You cannot escape morality.
Sure, but you make a worse mistake when you attribute all of it to Christianity. Ethical monotheism is a useful theology, but where it can lead is to justification of slavery and oppression, the antithesis to Jesus' objective.
I enjoy romance anime, and it's very refreshing to observe other cultures' moral imaginings. There's a different storytelling language at play, stemming from Japan's unique blend of natural religion, its own philosophical tradition, and the Christianity that merely influences Japanese thought, it doesn't swim in savior narrative like the West's cultural canon.
And it's pretty far from being "increasingly boring".
> its own philosophical tradition, and the Christianity that merely influences Japanese thought, it doesn't swim in savior narrative like the West's cultural canon.
Really? I see Japanese works with as much if not more savior narrative than western’s.
Maybe you don’t see it due to you mostly consuming romance anime, have you also tried western romance?
Western romance, kill me now. It's the same idiot misogynistic white dude trying to woo the same hotter, smarter, better in every way woman and conquering her into marriage.
What you describe better fits a dualistic Manichean view of the world than a Christian one. In an authentically Christian world view, which presupposes a natural law view knowable by unaided reason and one which predates Christianity, evil is the privation of the good, not something in its own right. When there is conflict between good and evil, it is not a conflict between two equal adversaries. Satan is not the evil God opposed to the good God. There is but one God, which is synonymous with Goodness itself; to be anti-God, anti-Christ is to be anti-Being, and one's own greatest enemy. Satan (and the other fallen angels) is rather a finite creature, more similar to Man than he is to God, who, out of his pride and disgust with the idea that God would become incarnate and suffer and die for the sake of His creation out of perfect love, that a human—which is to say, a spiritual animal—would become Queen of Heaven, that he, a superior angelic intellect and vastly more powerful being than any Man, would need to bow before such an animal exalted by God to better manifest His own divinity through them, chose to reject the meaning of his own being, his own purpose, rather than serve. "Non serviam!" Pride made one of the brightest creatures one of the most foolish by a free act, for there is nothing more stupid than refusing to submit to the truth because it goes against your own inflated self-importance.
And because all human beings are morally compromised and mixed, and the thin line between good and evil runs down the middle of every human heart, the Christian narrative can become arbitrarily complex, without falling into relativism and nihilism. We can tell stories with very clearly defined heroes and villains, yes, and these serve a purpose. But we can also entertain arbitrarily complex characters whose narrative gravitas depends on tragic flaws juxtaposed with flickers of virtue and demonstrations of moral progress and virtue. Man cannot save himself, and dies a sinner and a fool, but within his crippled state, yes, we can see his capacity choose good over evil, to make moral greatness with divine assistance. This is one of the most inspiring elements, and it resonates very deeply for a reason. Take a look at the Divine Comedy. Is Dante presented as a hero opposed to some great villain? No! Rather, the story begins with the Inferno, where Dante himself can be seen as the villain, the prodigal son. It is the story of repentance, the moral journey of recognizing one's own moral failings, one's own sinfulness, and turning away from it toward the good. And the journey, symbolically, is not an easy one. He must pass through Hell and Purgatory before he can arrive in Heaven. It is the story of the villain making his way back to the light, which is compounded. The ultimate villain in the Christian view is one's own sin. It is the pagan world that was wracked and obsessed with scapegoating the other to appease the guilty conscience. It was the Crucifixion that took that scapegoating impulse and transfigured it. It is the figure of Christ that achieves what all the scapegoating sought in vain through the only possible perfect sacrifice, and through it, an eternal life of participation in the inexhaustible divine nature, what is known as the Beatific Vision.
Man, born into sin, is reconciled with his Creator. The evil of creatures is permitted by God to manifest still greater good.
I mean, from a narrative perspective, you cannot do better that that. Denying it denies the human spirit, and produces a sickly and bland anthropology that inspires no one. Hence, the banality of modern attempts to construct all sorts of silly myths, all of which lead to death. To riff on Zygmunt Bauman, Nazism and Bolshevism were not aberrations, but where modernity leads. And to borrow a Voegelinian phrase, they attempt to immanentize the eschaton, because that is what modernity is forced to do, futile as it is, lest it collapse into frank and unvarnished nihilism. An honest, world-weary, postmodernist cynic could at least admit that the only way this deep and intrinsic human telos ordered toward divinity, toward deification, can be sublimated is through Christ. The only other alternative is to accept the absurdity of human nature, the futility and pointlessness of our existence, a road that ends only in death and despair.
So that's why, as the residual and imperfect hold of Christianity fades from the Western imagination, storytelling will become increasingly boring. No great works await us. Without telos, there is no story, only absurdity.
> if you really want to imagine post-Christian storytelling, you need to get away from heroes and villains entirely, and reframe the conflict in terms that aren't good and evil-focused. When I look that up in the encyclopedia in my head, it lands on romance. The conflict here forces both main characters to develop positive character traits, and gets completely away from good and evil.
"Positive traits" is just another way of saying "good qualities and virtues", and therefore a matter of morality again. You cannot escape morality. Every decision, no matter how trivial, is by its very nature a moral act. You can choose what you see as the objectively good, or you can choose something other than what you know you should. And the virtues are the habits that allow us to choose better and to do so consistently.