apophasis

Fiction vs. Non-Fiction

I know people deeply immersed in one or the other, and just a few immersed in both. The thing is, non-fiction gives us a direct dosing of ideas, seemingly without setting or apparatus. Fiction often doesn’t pay off what it promises, in terms of meaning. And our reading, really, is either a search for entertainment or a search for meaning.

Non-fiction, though, really does come with a substantial apparatus. In place of the normal aspects of fiction – plot, characterization, setting – we get the author’s presuppositions (e.g. about what the important questions are), his unaccountable absolutes (the unchallenged assertions inherent in his ideas), his biases, and the emotional impact of his own convictions, if any. In other words, there’s more weeding and processing to do than some readers acknowledge.

I’m a fan of both forms, but I confess I prefer fiction when I can get it. The thing that unites both forms is theme. If we refer to the theme of “the union of all men”, someone can suggest a non-fiction work, and I can suggest a work of fiction. But frankly, I find there are more subtle themes available in fiction that are as yet unexplored in non-fiction, and that would force me to look there, in any case.

One is not more important or significant than the other, but I think it’s easy for non-fiction lovers to deprive themselves of the real value of fiction by, if not careful, seeing everything as a prosaic proposition. There’s a kind of communication of through the whole soul available in fiction that seems only rarely accessible in its counterpart.

For me, sci-fi and fantasy are the unparalleled repositories of soul in modern art. …

Apophasis

“Now the divine nature, as it is in itself, according to its essence, transcends every act of comprehensive knowledge and it cannot be approached or attained by our speculation. Men have never discovered a faculty to comprehend the incomprehensible; nor have we ever been able to devise an intellectual technique for grasping the inconceivable. For this reason the great Apostle calls God’s ways unsearchable (Rom. 11:33), teaching us by this that the way that leads to the knowledge of the divine nature is inaccessible to our reason; and hence none of those who have lived before us has given us the slightest hint of comprehension suggesting that we might know that which in itself is above all knowledge.” – St. Gregory of Nyssa.

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