Peterson’s wildly popular interpretation of the Bible reveals what happens when this main character hermeneutic dictates our engagement with story—or perhaps the other way around. In her incisive analysis, Dani Treweek commends Peterson for his profound interest in “the human story,” but notes that this interest is, most specifically, in “the human story.” To Peterson, the story of Abraham is about self-optimization via adventure. And yet, Treweek explains, in reality, it isn’t about that all—none of Scripture is. It’s about “the eternal glorification of the Son of Man.” The Son of Man who knew nothing of self-optimization “but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,” becoming “obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

Our problem is not an obsession with story, but the function we think it serves—self-optimization—and the consequent self-focused hermeneutic we employ to engage it. We are consumed with creating, revising, and telling our own story; we insist on seeing our lives as mini narratives—what philosopher Galen Strawson has coined his “Psychological Narrativity Thesis.”

Reminiscent of Didion, Brooks further posits that “we have fictions in order not to die of the forlornness of our condition in the world.” He suggests that story forms the basis of our interaction with the world but, in doing so, reduces it to a “form of play.” He here adopts pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s construal of “play,” that is, the infant’s original “negotiation between subject and objective world.” In this, the infant learns to imbue “transitional objects” (stuffed animals, toys, etc.) with illusory value and thereby “obtain a sense of mastery over things.” Brooks argues that stories function like this, as well, and are therefore valuable not insofar as they are true but only insofar as they are useful (a prioritization which is very much in line with Peterson’s pragmatism). Without such imaginative play, he claims, “we risk being overwhelmed by an inhuman world.” In other words, all that stands between us and our erasure is the occasional suspension of disbelief.

I’d like to suggest the opposite, that our humanity is held together not by pretense—and our ability to stomach it from time to time—but by truth: stories which do not mischievously play on our capacity to believe but invite its full, authentic participation. That’s because our stories—our solipsistic “main character” constructions—do not form the basis of story but rather signal our privation. Narrative does not originate in the playful “negotiation between subject and objective world,” but in God’s creating both, and in their reconciliation in Christ.

Brooks seeks to come to the aid of a humanity consumed by myth, but in doing so, he makes the same mistake which spawned the very problem he diagnoses. Attempting to return story to its “proper” epistemological place, he reduces it to child’s play, asserting over it the dominance of rational scrutiny. He is not the first to do so. For this was the work of what Nietzsche called “Socratism.” Beginning with Socrates himself, Nietzsche argued, the movement resulted in an age “bent on the destruction of myth.” But it was this belittling of myth that birthed Nietzsche, and with Nietzsche, a progeny of aspiring Übermenschen “main characters.”

Myth has made a comeback so robust that we are not now discussing its destruction, but the storification of our age. The Nietzschean variety of myth, specifically, is identified by Henri de Lubac as deliberately barbaric and self-idolizing. It does not lead us into the fruits of our humanity but locates us “back among the beasts.” Both Socratism’s rejection of myth and the Nietzschean appropriation of it leave us with cultures that cannot rightly engage narrative, that cannot tell the truth. It is Nietzschean myth—and not myth itself—that has resulted in our age of information disorder. While Stewart is right that “a more critically minded and media-literate populace” would be of use in setting this to rights, it is not “the only antidote.” In fact, it is not an antidote at all, but is only useful in service to the actual antidote: the mystery of Christ, the one and true story.

As de Lubac articulates, “there is no more disastrous illusion than” that of Socratism (and Brooks): “this victory over illusion.” Reducing narrative to a “useful” form of “play,” to a fictional imposition on a disjointed string of events—this is no cure for a storified world. What we need is not de-mystification of myth but, in fact, the opposite. We need myth to be properly situated in mystery once more. Only then can its epistemic function be restored.

“What can it be but that we have lost the breast that fed us, we have lost Myth?” Nietzsche asks. And today, as we overcorrect in the other direction, what can it be but that we have lost the breast that fed myth, we have lost mystery? This, as it did to Nietzsche, has caused us to become self-involved in our mythologizing. We have taken after Nietzsche’s hyperbolic self-affirmation, on display in his Ecce Homo (including works such as “Why I am so Wise” and “Why I am so Clever”). Myth sans mystery, says de Lubac, “links us with nature… but also enslaves us to her fatal powers.” This “pagan myth” is utterly unchristian in that it takes as its blueprint one’s own image, a form of idolatry. What we need is not our own image, but a “chaste and sober rapture of the Spirit.”