dagan

What is the moral of the story? It is that fictional texts come to the aid of our metaphysical narrowmindedness. We live in the great labyrinth of the actual world, which is bigger and more complex than the world of Little Red Riding Hood. It is a world whose paths we have not yet entirely mapped out and whose total structure we are unable to describe. In the hope that rules of the game exist, humanity through the centuries has speculated about whether this labyrinth has an author, or perhaps more than one. And it has thought of God, or the gods, as if they were empirical authors, narrators, or model authors. People have wondered what an empirical divinity might be like: whether it has a beard, whether its a He, a She, or an IT, whether it was born or has always existed, and even (in our own times) whether its dead. God as Narrator has always been sought-in the intestines of animals, in the flittings of birds, in the burning bush, in the first sentence of the Ten Commandments. But some (including philosophers, of course, but also adherents of many religions) have searched for God as Model author-that is, God as the Rule of the Game, as the Law that makes or someday will make the labyrinth of the world understandable. The Divinity in this case is something we must discover at the same time we discover why we are in the labyrinth, and what path we are being asked to walk in it.

-Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods,