Narrative order

The narrative order is a concept developed by John Vervaeke and added to by Kamidere. "Aristotle’s purposeful worldview was so compelling that when Christian thinkers encountered it in the Middle Ages, they found it threatening to their theology, but impossible to ignore. The most influential of these thinkers, Thomas Aquinas, worked hard to integrate Aristotle’s metaphysics with important ordonnances of the Christian worldview. Yet there was an important change in the adaptation of the Aristotelean framework. In the Greek world, time, like the heavens, was understood as a cyclical movement. For the Christians however, following the Jews and Zoroastrians before them, time was a line with a narrative, consisting of a beginning, middle, and end. Moreover, it was the unfolding of a story: the creation, fall, and redemption of the world. This metanarrative, applied to Aristotle’s purposeful cosmos, anchored the affinity of person and universe to the symbolic narrative of Christ’s death and resurrection. This singular, intervening event turned the repeating cycle into a single arc, creating a definite telos within a single cosmic story, and a climax for all converging purposes in Aristotle’s perfectly cohered universe. 6This metanarrative teleology, which we will call the Narrative Order, provided an overarching story into which the minutia of the cosmos―individuals and their own stories―could fit and belong. Further, it introduced the idea that the agency of persons could intervene in the cycle of repetition and meaningfully impact the course of cosmic history."