story

Here story means the narrative form that carries the reader through experience without overt moral coercion.

The first mechanisms Jiang accepts are participatory and narrative: viewers enter the painting, imagine themselves inside it, and try to fill in the story of the depicted figures.

Another accepted mechanism is interpretive recovery of message and story: viewers try to understand what the artist wanted to convey, not just what is optically present.

Jiang says Dante, as a humanist committed to imagination, prefers more intelligible theological models because they are story-capable and allow a person to encounter divine figures rather than be blocked by abstraction.

He argues that no story can successfully stage a meeting with the Holy Trinity, which means trinitarian mystery denies narrative access to God in a way Dante finds intolerable.

The student says the artwork transforms because it does not impose a moral lesson directly but instead lets the reader follow the protagonist's journey and empathize.

One student model, left standing by Jiang as part of the exploration, casts absolute will as imagination or story-level commitment and contingent will as logic that compares outcomes and avoids worse damage.

He argues that the strongest civilizations are those whose founding stories are universal enough to connect with other cultures and to survive across time and space.

Jiang says the three models reach the same predictions because eschatology is geopolitics framed allegorically and passed down through story.