God Games: A Meditation for Fiction Authors

Analysis

I recently read a book review that excoriated the author for the poor use of God in the book. The author, claimed the reviewer, had treated God like some kind of secondary character who drops in and out. This is not a singular review, of course; I’ve seen it often as I’ve hunted for quality fiction, which, for Catholics, is still quite rare. In any case, the review had a point: the notion of “using” God in any way, or of treating God like another character, should be abhorrent to us. Not simply because it makes for a bad book or bad writing, but because God is not a character to be manipulated at our will. 

There are two major types of problems that occur when we authors write fiction. The first is that we play God: in the act of writing, we have the power to change the laws, the rules, the world, the morality to suit ourselves, rather than to glorify God. We change what it means to be human, what it means to be good, or evil. We define things the way we wish to. That is a sense of power that some authors seem to enjoy, putting their god-like fantasies into a made-up world. How many books and shows have turned angels into “humans with powers,” demons and devils into heroes and celebrities, portraying the occult as a source of pleasure, empowerment, sometimes even virtue?

The second problem is that we make God into a character that acts according to our desires. It is easy to create a world where God is barely present, or, if He is present, to humanize Him (and not in a Christological way). An author faces the mighty and to make Him follow our own will, including putting words into His mouth, deciding the miracles He will perform, and so on.

These temptations are so present because authorship is power; it is a form of creation and a form of propagation, though we must not mistake it for true Creation and procreation. It is no mistake that we often speak of God as an Author of life, words even used by St. Peter himself, not simply because He inspired and dictated the Scriptures, but because He spoke the Word, because by His words we came to be. Our paltry “creations” are nothing like God’s Creation. If we are to write, we must not attempt to build the tower of Babel with our words. And we must seek God’s glory, rather than undermining it by seeking our own. 

Authors of all creeds have never shied away from the exploration of god-likeness and creation; rather, one would think authors enjoy it, for there are so many interesting problems to be found in fictional explorations of god-likeness. The controversial liberal Chicago priest Fr. Andrew Greeley explored the more general problem of men playing “God” in God Game (1987), where the narrator accidentally becomes the “God-like” figure of an alternate universe through playing a video game. Problems of free will, desire, control, and all manner of expected issues come up when the narrator attempts to make the now real people of the alternate universe “turn back” or correct the problems of that universe. In the end, the narrator is not God, and cannot replace God; and, in fact, such a notion of God as the “controller” was wrong to begin with. It is to Greeley’s credit, that for all his works which sometimes used Catholicism in questionable ways, he understood that no human can replace or act as God–and that attempts to do so will be disastrous. 

Another take on god-likeness comes from Russian expatriate Vlamidir Nabokov, best known for writing Lolita (1955). He once dismissed E.M. Forster’s now-cliché notion that his characters could take over and dictate the course of the novel, mockingly saying that “one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.” He understood a crucial point: characters in a fiction book are merely characters, and authors may direct characters how they like, however realistic or unrealistic such characters end up being. It is true that we may not end up where we authors often do not end up where we intended (I, for one, was not expecting to have to remember anything about Forster’s works for this article). But that does not diminish our agency in writing a work of fiction. 

Greeley’s book and Nabokov’s words show us several different truths. Not only are we not God, but God does not exert total control over the will of humans, whom He endowed with free will. Furthermore, a character in a book is not a person; a character is, after all, our own creation, and he is soulless, no matter how real we make him to appear. Characters are not even slaves, for they are not real. If our characters should roam somewhere unexpected, it is almost certainly because we either directed them, or our experiences of reality dictated that it was right for them to go there, and we wrote that experience into the story. The characters never had free will; they were never real. That is what we can learn from Nabokov’s snark.

Forster’s comment about errant characters reveals something to us as well, though. We model characters based on our experiences. An author with greater age and experience is more likely to write a realistic character because they have, quite simply, known more people. This is another way we differ from God. We need experiences and models to create something. God needs only to think something into being; He does not need to base it on another idea. God is original. We are not.

This is the self-awareness an author requires. Once we are able to dismiss the thoughts of ourselves as gods, while also regaining our sense of responsibility for the content and direction of what we write, we can turn to the second problem: how to write in such a way that gives glory to God.

There is no easy way to say how one should do this. We may neither presume His mind nor replace Him. We must not simply treat Him as a character to whom other characters speak. And He is not the Deus Ex Machina of ancient Greek theater, coming in to solve every problem for the perfect earthly “happily ever after.” Any notion of using God’s power to achieve a desired outcome or God’s voice to affirm our own wishes must be dismissed. 

How can we remove ourselves from such ways of “using” God? We must first remove such notions from our own thoughts. In other words, the only way to be a good author is in the humble, self-aware pursuit of God. In A Secular Age (2007), Charles Taylor writes about the nature of belief in the European Middle Ages: people had a genuine sense of faith in God, angels, demons, with a keen internal awareness that everything in our lives was connected to the supernatural world. This sense of “enchantment,” were we to cultivate it, would lead us to act and think within a Christian reality, not in a secular reality where God is tacked on as an afterthought. Furthermore, this sense of enchantment would endow us with humility and a sense of our own smallness, wherein we will never desire to take God’s place. Such a time produced many great Christian epics! 

We must make it a habit to regain this sense of enchantment, to think and feel as Christians; not simply to acknowledge, but to exert our will and reason to know God as He is present among us. To aid us, we must of course pray–and pray often, and learn to pray as the saints did. And we can learn as much as we can about God. We can study Thomistic theology, to see how God acts in the world. We must read Scripture, to know how God has acted before. And we must know Tradition, using it to see what has and will change–and what will never change. 

Only a Catholic who is truly steeped in the Christian life, a life of deep reflection, study, prayer, humility, and faithfulness to the Church, will not be led astray by fads, secular philosophies, and false spiritualities. Such a person will not simply feel that God is in the world as a mere actor; such a person will know that God is the Creator and sustainer of all things. And only that person, who has experienced God in truth, and who is committed to the fullness of the Catholic faith, should become an author; for only that person will be able to write about God without attempting to replace Him.