Everything happens for a reason: God as a writer

Have you ever wondered what’s the greatest story ever written? It’s this. I mean us, the world. History is not just written by kingdom-shaping wars, the edicts of emperors and the solemn acts or proclamations of political men: its eon-long pages are also filled with the works and days of our countless little lives, our hopes, fears, dreams, ambitions – our petty, shameful moments as well as those of our nobler, higher self. 

The world is an intricate novel with seven billion leading characters, each one interacting with the other (to lesser or greater extent) even when the connection between them is not made apparent to the superficial reader. All our stories have common grounds and yet are wonderfully diversified as if the writer of this cosmic novel wished to tell the story of human pathos in all its infinite hues of possibility, without considering even the minutest variation as redundant or unnecessary.

Personally, as a writer, I aspire to be a certain ideal in all my works: every character presented should serve a particular purpose and all characters, though their interactions, should somehow coalesce towards the completion of the novel’s storyline. Nothing mentioned should be in excess; nothing should happen at random. The entire work must have meaning, a purpose of existence, but not merely onefold. Every reader must be able to enjoy it and comprehend it according to his own means of understanding and the work should have a sublime quality of “re-readability”.

Whether I attain that goal or not is an entirely different matter. Yet this is my discipline. This is my work plan and writing logic. A fairly simple one, granted, but in my opinion these are the bare bones which can make any novel great.

Being a diligent student of history I can’t help but recognize the same work scheme in these last seven thousand years of recorded annals of human civilization. The deeper I delve into a particular subject or period the more I realize there is no such thing as historical segregation. There is no “Babylonian history” or “Roman history” or “Greek history” separate one from the other. They all intermingle at some point or other – the one provides the cause, the other the effect and vice versa in an endless interchanging cycle of ages. For instance, was it a coincidence that Constantius Chlorus (the father of Constantine the Great) was surrounded by Christians of quality in his court and thus formed a good opinion of them even though he did not share the same view as them in religion? This opinion of his he inherited to his son, Constantine, who being an initiate into the mysteries of Mithras (like every nobleman with a military career at the time) was already familiar with monotheistic (or, at least, henotheistic) conceptions about divinity similar to those of the Christians. In turn, this facilitated Constantine’s embracing of the new religion (for whatever reasons) as the state religion of a Rome unified under his rule and thus Christianity was not only spared the limbo of obscurity it would have otherwise fallen into (as a small Judean sect or a deviation of Neoplatonism) but also spread from the farthest reaches of Europe to the Middle East and even made its way into China and the orient (with whatever repercussions that entailed). In this particular instance, as a writer, I don’t see coincidence. I see a carefully designed plot.

A good writer, you see, does not write about how things naturally play out, without any intervention or plot twists. He imposes his will upon them and molds them according to his plan. Otherwise there would be no story worth reading. Yet, in order to be successful in this endeavor, he must go about it through a natural and unstrained chain of events so that the reader will be convinced that things could not have played any other way or his emotions and sympathy will be stirred by such thoughts as “I wish it could have been some other way!” That’s where a writer’s power lies – that’s how he brings the purpose of his work to fruition. 

It seems as though the entire known history of humanity has been subjected to this premeditated writing-craft. If you merely think of history as a string of random coincidences I invite you to study it more closely and you will discover the writing genius behind it which, to anyone who has even attempted to tackle the problems arising from structuring a stirring storyline, is immediately recognized as the product of conscious art at work. Take for example the instance of emperor Justinian quenching the Samaritan revolts in the 6th century A.D.: the emperor’s forces crushed this hardy and industrious people, almost whipping them off the face of the earth. The few that were spared the sword were sold into slavery and their ragged mountain-lands became desolate. In a coup of poetic justice (perhaps even irony) it was through those lands, left unguarded (bereft as they were of their zealous and proud natives)  that the armies of the crescent moon first entered into Roman territory and gradually began their conquest which resulted in the fall of the empire in 1453. 

But let’s take even the so-called lesser things into account: if a species of dung beetle were to suddenly become extinct the ecosystem, in which all these illustrious characters of the human drama thrive and act out their passions, would feel the violent ripples change before reverting back to an altered point of balance.

Nothing is small enough to be considered insignificant in the great universal story. Modern theoretical physics aspires to change the world by discovering new particles – things invisible to the human eye and, for all practical intents and purposes of daily life, useless. 

Countless such connections can be made by the astute student of history who has eyes to see the multi-volume novel of mankind in as much of its totality, at least to the extent the limits of human knowledge allow. 

And where there is a novel there is a writer – for every work of art, recognized as such, must necessarily be the product of an artist for there would be no orderly scheme of things without an orderly mind directing it.

I chose to call this mind God, well aware of the fact that such a belief is highly unfashionable in this day and age, especially for those who serve at the liberal altar of “arts and letters”. 

The beauty of this grand design, in my opinion, is that every character in this vast narrative can be the protagonist. If we are to imagine the narrative of the human existence as a circle with an infinite circumference and ourselves as points within that circle, then every point therein could rightly serve as its center. Every tiny little point is an amazing story worth telling, an integral part of the whole. It can be the main plot and, at the same time, the backstory. 

God is a writer – ever present and constantly intervening; yet never appearing or making his voice heard, his decisions enforced. Why would he, anyway? We do it for him, regardless of whether we realize it or not. It’s all part of his book. And I for one can’t wait to read the next chapter.