I know this title sounds like a joke from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Probably a more accurate version of the title would be something like “What is God’s purpose?” but sometimes you have to go with the more clickbait-y version. Either way, the point here is not to ask the question of whether God exists, but to ask what he lives for. Why does God get up in the morning, so to speak? Why does He create things?
Obviously, theology has its own answers to this question. In the Latter-day Saint tradition, we would point to Moses 1:39 in which God explains to Moses that “this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” In other words, God exists to be in relation to his children and help to lift them up. With my limited understanding of other Christian denominations, I won’t speculate too much about how controversial this might be, but I have a sense this is not the norm.
I see some extensions of this idea in Brandon Sanderson’s latest novel, Isles of the Emberdark. I’ve written before about how LDS theology plays into the Cosmere’s magic systems, but Emberdark seems focused on this question. In particular, Sanderson uses two different characters to explore the idea of what a god’s purpose is, especially in relation to their followers.
**This rest of this post has some spoilers for Isles of the Emberdark. If you prefer to go in knowing nothing, you may want to save this post for after you finish reading.**
The most prominent deity/worshipper relationship in the novel is between Sixth of the Dusk (hereafter Dusk) and Patji. If you’ve read the novella that became the flashback sequence for the novel, you know that Patji is not a particularly nice god. In this world, the pantheon of gods is embodied in a series of islands that contain a valuable magical resource (the Aviar, several species of birds that grant magical powers) guarded by extremely deadly flora and fauna. Patji is the “father god” of this pantheon, so the most dangerous and most deadly. Dusk reverences Patji but also treats him as an adversary. As a trapper, he has spent his whole career training to avoid Patji’s dangers in order to retrieve the Aviar his society relies on. Their relationship is similar to Dusk’s relationship with his rival trappers: respectful but adversarial.
Dusk still speaks to Patji, in a constant background dialogue that reminds me of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. Still, Dusk seems to never expect help or answers, only opposition, even as his society is being destroyed by colonial outsiders that threated traditional worship of the Pantheon islands. He can’t help asking “those itching questions he should not be thinking—about why Patji is so terrible” (loc 529**). Dusk feels abandoned by Patji, exclaiming, “The ones who protect you [from colonization and modernization] are the ones you try hardest to kill. […] You deserve to be destroyed!” (loc 1743).
In this expanded version of the world, Sanderson reveals to readers a sort of answer to Dusk’s prayers. Why is Patji such a harsh god? Why does he make things difficult for his followers, including actively opposing and killing them? Does Patji do these things because he “hates all,” as Dusk seems to fear? (loc 1499).
As Dusk embarks on a very dangerous journey, which is all I can say spoiler-free, he suddenly realizes that Patji’s hostility prepared him for what he was now facing: “This was what he’d trained for, he was increasingly certain. Not this event, but this experience. Father, he thought. […] You made sure that some of us never grew soft from a life in the homeisles. You gave us the Aviar, but made us work for them, training, testing, preparing…” (loc 3078). Patji later speaks directly to Dusk, confirming this. Far from hating Dusk, Patji refers to him as “my son” (loc 3302)—a clear reference to the book of Moses, where God does the same for the biblical figure. Patji refers to everything that has happened to Dusk up to this point as training, a series of tests to increase his strength and ability to survive. “I have given you the tools,” says Patji. “Go forth and discover my will, trapper” (loc 3307).
Patji represents a god who wants us to suffer opposition to help us grow, a Latter-day Saint idea best reflected in 2 Nephi 2 and its discussion of opposition in all things. God doesn’t rescue his followers because he wants them to grow through trials and even dangers. Just like children need appropriate levels of risk to gain skills and confidence, God knows that we need a world full of danger, even sometime evil, in order to grow to be fully mature agents in our own right.
Now, this idea can be over-simplified into a pacifying solution to the problem of theodicy, and I think Sanderson is careful to avoid that here. Dusk’s realization of the purpose of his trials doesn’t immediately reconcile him to Patji. Dusk still seems to harbor some deeply buried resentment to the god who actively sought his death. However, these realizations are a step in coming closer to his god: “while he wouldn’t have said he had faith in Patji, he did respect the god. Fear him. And after so long living in the jungle, understand him” (loc 3081).
Sanderson pairs this tempered respect for a god who is more like a harsh, possibly psychotic coach than a loving father with a more positive view of the god/follower relationship in Starling’s plotline. At the very beginning of the novel, we find out that our secondary protagonist Starling is from a species of shapeshifting dragons. Due to their extremely long lives, Cosmere dragons tend to act as gods, acquiring followers and playing millennia-long games of strategy to bring about their purposes.
Emberdark doesn’t provide us a lot of information about whether these dragon gods tend to protect or rescue those who worship them. They very well might. One thing we do know they do is the way they answer prayers: “Her people lived to inspire others. They didn’t always live up to their own ideals, but the best of them—like her uncle—spent their entire existences sending comfort, confidence, and compassion to those who prayed to them” (loc 2617).
This inspirational role of dragons provides a mirror image to the negative relationship between Dusk and Patji. Just as Patji exists to transform his followers through opposition, dragons seem to exist to transform their followers through empathy and emotion. They don’t necessarily need to perform divine interventions to be an object of worship. Instead, dragons are gods because they are a source of solidarity. They suffer with their followers, which helps turn that suffering into something positive. This reminds me of Alma 7:11-13 which interprets Christ’s atonement to be not just about perfecting sin but about “tak[ing] upon him the pains and the sicknesses of his people […] that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.”
Importantly, both of these examples of the god/follower relationship focus on the god’s desire to transform the follower into something better than they were before. The purpose of God is always found in relationship, not some dispassionate self-existential reason. In fact, the gods seem to desire the relationship almost as much as the followers. This kind of mutual need between a god and their followers seems very Latter-day Saint to me, an extension of the kind of thinking that says creation and creator are of the same kind rather than essentially different.
I’d love to hear your thoughts about Isles of the Emberdark in the comments below. My overall review will be in next month’s “What I Read,” but you can probably tell that I really enjoyed the book.
** All quote locations in this post are from the Backerkit non-DRM ebook file. They may not precisely match other editions, but it’s the best I can do.