Deconstructing Fallen Angels, and Other Postmodern Conservative Pastimes

When I finished Ted Chiang's "Hell is the Absence of God," I thought I would have a hard time coming up with enough of an angle on it to justify a post. "Hey Catholics, here's a short story with a theologically interesting premise" isn't much of a hook. All praises to God for casual Google searches! Chiang isn't even a Christian. Well, stranger things have happened than inadvertent orthodoxy.

In the world of the story, God's existence has been proven. Angelic visitations are reported on the nightly news with statistics on the aftermath: how many miraculous cures, how many deaths and injuries, how many souls saved. Sometimes windows open up through which one can see souls in Hell, not in torment but simply walking around in a Godless dimension.

Our main character is not a devout man. He believes in God but doesn't love Him, knowing himself to be Hellbound but not really minding, given what Hell is like: "Of course, everyone knew that Heaven was incomparably superior, but to Neil it had always seemed too remote to consider, like wealth or fame or glamour." When his wife is killed by flying glass during a miracle, he realizes that the only way to rejoin her is to learn to love God, which introduces the dilemma of having to love God for a worldly reason:

This paradox confronted several people in the support group. One of the attendees, a man named Phil Soames, correctly pointed out that thinking of it as a condition to be met would guarantee failure. You couldn't love God as a means to an end, you had to love Him for Himself. If your ultimate goal in loving God was a reunion with your spouse, you weren't demonstrating true devotion at all.

A woman in the support group named Valerie Tommasino said they shouldn't even try. She'd been reading a book published by the humanist movement; its members considered it wrong to love a God who inflicted such pain, and advocated that people act according to their own moral sense instead of being guided by the carrot and the stick. These were people who, when they died, descended to Hell in proud defiance of God.

Neil himself had read a pamphlet of the humanist movement; what he most remembered was that it had quoted the fallen angels. Visitations of fallen angels were infrequent, and caused neither good fortune nor bad; they weren't acting under God's direction, but just passing through the mortal plane as they went about their unimaginable business. On the occasions they appeared, people would ask them questions: Did they know God's intentions? Why had they rebelled? The fallen angels' reply was always the same: Decide for yourselves. That is what we did. We advise you to do the same.

Chiang has said that, "as I grew older, it seemed to me that the idea of God didn’t explain anything that couldn’t be explained otherwise, so I’m currently an atheist," but a Catholic might say the same thing minus the last clause. Belief in God doesn't solve any metaphysical problems: even if he presented himself, I still wouldn't understand; even having understood, I still wouldn't love; without love, I still wouldn't be saved. His interviewer here calls "Hell is the Absence of God" a story with "a judgmental view of the Almighty," but only because the interviewer doesn't grasp that, when it comes to the uselessness of belief in God, atheists and Christians agree.

I'll give Chiang the last word on the question of whether the story is ultimately pro- or anti-God:

I wanted to explore the idea of a universe in which religion doesn’t require faith. In our world, religion relies on faith because definitive proof is unavailable. As a result, some people choose their religion based on which one makes them feel better, e.g. “I don’t like the judgmental god of Religion A, so I’m going to worship the kind and gentle god of Religion B.” That option exists because neither deity is unambiguously present, but if a particular god were here right now, we’d have to deal with him whether we liked him or not.

Later in the interview, he mentions that the key to unlocking another of his stories is this sentence from an unspecified feminist essay: "Allowing beautiful women their beauty may turn out to be one of the most difficult aspects of personal liberation." Apparently, the story revolves around a young woman who starts a treatment (made mandatory on college campuses) that disables aesthetic reactions to human appearance, then stops taking it in order to learn more about the world. I don't know about you, but I'll be saying a prayer for Chiang's salvation; as for his vocation, he seems to have found it already.

H/T on the story to Leah.