Small [g]ods

I read Going Postal about three years ago, and since then I have bought or borrowed one of Terry Pratchett’s semi-satirical fantasy novels on a regular basis. Since Amelia and her family share in this literary revelry, it has been a fun way to fellowship. I also find that many of Pratchett’s little novels have a charmingly serious side to them, and none more so than Small Gods.
Pratchett’s novels are set in the Discworld universe, in which the Discworld floats through space on the back of four elephants who are on the back of a humongous turtle. The “greatest” city of this world is Ankh-Morpork, which is where most of the books are set and where the regular characters live. However, a few of the books take place chiefly outside Ankh-Morpork, including the first two books, Pyramids, and Small Gods, which I recently finished. There are lots of ways to categorize Pratchett’s books, but one thing I have noticed is that, the farther from Ankh-Morpork and its familiar characters the books go, the more the gods of the series seem to play a role in what is happening.
In Small Gods (1992), Pratchett takes us across the Circle Sea to the desert theocracy (ecclesiocracy would be better) of Omnia. The place is ruled and inhabited by worshipers of the Great God Om, who ostensibly has spoken through his prophets on numerous occasions to bless his people with hundreds of commandments, complex sacrifices, heavy tithes, and countless inventive torture devices operated by the efficient Quisitors, who help everyone along the road to sanctification in their special way. At a position near the bottom of this whole scheme is the novice monk Brutha, who meets Om in his cabbage patch in the form of a very wrathful tortoise. They have adventures, thus the story.
I am not exactly aiming to review the book, but I do want to think about how Terry Pratchett set up his religious institution and the god who lay behind it all. At the moment I am thinking about the Omnians at the beginning of the book. In Small Gods Pratchett dives head-first into the question of religion in a way I have not seen him do in other places, and it gives us a little window into his understanding of religious life, the universe, and everything.
The Church of Om is clearly modeled on the pre-Reformation Catholic church. The Citadel, which functions as a center of both government and worship for Omnia, is not unlike the Vatican. The church leaders drag their soldiers (or their carcasses) across the desert on worthless crusades, upsetting all of Omnia’s neighbors on a regular basis. When people start getting funny ideas about the world being flat on the back of a tortoise (Om told one of his prophets it was spherical), they have their sins and ideas purged away by the Quisition. It is nothing new to see a writer declaring the hypocrisy of religion on account of these episodes, and Pratchett deals especially with the idea of religious torture for the remission of sins. I expected a simple atheistic judgment to be made- “See! Religion just breeds horrible suffering and writes off the terrible crimes of the church! We atheists are so much more understanding than those hypocrites! We don’t need God to tell us not to torture people!” It surprised me to see the author dig into the humanity of the Inquisitors as he entered their lair:

It has to be said…* there was little to laugh at in the cellar of the Quisition. Not if you had a normal sense of humor. There were no jolly little signs saying: You Don’t Have To Be Pitilessly Sadistic To Work Here But It Helps!!!
But there were things to suggest to a thinking man that the Creator of mankind had a very oblique sense of fun indeed, and to breed in his heart a rage to storm the gates of heaven.
The mugs, for example. The inquisitors stopped work twice a day for coffee. Their mugs, which each man had brought from home, were grouped around the kettle on the hearth of the central furnace which incidentally heated the irons and knives.
They had legends on them like A Present From the Holy Grotto of Ossory, or To The World’s Greatest Daddy…
And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
Vorbis loved knowing that. A man who knew that, knew everything he needed to know about people. (pp. 14-15)

*This ellipsis is original.
I felt that throughout the book Pratchett showed similar insight into how so many of the excesses of evil we see in the world are brought about by men. There are not just those few societal misfits who happen to be truly wicked while the rest of us get on with living decently. Rather, we are unlikely to encounter any of those few people who truly desire to do what is right, who will do so even if it brings pain or difficulty to their life. The view of man we get echoes the truth:

None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one. Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips. Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes. (Romans 3:10-18)

A related note is that in Small Gods, the only one who truly lives righteously, who refuses a wicked means to a good end and chooses to act righteously when it could bring him great harm, does so by his simple faith in his god and with the help of his god. Who happens to be a tortoise.
The book is worthy of a read, though it is one of the least light-hearted (though by no means the least funny) of Terry Pratchett’s books I have read so far. Not only are there times where Small Gods parallels the truth, as in this example of man’s everyday depravity, but there are also helpfully poignant pictures of the silliness of man-made religion and the lewdness of hypocrisy, paralleling the falsehoods that fill our world.