By Dominique Signoret (signodom.club.fr) (Dominique Signoret (signodom.club.fr)) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons
“Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species — if separate species we be — for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.” -H.P. Lovecraft, The Facts Concerning the Late Author Jermyn and His Family, 1925
Howard Phillips Lovecraft is considered among many to be the father of modern horror. He wrote his short stories of “Weird Fiction” during the 1920’s and 30’s, and captured a unique flavor of horror that writers have been trying to imitate ever since. Movies such as The Thing and the current film Prometheus have borrowed themes and concepts that Lovecraft originated.
What was so unique about Lovecraft’s writing? There are two common themes that run throughout Lovecraft’s work. The first is what has come to be known as ‘Cosmic Horror,’ that is, the concept that man is just an insignificant speck in a vast, uncaring, unknowable, and hostile universe. In story after story, Lovecraft’s protagonists open some door, find some secret into the larger universe, and their response is despair and insanity:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” -H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, 1926
The second theme is related to the first: the horror of heritage. That is to say, when one considers one’s origins, that humanity is nothing more than soulless, animated ooze; that human beings are just a link in a meaningless chain that contained all the lowest beasts, the natural reaction is, again, horror and despair.
Lovecraft himself had a dim view of religion. Like the New Atheists, Lovecraft felt that religion was responsible for more bad than good, more damage than help:
“Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.” -H.P. Lovecraft, from his personal letters
In many of his stories, most notably “The Shadow over Innsmouth” organized religion is just a façade for sinister indoctrination and a willful blindness to reality:
“If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.” H.P. Lovecraft, from his personal letters
So it is fair to say that Lovecraft, if he wasn’t an atheist, was at the very least strongly anti-religious. In his stories, Lovecraft created a pantheon of hideous, amoral “Outer Gods.” Chief among these was Azathoth, whom Lovecraft describes as “the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the centre of Chaos.” Elsewhere Lovecraft also makes Azathoth the creator of the universe. This is an eloquent description of an atheist mindset. The universe was conceived in mindless chaos, is ruled by mindless chaos, and is destined to return to mindless chaos. The answer to the questions of origin, purpose, and destiny are all the same: mindless chaos. And, as Lovecraft’s protagonists often discover, this realization is horrific.
Steve Turner puts this well when he says: “If chance be the father of all flesh - disaster is his rainbow in the sky. And when you hear a state of emergency: sniper kills 10; troops on rampage; bomb blasts school; it is but the sound of man, worshipping his maker."
Lovecraft captures something in his horror stories that so resonates with modern culture because it perfectly captures the correct response to materialistic naturalism: horror. Contrast, if you will, Lovecraft’s creator god with the God of the Bible: Azathoth rules from a throne of darkness. 1 John 1:5 says, “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” Azathoth is mindless. Colossians 2:3 says of God, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Azathoth is chaos. Psalm 65:6-9 calls God “…the one who by his strength established the mountains, being girded with might; who stills the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves, the tumult of the peoples, so that those who dwell at the ends of the earth are in awe at your signs. You make the going out of the morning and the evening to shout for joy. You visit the earth and water it; you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water; you provide their grain, for so you have prepared it.”
Even if the materialistic naturalist doesn’t buy into the Lovecraftian idea of a Godless universe being a thing of horror, it is difficult to see how they would get illumination, wisdom, and order out of an accidental and mindless universe.
Perhaps people should take Lovecraft’s challenge and “insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences,” And let truth emerge where it will. This is, after all, the same challenge that Elijah issued on the mountain of Carmel: “How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him; but if [Azathoth], then follow him.”
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