By Austin Freeman

It’s spooky season again–that time when the barrier between the living and the dead, the mortal and the damned, grows thin. Spectral shapes scratch at our bedroom windows. And we, sloughing off the illusions of our civilized and rational age, slink back into the mouldy embrace of pagan tradition. Halloween is coming.

All Hallows’ Eve

All of the above is ridiculous, of course. Halloween is a Christian holiday, and not even the jack-o-lanterns have pagan roots. The current tradition of Halloween is all a modern invention with the atmospheric veneer of antiquity. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s not fun. In other parts of the world, context dictates that Christians ought to perhaps abstain from a festival darkened by connotations that belie their convictions, but here in the United States, at least, Halloween is still a matter of Christian liberty.

How then, might a Christian want to participate in this liturgical event? Allow me to suggest a theological engagement with that dark eidolon of American horror, H.P. Lovecraft. Just as the Puritans that Lovecraft both admired and hated inscribed skulls upon the weathered and mossy graves of a moonlit cemetery, Lovecraft helps us to memento mori (remember death). All horror literature reminds us of our mortality in some way, and therefore inspires us to confront it as a theological event. What shall I do with my death? What comes afterward?

A Universe of Horror

But Lovecraft’s unique brand of cosmic horror does more than this. As I wrote in the introduction to Theology and H.P. Lovecraft, in these stories we are confronting not just a threat to our bodily integrity, or even to our souls, but to the idea of body and soul itself, as a sort of ordering rational principle to the world.

“Not content to trot out the same grotesques and goblins as his folkloric or Gothic predecessors, Lovecraft deliberately seeks to create existential dread rather than mere fright. He works to remove our security in reason, meaning, morality, human significance, and the value of civilization. More traditional forms of horror leave these intact, a sort of background existential comfort blanket. If I am being chased by the man with the chainsaw, I can at least take comfort in the fact that he might be caught and punished. If I fall victim to vampirism and am condemned to dwell in endless night, I at least know that, elsewhere, people are enjoying their morning coffees. Lovecraft, by contrast, offers no balm in Gilead, no recourse save confronting a truth we shudder to face. The monster is not Cthulhu; it is the universe” (Theology and H.P. Lovecraft 2022: 5-6).

This is why Lovecraft’s horror still strikes home. The dark enchantment of the ghost’s rattling chains means that there is a God who has chained it. There is a soul that endures beyond death. There is a purpose to human existence, such that leaving it unfinished does not allow your conscious mind to move onward into a presumably pleasant eternity. There is a moral law of life and death, such that violations of it engender monsters. The world is at bottom good and meaningful. This horror is specific rather than universal.

Lovecraft, however, denies all of this. He denies (or, more correctly, attempts to deny) that the universe has any sense or purpose. It’s all just an adaptive mechanism, a small bubble of what our reptile brains have been bred to consider normalcy. And beyond? The blind idiot god Azathoth “blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity” (The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath).

“Azathoth” likely derives from the alchemical or occultic concept of Azoth, the universal solvent and principle of transformation, the First Matter and encyclopedia of all existence. Lovecraft puts his own stamp on this–a universal solvent is something like Daniel Dennett’s universal acid. It dissolves everything into nothingness and chaos. This, Lovecraft says, is the heart of existence.

Affirmation via Denial

But what then is Azathoth blaspheming? Lovecraft likely means this merely as an evocative word, illustrating that Azathoth violates our sacred principles. I think there’s more to this than Lovecraft intends, however. For Lovecraft’s tales to upset these sacred principles–and here I’m thinking not of the divinity of Christ or what goes into the canon of Scripture–then he admits that these principles exist in the first place.

Natural things, normal things, are not scary. Zombies are scary because their existence affirms via denial what it means to be truly human. Exorcisms are unsettling because they accept via rejection the notion that the good should be our natural state. Whatever we fear shows us that its opposite is what we crave.

Our impulse toward rationality, toward discerning an ordering to the universe, and even toward the existence of a moral law (whether or not we agree on its specifics) are both diachronic and synchronic. That is, they seem to be present in all cultures across time and space. Does this not itself at least suggest that the universe really does operate this way? And if it does, should we not ask why?

Answering Lovecraft’s Call

In short, then, Lovecraft’s horror is a fitting Halloween meditation for two reasons. First, because as all horror does, it forces us to confront our own mortality and our attitude toward eternity–to take a theological stance toward the future. But Lovecraft also offers a second boon. His horror forces us to confront our attitude toward the universe itself–to take a theological stance toward the present. Do we accept or reject his picture of the place? Does the universe have a meaning and a purpose after all? If so, where does it come from?

Something to ponder ’neath the harvest moon.

Austin M. Freeman (PhD, systematic theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) specializes in the theology of fantasy literature, especially that of J.R.R. Tolkien. He is the editor of Theology and H.P. Lovecraft.