There is an immortal man in the sky. A wizard, if you like. He created everything, including the laws of physics and the categories of Right and Wrong, Good and Evil. Accordingly, he can tweak these things as he sees fit.
You cannot. You are a rat in a Skinner Box the size of all spacetime (the immortal sky-man lives outside of it). You are subject to rules on which you were not consulted ahead of time. You cannot know for certain what these rules are, because you have been offered many different and contradictory theories on the matter, many of which claim to be exclusively correct.
If you break the real rules, whatever they are, you will suffer infinitely terrible pain, forever.
While some of these rules make sense, others—particularly the ones governing your body, and what you may or may not do with it—run directly contrary to your deepest wants, your best reasoning, and even, to a certain extent, your own innate sense of right and wrong.
None of this matters. Again, if you break these rules which you cannot know, you will be punished horribly in unending linear time. This is just the way that it is, and the way that it is is Just, because the immortal sky-man created the category of Justice and has applied it to the rules.
Every piece of evidence contravening the rules—historical criticism, the findings of medicine and psychology, dinosaur bones—is a trap. Your own feelings and thoughts are the worst traps of all, because you can’t insulate yourself from them by throwing away your computer and reading only the right books.
The immortal wizard defines what Love is, and has elected to love you very, very much. He will love you straight into Hell, if it comes to that.
The Greatest Horror Story Ever Told
We can’t know for certain whether goodness is good because God says so, or whether God says so because it is good. In other words, we don’t know whether goodness, truth, and beauty are things that God made—and could, in theory, change—or whether God is bound by categories which are higher, or at least other than, himself. To put it even more bluntly, we can’t really say whether what we call God could commit, or be the source of, what we would call “evil”—and whether that would even matter, if he’s the one making the definitions in the first place.
The classical answer to this dilemma—that God can’t or won’t commit evil because goodness is his “nature”—doesn’t satisfy. For one thing, such a statement is essentially a pretty re-hashing of the claim that there are certain things an allegedly all-powerful God cannot do. In other words, this argument reproduces one of the dilemma’s horns. Whether God is bound by his intrinsic nature or by extrinsic laws makes little difference—in either case he remains bound.
And while it sounds very nice indeed to say that goodness, truth, beauty, and so on come from God, how on Earth would we know that? How can we make claims about the nature of God when everything from revelation to our own experience is at least a little bit suspect?
The version of the Abrahamic God we absorb through culture—the one that matters—is an omnipotent alien existing outside of space and time, gleefully crafting an unworkable moral code which, taken to its logical conclusion, will funnel the majority of our souls into a place of eternal torment. Such a God is, by any human definition, a monster. What you might call an eldritch abomination.
“The blind, idiot god”
Ironically, the best description we have of such a God—the one actually experienced by worshippers who don’t fit the normative mold, such as those of us labelled as “intrinsically disordered”—comes not from theology, but from weird/horror fiction.
Specifically, if we’re looking for a written account of what it actually feels like for most of us to share a universe with God as he is commonly understood, we might do well to skip over the glowing reports of the saints, and instead look to the work of that granddaddy of cosmic horror himself, H. P. Lovecraft.
For all his purple prose and personal shortcomings, Lovecraft nevertheless had an uncanny ability to evoke that creeping unease that wells up whenever we think too hard about everything we don’t know concerning our own existence. Writing during the heyday of modernism, Lovecraft scared the bejesus out of (some of) his contemporaries by writing stories that questioned the final authority of rationality, science, and dogma—suggesting that these and all other means of producing knowledge are merely idols, walls we put up to protect ourselves from the ultimate incomprehensibility of an indifferent cosmos.“3
In Lovecraft’s fiction, and in the larger “Mythos” surrounding it, the impersonal forces running this random, pointless nightmare are referred to as the “Outer Gods,” in the sense that they exist, somehow, outside of space and time. Chief among these is Azathoth, the source and rotten core of all creation—a horrifying parody of the Neoplatonic One, the Father of the Trinity, the Hindu Brahman, etc.
Lovecraft describes this twisted ground of being in Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath:
“[O]utside the ordered universe [is] that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes.”
And again, in “The Haunter of the Dark”:
“Ultimate Chaos, at whose center sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demonic flute held in nameless paws.”
A few key phrases stand out. Azathoth exists “outside the ordered universe” and “beyond time and space.” In other words, Lovecraft’s cosmicism posits that there is an outside in the first place, which can be contrasted with the fragile, contingent inside that is our universe. Moreover, this outer place—greater and perhaps more real than our little home— is “inconceivable, unlighted,” i.e. unknowable within the limits set by human consciousness. Finally, Azathoth, this “Lord of All Things,” is a “blind idiot”—infinite, total power, spewing out arbitrarily from the void and over creation without thought, purpose, or reason.
At first glance, Lovecraft’s ontology seems like a simple negation of the popular Christian worldview, which imagines God as the loving, benevolent source of creation and ruler of the universe. But a closer look reveals parallels between the two systems.
According to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo—creation out of nothing—God brings reality into being out of nothingness, rather than emanating it from himself or creating it within himself. Thus he is always other than his creation, which is the object to his eternal, unmoving subject.
Like Lovecraft’s description of his cosmos and its ruler, an ex nihilo account of reality plants the idea that God exists, in some sense, outside, and that we are trapped inside. Moreover, for every mystic claiming to have had direct knowledge of God, there’s another who contends that God is ultimately unknowable, that his home is as “unlighted” for us as are Azathoth’s hellish caverns “at the center of all infinity.”
Here, the similarities end for the Christian who can take God’s inherent goodness as a matter of faith, and therefore affirm that he is nothing like Lovecraft’s “blind idiot.” The rest of us are left to struggle in a difficult situation.
Being stuck in the snow globe that is reality created ex nihilo, we have no way of directly knowing who God is or what he wants—meaning that we can’t definitively deny the possibility of a “boundless daemon sultan” at the heart of existence. Nor, for that matter, can we rule out Huitzilopochtli, Roko’s Basilisk, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster as candidates for the underlying principle of things. An omnipotent God, divorced from his creation, wouldn’t necessarily be bothered by human notions of “absurdity.” He could be as wacky, and as cruel, we can possibly imagine.
Worse—he could be exactly as tradition describes him.
“No conceivable geometry”
Another well-known trope in the Lovecraft toolbox is the breakdown of Euclidean geometry in the presence of beings from outside our own universe. If a story doesn’t feature panicked WASPs getting nauseous at the sight of a misbehaving shape, it’s hardly a candidate for the Mythos. See, for instance, “The Thing on the Doorstep,”4 in which mild-mannered Edward Derby is forced by his wife to make regular astral trips to some other, awful plane of existence:
“He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places […] of complex angles that lead through invisible walls to other regions of space and time […] He [brought back] objects like nothing ever heard of on earth, whose insane curves and surfaces answered no conceivable purpose and followed no conceivable geometry. These things, he said, came ‘from outside’; and his wife knew how to get them.”
Though Daniel Upton, the narrator, is doubtful at first, he eventually comes to believe his friend’s wild stories, to the point where he experiences “the same dim feeling of blasphemous alienage and ineffable cosmic hideousness” that drives poor Edward to the ever-popular Arkham sanitarium.
In theory, the basic story underlying popular Christianity ought to be comforting: a wise, benevolent being wants you to spend eternity in bliss, and has provided you with a convenient checklist of to-dos that will help you get there.
In practice, for many of us, even the most positive version of this framework is more of a burden than a help. If one’s inclinations don’t line up with the set of prescribed behaviors and associated rewards—if one is queer, for instance, or doesn’t want to live forever in the first place—then God’s rules are experienced less as a shepherd’s gentle guidance for his flock, and more as a senseless, vicious twisting of observed reality that leaves us sick, afraid, and half-insane in our efforts to keep up.
At the risk of making Catholic sexual teaching into an easy punching bag, this is one area where the conflict between lived reality and imposed rules is particularly obvious. To over-simplify, the Church claims that every human is called either to celibacy or to lifelong, monogamous marriage focused mainly on child-rearing.
For many, spending ten minutes in an adult human body is enough to demonstrate the absurdity of this claim.
Assuming that the call to a vocation is experienced in our minds, hearts, and bodies—and where else would we experience such a thing?—then some of us are in fact “called” to an infinite variety of sexual expressions: to both deeply involved and casual encounters with multiple partners; to sex acts which have nothing to do with procreation; to intimacy with people of our own sex; and so on.
A queer person knows as much by the time they’re thirteen. But they might also realize—with the willing help of their pastor—that just because a thing is absurd does not necessarily mean that it is untrue. The very idea that an anthropomorphic God would make you with the capacity and overwhelming urge to have sex—only to forbid you from doing so on pain of eternal separation and burning—is the stuff of a Monty Python sketch. Laughable. Stupid. Downright insane.
But given that you can’t exactly phone him up to check, how would you prove that God is not insane?
And so begins the process of trying to adjust oneself to the “complex angles” of traditional Catholic teachings on sex. The Catholic who is paying attention quickly notices that these rules—put together over centuries by groups of celibate men, working off of poorly translated copies of allegedly inspired religious texts—do not line up with what is going on in his mind, his body, and his heart.
Unbothered by this inconsistency, upon reaching this point the vast majority of lay Catholics simply ignore these teachings as outdated and irrelevant, and get on with living decent lives. The remainder are split between those who actually like the rules, and the rest of us—the ones who desperately want it all to make some kind of sense, and so line up again and again to be kicked in the teeth by the Magisterium.
Once we have absorbed the notion that we can’t trust our own adult intuitions on matters of morality, ethics, and Spirit, we spend our lives walking around like protagonists in a Lovecraft story, subject to a “dim feeling of blasphemous alienage and ineffable cosmic hideousness.” We nurse a constant migraine, heartache, and nausea brought on by the mental squinting we have to do to make the “insane curves and surfaces” of Church teaching look like the reassuring right angles we’ve been promised.
Where our thoughts don’t line up with dogma, we straighten them. When our hearts pull us in unsanctioned directions, we break them. And when our bodies want the wrong things, we destroy them.
And maybe this is indeed our life’s purpose—to maim ourselves every day. To grind ourselves down until there’s nothing human left to question a set of rules with “no conceivable purpose” in this world. Given what we have to work with, we probably can’t know for sure either way. All we can really do is look back over the last two thousand years of accumulated trauma, and the effect it has had on people—and wonder when the nice men in white coats will come for us.
Iä, Iä. Cthulhu fhtagn.
- While it’s easy to chuckle at what have become perfectly obvious statements to us jaded postmodernists, it’s worth remembering that we’ve had more than a century to get used to the crisis of meaning that Lovecraft could only hint at. The realization of how fragile our systems can be was a big, scary problem at the time, and remains so for many of us at certain points in our lives.
- As a side note, “The Thing on the Doorstep” can be read as a harrowing take on the effects of psychological, emotional, and spiritual abuse by a romantic partner—which can also be experienced as otherworldly madness breaking through into a life we thought ordered, safe, and loving: “ . . . again, again . . . she’s trying . . . I might have known . . . nothing can stop that force; not distance, nor magic, nor death . . . it comes and comes, mostly in the night . . . I can’t leave . . . it’s horrible . . . oh, God, Dan, if you only knew as I do just how horrible it is. . .”
- While it’s easy to chuckle at what have become perfectly obvious statements to us jaded postmodernists, it’s worth remembering that we’ve had more than a century to get used to the crisis of meaning that Lovecraft could only hint at. The realization of how fragile our systems can be was a big, scary problem at the time, and remains so for many of us at certain points in our lives.
- As a side note, “The Thing on the Doorstep” can be read as a harrowing take on the effects of psychological, emotional, and spiritual abuse by a romantic partner—which can also be experienced as otherworldly madness breaking through into a life we thought ordered, safe, and loving: “ . . . again, again . . . she’s trying . . . I might have known . . . nothing can stop that force; not distance, nor magic, nor death . . . it comes and comes, mostly in the night . . . I can’t leave . . . it’s horrible . . . oh, God, Dan, if you only knew as I do just how horrible it is. . .”
