We were both weaned, Francis, you in your Roman tradition and I in my Protestant one, on the winsome belief that “All things work together for good for those who love the LORD, those who are called according to his purpose.” I am writing to you now simply to say this: our global eruption of nightmares, which would otherwise seem to disprove this canonical statement from my theological namesake, actually serves to confirm it — not directly but by demolishing the presumptuous prison of axioms in which it lay incarcerated for two millennia. “All things work together for good for those who love the LORD” — ah, but what good? And which LORD? “Those who are called according to his purpose” — ah, butwhat call, and which purpose?
The quotations and their implied questions point to our pressing need. What confronts us as an awful necessity, if we and our faith intend to survive, is a reconciliation of what we have always believed with what now presents itself as a contrary but incontrovertible truth. The classic theological antitheses — Jerusalem and Athens, the City of God and the City of Man, Christ and Belial — no longer apply. The only one that still retains any potency is that which refers to the enmity between the “seed of the woman” and the “seed of the serpent.” But it requires a substantive modification.
Our antithesis, our dilemma in the form of a sacred riddle, is simply this: what has Christ to do with Cthulhu?
It comes with a corollary: what has Jerusalem to do with R’lyeh?
In these letters I intend to present you with the rudiments of a viable theological recalibration that will explore the avenues opened up by these shocking juxtapositions, and that, in doing so, will safeguard the possibility of our salvation, albeit in a much modified and, as I fear we shall be unable to keep from feeling it, far less agreeable form.
As I navigate the burning wasteland, another environment flickers intermittently into view around me: a crazy-tilted maze of stone columns and temples vying with the reality of the blasted city and attempting to supplant it all at once in a cinematic superimposition. The ocean, hundreds of miles from here, laps momentarily at my feet, while a monolithic mass of ancient stone towers glimmers darkly offshore. I blink, shake my head and refuse to accept the vision. After a furtive hesitation, the inland wasteland regains its foothold.
ITS AWFULNESS. Especially in Mark’s gospel, but also throughout the New Testament and also the Hebrew scriptures, manifestations of divine reality are portrayed consistently as occasions for sheer terror. Jesus calms the storm; his disciples are filled not with sweet sentiments of divine love and comfort but with terror and awe. The women find his tomb empty; they do not exit the garden singing hosannas but stumble away in soul-blasted fright, unable to speak. When angels appear in bursts of light and song, shepherds and Roman soldiers alike faint, tremble, avert their eyes, raise their hands to ward off the sight of those awful messengers of a reality from beyond this world — a reality that is inherently awful because it is from beyond this world.
He pulls his attention out of the pages like a swimmer hauling himself naked and shivering out of icy black waters. He makes to inhale deeply, to suck in cleansing air, but finds that his breath remains frozen at mid-breast, just as it has been for months now, ever since reality first went mad with the collapsing of the distinction between divine and demonic, leaving him internally paralyzed, gripped as if by a fist in his diaphragm while grotesque supernatural impossibilities erupt all around.
The voice behind him remains silent, but its presence is palpable and its command unmistakable. With fixed stare and only slightly trembling hand, he resigns himself again to the task and begins reading from the first page, scanning not only for the meanings contained in the words themselves but for evidence of the interstitial semiotic glue that binds the whole insane edifice together. As always, his attention is soon swallowed whole by the dark and deranged philosophical cathedral it has entered.
Perhaps a recounting of how our new Great Awakening (a term whose traditional, historical use seems gallingly blinkered now) first made itself known to me will serve to purify and clarify our mutual apprehension of these matters.
As you know, I was hard at work on my third book of theology, a substantial and career- defining exercise in theological trailblazing to be titled The Fear of God, in which I took on the same theme treated by John Bunyan in his classic treatise with the same title, and agreed with him that “by this word fear we are to understand even God himself, who is the object of our fear.” I took for my orienting point Luther’s subversive declaration — which exerted a veritably talismanic power over me — that God “is more terrible and frightful than the Devil. For therefrom no man can refrain: if he thinketh on God aright, his heart and his body is struck with terror. Yea, as soon as he heareth God named, he is filled with trepidation and fear.”
One day — I distinctly remember the sun was shining sweetly through my living room window while a few birds twittered in the yard, so it must have been during the spring or summer, although my sense of time has lately become as confused and chaotic as the natural elements, which, as you know, have now taken on a schizophrenic kind of existence — one day I sat poring over a stack of pages that I had recently written, and was struck without warning by a thoroughly hideous vision. As I looked at my pages, I saw peering through the typewritten words, as if from behind the lines of text, a face more awful than any I had ever conceived. I need not describe it to you: the bloated octopoid visage with its obscenity of a fanged and tentacled maw, and with saurian and humanoid characteristics all mixed together in a surreal jumble. It conjured involuntary thoughts of the great Dragon of John’s Apocalypse, and of the watery waste of Genesis, and of the waters beyond the sky and below the earth, and of the chaos serpent Leviathan. But there was far more than that. Staring into the red-black effulgence of its awful eyes, I saw the skin of those biblical images peeled back to reveal great Mother Tiamat, the ancient archetype of all dragons and serpents and extra-cosmic chaos, wearing the more familiar imagery like a cheap rubber mask.
It was more than just a visual image, it was a veritable convulsion in my total being, and its ripples spread through the very air of the room. You well remember your own experience as you knelt praying before a statue of St. Jude and raised your eyes to his benevolent face, only to be greeted by the same sight I am describing. So you know, too, the violent illness that overtook me. I was gripped by a kind of mania even as my stomach and bowels twisted into searing knots, and I began turning frantically from page to page in an effort to escape the vision, but still the words of my magnum opus appeared as the bars of a cage holding back that impossible face, that locus of all nightmares, that source of all ancient, evil imaginings. I dimly remember ripping the book to shreds and even — I cannot remember why — eating portions of it, and then vomiting them back up; the half-digested paper had been transformed into tiny scrolls which I then ate again, and they tasted like honey, but then they turned so bitter in my mouth that I vomited yet again.