The Study of Theology and Lovecraft: A Match Made In Court of Azathoth

H.P. Lovecraft is the type of writer so resilient that even as he is criticized and scrutinized, he keeps on ticking along and people continue to read and admire his works. The subject of many nearly successful attempts to cancel him, thus removing him from the ranks of the greatest writers of all time, he has persevered despite having worked from a context of what some of his modern readers consider a bigoted worldview. But how accurate is this critical assessment of Lovecraft?

British philosopher John Gray once wrote, “Fortunately, the core of Lovecraft’s work has nothing to do with his social and racial resentments.” One might also add that Lovecraft’s views on God (specifically, the God of the Bible) is also not at the core of his writings, though the phenomena of the Christian religion – particularly the New England strand of Puritanism that he was inculcated in – presses in more firmly around him than these other tangential arenas of lesser concern which attract contemporary criticism (like race and gender). 

Religion, and making a commentary on religion through his weird fiction, do figure as one of the predominant issues surrounding his work while the concerns noted above were issues that society as a whole dealt with. Granted that many writers from his era engaged with religious themes and concepts, with Lovecraft it was and remains radically different. One cannot read the majority of his stories without feeling a certain spiritual element come alive that helps transport the readers back to a 1920’s post-Puritan culture (and indeed, much further back than that). 

As I’ve written elsewhere, to say that Lovecraft was a man of his times is an understatement and deflection. He was more a man out of time, living firmly in a romanticized past and fantasizing about a dangerous future. This was a religious endeavor – which is to say, a mission of devotion and worship – even for a staunch atheist like Lovecraft. Though an atheist, Lovecraft couldn’t escape the religious and spiritual reality he was trying to flee from.

Lovecraft often wrote with a big “biblical” style much like many of the Puritan divines. When giving advice to aspiring writers in his work “Literary Composition” (1920), Lovecraft directed them to read the King James Bible for inspiration, complete with a pseudo-sectarian anti-Catholic dig that would have very much pleased the very Puritans he despised:

An excellent habit to cultivate is the analytical study of the King James Bible. For simple yet rich and forceful English, this masterly production is hard to equal; and even though its Saxon vocabulary and poetic rhythm be unsuited to general composition, it is an in- valuable model for writers on quaint or imaginative themes. Lord Dunsany, perhaps the greatest living prose artist, derived nearly all of his stylistic tendencies from the Scriptures; and the contemporary critic Boyd points out very acutely the loss sustained by most Catholic Irish writers through their unfamiliarity with the historic volume and its traditions.

With such a religious backdrop to the work of Lovecraft, I was very pleased to read Theology and H.P. Lovecraft edited by Austin M. Freeman. This book is a collection of very good essays that provide an analysis of the works of Lovecraft by applying a myriad of religious critiques and insights. Most of the content deals with Christian theology and themes, with the exception of “Prophet of the Mythos: H.P. Lovecraft, Muhammad, and Arabic Scriptures” by Andrew J. O’Connor that concerns Lovecraft and Islam but is very much worth reading. The strongest of the bunch is “When God Goes Mad: Lovecraft, Von Balthasar, and the Split between Transcendence and Goodness” by Lyle Enright and Nick Bennett. This chapter (or article) fleshes out some of the deeper recesses of Lovecraft’s inadvertent Christian impulses and does so in a very satisfying way. Also worth reading is “A Dark Poem: Lovecraft’s Puritan Aesthetics and the Vice of Curiosity” by Geoffrey Reiter which was of special interest to a Puritan scholar such as myself.

In utilizing Christian themes and common religious trajectories, Lovecraft was able to appropriate and reference a movement and mission that was in his bones and beneath his feet without being in his head or heart. Understand the horror of Lovecraft is impossible without the theology and spiritual concerns that lurk in the background. The writers included in this collection all go about proving this point by looking over many of Lovecraft’s works. Any reader who is interested in Lovecraft will find an exceptional resource in Theology and H.P. Lovecraft. What we find is that with the reader’s priorities in place and lens firmly attached, reading Lovecraft can ironically be a spiritual experience that brings us to a place of deeper contemplation about the God of New Jerusalem himself, the original Old One. 

Theology and H.P. Lovecraft
Edited by Austin M. Freeman
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2022; 290pp

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