An answer to Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft began his seminal 1927 essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” with these words: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” I disagree, and here’s why.

Lovecraft was a famously rapacious reader, not only of the arts but of the sciences, and he strove to enhance his fiction with the real-world findings of astronomy, geography, and especially anthropology. Indeed, in his own day, his work might well have fallen under the heading of what we would now call “hard sci-fi”—i.e., fiction rigorously predicated on authentic science—although it feels more like space opera in the post-Asimov era of the genre. Sadly, the prevailing view of evolution in Lovecraft’s time was no less suffused with anti-religious anti-science than the contemporary one, summed up long ago by Chesterton as “secret pessimism that loves to make primitive man a crawling creature, whose body is filth and whose soul is fear” (The Everlasting Man).

The “timorocentric” view (if you will) of mankind is thus rooted partly in popular pseudo-science, but also in idiosyncratic pseudo-philosophy. In a letter to Farnsworth Wright in 1927 (the same year he first published “Supernatural Horror in Literature”), Lovecraft stated, “All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. . . One must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.”

This is silly. We have no need of recourse to any transcendental vision to refute this view on its own terms. The idea that man is practically non-existent by reason of being physically smaller than some of the objects in his vicinity, is manifestly self-contradictory: without the constituent parts of the cosmos, there is no cosmos; without hydrogen atoms, there could be no stars. Anyone who believes himself in agreement with Lovecraft’s assertion on this matter simply hasn’t thought it through.

Identifying the sources of his timorocentrism, however, is not in itself an answer to this diseased belief. The truth is that, in the end, the only argument which truly persuades us is the ad hominem. Successful preachers of the Gospel spread their truths primarily not by preaching but by personal holiness. And Lovecraft’s philosophy of cosmic indifferentism very starkly leads to the unhallowed antipodes, where any and all virtue (as he himself continuously proclaimed) is impossible. He wasn’t a brave man; and it is profoundly typical of the disordered conscience to insist upon the universality of its disorder. To him, the strongest emotion was indeed fear, and the same, he thought, must surely hold true for everyone—but the universalization is undefended and, self-evidently, altogether subjective. Perhaps if we substituted “might be” for “is” in his famous adage, we could at least find ourselves bobbing in some peripheral eddy of potential truth—if we had no recourse to a transcendental vision.

But we are not without such recourse. We’re Catholics, and we know that the Gifts of the Holy Spirit are sevenfold: Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety, and Fear of the Lord. Now, that final Gift is also translated as Wonder & Awe. This is what our forebears felt, and what we feel, on encountering the Numinous, the Otherworldly, the Divine. Though much like terror, it is also much like joy. This is not the kind of fear that makes a man cower and slink away into the muck. Yes, it does make him cower at first—“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10)—but the wiser he grows, the taller he stands. If, in that endlessly quoted sentence that forms the thematic core of H.P. Lovecraft’s whole body of work, we replaced “fear” with “Wonder and Awe”—then, almost one hundred years after he wrote those miserable, despairing words, we would finally strike the bedrock of an absolute and everlasting truth.