of voices swells momentarily to a peak, washing up from below the balcony outside and telling of a tensely waiting throng before settling back into an undulating trough.
He nods and returns to the pages.
ITS TRANSCENDENCE. In the Book of Isaiah we encounter a Yahweh who protects the cosmic order from destructive incursions by the ancient chaos serpents but also launches His own cosmos- shaking assaults against that order, all leading up to a concluding note of horror in the book’s worm-infested final verse that has resounded down through the ages and brought no end of trouble for biblical exegetes, since its literary and theological effect is to stamp the book with the impossible message that Yahweh is the ultimate chaos monster who only saves His creation from the others so that He can destroy it Himself. (Surely you remember this subversive reading of the Isaian text from my last book, which sold relatively well but drew such scathing condemnation from my fellow theologians.)
Is it possible, can we conclude, that these and a thousand other aspects of our tradition were always both more and less than they seemed — that they were, in a word, other than they seemed; that instead of pointing directly toward spiritual and metaphysical truths, the great concepts, words, and icons of our tradition were in fact mere signals, hints, clues, that gestured awkwardly toward a reality whose true character was and is far different from and perhaps even opposite to the surface meanings?
Consider: humanity’s dual nature — conscious and unconscious, deliberate and autonomic, free and determined, physical and spiritual, cerebral and reptilian — has always singled us out as the earth’s only true amphibians. We have always acted from two centers and stood with feet planted in two separate worlds. Now we have seen this duality ripped apart or brought to fruition — how to regard it is unclear — as those elements of reality represented by our reptilian brainbase, and by the darkest archetypes of our collective unconscious, and by the corresponding monstrous elements in our mythological traditions, have fulfilled a nexus of ancient race-level fears.
Does this perhaps indicate something of our role in what is transpiring? Do we perhaps serve a necessary function as bridges between the realms, simply by the fact of our fundamental duality?
I turn my eyes skyward and see the gargoylish figures still commanding the open air between the coiling columns of smoke. Rubbery black demonoid shapes with smooth blank faces and leathery wings swoop and careen like flakes of ash on a hot wind.
A moment later I stumble on a fragment of granite, and the involuntary ducking of my head proves perfectly timed for avoiding a surely fatal encounter with a squid-like shape twenty feet long that bloats and shimmers through the air in a rhythmic pulsating pattern like a sea creature propelling itself through deep water. I stare at its underside, sick with terror, as it slides past and over me, but then note with relief that the fat torpedo- shaped body is turned so that its great blank eye looks laterally instead of downward. Had the thing been looking down, it would have done what these sentinels always do when they detect their prey: it would have paused directly over me and regarded me through that alien eye with an equally alien intelligence. Then it would have bunched itself into a knotted mass of claw-tipped tentacles ringed around a dilating sphincter-mouth set with concentric rows of needled teeth, and dropped upon me with inconceivable speed and ferocity. I have already seen those serpentine tentacles enmesh many a man in their deadly loops. I have heard the human flesh sizzle and scorch on contact with that corrosive extra-dimensional matter. I have watched shrieking people disappear into that churning meat grinder of a mouth.
As incongruous as it may sound, I now express thanks, not just passive resignation but a positive gratitude, for the waking nightmare that has overtaken us. For those things that otherwise seem so horrific in their surface appearances can actually serve to awaken us from our dogmatic slumbers and lead us to a more vital and viable faith, a faith that is unshakeable, unassailable, impervious to doubt: a true theological exemplar of Luther’s Ein Feste Burg, although this mighty fortress, if rendered in literal brick and stone, would embody a warped architectural schema of a pointedly nonhuman and non-rational nature.
It would be so easy to rearrange some of these fragments, to clarify their individual and collective meanings by connecting some of their philosophical edges where they obviously cohere. But despite his pleading for permission to do so, the rule is firm: the pages and their contents must remain in their received order, and must be met and dealt with in that order and no other. Any interpretation must emerge from and pointedly account for that canonically unalterable jumble in its precise given form. A new Revelation, so many members of the hierarchy have said to him and to each other on so many different occasions since the papers first came into their possession at a time when the global nightmare was just beginning to invade from the shadows. A new scripture. A third testament. They have said such things in tones of awe, and exultation, and confusion, and horror, and, increasingly, with a dogmatic air of fanatical certitude.
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
