An unusual and refreshingly fresh Catholic take on Lovecraft, in the new article on “H.P. Lovecraft and a Godless Universe”. Making a point I don’t recall hearing put so bluntly, before now…
Lovecraft undermines the notion that atheism and the rejection of religion would lead to the elevation of mankind. […] It isn’t [human] triumph and unrestrained glory and progress; it is madness and idiocy and filth [… This] is a strange combination, one that is not found often; Lovecraft rejected God, but he had no hopes for a world without Him.
Lovecraft himself made the point eloquently enough in the letters, though at more length. To the effect that the quainter Christian trappings were something he valued for their connection to the rooted life of the past and the ways of his forefathers. And that more broadly religion was useful in maintaining a time-worn social coherence among the general populace — at a time (c. 1919-1936) when forces of both the right and left were elsewhere seeking to establish (often by force) their own ‘new world built on new foundations’.
I’ve got this in my commonplace book, and it seems to be quoted in a lot of places:
All rationalism tends to minimise the value and importance of life, and to decrease the sum total of human happiness. In many cases the truth may cause suicidal or nearly suicidal depression.
— H.P. Lovecraft