Perhaps God Is Mad: Azathoth and the Madness of the Universe

There is a possibility that theology is reluctant to contemplate and that atheism sometimes dismisses too quickly. What if God were neither good nor evil? What if the problem were not His morality, but His very sanity? What if the world, with all its suffering, were the product not of an evil design, but of cosmic madness?

One evening, over dinner, I found myself thinking of Azathoth, the most unsettling deity in the literary universe of H. P. Lovecraft. Not Cthulhu, not the other Great Old Ones, but Azathoth himself: the blind idiot god, the primordial chaos that babbles and raves at the center of infinity, indifferent to everything human beings call good, evil, justice, and love.

Azathoth does not need to be evil. It is enough that he does not know what he is doing.

THE QUESTION IS NOT WHETHER GOD IS GOOD

For millennia, humanity has tried to explain evil. Religions have imagined benevolent deities, destructive powers, and cosmic wars between opposing principles. In the ancient Iranian world, Zoroastrianism developed a vision in which the beneficent principle of Ahura Mazda stands in opposition to the destructive spirit known as Angra Mainyu, later identified in tradition with Ahriman.

It is a powerful solution: evil is not attributed entirely to the principle of goodness, but traced to an opposing force. The world becomes the theater of a conflict.

Yet this explanation leaves other questions unanswered. Why does such a conflict exist in the first place? Why does suffering strike even those who have done nothing to deserve it? And why does cruelty so often seem to achieve what righteousness cannot?

Christian tradition answers that God is love. Other believers argue that the human mind cannot comprehend the divine plan. Atheists may conclude that a universe so indifferent has no need for a creator.

And yet, when we look at the world, all these positions collide with a reality that refuses to be tamed.

THE TEARS OF THE INNOCENT

Think of the children in cancer wards. Of the people who die beneath the bombs without ever having chosen a war. Of those who devote their lives to others and are repaid with ingratitude, while those who manipulate, humiliate, and destroy manage to build successful lives.

Think of the victims of sadists, predators, and violent people. Of those who suffer injustice without ever obtaining redress, while those responsible carry on as though nothing happened.

No answer can give a dead child back their life. No philosophical formula can make suffering just simply because someone manages to fit it into a larger design.

This is the point at which the problem of evil ceases to be an intellectual exercise and becomes a wound.

To say that God is evil would be presumptuous: it would mean attributing intentions to Him that we cannot know. But declaring Him good, all-powerful, and perfectly loving while the world produces immeasurable suffering also requires an act of faith that not everyone can make.

What if both alternatives were wrong?

AZATHOTH, THE GOD WHO DOES NOT KNOW

The great insight of Lovecraft's cosmic horror is that the universe may not be organized around humanity, its hopes, or its morality. Reality may be vastly greater than our categories and utterly indifferent to our expectations.

Azathoth takes this idea to its most disturbing imaginative extreme. He is not the ruler of a hellish kingdom who punishes the good and rewards the wicked. He is not a tyrant who persecutes human beings to achieve some purpose. He is an embodiment of blind chaos, a force that offers not even the comfort of a recognizable intention.

An evil God, after all, would still be a God we could understand. His cruelty would have a meaning, however terrible. We could hate Him, rebel against Him, fight Him.

But how do you rebel against something that cannot even distinguish between what it creates and what it destroys?

Perhaps our tragedy lies precisely here: we are creatures who search for moral meaning in a reality that may contain none.

We would not necessarily be punished. We would not necessarily be tested. Nor would we necessarily be abandoned.

We might simply be here.

WHY DO THE BAD GUYS WIN?

Reality does not always confirm our belief that goodness should be rewarded. Ruthless people can exploit trust, ignore their scruples, and shift the cost of their decisions onto others. Those who possess empathy may hesitate in the face of suffering that a cynic does not even consider.

Of course, not all wicked people win, and not all good people lose. Solidarity exists. So do courage, hard-won justice, and lives saved. But there is no universal law guaranteeing that every victim will be compensated or every perpetrator punished.

Children's stories need endings in which the good prevail. Real life, however, is under no obligation to follow the narrative structure of a fairy tale.

Perhaps this is why the idea of a universe governed by a perfectly benevolent will becomes so difficult to sustain: not because goodness does not exist, but because its victory is not guaranteed.

What if madness were a metaphor for this absence of guarantees? What if what we call evil were not always the expression of malicious intent, but also the result of a world with no overarching moral direction?

PERHAPS GOD IS MAD

I am not claiming that God is mad. I have no evidence to support such a claim. And perhaps no one can know whether there is a consciousness behind the universe, a will, an impersonal principle, or nothing at all.

But the hypothesis deserves to be articulated, at least as a philosophical provocation.

Perhaps God is not the judge we imagined. Perhaps He is not the loving father we were promised. Perhaps He is not even the demon we would like to blame in order to give our suffering a face.

Perhaps, if He exists, He cannot comprehend what is happening. Or perhaps the question itself is misguided, because we attribute a mind and a personality to something that has nothing human about it.

From this perspective, the tears of the innocent would not be the price of a lesson, a test of faith, or a necessary step toward some greater good. They would simply be tears. Suffering without any justification we can know. An injustice that remains an injustice even when no one can make it right.

And so the question changes. No longer: Why does God allow evil? But rather: Why do we keep expecting the universe to be just?

Perhaps we need to believe that someone, somewhere, is keeping score. That every wrong will be made right, every victim redeemed, every perpetrator judged. Because the alternative is unbearable: some people suffer for no reason, some injustices are never remedied, and the universe owes no one an explanation.

And yet, even if the cosmos were blind, we are not obliged to become blind ourselves. If there is no justice guaranteed from above, human justice becomes all the more necessary. If the world does not spontaneously distinguish between victims and perpetrators, we must do so.

Perhaps God is mad.

Or perhaps we are so desperately human that we cannot accept a universe that owes us no explanation.

But one question remains, suspended above all the others: if the world is not governed by justice, if suffering follows no design, and if goodness guarantees no victory, what prevents us from becoming like those who make us suffer?

Perhaps it is with this question, rather than with the certainty that God is good, that our humanity can begin.

The Donkey Climbing the Stairs

When merit isn't enough

Every society teaches its children that ability matters.

Work hard. Prepare yourself. Do your best. If you are good enough, you will have a chance.

Then, sooner or later, many of us discover the uncomfortable truth: merit can open a door, but it does not always decide who gets through it.

Sometimes the door opens for the person who knows someone.

Sometimes it stays closed for the person who was better prepared.

Sometimes the rules are followed exactly as written—and yet the outcome still feels profoundly unfair.

That realization can arrive early in life. Mine did.

I was eight years old.

The story behind the poem

Two boys I knew had attended the same school. Both were capable and well prepared. One had connections that helped him move forward and eventually reach the Military Academy in Modena.

The other was rejected during the selection process after a medical examination identified a physical problem.

What stayed with me was not simply that one succeeded and the other failed.

It was the suspicion that the difference between them had not been their ability.

If someone cannot defeat you on preparation, there is always another way to stop you.

I was only eight, so I had no vocabulary for what I was witnessing. I didn't know about cronyism, patronage, social networks, or what I would later call relational capital.

I only knew that something wasn't right.

Years later, that memory became the starting point for the first poem I ever wrote: The Donkey Climbing the Stairs.

The title came from the absurdity of the image itself: a donkey somehow climbing stairs while someone who actually knows how to climb is left behind.

Injustice becomes different when it happens to someone you know

As a child, I had already been deeply disturbed by images of historical violence.

I remember seeing films depicting the massacres of Native Americans by the U.S. cavalry. I remember images of Nazi concentration camps and the horrors inflicted on prisoners.

Those events were immense. They belonged to history, to distant places and distant generations.

But the story of those two boys was different.

It wasn't history.

It was my world.

I knew the boy who moved forward. I knew the boy who was stopped.

That makes injustice harder to look away from.

Perhaps this is where our sense of justice really begins—not with political theory or moral philosophy, but with the first moment when we look at something happening in front of us and instinctively think:

This is not right.

Privilege rarely looks dramatic

As I grew older, I realized that favoritism does not always announce itself with a major political scandal or a coveted public job.

Sometimes it is much smaller.

A connection that moves someone ahead on a waiting list.

A phone call that gets an appointment sooner.

A professional who makes an exception.

A favor that is quietly returned.

A door that opens because someone knows the person on the other side.

None of these things, taken separately, seems capable of changing a society.

But societies are not shaped only by spectacular acts of corruption.

They are also shaped by thousands of ordinary exceptions.

The problem begins when the formal rules remain equal while access to those rules becomes unequal.

The law may be the same for everyone. The path through it may not be.

The child who wanted justice

When I wrote The Donkey Climbing the Stairs, I had no theory of power.

I wasn't trying to explain Italian society.

I wasn't writing about political parties or ideology.

I was simply trying to give a shape to something that had disturbed me as a child.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder how much of that eight-year-old boy is still inside me.

Because growing older changes our relationship with justice.

Children tend to believe that if something is wrong, someone should fix it.

Adults learn that the world is much harder to repair.

We discover that injustice is not an exception to human history. It is one of its recurring features.

We discover that we cannot fight every battle.

And eventually we face a more uncomfortable question:

What do you do when you realize that the world will not necessarily become fair?

The Zealot, the Pharisee, and the Sadducee

I have sometimes imagined three possible answers.

The first is the Zealot: the person who continues fighting injustice wherever he encounters it, regardless of the personal cost.

The second is the Pharisee, in my own contemporary interpretation of the figure: someone who publicly presents himself as a defender of justice, but may eventually turn that struggle into a career, a social identity, or a source of power.

And then there is the Sadducee.

The Sadducee, as I imagine him, has a different ambition.

He doesn't want to save the world.

He wants to reach a position where the world can no longer determine his fate.

He settles his own grievances. He secures his own position. He makes himself sufficiently strong, connected, or independent that he no longer needs society to be fair to him.

There is something undeniably cynical about that position.

But it raises an uncomfortable question:

Is open self-interest more honest than pretending that personal ambition is a universal cause?

I don't have a final answer.

Perhaps because I still contain all three figures.

The child who wanted justice.

The adult who understands power.

And the man who sometimes wonders whether the safest way to escape injustice is not to defeat it, but to become strong enough that it can no longer reach you.

What happens when justice is no longer guaranteed?

Maybe growing up does not mean losing our belief in justice.

Maybe it means discovering that justice is not guaranteed.

From there, people choose different paths.

Some keep fighting.

Some adapt.

Some enter the system hoping to change it.

Some enter the system because they want a share of its advantages.

And some eventually decide that their only realistic goal is to protect themselves.

I still don't know which path I will ultimately take.

But I know where the question began.

It began with two boys.

One kept climbing.

The other was stopped.

And somewhere behind that memory is an eight-year-old child who did not yet know the words clientelism, privilege, or relational capital.

He didn't need them.

He only needed to see an injustice.

And perhaps that is the strange thing about growing older:

we spend years learning the language to describe what a child can recognize in a single moment.