But especially in love, only counterfeit, from parents exist nowadays. We have all been taught to mistrust everybody emotionally, from parents downwards, or upwards. Don’t trust anybody with your real emotions: if you’ve got any: that is the slogan of today. Trust them with your money, even, but never with your feelings. They are bound to trample on them.
I believe there has never been an age of greater mistrust between persons than ours today: under a superficial but quite genuine social trust. Very few of my friends would pick my pocket, or let me sit on a chair where I might hurt myself. But practically all my friends would turn my real emotions to ridicule. They can’t each implies a fundamental emotional sympathy. And hence, counterfeit love, which there is no escaping.
And with counterfeit emotions there is no real sex at all. Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle. Once come down to sex, and the emotional swindle must collapse. But in all the approaches to sex, the emotional swindle intensifies more and more. Till you get there. Then collapse.
Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless, devastating against false love. The peculiar hatred of people who have not loved one another, but who have pretended to, even perhaps have imagined they really did love, is one of the phenomena of our time. The phenomenon, of course, belongs to all time. But today it is almost universal. People who thought they loved one another dearly, dearly, and went on for years, ideal: lo! Suddenly the most profound and vivid hatred appears. If it doesn’t come out fairly young, it saves itself till the happy couple are nearing fifty, the time of the great sexual change- and then- cataclysm!
Nothing is more startling. Nothing is more staggering, in our age, than the intensity of the hatred people, men and women, feel for one another when they have once ‘loved’ one another. It breaks out in the most extraordinary ways. And when you know people intimately, it is almost universal. It is the charwoman as much as the mistress, and the duchess as much as the policeman’s wife.
Now the real tragedy is here: that we are none of us all of a piece, none of us all counterfeit, or all true love. And in many a marriage, in among the counterfeit there flickers a little flame of the true thing, on both sides. The tragedy is, that in an age peculiarly conscious of counterfeit, peculiarly suspicious of substitute and swindle in emotion, particularly sexual emotion, the rage and mistrust against the counterfeit element is likely to overwhelm and extinguish the small, true flame of real loving communion, which might have made two lives happy. Herein lies the danger of harping only on the counterfeit and the swindle of emotion, as most ‘advanced’ writers do. Though they do it, of course, to counterbalance the hugely greater swindle of the sentimental ‘sweet’ writers.
Now when brilliant young people like this talk to me about sex: or scorn to: I say nothing. There is nothing to say. But I feel a terrible weariness. To them sex means, just plainly and simply, a lady’s underclothing, and the fumbling therewith. They have read all the love literature, Anna Karenina, all the rest, and looked at to today, sex means to them meaningless young women and expensive underthings. Whether they are young men from Oxford, or working- men, it is the same.
The woman exposes her flesh more and more, and the more she exposes, the more men are sexually repelled by her. But let us not forget that the men are socially thrilled, while sexually repelled.
But we are very mixed, all of us, and creatures of many diverse and often opposing desires, the very men who encourage women to be most daring and sexless complain most bitterly of the sexlessness of women. The same the women. the women who adore men so tremendously for their social smartness and sexlessness as males, hate them most bitterly for not being ‘men.’ But at certain hours in their lives, all individuals hate counterfeit sex with deadly and maddened hate, and those who have dealt it out most perhaps have the wildest hate of it, in the other person- or persons.
But when women’s flesh arouses no sort of desire, something is specially wrong! Something is sadly wrong. For the naked arms of women today asrouses a feeling of flippancy, cynicism,a dn vulgarity which is indeed the very last feeling to go to church with, if you have any respect for the Church. The bare arms of women in an Italian church are really a mark of disrespect, given the tradition.
Now this question of sex and marriage is of paramount importance. Our social life is established on marriage, and marriage, the sociologists say, is established upon property. Marriage has found the best- method of conserving property and stimulating production. Which is all there is to it.
For my part, I have to say NO! every time. And having said it, we have to come back and consider the famous saying, that perhaps the greatest contribution to the social life of man made by Christianity is- marriage. Christianity brought marriage into the world: marriage as we know it. Christianity established the little autonomy of the family within the greater rule of the State. Christianity made marriage in some respects inviolate, not to be violated by the State. It is marriage, perhaps, which has given man the best of his freedom, given him his little kingdom of his own within the big kingdom of the State, given him his foothold of independence on which to stand and resist an unjust State. Man and wife, a king and queen with one or two subjects, and a few square yards of territory of their own: this, really, is marriage. It is true freedom because it is a true fulfillment, for man, woman, and children.
And the Church created marriage by making it a sacrament, a sacrament of man and woman united in the sex communion, and never to be separated, except by death. And even when separated by death, still not freedom the marriage. Marriage, as far as the individual went, eternal. Marriage, making one complete body out of two incomplete ones, and providing for the complex development of the man’s soul and the woman’s soul in unison, throughout a life- time. Marriage sacred and inviolable, the great way of earthly fulfillment for man and woman, in unison, under the spiritual rule of the Church.
This is Christianity’s great contribution to the life of man, and it is only too easily overlooked. Is it, or is it not, a great step in the direction of life- fulfillment of man and woman, or is it a frustration? It is a very important question indeed, and every man and woman must answer it.
But supposing I am neither bent on saving my own soul nor other people’s souls? Supposing Salvation seems incomprehensible to me, as I confess it does? ‘being saved’ seems to me just jargon, the jargon of self- conceit. Supposing, then, that I cannot see this Saviour and Salvation stuff, supposing that I see the soul as something which must be developed and fulfilled, to the very end; what then?
The rhythm of life itself was preserved by the Church hour by hour, day by day, season by season, year by year, epoch by epoch, down among the people, and the wild coruscations were accommodated to this permanent rhythm. We feel it, in the south , in the country, when we hear the jangle of the bells at dawn, at noon, at sunset, making the hours with the sound of mass or prayers. It is the rhythm of the daily sun. We feel it in the John’s Day, all Saints, all Souls. This is the wheeling of the year, the movement of the sun through solstice and equinox, the coming of the seasons, the sadness of Lent, the delight of Easter, the wonder of Pentecost, the fires of St. John, the candles on the graves of All Souls, the lit- up tree of Christmas, all representing kindled rhythmic emotions in the souls of men and women. And men experience the great rhythm of emotion man- wise, women experience it womanwise, and in the unison of men and women it is complete.
Augustine said that God created the universe new every day: and to the living, emotion soul this is true. Every dawn dawns upon an entirely new universe, every Easter light up an entirely new glory of a new world opening in utterly new flower. And the soul of man and the soul of woman is in the same way, with the infinite delight of life and the ever- newness of life. So a man and a woman are new to one another throughout a life- time, in the rhythm of marriage that matches the rhythm of marriage that matches the rhythm of the year.
APOCALYPSE AND THE WRITINGS ON REVELATION
Firs
t published in 1931, this is Lawrence’s last book, written during the winter of 1929, when he was dying. It is a radical criticism of civilisation and a statement of the author’s unwavering belief in man’s power to create ‘a new heaven and a new earth’. The work poses a system of thought on religion, art, psychology and politics, and has been noted as Lawrence’s final attempt to convey his vision of man and the universe.
Vence, France, where Lawrence died, shortly after writing ‘Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation’
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER I
Apocalypse means simply Revelation, though there is nothing simple about this one, since men have puzzled their brains for nearly two thousand years to find out what, exactly, is revealed in all its orgy of mystification, and of all the books in the Bible, they find Revelation perhaps the least attractive.
That is my own first feeling about it. From earliest years right into manhood, like any other nonconformist child I had the Bible poured every day into my helpless consciousness, till there came almost a saturation point. Long before one could think or even vaguely understand, this Bible language, these ‘portions’ of the Bible were douched over the mind and consciousness, till they became soaked in, they became an influence which affected all the processes of emotion and thought. So that today, although I have ‘forgotten’ my Bible, I need only begin to read a chapter to realise that I ‘know’ it with an almost nauseating fixity. And I must confess, my first reaction is one of dislike, repulsion, and even resentment. My very instincts resent the Bible.
The reason is now fairly plain to me. Not only was the Bible, in portions, poured into the childish consciousness day in, day out, year in, year out, willy-nilly, whether the consciousness could assimilate it or not, but also it was day in, day out, year in, year out expounded, dogmatically, and always morally expounded, whether it was in day- school or Sunday-school, at home or in Band of Hope or Christian Endeavour. The interpretation was always the same, whether it was a Doctor of Divinity in the pulpit, or the big blacksmith who was my Sunday-school teacher. Not only was the Bible verbally trodden into the consciousness, like innumerable foot-prints treading a surface hard, but the foot-prints were always mechanically alike, the interpretation was fixed, so that all real interest was lost.
The process defeats its own ends. While the Jewish poetry penetrates the emotions and the imagination, and the Jewish morality penetrates the instincts, the mind becomes stubborn, resistant, and at last repudiates the whole Bible authority, and turns with a kind of repugnance away from the Bible altogether. And this is the condition of many men of my generation.
Now a book lives as long as it is unfathomed. Once it is fathomed, it dies at once. It is an amazing thing, how utterly different a book will be, if I read it again after five years. Some books gain immensely, they are a new thing. They are so astonishingly different, they make a man question his own identity. Again, other books lose immensely. I read War and Peace once more, and was amazed to find how little it moved me, I was almost aghast to think of the raptures I had once felt, and now felt no more.
So it is. Once a book is fathomed, once it is known, and its meaning is fixed or established, it is dead. A book only lives while it has power to move us, and move us differently; so long as we find it different every time we read it. Owing to the flood of shallow books which really are exhausted in one reading, the modern mind tends to think every book is the same, finished in one reading. But it is not so. And gradually the modern mind will realise it again. The real joy of a book lies in reading it over and over again, and always finding it different, coming upon another meaning, another level of meaning. It is, as usual, a question of values: we are so overwhelmed with quantities of books, that we hardly realise any more that a book can be valuable, valuable like a jewel, or a lovely picture, into which you can look deeper and deeper and get a more profound experience every time. It is far, far better to read one book six times, at intervals, than to read six several books. Because if a certain book can call you to read it six times, it will be a deeper and deeper experience each time, and will enrich the whole soul, emotional and mental. Whereas six books read once only are merely an accumulation of superficial interest, the burdensome accumulation of modern days, quantity without real value.
We shall now see the reading public dividing again into two groups: the vast mass, who read for amusement and for momentary interest, and the small minority, who only want the books which have value to themselves, books which yield experience, and still deeper experience.
The Bible is a book that has been temporarily killed for us, or for some of us, by having its meaning arbitrarily fixed. We know it so thoroughly, in its superficial or popular meaning, that it is dead, it gives us nothing any more. Worse still, by old habit amounting almost to instinct, it imposes on us a whole state of feeling which is now repugnant to us. We detest the ‘chapel’ and the Sunday-school feeling which the Bible must necessarily impose on us. We want to get rid of all that vulgarity — for vulgarity it is.
Perhaps the most detestable of all these books of the Bible, taken superficially, is Revelation. By the time I was ten, I am sure I had heard, and read, that book ten times over, even without knowing or taking real heed. And without ever knowing or thinking about it, I am sure it always roused in me a real dislike. Without realising it, I must, from earliest childhood, have detested the pie-pie mouthing, solemn, portentous, loud way in which everybody read the Bible, whether it was parsons or teachers or ordinary persons. I dislike the ‘parson’ voice through and through my bones. And this voice, I remember, was always at its worst when mouthing out some portion of Revelation. Even the phrases that still fascinate me I cannot recall without shuddering, because I can still hear the portentous declamation of a nonconformist clergyman: ‘And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called ‘ there my memory suddenly stops, deliberately blotting out the next words: ‘Faithful and True.’ I hated, even as a child, allegory: people having the names of mere qualities, like this somebody on a white horse, called ‘Faithful and True’. In the same way I could never read Pilgrim’s Progress. When as a small boy I learnt from Euclid that: ‘The whole is greater than the part,’ I immediately knew that that solved the problem of allegory for me. A man is more than mere Faithfulness and Truth, and when people are merely personifications of qualities they cease to be people for me. Though as a young man I almost loved Spenser and his Faerie Queene, I had to gulp at his allegory.
But the Apocalypse is, and always was from earliest childhood, to me antipathetic. In the first place its splendiferous imagery is distasteful because of its complete un- naturalness. ‘And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.
‘And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.
And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying. Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.’
A passage like that irritated and annoyed my boyish mind because of its pompous unnaturalness. If it is imagery, it is imagery which cannot be imagined: for how can four b
easts be ‘full of eyes before and behind’, and how can they be ‘in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne’? They can’t be somewhere and somewhere else at the same time. But that is how the Apocalypse is.
Again, much of the imagery is utterly unpoetic and arbitrary, some of it really ugly, like all the wadings in blood, and the rider’s shirt dipped in blood, and people washen in the blood of the Lamb. Also such phrases as ‘the wrath of the Lamb’ are on the face of them ridiculous. But this is the grand phraseology and imagery of the nonconformist chapels, all the Bethels of England and America, and all the Salvation armies. And vital religion is said to be found, in all ages, down among the uneducated people.
Down among the uneducated people you will still find Revelation rampant. I think it has had, and perhaps still has more influence, actually, than the Gospels or the great Epistles. The huge denunciation of Kings and Rulers, and of the whore that sitteth upon the waters is entirely sympathetic to a Tuesday evening congregation of colliers and colliers’ wives, on a black winter night, in the great barnlike Pentecost Chapel. And the capital letters of the name: mystery, babylon the great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth thrill the old colliers today as they thrilled the Scotch Puritan peasants and the more ferocious of the early Christians. To the underground early Christians, Babylon the great meant Rome, the great city and the great empire which persecuted them. And great was the satisfaction of denouncing her and bringing her to utter, utter woe and destruction, with all her kings, her wealth and her lordliness. After the Reformation, Babylon was once more identified with Rome, but this time it meant the Pope, and in Protestant and nonconformist England and Scotland out rolled the denunciations of John the Divine, with the grand cry: ‘Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.’ Nowadays the words are still mouthed out, and sometimes still they are hurled at the Pope and the Roman Catholics, who seem to be lifting their heads up again. But more often, today, Babylon means the rich and wicked people who live in luxury and harlotry somewhere in the vague distance, London, New York, or Paris worst of all, and who never once set foot in ‘chapel’, all their lives.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 982