It is very nice, if you are poor and not humble — and the poor may be obsequious, but they are almost never truly humble in the Christian sense — to bring your grand enemies down to utter destruction and discomfiture, while you yourself rise up to grandeur. And nowhere does this happen so splendiferously as in Revelation. The great enemy in the eyes of Jesus was the Pharisee, harping on the letter of the law. But the Pharisee is too remote and subtle for the collier and the factory-worker. The Salvation Army at the street corner rarely raves about Pharisees. It raves about the Blood of the Lamb, and Babylon, Sion, and Sinners, the great harlot, and angels that cry Woe, Woe, Woe! and Vials that pour out horrible plagues. And above all, about being Saved, and sitting on the Throne with the Lamb, and reigning in Glory, and having Everlasting Life, and living in a grand city made of jasper, with gates of pearl: a city that ‘had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it’. If you listen to the Salvation Army you will hear that they are going to be very grand. Very grand indeed, since they get to heaven. Then they’ll show you what’s what. Then you’ll be put in your place, you superior person, you Babylon: down in hell and in brimstone.
This is entirely the tone of Revelation. What we realise when we have read the precious book a few times is that John the Divine had on the face of it a grandiose scheme for wiping out and annihilating everybody who wasn’t of the elect, the chosen people, in short, and of climbing up himself right on to the throne of God. With nonconformity, the chapel people took over to themselves the Jewish idea of the chosen people. They were ‘it’, the elect, or the ‘saved’. And they took over the Jewish idea of ultimate triumph and reign of the chosen people. From being bottom dogs they were going to be top dogs: in Heaven. If not sitting actually on the throne, they were going to sit in the lap of the enthroned Lamb. It is doctrine you can hear any night from the Salvation Army or in any Bethel or Pentecost Chapel. If it is not Jesus, it is John. If it is not Gospel, it is Revelation. It is popular religion, as distinct from thoughtful religion.
CHAPTER II
Or at least, it was popular religion when i was a boy. And I remember, as a child, I used to wonder over the curious sense of self-glory which one felt in the uneducated leaders, the men especially of the Primitive Methodist Chapels. They were not on the whole pious or mealy-mouthed or objectionable, these colliers who spoke heavy dialect and ran the ‘Pentecost’. They certainly were not humble or apologetic. No, they came in from the pit and sat down to their dinners with a bang, and their wives and daughters ran to wait on them quite cheerfully, and their sons obeyed them without overmuch resentment. The home was rough yet not unpleasant, and there was an odd sense of wild mystery or power about, as if the chapel men really had some dispensation of rude power from above. Not love, but a rough and rather wild, somewhat ‘special’ sense of power. They were so sure, and as a rule their wives were quite humble to them. They ran a chapel, so they could run their household. I used to wonder over it, and rather enjoy it. But even I thought it rather ‘common’. My mother, who was Congregationalist, never set foot in a Primitive Methodist Chapel in her life, I suppose. And she was certainly not prepared to be humble to her husband. If he’d been a real cheeky chapel man, she would no doubt have been much meeker with him. Cheek, that was the outstanding quality of chapel men. But a special kind of cheek, authorised from above, as it were. And I know now, a good deal of this special kind of religious cheek was backed up by the Apocalypse.
It was not till many years had gone by, and I had read something of comparative religion and the history of religion, that I realised what a strange book it was that had inspired the colliers on the black Tuesday nights in Pentecost or Beauvale Chapel to such a queer sense of special authority and of religious cheek. Strange marvellous black nights of the north Midlands, with the gas-light hissing in the chapel, and the roaring of the strong-voiced colliers. Popular religion: a religion of self-glorification and power, forever! and of darkness. No wailing ‘Lead, kindly Light!’ about it.
The longer one lives, the more one realises that there are two kinds of Christianity, the one focussed on Jesus and the Command: Love one another! — and the other focussed, not on Paul or Peter or John the Beloved, but on the Apocalypse. There is the Christianity of tenderness. But as far as I can see, it is utterly pushed aside by the Christianity of self-glorification: the self-glorification of the humble.
There’s no getting away from it, mankind falls forever into the two divisions of aristocrats and democrats. The purest aristocrats during the Christian era have taught democracy. And the purest democrats try to turn themselves into the most absolute aristocracy. Jesus was an aristocrat, so was John the Apostle, and Paul. It takes a great aristocrat to be capable of great tenderness and gentleness and unselfishness: the tenderness and gentleness of strength. From the democrat you may often get the tenderness and gentleness of weakness: that’s another thing. But you usually get a sense of toughness.
We are speaking now not of political parties, but of the two sorts of human nature: those that feel themselves strong in their souls, and those that feel themselves weak. Jesus and Paul and the greater John felt themselves strong. John of Patmos felt himself weak, in his very soul.
In Jesus’s day, the inwardly strong men everywhere had lost their desire to rule on earth. They wished to withdraw their strength from earthly rule and earthly power, and to apply it to another form of life. Then the weak began to rouse up and to feel inordinately conceited, they began to express their rampant hate of the ‘obvious’ strong ones, the men in worldly power.
So that religion, the Christian religion especially, became dual. The religion of the strong taught renunciation and love. And the religion of the weak taught Down with the strong and the powerful, and let the poor be glorified. Since there are always more weak people, than strong, in the world, the second sort of Christianity has triumphed and will triumph. If the weak are not ruled, they will rule, and there’s the end of it. And the rule of the weak is Down with the strong!
The grand biblical authority for this cry is the Apocalypse. The weak and pseudo-humble are going to wipe all worldly power, glory, and riches off the face of the earth, and then they, the truly weak, are going to reign. It will be a millennium of pseudo-humble saints, and gruesome to contemplate. But it is what religion stands for today: down with all strong, free life, let the weak triumph, let the pseudo-humble reign. The religion of the self-glorification of the weak, the reign of the pseudo-humble. This is the spirit of society today, religious and political.
CHAPTER III
And this was pretty well the religion of John of Patmos. They say he was an old man already when he finished the Apocalypse in the year A.D. 96: which is the date fixed by modern scholars, from ‘internal evidence’.
Now there were three Johns in early Christian history: John the Baptist, who baptised Jesus, and who apparently founded a religion, or at least a sect of his own, with strange doctrines that continued for many years after Jesus’s death; then there was the Apostle John, who was supposed to have written the Fourth Gospel and some Epistles; then there was this John of Patmos who lived in Ephesus and was sent to prison on Patmos for some religious offence against the Roman State. He was, however, released from his island after a term of years, returned to Ephesus, and lived, according to legend, to a great old age.
For a long time it was thought that the Apostle John, to whom we ascribe the Fourth Gospel, had written the Apocalypse also. But it cannot be that the same man wrote the two works, they are so alien to one another. The author of the Fourth Gospel was surely a cultured ‘Greek’ Jew, and one of the great inspirers of mystic, ‘loving’ Christianity. John of Patmos must have had a very different nature. He certainly has inspired very different feelings.
When we come to read it critically and seriously, we realise that the Apocalypse reveals a profoundly important Christian doctrine which has in it none of the real Christ, none of the real Gospel, none of the creative breath of Chris
tianity, and is nevertheless perhaps the most effectual doctrine in the Bible. That is, it has had a greater effect on second-rate people throughout the Christian ages, than any other book in the Bible. The Apocalypse of John is, as it stands, the work of a second-rate mind. It appeals intensely to second-rate minds in every country and every century.
Strangely enough, unintelligible as it is, it has no doubt been the greatest source of inspiration to the vast mass of Christian minds — the vast mass being always second rate — since the first century, and we realise, to our horror, that this is what we are up against today; not Jesus nor Paul, but John of Patmos.
The Christian doctrine of love even at its best was an evasion. Even Jesus was going to reign ‘hereafter’, when his ‘love’ would be turned into confirmed power. This business of reigning in glory hereafter went to the root of Christianity, and is, of course, only an expression of frustrated desire to reign here and now. The Jews would not be put off: they were determined to reign on earth, so after the Temple of Jerusalem was smashed for the second time, about 200 b.c., they started in to imagine the coming of a Messiah militant and triumphant, who would conquer the world. The Christians took this up as the Second Advent of Christ, when Jesus was coming to give the gentile world its final whipping, and establish a rule of saints. John of Patmos extended this previously modest rule of saints (about forty years) to the grand round number of a thousand years, and so the Millennium took hold of the imagination of men.
And so there crept into the New Testament the grand Christian enemy, the power-spirit. At the very last moment, when the devil had been so beautifully shut out, in he slipped, dressed in apocalyptic disguise, and enthroned himself at the end of the book as Revelation.
For Revelation, be it said once and for all, is the revelation of the undying will-to-power in man, and its sanctification, its final triumph. If you have to suffer martyrdom, and if all the universe has to be destroyed in the process, still, still, still, O Christian, you shall reign as a king and set your foot on the necks of the old bosses!
This is the message of Revelation.
And just as inevitably as Jesus had to have a Judas Iscariot among his disciples, so did there have to be a Revelation in the New Testament.
Why? Because the nature of man demands it, and will always demand it.
The Christianity of Jesus applies to a part of our nature only. There is a big part to which it does not apply. And to this part, as the Salvation Army will show you, Revelation does apply.
The religions of renunciation, meditation, and self-knowledge are for individuals alone. But man is individual only in part of his nature. In another great part of him, he is collective.
The religions of renunciation, meditation, self-knowledge, pure morality are for individuals, and even then, not for complete individuals. But they express the individual side of man’s nature. They isolate this side of his nature. And they cut off the other side of his nature, the collective side. The lowest stratum of society is always non-individual, so look there for the other manifestation of religion.
The religions of renunciation, like Buddhism or Christianity or Plato’s philosophy, are for aristocrats, aristocrats of the spirit. The aristocrats of the spirit are to find their fulfilment in self-realisation and in service. Serve the poor. Well and good. But whom are the poor going to serve? It is a grand question. And John of Patmos answers it. The poor are going to serve themselves, and attend to their own self- glorification. And by the poor we don’t mean the indigent merely; we mean the merely collective souls, terribly ‘middling’, who have no aristocratic singleness and alone- ness.
The vast mass are these middling souls. They have no aristocratic individuality, such as is demanded by Christ or Buddha or Plato. So they skulk in a mass and secretly are bent on their own ultimate self-glorification. The Patmossers.
Only when he is alone, can man be a Christian, a Buddhist, or a Platonist. The Christ statues and Buddha statues witness to this. When he is with other men, instantly distinction occurs, and levels are formed. As soon as he is with other men, Jesus is an aristocrat, a master. Buddha is always the Lord Buddha. Francis of Assisi, trying to be so humble, as a matter of fact finds a subtle means to absolute power over his followers. Shelley could not bear to be the aristocrat of his company. Lenin was a Tyrannus in shabby clothes.
So it is! Power is there, and always will be. As soon as two or three men come together, especially to do something, then power comes into being, and one man is a leader, a master. It is inevitable.
Accept it, recognise the natural power in the man, as men did in the past, and give it homage, then there is a great joy, an uplifting, and a potency passes from the powerful to the less powerful. There is a stream of power. And in this, men have their best collective being, now and forever, and a corresponding flame springs up in yourself. Give homage and allegiance to a hero, and you become yourself heroic. It is the law of men. Perhaps the law of women is different.
But act on the reverse, and what happens! Deny power, and power wanes. Deny power in a greater man, and you have no power yourself. But society, now and forever, must be ruled and governed. So that the mass must grant authority where they deny power. Authority now takes the place of power, and we have ‘ministers’ and public officials and policemen. Then comes the grand scramble of ambition, competition, and the mass treading one another in the face, so afraid they are of power.
A man like Lenin is a great evil saint who believes in the utter destruction of power. It leaves men unutterably bare, stripped, mean, miserable, and humiliated. Abraham Lincoln is a half-evil saint who almost believes in the utter destruction of power. President Wilson is a quite evil saint who quite belieyes in the destruction of power — but who runs himself to megalomania and neurasthenic tyranny. Every saint becomes evil — and Lenin, Lincoln, Wilson are true saints so long as they remain purely individual; — every saint becomes evil the moment he touches the collective self of men. Then he is a perverter: Plato the same. The great saints are for the individual only, and that means, for one side of our nature only, for in the deep layers of ourselves we are collective, we can’t help it. And the collective self either lives and moves and has its being in a full relationship of power: or it is reserved, and lives a frictional misery of trying to destroy power, and destroy itself.
But nowadays, the will to destroy power is paramount. Great kings like the Tzar — we mean great in position- are rendered almost imbecile by the vast anti-will of the masses, the will to negate power. Modern kings are negated till they become almost idiots. And the same of any man in power, unless he be a power-destroyer and a white- feathered evil bird: then the mass will back him up. How can the anti-power masses, above all the great middling masses, ever have a king who is more than a thing of ridicule or pathos?
The Apocalypse has been running for nearly two thousand years: the hidden side of Christianity: and its work is nearly done. For the Apocalypse does not worship power. It wants to murder the powerful, to seize the power itself, the weakling.
Judas had to betray Jesus to the powers that be, because of the denial and subterfuge inherent in Jesus’s teaching. Jesus took up the position of the pure individual, even with his disciples. He did not really mix with them, or even really work or act with them. He was alone all the time. He puzzled them utterly, and in some part of them, he let them down. He refused to be their physical power-lord: the power-homage in a man like Judas felt itself betrayed! So it betrayed back again: with a kiss. And in the same way, Revelation had to be included in the New Testament, to give the death kiss to the Gospels.
CHAPTER IV
It is a curious thing, but the collective will of a community really reveals the basis of the individual will. The early Christian Churches, or communities, revealed quite early a strange will to a strange kind of power. They had a will to destroy all power, and so usurp themselves the final, the ultimate power. This was not quite the teaching of Jesus, but it was the inevitable implicat
ion of Jesus’s teaching, in the minds of the vast mass of the weak, the inferior. Jesus taught the escape and liberation into unselfish, brotherly love: a feeling that only the strong can know. And this, sure enough, at once brought the community of the weak into triumphant being; and the will of the community of Christians was anti-social, almost anti-human, revealing from the start a frenzied desire for the end of the world, the destruction of humanity altogether; and then, when this did not come, a grim determination to destroy all mastery, all lordship, and all human splendour out of the world, leaving only the community of saints as the final negation of power, and the final power.
After the crash of the Dark Ages, the Catholic Church emerged again a human thing, a complete, not a half-thing, adjusted to seed-time and harvest and the solstice of Christmas and of mid-summer, and having a good balance, in early days, between brotherly love and natural lordship and splendour. Every man was given his little kingdom in marriage, and every woman her own little inviolate realm. This Christian marriage guided by the Church was a great institution for true freedom, true possibility of fulfilment. Freedom was no more, and can be no more than the possibility of living fully and satisfactorily. In marriage, in the great natural cycle of church ritual and festival, the early Catholic Church tried to give this to men. But alas, the Church soon fell out of balance, into worldly greed.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 983