No doubt the death was necessary. It is the long, slow death of society which parallels the quick death of Jesus and the other dying gods. It is death none the less, and will end in the annihilation of the human race — as John of Patmos so fervently hoped — unless there is a change, a resurrection, and a return to the cosmos.
But these flashes of the cosmos in Revelation can hardly be attributed to John of Patmos. As apocalyptist he uses other people’s flashes to light up his way of woe and hope. The grand hope of the Christians is a measure of their utter despair.
It began, however, before the Christians. Apocalypse is a curious form of literature, Jewish and Jewish-Christian. This new form arose somewhere about 200 B.C., when the prophets had finished. An early Apocalypse is the Book of Daniel, the latter part at least: another is the Apocalypse of Enoch, the oldest parts of which are attributed to the second century B.C.
The Jews, the Chosen People, had always had an idea of themselves as a grand imperial people. They had their try, and failed disastrously. Then they gave it up. After the destruction they ceased to imagine a great natural Jewish Empire. The prophets became silent forever. The Jews became a people of postponed destiny. And then the seers began to write Apocalypses.
The seers had to tackle this business of postponed destiny. It was no longer a matter of prophecy: it was a matter of vision. God would no longer tell his servant what would happen, for what would happen was almost untellable. He would show him a vision.
Every profound new movement makes a great swing also backwards to some older, half-forgotten way of consciousness. So the apocalyptists swung back to the old cosmic vision. After the second destruction of the Temple the Jews despaired, consciously or unconsciously, of the earthly triumph of the Chosen People. Therefore, doggedly, they prepared for an unearthly triumph. That was what the apocalyptists set out to do: to vision forth the unearthly triumph of the Chosen.
To do this, they needed an all-round view: they needed to know the end as well as the beginning. Never before had men wanted to know the end of creation: sufficient that it was created, and would go on for ever and ever. But now, the apocalyptists had to have a vision of the end.
They became then cosmic. Enoch’s visions of the cosmos are very interesting, and not very Jewish. But they are curiously geographical.
When we come to John’s Apocalypse, and come to know it, several things strike us. First, the obvious scheme, the division of the book into two halves, with two rather discordant intentions. The first half, before the birth of the baby Messiah, seems to have the intention of salvation and renewal, leaving the world to go on renewed. But the second half, when the Beasts rouse up, develops a weird and mystic hate of the world, of worldly power, and of everything and everybody who does not submit to the Messiah out and out. The second half of the Apocalypse is flamboyant hate and simple lust, lust is the only word, for the end of the world. The apocalyptist must see the universe, or the known cosmos, wiped out utterly, and merely a heavenly city and a hellish lake of brimstone left.
The discrepancy of the two intentions is the first thing that strikes us. The first part, briefer, more condensed or abbreviated, is much more difficult and complicated than the second part, and the feeling in it is much more dramatic, yet more universal and significant. We feel in the first part, we know not why, the space and pageantry of the pagan world. In the second part is the individual frenzy of those early Christians, rather like the frenzies of chapel people and revivalists today.
Then again, we feel that in the first part we are in touch with great old symbols, that take us far back into time, into the pagan vistas. In the second part, the imagery is Jewish allegorical, rather modern, and has a fairly easy local and temporal explanation. When there is a touch of true symbolism, it is not of the nature of a ruin or a remains embedded in the present structure, it is rather an archaic reminiscence.
A third thing that strikes us is the persistent use of the great pagan, as well as Jewish power-titles, both for God and for the Son of Man. King of Kings and Lord of Lords is typical throughout, and Kosmokrator, and Kosmodynamos. Always the titles of power, and never the titles of love. Always Christ the omnipotent conqueror flashing his great sword and destroying, destroying vast masses of men, till blood mounts up to the horses’ bridles. Never Christ the Saviour: never. The Son of Man of the Apocalypse comes to bring a new and terrible power on to the earth, greater than that of any Pompey or Alexander or Cyrus. Power, terrific, smiting power. And when praise is uttered, or the hymn to the Son of Man, it is to ascribe to him power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing — all the attributes given to the great kings and Pharaohs of the earth, but hardly suited to a crucified Jesus.
So that we are left puzzled. If John of Patmos finished this Apocalypse in a.d. 96, he knew strangely little of the Jesus legend, and had just none of the spirit of the Gospels, all of which preceded his book. A curious being, this old John of Patmos, whoever he was. But anyhow he focussed the emotions of certain types of men for centuries to come.
What we feel about the Apocalypse is that it is not one book but several, perhaps many. But it is not made up of pieces of several books strung together, like Enoch. It is one book, in several layers: like layers of civilization as you dig deeper and deeper to excavate an old city. Down at the bottom is a pagan substratum, probably one of the ancient books of the Aegean civilisation: some sort of book of a pagan Mystery. This has been written over by Jewish apocalyptists, then extended, and then finally written over by the Jewish-Christian apocalyptist John: and then, after his day, expurgated and corrected and pruned down and added to by Christian editors who wanted to make of it a Christian work.
But John of Patmos must have been a strange Jew: violent, full of the Hebrew books of the Old Testament, but also full of all kinds of pagan knowledge, anything that would contribute to his passion, his unbearable passion, for the Second Advent, the utter smiting of the Romans with the great sword of Christ, the trampling of mankind in the winepress of God’s anger till blood mounted to the bridles of the horses, the triumph of the rider on a white horse, greater than any Persian king: then the rule of martyrs for one thousand years: and then, oh then the destructidn of the entire universe, and the last Judgment. ‘Come, Lord Jesus, Come!’
And John firmly believed he was coming, and coming immediately. Therein lay the trembling of the terrific and terrifying hope of the early Christians: that made them, naturally, in pagan eyes, the enemies of mankind altogether.
But He did not come, so we are not very much interested. What does interest us is the strange-pagan recoil of the book, and the pagan vestiges. And we realise how the Jew, when he does look into the outside world, has to look with pagan or gentile eyes. The Jews of the post-David period had no eyes of their own to see with. They peered inward at their Jehovah till they were blind: then they looked at the world with the eyes of their neighbours. When the prophets had to see visions, they had to see Assyrian or Chaldean visions. They borrowed other gods to see their own invisible God by.
Ezekiel’s great vision, which is so largely repeated in the Apocalypse, what is it but pagan, disfigured probably by jealous Jewish scribes? a great pagan concept of the Time Spirit and the Kosmokrator and the Kosmodynamos! Add to this that the Kosmokrator stands among the wheels of the heavens, known as the wheels of Anaximander, and we see where we are. We are in the great world of the pagan cosmos.
But the text of Ezekiel is hopelessly corrupt — no doubt deliberately corrupted by fanatical scribes who wanted to smear over the pagan vision. It is an old story.
It is none the less amazing to find Anaximander’s wheels in Ezekiel. These wheels are an ancient attempt to explain the orderly yet complex movement of the heavens. They are based on the first ‘scientific’ duality which the pagans found in the universe, namely, the moist and the dry, the cold and the hot, air (or cloud) and fire. Strange and fascinating are the great revolving wheels of the sky, made
of dense air or night-cloud and filled with the blazing cosmic fire, which fire peeps through or blazes through at certain holes in the felloes of the wheels, and forms the blazing sun or the pointed stars. All the orbs are little holes in the black wheel which is full of fire: and there is wheel within wheel, revolving differently.
Anaximander, almost the very first of the ancient Greek thinkers, is supposed to have invented this ‘wheel’ theory of the heavens in Ionia in the sixth century b.c. Anyhow Ezekiel learnt it in Babylonia: and who knows whether the whole idea is not Chaldean. Surely it has behind it centuries of Chaldean sky-knowledge.
It is a great relief to find Anaximander’s wheels in Ezekiel. The Bible at once becomes a book of the human race, instead of a corked-up bottle of ‘inspiration’. And so it is a relief to find the four Creatures of the four quarters of the heavens, winged and starry. Immediately we are out in the great Chaldean star-spaces, instead of being pinched up in a Jewish tabernacle. That the Jews managed, by pernicious anthropomorphising, to turn the four great Creatures into Archangels, even with names like Michael and Gabriel, only shows the limit of the Jewish imagination, which can know nothing except in terms of the human ego. It is none the less a relief to know that these policemen of God, the great Archangels, were once the winged and starry creatures of the four quarters of the heavens, quivering their wings across space, in Chaldean lore.
In John of Patmos, the ‘wheels’ are missing. They had been superseded long ago by the spheres of the heavens. But the Almighty is even more distinctly a cosmic wonder, amber-coloured like sky-fire, the great Maker and the great Ruler of the starry heavens, Demiurge and Kosmokrator, the one who wheels the cosmos. He is a great actual figure, the great dynamic god, neither spiritual nor moral, but cosmic and vital.
Naturally or unnaturally, the orthodox critics deny this. Archdeacon Charles admits that the seven stars in the right hand of the ‘Son of Man’ are the stars of the Bear, wheeling round the Pole, and that this is Babylonian: then he goes on to say ‘but our author can have had nothing of this in mind.’
Of course, excellent clergymen of today know exactly what ‘our author’ had in mind. John of Patmos is a Christian saint, so he couldn’t have had any heathenism in mind. This is what orthodox criticism amounts to. Whereas as a matter of fact we are amazed at the almost brutal paganism of ‘our author’, John of Patmos. Whatever else he was, he was not afraid of a pagan symbol, nor even, apparently, of a whole pagan cult. The old religions were cults of vitality, potency, and power: we must never forget it. Only the Hebrews were moral: and they only in patches. Among the old pagans, morals were just social manners, decent behaviour. But by the time of Christ all religion and all thought seemed to turn from the old worship and study of vitality, potency, power, to the study of death and death- rewards, death-penalties, and morals. All religion, instead of being religion of life, here and now, became religion of postponed destiny, death, and reward afterwards, ‘if you are good’.
John of Patmos accepted the postponement of destiny with a vengeance, but he cared little about ‘being good’. What he wanted was the ultimate power. He was a shameless, power-worshipping pagan Jew, gnashing his teeth over the postponement of his grand destiny.
It seems to me he knew a good deal about the pagan value of symbols, as contrasted even with the Jewish or Christian value. And he used the pagan value just when it suited him, for he was no timid soul. To suggest that the figure of the Kosmodynamos wheeling the heavens, the great figure of cosmic Fire with the seven stars of the Bear in his right hand, could be unknown to John of Patmos is beyond even an archdeacon. The world of the first century was full of star-cults, the figure of the Mover of the Heavens must have been familiar to every boy in the east. Orthodox critics in one breath relate that ‘our author’ had no starry heathenism in mind, and in the next they expatiate on how thankful men must have been to escape, through Christianity, from the senseless and mechanical domination of the heavens, the changeless rule of the planets, the fixed astronomical and astrological fate. ‘Good heavens!’ we still exclaim: and if we pause to consider, we shall see how powerful was the idea of moving, fate-fixing heavens, half cosmic, half mechanical, but still not anthropomorphic.
I am sure not only John of Patmos, but St. Paul and St. Peter and St. John the Apostle knew a great deal about the stars, and about the pagan cults. They chose, perhaps wisely, to suppress it all. John of Patmos did not. So his Christian critics and editors, from the second century down to Archdeacon Charles, have tried to suppress it for him. Without success: because the kind of mind that worships the divine power always tends to think in symbols. Direct thinking in symbols, like a game of chess, with its king and queen and pawns, is characteristic of those men who see power as the great desideratum — and they are the majority. The lowest substratum of the people still worships power, still thinks crudely in symbols, still sticks to the Apocalypse and is entirely callous to the Sermon on the Mount. But so, apparently, does the highest superstratum of church and state still worship in terms of power: naturally, really.
But the orthodox critics like Archdeacon Charles want to have their cake and eat it. They want the old pagan power-sense in the Apocalypse, and they spend half their time denying it is there. If they have to admit a pagan element, they gather up the skirts of their clerical gowns and hurry past. And at the same time, the Apocalypse is a veritable heathen feast for them. Only they must swallow it with pious appearances.
Of course the dishonesty, we can call it no less, of the Christian critic is based on fear. Once start admitting that anything in the Bible is pagan, of pagan origin and meaning, and you are lost, you won’t know where to stop. God escapes out of the bottle once and for all, to put it irreverently. The Bible is so splendidly full of paganisms and therein lies its greater interest. But once admit it, and Christianity must come out of her shell.
Once more then we look at the Apocalypse, and try to sense its structure vertically, as well as horizontally. For the more we read it, the more we feel that it is a section through time, as well as a Messianic mystery. It is the work of no one man, and even of no one century, of that we feel sure.
The oldest part, surely, was a pagan work, probably the description of the ‘secret’ ritual of initiation into one of the pagan Mysteries, Artemis, Cybele, even Orphic: but most probably belonging there to the east Mediterranean, probably actually to Ephesus: as would seem natural. If such a book existed, say two or perhaps three centuries before Christ, then it was known to all students of religion: and perhaps it would be safe to say that every intelligent man in that day, especially in the east, was a student of religion. Men were religious-mad: not religious-sane. The Jews were just the same as the gentiles. The Jews of the dispersion certainly read and discussed everything they could lay their hands on. We must put away forever the Sunday-school idea of a bottled-up Jewry with nothing but its own god to think about. It was very different. The Jews of the last centuries b.c. were as curious, as widely read, and as cosmopolitan as the Jews of today: saving, of course, a few fanatical sets and sects.
So that the old pagan book must quite early have been taken and written over by a Jewish apocalyptist, with a view to substituting the Jewish idea of a Messiah and a Jewish salvation (or destruction) of the whole world, for the purely individual experience of pagan initiation. This Jewish Apocalypse, written over perhaps more than once, was surely known to all religious seekers of Jesus’s day, including the writers of the Gospel. And probably, even before John of Patmos tackled it, a Jewish-Christian apocalyptist had rewritten the work once more, probably had already extended it in the prophetic manner of Daniel, to foretell the utter downfall of Rome: for the Jews loved nothing in the world so much as prophesying the utter downfall of the gentile kingdoms. Then John of Patmos occupied his prison-years on the island in writing the whole book over once more, in his own peculiar style. We feel that he invented little, and had few ideas: but that he did indeed have a fierce and burning passion agai
nst the Romans who had condemned him. For all that, he shows no hatred of the pagan Greek culture of the east. In fact, he accepts it almost as naturally as his own Hebrew culture, and far more naturally than the new Christian spirit, which is alien to him. He rewrites the older Apocalypse, probably cuts the pagan passages still shorter, simply because they have no Messianic anti-Rome purport, not for any objection to their paganism; and then he lets himself go in the second half of the book, where he can lash the Beast called Rome (or Babylon), the Beast called Nero, or Nero redivivus, and the Beast called Antichrist, or the Roman priesthood of the Imperial cult. How he left the final chapters about the New Jerusalem we don’t know, but they are now in a state of confusion.
We feel that John was a violent but not very profound person. If he invented the letters to the seven churches, they are a rather dull and weak contribution. And yet it is his curious fervid intensity which gives to Revelation its lurid power. And we cannot help liking him for leaving the great symbols on the whole intact.
But after John had done with it, the real Christians started in. And that we really resent. The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man. The one fixed attitude of Christianity towards the pagan religious vision has been an attitude of stupid denial, denial that there was anything in the pagans at all, except bestiality. And all pagan evidence in the books of the Bible had to be expurgated, or twisted into meaninglessness, or smeared over into Christian or Jewish semblances.
This is what happened to the Apocalypse after John left it. How many bits the little Christian scribes have snipped out, how many bits they have stuck in, how many times they have forged ‘our author’s’ style, we shall never know: but there are certainly many evidences of their pettifogging work. And all to cover up the pagan traces, and make this plainly unchristian work passably Christian.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 985