We cannot help hating the Christian fear, whose method, from the very beginning, has been to deny everything that didn’t fit: or better still, suppress it. The system of suppression of all pagan evidence has been instinctive, a fear- instinct, and has been thorough, and has been really criminal, in the Christian world, from the first century until today. When a man thinks of the vast stores of priceless pagan documents that the Christians have wilfully destroyed, from the time of Nero to the obscure parish priests of today, who still burn any book found in their parish that is unintelligible, and therefore possibly heretical, the mind stands still! — and we reflect with irony on the hullabaloo over Rheims Cathedral. How many of the books we would give our fingers to possess, and can’t, are lost because the Christians burnt them on purpose! They left Plato and Aristotle, feeling these two kin. But the others — !
The instinctive policy of Christianity towards all true pagan evidence has been and is still — suppress it, destroy it, deny it. This dishonesty has vitiated Christian thought from the start. It has, even more curiously, vitiated ethnological scientific thought the same. Curiously enough, we do not look on the Greeks and the Romans, after about 600 b.c., as real pagans: not like Hindus or Persians, Babylonians or Egyptians, or even Cretans, for example. We accept the Greeks and Romans as the initiators of our intellectual and political civilisation, the Jews as the fathers of our moral- religious civilisation. So these are ‘our sort’. All the rest are mere nothing, almost idiots. All that can be attributed to the ‘barbarian’ beyond the Greek pale: that is, to Minoans, Etruscans, Egyptians, Chaldeans, Persians, and Hindus, is, in the famous phrase of a famous German professor: Urdumm- heit. Urdummheit, or primal stupidity, is the state of all mankind before precious Homer, and of all races, all, except Greek, Jew, Roman, and — ourselves!
The strange thing is that even true scholars, who write scholarly and impartial books about the early Greeks, as soon as they mention the autochthonous races of the Mediterranean, or the Egyptians, or the Chaldeans, insist on the childishness of these peoples, their perfectly trivial achievement, their necessary Urdummheit. These great civilised peoples knew nothing: all true knowledge started with Thales and Anaximander and Pythagoras, with the Greeks. The Chaldeans knew no true astronomy, the Egyptians knew no mathematics or science, and the poor Hindus, who for centuries were supposed to have invented that highly important reality, the arithmetical zero, or nought, are now not allowed even this merit. The Arabs, who are almost ‘us’, invented it.
It is most strange. We can understand the Christian fear of the pagan way of knowledge. But why the scientific fear? Why should science betray its fear in a phrase like Urdummheit? We look at the wonderful remains of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, and old India, and we repeat to ourselves: Urdummheit! Urdummheit? We look at the Etruscan tombs and ask ourselves again, Urdummheit? primal stupidity! Why, in the oldest of peoples, in the Egyptian friezes and the Assyrian, in the Etruscan paintings and the Hindu carvings we see a splendour, a beauty, and very often a joyous, sensitive intelligence which is certainly lost in our world of Neufrechheit. If it is a question of primal stupidity or new impudence, then give me primal stupidity.
The Archdeacon Charles is a true scholar and authority in Apocalypse, a far-reaching student of his subject. He tries, without success, to be fair in the matter of pagan origins. His predisposition, his terrific prejudice, is too strong for him. And once, he gives himself away, so we understand the whole process. He is writing in time of war — at the end of the late war — so we must allow for the fever. But he makes a bad break, none the less. On page 86 of the second volume of his commentary on Revelation, he writes of the Antichrist in the Apocalypse that it is ‘a marvellous portrait of the great god-opposing power that should hereafter arise, who was to exalt might above right, and attempt, successfully or unsuccessfully for the time, to seize the sovereignty of the world, backed by hosts of intellectual workers, who would uphold all his pretensions, justify all his actions, and enforce his political aims by an economic warfare, which menaced with destruction all that did not bow down to his arrogant and godless claims. And though the justness of this forecast is clear to the student who approaches the subject with some insight, and to all students who approach it with the experience of the present world war, we find that as late as 1908, Bousset in his article on the “Antichrist” in Hastings’s Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, writes as follows: “The interest in the (Antichrist)
legend ... is now to be found only among the lower classes of the Christian community, among sects, eccentric individuals, and fanatics.”
‘No great prophecy receives its full and final fulfilment in any single event, or single series of events. In fact, it may not be fulfilled at all in regard to the object against which it was primarily delivered by the prophet or seer. But, if it is the expression of a great moral and spiritual truth, it will of a surety be fulfilled at sundry times and in divers manners and in varying degrees of completeness. The present attitude of the Central Powers of Europe on this question of might against right, of Caesarism against religion, of the state against God, is the greatest fulfilment that the Johan- nine prophecy in XIII has as yet received. Even the very indefiniteness regarding the chief Antichrist in XIII is reproduced in the present upheaval of evil powers. In XIII the Antichrist is conceived as a single individual, i.e., the demonic Nero; but even so, behind him stands the Roman Empire, which is one with him in character and purpose, and in itself the Fourth Kingdom or the Kingdom of the Antichrist — in fact, the Antichrist itself. So in regard to the present war, it is difficult to determine whether the Kaiser or his people can advance the best claims to the title of a modern Antichrist. If he is a present-day representative of the Antichrist, so just as surely is the empire behind him, for it is one in spirit and purpose with its leader — whether regarded from its military side, its intellectual, or its industrial. They are in a degree far transcending that of ancient Rome “those who are destroying the earth”.’
So there we have Antichrist talking German to Arch deacon Charles, who, at the same moment, is using the books of German scholars for his work on the Apocalypse. It is as if Christianity and ethnological science alike could not exist unless they had an opposite, an Antichrist or an Urdummheit, for an offset. The Antichrist and the Urdummheit are just the fellow who is different from me. Today Antichrist speaks Russian, a hundred years ago he spoke French, tomorrow he may speak cockney or the Glasgow brogue. As for Urdummheit, he speaks any language that isn’t Oxford or Harvard or an obsequious imitation of one of these.
CHAPTER VII
It is childish. What we have now to admit is that the beginning of the new era (our own) coincided with the dying of the old era of the true pagans or, in the Greek sense, barbarians. As our present civilisation was showing the first sparks of life, say in 1000 B.C., the great and ancient civilisation of the older was waning: the great river civilisations of the Euphrates, the Nile, and the Indus, with the lesser sea-civilisations of the Aegean. It is puerile to deny the age and the greatness of the three river civilisations, with their intermediary cultures in Persia or Iran, and in the Aegean, Crete or Mycenae. That any of these civilisations could do a sum in long division we do not pretend. They may not even have invented the wheel-barrow. A modern child of ten could lick them hollow in arithmetic, geometry, or even, maybe, astronomy. And what of it?
What of it? Because they lacked our modern mental and mechanical attainments, were they any less ‘civilised’ or ‘cultured’, the Egyptians and the Chaldeans, the Cretans and the Persians and the Hindus of the Indus, than we are? Let us look at a great seated statue of Rameses, or at Etruscan tombs; let us read of Assiburnipal or Darius, and then say: How do our modern factory-workers show beside the delicate Egyptian friezes of the common people of Egypt? or our khaki soldiers, beside the Assyrian friezes? or our Trafalgar Square lions beside these of Mycenae? Civilisation? it is revealed rather in sensitive life than in inventions: and ha
ve we anything as good as the Egyptians of two or three thousand years before Christ as a people? Culture and civilisation are tested by vital consciousness. Are we more vitally conscious than an Egyptian 3000 years b.c. was? Are we? Probably we are less. Our conscious range is wide, but shallow as a sheet of paper. We have no’ depth to our consciousness.
A rising thing is a passing thing, says Buddha. A rising civilisation is a passing civilisation. Greece rose upon the passing of the Aegean: and the Aegean was the link between Egypt and Babylon. Greece rose as the passing of the Aegean civilisation, and Rome rose as the same, for the Etruscan civilisation was a last strong wave from the Aegean, and Rome rose, truly, from the Etruscans. Persia arose from between the cultures of the Euphrates and the Indus, and no doubt, in the passing of these.
Perhaps every rising civilisation must fiercely repudiate the passing civilisation. It is a fight within the self. The Greeks fiercely repudiated the barbarians. But we know now, the barbarians of the east Mediterranean were as much Greeks as most of the Greeks themselves. They were only Greeks, or autochthonous Hellenes who adhered to the old way of culture instead of taking on the new. The Aegean must always have been, in the primitive sense, Hellenic. But the old Aegean culture is different from what we call Greek, especially in its religious basis. Every old civilisation, we may be certain of it, had a definitely religious basis. The nation was, in a very old sense, a church, or a vast cult-unit. From cult to culture is only a step, but it took a lot of making. Cult-lore was the wisdom of the old races. We now have culture.
It is fairly difficult for one culture to understand another. But for culture to understand cult-lore is extremely difficult, and, for rather stupid people, impossible. Because culture is chiefly an activity of the mind, and cult-lore is an activity of the senses. The pre-Greek ancient world had not the faintest inkling of the lengths to which mental activity could be carried. Even Pythagoras, whoever he was, had no inkling: nor Herakleitos nor even Empedokles or Anaxa- goras. Socrates and Aristotle were the first to perceive the dawn.
But on the other hand, we have not the faintest conception of the vast range that was covered by the ancient sense-consciousness. We have lost almost entirely the great and intricately developed sensual awareness, or sense-awareness, and sense-knowledge, of the ancients. It was a great depth of knowledge arrived at direct, by instinct and intuition, as we say, not by reason. It was a knowledge based not on words but on images. The abstraction was not into generalisations or into qualities, but into symbols. And the connection was not logical but emotional. The word ‘therefore’ did not exist. Images or symbols succeeded one another in a procession of instinctive and arbitrary physical connection — some of the Psalms give us examples — and they ‘get nowhere’ because there was nowhere to get to, the desire was to achieve a consummation of a certain state of consciousness, to fulfil a certain state of feeling-awareness. Perhaps all that remains to us today of the ancient way of ‘thought-process’ are games like chess and cards. Chess-men and card-figures are symbols: their ‘values’ are fixed in each case: their ‘movements’ are non-logical, arbitrary, and based on the power-instinct.
Not until we can grasp a little of the working of the ancient mind can we appreciate the ‘magic’ of the world they lived in. Take even the sphinx conundrum: What is it that goes first on four legs, then on two, and then on three? — The answer is: Man. — To us it is rather silly, the great question of the sphinx. But in the uncritical ancient who felt his images, there would spring up a great complex of emotions and fears. The thing that goes on four legs is the animal, in all its animal difference and potency, its hinterland consciousness which circles round the isolated consciousness of man. And when, in the answer, it is shown that the baby goes on four legs, instantly there springs up another emotional complex, half fear, half amusement, as man realises himself as an animal, especially in the infantile state, going on all fours with face to the ground and belly or navel polarised to the earth’s centre, like a true animal, instead of navel polarised to the sun, as in the true man, according to primitive conception. The second clause, of the two-legged creature, would bring up complex images of men, monkeys, birds, and frogs, and the weird falling into relationship of these four would be an instant imaginative act, such as is very hard for us to achieve, but which children still make. The last clause, of the three- legged creature, would bring wonder, faint terror, and a searching of the great hinterlands beyond the deserts and the sea for some still-unrevealed beast.
So we see that the emotional reaction to such a conundrum was enormous. And even kings and heroes like Hector or Menelaus would make the same reaction, as a child now does, but a thousandfold stronger and wider. Men were not fools for so doing. Men are far more fools today, for stripping themselves of their emotional and imaginative reactions, and feeling nothing. The price we pay is boredom and deadness. Our bald processes of thought no longer are life to us. For the sphinx-riddle of man is as terrifying today as it was before Oedipus, and more so. For now it is the riddle of the dead-alive man, which it never was before.
CHAPTER VIII
Man thought and still thinks in images. But now our images have hardly any emotional value. We always want a ‘conclusion’, an end, we always want to come, in our mental processes, to a decision, a finality, a full stop. This gives us a sense of satisfaction. All our mental consciousness is a movement onwards, a movement in stages, like our sentences, and every full-stop is a mile-stone that marks our ‘progress’ and our arrival somewhere. On and on we go, for the mental consciousness. Whereas of course there is no goal. Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.
While men still thought of the heart or the liver as the seat of consciousness, they had no idea of this on-and-on process of thought. To them a thought was a completed state of feeling-awareness, a cumulative thing, a deepening thing, in which feeling deepened into feeling in consciousness till there was a sense of fulness. A completed thought was the plumbing of a depth like a whirlpool, of emotional awareness, and at the depth of this whirlpool of emotion the resolve formed. But it was no stage in a journey. There was no logical chain to be dragged further.
This should help us to appreciate that the oracles were not supposed to say something that fitted plainly in the whole chain of circumstance. They were supposed to deliver a set of images or symbols of the real dynamic value, which should set the emotional consciousness of the enquirer, as he pondered them, revolving more and more rapidly, till out of a state of intense emotional absorption the resolve at last formed; or, as we say, the decision was arrived at. As a matter of fact, we do very much the same in a crisis. When anything very important is to be decided we withdraw and ponder and ponder until the deep emotions are set working and revolving together, revolving, revolving, till a centre is formed and we ‘know what to do’. And the fact that no politician today has the courage to follow this intensive method of ‘thought’ is the reason of the absolute paucity of the political mind today.
CHAPTER IX
Well then, let us return to the Apocalypse with this in mind: that the Apocalypse is still, in its movement, one of the works of the old pagan civilisation, and in it we have, not the modern process of progressive thought, but the old pagan process of rotary image-thought. Every image fulfils its own little circle of action and meaning, then is superseded by another image. This is specially so in the first part, before the birth of the Child. Every image is a picturegraph, and the connection between the images will be made more or less differently by every reader. Nay, every image will be understood differently by every reader, according to his emotion-reaction. And yet there is a certain precise plan or scheme.
We must remember that the old human conscious process has to see something happen, every time. Everything is concrete, there are no abstractions. And everything does something.
To the ancient consciousness, Matter, Materia, or Subs
tantial things are God. A pool of water is god. And why not? The longer we live the more we return to the oldest of all visions. A great rock is god. I can touch it. It is undeniable. It is god.
Then those things that move are doubly god. That is, we are doubly aware of their godhead: that which is, and that which moves is twice godly. Everything is a ‘thing’: and every ‘thing’ acts and has effect: the universe is a great complex activity of things existing and moving and having effect. And all this is god.
Today, it is almost impossible for us to realise what the old Greeks meant by god, or theos. Everything was theos; but even so, not at the same moment. At the moment, whatever struck you was god. If it was a pool of water, the very watery pool might strike you: then that was god; or a faint vapour at evening rising might catch the imagination: then that was theos; or thirst might overcome you at the sight of the water: then the thirst itself was god; or you drank, and the delicious and indescribable slaking of thirst was the god; or you felt the sudden chill of the water as you touched it: and then another god came into being, ‘the cold’: and this was not a quality, it was an existing entity, almost a creature, certainly a theos: the cold; or again, on the dry lips something suddenly alighted: it was ‘the moist’, and again a god. Even to the early scientists or philosophers, ‘the cold’, ‘the moist’, ‘the hot’, ‘the dry’ were things in themselves, realities, gods, theoi. And they did things.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 986