An odd sense of wild mystery

On D. H. Lawrence's Apocalypse

Apocalypse, composed in 1928 and published posthumously in 1931, is D. H. Lawrence’s Genealogy of Morality and Thus Spoke Zarathustra in one, combining the cultural diagnostic of the former with the latter’s announcement of a new age. The work presents a speculative psychology of the West, interpreted as a conflict between two warring groups or principles: “strong” and “weak,” “aristocrats” and “democrats,” “individuals” and the “mass.” Like Nietzsche, Lawrence interprets this conflict as to some extent one between pagan and Jewish (or Jewish–Christian) morality, though with some differences of emphasis owing to the fact that, unlike Nietzsche’s speculative “genealogy” of culture, Lawrence presents his argument as the excavation of strata putatively contained within a single text; that is, as an act of speculative Higher Criticism aimed at uncovering tensions between, on the one hand, Revelation and the Gospels (which Lawrence sees as marking a fundamental polarity within Christianity) and, on the other, between Revelation’s own surface meaning and what he portrays as the more primordial, cosmic religion contained within it. Lawrence sees Revelation’s surface meaning as a betrayal of the Gospels, and the Gospels themselves as vitiated by the paradoxical character of Jesus’s teaching. Recovery of the suppressed element within Revelation is to offer the highly ambiguous remedy for both.¹

To this overall difference of focus corresponds Lawrence’s differing account of the underlying human conflict. Instead of Nietzsche’s war between “masters” and “slaves,” Lawrence focuses on the nature of the “aristocrat,” of whom Jesus is one. What he stresses is, above all, this figure’s selflessness, and it is this that gives an inherent instability to the program. The antipathetic element to such selflessness is a kind of ressentiment (“envy,” in Lawrence’s terminology), but his proposed remedy for it differs from Nietzsche’s. While there is much in Lawrence’s writing to suggest an emulation of the figure of Christ (that is, in the strong, Latin sense of aemulatio, “vying with,” not the traditional “imitation”), analogous to Nietzsche’s self-presentation as Anti-Christ, the deeper potentials Lawrence identifies in Apocalypse involve not so much a new spirit of individual assertiveness and agency, as a new connection to the universe. So far, so typical of Lawrence. More unusually, it is the “cosmic” Jesus (“Kosmokrator” or “Kosmodynamos”), not Jesus the man, that Lawrence recovers from the Apocalypse of John. (Jesus the man is the subject of another work, the novella The Man Who Died, a.k.a. The Escaped Cock, to which I may devote a separate essay.)

To begin, however, with what Lawrence identifies as Revelation’s surface meaning. Lawrence connects the centrality of Revelation within his childhood exposure to the Bible to the culture of the non-conforming, low-Church sects, which were, in his telling, particularly entranced by the account of the downfall of kingdoms, the destruction of worldly pride.² This opens up a basic theme in Lawrence’s account of the Bible in which, with the “splitting” that is characteristic of him, he distinguishes sharply between the religion of Jesus and the Gospels and the religion of Apocalypse.³ Broadly, Lawrence argues that the former, which was fundamentally “aristocratic” in its self-giving, albeit devoted to the humble rather than to worldly powers, aroused an expectation in its (democratic) auditors that it could not deliver, nor they receive. The Apocalypse of John, in Lawrence’s account, was designed to minister to this desire for the punishment and overthrow of kings and worldly leaders, albeit in symbolic form. If politics in Lawrence’s day saw the recrudescence of such impulses, then the antidote was the recovery of the book’s originary impulse.

Lawrence describes the advent of Jesus as the result of a civilizational crisis: the ruling classes have lost their desire to rule, prompting the weak—the masses—to exploit their opportunity:

In Jesus’ day the inwardly strong 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 of 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.

This account has many echoes in Lawrence’s account of his own day. It evokes, for instance, his portrayals of the weakness of post-Victorian Liberalism in both “The Nightmare”—the lightly fictionalized memoir of the First World War, inset as a flashback in his novel Kangaroo⁴—and in Women in Love’s account of the death-descent of the elder Mr Crich. Like Yeats’s similarly dualistic A Vision, if less specific in its account of historical cycles, Lawrence describes a permanent condition of human affairs:⁵

There’s no getting away from it, mankind falls forever into the two divisions of aristocrat and democrat. 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.

There is something unstable, however, in Lawrence’s distinction between the visible and the inward (and thus more authentic) forms of “strength” and “weakness” (and their corresponding dispositions toward generosity and resentment). Lawrence is eager to distinguish between the truly strong and the merely obvious, visible powers of the earth (this is visible in his remark that what the Christians, roused up by the likes of John, came to “express their rampant hate of the ‘obvious’ strong ones”). For, notwithstanding his repulsion by rabble-rousing, the drift of his argument is not to justify current political authority and institutions. Indeed, current political institutions and authorities have themselves, on his view, been corrupted by the spirit of “democracy” and Christianity and its attendant resentments. The sense that the “weak” have already triumphed, and that their further abdication of authority can only incite the rampaging of the “pseudo-humble” “bullies” is likewise a strong and pervasive theme in “The Nightmare,” and central to Lawrence’s critique of Liberalism during the period of the war.

The lack of identity between the authentically strong and the “obvious strong”—that is, the holders of political authority—will remain important in Lawrence’s work, in Apocalypse and elsewhere. We cannot underestimate the lingering significance of the Jesus-aristocrat for Lawrence’s imagination. Lawrence is, again, quite interested in a kind of emulation of Jesus, with a doctrine of separateness-in-connection to be distinguished from the doctrine of love that Jesus himself propounded, and having as its centerpiece the pure lived example, rather than commanding. But there remains the brute fact of the majority of the weak and the minority of the strong—stated by Lawrence with the brisk movement from major to minor premise: “Since there are always more weak people than strong, in the world, the second sort of Christianity has triumphed and will.”

Lawrence’s “strong” and “weak” are, again, not reducible to class, wealth, or position. They describe, for him, two radically distinct and opposed natures; his statement presents itself as true for all time, not of any particular, contingent state of affairs: “There’s no getting away from it, mankind falls forever into the two divisions of aristocrat and democrat.” On other occasions, Lawrence will make quite clear that he sees current social arrangements in the disposition of wealth as temporary and contingent—he will speak frequently, and consistently across his career and lifetime of the need for some kind of social provision to free men and women from material want and hunger.⁶ The spiritual distinction alone, he insists, is permanent.

But what does Lawrence mean by “power”? Lawrence uses this term with all but consistent vagueness, or reservation. (Though the answer clearly has something to do with charisma, a force of soul that is not that of personality, but rather an openness to energies and forces passing through one, of which the prime instance is sex.) By “reservation,” I mean that Lawrence’s usage contains always the possibility that any concrete manifestation of such power is not really the power he had in mind. Hence the rejection by Lawrence of concrete instances of what might think to be charismatic and authorative political power—of which Mussolini’s Fascism is the most notable.⁷ Yet Lawrence does not merely reject; his text also contains a counter-pressure in its intimation of his own, positive interpretation of Power—and does so at the moment that marks its key turning-point. This comes when Lawrence writes: “But it [Revelation] contains also some revelation of the true and positive Power-spirit.”

Lawrence has just told us that the Biblical book “resounds with the dangerous snarl of the frustrated, suppressed collective self, frustrated power-spirit in man, vengeful.” The argument issuing from this distinction can be summarized as follows. There is an aspect of man’s nature that is non-individual, collective. The exhortation to virtue has been delivered to men by aristocrats of the spirit: self-denying men, who have devoted themselves to the “weak”; empirically, the poor. But the poor, the masses to whom such men are devoted, are not themselves “aristocrats,” and will not give themselves “selflessly” in this fashion. Jesus, then, aristocrat of the spirit, arouses a desire that he cannot satisfy. The problem here is twofold. When the desire aroused is for destruction of the powers-that-be, it rests, Lawrence points out, on a misapprehension: Jesus’s anger is against the Pharisees, not the imperial Romans; his exhortation is that one should render unto Caesar, leaving it for John to translate the religious opposition into a political one, against Rome. But the deeper issue lies in the nature of Jesus’s command, since the life of selflessness, self-giving, non-lordship, can be lived only by individuals. And the mass of men, by definition, are not individuals.

In Lawrence’s delineation of the problem of Apocalypse, we begin to glimpse the basis of his revulsion from Fascism as concretely manifested, though also why he so often found himself drawn into illicit commerce with it. Fearing the destructive passions of the multitude, Lawrence could not but recoil from expressions of such brutality when they manifested themselves in militarized, political form. At the same time, however, believing the distinction between aristocrat and mass to be eternal, rather than temporary and contingent, Lawrence’s interest in preserving some space for the peaceable saw some need of at least rechanneling such “unappeased” rage, like an upward funneling flame. This collective desire the Apocalypse of John seeks to satisfy by imagining the destruction of the world. Yet in this same cosmic broadening in scale, Lawrence sees the germ of the “positive Power-spirit” within Revelation, one aiming not at the destruction of the world, but at oneness with it. This, Lawrence explains, comes in the image of Jesus as the “Kosmodynamos” and “Kosmokrator”—images of a cosmos-ordering God or benign demiurge that evokes a primordial relationship to the cosmos, unmediated by the “thou-shalt-nots” of Christian morality. Lawrence’s final turn to the admiration of this figure of cosmic oneness has the aesthetic ambiguity, but the political advantage, of its vagueness.

We aren’t without all guides to what Lawrence might mean, however.

Scholars believe the poem “Almond Blossom,” later collected in the 1923 volume Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, to have been composed in January 1921, a few months after the major phase of composition for that book, from which it marks both a continuation and a break. Its theme is recurrence under unpropitious circumstances. The location marker “Fontana Vecchia” identifies the poem with the pensione in Taormina, Sicily, that Lawrence had leased a year previously, in March 1920, which was to be his and Frieda’s first and only semi-permanent residence in Italy. These are its opening lines, with their echo of an early version of Studies in Classic American Literature: