Abstract
D. H. Lawrence was one of the most controversial writers of the twentieth century who dared to criticize established convention through both his fictional and non-fictional works. He believed that artists of all kinds could use their works as tools for social change. To this end, he moved away from literary conventions and used language in a new way, took well-known symbols and transformed them into vectors of his own individual and unique thought. Through an examination of his work, Apocalypse, This article aims to show how Lawrence negates orthodox religious thinking by demonstrating how Jewish and Christian scribes mutilated and destroyed an original pagan document to fit their conventional religious doctrine. Taking Stoicism as his starting point, I will prove that it forms the kernel of truth for his own personal philosophy. To this end, I will firstly show how Lawrence shared many of the beliefs of Zeno of Citium, the founder of stoicism. Then, I will show how Lawrence goes on to defy meaning through analysis of the Book of Revelation. Finally, the importance of apocalyptic symbols will be explored and shown to reveal Lawrence’s unique interpretation of them.
Keywords: Apocalypse, Symbols, Stoicism, The Book of Revelation, Kernel of truth.
1. Lawrence and the strive for imagination
D.H. Lawrence railed against the analytical tyranny of the twentieth century, in particular, the fixed interpretation of much of the literature that stifled the creative mind. He believed that artists of all kinds (writers, artists and sculptors) could use their works as tools for social change. He aimed at being a pioneer and, at the expense of his literary reputation, he tried to lead man away from the suffocating dogma of convention and persuade him to embrace life through innovation and creativity. To do this, he hit hard at the core of the establishment by criticizing the orthodox interpretation of biblical texts. He thus, undermined conventional authority which, for him, only served to control and restrict the liberty of man. This article will lean on his work Apocalypse to illustrate how he re-interprets one of the most important texts of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, illustrating how Jewish and Christian scribes mutilated and destroyed the original pagan document to fit their conventional religious doctrine.
“What we care about is the release of the imagination” (Apocalypse, 47). With this aim in mind, he tries to illustrate the importance of fluidity of meaning and criticises the modern mind for thinking that “every book is the same”. He states that “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”(Apocalypse, 60). For him, all is a question of interpretation and this enabled to create a totally new and dynamic form of expression in keeping with his apocalyptic philosophy. He explored language in a new way, took well-known symbols and transformed them into vectors of his own individual and unique thought. In this article, I will isolate these specific apocalyptic symbols to show not only their importance but also how they are intrinsic parts, that is, functional elements of his moral philosophy. In this way, his work Apocalypse will be seen as both the point of departure and a culmination of Lawrence’s creative endeavour.
Lawrence believed that philosophy and religion exacerbated the sterility of modern life and he set out to create a philosophy that would strip away the layers of what he saw false beliefs and restore man to his primal state.
In keeping with the principles of Zeno of Citium, Lawrence believed that every man’s happiness depends upon a healthy relationship with the cosmos. Through his works, he aimed to show that this basic kernel of truth had been buried beneath layers of doctrine and dogma, which in their very essence had negated it.
2. Lawrence and Stoicism
The doctrine of Zeno of Citium which later, became the philosophy of stoicism, can fruitfully be compared with Lawrence’s beliefs. Stoicism originated in Athens in 301 BC. The term “stoicism” was taken from Stoa Poilike (the painted arch), which was the place where Zeno taught his philosophy. At that time, it bore no real relation to the conventional meaning of the word that is, “indifference to the feelings of both pleasure and pain” (Matakas), which still prevails today. One of the main precepts of Zeno’s philosophy included the belief that man's happiness depended upon his ability to live a life of virtue. By Virtue, he meant the will to live according to the laws of nature. This idea is in total harmony with Lawrence’s thinking. Indeed, he would have undoubtedly argued that if Zeno had found it necessary to reassert such a belief, then, the human race was already, at that time, in a state of decline. Zeno, along with his disciple Chrysippus, taught that the universe is an active, reasoning substance known as god or nature, defining the universe as “God and the universal outpouring of its soul” (De Natura Deorum, 39). In this way, then, it is easy to see how the morphological shift in the word “virtue”, to include both its religious and ethical connotations of modern English, could have occurred.
These pantheistic views were undoubtedly shared by Lawrence who wrote, in 1911, after rejecting his Nonconformist upbringing, “There still remains a God, a vast, shimmering impulse which wavers onwards towards some end” (Apocalypse and Writings of Revelation, 17). The indefinite article “a”, in the above quotation, underlines his rejection of God of conventional religious belief. Lawrence believed in the god of Zeno and Chrysippus understood as the “world’s guiding principle”, existing “in the common nature of things and the totality that embraces all existence” (Dyck and Cicero). Like the stoics, he recognized that the essence of god can be found in everything and grounded his metaphysics in these ancient beliefs.
The stoics believed that the substance which makes up the universe, could be divided into two classes: the passive and the active. The passive substance, defined by Seneca, as a matter which “lies sluggish, a substance ready for any use, but sure to remain unemployed if no one sets it in the motion” (M.Gummere) is vitalized by the active substance, defined as Universal Reason (Logos). According to Zeno, it is this aether, this Logos, that forms the basis of all activity in the universe, since it has the ability to both destroy and regenerate.
Lawrence recognized this relationship to the extent that when he wrote, in his Apocalypse “I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea” (Apocalypse, 27), he was not merely speaking metaphorically, he was especially recognizing “the terrific embrace” of the Chaldean sun and moon. Like the stoics before him, he understood the wonder of the creative flux existing between man understood as passive matter, and these celestial beings considered as active matter. In his Apocalypse, he says of the moon “The moon is the great moon still, she gives forth her soft and feline influences, she sways us still, and asks for sympathy back again”(Apocalypse, 53). He also demands homage for the sun whose invigorating force is the source of life and energy on earth.
The stoics believed that the relationship between this passive and active matter was confirmed by cosmic determinism. The Logos was seen as a rational force that directed the universe for a single purpose, in other words that everything happens for the best. From this deterministic viewpoint, the stoics deduced that the consequences of all actions were the result of forces beyond the control of the human beings. They believed in man’s ability to reason and, through his reasoning, accept this deterministic outlook. They upheld the values of wisdom and self-control in order to fulfil their duty, which consisted in obedience to the rules of nature. One of the rules of their discipline was “Follow where reason leads” (History of Western Philosophy, 264). Man must strive to be free of passions and passively react to external events. Stoic virtue consists in the ability of man to amend his will to suit the world in which he lived. To quote the words of Epictetus, a virtuous man must remain “sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy” (History of Western Philosophy, 264). In the words of the ancient Greeks, the word “passion” meant “anguish” or “suffering”: so if a man was to be happy, it was natural that he should free himself from such emotions and transform them into fortitude and calm.
Lawrence, himself, believed in cosmic determinism but his thinking differed from the Stoics in one important point. Although he believed that cosmic elements influenced the fate of man, he felt that this belief was grounded in intuition rather than in reason. He wrote in Why The Novel Matters, that “Right and wrong is an instinct, but an instinct of the whole consciousness in a man, bodily, mental, spiritual at once” (Why the Novel Matters, 171). Here, he is affirming his belief that the word “instinct” is more literal a translation of the word “Logos” than the word “Reason”, used by the stoics, because of all its connotations of the stultifying control of the mind. He also denigrates the importance these ancient thinkers placed upon the mind, bringing instincts back into the equation and emphasising his holistic approach.
With the advent of Christianity, stoicism developed into a social tool, translating itself into a fatalistic acceptance of adversity. In 1 BC, John of Patmos wrote the Book of Revelation and encouraged Christians to welcome suffering as a sign of God’s favour. He taught them to believe that they were the Chosen Ones whose persecution would be rewarded by an eternal place in the kingdom of heaven. They had only to remain calm and accept the faith decreed them by God; hence, the morphological shift on the word stoic was complete. This definition of the word stoic, with all its connotations of repression of feelings, was of course anathema to Lawrence, whose acceptance of cosmic determinism was grounded in the instincts and not in reason.
3. Lawrence and the Book of Revelation
The ideas contained in the Book of Revelation were anathema to D. H .Lawrence. This last book of the New Testament, written around 1 AD by John of Patmos who had been banished by the Roman authorities for the religious beliefs it expressed. It has been open to several interpretations but it is generally accepted that the book was written not only as a critic of the society in which Patmos lived but also as a message of hope to his followers that their persecution at the hands of the Roman authorities would not be in vain. Good would overthrow evil and martyrdom would be welcomed as a rite of passage for an eternal life in heaven.
These ideas were anathema to D. H. Lawrence. He believed that man should not be placated by the promise of an afterlife. For him, man has only one life and he should live it to the full. Indeed, he concludes his work, Apocalypse, by saying: “Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent” (Apocalypse, 122). This shows to what extent he was against the conventional interpretation of the Book of Revelation believing it to be a tool to stifle and control individuality. In a Review of the Book of Revelation by Doctor Oman, which he wrote using the pseudonym L .H. Davidson, he boldly criticisizes the rigidity of traditional thought along with its failure to understand that “an apocalypse has, must have, is intended to have various levels or layers or strata of meaning” (Apocalypse, 41). In a rhetorical question “Why should Doctor Oman oppose the view that, besides the drama of the fall of World Rule and triumph of the word, there is another drama, or rather several other concurrent dramas?” (Apocalypse, 41). He poured out all the scorn he felt for the fixed ideals that he believed had destroyed forever man’s liaison with the cosmos.
When he wrote the Review of the Book of Revelation by Dr. John Oman in 1924, D. H. Lawrence knew that his ideas were really provocative. On March 31st, 1923, J. Middleton Murry wrote of Lawrence “I felt, and I said, that he was an enemy of civilization. It was perfectly true. He is the conscious and deliberate, yet passionate and potent enemy of modern civilization. If our modern life, our modern civilization, is fundamentally good and true and valuable, then indeed the cry must be raised against D.H. Lawrence.” (Dh Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, 184). It is for this reason, then, that he chose to write under a pseudonym, hoping to give his vision more weight and really influence the thought trend of society.
Writing in Apocalypse that there is “a pagan kernel to the book”, (Apocalypse, 98) he believed that the original version of this text belonged to the pre-Christian world and was a symbolic account of how to restore a living connection with the cosmos and find inner harmony. The text, he says, bears witness to “the opening, and conquest of the great psychic centres of the human body” (Apocalypse, 101). For him, it is the account of man’s descent into a nihilistic state and his subsequent rebirth into a new life: “The old Adam is going to be conquered, die, and be re-born as the new Adam” (Apocalypse, 101). For him, its meaning is symbolical rather allegorical, its references are astrological rather than biblical and its theme is the “drama of cosmic man” (Apocalypse, 41) rather than “the triumph of the world” (Apocalypse, 41).
D. H. Lawrence believed that generations of scribes had distorted the original account by adding, subtracting or transforming important details in order to promote their own conventional views. He states in Apocalypse that the book “was written over perhaps more than once, by Jewish apocalyptists, before the time of Christ: that John of Patmos probably wrote over the whole book once more, to make it Christian: and after that Christian scribes and editors tinkered with it to make it safe” (Apocalypse, 98). Through a series of acerbic and sometimes flippant remarks, he traces the damage made by this “tinkering” and attempts to restore the text to its original meaning. His first criticism of the Book of Revelation concerns the plan which has been “very much broken up” (Apocalypse, 47) by the Jewish need to force “some ethical or tribal meaning in” (Apocalypse, 97). In derogatory fashion, He goes on to criticize the mise en scène ,which with the addition of Jewish detail has become, to quote his words “a complete muddle” (Apocalypse, 97). “we are not surprised” … “to find the mise en scene of the vision muddled up, Jewish temple furniture shoved in, and twenty-four elders or presbyters who no longer quite know what they are, but are trying to be as Jewish as possible, and so on” (Apocalypse, 97). He admired the “lovely plan” of the ancient apocalyptic text, which was based on the pagan conception of time. Primitive man believed that time moved in cycles and, when one cycle finished, another began, quite like the original one but on a different level. According to D. H. Lawrence, this world was based upon the astrological heavens with the twelve zodiac signs at its centre and time moving in spirals from one level to another. “The “world” is established on twelve: the number twelve is basic for an established cosmos. And the cycles move in sevens.” (Apocalypse, 97). This design was too “pagan and immoral” for the Jewish and, later, the Christian scribes who needed to make “things safe” by adopting “our time-continuum method” and deleting whole passages of “star-lore” (Apocalypse, 98). To this end, then, the Lion of Judah is transformed into a Lamb, the conventional image of Jesus Christ, whereas, in the original pagan text it would surely have been Aries (The Ram) or Taurus (The Bull). Lawrence points out that these “pagan mysteries of the sacrifice of the god for the sake of a greater resurrection are older than Christianity” (Apocalypse, 99). It is logical then, that this apocalyptic mystery was described in terms of the Zodiac. Leo (The Lion) represents God who received blood sacrifices in the form of either a sheep (Aries) or a bull (Taurus); they, in their turn, became the scarified god whose blood was shed so that mankind could live.
From the very first chapters of the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos establishes his message. The theme of his work is the triumph of the word of God over the evil rampant in the world. To this end, from the very beginning, the symbol of “the book”, thought by D. H. Lawrence to have been added by the Jews, is introduced, destroying forever the intended supremacy of instinct and intuition. He says in Apocalypse : “The Almighty has a book in his hand. The book is no doubt a Jewish symbol. They are bookish people: and always great keepers of accounts: reckoning up sins throughout the ages” (Apocalypse, 99). Here, his tone is flippant, even humorous and, although he goes on to say “it is a detail”, it is, nevertheless, important and serves to transform the whole meaning of the work. The book becomes a symbol of the mind and the intellect, enforcing John of Patmos’s message to his followers according to which they remain rational and stoic in the face of adversity with a promise of eternal life in heaven. It is through the influence of the written word – that is to say, the book- that conventional religion controls and manipulates the masses.
By pinpointing in detail the additions, suppressions and transformations of the pagan document, D. H. Lawrence succeeded in restoring authenticity to a vision that had been distorted beyond recognition. He has shown how a society can “tinker” with a kernel of truth, twist it into meaninglessness and create a false reality, which becomes a controlling convention. Through a lightly veiled criticism, he infers in Apocalypse that what the Christians had done in the Book of Revelation, Freud and his disciples have done to society “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” (Apocalypse, 87). Freud’s psychoanalytical theory plays the role of the Christian church and conditions society to repress any emotions that could undermine the status quo. It is the aim of the conscious mind to control the primal urges of the personality or, to quote the words of Lawrence, to “suppress it, destroy it, deny it” (Apocalypse, 87). He concludes with the thought that men are “fools today, for stripping themselves of their emotional and imaginative reactions, and feeling nothing. The price we pay is boredom and deadness” (Apocalypse, 92). He aimed throughout his literary career to revitalize the thought processes of the human mind, re-evaluate the role of intuition and encourage man to search for answers within his inner being.
To this end, Lawrence strived to eradicate the allegorical interpretation of the book and replace it by symbolic interpretation. He understood the power of a symbol to stir the imagination and adapt itself to different interpretations. In A Review of The Book of Revelations by Dr. John Oman, he states “As a matter of fact, old symbols have many meanings, and we only define one meaning in order to leave another undefined” (Apocalypse, 42), recognizing the inexhaustibility of the interpretation of any symbol and seeing it as an appropriate means of expression in apocalyptic writing. He was aware that The Apocalypse means different things to different people and, as such, a symbol should be left with a flexibility of meaning to cover all possibilities. In the same review, Lawrence writes “an Apocalypse has, must have, is intended to have various levels or layers or strata of meaning” (Apocalypse, 41) and he criticizes Dr. Oman’s exhaustive explanation as a product of the intellect and not the imagination “Yet we cannot agree that Dr. Oman’s explanation of the Apocalypse is exhaustive. No explanation of symbols is final. Symbols are not intellectual quantities, they are not to be exhausted by the intellect” (Apocalypse, 41). In his own work entitled Apocalypse, he offers another interpretation, giving the symbols an astrological meaning and relating the drama of cosmic man.
For Lawrence, then, it is a question of interpretation. Indeed, in the Review of the Book of Revelation by Dr. John Oman, he states: “We gladly accept Dr. Oman’s interpretation of the two Women and the Beasts” (Apocalypse, 41). It is rather the realisation of the immense freedom in accepting multiple layers of interpretation, giving imagination free reign to create each person’s individual vision.
4. Lawrence and the Symbols of Apocalypse
Lawrence’s Apocalypse is his attempt to defy orthodox conventional meaning. Incorporating into it the whole of his literary vision, he attacks the dogmatic interpretation of the Bible which was: “verbally trodden into the consciousness” (Apocalypse, 60) and its mystery destroyed at every turn by fixed interpretation. “The Bible is a book that has been temporarily killed for us, or for some of us, by having its meaning arbitrary fixed” (Apocalypse, 60). He goes on to say: “Once a book is fathomed, once it is known, and its meaning is fixed and established, it is dead” (Apocalypse, 60). We can see that for Lawrence abook only lives while it has the power to move us, and move us differently, as long as we find it different every time we read it. For him, a true work of art must appeal to the individual sense of self at the centre of every man.
Although in his work he examines the Book of Revelation in the Bible, it is so much more than a simple critique. It is an insight into his own narrative technique. He dismisses the use of allegory with its fixed interpretations as antipathetic to him and unnatural. He goes on to define it as a : “narrative description using, as a rule, images to express certain definite qualities. Each image means something, and is a term in the argument and nearly always for a moral or didactic purpose, for under the narrative of an allegory lies a didactic argument, usually moral” (Apocalypse, 48)
Instead, he turns to the use of symbols to give his work “meaning” and make it live. In the “Introduction of the Dragon of the Apocalypse” by Frederick Carter, he says that true symbols defy “superficial allegorical meaning”. His argument is, if you give something a meaning it is automatically limited or fixed. A symbol must live, it must reflect being. He clearly states this in Apocalypse:
“You can’t give a great symbol a “meaning”, any more than you can give a cat a “meaning”. Symbols are organic units of consciousness with a life of their own, and you can never explain them away, because their value is dynamic, emotional, belonging to the sense-consciousness of the body and soul, and not simply mental” (Apocalypse, 48)
4.1 The horse
Throughout the ages, the horse has always been considered a symbol of power and a source of life. D. H. Lawrence shared these beliefs, describing the horse in chapter X of his work Apocalypse as “the symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action, in man” (Apocalypse, 102). As “a dominant symbol” (Apocalypse, 101), he recognizes its importance in the Book of Revelation and goes on to interpret the four horsemen in his own personal way. For him, they represent one of two things: the first, according to the four humours of Hippocrates, the second according to the four planetary natures of man as laid down by the Chaldean astrologists. Firstly, the four colours of the horses (white, red, black and pale) correspond to the four natures of man (sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic). The second meaning highlights the interrelation between man and the universe. The Chaldean astrologists believed that the four primary natures of man (jovial, saturnine, martial and mercurial) correspond to the sun and the planets Mars, Saturn and Mercury.
If these interpretations are correct, then, it is no surprise that John of Patmos, and the Jewish Apocalyptists, before him “cut away” the astrological references transforming the horse from a symbol of potency and life into an emblematic representation of future events. This, according to Lawrence, was a deliberate attempt to make the pagan document acceptable to the Orthodox Church:
“The original meaning, which was pagan, is smeared over intentionally with a meaning that can fit this” Church of Christ versus the wicked Gentile Powers” business. But none of that touches the horsemen themselves. And perhaps here better than anywhere else in the book can we see the peculiar way in which the old meanings has been cut away and confused and changed, deliberately, while the bones of the structures have been left.” (Apocalypse, 104)
All the interesting and vital cosmic details have been cut away leaving the Apocalypse, in D. H. Lawrence as a : “a string of cosmic calamities, monotonous” (Apocalypse, 105). Through his words: “In they ride, short and sharp and it is over. They have been cut down to a minimum” (Apocalypse, 101) he manages to convey his derision for the scribes and editors who had destroyed forever the astrological and zodiacal magic of these symbols. His aim in his work is to try to restore the pagan vision to its former glory, “to have back the pagan record of initiation” (Apocalypse, 101) and highlight his own apocalyptic beliefs.
According to orthodox interpretation, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, described in of the Book of Revelation( chapter 6) , are symbolic descriptions of different events which John of Patmos prophesised would take place before the end of time. The first horseman riding a white horse is interpreted in conventional thinking as the antichrist who will be given authority and conquer all who oppose him. The antichrist parallels the true Christ who returns at the end of Apocalypse also mounted on a white horse. For Lawrence, however, the white horse represents life, which shines with a dazzling, white light. In Apocalypse, he explains how the blood of life can be seen as white “in our old days, the blood was the life, and visioned as power it was like white light” (Apocalypse, 102). In Revelation (chapter six, verse two) the rider of the white horse “held a bow, and he was given a crown, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest” (Carroll and Prickett). For Lawrence, this is not the antichrist; it is “the royal me” (Apocalypse, 102) and his horse is “the whole mana of a man”. He is the “very self” who must ride out and conquer the old self in anticipation of the birth of a new self. Lawrence compares him both to the sun and the moon “And he rides forth, like this sun, with arrow, to conquest, but not with the sword, for the sword implies also judgement, and this is my dynamic or potent self. And his how is the bended bow of the body, like the crescent moon” (Apocalypse, 103). The last rider on the white horse at the end of the Book of Revelation is for Lawrence the true self, triumphant and victorious leading “his hosts” to life. He negates the following verse of Relation (chapter 19: verse 15) “And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron” (Apocalypse, 103) as a Jewish addition, conjuring up the picture of a controlling and vengeful god. This is an anathema to D. H. Lawrence. The sword, he said, implies judgement and would have been absent from the pagan record: “Let us go back to the bow and arrows of him to whom judgment is not given” (Apocalypse, 103).
The second horseman, appearing in Revelation (chapter 6: verse 4) was intended by John of Patmos to prophesize a terrible period of warfare which would inevitably break out before the end of the world between the supporters of the antichrist – the false religion – and the followers of the true God. For Lawrence, the red horse represents choler: “not mere anger, but natural fieryness, what we call passion” (Apocalypse, 102). He goes on to say that with the appearance of the second rider, “strife and war enter the world” (Apocalypse, 103). It is not the physical world of which he speaks but “the inner world of the self” (Apocalypse, 103). The conflict is the struggle between the conscious and the unconscious mind or, to use the words of Sigmund Freud, the super ego and the id.
John of Patmos uses the third horseman, astride a black horse, to prophesise a period of austerity and famine, the inevitable outcome of the wars with the second horseman. The writer’s message is clear. The followers of the true religion will be faced with a period of scarcity and corruption leaving them weak and poor. In contrast, and underlining the influence of Freud, for Lawrence, the black horse represents the ego, the conscious mind, which must try to find a balance between the superego and the id. In his Apocalypse, it is represented as black bile, in an effort to portray modern man’s predicament: the ego has chosen the super ego over the id and intuition has been sacrificed to convention. “Bread” he says, symbolises the flesh or physical instincts which had been “symbolically sacrificed” in favour of false ideals. His imagery is powerful. Bile is a necessary element for digestion in the human body, but when in excess can result in death. By inference, the ego “carries the balance of measure” (Apocalypse, 103) in the human personality but when its influence is biased, individuality is automatically sacrificed to conventionality: to Lawrence, this means “death”.
The fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, riding a pale horse is symbolic of death and destruction. The inevitable outcome of strife and war, famine and deprivation, is, for John of Patmos, the physical death of the believers to be followed by a period of purgatory until they reach their destined place of an eternal life in heaven. The rider on the pale horse also represents death for Lawrence, but it is the death of the physical and dynamic self : “the “little death” of the initiate”, (Apocalypse, 103) which forces man to retreat into “the underworld” of his “being” (Apocalypse, 103) in preparation for his rebirth on a new and vital plane.