CHAPTER XXII
When we come to the second half of Revelation, after the new-born child is snatched to heaven and the woman has fled into the wilderness, there is a sudden change, and we feel we are reading purely Jewish and Jewish-Christian Apocalypse, with none of the old background.
And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon.’ They cast down the dragon out of heaven into the earth, and he becomes Satan, and ceases entirely to be interesting. When the great figures of mythology are turned into rationalised or merely moral forces, then they lose interest. We are acutely bored by moral angels and moral devils. We are acutely bored by a ‘rationalised’ Aphrodite. Soon after iooo b.c. the world went a little insane about morals and ‘sin’. The Jews had always been tainted.
What we have been looking for in the Apocalypse is something older, grander than the ethical business. The old, flaming love of life and the strange shudder of the presence of the invisible dead made the rhythm of really ancient religion. Moral religion is comparatively modern, even with the Jews.
But the second half of the Apocalypse is all moral: that is to say, it is all sin and salvation. For a moment there is a hint of the old cosmic wonder, when the dragon turns again upon the woman and she is given wings of an eagle and flies off into the wilderness: but the dragon pursues her and spues out a flood upon her, to overwhelm her: ‘And the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.’
The last words are, of course, the moral ending tacked on by some Jew-Christian scribe to the fragment of myth. The dragon is here the watery dragon, or the dragon of chaos, and in his evil aspect still. He is resisting with all his might the birth of a new thing, or new era. He turns against the Christians, since they are the only ‘good’ thing left on earth.
The poor dragon henceforth cuts a sorry figure. He gives his power, and his seat, and great authority to the beast that rises out of the sea, the beast with ‘seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion.’
We know this beast already: he comes out of Daniel and is explained by Daniel. The beast is the last grand world- empire, the ten horns are ten kingdoms confederated in the empire — which is of course Rome. As for the leopard, bear, and lion qualities, these are also explained in Daniel as the three empires that preceded Rome, the Macedonian, swift as a leopard, the Persian, stubborn as a bear, the Babylonians, rapacious as the lion.
We are back again at the level of allegory, and for me, the real interest is gone. Allegory can always be explained: and explained away. The true symbol defies all explanation, so does the true myth. You can give meanings to either — you will never explain them away. Because symbol and myth do not affect us only mentally, they move the deep emotional centres every time. The great quality of the mind is finality. The mind ‘understands’, and there’s an end of it.
But the emotional consciousness of man has a life and movement quite different from the mental consciousness. The mind knows in part, in part and parcel, with full stop after every sentence. But the emotional soul knows in full, like a river or a flood. For example, the symbol of the dragon — look at it, on a Chinese tea-cup or in an old wood-cut, read it in a fairy-tale — and what is the result? If you are alive in the old emotional self, the more you look at the dragon, and think of it, the farther and farther flushes out your emotional awareness, on and on into dim regions of the soul aeons and aeons back. But if you are dead in the old feeling-knowing way, as so many moderns are, then the dragon just ‘stands for’ this, that, and the other — all the things it stands for in Frazer’s Golden Bough: it is just a kind of glyph or label, like the gilt pestle and mortar outside a chemist’s shop. Or take better still the Egyptian symbol called the ankh, the symbol of life, etc., which the goddesses hold in their hands. Any child ‘knows what it means’. But a man who is really alive feels his soul begin to throb and expand at the mere sight of the symbol. Modern men, however, are nearly all half dead, modern women too. So they just look at the ankh and know all about it, and that’s that. They are proud of their own emotional impotence.
Naturally, then, the Apocalypse has appealed to men through the ages as an ‘allegorical’ work. Everything just ‘meant something’ and something moral at that. You can put down the meaning flat — plain as two and two make four.
The beast from the sea means Roman Empire — and later Nero, number 666. The beast from the earth means the pagan sacerdotal power, the priestly power which made the emperors divine and made Christians even ‘worship’ them. For the beast from the earth has two horns, like a lamb, a false Lamb indeed, an Antichrist, and it teaches its wicked followers to perform marvels and even miracles — of witchcraft, like Simon Magus and the rest.
So we have the Church of Christ — or of the Messiah — being martyred by the beast, till pretty well all good Christians are martyred. Then at last, after not so very long a time — say forty years — the Messiah descends from heaven and makes war on the beast, the Roman Empire, and on the kings who are with him. There is a grand fall of Rome, called Babylon, and a grand triumph over her downfall — though the best poetry is all the time lifted from Jeremiah or Ezekiel or Isaiah, it is not original. The sainted Christians gloat over fallen Rome: and then the Victorious Rider appears, his shirt bloody with the blood of dead kings. After this, a New Jerusalem descends to be his Bride, and these precious martyrs all get their thrones, and for a thousand years (John was not going to be put off with Enoch’s meagre forty), for a thousand years, the grand Millennium, the Lamb reigns over the earth, assisted by all the risen martyrs. And if the martyrs in the Millennium are going to be as bloodthirsty and ferocious as John the Divine in the Apocalypse — Revenge! Timotheus cries — then somebody’s going to get it hot during the thousand years of the rule of Saints.
But this is not enough. After the thousand years the whole universe must be wiped out, earth, sun, moon, stars, and sea. These early Christians fairly lusted after the end of the world. They wanted their own grand turn first — Revenge! Timotheus cries. — But after that, they insisted that the whole universe must be wiped out, sun, stars, and all — and a new New Jerusalem should appear, with the same old saints and martyrs in glory, and everything else should have disappeared except the lake of burning brimstone in which devils, demons, beasts and bad men should frizzle and suffer for ever and ever and ever, Amen!
So ends this glorious work: surely a rather repulsive work. Revenge was indeed a sacred duty to the Jerusalem Jews: and it is not the revenge one minds so much as the perpetual self-glorification of these saints and martyrs, and their profound impudence. How one loathes them, in their ‘new white garments’. How disgusting their priggish rule must be! How vile is their spirit, really, insisting, simply insisting on wiping out the whole universe, bird and blossom, star and river, and above all, everybody except themselves and their precious ‘saved’ brothers. How beastly their New Jerusalem, where the flowers never fade, but stand in everlasting sameness! How terribly bourgeois to have unfading flowers!
No wonder the pagans were horrified at the ‘impious’ Christian desire to destroy the universe. How horrified even the old Jews of the Old Testament would have been! For even to them, earth and sun and stars were eternal, created in the grand creation by Almighty God. But no, these impudent martyrs must see it all go up in smoke.
Oh, it is the Christianity of the middling masses, this Christianity of the Apocalypse. And we must confess, it is hideous. Self-righteousness, self-conceit, self-importance and secret envy underlie it all.
By the time of Jesus, all the lowest classes and mediocre people had realised that never would they get a chance to be kings, never
would they go in chariots, never would they drink wine from gold vessels. Very well then — they would have their revenge by destroying it all. ‘Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils.’ And then all the gold and silver and pearls and precious stones and fine linen and purple, and silk, and scarlet — and cinnamon and frankincense, wheat, beasts, sheep, horses, chariots, slaves, souls of men — all these that are destroyed, destroyed, destroyed in Babylon the great — how one hears the envy, the endless envy screeching through this song of triumph!
No, we can understand that the Fathers of the Church in the east wanted Apocalypse left out of the New Testament. And like Judas among the disciples, it was inevitable that it should be included. The Apocalypse is the feet of clay to the grand Christian image. And down crashes the image, on the weakness of these very feet.
There is Jesus — but there is also John the Divine. There is Christian love — and there is Christian envy. The former would ‘save’ the world — the latter will never be satisfied till it has destroyed the world. They are two sides of the same medal.
CHAPTER XXIII
Because, as a matter of fact, when you start to teach individual self-realisation to the great masses of people, who when all is said and done are only fragmentary beings, incapable of whole individuality, you end by making them all envious, grudging, spiteful creatures. Anyone who is kind to man knows the fragmentariness of most men, and wants to arrange a society of power in which men fall naturally into a collective wholeness, since they cannot have an individual wholeness. In this collective wholeness they will be fulfilled. But if they make efforts at individual fulfilment, they must fail for they are by nature fragmentary. Then, failures, having no wholeness anywhere, they fall into envy and spite. Jesus knew all about it when he said: To them that have shall be given, etc. But he had forgotten to reckon with the mass of the mediocre, whose motto is: We have nothing and therefore nobody shall have anything.
But Jesus gave the ideal for the Christian individual, and deliberately avoided giving an ideal for the State or the nation. When he said, ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s’, he left to Caesar the rule of men’s bodies, willy- nilly: and this threatened terrible danger to a man’s mind and soul. Already by the year a.d. 60 the Christians were an accursed sect; and they were compelled, like all men, to sacrifice, that is to give worship to the living Caesar. In giving Caesar the power over men’s bodies, Jesus gave him the power to compel men to make the act of worship to Caesar. Now I doubt if Jesus himself could have performed this act of worship, to a Nero or a Domitian. No doubt he would have preferred death. As did so many early Christian martyrs. So there, at the very beginning was a monstrous dilemma. To be a Christian meant death at the hands of the Roman State; for refusal to submit to the cult of the Emperor and worship the divine man, Caesar, was impossible to a Christian. No wonder, then, that John of Patmos saw the day not far off when every Christian would be martyred. The day would have come, if the imperial cult had been absolutely enforced on the people. And then when every Christian was martyred, what could a Christian expect but a Second Advent, resurrection, and an absolute revenge! There was a condition for the Christian community to be in, sixty years after the death of the Saviour.
Jesus made it inevitable, when he said that the money belonged to Caesar. It was a mistake. Money means bread, and the bread of men belongs to no men. Money means also power, and it is monstrous to give power to the virtual enemy. Caesar was bound, sooner or later, to violate the soul of the Christians. But Jesus saw the individual only, and considered only the individual. He left it to John of Patmos, who was up against the Roman State, to formulate the Christian vision of the Christian State. John did it in the Apocalypse. It entails the destruction of the whole world, and the reign of saints in ultimate bodiless glory. Or it entails the destruction of all earthly power, and the rule of an oligarchy of martyrs (the Millennium).
This destruction of all earthly power we are now moving towards. The oligarchy of martyrs began with Lenin, and apparently others also are martyrs. Strange, strange people they are, the martyrs, with weird, cold morality. When every country has its martyr-ruler, either like Lenin or like those, what a strange, unthinkable world it will be! But it is coming: the Apocalypse is still a book to conjure with.
A few vastly important points have been missed by Christian doctrine and Christian thought. Christian fantasy alone has grasped them.
1. No man is or can be a pure individual. The mass of men have only the tiniest touch of individuality: if any. The mass of men live and move, think and feel collectively, and have practically no individual emotions, feelings or thoughts at all. They are fragments of the collective or social consciousness. It has always been so. And will always be so.
2. The State, or what we call Society as a collective whole cannot have the psychology of an individual. Also it is a mistake to say that the State is made up of individuals.
It is not. It is made up of a collection of fragmentary beings. And no collective act, even so private an act as voting, is made from the individual self. It is made from the collective self, and has another psychological background, non-individual.
3. The State cannot be Christian. Every State is a Power. It cannot be otherwise. Every State must guard its own boundaries and guard its own prosperity. If it fails to do so, it betrays all its individual citizens.
4. Every citizen is a unit of worldly power. A man may wish to be a pure Christian and a pure individual. But since he must be a member of some political State, or nation, he is forced to be a unit of worldly power.
5. As a citizen, as a collective being, man has his fulfilment in the gratification of his power-sense. If he belongs to one of the so-called ‘ruling nations’, his soul is fulfilled in the sense of his country’s power or strength. If his country mounts up aristocratically to a zenith of splendour and power, in a hierarchy, he will be all the more fulfilled, having his place in the hierarchy. But if his country is powerful and democratic, then he will be obsessed with a perpetual will to assert his power in interfering and preventing other people from doing as they wish, since no man must do more than another man. This is the condition of modern democracies, a condition of perpetual bullying.
In democracy, bullying inevitably takes the place of power. Bullying is the negative form of power. The modern Christian State is a soul-destroying force, for it is made up of fragments which have no organic whole, only a collective whole. In a hierarchy each part is organic and vital, as my finger is an organic and vital part of me. But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness.
6. To have an ideal for the individual which regards only his individual self and ignores his collective self is in the long run fatal. To have a creed of individuality which denies the reality of the hierarchy makes at last for more anarchy. Democratic man lives by cohesion and resistance, the cohesive force of ‘love’ and the resistant force of the individual ‘freedom’. To yield entirely to love would be to be absorbed, which is the death of the individual: for the individual must hold his own, or he ceases to be ‘free’ and individual. So that we see, what our age has proved to its astonishment and dismay, that the individual cannot love. The individual cannot love: let that be an axiom. And the modern man or woman cannot conceive of himself, herself, save as an individual. And the individual in man or woman is bound to kill, at last, the lover in himself or herself. It is not that each man kills the thing he loves, but that each man, by insisting on his own individuality, kills the lover in himself, as the woman kills the lover in herself. The Christian dare not love: for love kills that which is Christian, democratic, and modern, the individual. The individual cannot love. When the individual loves, he ceases to be purely individual. And so he must recover himself, and cease to lov
e. It is one of the most amazing lessons of our day: that the individual, the Christian, the democrat cannot love. Or, when he loves, when she loves, he must take it back, she must take it back.
So much for private or personal love. Then what about that other love, ‘caritas’, loving your neighbour as yourself?
It works out the same. You love your neighbour. Immediately you run the risk of being absorbed by him: you must draw back, you must hold your own. The love becomes resistance. In the end, it is all resistance and no love: which is the history of democracy.
If you are taking the path of individual self-realisation, you had better, like Buddha, go off and be by yourself, and give a thought to nobody. Then you may achieve your Nirvana. Christ’s way of loving your neighbour leads to the hideous anomaly of having to live by sheer resistance to your neighbour, in the end.
The Apocalypse, strange book, makes this clear. It shows us the Christian in his relation to the State; which the gospels and epistles avoid doing. It shows us the Christian in relation to the State, to the world, and to the cosmos. It shows him in mad hostility to all of them, having, in the end, to will the destruction of them all.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 992
