Then came the Reformation, and the thing started over again: the old will of the Christian community to destroy human worldly power, and to substitute the negative power of the mass. The battle rages today, in all its horror. In Russia, the triumph over worldly power was accomplished, and the reign of saints set in, with Lenin for the chief saint.
And Lenin was a saint. He had every quality of a saint. He is worshipped today, quite rightly, as a saint. But saints who try to kill all brave power in mankind are fiends, like the Puritans who wanted to pull all the bright feathers out of the chaffinch. Fiends!
Lenin’s rule of saints turned out quite horrible. It has more thou-shalt-nots than any rule of ‘Beasts’, or emperors. And this is bound to be so. Any rule of saints must be horrible. Why? Because the nature of man is not saintly. The primal need, the old-Adamic need in a man’s soul is to be, in his own sphere and as far as he can attain it, master, lord, and splendid one. Every cock can crow on his own muck- heap, and ruffle gleaming feathers; every peasant could be a glorious little Tzar in his own hut, and when he got a bit drunk. And every peasant was consummated in the old dash and gorgeousness of the nobles, and in the supreme splendour of the Tzar. The supreme master and lord and splendid one: their own, their own splendid one: they might see him with their own eyes, the Tzar! And this fulfilled one of the deepest, greatest, and most powerful needs of the human heart. The human heart needs, needs, needs, splendour, gorgeousness, pride, assumption, glory, and lordship. Perhaps it needs these even more than it needs love: at least, even more than bread. And every great king makes every man a little lord in his own tiny sphere, fills the imagination with lordship and splendour, satisfies the soul. The most dangerous thing in the world is to show man his own paltriness as hedged-in male. It depresses him, and makes him paltry. We become, alas, what we think we are. Men have been depressed now for many years in their male and splendid selves, depressed into dejection and almost into abjection. Is not that evil? Then let men themselves do something about it.
And a great saint like Lenin — or Shelley or St. Francis — can only cry anathema! anathema! to the natural proud self of power, and try deliberately to destroy all might and all lordship, and leave the people poor, oh, so poor! Poor, poor, poor, as the people are in all our modern democracies, though nowhere so absolutely impoverished in life as in the most absolute democracy, no matter how they be in money.
The community is inhuman, and less than human. It becomes at last the most dangerous because bloodless and insentient tyrant. For a long time, even a democracy like the American or the Swiss will answer to the call of a hero, who is somewhat of a true aristocrat: like Lincoln: so strong is the aristocratic instinct in man. But the willingness to give the response to the heroic, the true aristocratic call, gets weaker and weaker in every democracy, as time goes on. All history proves it. Then men turn against the heroic appeal, with a sort of venom. They will only listen to the call of mediocrity wielding the insentient bullying power of mediocrity: which is evil. Hence the success of painfully inferior and even base politicians.
Brave people add up to an aristocracy. The democracy of thou-shalt-not is bound to be a collection of weak men. And then the sacred ‘will of the people’ becomes blinder, baser, and more dangerous than the will of any tyrant. When the will of the people becomes the sum of the weakness of a multitude of weak men, it is time to make a break.
So today. Society consists of a mass of weak individuals trying to protect themselves, out of fear, from every possible imaginary evil, and, of course, by their very fear, bringing the evil into being.
This is the Christian community today, in its perpetual mean thou-shalt-not. This is how Christian doctrine has worked out in practice.
CHAPTER V
And Revelation was a foreshadowing of all this. It is above all what some psychologists would call the revelation of a thwarted ‘superiority’ goal, and a consequent inferiority complex. Of the positive side of Christianity, the peace of meditation and the joy of unselfish service, the rest from ambition and the pleasure of knowledge, we find nothing in the Apocalypse. Because the Apocalypse is for the non- individual side of a man’s nature, written from the thwarted collective self, whereas meditation and unselfish service are for pure individuals, isolate. Pure Christianity anyhow cannot fit a nation, or society at large. The great war made it obvious. It can only fit individuals. The collective whole must have some other inspiration.
And the Apocalypse, repellent though its chief spirit be, does also contain another inspiration. It is repellent because it resounds with the dangerous snarl of the frustrated, suppressed collective self, the frustrated power-spirit in man, vengeful. But it contains also some revelation of the true and positive power-spirit. The very beginning surprises us: ‘John to the seven churches in Asia: grace be to you and peace from he who is and was and is coming, and from the seven Spirits before his throne, and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the first-born from the dead, and the prince over the kings of the earth; to him who loves us and loosed us from our sins by shedding his blood — he has made us a realm of priests for his God and Father — to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever, Amen. Lo, he is coming on the clouds, to be seen by every eye, even by those who impaled him, and all the tribes of earth will wail because of him: even so, Amen.’ — I have used Moffatt’s translation, as the meaning is a little more explicit than in the authorised version.
But here we have a curious Jesus, very different from the one in Galilee, wandering by the lake. And the book goes on: ‘On the Lord’s day I found myself rapt in the Spirit, and I heard a loud voice behind me like a trumpet calling, “Write your vision in a book.” — So I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me; and on turning round I saw seven golden lampstands and in the middle of the lamp- stands One who resembled a human being, with a long robe, and a belt of gold round his breast; his head and hair were white as wool, white as snow; his eyes flashed like fire, his feet glowed like burnished bronze, his voice sounded like many waves, in his right hand he held seven stars, a sharp sword with a double edge issued from his mouth, and his face shone like the sun in full strength. When I saw him, I fell at his feet like a dead man; but he laid his hand on me, saying: ‘Do not be afraid; I am the First and Last, I was dead and here I am alive for evermore, holding the keys that unlock death and Hades. Write down your vision of what is and what is to be hereafter. As for the secret symbol of the seven stars which you have seen in my right hand, and of the seven golden lampstands: the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches. To the angel of the church at Ephesus write thus: — ‘These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand, who moves among the seven golden lampstands — “ ‘
Now this being with the sword of the Logos issuing from his mouth and the seven stars in his hand is the Son of God, therefore, the Messiah, therefore Jesus. It is very far from the Jesus who said in Gethsemane: ‘My heart is sad, sad even unto death; stay here and watch.’ — But it is the Jesus that the early Church, especially in Asia, prominently believed in.
And what is this Jesus? It is the great Splendid One, almost identical with the Almighty in the visions of Ezekiel and Daniel. It is a vast cosmic lord, standing among the seven eternal lamps of the archaic planets, sun and moon and five great stars around his feet. In the sky his gleaming head is in the north, the sacred region of the Pole, and he holds in his right hand the seven stars of the Bear, that we call the Plough, and he wheels them round the Pole star, as even now we see them wheel, causing universal revolution of the heavens, the roundwise moving of the cosmos. This is the lord of all motion, who swings the cosmos into its course. Again, from his mouth issues the two-edged sword of the Word, the mighty weapon of the Logos which will smite the world (and in the end destroy it). This is the sword indeed that Jesus brought among men. And lastly, his face shines like the sun in full strength, the source of life itself, the dazzler, before whom we fall as if de
ad.
And this is Jesus: not only the Jesus of the early churches, but the Jesus of popular religion today. There is nothing humble nor suffering here. It is our ‘superiority goal’, indeed. And it is a true account of man’s other conception of God; perhaps the greater and more fundamental conception: the magnificent Mover of the Cosmos! To John of Patmos, the Lord is Kosmokrator, and even Kosmodynamos; the great Ruler of the Cosmos, and the Power of the Cosmos. But alas, according to the Apocalypse man has no share in the ruling of the cosmos until after death. When a Christian has been put to death by martyrdom, then he will be resurrected at the Second Advent and become himself a little Kosmokrator, ruling for a thousand years. It is the apotheosis of the weak man.
But the Son of God, the Jesus of John’s vision, is more even than this. He holds the keys that unlock death and Hades. He is Lord of the Underworld. He is Hermes, the guide of souls through the death-world, over the hellish stream. He is master of the mysteries of the dead, he knows the meaning of the holocaust, and has final power over the powers below. The dead and the lords of death, who are always hovering in the background of religion away down among the people, these chthonioi of the primitive Greeks, these too must acknowledge Jesus as a supreme lord.
And the lord of the dead is master of the future, and the god of the present. He gives the vision of what was, and is, and shall be.
Here is a Jesus for you! What is modern Christianity going to make of it? For it is the Jesus of the very first communities, and it is the Jesus of the early Catholic Church, as it emerged from the Dark Ages and adjusted itself once more to life and death and the cosmos, the whole great adventure of the human soul, as contrasted with the little petty personal adventure of modern Protestantism and Catholicism alike, cut off from the cosmos, cut off from Hades, cut off from the magnificence of the Star-mover. Petty little personal salvation, petty morality instead of cosmic splendour, we have lost the sun and the planets, and the Lord with the seven stars of the Bear in his right hand. Poor, paltry, creeping little world we live in, even the keys of death and Hades are lost. How shut in we are! All we can do, with our brotherly love, is to shut one another in. We are so afraid somebody else might be lordly and splendid, when we can’t. Petty little bolshevists, every one of us today, we are determined that no man shall shine like the sun in full strength, for he would certainly outshine us.
Now again we realise a dual feeling in ourselves with regard to the Apocalypse. Suddenly we see some of the old pagan splendour, that delighted in the might and the magnificence of the cosmos, and man who was as a star in the cosmos. Suddenly we feel again the nostalgia for the old pagan world, long before John’s day, we feel an immense yearning to be freed from this petty personal entanglement of weak life, to be back in the far-off world before men became ‘afraid’. We want to be freed from our tight little automatic ‘universe’, to go back to the great living cosmos of the ‘unenlightened’ pagans.
Perhaps the greatest difference between us and the pagans lies in our different relation to the cosmos. With us, all is personal. Landscape and the sky, these are to us the delicious background of our personal life, and no more. Even the universe of the scientist is little more than an extension of our personality, to us. To the pagan, landscape and personal background were on the whole indifferent. But the cosmos was a very real thing. A man lived with the cosmos, and knew it greater than himself.
Don’t let us imagine we see the sun as the old civilisations saw it. All we see is a scientific little luminary, dwindled to a ball of blazing gas. In the centuries before Ezekiel and John, the sun was still a magnificent reality, men drew forth from him strength and splendour, and gave him back homage and lustre and thanks. But in us, the connection is broken, the responsive centres are dead. Our sun is a quite different thing from the cosmic sun of the ancients, so much more trivial. We may see what we call the sun, but we have lost Helios forever, and the great orb of the Chaldeans still more. We have lost the cosmos, by coming out of responsive connection with it, and this is our chief tragedy. What is our petty little love of nature — Nature!! — compared to the ancient magnificent living with the cosmos, and being honoured by the cosmos!
And some of the great images of the Apocalypse move us to strange depths, and to a strange wild fluttering of freedom: of true freedom, really, an escape to somewhere, not an escape to nowhere. An escape from the tight little cage of our universe; tight, in spite of all the astronomist’s vast and unthinkable stretches of space; tight, because it is only a continuous extension, a dreary on and on, without any meaning: an escape from this into the vital cosmos, to a sun who has a great wild life, and who looks back at us for strength or withering, marvellous, as he goes his way. Who says the sun cannot speak to me! The sun has a great blazing consciousness, and I have a little blazing consciousness. When I can strip myself of the trash of personal feelings and ideas, and get down to my naked sun-self, then the sun and I can commune by the houi the blazing interchange, and he gives me life, sun-life, and I send him a little new brightness from the world of the bright blood. The great sun, like an angry dragon, hater of the nervous and personal consciousness in us. As all these modern sunbathers must realise, for they become disintegrated by the very sun that bronzes them. But the sun, like a lion, loves the bright red blood of life, and can give it an infinite enrichment if we know how to receive it. But we don’t. We have lost the sun. And he only falls on us and destroys us, decomposing something in us: the dragon of destruction instead of the life-bringer.
And we have lost the moon, the cool, bright, ever-varying moon. It is she who would caress our nerves, smooth them with the silky hand of her glowing, soothe them into serenity again with her cool presence. For the moon is the mistress and mother of our watery bodies, the pale body of our nervous consciousness and our moist flesh. Oh, the moon could soothe us and heal us like a cool great Artemis between her arms. But we have lost her, in our stupidity we ignore her. and angry she stares down on us and whips us with nervous whips. Oh, beware of the angry Artemis of the night heavens, beware of the spite of Cybele, beware of the vindictivness of horned Astarte.
For the lovers who shoot themselves in the night, in the horrible suicide of love, they are driven mad by the poisoned arrows of Artemis: the moon is against them: the moon is fiercely against them. And oh, if the moon is against you, oh, beware of the bitter night, especially the night of intoxication.
Now this may sound nonsense, but that is merely because we are fools. There is an eternal vital correspondence between our blood and the sun: there is an eternal vital correspondence between our nerves and the moon. If we get out of contact and harmony with the sun and moon, then both turn into great dragons of destruction against us. The sun is a great source of blood-vitality, it streams strength to us. But once we resist the sun, and say: It is a mere ball of gas! — then the very streaming vitality of sunshine turns into subtle disintegrative force in us, and undoes us. The same with the moon, the planets, the great stars. They are either our makers or our unmakers. There is no escape.
We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great gleaming nerve-centre from which we quiver forever. Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time. And if we deny Aldebaran, Aldebaran will pierce us with infinite dagger-thrusts. He who is not with me is against me! — that is a cosmic law.
Now all this is literally true, as men knew in the great past, and as they will know again.
By the time of John of Patmos, men, especially educated men, had already almost lost the cosmos. The sun, the moon, the planets, instead of being the communers, the comminglers, the life-givers, the splendid ones, the awful ones, had already fallen into a sort of deadness; they were the arbitrary, almost mechanical engineers of fate and destiny. By the time of Jesus, men had turned the heavens into a mec
hanism of fate and destiny, a prison. The Christians escaped this prison by denying the body altogether. But alas, these little escapes! especially the escapes by denial! — they are the most fatal of evasions. Christianity and our ideal civilisation have been one long evasion. It has caused endless lying and misery, misery such as people know today, not of physical want but of far more deadly vital want. Better lack bread than lack life. The long evasion, whose only fruit is the machine!
We have lost the cosmos. The sun strengthens us no more, neither does the moon. In mystic language, the moon is black to us, and the sun is as sackcloth.
Now we have to get back the cosmos, and it can’t be done by a trick. The great range of responses that have fallen dead in us have to come to life again. It has taken two thousand years to kill them. Who knows how long it will take to bring them to life?
When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos. — It is nothing human and personal that we are short of. What we lack is cosmic life, the sun in us and the moon in us. We can’t get the sun in us by lying naked like pigs on a beach. The very sun that is bronzing us is inwardly disintegrating us — as we know later. Process of katabolism. We can only get the sun by a sort of worship: and the same with the moon. By going forth to worship the sun, worship that is felt in the blood. Tricks and postures only make matters worse.
CHAPTER VI
And now we must admit that we are also grateful to St. John’s Revelation for giving us hints of the magnificent cosmos and putting us into momentary contact. The contacts, it is true, are only for moments, then they are broken by this other spirit of hope-despair. But even for the moments we are grateful.
There are flashes throughout the first part of the Apocalypse of true cosmic worship. The cosmos became anathema to the Christians, though the early Catholic Church restored it somewhat after the crash of the Dark Ages. Then again the cosmos became anathema to the Protestants after the Reformation. They substituted the non-vital universe of forces and mechanistic order, everything else became abstraction, and the long, slow death of the human being set in. This slow death produced science and machinery, but both are death products.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 984
