This post is dedicated to the memory of
JOHN POLKINGHORNE
scientist-theologian
16 October 1930 – 9 March 2021
‘The Myrrh-Bearing Women’, Russian icon, c. 1475
My thanks know no end to John Pym, Damian Grant and Laurence Brockliss for their superb posts on Lawrence’s Women in Love, the novel and film. They absolutely rose to the occasion of addressing the questions that I found myself left with after watching the film and reading the novel back in January. Their posts have had well above average viewing figures, and experience shows that guest posts are some of the most regularly visited (from all over the world) on the Calderonia site. I seriously hope that readers will not be shy to continue to leave Comments on these deliberately challenging essays.
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A subject that I was not expecting to come out of this exercise is Lawrence’s attitude to religion, Christianity, and Jesus Christ in particular. I will touch on just a few points here, based on my readings of The Rainbow, Women in Love, and ‘The Man Who Died’ (1928).
I was amazed at how many allusions to the Bible there are in The Rainbow, predominantly but not only to the Old Testament. Damian Grant must correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that the whole novel is entangled with that text. ‘In everything she saw she grasped and groped to find the creation of the living God’, we are told as Ursula sits alone after her miscarriage at the end of The Rainbow, and the last paragraph opens with a pastiche of lines from Genesis 9: 11-17 that is so good one could be forgiven for thinking it was a quotation: ‘And the rainbow stood on the earth.’
By contrast, Women in Love seems a New Testament work, rather obsessed with Jesus. Birkin is referred to by others as ‘the Sunday school teacher’, ‘a preacher’, ‘really a priest’, and in the priceless grand guignol chapter ‘Gudrun in the Pompadour’ he is actually said by Halliday to be ‘as bad as Jesus’, to which another Bohemian adds: ‘He is a megalomaniac, of course, it is a form of religious mania. He thinks he is the Saviour of man.’ Even as the debunking of Birkin proceeds, however, we are aware that it is a travesty of the man. The effect is to clear the superficial, parodic resemblances of Birkin to Christ and leave one real, very powerful one: resurrection. ‘This marriage with her’, Birkin sees, is his ‘resurrection and his life’ — a quotation from Christ’s words to Martha at St John 11: 25, ‘I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live’ (used as the first words of the Church of England funeral service). Well, perhaps Lawrence saw the whole of Women in Love as the story of Birkin’s and Ursula’s ‘resurrection’, following her near-death at the end of The Rainbow and his state of being ‘quite dead-alive’ at the beginning of the sequel?
I had never been attracted to reading Lawrence’s fifty-page story ‘The Man Who Died’, as I gathered it was about Christ surviving crucifixion and being ‘resurrected’ by a nubile priestess of Isis. It did not sound promising. I have recently read it three times, however, and find it a masterpiece. It is complex, the delicacy with which Lawrence uses just enough Biblical language is amazing, there is none of that ejaculatory over-writing which in my view mars Women in Love, and I defy anyone not to find the evocation of the priestess’s world on the shores of Sidon poetical in the truest sense, convincing, and deeply moving.
There are a number of features to Christ that are stressed in this story and amount to Lawrence’s christology (here, at least). First, there is the same paramount focus on resurrection as in Women in Love. To the peasant who shelters him, and to the myrrh-bearing women, this Christ says he is alive because ‘they took me down too soon’, implying that he revived in the tomb. But both he and Lawrence repeatedly state that he died, so he can’t have been merely resuscitated. Moreover, the extraordinary description of his awakening from death suggests that there is an ulterior force behind the act, not just the recovery powers of his body, and that as a resurrected person he is not going to die again but has before him ‘an eternity of time’ (‘I am with you alway’, St Matthew 28: 20).
It is very noticeable how often Lawrence’s Christ feels ‘compassion’ — for the Roman soldiers asleep by his tomb, for the peasant people, but strangely enough not for ‘Madeleine’ (Mary Magdalene) or the other women. ‘The power was still in him to heal any man or child who touched his compassion.’ He also smiles, laughs, and connects with people by speaking ‘gently’. He can ‘read’ people and a situation intuitively. His teaching, it is suggested, had ‘offered only kindness’, that’s what it came down to.
Lawrence’s argument is with Christ’s kenosis (utter pouring of himself out). ‘I gave more than I took, and that also is woe and vanity. So Pilate and the high priests saved me from my own excessive salvation.’ Risen from the dead,
he had realized at last that the body, too, has its little life, and beyond that, the greater life. He was virgin, in recoil from the little, greedy life of the body. But now he knew that virginity is a form of greed; and that the body rises again to give and to take, to take and to give, ungreedily.
Now he will discover the ‘phenomenal world’, which we are told he had never ‘seen’ because ‘I was too much blinded by my confusion within it’. ‘Nothing is so marvellous as to be alone in the phenomenal world’, this Christ tells himself, and Lawrence’s own imagination of him experiencing it is marvellous. The culmination for Christ, ‘who had never known a woman’, is his sexual ‘healing’ by the young virgin priestess of Isis In Search who has been waiting for her Osiris all her life, and conceives by him. For my taste, at least, it is beautifully described.
Lawrence is right: the question of Christ’s sexuality is rather important. When I was interviewing John Polkinghorne for our book What Can We Hope For? he referred several times to St Gregory of Nazianus’s dictum ‘what is not shared is not redeemed’, explaining: ‘As with his death, if Jesus is the son of God and came to share and redeem human nature, then he has to share in all human experience’ (p. 57). I put to him the objection that Jesus didn’t share in all human experience, because ‘he didn’t know erotic, sexual love’. I never saw John so angry. ‘No,’ he shot at me, ‘and he didn’t murder anyone, either!’ But then he added: ‘Nor did he know the radio, or drive a car!’ It was not my function as interviewer to pursue this, so the subject dissolved in laughter.
There is no doubt in my mind that Christ did love a number of women, and that they loved him. More than that, it seems, we cannot say.
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The frequency of epiphany, transfiguration, revelation, and what Lawrentians see as ‘prophecy’ in Lawrence’s work, inclines me, after my reading of The Rainbow, Women in Love, and ‘The Man Who Died’, to see Lawrence as a (secular) religious writer. Even sex in these works is a ‘mystic’ experience rather than one of lovemaking. And all through, there are what I would regard as religious insights. For instance, at the very end of Women in Love Birkin contemplates the frozen corpse of his friend Gerald Crich and thinks:
Those who die, and dying can still love, still believe, do not die. They live still in the beloved. Gerald might still have been living in the spirit with Birkin, even after death. He might have lived with his friend, a further life.
But Gerald was ‘the denier’. Earlier, he had ‘let go for ever’ his ‘warm, momentaneous grip of final love’ on Birkin’s hand and left Birkin’s heart ‘cold, frozen, hardly able to beat’. Consequently, Gerald could not be a ‘second presence’ for Birkin. He, Gerald, was now nowhere for Birkin; an emptiness. Ursula comforts him:
‘You’ve got me,’ she said.
He smiled and kissed her.
‘If I die,’ he said, ‘you’ll know I haven’t left you.’
‘And me?’ she cried.
‘And you won’t have left me,’ he said. ‘We shan’t have any need to despair, in death.’
This is very modern theology.
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HAPPY EASTER!
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
An extremely beautiful post Patrick; thank you.
Just one quibble: your description of Lawrence as a ‘(secular) religious writer’. What is the first adjective doing here?
T.S. Eliot, near the end of the 1937 essay extracted below, also describes him as a ‘secular’ religious writer (asterisks around important bits my additions):
‘before making my concluding observations, I shall consider one man who cannot be omitted, an Englishman who cannot be duplicated or replaced by a specimen from any other country, whose position is unique, and whose peculiar attitude towards Christianity does not seem to me to have been quite correctly estimated. That is D. H. Lawrence.
… With these two odd handicaps — the will against Christianity that was a residue of childhood and adolescence, and the temperament of uneducation — Lawrence started out on a lifelong search for a religion.
Whatever his disadvantages, a man of the ability of Lawrence, and with such an addiction, can be of very great value indeed; and *it is as an investigator of the religious life — as a kind of contemplative rather than a theologian — that he seems to me to take a high place with most right*. People have deplored the spoiling of the remarkable novelist of Sons and Lovers for the making of a medicine man; but much as I admire that rather sickly and morally unintelligible book, I find the medicine man much more important than the novelist. …
I think of Lawrence neither as an artist, nor as a man who failed to be an artist; I think of him, as I have suggested, as *a researcher into religious emotion*. And unless we see him as this, we are apt to attach too much importance to his views on sex and on society, to his psychological extravaganzas, and to personal peculiarities which may account for his aberrations.
… Lawrence had a really extraordinary capacity for being exacerbated by the modern world of enlightenment and progress, whether in a Midland mining village or in metropolitan intellectual society. This world was his nightmare; he wanted a world in which religion would be real, not a world of church congresses and religious newspapers, not even a world in which a religion could be believed, but *a world in which religion would be something deeper than belief, in which life would be a kind of religious behaviourism*. Hence the prancing Indians, who, in Mornings in Mexico, inspired some of his finest and most brilliant writing. He wished to go as low as possible in the scale of human consciousness, in order to find something that he could assure himself was real.
…The attempt is fundamentally chimerical. We do not feel that Lawrence really got inside the skin of his Hopis, nor would we wish him to do so, because he was a civilized and sensitively conscious man, and his Indians, one feels, are pretty stupid. He merely gave a marvellous record of how the Indians affected Lawrence. Yet his mistaken attempt was the result of an awareness of something very important. He was aware that religion is not, and can never survive as, simply a code of morals. It has not even much meaning to say that religion is ‘good’. Other things are good or bad in relation to one’s religion. If (I think he would have said) you find you can only accept an ‘evil’ religion, then for God’s sake do, for that is far nearer the truth than not having any. For what the evil religion has in common with the good is more important than the differences; and it is more important really to feel terror than to sing comminatory psalms. So he set himself, by an immense effort of will — the same effort that the Christian has to make towards a different end — to believe in nature spirits, and to try to worship stocks and stones. And with the same perseverance he set himself to an attitude of scepticism towards science, for he saw that science only provides a relative truth, and as we cannot know the relations, we do better — the contemporary mind being what it is — to deny it altogether than to accept it as an absolute which it is not.
The religion of Lawrence can be a useful criterion for us in testing the reality of our own faith: it can serve as a constant reminder that Christianity is frightening, frightful and scandalous to that secular mind which we are all compelled to some extent to share. But *for itself, it remains on the level of secularism, because it remains a religion of power and magic*. Or rather, the religion which Lawrence would have liked to achieve is a religion of power and magic, of control rather than propitiation. What he, being a civilized man, actually arrived at, was, of course, only a religion of autotherapy. It was like the restless search of the hypochondriac for a climate in which he can be cured, or in which at least he can bear his ailments more easily. Perhaps there is this motive in all of us, but if so, at least we can hope that our being aware of it helps to keep it in its place. We can cry, Thou son of David, have mercy on me, but we can be healed only if our faith is stronger even than our desire to be healed.’
For Eliot, Lawrence is ‘secular’ because he is not Christian in Eliot’s sense of the term. But Christ is a reference point in all of Lawrence’s religious explorations. And for these explorations the adjective ‘secular’, to me, jars. Nothing was secular to Lawrence.
Finally, here’s a little more on Lawrence and Christ, in case of interest to anyone: https://catherinebrown.org/d-h-lawrence-icon/
Thank you indeed for sharing this extract with us, Catherine, and I do appreciate why you ask your question. I had never seen this writing of Eliot’s before. It is interesting, but strangely depressing, as Eliot in ‘clerical cut’ usually is.
I agree with you that he seems to call Lawrence ‘secular’ because Lawrence is not Christian in Eliot’s sense of the term. But I feel he also applies the adjective because of what he sees as Lawrence’s interest in observing religions quasi-anthropologically.
I myself used ‘secular’ in a far more basic sense, I’m afraid. I remember that I first wrote ‘Lawrence as a religious writer’, but then feared readers would take that to mean ‘writing from within a religion’, especially an established one. I agree with you that Lawrence was a religious writer tout court — he wrote about the human need for religion as such — but I still think there is a case for stressing that he was writing about Christianity (the particular focus of my post) from outside any established form. Thus, for instance, Pavel Florensky (a Russian Orthodox priest), or John Robinson (an Anglican bishop) are what one might call ‘religious religious’ writers, but Bakhtin or Kierkegaard are ‘secular’ religious writers as neither of them regarded himself as a member of his national church. I’d go so far as to say a ‘secular’ religious writer explores other people’s belief whereas the ‘religious religious’ writer has a ‘religion’.
I will say this for Eliot’s essay: it sent me back to Mornings in Mexico after sixty years, and the chapter ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’ really is as fine Eliot says. But the answers on this subject, as far as I can see, are all embedded in your magnificent article, which I strongly recommend Calderonians to read by following the link at the bottom of Catherine’s Comment.
Patrick, and Catherine: I’ve now re-read your Post, Catherine’s Comment (and her Chapter), and your sub-Comment; so am ready to append my own sub-sub-Comment. Especially as it is now Easter Sunday morning, and last night I watched/listened to a complete performance of Bach’s Matthew Passion on French TV (from Versailles). For a moment, this made me feel like the faithful altar-boy I once was.
What kind of religious writer was Lawrence? I have to agree with Patrick that he was a ‘secular’ one in the sense that he was a maverick or freebooter in the field. As a short cut into the subject, I looked up the entries under Religion in my Index to Phoenix, and was impressed by the consistency of Lawrence’s position in these essays. The base-line is always the idea that true religious feeling lies too deep to be appropriated; it cannot be codified (least of all moralized) but only lived. (Didn’t Yeats write somewhere that we can never know the truth, only live it?) Any attempt to construct religion ends up with just scaffolding (I think of Notre Dame!); we are on the way to where ‘Priests in black gowns / Are doing their rounds, / Binding with briars / My joys and desires.’ Just as the ‘wave-tip of life,’ on which Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Died’ hinges and balances precariously, cannot be arrested — not even by Hokusai! — when the word, which is always moving in Lawrence, pulsating, contributing to and surrendering to a larger rhythm, becomes the Word, to be graven and inscribed; ‘He that takes joy as it flies / Lives in eternity’s sunrise; / He that would the bird decoy / Doth the winged life destroy.’
Incidentally, it is very dishonest of Eliot to suggest — in the passage Catherine quotes — that Lawrence was seeking to engage with the ‘lowest’ (rather than the ‘deepest’) level of consciousness; with that one treacherous word shovelling on a whole alien value-system. Eliot struggled with Lawrence as Lawrence struggled with Christ — or Satan. At the same time, he was honest enough to be disturbed by, afraid of what Lawrence represented, and so to lash out on occasion in a kind of desperate reflex.
I was happy to be reminded by Catherine that Lawrence saw The Rainbow as ‘a kind of Bible for the English people’. (A very Unauthorized Version!) And Patrick reminds us that The Rainbow is an Old Testament novel, thickly sown with references, just as Women in Love (with Birkin/Christ) has more of a New Testament atmosphere — although one of the titles Lawrence entertained, Dies Irae, also points towards the Apocalypse, and the ‘end-of-the-world feeling’ that Lawrence also attributed to the novel.
But what, meanwhile, of Christ? I understand ‘The Man Who Died’ as a kind of settling of accounts with Christ: the Christ by whom Lawrence was haunted all his life (I profit from Catherine’s many pertinent citations). In the end, Lawrence had to incorporate this Christ, include him in his own imaginative universe. While the other, suffering and sacrificial Christ is (gently but firmly) rejected: as Yeats rejected von Hugel (‘So get you gone, von Hugel, though with blessings on your head’). And as for immortality: ‘Tomorrow is another day.’ The true Lawrentian immortality is that conferred and guaranteed by love, as sublimely invoked by Cleopatra: ‘I have immortal longings in me.’
This Comment is long enough, though I would like to have added some reaction to reading Catherine’s chapter, referred to at the end of her Comment, which is indeed rich in reference and wholly relevant to the theme you have introduced. I liked Baldick’s idea of Leavis as St Paul to Lawrence’s Christ; and was much taken with the ‘BD’ Lawrence, armed with sabre and pistol against the modern world. Obviously, a lot has been happening in Lawrence criticism since I gave up on it twenty years ago — though I must admit that the idea of a vegan Lawrence ‘tempts my risibility’. I should be better informed, and chastened.
Thank you both for shedding so much light on Lawrence and religion. Damian appositely collocates Blake with Lawrence in his Comment, and this irritates the only question I have remaining about the topic: how do Lawrence’s and Blake’s placings of Jesus differ? As Catherine has said, ‘Christ is a reference point in all of Lawrence’s religious exploration’; indeed after reading her article I almost feel Lawrence was morbidly obsessed with Christ. But if Christ was a/the cynosure for Lawrence, Blake seems thoroughly confused in his placing of him: at the end of ‘The Gates of Paradise’, for instance, we are told that Satan is ‘Worship’d by the names of Jesus and Jehovah’. I have never understood this.