1 00:00:10,430 --> 00:00:19,340 Hello. I remember once I was in South Korea and looking down over Seoul at night from the top of the television tower, 2 00:00:19,340 --> 00:00:26,390 which stands on top of the mountain, which overlooks the city, I stood and looked for a while. 3 00:00:26,390 --> 00:00:34,310 It is a vast, sprawling city. Nothing about it struck me in particular, except that it was bigger than I'd imagined it. 4 00:00:34,310 --> 00:00:40,850 Then someone I was with pointed out a neon cross on top of a building nearby. 5 00:00:40,850 --> 00:00:53,570 South Korea is about 30 percent Christian, and they choose chose to illuminate their symbol at night, rather like the South Italians in Neon. 6 00:00:53,570 --> 00:01:02,330 Then the same person pointed out another cross only a few blocks away, and then another also nearby. 7 00:01:02,330 --> 00:01:08,570 My brain assimilated the shape of the cross and my eye was now on the lookout for them. 8 00:01:08,570 --> 00:01:12,770 I saw about 10 within a small region and in the region next to it. 9 00:01:12,770 --> 00:01:23,000 And as my eyes spread out across the city, I realised with something of a shock that the cityscape was punctuated by hundreds of neon crosses. 10 00:01:23,000 --> 00:01:31,010 This effect is striking even in Naples, but far more so in Seoul, where I had not expected it. 11 00:01:31,010 --> 00:01:35,510 Surveying Lawrence's works is a similar experience. 12 00:01:35,510 --> 00:01:47,720 We do not necessarily expect to find his work studied with Christian concepts, biblical incidences, King James phraseology and church buildings. 13 00:01:47,720 --> 00:01:52,580 But once we start looking for them, they are almost everywhere we turn. 14 00:01:52,580 --> 00:02:04,640 Even in the titles The Rainbow, Arun's Rod, The Man Who Died Apocalypse Women in Love starts with a church wedding. 15 00:02:04,640 --> 00:02:11,870 The ballet performed at Bread will be is the biblical story of of Naomi, Ruth and Orpah. 16 00:02:11,870 --> 00:02:18,380 Lawrence was steeped in Christianity from his earliest moments of consciousness and never left it alone, 17 00:02:18,380 --> 00:02:28,130 even after he gave up on its dogma at the Lady Chatterley trial in nineteen sixty two, which I keep returning. 18 00:02:28,130 --> 00:02:33,920 One of the witnesses for the defence was the Bishop of Woolwich, Dr John Robinson. 19 00:02:33,920 --> 00:02:38,900 He was a theologian of Cambridge University who specialised in ethics. 20 00:02:38,900 --> 00:02:44,000 He said Lawrence did not have a Christian valuation of sex, 21 00:02:44,000 --> 00:02:50,300 and the kind of sexual relationship depicted in the book is not one that I would necessarily regard as ideal. 22 00:02:50,300 --> 00:02:59,120 But what I think is clear is that what Lawrence was trying to do is portray the sex relationship as something essentially sacred. 23 00:02:59,120 --> 00:03:06,350 He was then asked by a journalist, is this a book which, in your view, Christians ought to read? 24 00:03:06,350 --> 00:03:14,150 He said, yes, I think it is. Predictably, next day, banner headlines in the British newspapers. 25 00:03:14,150 --> 00:03:19,560 Lady Chatterley, a book all Christians should read. 26 00:03:19,560 --> 00:03:24,960 Of course, one of the things which made this preposterous was that many Christians abhorred Lawrence's 27 00:03:24,960 --> 00:03:30,360 writing for reasons amongst which was their perceived attitude towards Christianity, 28 00:03:30,360 --> 00:03:40,650 per say, one of the several reasons for which the post conversion T.S. Eliot disliked Lawrence was the way he viewed him as a heretic. 29 00:03:40,650 --> 00:03:45,300 So I think that we should start with a bit of a history of Lawrence's faith. 30 00:03:45,300 --> 00:03:54,390 He was born into congregational ism. A Congregationalist community, quite simply, is one that is self-sufficient. 31 00:03:54,390 --> 00:04:00,930 It doesn't recognise any clerical hierarchy beyond its own congregation. 32 00:04:00,930 --> 00:04:05,190 There are, for example, Jewish Congregationalist synagogues. 33 00:04:05,190 --> 00:04:14,100 But in the context of England, it generally refers to a type of Protestantism which by definition is not a unified sect. 34 00:04:14,100 --> 00:04:21,840 It goes back to the 17th century, along with the Presbyterians, the Unitarians, the Baptists and the Quakers. 35 00:04:21,840 --> 00:04:31,920 In the Victorian period, though, the Baptist and Congregationalist churches expanded far faster than the others by eighteen fifty one, 36 00:04:31,920 --> 00:04:38,490 nearly eight percent of the English and Welsh were either Baptist or Congregationalist, 37 00:04:38,490 --> 00:04:44,040 and some of the most respected Victorian preachers were Congregationalists. 38 00:04:44,040 --> 00:04:54,300 This success is reflected in the fact that they were the first non Anglican denomination to found an Oxbridge college, which is here in Oxford. 39 00:04:54,300 --> 00:05:00,210 That's Mansfield College, founded by Congregationalists in 1886. 40 00:05:00,210 --> 00:05:05,520 One difference between the Congregationalists and the Baptists is that they were far more liberal. 41 00:05:05,520 --> 00:05:09,150 They did not insist on literal readings of the Bible. 42 00:05:09,150 --> 00:05:17,580 They generally accepted the findings of the higher critics who had studied historical evidence of biblical claims and also, 43 00:05:17,580 --> 00:05:25,140 by and large accepted the findings of Victorian biologists, archaeologists and palaeontologists. 44 00:05:25,140 --> 00:05:31,740 Lawrence said that he was glad that he has not been born into the primitive Methodist church, 45 00:05:31,740 --> 00:05:36,000 which was the other main nonconformist grouping and eastward since, 46 00:05:36,000 --> 00:05:44,730 I quote, they were always having revivals and being saved and I always had a horror of being saved. 47 00:05:44,730 --> 00:05:53,700 Indeed, the preaching at the Eastwood Congregationalist Church was sufficiently liberal that it sometimes offended Lawrence's pious mother. 48 00:05:53,700 --> 00:06:03,630 When the young Lawrence wrote in 1997 to his pastor, Robert, to read a list of rational objections to Christian theology, 49 00:06:03,630 --> 00:06:09,750 Read responded by giving a series of sermons in which he argued that the Bible should 50 00:06:09,750 --> 00:06:16,410 be read intelligently in the light of science from which it had nothing to fear. 51 00:06:16,410 --> 00:06:24,510 The church was also a major cultural centre in Eastwood, which amongst other projects ran a literary society. 52 00:06:24,510 --> 00:06:34,280 It was here that in nineteen eight, Lawrence made his first public statement on aesthetics with a lecture Art and the Individual. 53 00:06:34,280 --> 00:06:38,510 I have little doubt that Lawrence would have rebelled harder scornfully, 54 00:06:38,510 --> 00:06:48,230 more aggressively towards Christianity had he been brought up either in a less tolerant Protestant church or as a Catholic. 55 00:06:48,230 --> 00:06:57,290 He was, as a boy, deeply Christian. Nonetheless, he had his moment of youthful rebellion as people brought up in a church often. 56 00:06:57,290 --> 00:07:05,240 Well, it took off when he went to Nottingham University to do his teaching certificate at the age of 21. 57 00:07:05,240 --> 00:07:12,230 He read their voraciously in a number of authors who were liable to shake or alter the nature of a Christian faith. 58 00:07:12,230 --> 00:07:18,860 Schopenhauer, William James Huxley, Darwin, Spencer M. 59 00:07:18,860 --> 00:07:24,080 Religious anthropology, such as Phrases The Golden Bough, Madame Blavatsky, 60 00:07:24,080 --> 00:07:33,170 Theosophy and Higher Criticism such as Runnels Famous Eighteen Sixty three biography La Vida Jizzy. 61 00:07:33,170 --> 00:07:42,870 He fell in with friends who ridiculed religion, including socialists and suffragettes Blanche Jennings and Alice DACs. 62 00:07:42,870 --> 00:07:48,150 He did continue to attend chapel with his mother and their friends, the chambers, 63 00:07:48,150 --> 00:07:55,530 but one evening in the spring of 1988, when they were on their way home from chapel, he suddenly fell into a rage. 64 00:07:55,530 --> 00:08:02,550 He denounced his minister, Robert Reed, and did a savage imitation of him after this period. 65 00:08:02,550 --> 00:08:07,800 He never returned to the faith of his childhood or of his mother. 66 00:08:07,800 --> 00:08:13,800 He made several of the standard criticisms of the doctrine of reward in heaven. 67 00:08:13,800 --> 00:08:19,170 For example, in his poem, When Wilt Thou Teach the People? 68 00:08:19,170 --> 00:08:26,220 When a saviour has saved a people, they find he has sold them to his father. 69 00:08:26,220 --> 00:08:30,270 They say we are saved, but we are starving. 70 00:08:30,270 --> 00:08:40,410 He says the sooner will you eat imaginary cake in the mansions of my father, they say, can't we have a loaf of common bread? 71 00:08:40,410 --> 00:08:46,260 He says, no, you must go to heaven and eat the most marvellous cake. 72 00:08:46,260 --> 00:08:51,300 Or Lenin says, you are saved, but you are saved wholesale. 73 00:08:51,300 --> 00:08:59,640 You are no longer man that is bourgeois. You are items in the Soviet state in sons and lovers. 74 00:08:59,640 --> 00:09:07,770 Paul's sexual and religious problems with Miriam are connected with the fact that she, like Jesse Chambers', on whom she is based, 75 00:09:07,770 --> 00:09:18,960 is strongly Christian quote, such women as treasure, religion inside them, breathe it in their nostrils and see the whole of life in a mist thereof. 76 00:09:18,960 --> 00:09:23,610 So to Miriam, Christ and God made one great figure which she loved, 77 00:09:23,610 --> 00:09:35,670 trembling and passionately when a tremendous sunset burned out of the western sky, she prays, Oh, Lord, let me not love poor morale. 78 00:09:35,670 --> 00:09:40,260 Keep me from loving him if I ought not to love him. 79 00:09:40,260 --> 00:09:47,700 But Lord, if it is Thy will that I should love him, make me love him as Christ would who died for the souls of men, 80 00:09:47,700 --> 00:09:52,850 make me love him splendidly because he is the son. 81 00:09:52,850 --> 00:10:00,980 There was a long battle, this is still quoting between him and her, he was utterly and unfaithful to her, even in her own presence. 82 00:10:00,980 --> 00:10:06,470 Then he was ashamed, then repentant. Then he hated her and went off again. 83 00:10:06,470 --> 00:10:10,060 Those were the ever recurring conditions. 84 00:10:10,060 --> 00:10:18,220 In his next major novel, The Rainbow Lawrence, rather than pitting himself against one of his loved ones, as in life, 85 00:10:18,220 --> 00:10:27,970 presents his own Sicher Makia, the battle in his soul by splitting tendencies of himself and dividing them between different characters. 86 00:10:27,970 --> 00:10:37,090 At least I think that's one way of interpreting them. We can see this happening in the 7th chapter of the Rainbow called the Cathedral. 87 00:10:37,090 --> 00:10:43,150 Once read Never Forgotten Will Brangwyn has the idea that he and his wife Anna 88 00:10:43,150 --> 00:10:47,290 will visit every cathedral in England over the course of their married life. 89 00:10:47,290 --> 00:10:49,980 And they start with Lincoln. 90 00:10:49,980 --> 00:11:02,040 Will enter it like a pilgrim, he pushed open the door and the great pillared gloom was before him in which his soul shuddered and rose from her nest. 91 00:11:02,040 --> 00:11:09,670 His soul leapt, soared up into the great church, spanned round with the rainbow. 92 00:11:09,670 --> 00:11:22,420 The jewelled gloom, folded music upon silence, light upon darkness, fecundity upon death as a seed folds, leaf upon leaf and silence upon the root. 93 00:11:22,420 --> 00:11:32,170 There his soul remained at the apex of the arch, clenched in the timeless ecstasy consummated. 94 00:11:32,170 --> 00:11:38,380 His passion in the cathedral at first awed her. That's Anna, his wife then made her angry. 95 00:11:38,380 --> 00:11:44,170 After all, there was the sky outside this mysterious half night. 96 00:11:44,170 --> 00:11:48,720 And then she looks up and she sees carved faces. 97 00:11:48,720 --> 00:11:55,500 And they are grotesque and leering and they suddenly make her realise that the cathedral isn't absolute. 98 00:11:55,500 --> 00:12:04,890 They winked and leered, giving suggestion of the many things that had been left out of the great concept of the church. 99 00:12:04,890 --> 00:12:09,690 So and then points out to, well, one of these mean, ridiculous little faces. 100 00:12:09,690 --> 00:12:15,600 And his ecstasy is promptly destroyed. His mouth was full of ash. 101 00:12:15,600 --> 00:12:19,770 His soul was furious. Yet somewhere in him, 102 00:12:19,770 --> 00:12:26,190 he responded more deeply to the sly little face that knew better than he had done before 103 00:12:26,190 --> 00:12:33,600 to the perfect search of his cathedral before he had thought the cathedral absolute. 104 00:12:33,600 --> 00:12:42,360 But now he saw cathedrals crouching under the sky with still the dark, mysterious world of reality inside. 105 00:12:42,360 --> 00:12:50,460 But as a world, within a world, a sort of sideshow, whereas before to him they had been as a world within a chaos, 106 00:12:50,460 --> 00:12:56,670 a reality and order, and absolute within a meaningless confusion. 107 00:12:56,670 --> 00:13:02,130 Outside the cathedral were many flying spirits that could never be sifted through 108 00:13:02,130 --> 00:13:09,270 the jewelled gloom he thought of God and of the whole blue rotunda of the day. 109 00:13:09,270 --> 00:13:14,910 That was something great and free. He thought of the ruins of the Grecian worship, 110 00:13:14,910 --> 00:13:24,720 and it seemed that a temple was never perfectly a temple till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs. 111 00:13:24,720 --> 00:13:31,170 If you want to see Lawrence's ideal of a temple, I suggest that you walk through Port Meadow to the north west of Oxford, 112 00:13:31,170 --> 00:13:36,360 and just before you get to the Trout Pub in lower will the cut look to the left and see the 113 00:13:36,360 --> 00:13:43,950 ruins of God's stone nunnery consecrated eleven thirty nine ruined since the civil war, 114 00:13:43,950 --> 00:13:52,480 roofless, fully open to the sky and with no glass and its windows to create a jewelled gloom. 115 00:13:52,480 --> 00:14:00,490 Neither the Greek temples nor St. Nunnery are decaying, they're dying is over. 116 00:14:00,490 --> 00:14:06,400 They live on now differently, cooperating with more recent thoughts. 117 00:14:06,400 --> 00:14:12,280 But Lawrence does not like a religion actively in the process of decay. 118 00:14:12,280 --> 00:14:19,180 We feel this when Cyril Birdsell, the first person narrator of Lawrence's first novel Before Sons and Lovers, 119 00:14:19,180 --> 00:14:25,920 the white peacock finds himself in a forest approaching an abandoned church. 120 00:14:25,920 --> 00:14:33,300 As I drew near an owl floated softly out of the black tower, grass overgrew the threshold. 121 00:14:33,300 --> 00:14:40,380 I pushed open the door, grinding back a heap of fallen plaster and rubbish and entered the place in the twilight. 122 00:14:40,380 --> 00:14:43,560 The pews were leaning in ghostly disorder, 123 00:14:43,560 --> 00:14:51,660 the prayer books dragged from their ledges scattered on the floor in the dust and rubble turned torn by mice and birds. 124 00:14:51,660 --> 00:14:56,520 I shivered in the dark, evil smelling place and hurried to get out of doors. 125 00:14:56,520 --> 00:15:01,620 I clutched my hands with relief and pleasure when I saw the sky above me 126 00:15:01,620 --> 00:15:07,500 quivering with the last crystal light Will Brangwyn to go back to the rainbow, 127 00:15:07,500 --> 00:15:13,320 who is responsible for keeping up the fully functional church next door to his house, 128 00:15:13,320 --> 00:15:24,780 tries to overrule his reason into believing the accuracy of biblical accounts such as the transformation of water into wine at Kaner. 129 00:15:24,780 --> 00:15:27,320 It was true for him. 130 00:15:27,320 --> 00:15:36,470 Very well, it was not true, the water had not turned into wine, but for all that, he would live in his soul as if the water had turned into wine. 131 00:15:36,470 --> 00:15:39,720 His mind, he let sleep. 132 00:15:39,720 --> 00:15:48,450 And here I want to draw the first of a number of parallels I'm going to make with Tolstoy, Tolstoy was born almost 60 years before Lawrence, 133 00:15:48,450 --> 00:15:58,530 but was still going strong until Lawrence was 25, at which time he was one of the most read novelists in England as well as Russia. 134 00:15:58,530 --> 00:16:05,580 He was born into the Orthodox Church and unlike Lawrence, didn't take Christianity very seriously until he was in middle age. 135 00:16:05,580 --> 00:16:13,590 Then he had a spiritual crisis, which you find documented in Anna Karenina, particularly in the character of Levin. 136 00:16:13,590 --> 00:16:22,830 Now, Levin and Tolstoy, like well Brangwyn, try hard to send their minds to sleep so that they can accept the dogma of 137 00:16:22,830 --> 00:16:29,610 Christianity by setting aside the problems such as contingency of place of birth, 138 00:16:29,610 --> 00:16:36,240 the conflicting claims of other religions, the contradictions of Christianity itself, 139 00:16:36,240 --> 00:16:44,130 Levin and Anna Karenina and Will Brangwyn in the Rainbow both manage it just. 140 00:16:44,130 --> 00:16:55,320 Both Lawrence and Tolstoi, their creators whose intellect just would not stop crying and go to sleep like important babies, did not manage it. 141 00:16:55,320 --> 00:16:59,610 They rejected the church. Tolstoy was even excommunicated from it. 142 00:16:59,610 --> 00:17:04,660 And then they both went on to create their own kind of religion. 143 00:17:04,660 --> 00:17:11,610 And Lawrence, as he did this, as he created his own, was highly conscious that Tolstoy had done the same before him. 144 00:17:11,610 --> 00:17:17,640 Bear in mind, they were Tolstoyan churches in England while Florence was writing these works. 145 00:17:17,640 --> 00:17:24,660 But the churches to which they were both, which they had both rejected, were very different to each other. 146 00:17:24,660 --> 00:17:33,960 Tolstoy was inveighing against the official religion of a state which he found autocratic, brutal, profoundly godless. 147 00:17:33,960 --> 00:17:43,060 Lawrence never felt anything like the same level of hostility towards either Congregationalist or Anglicanism. 148 00:17:43,060 --> 00:17:52,540 At Bridel and Women in Love, there's a curious aside when Harmony's brother Alexander excuses himself from swimming by saying that in fact, 149 00:17:52,540 --> 00:17:59,410 he's going to go to church, I must go to church and read the lessons they expect me. 150 00:17:59,410 --> 00:18:04,450 Are you a Christian? Ask the Italian countess with sudden interest. 151 00:18:04,450 --> 00:18:10,330 No, said Alexander, I'm not. But I believe in keeping up the old institutions. 152 00:18:10,330 --> 00:18:16,750 They are so beautiful, said the Fraulein daintily. Oh, they are Spradley. 153 00:18:16,750 --> 00:18:21,490 The church bells were ringing a little way off, not a cloud in the sky. 154 00:18:21,490 --> 00:18:30,610 The swans were like lilies on the water below. One wanted to swoon into the bygone perfection of it all. 155 00:18:30,610 --> 00:18:37,990 Goodbye, called Alexander, waving his gloves cheerily, and he disappeared behind the bushes on his way to church. 156 00:18:37,990 --> 00:18:44,950 This is Anglicanism, not as evil, but as a repository of nostalgia and quaint beauty. 157 00:18:44,950 --> 00:18:55,660 Now, time has moved on since the decades in which the rainbow is set, leaven and will brangwyn our men of the preceding century. 158 00:18:55,660 --> 00:19:01,510 Of the later part of the 19th century, Women in Love is a novel of the First World War. 159 00:19:01,510 --> 00:19:08,050 Christianity in this novel is no longer presented as a viable truth for its characters. 160 00:19:08,050 --> 00:19:14,680 Birken and Ursula, like her parents, have their own outing to a cathedral. 161 00:19:14,680 --> 00:19:15,770 Subtle minster. 162 00:19:15,770 --> 00:19:25,720 This is in the chapter I think is twenty three called excursions, but significantly on this excursion of the younger generation, they don't go inside. 163 00:19:25,720 --> 00:19:33,160 In fact, the cathedral is hardly more than a backdrop to the ecstasy that takes place between them and that takes place in the nearby. 164 00:19:33,160 --> 00:19:41,230 In insofar as Ursula does notice it, it is to notice how distanced she feels from it. 165 00:19:41,230 --> 00:19:52,930 They heard the minister bells playing a hymn when the hour had struck six Glory to Thee, My God, this night for all the blessings of the light. 166 00:19:52,930 --> 00:20:00,520 So to Ursula Zawia, the tune fell out, drop by drop from the unseen sky onto the dusky town. 167 00:20:00,520 --> 00:20:05,050 It was like dim, bygone centuries sounding. 168 00:20:05,050 --> 00:20:13,390 It was all so far off. She stood in the old yard of the end, smelling of straw and stables and significantly petrol. 169 00:20:13,390 --> 00:20:22,300 What was it all? This was no actual world. It was the dream world of one's childhood, a great circumscribed reminiscence. 170 00:20:22,300 --> 00:20:24,880 Now, as you'll know, if you've read this novel in it, 171 00:20:24,880 --> 00:20:33,370 Ursula's parents who were such full characters when they appear in the rainbow here and women in love, they are flattened into caricature. 172 00:20:33,370 --> 00:20:44,560 The only member of the older generation whose attitude towards religion is seriously taken note of is that of Critch Jerrold's aged and dying father. 173 00:20:44,560 --> 00:20:54,190 In some respect, Critch is like Lhevinne. He believes that the men who work for him are his spiritual superiors because 174 00:20:54,190 --> 00:20:58,570 they are poorer and simpler than him and therefore they are closer to Christ. 175 00:20:58,570 --> 00:21:07,780 But in the age of ruthless modernisation personified by his son, his faith is presented as being no longer adequate. 176 00:21:07,780 --> 00:21:12,070 Quote, The father drew more and more out of the light. 177 00:21:12,070 --> 00:21:23,500 The whole frame of the real life was broken for him. He had been right, according to his lights, and his lights had been those of the great religion. 178 00:21:23,500 --> 00:21:29,830 Yet they seemed to have become obsolete, to be superseded in the world he could not understand. 179 00:21:29,830 --> 00:21:40,630 He only withdrew his lights into an inner room, into the silence, the beautiful candles of belief that would not do to light the world anymore. 180 00:21:40,630 --> 00:21:50,370 They would still burn sweetly and sufficiently in the inner room of his soul in the silence of his retirement. 181 00:21:50,370 --> 00:21:54,630 The tone of this is as gentle as the man it describes and it regrets, 182 00:21:54,630 --> 00:22:02,390 even whilst it insists that the modern world will not be illuminated by those candles. 183 00:22:02,390 --> 00:22:07,100 This tone leaves no room for contempt of the great religion, 184 00:22:07,100 --> 00:22:15,620 for that phrase is not only free and direct speech for Critch when civil bedsore gets out of the church, which I quoted before, 185 00:22:15,620 --> 00:22:23,840 which is decaying and sees an eponymous white peacock flying up and landing on the head of a stone angel and soiling that head, 186 00:22:23,840 --> 00:22:32,030 he damns the bird for its irreverence, even though the angel itself or what it stands for might have died. 187 00:22:32,030 --> 00:22:37,760 But Lawrence's argument is that that happened to Christianity because it had become static and 188 00:22:37,760 --> 00:22:45,050 remember the emphasis I placed last week on change as of great importance and value to Lawrence, 189 00:22:45,050 --> 00:22:54,680 Lawrence said the Bible is a book that has been temporarily killed for us or by some of us by having its meaning temporarily fixed. 190 00:22:54,680 --> 00:23:04,400 So what Lawrence did himself was to open up the Bible by reinterpreting its figures and images in his own way without the guidance of the church. 191 00:23:04,400 --> 00:23:08,330 This is Protestantism taken to an extreme. 192 00:23:08,330 --> 00:23:17,840 Put another way, he took the Bible as a source of myth, spiritually true myth, if only his soul could interpret it anew. 193 00:23:17,840 --> 00:23:24,320 He likened himself to Adam Freeda to Eve as they spent their life together, 194 00:23:24,320 --> 00:23:32,030 travelling across the world searching for a way back into paradise at their ranch in Delmonte, Mexico. 195 00:23:32,030 --> 00:23:44,170 He painted Adam and Eve on the door. Lady Chatterley's and Malha sorry, Chatterley and Mallows almost managed to find their Eden. 196 00:23:44,170 --> 00:23:47,890 After the war, when he and freedom could finally get out of Britain, 197 00:23:47,890 --> 00:23:58,300 he used the metaphor of the exodus out of bondage in Aaron's world and also in his Australian novels when in the late 20s, 198 00:23:58,300 --> 00:24:08,080 he defended his paintings from criticism. He cited the Song of Solomon as a great poem where loveliness is interwoven with sex. 199 00:24:08,080 --> 00:24:19,570 Now, having taken these different elements of the Bible, Women in Love is, of course, his Apokolips early proposals of titles for this novel, 200 00:24:19,570 --> 00:24:25,810 any one of which would have been more telling than the one he eventually chose were Noah's Ark. 201 00:24:25,810 --> 00:24:31,540 The latter days and era. The Day of Wrath. 202 00:24:31,540 --> 00:24:36,880 But this is only to desert that this is only to observe how he remembered the Bible 203 00:24:36,880 --> 00:24:43,390 into something living by using its tropes and by taking it itself as a trope, 204 00:24:43,390 --> 00:24:48,130 it is no statement of what his metaphysical beliefs actually were. 205 00:24:48,130 --> 00:24:55,120 Now in the first leg to be slightly touched on them when I took Lawrence's statements on consciousness from different places, 206 00:24:55,120 --> 00:25:03,880 noted their contradictions and noted that Lawrence embraced change as necessary to life, it is the same with his religious attitudes. 207 00:25:03,880 --> 00:25:10,300 One of the constants is his attribution of change to God in relation to man and man, 208 00:25:10,300 --> 00:25:20,560 in relation to God as early as Paul in sons and Lovers, he says it is not religious to be religious. 209 00:25:20,560 --> 00:25:25,810 I reckon a crow is religious when it sails across the sky, 210 00:25:25,810 --> 00:25:34,330 but it only does it because it feels itself carried to where it's going, not because it thinks it is being eternal. 211 00:25:34,330 --> 00:25:44,710 In other words, ontology trumps epistemology being, which is flock's is more important than knowing which is Stacie's. 212 00:25:44,710 --> 00:25:51,370 Any statement of dogma as a permanent truth must therefore be error. 213 00:25:51,370 --> 00:25:57,610 When Lawrence's sister, ADA, was undergoing her own crisis of faith, Lawrence wrote sympathetically to her, 214 00:25:57,610 --> 00:26:03,010 assuring her that her belief of church Christianity need not to leave her alone 215 00:26:03,010 --> 00:26:09,310 in a materialistic universe such as the one that George Eliot shivered in. 216 00:26:09,310 --> 00:26:14,560 He said, Jehovah is the Jews idea of God, not ours. 217 00:26:14,560 --> 00:26:21,880 Christ was infinitely good, but mortal as we are, there still remains a God, 218 00:26:21,880 --> 00:26:29,350 but not a personal God, a vast, shimmering impulse which wavers onward towards some end. 219 00:26:29,350 --> 00:26:39,550 I don't know what when we die, we fall back into the big shimmering sea of unorganised life, which we call God. 220 00:26:39,550 --> 00:26:50,350 It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's own heart and not to be dependent on tradition and second hand ideals. 221 00:26:50,350 --> 00:26:58,090 Birkin reaches for his own religion with his own heart when he stands in front of the frozen corpse of his best friend. 222 00:26:58,090 --> 00:27:03,250 This is perhaps one of the most powerful passages in Lawrence's writing. 223 00:27:03,250 --> 00:27:09,620 He turned away. Either the heart would break or cease to care. 224 00:27:09,620 --> 00:27:20,850 Best ceased to care. Whatever the mystery which has brought forth man and the universe, it is a non-human mystery, it has its own great hands. 225 00:27:20,850 --> 00:27:28,230 Man is not the criterion. Best leave it all to the vast creative, non-human mystery. 226 00:27:28,230 --> 00:27:33,200 Best strive with oneself only, not the universe. 227 00:27:33,200 --> 00:27:41,120 God cannot do without man, it was the saying of some great French religious teacher, but surely this is false. 228 00:27:41,120 --> 00:27:51,580 God can do with that man. God could do without the city of Sauri and the mastodon, those creatures failed creatively to develop. 229 00:27:51,580 --> 00:27:56,740 So, God, the great creative mystery dispensed with them. 230 00:27:56,740 --> 00:28:04,640 In the same way the mystery could dispense with man if he, too, should fail creatively to change and develop. 231 00:28:04,640 --> 00:28:12,050 It was very consoling to Burkean to think this if humanity ran into a cul de sac and expended itself, 232 00:28:12,050 --> 00:28:22,310 the timeless creative mystery would bring forth some other being finer, more wonderful to carry on the embodiment of creation. 233 00:28:22,310 --> 00:28:28,670 The game was never up. The Fountainhead was incorruptible and unsearchable. 234 00:28:28,670 --> 00:28:37,100 It had no limits. It could bring forth miracles to have one's pulse beating direct from the mystery. 235 00:28:37,100 --> 00:28:44,360 This was perfection. Unutterable satisfaction, human or inhuman, mattered nothing. 236 00:28:44,360 --> 00:28:51,040 The perfect pulse pulse throbbed with indescribable being. 237 00:28:51,040 --> 00:28:56,200 At other times, he is notably reluctant to take God as an agent, 238 00:28:56,200 --> 00:29:04,300 a cause or even as a signifier in Fantasia of the unconscious, which is three years later than women in love. 239 00:29:04,300 --> 00:29:08,190 He sounds a little closer to agnosticism. 240 00:29:08,190 --> 00:29:17,370 There's not a shadow of doubt about it, the first cause is just unknowable to us and we'd be sorry if it wasn't whether it's God or the atom. 241 00:29:17,370 --> 00:29:24,880 All I say is or I'm. The first business of every faith is to declare its ignorance. 242 00:29:24,880 --> 00:29:33,160 I don't know where I come from nor where I exit to, I don't know the origins of life nor the goal of death. 243 00:29:33,160 --> 00:29:39,370 I don't know how the two parent cells, which are my biological origin, became the me, which I am. 244 00:29:39,370 --> 00:29:46,100 The chemical analysis is just a farce. And my father and mother were just vehicles. 245 00:29:46,100 --> 00:29:52,770 And yet, I must say, since I've got to know about the two cells, I'm glad I do know. 246 00:29:52,770 --> 00:30:02,250 But normally, Lawrence is not an agnostic precisely because he isn't concerned either with kenosis knowing or. 247 00:30:02,250 --> 00:30:10,120 Two years later in his essay called On Being Religious, Lawrence emphasises that God isn't really quite a word. 248 00:30:10,120 --> 00:30:15,270 It's an accusation and a glyph. It never had a definition. 249 00:30:15,270 --> 00:30:22,500 When a man says there is a God or there is no God or I don't know whether there is a God or not, 250 00:30:22,500 --> 00:30:30,340 he is merely using the little word like a toy pistol to announce that he has taken an attitude. 251 00:30:30,340 --> 00:30:40,030 Yet typically for him, having established this attitude, he can later contradict himself and brusquely announce God always is and we all know it. 252 00:30:40,030 --> 00:30:42,730 When he revised his collected poems, 253 00:30:42,730 --> 00:30:52,090 he at one stage removed all uses of the term God and then in a later revision reinstated them in his last few months, 254 00:30:52,090 --> 00:30:58,480 he said that he no longer objected to the word God and that he intended to find him. 255 00:30:58,480 --> 00:31:04,540 But God to him, as I said, is changing his position in the cosmos. 256 00:31:04,540 --> 00:31:11,680 The great God departs from the heaven where man has located him and plumps is thrown down somewhere else, 257 00:31:11,680 --> 00:31:17,230 man being an arse keeps going to the same door to beg for his carrott. 258 00:31:17,230 --> 00:31:25,510 The great and majestic movement of the heavens has slowly carried away even the cross of Jesus from its place of Calvary. 259 00:31:25,510 --> 00:31:30,760 God gave us away to himself. God gave us Jesus and the way of repentance and love. 260 00:31:30,760 --> 00:31:39,340 And hence we assert that the Almighty cannot go back on it. Did Jesus ever say I am the way and there is no other way? 261 00:31:39,340 --> 00:31:46,960 According to Paul, he did say exactly that. But Lawrence prefers to concentrate on on his understanding of Jesus. 262 00:31:46,960 --> 00:31:51,460 At that moment. There was no other way for many centuries. 263 00:31:51,460 --> 00:32:00,040 There was no other way. But the point is that God has now moved on in the cosmos and Christ didn't leave us quite alone. 264 00:32:00,040 --> 00:32:06,460 Quote, He plainly indicated the only means of finding the right way, the Holy Ghost. 265 00:32:06,460 --> 00:32:10,240 The Holy Ghost is within you for the moment. 266 00:32:10,240 --> 00:32:15,190 We are lost. Let's admit it. None of us knows the way to God. 267 00:32:15,190 --> 00:32:27,160 Now, for the moment, there is no saviour. Yet we hear the strange calling of the Holy Ghost like a hound on the sent away in the unmapped wilderness. 268 00:32:27,160 --> 00:32:30,970 And it seems great fun to follow. Oh, great fun. 269 00:32:30,970 --> 00:32:34,610 God's own great fun. 270 00:32:34,610 --> 00:32:43,070 This is consistent with an unpublished page in his notebook of the year before, which begins, There is no real battle between me and Christianity. 271 00:32:43,070 --> 00:32:49,980 Here he states a creed quite plainly, I believe in the all overshadowing God. 272 00:32:49,980 --> 00:32:56,270 I believe that Jesus is one of the sons of God, not, however, the only son of God. 273 00:32:56,270 --> 00:33:02,720 I believe that the men who believe in the all overshadowing God will naturally form a church of God. 274 00:33:02,720 --> 00:33:10,010 But I cannot believe in a church of Christ. Jesus is only one of the sons of Almighty God. 275 00:33:10,010 --> 00:33:17,000 There are many saviours. There is only one God. This, again, is remarkably similar to Tolstoy's, 276 00:33:17,000 --> 00:33:25,580 and that is the religion which Tolstoy's Holy Ghost guided him into after he had rejected orthodoxy and Orthodoxy had rejected him. 277 00:33:25,580 --> 00:33:31,160 He believed in God. He believed that Christ was particularly exemplary. 278 00:33:31,160 --> 00:33:35,390 Christian Tolstoy ism is based around the example of Christ in the Gospels, 279 00:33:35,390 --> 00:33:45,000 in particular his Sermon on the Mount Christ's religion rather than the religion of Christ the Christ cult. 280 00:33:45,000 --> 00:33:51,690 Bear in mind that Tolstoy was also something of a Saint Augustine, he visited his first prostitute when he was 15. 281 00:33:51,690 --> 00:33:56,760 He had affairs with peasants after he was married. He had 13 children with his wife. 282 00:33:56,760 --> 00:33:58,690 When he was spiritually reborn, 283 00:33:58,690 --> 00:34:05,580 he rejected the flesh and thought that sexual intercourse should be kept to an absolute minimum and rejected all forms of violence, 284 00:34:05,580 --> 00:34:12,480 selfhood and pride. And of course, this is where Lawrence departs from Tolstoy. 285 00:34:12,480 --> 00:34:21,000 In Lawrence's review of Tolstoy's late novel Resurrection, he wrote, Tolstoy writhed very hard on the cross. 286 00:34:21,000 --> 00:34:28,800 His resurrection is the step into the tomb. But Christ is not twice put on the cross, not a second time. 287 00:34:28,800 --> 00:34:35,460 And this is the great point that Tolstoy missed. It seemed to him Christ would go on being crucified. 288 00:34:35,460 --> 00:34:41,460 Everlastingly, the essay ends with the sentiment The Lord is risen. 289 00:34:41,460 --> 00:34:46,980 Let us rise as well and be lords. 290 00:34:46,980 --> 00:34:55,500 This tone is reminiscent of someone who sums up the most important differences between Tolstoy and Laurence. 291 00:34:55,500 --> 00:35:01,290 She may well have guessed platelets to fill her needs to 1844. 292 00:35:01,290 --> 00:35:13,650 Nineteen hundred, in fact, Tolstoi also read Nature, but he never bet he made nowhere near as obvious an impression on Tolstoy as he did on Lawrence. 293 00:35:13,650 --> 00:35:22,140 Lawrence discovered nature in the winter of 1989 when he was in Croydon for his first postgraduation teaching job. 294 00:35:22,140 --> 00:35:30,720 Croydon Town Library bought the levy translation of the complete works of literature as they came out between 1999 and 1913. 295 00:35:30,720 --> 00:35:35,640 Although since he had studied German, he could also have read them in the original. 296 00:35:35,640 --> 00:35:43,980 He would also have been encouraged in his reading by Edward Garnett, who became his literary father figure after they met in 1911. 297 00:35:43,980 --> 00:35:52,520 Garnett found in Nietzsche, quote, the most brilliant psychological analysis of Christianity ever. 298 00:35:52,520 --> 00:35:58,850 There are certain striking similarities, therefore, not only between Lawrence and Tolstoy, but between Lawrence and Nicha, 299 00:35:58,850 --> 00:36:09,770 both men were anti intellectual thinkers, mythic plastic, mythmakers, anti moral moralists who engaged with Christianity throughout their lives. 300 00:36:09,770 --> 00:36:15,530 Nature had a strict Lutheran background. His father and both grandfathers were ministers. 301 00:36:15,530 --> 00:36:23,270 His critique of Christianity got stronger over the course of his career from many, many bishops also mentioned mentalities, 302 00:36:23,270 --> 00:36:28,760 human or to human, of eighteen seventy eight through to defoliation Vision Schaft the gay science, 303 00:36:28,760 --> 00:36:33,290 which was in fact Lawrence's first idea as a title for the work that eventually 304 00:36:33,290 --> 00:36:39,800 became called Study of Thomas Hardy in that needs to wrote that God is dead, 305 00:36:39,800 --> 00:36:44,990 but later added The Christian God has become unbelievable. 306 00:36:44,990 --> 00:36:49,610 He makes clear that he admires the Old Testament, but not the new. 307 00:36:49,610 --> 00:36:58,910 And this not because of Christ, but because of Paul, who is responsible for much Christian theology in Davilla also marked the will to power. 308 00:36:58,910 --> 00:37:10,720 He accuses Paul of turning a Buddhistic peace movement into a pagan mystery doctrine with its own blood drinking ritual. 309 00:37:10,720 --> 00:37:16,000 Jesus paid according to nature for appealing to the lowest and stupidest because they 310 00:37:16,000 --> 00:37:22,930 reconceived him in terms which they understood as a personal redeemer and a salvation story. 311 00:37:22,930 --> 00:37:33,310 He goes on, Christianity is still possible at any time, not tied to any of the impudent dogmas that have adorned themselves with its name. 312 00:37:33,310 --> 00:37:38,590 Christianity is a way of life, not a system of beliefs, it tells us how to act, 313 00:37:38,590 --> 00:37:46,780 not what we ought to believe, that Antichrist is therefore surprisingly not Antichrist. 314 00:37:46,780 --> 00:37:55,600 It portrays him as a misguidedly otherworldly but admirable figure in insights from Gordon Bouzar Beyond Good and Evil. 315 00:37:55,600 --> 00:38:01,840 He praises Christianity for preserving the Bible and instilling into the masses reverence for it. 316 00:38:01,840 --> 00:38:12,730 So so far, admittedly, we're not that far from Tolstoy ism, but in also how to stir the spokes are we hear the distinctively Nietzsche and mockery. 317 00:38:12,730 --> 00:38:18,850 And this book was a particular favourite of Laurence and Freeda. It plays with the Bible. 318 00:38:18,850 --> 00:38:22,840 Adam wanders around complaining of the theft of his rib. 319 00:38:22,840 --> 00:38:34,760 Zarathustra suggests that how Jesus lived just a bit longer, quote, He would have learnt to live and learnt to love the earth and laughter as well. 320 00:38:34,760 --> 00:38:41,090 Now, he wasn't the only one to imagine alternative plot developments for Christ, 321 00:38:41,090 --> 00:38:47,000 Tolstoy's great rival and Lawrence's rival for the attention of the British public, 322 00:38:47,000 --> 00:38:52,700 Fyodor Dostoevsky had done the same just three years before Nietzsche wrote thus, 323 00:38:52,700 --> 00:39:00,260 thus spoke with Ostrer or rather his fictional character, Ivan Karamazov did in Bradsher Karamazov. 324 00:39:00,260 --> 00:39:11,260 The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan tells his brother Alyosha a conception for a poem he wants to write, and he calls this sketch the Grand Inquisitor. 325 00:39:11,260 --> 00:39:16,710 Christ comes back for a visit to 15th century civil. 326 00:39:16,710 --> 00:39:21,330 This is not his second coming in glory, this is just an informal visit, 327 00:39:21,330 --> 00:39:26,130 he was going to appear amongst his children just when the bones of the heretics 328 00:39:26,130 --> 00:39:31,950 sentenced to be burnt alive had commenced crackling at the flaming steaks. 329 00:39:31,950 --> 00:39:35,940 Owing to his limitless mercy, he mixes once more with mortals. 330 00:39:35,940 --> 00:39:46,170 And in the very moment when before king courtiers, knights, cardinals and the fairest dames of court before the whole population of Seville, 331 00:39:46,170 --> 00:39:54,480 upwards of 100 hundred wicked heretics are being roasted in a magnificent Autodefensas at Marum de Gloria. 332 00:39:54,480 --> 00:40:02,230 By the order of the powerful Cardinal Grand Inquisitor, he comes silently and unannounced. 333 00:40:02,230 --> 00:40:07,800 Yet all how strange. Yes, all recognise him at once. 334 00:40:07,800 --> 00:40:13,560 So the population crowd around him, he performed several miracles and he smiles on everyone with compassion, 335 00:40:13,560 --> 00:40:19,920 then he is arrested, imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Inquisition. 336 00:40:19,920 --> 00:40:28,170 The Grand Inquisitor comes to visit him in prison. He knows it's Christ, but he criticises Christ for his message. 337 00:40:28,170 --> 00:40:36,840 He accuses him of demanding too much of humans and therefore of being dangerous and superfluous to the mission of the church. 338 00:40:36,840 --> 00:40:42,990 The inquisitor does not believe that most people can handle the freedom that Jesus gave them, 339 00:40:42,990 --> 00:40:47,190 and he therefore is in fact condemning those people to suffer. 340 00:40:47,190 --> 00:40:58,080 The church, on the other hand, follows the wise spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction, i.e. Satan, for he, 341 00:40:58,080 --> 00:41:06,630 through compulsion, provided the tools to end all human suffering by uniting everyone under the banner of the church. 342 00:41:06,630 --> 00:41:14,370 So the multitude is then guided through the church by the few who are strong enough to take on themselves the burden of freedom. 343 00:41:14,370 --> 00:41:20,790 The Inquisitor will be a martyr, spending his life in order to keep choice from humanity. 344 00:41:20,790 --> 00:41:24,720 That choice under which humanity suffers. 345 00:41:24,720 --> 00:41:36,690 Christ listens to all of this silently, and at the end he kisses the inquisitor on his bloodless aged lips instead of giving any other form of answer. 346 00:41:36,690 --> 00:41:43,420 The inquisitor then releases Christ, but orders him never to return. 347 00:41:43,420 --> 00:41:51,800 Alyosha, who was the brother to whom Iran is telling the story, hears him out and then kisses Iran likewise, 348 00:41:51,800 --> 00:41:58,540 ultimately the story is a satire against the atheist materialist Iran who is telling the story? 349 00:41:58,540 --> 00:42:06,790 Alyosha, who is a novice monk, eventually demonstrates in the novel a way of living, which is both Christ like and possible. 350 00:42:06,790 --> 00:42:08,710 But in Dostoevsky's own letters, 351 00:42:08,710 --> 00:42:18,820 we can see that he struggled with the questions posed in the Grand Inquisitor and wondered how they might affect the faith of the reader. 352 00:42:18,820 --> 00:42:27,010 Certainly Avan story made sufficient of an impression that it came to be published separately from the rest of what is a very long novel. 353 00:42:27,010 --> 00:42:36,370 Madame Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, translated it into English, as did SS Cotillions, who was Lawrences close Ukrainian friend. 354 00:42:36,370 --> 00:42:41,950 Lowrance helped him with the translation of this story and wrote a preface. 355 00:42:41,950 --> 00:42:46,750 This preface was the last thing Lawrence published before he died. 356 00:42:46,750 --> 00:42:53,590 In it, he said that he thought the inquisitor raised an unanswerable criticism of Christ, 357 00:42:53,590 --> 00:43:01,480 and he criticised Dostoevsky for putting those arguments in the mouth of someone who also sentences hundreds of people to burn. 358 00:43:01,480 --> 00:43:12,040 And at one remove in the mouth of the atheist materialist Ivan Dostoyevsky himself falls back onto an orthodox faith upper and lower case O, 359 00:43:12,040 --> 00:43:18,040 which Lawrence rejects and sees as being the obverse of a sinister hatred when 360 00:43:18,040 --> 00:43:22,750 he reviewed John Middleton Marries wildly enthusiastic book about Dostoyevsky. 361 00:43:22,750 --> 00:43:32,410 This was at the height of the Russian craze in England. Lawrence described him as like the rat slithering along and hate in the shadows. 362 00:43:32,410 --> 00:43:42,910 I should say that. Elsewhere, though, Lawrence confesses, a subterranean love for Dostoevsky to Dostoyevsky was the avatar of the art of the future. 363 00:43:42,910 --> 00:43:52,300 To Lawrence, he was the culmination of two millennia of Christianity whose work made it possible for later artists to really make it new. 364 00:43:52,300 --> 00:43:59,230 And that's what Lawrence did in a story he wrote at just about the same time as this preface. 365 00:43:59,230 --> 00:44:07,330 This is his last story called The Man Who Died, otherwise known under the title The Escaped Cock. 366 00:44:07,330 --> 00:44:19,600 The story is set near Jerusalem in about 30. A man who was only ever called the man who died wakes up in the darkness full of physical pain. 367 00:44:19,600 --> 00:44:24,250 Gradually, he revives and unwinds the bandages from himself. 368 00:44:24,250 --> 00:44:32,020 seised suddenly, with a force of life, he manages to push away the stone, which seems to be blocking the cave in which he is lying. 369 00:44:32,020 --> 00:44:41,950 It's not clear whether he was taken down from the cross too soon or whether, as the narrator repeatedly describes him, he is in fact the man who died. 370 00:44:41,950 --> 00:44:48,520 In any case, he's now alive. Once he's physically well enough, he has a period recovering in a peasant hut. 371 00:44:48,520 --> 00:44:57,730 He walks to Egypt, where he meets a priestess of ISIS, ISIS, whose husband, Cyrus, was cut into many pieces. 372 00:44:57,730 --> 00:45:05,370 When Jesus walks in, she recognises him as a Cyrus, her return to her resurrected husband. 373 00:45:05,370 --> 00:45:10,890 Jesus comes to understand that he was killed because he gave too much. 374 00:45:10,890 --> 00:45:20,620 He had preached a corrective to a life of selfhood, but he had not had the wisdom and the generosity also to take. 375 00:45:20,620 --> 00:45:26,200 He tells Mary Matalin, who finds him with an eye to run to excess. 376 00:45:26,200 --> 00:45:31,660 I gave more than I took and that also is woe and vanity. 377 00:45:31,660 --> 00:45:38,740 So Judas and the high priests saved me from my own excessive salvation. 378 00:45:38,740 --> 00:45:45,160 He paid for it by being tortured to death. And he's not going to do that again. 379 00:45:45,160 --> 00:45:55,570 He meets the priestess in her temple at night and in front of the idol of ISIS, he makes love for the first time in his life. 380 00:45:55,570 --> 00:45:59,860 He stays on there living in a cave with her for several months. 381 00:45:59,860 --> 00:46:04,150 She falls pregnant. Then it is time for him to move on. 382 00:46:04,150 --> 00:46:08,230 He has fulfilled himself with her. He has started his new life. 383 00:46:08,230 --> 00:46:14,890 But now both he and she should develop separately. I should say there is no hint that he is abandoning her at an awkward moment. 384 00:46:14,890 --> 00:46:22,510 She's she's going to be fine. No, surprisingly, this story, which was published in Forum, raised a storm. 385 00:46:22,510 --> 00:46:31,090 Laurence himself described it as one of his thin skinned stories, i.e., it was about himself and his work for like Nesher. 386 00:46:31,090 --> 00:46:38,140 He identified with Christ. And although his own teachings had always been consistent with the message of this story, 387 00:46:38,140 --> 00:46:47,240 perhaps he felt that he himself throughout his life had given too much, had tried too hard to save the world. 388 00:46:47,240 --> 00:46:54,800 His own friends certainly saw the resemblance, admittedly, some of him saw him more as an Old Testament figure. 389 00:46:54,800 --> 00:47:05,120 Mark Rampion, the character based on Lawrence in Huxley's Point Counterpoint, describes himself as a Jeremiah lambasting society for its failings. 390 00:47:05,120 --> 00:47:10,730 Bertrand Russell acknowledged his amazing powers of discernment. 391 00:47:10,730 --> 00:47:17,840 He is like Ezekiel or some other Old Testament prophet, but most of all, he was likened to Christ. 392 00:47:17,840 --> 00:47:24,980 Bear in mind, he was always thin. He was increasingly gaunt, and from 1914 onwards, he wore a beard. 393 00:47:24,980 --> 00:47:30,140 In the war, he often referred to himself as the crucified Christ lying in the tomb. 394 00:47:30,140 --> 00:47:42,350 And then he arose. After the war, Cecil Grey accused him of playing Jesus Christ to a regiment of Mary Magdalene's, like his contemporary Rasputin. 395 00:47:42,350 --> 00:47:48,020 He did have a he did have a considerable female following. 396 00:47:48,020 --> 00:47:52,310 He was subject to sudden rages like Christ in the temple. 397 00:47:52,310 --> 00:47:55,250 And of course, like Nietzsche, he resembles Christ most. 398 00:47:55,250 --> 00:48:03,800 When he rebelled against established Christianity, boys in the streets of Oaxaca saw the resemblance. 399 00:48:03,800 --> 00:48:12,560 Dorothea Brett painted him on a cross and he was criticised for preaching, as Tolstoy also was. 400 00:48:12,560 --> 00:48:21,770 Last week we looked at the incident in the Cafe Royal, or the Pompidou Pompadour, in which Birkins thoughts are being ridiculed by the Bohemian set. 401 00:48:21,770 --> 00:48:28,290 Haliday reads out one of Birkins letters in the voice of a clergyman reading from the Scriptures. 402 00:48:28,290 --> 00:48:33,050 Oh, but I do think it's wonderful. It almost supersedes the Bible. 403 00:48:33,050 --> 00:48:38,120 Oh, I do think those phrases are too absurdly wonderful. They're nearly as good as Jesus. 404 00:48:38,120 --> 00:48:43,280 I think it's an awful cheek like that to write like that, said the person. 405 00:48:43,280 --> 00:48:46,610 Yes, yes. So do I, said the Russian. He is a megalomaniac. Of course. 406 00:48:46,610 --> 00:48:51,350 It is a form of religious mania. He thinks he is the saviour of man. 407 00:48:51,350 --> 00:48:59,510 One can hear in Libya. Nikolaev's comment the tone of the high priest. He says he is the son of God. 408 00:48:59,510 --> 00:49:05,420 This is not just satire of Birken or satire of these trivial people's satire of Birken. 409 00:49:05,420 --> 00:49:09,530 It points to actually what was a serious aspiration on Lawrence's part. 410 00:49:09,530 --> 00:49:14,760 It almost supersedes the Bible. He was trying. 411 00:49:14,760 --> 00:49:20,640 He said that with the rainbow, he wanted to create a kind of Bible for the English people, 412 00:49:20,640 --> 00:49:24,810 but only by showing away, not that anybody should adopt the dogma of the rainbow. 413 00:49:24,810 --> 00:49:30,150 Of course, it's for us all to break free to our own discovery. 414 00:49:30,150 --> 00:49:38,040 Towards the end of his life, when he was almost consumed by consumption, his friend Earl Brewster Brewster massaged him with oil. 415 00:49:38,040 --> 00:49:41,820 So how emaciated and marginalised was his body? 416 00:49:41,820 --> 00:49:47,430 Like one of the haggard, mediaeval carved figures of the crucified Jesus, 417 00:49:47,430 --> 00:49:53,730 Lawrence had described precisely such figures in his 1915 account of walking across the Alps into 418 00:49:53,730 --> 00:49:59,640 Italy with Frida in the summer of 1912 will be coming back to this in more detail in week five, 419 00:49:59,640 --> 00:50:09,720 which is the Alps. Lecture in that essay indicates he has no patience for self-pity or for the valorisation of pain. 420 00:50:09,720 --> 00:50:16,530 He notes that as one nears Italy, the tendency of the crucifix is to become weak and sentimental. 421 00:50:16,530 --> 00:50:22,230 The carved Christ's turn up their faces and roll back their eyes very piteously. 422 00:50:22,230 --> 00:50:27,330 They are looking to heaven and thinking about themselves in self commiseration. 423 00:50:27,330 --> 00:50:32,580 Beyond the brana, I've only seen vulgar or sensational crucifixes. 424 00:50:32,580 --> 00:50:36,570 There are great gashes on the breast and the knees of the Christ figure, 425 00:50:36,570 --> 00:50:42,090 and the scarlet flows out and trickles down to the crucified body has become a ghastly striped thing of 426 00:50:42,090 --> 00:50:50,250 red and white is particularly haunted by one Christ who is seated in a chapel near Santiago in Austria. 427 00:50:50,250 --> 00:50:56,010 The face is turned slightly over his shoulder to look and the eyes have no seeing. 428 00:50:56,010 --> 00:51:05,990 Quote, The criminal look of misery and hatred on the fixed, violated face and the bloodshot eyes is almost impossible. 429 00:51:05,990 --> 00:51:15,500 He much prefers the crisis on the Bavarian side, which are made in the image of their makers, quote, The Christ was a peasant of the foot of the Alps. 430 00:51:15,500 --> 00:51:24,410 He had broad cheekbones and sturdy limbs. It was a man nailed down in spirit, but set stubbornly against the bondage and the disgrace. 431 00:51:24,410 --> 00:51:32,140 The middle aged peasant of the crucifix resisted, unmoving the misery of his position. 432 00:51:32,140 --> 00:51:41,320 Lawrence even supposedly had a last supper, a dinner in cafe in the Cafe Royale when he returned to England in 1923, 433 00:51:41,320 --> 00:51:49,430 John Middleton Murray recalls that Lawrence put his arms around him and said, Do not betray me. 434 00:51:49,430 --> 00:51:56,450 Lawrence's friends or disciples later felt that Murray did precisely that did betray him in the book, 435 00:51:56,450 --> 00:52:03,440 which he wrote soon after Lawrence's death, Son of Woman, The Story of D.H. Lawrence. 436 00:52:03,440 --> 00:52:13,910 In this book, he psychoanalyse is Jesus as sorry Freudian slip psychoanalyse is Lawrence as a Jesus haunted man who demanded 437 00:52:13,910 --> 00:52:19,550 physical rather than spiritual resurrection and who was therefore the priest of an impossible religion. 438 00:52:19,550 --> 00:52:29,930 Quote And bear in mind that the Murray had himself already written a biography of Jesus quote, If Jesus was right, Lawrence was wrong. 439 00:52:29,930 --> 00:52:36,470 If Lawrence was right, Jesus was wrong. Lawrence, as we've seen, would agree. 440 00:52:36,470 --> 00:52:42,230 Murray thinks that Lawrence had too much love, so he had to run away from it and hide in a woman. 441 00:52:42,230 --> 00:52:49,910 Hence the title of the book. His love turned to hate, reversing the message of the man who died. 442 00:52:49,910 --> 00:52:59,480 Murray says that only Jesus can judge Lawrence because he loved, as Lawrence did, but he overcame whatever fear he felt. 443 00:52:59,480 --> 00:53:04,070 Lawrence, also unlike Christ, was a, quote, sex crucified man. 444 00:53:04,070 --> 00:53:10,760 And that hyphenated adjective sex crucified is one that Lawrence himself often uses, particularly in his poetry. 445 00:53:10,760 --> 00:53:11,300 Quote, 446 00:53:11,300 --> 00:53:20,720 He gradually disintegrates his own integrity and becomes the anti type of the man who is from the beginning and will be to the end his veritable hero, 447 00:53:20,720 --> 00:53:26,090 Jesus Christ through Lawrence. This is still quoting Murray through Lawrence. 448 00:53:26,090 --> 00:53:31,400 We learn to know ourselves in a way which men have never known themselves before. 449 00:53:31,400 --> 00:53:37,700 If he was crucified as he surely was, it was for us that he was crucified. 450 00:53:37,700 --> 00:53:44,900 And finally, he says that Lawrence should have had a Judas earlier who might have shown him his error to himself. 451 00:53:44,900 --> 00:53:53,000 Quote, This betrayal was the one thing you lacked, the one thing I had to give that you might shine forth amongst men. 452 00:53:53,000 --> 00:54:02,780 The thing of wonder that you were you were richly endowed with spirit and love and denied both that which you sought to strangle. 453 00:54:02,780 --> 00:54:14,590 You are doomed to bring to birth in men. Catherine Carswell Duley accused Murray of being Lawrences Judas in her gospel of Lawrence, 454 00:54:14,590 --> 00:54:20,650 which is called the Savage Pilgrimage, and that came out in the following year nineteen thirty two. 455 00:54:20,650 --> 00:54:26,320 But to conclude, at the end of his life, Lawrence was less concerned with Christ, 456 00:54:26,320 --> 00:54:32,350 who after all, for him was supposedly only a man, but with God, whatever that was. 457 00:54:32,350 --> 00:54:41,470 One of his last poems is called The Ship of Death, and it is with extracts from that colour as it is significantly by ancient Egyptian beliefs. 458 00:54:41,470 --> 00:54:46,940 He was quite Egypt orientated in his last year or so that I want to end. 459 00:54:46,940 --> 00:54:50,960 Have you built your ship of death? Oh, have you? 460 00:54:50,960 --> 00:54:59,870 Oh, build your ship of death for you will need it launch out the fragile soul in the fragile ship of courage, 461 00:54:59,870 --> 00:55:08,660 the ark of faith with its story of food and little cooking pans and change of clothes as it sets off. 462 00:55:08,660 --> 00:55:18,170 There is no port. There is nowhere to go. The upper darkness is heavy as the lower between them, the little ship is gone. 463 00:55:18,170 --> 00:55:29,890 You stanza, it is the end, it is oblivion, you stanza, and yet out of eternity, a thread separates itself on the blackness. 464 00:55:29,890 --> 00:55:33,530 Oh wait, wait for there's the dawn. 465 00:55:33,530 --> 00:55:42,890 The flood subsides and the body, like a warm sea, shall emerge as strange and lovely, the frail souls steps out into the house again, 466 00:55:42,890 --> 00:55:50,410 filling the heart with peace swings, the heart renewed with peace, even of oblivion. 467 00:55:50,410 --> 00:55:59,720 Oh, build your ship of death oh, build it for you will need it for the voyage of oblivion awaits you. 468 00:55:59,720 --> 00:56:08,000 Terry Eagleton once said that Lawrence manages to communicate a richer sense of God than almost any other 20th century author. 469 00:56:08,000 --> 00:56:19,362 I would agree. Thank you.