Hello. I remember once I was in South Korea and looking down over Seoul at night from the top of the television tower,
which stands on top of the mountain, which overlooks the city, I stood and looked for a while.
It is a vast, sprawling city. Nothing about it struck me in particular, except that it was bigger than I'd imagined it.
Then someone I was with pointed out a neon cross on top of a building nearby.
South Korea is about 30 percent Christian, and they choose chose to illuminate their symbol at night, rather like the South Italians in Neon.
Then the same person pointed out another cross only a few blocks away, and then another also nearby.
My brain assimilated the shape of the cross and my eye was now on the lookout for them.
I saw about 10 within a small region and in the region next to it.
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.
This effect is striking even in Naples, but far more so in Seoul, where I had not expected it.
Surveying Lawrence's works is a similar experience.
We do not necessarily expect to find his work studied with Christian concepts, biblical incidences, King James phraseology and church buildings.
But once we start looking for them, they are almost everywhere we turn.
Even in the titles The Rainbow, Arun's Rod, The Man Who Died Apocalypse Women in Love starts with a church wedding.
The ballet performed at Bread will be is the biblical story of of Naomi, Ruth and Orpah.
Lawrence was steeped in Christianity from his earliest moments of consciousness and never left it alone,
even after he gave up on its dogma at the Lady Chatterley trial in nineteen sixty two, which I keep returning.
One of the witnesses for the defence was the Bishop of Woolwich, Dr John Robinson.
He was a theologian of Cambridge University who specialised in ethics.
He said Lawrence did not have a Christian valuation of sex,
and the kind of sexual relationship depicted in the book is not one that I would necessarily regard as ideal.
But what I think is clear is that what Lawrence was trying to do is portray the sex relationship as something essentially sacred.
He was then asked by a journalist, is this a book which, in your view, Christians ought to read?
He said, yes, I think it is. Predictably, next day, banner headlines in the British newspapers.
Lady Chatterley, a book all Christians should read.
Of course, one of the things which made this preposterous was that many Christians abhorred Lawrence's
writing for reasons amongst which was their perceived attitude towards Christianity,
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.
So I think that we should start with a bit of a history of Lawrence's faith.
He was born into congregational ism. A Congregationalist community, quite simply, is one that is self-sufficient.
It doesn't recognise any clerical hierarchy beyond its own congregation.
There are, for example, Jewish Congregationalist synagogues.
But in the context of England, it generally refers to a type of Protestantism which by definition is not a unified sect.
It goes back to the 17th century, along with the Presbyterians, the Unitarians, the Baptists and the Quakers.
In the Victorian period, though, the Baptist and Congregationalist churches expanded far faster than the others by eighteen fifty one,
nearly eight percent of the English and Welsh were either Baptist or Congregationalist,
and some of the most respected Victorian preachers were Congregationalists.
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.
That's Mansfield College, founded by Congregationalists in 1886.
One difference between the Congregationalists and the Baptists is that they were far more liberal.
They did not insist on literal readings of the Bible.
They generally accepted the findings of the higher critics who had studied historical evidence of biblical claims and also,
by and large accepted the findings of Victorian biologists, archaeologists and palaeontologists.
Lawrence said that he was glad that he has not been born into the primitive Methodist church,
which was the other main nonconformist grouping and eastward since,
I quote, they were always having revivals and being saved and I always had a horror of being saved.
Indeed, the preaching at the Eastwood Congregationalist Church was sufficiently liberal that it sometimes offended Lawrence's pious mother.
When the young Lawrence wrote in 1997 to his pastor, Robert, to read a list of rational objections to Christian theology,
Read responded by giving a series of sermons in which he argued that the Bible should
be read intelligently in the light of science from which it had nothing to fear.
The church was also a major cultural centre in Eastwood, which amongst other projects ran a literary society.
It was here that in nineteen eight, Lawrence made his first public statement on aesthetics with a lecture Art and the Individual.
I have little doubt that Lawrence would have rebelled harder scornfully,
more aggressively towards Christianity had he been brought up either in a less tolerant Protestant church or as a Catholic.
He was, as a boy, deeply Christian. Nonetheless, he had his moment of youthful rebellion as people brought up in a church often.
Well, it took off when he went to Nottingham University to do his teaching certificate at the age of 21.
He read their voraciously in a number of authors who were liable to shake or alter the nature of a Christian faith.
Schopenhauer, William James Huxley, Darwin, Spencer M.
Religious anthropology, such as Phrases The Golden Bough, Madame Blavatsky,
Theosophy and Higher Criticism such as Runnels Famous Eighteen Sixty three biography La Vida Jizzy.
He fell in with friends who ridiculed religion, including socialists and suffragettes Blanche Jennings and Alice DACs.
He did continue to attend chapel with his mother and their friends, the chambers,
but one evening in the spring of 1988, when they were on their way home from chapel, he suddenly fell into a rage.
He denounced his minister, Robert Reed, and did a savage imitation of him after this period.
He never returned to the faith of his childhood or of his mother.
He made several of the standard criticisms of the doctrine of reward in heaven.
For example, in his poem, When Wilt Thou Teach the People?
When a saviour has saved a people, they find he has sold them to his father.
They say we are saved, but we are starving.
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?
He says, no, you must go to heaven and eat the most marvellous cake.
Or Lenin says, you are saved, but you are saved wholesale.
You are no longer man that is bourgeois. You are items in the Soviet state in sons and lovers.
Paul's sexual and religious problems with Miriam are connected with the fact that she, like Jesse Chambers', on whom she is based,
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.
So to Miriam, Christ and God made one great figure which she loved,
trembling and passionately when a tremendous sunset burned out of the western sky, she prays, Oh, Lord, let me not love poor morale.
Keep me from loving him if I ought not to love him.
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,
make me love him splendidly because he is the son.
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.
Then he was ashamed, then repentant. Then he hated her and went off again.
Those were the ever recurring conditions.
In his next major novel, The Rainbow Lawrence, rather than pitting himself against one of his loved ones, as in life,
presents his own Sicher Makia, the battle in his soul by splitting tendencies of himself and dividing them between different characters.
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.
Once read Never Forgotten Will Brangwyn has the idea that he and his wife Anna
will visit every cathedral in England over the course of their married life.
And they start with Lincoln.
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.
His soul leapt, soared up into the great church, spanned round with the rainbow.
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.
There his soul remained at the apex of the arch, clenched in the timeless ecstasy consummated.
His passion in the cathedral at first awed her. That's Anna, his wife then made her angry.
After all, there was the sky outside this mysterious half night.
And then she looks up and she sees carved faces.
And they are grotesque and leering and they suddenly make her realise that the cathedral isn't absolute.
They winked and leered, giving suggestion of the many things that had been left out of the great concept of the church.
So and then points out to, well, one of these mean, ridiculous little faces.
And his ecstasy is promptly destroyed. His mouth was full of ash.
His soul was furious. Yet somewhere in him,
he responded more deeply to the sly little face that knew better than he had done before
to the perfect search of his cathedral before he had thought the cathedral absolute.
But now he saw cathedrals crouching under the sky with still the dark, mysterious world of reality inside.
But as a world, within a world, a sort of sideshow, whereas before to him they had been as a world within a chaos,
a reality and order, and absolute within a meaningless confusion.
Outside the cathedral were many flying spirits that could never be sifted through
the jewelled gloom he thought of God and of the whole blue rotunda of the day.
That was something great and free. He thought of the ruins of the Grecian worship,
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.
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,
and just before you get to the Trout Pub in lower will the cut look to the left and see the
ruins of God's stone nunnery consecrated eleven thirty nine ruined since the civil war,
roofless, fully open to the sky and with no glass and its windows to create a jewelled gloom.
Neither the Greek temples nor St. Nunnery are decaying, they're dying is over.
They live on now differently, cooperating with more recent thoughts.
But Lawrence does not like a religion actively in the process of decay.
We feel this when Cyril Birdsell, the first person narrator of Lawrence's first novel Before Sons and Lovers,
the white peacock finds himself in a forest approaching an abandoned church.
As I drew near an owl floated softly out of the black tower, grass overgrew the threshold.
I pushed open the door, grinding back a heap of fallen plaster and rubbish and entered the place in the twilight.
The pews were leaning in ghostly disorder,
the prayer books dragged from their ledges scattered on the floor in the dust and rubble turned torn by mice and birds.
I shivered in the dark, evil smelling place and hurried to get out of doors.
I clutched my hands with relief and pleasure when I saw the sky above me
quivering with the last crystal light Will Brangwyn to go back to the rainbow,
who is responsible for keeping up the fully functional church next door to his house,
tries to overrule his reason into believing the accuracy of biblical accounts such as the transformation of water into wine at Kaner.
It was true for him.
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.
His mind, he let sleep.
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,
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.
He was born into the Orthodox Church and unlike Lawrence, didn't take Christianity very seriously until he was in middle age.
Then he had a spiritual crisis, which you find documented in Anna Karenina, particularly in the character of Levin.
Now, Levin and Tolstoy, like well Brangwyn, try hard to send their minds to sleep so that they can accept the dogma of
Christianity by setting aside the problems such as contingency of place of birth,
the conflicting claims of other religions, the contradictions of Christianity itself,
Levin and Anna Karenina and Will Brangwyn in the Rainbow both manage it just.
Both Lawrence and Tolstoi, their creators whose intellect just would not stop crying and go to sleep like important babies, did not manage it.
They rejected the church. Tolstoy was even excommunicated from it.
And then they both went on to create their own kind of religion.
And Lawrence, as he did this, as he created his own, was highly conscious that Tolstoy had done the same before him.
Bear in mind, they were Tolstoyan churches in England while Florence was writing these works.
But the churches to which they were both, which they had both rejected, were very different to each other.
Tolstoy was inveighing against the official religion of a state which he found autocratic, brutal, profoundly godless.
Lawrence never felt anything like the same level of hostility towards either Congregationalist or Anglicanism.
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,
he's going to go to church, I must go to church and read the lessons they expect me.
Are you a Christian? Ask the Italian countess with sudden interest.
No, said Alexander, I'm not. But I believe in keeping up the old institutions.
They are so beautiful, said the Fraulein daintily. Oh, they are Spradley.
The church bells were ringing a little way off, not a cloud in the sky.
The swans were like lilies on the water below. One wanted to swoon into the bygone perfection of it all.
Goodbye, called Alexander, waving his gloves cheerily, and he disappeared behind the bushes on his way to church.
This is Anglicanism, not as evil, but as a repository of nostalgia and quaint beauty.
Now, time has moved on since the decades in which the rainbow is set, leaven and will brangwyn our men of the preceding century.
Of the later part of the 19th century, Women in Love is a novel of the First World War.
Christianity in this novel is no longer presented as a viable truth for its characters.
Birken and Ursula, like her parents, have their own outing to a cathedral.
Subtle minster.
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.
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.
In insofar as Ursula does notice it, it is to notice how distanced she feels from it.
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.
So to Ursula Zawia, the tune fell out, drop by drop from the unseen sky onto the dusky town.
It was like dim, bygone centuries sounding.
It was all so far off. She stood in the old yard of the end, smelling of straw and stables and significantly petrol.
What was it all? This was no actual world. It was the dream world of one's childhood, a great circumscribed reminiscence.
Now, as you'll know, if you've read this novel in it,
Ursula's parents who were such full characters when they appear in the rainbow here and women in love, they are flattened into caricature.
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.
In some respect, Critch is like Lhevinne. He believes that the men who work for him are his spiritual superiors because
they are poorer and simpler than him and therefore they are closer to Christ.
But in the age of ruthless modernisation personified by his son, his faith is presented as being no longer adequate.
Quote, The father drew more and more out of the light.
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.
Yet they seemed to have become obsolete, to be superseded in the world he could not understand.
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.
They would still burn sweetly and sufficiently in the inner room of his soul in the silence of his retirement.
The tone of this is as gentle as the man it describes and it regrets,
even whilst it insists that the modern world will not be illuminated by those candles.
This tone leaves no room for contempt of the great religion,
for that phrase is not only free and direct speech for Critch when civil bedsore gets out of the church, which I quoted before,
which is decaying and sees an eponymous white peacock flying up and landing on the head of a stone angel and soiling that head,
he damns the bird for its irreverence, even though the angel itself or what it stands for might have died.
But Lawrence's argument is that that happened to Christianity because it had become static and
remember the emphasis I placed last week on change as of great importance and value to Lawrence,
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.
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.
This is Protestantism taken to an extreme.
Put another way, he took the Bible as a source of myth, spiritually true myth, if only his soul could interpret it anew.
He likened himself to Adam Freeda to Eve as they spent their life together,
travelling across the world searching for a way back into paradise at their ranch in Delmonte, Mexico.
He painted Adam and Eve on the door. Lady Chatterley's and Malha sorry, Chatterley and Mallows almost managed to find their Eden.
After the war, when he and freedom could finally get out of Britain,
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,
he defended his paintings from criticism. He cited the Song of Solomon as a great poem where loveliness is interwoven with sex.
Now, having taken these different elements of the Bible, Women in Love is, of course, his Apokolips early proposals of titles for this novel,
any one of which would have been more telling than the one he eventually chose were Noah's Ark.
The latter days and era. The Day of Wrath.
But this is only to desert that this is only to observe how he remembered the Bible
into something living by using its tropes and by taking it itself as a trope,
it is no statement of what his metaphysical beliefs actually were.
Now in the first leg to be slightly touched on them when I took Lawrence's statements on consciousness from different places,
noted their contradictions and noted that Lawrence embraced change as necessary to life, it is the same with his religious attitudes.
One of the constants is his attribution of change to God in relation to man and man,
in relation to God as early as Paul in sons and Lovers, he says it is not religious to be religious.
I reckon a crow is religious when it sails across the sky,
but it only does it because it feels itself carried to where it's going, not because it thinks it is being eternal.
In other words, ontology trumps epistemology being, which is flock's is more important than knowing which is Stacie's.
Any statement of dogma as a permanent truth must therefore be error.
When Lawrence's sister, ADA, was undergoing her own crisis of faith, Lawrence wrote sympathetically to her,
assuring her that her belief of church Christianity need not to leave her alone
in a materialistic universe such as the one that George Eliot shivered in.
He said, Jehovah is the Jews idea of God, not ours.
Christ was infinitely good, but mortal as we are, there still remains a God,
but not a personal God, a vast, shimmering impulse which wavers onward towards some end.
I don't know what when we die, we fall back into the big shimmering sea of unorganised life, which we call God.
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.
Birkin reaches for his own religion with his own heart when he stands in front of the frozen corpse of his best friend.
This is perhaps one of the most powerful passages in Lawrence's writing.
He turned away. Either the heart would break or cease to care.
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.
Man is not the criterion. Best leave it all to the vast creative, non-human mystery.
Best strive with oneself only, not the universe.
God cannot do without man, it was the saying of some great French religious teacher, but surely this is false.
God can do with that man. God could do without the city of Sauri and the mastodon, those creatures failed creatively to develop.
So, God, the great creative mystery dispensed with them.
In the same way the mystery could dispense with man if he, too, should fail creatively to change and develop.
It was very consoling to Burkean to think this if humanity ran into a cul de sac and expended itself,
the timeless creative mystery would bring forth some other being finer, more wonderful to carry on the embodiment of creation.
The game was never up. The Fountainhead was incorruptible and unsearchable.
It had no limits. It could bring forth miracles to have one's pulse beating direct from the mystery.
This was perfection. Unutterable satisfaction, human or inhuman, mattered nothing.
The perfect pulse pulse throbbed with indescribable being.
At other times, he is notably reluctant to take God as an agent,
a cause or even as a signifier in Fantasia of the unconscious, which is three years later than women in love.
He sounds a little closer to agnosticism.
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.
All I say is or I'm. The first business of every faith is to declare its ignorance.
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.
I don't know how the two parent cells, which are my biological origin, became the me, which I am.
The chemical analysis is just a farce. And my father and mother were just vehicles.
And yet, I must say, since I've got to know about the two cells, I'm glad I do know.
But normally, Lawrence is not an agnostic precisely because he isn't concerned either with kenosis knowing or.
Two years later in his essay called On Being Religious, Lawrence emphasises that God isn't really quite a word.
It's an accusation and a glyph. It never had a definition.
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,
he is merely using the little word like a toy pistol to announce that he has taken an attitude.
Yet typically for him, having established this attitude, he can later contradict himself and brusquely announce God always is and we all know it.
When he revised his collected poems,
he at one stage removed all uses of the term God and then in a later revision reinstated them in his last few months,
he said that he no longer objected to the word God and that he intended to find him.
But God to him, as I said, is changing his position in the cosmos.
The great God departs from the heaven where man has located him and plumps is thrown down somewhere else,
man being an arse keeps going to the same door to beg for his carrott.
The great and majestic movement of the heavens has slowly carried away even the cross of Jesus from its place of Calvary.
God gave us away to himself. God gave us Jesus and the way of repentance and love.
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?
According to Paul, he did say exactly that. But Lawrence prefers to concentrate on on his understanding of Jesus.
At that moment. There was no other way for many centuries.
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.
Quote, He plainly indicated the only means of finding the right way, the Holy Ghost.
The Holy Ghost is within you for the moment.
We are lost. Let's admit it. None of us knows the way to God.
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.
And it seems great fun to follow. Oh, great fun.
God's own great fun.
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.
Here he states a creed quite plainly, I believe in the all overshadowing God.
I believe that Jesus is one of the sons of God, not, however, the only son of God.
I believe that the men who believe in the all overshadowing God will naturally form a church of God.
But I cannot believe in a church of Christ. Jesus is only one of the sons of Almighty God.
There are many saviours. There is only one God. This, again, is remarkably similar to Tolstoy's,
and that is the religion which Tolstoy's Holy Ghost guided him into after he had rejected orthodoxy and Orthodoxy had rejected him.
He believed in God. He believed that Christ was particularly exemplary.
Christian Tolstoy ism is based around the example of Christ in the Gospels,
in particular his Sermon on the Mount Christ's religion rather than the religion of Christ the Christ cult.
Bear in mind that Tolstoy was also something of a Saint Augustine, he visited his first prostitute when he was 15.
He had affairs with peasants after he was married. He had 13 children with his wife.
When he was spiritually reborn,
he rejected the flesh and thought that sexual intercourse should be kept to an absolute minimum and rejected all forms of violence,
selfhood and pride. And of course, this is where Lawrence departs from Tolstoy.
In Lawrence's review of Tolstoy's late novel Resurrection, he wrote, Tolstoy writhed very hard on the cross.
His resurrection is the step into the tomb. But Christ is not twice put on the cross, not a second time.
And this is the great point that Tolstoy missed. It seemed to him Christ would go on being crucified.
Everlastingly, the essay ends with the sentiment The Lord is risen.
Let us rise as well and be lords.
This tone is reminiscent of someone who sums up the most important differences between Tolstoy and Laurence.
She may well have guessed platelets to fill her needs to 1844.
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.
Lawrence discovered nature in the winter of 1989 when he was in Croydon for his first postgraduation teaching job.
Croydon Town Library bought the levy translation of the complete works of literature as they came out between 1999 and 1913.
Although since he had studied German, he could also have read them in the original.
He would also have been encouraged in his reading by Edward Garnett, who became his literary father figure after they met in 1911.
Garnett found in Nietzsche, quote, the most brilliant psychological analysis of Christianity ever.
There are certain striking similarities, therefore, not only between Lawrence and Tolstoy, but between Lawrence and Nicha,
both men were anti intellectual thinkers, mythic plastic, mythmakers, anti moral moralists who engaged with Christianity throughout their lives.
Nature had a strict Lutheran background. His father and both grandfathers were ministers.
His critique of Christianity got stronger over the course of his career from many, many bishops also mentioned mentalities,
human or to human, of eighteen seventy eight through to defoliation Vision Schaft the gay science,
which was in fact Lawrence's first idea as a title for the work that eventually
became called Study of Thomas Hardy in that needs to wrote that God is dead,
but later added The Christian God has become unbelievable.
He makes clear that he admires the Old Testament, but not the new.
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.
He accuses Paul of turning a Buddhistic peace movement into a pagan mystery doctrine with its own blood drinking ritual.
Jesus paid according to nature for appealing to the lowest and stupidest because they
reconceived him in terms which they understood as a personal redeemer and a salvation story.
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.
Christianity is a way of life, not a system of beliefs, it tells us how to act,
not what we ought to believe, that Antichrist is therefore surprisingly not Antichrist.
It portrays him as a misguidedly otherworldly but admirable figure in insights from Gordon Bouzar Beyond Good and Evil.
He praises Christianity for preserving the Bible and instilling into the masses reverence for it.
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.
And this book was a particular favourite of Laurence and Freeda. It plays with the Bible.
Adam wanders around complaining of the theft of his rib.
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.
Now, he wasn't the only one to imagine alternative plot developments for Christ,
Tolstoy's great rival and Lawrence's rival for the attention of the British public,
Fyodor Dostoevsky had done the same just three years before Nietzsche wrote thus,
thus spoke with Ostrer or rather his fictional character, Ivan Karamazov did in Bradsher Karamazov.
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.
Christ comes back for a visit to 15th century civil.
This is not his second coming in glory, this is just an informal visit,
he was going to appear amongst his children just when the bones of the heretics
sentenced to be burnt alive had commenced crackling at the flaming steaks.
Owing to his limitless mercy, he mixes once more with mortals.
And in the very moment when before king courtiers, knights, cardinals and the fairest dames of court before the whole population of Seville,
upwards of 100 hundred wicked heretics are being roasted in a magnificent Autodefensas at Marum de Gloria.
By the order of the powerful Cardinal Grand Inquisitor, he comes silently and unannounced.
Yet all how strange. Yes, all recognise him at once.
So the population crowd around him, he performed several miracles and he smiles on everyone with compassion,
then he is arrested, imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Inquisition.
The Grand Inquisitor comes to visit him in prison. He knows it's Christ, but he criticises Christ for his message.
He accuses him of demanding too much of humans and therefore of being dangerous and superfluous to the mission of the church.
The inquisitor does not believe that most people can handle the freedom that Jesus gave them,
and he therefore is in fact condemning those people to suffer.
The church, on the other hand, follows the wise spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction, i.e. Satan, for he,
through compulsion, provided the tools to end all human suffering by uniting everyone under the banner of the church.
So the multitude is then guided through the church by the few who are strong enough to take on themselves the burden of freedom.
The Inquisitor will be a martyr, spending his life in order to keep choice from humanity.
That choice under which humanity suffers.
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.
The inquisitor then releases Christ, but orders him never to return.
Alyosha, who was the brother to whom Iran is telling the story, hears him out and then kisses Iran likewise,
ultimately the story is a satire against the atheist materialist Iran who is telling the story?
Alyosha, who is a novice monk, eventually demonstrates in the novel a way of living, which is both Christ like and possible.
But in Dostoevsky's own letters,
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.
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.
Madame Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, translated it into English, as did SS Cotillions, who was Lawrences close Ukrainian friend.
Lowrance helped him with the translation of this story and wrote a preface.
This preface was the last thing Lawrence published before he died.
In it, he said that he thought the inquisitor raised an unanswerable criticism of Christ,
and he criticised Dostoevsky for putting those arguments in the mouth of someone who also sentences hundreds of people to burn.
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,
which Lawrence rejects and sees as being the obverse of a sinister hatred when
he reviewed John Middleton Marries wildly enthusiastic book about Dostoyevsky.
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.
I should say that. Elsewhere, though, Lawrence confesses, a subterranean love for Dostoevsky to Dostoyevsky was the avatar of the art of the future.
To Lawrence, he was the culmination of two millennia of Christianity whose work made it possible for later artists to really make it new.
And that's what Lawrence did in a story he wrote at just about the same time as this preface.
This is his last story called The Man Who Died, otherwise known under the title The Escaped Cock.
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.
Gradually, he revives and unwinds the bandages from himself.
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.
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.
In any case, he's now alive. Once he's physically well enough, he has a period recovering in a peasant hut.
He walks to Egypt, where he meets a priestess of ISIS, ISIS, whose husband, Cyrus, was cut into many pieces.
When Jesus walks in, she recognises him as a Cyrus, her return to her resurrected husband.
Jesus comes to understand that he was killed because he gave too much.
He had preached a corrective to a life of selfhood, but he had not had the wisdom and the generosity also to take.
He tells Mary Matalin, who finds him with an eye to run to excess.
I gave more than I took and that also is woe and vanity.
So Judas and the high priests saved me from my own excessive salvation.
He paid for it by being tortured to death. And he's not going to do that again.
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.
He stays on there living in a cave with her for several months.
She falls pregnant. Then it is time for him to move on.
He has fulfilled himself with her. He has started his new life.
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.
She's she's going to be fine. No, surprisingly, this story, which was published in Forum, raised a storm.
Laurence himself described it as one of his thin skinned stories, i.e., it was about himself and his work for like Nesher.
He identified with Christ. And although his own teachings had always been consistent with the message of this story,
perhaps he felt that he himself throughout his life had given too much, had tried too hard to save the world.
His own friends certainly saw the resemblance, admittedly, some of him saw him more as an Old Testament figure.
Mark Rampion, the character based on Lawrence in Huxley's Point Counterpoint, describes himself as a Jeremiah lambasting society for its failings.
Bertrand Russell acknowledged his amazing powers of discernment.
He is like Ezekiel or some other Old Testament prophet, but most of all, he was likened to Christ.
Bear in mind, he was always thin. He was increasingly gaunt, and from 1914 onwards, he wore a beard.
In the war, he often referred to himself as the crucified Christ lying in the tomb.
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.
He did have a he did have a considerable female following.
He was subject to sudden rages like Christ in the temple.
And of course, like Nietzsche, he resembles Christ most.
When he rebelled against established Christianity, boys in the streets of Oaxaca saw the resemblance.
Dorothea Brett painted him on a cross and he was criticised for preaching, as Tolstoy also was.
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.
Haliday reads out one of Birkins letters in the voice of a clergyman reading from the Scriptures.
Oh, but I do think it's wonderful. It almost supersedes the Bible.
Oh, I do think those phrases are too absurdly wonderful. They're nearly as good as Jesus.
I think it's an awful cheek like that to write like that, said the person.
Yes, yes. So do I, said the Russian. He is a megalomaniac. Of course.
It is a form of religious mania. He thinks he is the saviour of man.
One can hear in Libya. Nikolaev's comment the tone of the high priest. He says he is the son of God.
This is not just satire of Birken or satire of these trivial people's satire of Birken.
It points to actually what was a serious aspiration on Lawrence's part.
It almost supersedes the Bible. He was trying.
He said that with the rainbow, he wanted to create a kind of Bible for the English people,
but only by showing away, not that anybody should adopt the dogma of the rainbow.
Of course, it's for us all to break free to our own discovery.
Towards the end of his life, when he was almost consumed by consumption, his friend Earl Brewster Brewster massaged him with oil.
So how emaciated and marginalised was his body?
Like one of the haggard, mediaeval carved figures of the crucified Jesus,
Lawrence had described precisely such figures in his 1915 account of walking across the Alps into
Italy with Frida in the summer of 1912 will be coming back to this in more detail in week five,
which is the Alps. Lecture in that essay indicates he has no patience for self-pity or for the valorisation of pain.
He notes that as one nears Italy, the tendency of the crucifix is to become weak and sentimental.
The carved Christ's turn up their faces and roll back their eyes very piteously.
They are looking to heaven and thinking about themselves in self commiseration.
Beyond the brana, I've only seen vulgar or sensational crucifixes.
There are great gashes on the breast and the knees of the Christ figure,
and the scarlet flows out and trickles down to the crucified body has become a ghastly striped thing of
red and white is particularly haunted by one Christ who is seated in a chapel near Santiago in Austria.
The face is turned slightly over his shoulder to look and the eyes have no seeing.
Quote, The criminal look of misery and hatred on the fixed, violated face and the bloodshot eyes is almost impossible.
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.
He had broad cheekbones and sturdy limbs. It was a man nailed down in spirit, but set stubbornly against the bondage and the disgrace.
The middle aged peasant of the crucifix resisted, unmoving the misery of his position.
Lawrence even supposedly had a last supper, a dinner in cafe in the Cafe Royale when he returned to England in 1923,
John Middleton Murray recalls that Lawrence put his arms around him and said, Do not betray me.
Lawrence's friends or disciples later felt that Murray did precisely that did betray him in the book,
which he wrote soon after Lawrence's death, Son of Woman, The Story of D.H. Lawrence.
In this book, he psychoanalyse is Jesus as sorry Freudian slip psychoanalyse is Lawrence as a Jesus haunted man who demanded
physical rather than spiritual resurrection and who was therefore the priest of an impossible religion.
Quote And bear in mind that the Murray had himself already written a biography of Jesus quote, If Jesus was right, Lawrence was wrong.
If Lawrence was right, Jesus was wrong. Lawrence, as we've seen, would agree.
Murray thinks that Lawrence had too much love, so he had to run away from it and hide in a woman.
Hence the title of the book. His love turned to hate, reversing the message of the man who died.
Murray says that only Jesus can judge Lawrence because he loved, as Lawrence did, but he overcame whatever fear he felt.
Lawrence, also unlike Christ, was a, quote, sex crucified man.
And that hyphenated adjective sex crucified is one that Lawrence himself often uses, particularly in his poetry.
Quote,
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,
Jesus Christ through Lawrence. This is still quoting Murray through Lawrence.
We learn to know ourselves in a way which men have never known themselves before.
If he was crucified as he surely was, it was for us that he was crucified.
And finally, he says that Lawrence should have had a Judas earlier who might have shown him his error to himself.
Quote, This betrayal was the one thing you lacked, the one thing I had to give that you might shine forth amongst men.
The thing of wonder that you were you were richly endowed with spirit and love and denied both that which you sought to strangle.
You are doomed to bring to birth in men. Catherine Carswell Duley accused Murray of being Lawrences Judas in her gospel of Lawrence,
which is called the Savage Pilgrimage, and that came out in the following year nineteen thirty two.
But to conclude, at the end of his life, Lawrence was less concerned with Christ,
who after all, for him was supposedly only a man, but with God, whatever that was.
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.
He was quite Egypt orientated in his last year or so that I want to end.
Have you built your ship of death? Oh, have you?
Oh, build your ship of death for you will need it launch out the fragile soul in the fragile ship of courage,
the ark of faith with its story of food and little cooking pans and change of clothes as it sets off.
There is no port. There is nowhere to go. The upper darkness is heavy as the lower between them, the little ship is gone.
You stanza, it is the end, it is oblivion, you stanza, and yet out of eternity, a thread separates itself on the blackness.
Oh wait, wait for there's the dawn.
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,
filling the heart with peace swings, the heart renewed with peace, even of oblivion.
Oh, build your ship of death oh, build it for you will need it for the voyage of oblivion awaits you.
Terry Eagleton once said that Lawrence manages to communicate a richer sense of God than almost any other 20th century author.
I would agree. Thank you.