DH Lawrences Apocalypse
DH Lawrences Apocalypse
DH Lawrences Apocalypse
Lawrence’s Apocalypse
Writer, critic and painter, David Herbert (D.H.) Lawrence is one of the greatest
Romantic Movement1 which places the concept of self at the center of artistic expression.
This notion persists, albeit against the course of cultural development (yet in line with
Lawrence’s treatment), into the early twentieth century Modernist Movement of which
Lawrence was a part. The corporate intention of Modernist literature is to remove the
personality of the author from the work. Lawrence, however, with his attestation of self,
writes as an articulation of his personality and he makes known that “his works chart the
profound unease many writers have felt faced with a world in which creative human
intelliectual forms” (11). In his essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), T.S.
the use of art as a demonstration of impressions and experiences and that marks true
talent by a writer’s ability to separate him or her self from their creation. Still, D.H.
1
The Romantic Movement in literature began in the end of the 18th century and flourished in the 19th
century. The literature is characterized by an emphasis on emotion, passion, and nature.
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Lawrence dissents by using multiple mediums of art as a platform for his personal
criticize the immutable social and religious structures of modern society. In her
iconaclastic work, a radical and searching criticism of the political, religious, and social
structures which have shaped our materialistic and technological age” (11). Apocalypse
was Lawrence’s final book; it was also his final rebellion against the traditions of the
Modernist movement and (despite the fact that he was “profoundly Christian”) the
organized Christian religion. It was his digression from established practices and his
attempt to communicate his personal system of thought about God, man, relationships
Lawrence believed that the Book of Revelation from the Bible revealed the
“fundamental truths about human psychology.” Lawrence suggests that the Bible, just as
any other story of man, should be duly investigated: the Book of Revelation tested as a
“symbolic account of how to attain inner harmony”(12). It is, according to Lawrence, the
novel of every man (the “man alive”) that communicates the significance of the
individual and the relationship between the individual and the collective society. Thus,
the Bible should be thoroughly examined and challenged in order to form ideas about its
relevence and validity. In Why the Novel Matters (1966) Lawrence writes:
The novel is the book of life. In this sense, the Bible is a great
confused novel. You may say, it is about God. But it is really about
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Mark, Judas, Paul, Peter: what is it but man alive, from start to
finish? Man alive, not mere bits. Even the Lord is another man
head (105).
Lawrence’s concern with “man alive” does not align with Eliot’s call for the “extinction
life, but especially art. He held that to demonstrate the circumstances of humanism,
writers must include their own human insight and characteristics; otherwise, it is not a
Those views, in this regard, suggest that individual realization is found through personal
analysis and the discovery of self; there is no place for the eradication of personality.
Students of literary form might say that Lawrence never quite belonged among the
modernists as he was uninterested with the aestheticism of the age, and in fact, Virginia
Woolf said of him, “[he] echoes nobody, continues no tradition, is unaware of the past
(qtd. In The Hostile Son, Oates). Still, many of his contemporaries and most modern
literary tradition in order to proclaim the impersonal and the divine within ordinary men”
(Oates). In his book, DH Lawrence and the Bible (2000), T.R. Wright comments on
beliefs with the otherwise discredited tools that lie to hands (2).
Arguably, there is no other work from Lawrence that is as ambitious in asserting personal
dogma and the need for biblical exploration as Apocalypse and the Writings on
Revelation. In it he uses the Bible as a mine of private symbolism and meaning in order
to discuss human psychology, authority, and the relationship between man and the state.
In this work, just as in most apocalyptic writing, symbolism is used by the author to
evoke complex thoughts and feelings in the reader because, as Lawrence writes, “man
thought and still thinks in images” (93). It is Lawrence’s hope that his emblematic
suggestions regarding our “being” and our function in society will enable us to identify
these thoughts and feelings; and as a result, make discoveries that are personally relevant
and initiate change. He explains his use of symbolism in his biblical allegory as an
attempt to ascertain truths: “Allegory can always be explained: and explained away. The
true symbol defies all explanation, so does the true myth. You can give meanings to
either - you will never explain them away” (142). Lawrence’s interest in finding
applicable associations between art and the condition of the individual man led his
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examination of the Book of Revelation (A.D. 95) as the guiding point (of both debate and
Apocalypse by painter and mystic, Frederick Carter. Shortly after deciding to expand the
introduction into a book of his own; however, Lawrence abandoned the manuscript,
which was eventually published as Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation in 1931
after his death. In Apocalypse, Lawrence writes an allegory of the Book of Revelation
that challenges the reader to consider more relevant meaning for the text, meaning that
would affect the reader as they live -- opposed to after they have died. The pervasive
paradox of "life through death" from ancient to medieval times, and upheld in Christian
revered last steps of human “life”: death, judgment, heaven and hell, by introducing the
idea that action dictates how ones “last steps” will be ordered; or further, that man should
concentrate on improving present life and be less concerned with the after-life:
Man wants his physical fulfillment first and foremost, since now,
once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast
marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the
The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here
and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only
and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos (149).
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Despite the fact that his analysis of God’s will for man, and his interpretation of the Bible
challenge the thinking of mainstream Christianity; the Bible can still “legitimately be
called the genesis of [Lawrence's] fiction, its most significant precursor text; it not only
generates a great deal of his own writing but provides the most important context for its
writes of a saturation that occurred from the Bible being “poured into his helpless
Still, despite his resentment for the Bible, Lawrence sermonizes the fundamental
principals of the Christian faith in Apocalypse. Through world travels, broad reading,
and exposure to a plethora of other cultures, religions and societies; Lawrence is armed
with the same anthropology that Eliot uses in his poem The Waste Land (1922)2. He
combines this new understanding of humanity with his prior association with spirituality
and mysticism to write Apocalypse. Both Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation and
The Waste Land plainly reflect the authors’ struggle to discover the purpose of mankind
in response to the events of the early twentieth century. To some extent, this struggle was
2
One major theme of the poem is disillusionment, which Eliot indicates is the current state of affairs in
modern society, especially the post World War I.
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devastation of World War I caused these misgivings about human purpose to shift from
being an exploratory viewpoint into a very real component of personal experience. For
all intents and purposes, the intellectual, artistic and personal lives of westerners become
subjugated by the invariable questions attached to the state of the universe and human
experience.
With his new anthropology Lawrence discovers in the Christian text an earlier
sub-text of pagan ritual and myth which are prominent themes in his apocalyptic allegory,
he writes, “The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness
of man” (86). Lawrence saw Christian thought expelling the remnants of pagan Gods
and pagan symbols, and internalized this expulsion as an attempt to “suppress, destroy
and deny” the mythical connections to Christianity. Yet, Biblical scholars do not deny
that the Book of Revelation is riddled with pagan ritual and myth; although, most suggest
that the pagan images are cathartic. According to John Gager, author of The End of Time
cult. The mechanism for this demarcation, they argue, is the use of
of Revelation, White) .
Assuming that the imposing pagan images present in Revelation are a reflection of the
culture in which Christians lived at the time the book was written, Lawrence seems
flawed when he writes about the Biblical scene at the temple of Cybele3:
know, the end of the ritual of the Mysteries of Isis. Such a scene
(106-07).
If Gager’s claim is applicable here, then the Christian reading of this passage is not a turn
from paganism, but instead an illustration of the Roman World in which the Christian
Revelation; and unsympathetic to the Bible as a whole despite the fact that it is the
loosely and befitting to the individual, we find that it is a collection of symbolisms that
have taken on multiple meanings and that transcend time, culture and religion. We find,
experience that reflects the eternal fight between good and evil:
3
Cybele is a deification of “Earth Mother.” The popularity of the Cybele cult in the city of Rome and
throughout the empire is thought to have inspired the author of Book of Revelation to allude to her in his
portrayal of the mother of harlots who rides the Beast.
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between good and evil, that according to the combat myths, shaped
the beginning of history, in both the Jewish religion and later in the
between good and evil, which will reach a final goal, a final
D.H. Lawrence’s critique of the world and man’s role in the world in Apocalypse mirrors
the same expression revealed by the author of Revelation and other authors of apocalyptic
works. In her book English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 (2000), Judith Ruderman
…readers with even the slightest familiarity with the Bible can
fall from grace, the end of the world, the resurrection of the body,
Still, Lawrence admittedly has problems with the rigidity of organized religion,
specifically Christianity and the Bible; as he sought fluidity in spirituality and art:
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Each thing, living and unliving, streams in its own odd intertwining
flux, and nothing, not even man nor the God of man, nor anything
that man has thought or felt or known is fixed or abiding (Art and
Morality 525).
Lawrence and his allegorical interpretation of the apocalypse intentionally reflect the
theory of variability and encourage the proposal that art, life, faith and God must be
shaped and reshaped according to the situational circumstances of the time: for both the
individual man and society. To this end, Lawrence declares that the Bible is a living
organism that lives because we live; and that will die when inflexibility in analysis allows
it to become extraneous. What is relevant, despite the span of time or generation of men,
is the discernment of the individual, the state, the world and the distribution of power.
Lawrence parallels all of these things as they exist in the Book of Revelation with his own
symbolism in Apocalypse.
In introducing the Book of Revelation, Lawrence explains that the book was deeply
embedded in his consciousness and had been since as a child he had heard it expounded
repeatedly, endlessly, from the pulpit; he knew it inside out even before he started to think
about its meaning (59). Revelation, the last of sixty-six books in the Christian Bible, is
literature that uses symbolic imagery to communicate hope to those in the midst of
persecution. Christians believe that Jesus gave the book to John of Patmos, an
eyewitness of Jesus, in order to assure Christians that He would return to vindicate the
John starts the book by explaining how he received the revelation from God, he
begins, “The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show His servants what
must soon take place” (2002). John continues to narrate the account of how Christ came
to him in a vision and told him of the things that would happen during the end days of the
earth. He then records specific messages from Jesus to the seven churches in Asia4. But
while dictating the messages to the churches, John begins to speak of dramatic and
majestic images that portray the future rise of evil. These events, according to the
revelation, are followed by the triumph of the king, the wedding of the Lamb, the final
judgment and the coming of New Jerusalem. The book concludes with the promise of
Christ’s return. To readers familiar with both the Book of Revelation and the apocalyptic
metaphor written by D.H. Lawrence it is “abundantly clear, even from this brief sketch,
not only that Lawrence was saturated with the Bible but that he continued throughout his
life to reproduce its images” (Wright 10). These images lay out the writers philosophical
Slightly less dramatic than the apocalypse of the Bible is the anticipated
catastrophe of the twentieth century of which Lawrence spoke in his letters. Living
during World War I, he saw the destruction as a mark of the end of civilization. He wrote
of a “great struggle with the powers of Darkness” (120) and revealed his feelings that the
“whole thing is coming to an end – the whole of England, of the Christian era” (142). It
is no surprise that Lawrence found the Book of Revelation to be significant to the time;
and that characters and events of the Bible could be paralleled to his humanity and the
world in which he lived. Joyce Carol Oates writes, “Lawrence is one of our true
4
The churches of Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia (Lydia), and Laodicea
(Phrygia) located in Asia Minor.
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prophets, not only in his ‘madness for the unknown’ and in his explicit warning but in his
lifelong development of a technique, a fictional and poetic way in which the prophetic
voice can be given formal expression” (The Candid Revelation, Oates). As a modern
prophet, Lawrence furnishes readers with insight into the destiny of man if he does not
reflect on the larger significance of life; or heed the warnings afforded to us. Presenting
his beliefs, Lawrence, through his use of mythic patterns, articulates the need for a
balanced human consciousness in order for the human race to achieve wholeness.
While the apocalypse of the Bible may use the universe as backdrop for its action;
however, Lawrence suggests that its real setting is the human self. He sees in Revelation
a text corrupted sometimes by allegory, but when read and reconstructed properly, it
traces a myth of the self, its journey, and its transformations. To exhibit the myth of self
or psyche, how the self is changeable, and the transcendence into a greater individual
psychic being, Lawrence likens his individual self to the pale horse and the pale rider of
the apocalypse:
He is the royal me, he is my very self, and his horse is the whole
new cycle of action by the Lamb and riding forth to conquest, the
conquest of the old self for the birth of a new self. It is he, truly,
who shall conquer all the other ‘powers’ of the self (102-03).
Biblically, the pale horse is a representation of death, while the pale rider symbolizes
Hades, the god of the underworld. Together with the red horse (warfare) and the black
horse (famine), the pale horse and his rider are sent to earth to unleash judgment and
destruction (Revelation 6:2-8). According to the author, it is during this time of judgment
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that the unbelievers are allowed to turn away from their sin and embrace Christ.
Lawrence rebels against the sentence of death found in the Bible by becoming the
adjudicator and refusing to accept the ruling and the consequences attached to non-
conformity. By escaping the psyche of his previously prescribed self, Lawrence is able to
overcome all other facets of his personality; thus, controlling his circumstance.
the nineteenth century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Lawrence had no doubt
read. When Lawrence writes in Aaron’s Rod (1922), “…there is only one thing, your
own very self. So you’d better stick to it. You can’t be any bigger than just yourself, so
you needn’t drag God in….” (Lawrence XXI), the influence of Nietzsche’s theory of a
“dead God” and his teachings on the importance of fostering one’s inner self is made
evident. Then, in Kangaroo (1923) Lawrence expresses his own idea of a “superman”
which was a constant theme in Nietzsche’s writings. The philosopher often spoke of our
constant struggle to achieve some degree of power and our natural desire to assert our
personal strength; as well as our need to dominate and reshape the world to fit our own
asserts the power of life, creativity and the realities of the world we live in, rather than
“superman as the individual rising precariously out of the mire of mass mediocrity, and
[own] his existence” (SEP 2008). Such a charge was accepted by D.H. Lawrence who, in
Apocalypse, affirms his “superman” in the nature of “death,” a force with infinite power
In life and in text, Lawrence resists organized powers; both religious and
governmental, and claims his independence from external forces. Yet, it is Lawrence
who causes our certainty in the power of self to falter by introducing his credence that the
the collection of individual wills that aids the power of the authority because the
individual resolve is only a product of the desired outcome of the collective. He writes,
“The State . . . cannot have the psychology of the individual. . . . and no collective act,
even so private an act as voting, is made from the individual self. It is made from the
According to his theory, state and religious powers are controlled by the will of the many
individuals, but mankind’s inability to realize its power in this regard allows them to
believe that the opposite is true. This belief is what prods us to, willingly and without
The untapped power of the individual attracts Lawrence to political analysis and
Lawrence, this spirit is the key to understanding social organization and the cultures it
produces. The “power-spirit” or “power-sense” (147), and the book of Revelation are,
according to Lawrence, Christianity’s attempt to constrain and charter the natural power-
spirit in us:
Power is there, and always will be. As soon as two or three men
greater man, and you have no power yourself. But society, now
and forever, must be ruled and governed. So that the mass must
grant authority where they deny power. Authority now takes the
policemen (68).
Here, Lawrence writes of man’s complacency in relinquishing his power to the ruling
“authority.” It is part of our innate heroism that requires us to question the power of
those in authority; but instead, we seek hero status through conformity -- from pledging
our allegiances to those in power knowing that society frowns upon refuting the
established supremacy. Lawrence contends that the individual should recognize and
reclaim power because without our interference the democracy will fail. He claims that
the organization of power will eventually fall apart without the intervention of the
“powerless” because the disjointed efforts and individual agendas of the authorities will
wholeness (147).
However, Lawrence pacifies the reader by insisted that even when no action is taken, the
apocalypse (or the relative course of events involving destruction, war and societal
restoration) will end with power being rightfully restored to the powerless: “the
Apocalypse does not worship power. It wants to murder the powerful, to seize power
itself, the weakling” (69). There is no power in power itself, but power is in the spirit of
demoralized group of people, a prophecy that involves empowerment offers the hope that
suffering will come to an end. Christianity, in fact, developed out of Judaism partly as a
Reformation, when the German peasants flocked to the reformers' standards in order to
try and release themselves from feudalism; and then to the twentieth century, where
Marxism explicitly appealed to the oppressed of the world, we witness the trend where
the exploited search for reprieve. Further west in America, Patrick Henry, a colonist in
quest of freedom from British oppression cries, “Give me liberty or give me death.”
Then, not long after, slaves in America fought for the same liberty. In all of these
circumstances the oppressed were either waiting for, or experiencing some apocalyptic
encounter (judgment, war or threats or war) that promised liberation from their
tormentors. Throughout the history of human existence is the reality of the individual
need to find hope in an end that involves regaining control and escaping the power of the
a time when all of mankind, those who have endured under the rule of an unworthy
And the Apocalypse, repellant though its chief spirit be, does also
It is his hope that in the fight for freedom (whether figurative or literal), the individual
will gain the “revelation” that they have always been powerful. However, even in the
Power-spirit, as Lawrence is aware, the individual can never be as potent as the collection
contributes to the power of some organized collective. During the First World War,
Lawrence was accused of spying for the Germans and officially expelled from Cornwall,
England in 1917. It was during this time that he began to explore the world, including
different cultures and religions. As a result, Lawrence became a “citizen of the world”
and developed a holistic approach to life and religion. In his travels, and in his
Love, Lawrence).
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Notwithstanding his politically motivated exile, and despite that fact that he had been
ostracized (and at one point censored) by the authorities and his artistic contemporaries,
shows that he is aware of the need to somehow be connected to other members of the
applies the teachings as they fit his life circumstances. In text, Lawrence is in constant
flux when considering the awareness of man and the alliance with external identities: His
himself and the individual components of his own consciousness. And although the
individual man has needs that are rarely reflected by the larger group, he still is
compelled to identify with a community. Lawrence writes, “One of the obscurest but
profoundest needs of man is this need to belong to a group, a group called a church, or a
nation, or an empire, and to feel the power thereof …” (161-162). While Lawrence urges
us to be free from labels, or what he calls “false positions,” such as Christian and
democrat, he still considers himself a Christian. He knew that “to have an ideal for the
individual which regards only his individual self and ignores his collective self is in the
long run fatal” (147). Christianity is the facet of his collective self to which he has the
most profound, recognizable and constant connection; therefore, the more intently he
works to separate himself from the faith, the more allied the two become.
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declares that each part (meaning the individual) is “organic and vital” in creating the
echoes the words of the Apostle Paul as he also uses the human body to illustrate the
responsibility Christians have to live and work together (Romans 12: 4-55). Further, his
idea that power will always exist when “two or three men come together” is reminiscent
of Jesus (Matthew 18:19-206) as he looked ahead to the “new day” when he would be
present with his followers not in body, but through his Holy Spirit. In the body of
believers (the church), the sincere agreement of two or three people is more powerful
symbols and references is bewildering, bearing in mind his negation of the Christian
moral code. This is, until readers realize that he does not truly resent the Bible but
resents the rigidity of the Christian faith in which he was raised. Therefore, he uses the
Bible to illustrate universal concepts that embrace the faith without embracing the ritual.
Lawrence narrates Revelation in a way that reveals the rich historical and spiritual
While Lawrence argues against the teachings of the Bible and Christianity as viable
sources of assurance for all, he unwontedly preaches the basic principals of the Christian
teachings. Readers can conclude; therefore, that Lawrence never intends to be removed
from the movement in which he wrote nor the religion to which he was affiliated.
Lawrence made clear that his intentions as a conscious individual were to illustrate the
5
“Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same
function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.”
6
“For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.”
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the teachings of the Bible; instead he scrutinizes the intentions of the writers, gives
personal meaning to symbols and reforms the text in order to reconfirm his alliance with
Christianity and the universal community. The Apocalypse and the Writings of
Christianity with ancient myths and mysticisms that are, according to Lawrence, vital
parts in the quest of wholeness with the self and the heavens. Questioning, after all,
facilitates understanding:
In Apocalypse, Lawrence is a proponent for improving the condition of the physical man.
Through gaining understanding of human psychology and man’s relationship with the
universe, he teaches how to connect with the external environment. He expresses his
faith in the power of humanity and our ability to “re-establish the living organic
connections with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family”
(149). Accordingly, he encourages intraspection and the free criticism of the social and
The exploration of choice, and the assertion of the individual right to belong to a
Lawrence’s questioning the constraints set upon him by the Modernist movement to
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which he belonged. It is also the ambition of his work in Apocalypse and the Writings of
Revelation. The text gives credence to the need for viable theories of humanism and
Works Cited
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2001.
John Gager, The End of Time and the Rise of Community, in Kingdom and Community:
The Social World of Early Christianity. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1975.
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lawrence/dh/l41a/chap21.html
Lawrence, D.H. Apocalypse. Ed. Mara Kalnins. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.
Lawrence, D.H. Why the Novel Matters, D.H. Lawrence: Selected Literary Criticism, ed.
Moore, Harry T. The Priest of Love: A Life of D. H. Lawrence. Illinois: Southern Illinois
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/explanation/
1946.
2000
H.M. Robinson, Nietzsche, Lawrence and the Somatic Conception of the Good Life, New
Comparison, 5 (1988).
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References
Easson, Angus. “’My Very Knees Are Glad’: D. H. Lawrence and Apocalypse Again,”
Gutierrez, Donald. Lapsing Out: Embodiments of Death and Rebirth in the Last Works of
D. H. Lawrence, 1979.
Kuczkowski, Richard. “Lawrence Enters the Pantheon,” in Review. IV (1982), pp. 159-
170.