William Blake: Satan in his Original Glory (c. 1805)
Ink and watercolour on paper (429 x 339 mm)
"Remember I think Christ was profoundly, disastrously wrong." [1]
"Jesus becomes more unsympatisch to me, the longer I live: crosses and nails and tears and all that stuff! I think he showed us into a nice cul de sac." [2]
"Yes, I am all for Lucifer, who is really the Morning Star. The real principle of Evil is not anti-Christ or anti-Jehovah, but anti-life. I agree with you, in a sense, that I am with the antichrist. Only I am not anti-life." [3]
These three brief extracts from Lawrence's letters, written between January 1925 and June 1929, reveal much about his relationship to Christianity; a relationship which became increasingly marked by hostility to the Nazarene on the one hand and sympathy for the Devil on the other.
I'm not sure Lawrence would ever have gone as far as Nietzsche in characterising Christianity as the "extremest thinkable form of corruption" and the one "immortal blemish of mankind" [4], but he certainly positions himself like the latter as versus the Crucified and takes up Nietzsche's project of revaluation in poems such as 'When Satan Fell'; a lovely postromantic text, reminiscent of Milton and Blake, which makes perfect reading for an Easter beyond good and evil [5] ...
because the Lord Almighty rose a bit too high,
a bit beyond himself.
So Satan only fell to keep a balance.
"Are you so lofty, O my God?
Are you so pure and lofty, up aloft?
Then I will fall, and plant the paths to hell
with vines and poppies and fig-trees
so that lost souls may eat grapes
and the moist fig
and put scarlet buds in their hair on the way to hell,
on the way to dark perdition."
And hell and heaven are the scales of the balance of life
which swing against each other. [6]
Notes
[1] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), letter number 3343, [26 January 1925], p. 205.
[2] Ibid., letter number 3516, [26 October 1925], p. 322.
[3] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, letter number 5140, (12 June, 1929), pp. 331-32.
[4] Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), section 62, pp. 196-97.
[5] It's important to note that when Lawrence writes of Lucifer (or Satan), he does so without subscribing to the Christian belief that, post fall, he became the enemy of mankind and the source of all evil in the world. As the last lines of the above verse make clear, for Lawrence, heaven and hell are both vital states of human experience necessary for 'the balance of life' and should not be given a simplistic moral interpretation.
[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'When Satan Fell', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 624.
Readers might be interested in a sister post to this one, on D. H. Lawrence and the poetry of evil: click here.
For the 2013 version of Easter with the Anti-Christ, click here.
For the 2019 version of Easter with the Anti-Christ, click here.
[5] It's important to note that when Lawrence writes of Lucifer (or Satan), he does so without subscribing to the Christian belief that, post fall, he became the enemy of mankind and the source of all evil in the world. As the last lines of the above verse make clear, for Lawrence, heaven and hell are both vital states of human experience necessary for 'the balance of life' and should not be given a simplistic moral interpretation.
[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'When Satan Fell', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 624.
Readers might be interested in a sister post to this one, on D. H. Lawrence and the poetry of evil: click here.
For the 2013 version of Easter with the Anti-Christ, click here.
For the 2019 version of Easter with the Anti-Christ, click here.
