Apocalypse Now

Lawrence's relationship to Christianity, like Nietzsche's, grows ever less ambiguous and ever more hostile over the years; he moves from simply thinking Jesus mistaken with his monomaniacal insistence on Love, to explicitly siding with the anti-Christ.

Thus it comes as no surprise that in his final work, Apocalypse, Lawrence takes up Nietzsche's opposition to the Crucified as his own. Lawrence, however, chooses to pin the blame for the negation of the gospels on John of Patmos rather than St Paul and argues that it is only in the Book of Revelation that we hear at last the cry of slave revolt and discover the hidden power-spirit within Christianity which lusts for final judgement and world destruction.

In Revelation, there is no longer thought of forgiveness or of developing a Christianity of tenderness; this has been supplanted once and for all by hatred and a Christianity of self-glorification on behalf of anarcho-nihilists masquerading as the meek and humble. The noble and almost Stoical teachings of Jesus, meant for the ears of the discerning individual, are substituted by a form of moral idealism aimed at the masses - or 'Platonism for the people', as Nietzsche amusingly describes it.

Central to this hideously mutated popular Christianity, is the lie of personal immortality. This, along with the conceit of equality of all souls, serves only to flatter those who imagine themselves to be the great measure and meaning of the entire universe. Lawrence argues it is a mixture of fear and egoism that sits behind this exaggerated inflation of the person and positing of an immortal I. The Church, shamelessly, manipulates this fear and does what it can to intensify it whilst promising salvation to those who accept its authority.

The enemy, therefore, is not Jesus nailed to the Cross, but those who would keep him there as bait and who find in this grotesque symbol a sign of their own triumph and moral superiority. The last book of the Bible is their book; a book of lies which is full of the "vast anti-will of the masses" [69]. Deleuze describes it as an example of zombie theology and he's right; it's an obscene work by and for the unclean, the unforgiving, and the undead.

And yet, due to John the Divine's decision to reactivate and redirect certain pagan symbols and forces, Lawrence can't help having a degree of sympathy - even admiration - for the author and the book. This, however, in no way lessens his horror for a work that displays an almost insane desire for cosmic annihilation and the "reign of saints in ultimate bodiless glory" [146].

Unfortunately, there are still religious lunatics in the world today who long for the end of days. And that is why Lawrence's Apocalypse remains an important text. But it is not merely a crucial insight into the politics and psycho-pathology of ressentiment, it is also one last glad tiding in its own right, as Deleuze notes. For Lawrence's posthumously published final work is a passionate call for a new way of living that stays true to the earth and the body.

God is dead, taught Nietzsche. But we are not, says Lawrence. And so we might, if we wish, find a way to develop an entire range of new ideas and feelings, beyond good and evil. Obviously, this cannot be achieved overnight; the revaluation of all values is a project of generations. But the key word remains the great word of the unborn day: Resurrection.