LAWRENCE AND CHRIST
be entailed. I do not go out to war in the intention of avoiding
all danger or discomfort: I go to fight for myself. Every step
I move forward into being brings a newer, juster proportion
into the world, gives me less need of storehouse and barn,
allows me to leave all and to take what I want by the way,
sure it will always be there; allows me in the end to fly the
flag of myself, at the extreme tip of life.
49
What Lawrence and his heroes desire-and it
is
implicit in
the passages quoted above and in numerous descriptions of the
sexual act at the moment of consummation (e.g. "he felt as if he
were seated in imme;morial potency") -is to be, as it were, the
point at which all the energies of the universe converge and
where they can experience them incarnate in their beings as sheer
power.
The experience, from which Birkin recoiled in his specula–
tions about the inverted culture of the "African way," holds the
secret of power which the Laurentian hero desires to possess.
In his book
Christ and Nietzsche,
G. Wilson Knight remarks
that the self in becoming one with the cosmos achieves an herma–
phroditic unity in which it engages in a kind of sexual intercourse
with itself. Knight, following Nietzsche, suggests an analogue for this
state of being in the creative act itself. What is involved is a pas–
sive (feminine) receptivity to the inspirational Dionysian flow into
consciousness and an active (masculine) exertion of the Apollonian
will to make order, significance and beauty.
Only a deliberate insensitivity to Lawrence's imagination of
transcendence could produce the statement of one critic that the
difference between the Laurentian idea and the Christian "is not
ineradicable. Whether man receives the sacred flow of life which
God has given him, and
r~mains
thankful for that, or whether
man transcends his finite self, to participate in the God-stuff, the
ultimate effect is the same."2 It is precisely Lawrence's point that
this difference makes
all
the difference in the universe.
. . . To pretend that all is one stream is to cause chaos
and nullity. To pretend to express one stream in terms of an–
other, so as to identify the two, is false and sentimental.
2. Mark Spilka,
The Love of Ethic of D. H. Lawrence
(Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1957),
p.
217.
