LAWRENCE AND CHRIST
53
ollS to Christ himself in (Christ's) challenge against the rigidity of
Judaic Law." Knight has very brilliantly argued for the Dionysian
or power content of Christ's doctrine as opposed to the Christian
doctrine. Thus he distinguishes between the inclusive "super-sex–
uality" of Christ and "the ghostly, bloodless, nasalised and utterly
unsexual ... tone of our Church tradition." Jesus's dread of the
crowd,
his
impulse to solitude, and the pain and joy of the cruci–
fixion and resurrection are regarded by Knight as the Dionysian
involvement with the cosmos that carries the self beyond the
"normal" sensual experience of the world into an hermaphroditic
oneness of the self with the universe, of the self with the self.
Christ's love is not altruism, but self-renewal. Viewed from this
"higher critical" position,
The Man Who Died
is a significant re–
telling of the story within the tradition. Nietzsche himself would have
disagreed with Knight's conception of Christ. But his admiration
for Jesus was genuine, and he was careful to distinguish him from
contemporary Christianity as well as from the creeds.
Lawrence's version of the Christ story, in which the man
separates himself from the vulgar after he descends from the crbss,
is a repudiation of something central in the
Christian
ethos. Lawrence
has seen through the willed and enervating democratic character
of Christianity and rejected it for a fierce aristocratic aloneness.
Whatever ultimate significance the life of Jesus had, Christianity
for writers like Blake, Nietzsche, and Lawrence had come to be
an enemy of life, and the attempts of commentators and critics to
reconcile them to Christianity on some higher ground have the ef–
fect of depriving them of the weapon that Jesus himself was
permitted: the sword. Lawrence came with the sword. His mes–
sage was not peace and reconciliation, but destruction and recrea–
tion. The gentle Jesus who embodied the hopes and aspirations of
the meek and poor (the Jesus of Christianity) is an alien spirit to
Lawrence.
In an introduction that Lawrence wrote to Dostoevsky'S version
of the Christ story, the un-Christian and aristocratic power bias of
Lawrence's imagination is revealed in an extraordinary way. In
summarizing the argument of the Grand Inquisitor, Lawrence
makes
his
characteristic effort to rescue the tale from the artist.
According to Lawrence, Christ's
kiss,
which is paralleled in the
