George Scialabba, writing about D.H. Lawrence, sums up everything I have lately been trying to understand and to translate from theological language into a secular vernacular:
He believed that the universe and the individual soul were pulsing with mysteries, from which men and women were perennially distracted by want or greed or dogma…he thought that beauty, graceful physical movement, unselfconscious emotional directness, and a sense, even an inarticulate sense, of connection to the cosmos, however defined—to the sun, to the wilderness, to the rhythms of a craft or the rites of a tribe—were organic necessities of a sane human life. He thought that reason was not something fundamental to human identity but rather a phenomenon of the surface: “I conceive a man’s body as a kind of flame…and the intellect is just the light that is shed on things around.” He thought that every free spirit revered someone or something braver or finer than itself, and that this spontaneous reverence was the basis of any viable social order. “Man has little needs and deeper needs,” he wrote; and he complained that [modern life] spoke chiefly to our little needs and could therefore lead only to universal mediocrity and frustration…
“We have fallen into the habit of living from our little needs till we have almost lost our deeper needs in a sort of madness.” Whether or not you accept Lawrence’s conception of our deeper needs, it is hard to deny the madness. “A wave of generosity or a wave of death,” he prophesied, shortly before his own death. We know which one came to pass.
Like all the other great diagnosticians of nihilism, Lawrence recognized that although the irrational cannot survive, the rational does not suffice. We live, he taught, by mysterious influxes of spirit, of what Blake called “Energy”. Irrationalists make superstitions out of these mysteries, rationalists make systems, each in a futile, anxious attempt at mastery. Lawrence wanted us to submit: to give up the characteristic modern forms—possessive individualism, technological messianism, political and sexual ‘ressentiment’—of humankind’s chronic pretense at mastery…
Norman Mailer paid Lawrence this exquisite and definitive tribute: “What he was asking for had been too hard for him, it is more than hard for us; his life was, yes, a torture, and we draw back in fear, for we would not know how to try to burn by such a light.”
{From “Shipwrecked,” by George Scialabba, in The Modern Predicament)
The light by which D.H. Lawrence burned was the same light that engulfed and enflamed Saul of Tarsus, and which he called “Christ”. It was the same light which enlightened Augustine and Pascal, Gerrard Winstanley and Jacob Hus, Voltaire and Rousseau, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Rilke and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Berdyaev and Shestov and Mounier: all of whom relentlessly insisted that we recognize our deeper needs and organize our lives around them. Call it mystery or Energy or Spirit, call it Sophia or call it Christ: by any name it is the flame to which we human moths are drawn, not to be annihilated but to be purified, resurrected, and transformed.
As always, of course, ni fallor: that is, I could be wrong.
Scialabba isn’t wrong, and neither are you. As a churchy-type person, I keep trying to show people how scripture and (admittedly, pretty flexible Episcopal) dogma promote this view and approach to life, rather than divert from it. I spend a certain amount of time translating. Like any good thing, scripture and dogma can be used for enrichment or impoverishment.
Posted by: Ann Markle | 02/03/2020 at 02:35 PM