Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence, page 1065
I: How do you believe in God? HE: I believe in goodness.
(Basta! Turn him down and try again.)
I: How do you believe in God? HE: I believe in love.
(Exit. Call another.)
I: How do you believe in God? HE: I don’t know.
I: What difference does it make to you, whether you believe in God or not?
HE: It makes a difference, but I couldn’t quite put it into words. I: Are you sure it makes a difference? Does it make you kinder or fiercer?
HE: Oh! — I think it makes me more tolerant.
(Retrp me. — Enter another believer.)
HE: Hullo!
I: Hullo!
HE: What’s up?
I: Do you believe in God?
HE: What the hell is that to you?
I: Oh, I’m just asking.
HE: What about yourself?
I: Yes, I believe.
HE: D’you say your prayers at night? I: No.
HE: When d’you say ‘em, then? I: I don’t.
HE: Then what use is your God to you? I: He merely isn’t the sort you pray to. HE: What do you do with him then? I: It’s what he does with me. HE: And what does he do with you?
I: Oh, I don’t know. He uses me as the thin end of the wedge.
HE: Thin enough! What about the thick end?
I: That’s what we’re waiting for.
HE: You’re a funny customer.
I: Why not? Do you believe in God?
HE: Oh, I don’t know. I might, if it looked like fun.
I: Right you are.
This is what I call a conversation between two true believers. Either believing in a real God looks like fun, or it’s no go at all. The Great God has been treated to so many sighs, supplications, prayers, tears and yearnings that, for the time, He’s had enough. There is, I believe, a great strike on in heaven. The Almighty has vacated the throne, abdicated, climbed down. It’s no good your looking up into the sky. It’s empty. Where the Most High used to sit listening to woes, supplications and repentances, there’s nothing but a great gap in the empyrean. You can still go on praying to that gap, if you like. The Most High has gone out.
He has climbed down. He has just calmly stepped down the ladder of the angels, and is standing behind you. You can go on gazing and yearning up the shaft of hollow heaven if you like. The Most High just stands behind you, grinning to Himself.
Now this isn’t a deliberate piece of blasphemy. It’s just one way of stating an everlasting truth: or pair of truths. First, there is always the Great God. Second, as regards man, He shifts His position in the cosmos. The Great God departs from the heaven where man has located Him, and plumps His throne down somewhere else. Man, being an ass, keeps going to the same door to beg for his carrot, even when the Master has gone away to another house. The ass keeps on going to the same spring to drink, even when the spring has dried up, and there’s nothing but clay and hoofmarks. It doesn’t occur to him to look round, to see where the water has broken out afresh, somewhere else out of some live rock. HabitI God has become a human habit, and Man expects the Almighty habitually to lend Himself to it. Whereas the Almighty — it’s one of His characteristics — won’t. He makes a move, and laughs when Man goes on praying to the gap in the Cosmos.
“Oh, little hole in the wall! Oh, little gap, holy little gap!” as the Russian peasants are supposed to have prayed, making a deity of the hole in the wall.
Which makes me laugh. And nobody will persuade me that the Lord Almighty doesn’t roar with laughter, seeing all the Christians still rolling their imploring eyes to the skies where the hole is, which the Great God left when He picked up his throne and walked.
I tell you, it isn’t blasphemy. Ask any philosopher or theologian, and he’ll tell you that the real problem for humanity isn’t whether God exists or not. God always is, and we all know it. But the problem is, how to get at Him. That is the greatest problem ever set to our habit-making humanity. The theologians try to find out: How shall Man put himself into relation to God, into a living relation? Which is: How shall Man find God? That’s the real problem.
Because God doesn’t just sit still somewhere in the Cosmos. Why should He? He, too, wanders His own strange way down the avenues of time, across the intricacies of space. Just as the heavens shift. Just as the pole of heaven shifts. We know now that, in the strange widdershins movement of the heavens, called precession, the great stars and constellations and planets are all the time slowly, invisibly, but absolutely shifting their positions; even the pole-star is silently stealing away from the pole. Four thousand years ago, our pole-star wasn’t a pole-star. The earth had another one. Even at the present moment, Polaris has side-stepped. He doesn’t really stand at the axis of the heavens. Ask any astronomer. We shall soon have to have another pole-star.
So it is with the Great God. He slowly and silently and invisibly shifts His throne, inch by inch, across the Cosmos. Inch by inch, across the blue floor of heaven, till He comes to the stairs of the angels. Then step by step down the ladder.
Where is He now? Where is the Great God now? Where has He put His throne?
We have lost Him! We have lost the Great God! O God, O God, we have lost our Great God! Jesus, Jesus, Thou art the Way! Jesus, Jesus, Thou art the Way to the Father, to the Lord Everlasting.
But Jesus shakes His head. In the great wandering of the heavens, the foot of the Cross has shifted. The great and majestic movement of the heavens has slowly carried away even the Cross of Jesus from its place on Calvary. And Jesus, who was our Way to God, has stepped aside, over the horizon with the Father.
So it is. Man is only Man. And even the Gods and the Great God go their way; stepping slowly, invisibly, across the heavens of time and space, going somewhere, we know not where. They do not stand still. They go and go, till they pass below the horizon of Man.
Till Man has lost his Great God, and there remains only the gap, and images, and hollow words. The Way, even the Great Way of Salvation, leads only to the pit, the nothingness, the gap.
It is not our fault. It is nobody’s fault. It is the mysterious and sublime fashion of the Almighty, who travels too. At least, as far as we are concerned, He travels. Apparently He is the same today, yesterday, and for ever. Like the pole-star. But now we know the pole-star slowly but inevitably side-steps. Polaris is no longer at the pole of the heavens.
Gradually, gradually God travels away from us, on His mysterious journey. And we, being creatures of obstinacy and will, we insist that He cannot move. God gave us a way to Himself. God gave us Jesus, and the way of repentance and love, the way to God. The salvation through Christ Jesus our Lord.
And hence, we assert that the Almighty cannot go back on it. He can never get away from us again. At the end of the way of repentance and love, there God is, and must be. Must be, because God Himself said that He would receive us at the end of the road of repentance and love.
And He did receive men at the end of this road. He received our fathers even, into peace and salvation.
Then He must receive us.
And He doesn’t. The road no longer leads to the Throne.
We are let down.
Are we? Did Jesus ever say: I am the way, and there is no other way? At the moment there was no other way. For many centuries, there was no other way. But all the time, the heavens were mysteriously revolving and God was going His own unspeakable way. All the time, men had to be making the road afresh. Even the road called Jesus, the Way of the Christian to God, had to be subtly altered, century by century. At the Renaissance, in the eighteenth century, great curves in the Christian road to God, new strange directions.
As a matter of fact, never did God or Jesus say that there was one straight way of salvation, for ever and ever. On the contrary, Jesus plainly indicated the changing of the way. And what is more, He indicated the only means to the finding of the right way.
The Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost is within you. And it is a Ghost, for ever a Ghost, never a Way or a Word. Jesus is a Way and a Word. God is the Goal. But the Holy Ghost is for ever Ghostly, unrealizable. And against this unsubstantial unreality, you may never sin, or woe betide you.
Only the Holy Ghost within you can scent the new tracks of the Great God across the Cosmos of Creation. The Holy Ghost is the dark hound of heaven whose baying we ought to listen to, as he runs ahead into the unknown, tracking the mysterious everlasting departing of the Lord God, who is for ever departing from us.
And now the Lord God has gone over our horizon. The foot of the Cross is lifted from the Mound, and moved across the heavens. The pole-star no longer stands on guard at the true polaric centre. We are all disorientated, all is gone out of gear.
All right, the Lord God left us neither blind nor comfortless nor helpless. We’ve got the Holy Ghost. And we hear Him baying down strange darknesses, in other places.
The Almighty has shifted His throne, and we’ve got to find a new road. Therefore we’ve got to get off the old road. You can’t stay on the old road, and find a new road. We’ve got to find our way to God. From time to time Man wakes up and realizes that the Lord Almighty has made a great removal, and passed over the known horizon. Then starts the frenzy, the howling, the despair. Much better listen to the dark hound of heaven, and start off into the dark of the unknown, in search.
From time to time, the Great God sends a new saviour. Christians will no longer have the pettiness to assert that Jesus is the only Saviour ever sent by the everlasting God. There have been other saviours, in other lands, at other times, with other messages. And all of them Sons of God. All of them sharing the Godhead with the Father. All of them showing the Way of Salvation and of Right. Different Saviours. Different Ways of Salvation. Different pole- stars, in the great wandering Cosmos of time. And the Infinite God, always changing, and always the same infinite God, at the end of the different Ways.
Now, if I ask you if you believe in God, I do not ask you if you know the Way to God. For the moment, we are lost. Let us admit it. None of us knows the way to God. The Lord of time and space has passed over our horizon, and here we sit in our mundane creation, rather flabbergasted. Let us admit it.
Jesus, the Saviour, is no longer our Way of Salvation. He was the Saviour, and is not. Once it was Mithras: and has not been Mithras for these many years. It never was Mithras for us. God sends different Saviours to different peoples at different times.
Now, for the moment, there is no Saviour. The Jews have waited for three thousand years. They preferred just to wait. We do not. Jesus taught us what to do, when He, Christ, could no longer save us.
We go in search of God, following the Holy Ghost, and depending on the Holy Ghost. There is no Way. There is no Word. There is no Light. The Holy Ghost is ghostly and invisible. The Holy Ghost is nothing, if you like. Yet we hear His strange calling, the strange calling like a hound on the scent, away in the unmapped wilderness. And it seems great fun to follow. Oh, great fun, God’s own good fun.
Myself, I believe in God. But I’m off on a different road. Adids! and, if you like, au revoir!
BOOKS
Are books just toys? the toys of consciousness?
Then what is man? The everlasting brainy child?
Is man nothing but a brainy child, amusing himself for ever with the printed toys called books?
That also. Even the greatest men spend most of their time making marvellous fine toys. Like Pickwick or Two on a Tower.
But there is more to it.
Man is a thought-adventurer.
Man is a great venture in consciousness.
Where the venture started, and where it will end, nobody knows. Yet here we are — a long way gone already, and no glimpse of any end in sight. Here we are, miserable Israel of the human consciousness, having lost our way in the wilderness of the world’s chaos, giggling and babbling and pitching camp. We needn’t go any further.
All right, let us pitch camp, and see what happens. When the worst comes to the worst, there is sure to be a Moses to set up a serpent of brass. And then we can start off again.
Man is a thought-adventurer. He has thought his way down the far ages. He used to think in little images of wood or stone. Then in hieroglyphs on obelisks and clay rolls and papyrus. Now he thinks in books, between two covers.
The worst of a book is the way it shuts up between covers. When men had to write on rocks and obelisks, it was rather difficult to lie. The daylight was too strong. But soon he took his venture into caves and secret holes and temples, where he could create his own environment and tell lies to himself. And a book is an underground hole with two lids to it. A perfect place to tell lies in.
Which brings us to the real dilemma of man in his long adventure with consciousness. He is a liar. Man is a liar unto himself. And once he has told himself a lie, round and round he goes after that lie, as if it was a bit of phosphorus on his nose-end. The pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire wait for him to have done. They stand silently aside, waiting for him to rub the ignis fatuus off the end of his nose. But man, the longer he follows a lie, becomes all the surer he sees a light.
The life of man is an endless venture into consciousness. Ahead goes the pillar of cloud by day, the pillar of fire by night, through the wilderness of time. Till man tells himself a lie, another lie. Then the lie goes ahead of him, like the carrot before the ass.
There are, in the consciousness of man, two bodies of knowledge: the things he tells himself, and the things he finds out. The things he tells himself are nearly always pleasant, and they are lies. The things he finds out are usually rather bitter to begin with.
Man is a thought-adventurer. But by thought we mean, of course, discovery. We don’t mean this telling himself stale facts and drawing false deductions, which usually passes as thought. Thought is an adventure, not a trick.
And of course it is an adventure of the whole man, not merely of his wits. That is why one cannot quite believe in Kant, or Spinoza. Kant thought with his head and his spirit, but he never thought with his blood. The blood also thinks, inside a man, darkly and ponderously. It thinks in desires and revulsions, and it makes strange conclusions. The conclusion of my head and my spirit is that it would be perfect, this world of men, if men all loved one another. The conclusion of my blood says nonsense, and finds the stunt a bit disgusting. My blood tells me there is no such thing as perfection. There is the long endless venture into consciousness down an ever-dangerous valley of days.
Man finds that his head and his spirit have led him wrong. We are at present terribly off the track, following our spirit, which says how nice it would be if everything was perfect, and listening to our head, which says we might have everything perfect if we would only eliminate the tiresome reality of our obstinate blood-being.
We are sadly off the track, and we’re in a bad temper, like a man who has lost his way. And we say: I’m not going to bother. Fate must work it out.
Fate doesn’t work things out. Man is a thought-adventurer, and only his adventuring in thought rediscovers a way.
Take our civilization. We are in a tantrum because we don’t really like it now we’ve got it. There we’ve been building it for a thousand years, and built so big we can’t shift it. And we hate it, after all.
Too bad! What’s to be done?
Why, there’s nothing to be done! Here we are, like sulky children, sulking because we don’t like the game we’re playing, feeling that we’ve been made to play it against our will. So play it we do: badly: in the sulks.
We play the game badly, so of course it goes from bad to worse. Things go from bad to worse.
All right, let ‘em! Let ‘em go from bad to worse. Apres moi le deluge.
By all means! But a deluge presupposes a Noah and an Ark. The old adventurer on the old adventure.
When you come to think of it, Noah matters more than the deluge, and the ark is more than all the world washed out.
Now we’ve got the sulks, and are waiting for the flood to come and wash out our world and our civilization. All right, let it come. But somebody’s got to be ready with Noah’s Ark.
We imagine, for example, that if there came a terrible crash and terrible bloodshed over Europe, then out of the crash and bloodshed a remnant of regenerated souls would inevitably arise.
We are mistaken. If you look at the people who escaped the terrible times of Russia, you don’t see many regenerated souls. They are more scared and senseless than ever. Instead of the great catastrophe having restored them to manhood, they are finally unmanned.
What’s to be done? If a huge catastrophe is going only to unman us more than we are already unmanned, then there’s no good in a huge catastrophe. Then there’s no good in anything, for us poor souls who are trapped in the huge trap of our civilization.
Catastrophe alone never helped man. The only thing that ever avails is the living adventurous spark in the souls of men. If there is no living adventurous spark, then death and disaster are as meaningless as tomorrow’s newspaper.
Take the fall of Rome. During the Dark Ages of the fifth, sixth, seventh centuries A.D., the catastrophes that befell the Roman Empire didn’t alter the Romans a bit. They went on just the same, rather as we go on today, having a good time when they could get it, and not caring. Meanwhile Huns, Goths, Vandals, Visigoths, and all the rest wiped them out.
With what result? The flood of barbarism rose and covered Europe from end to end.
But, bless your life, there was Noah in his Ark with the animals. There was young Christianity. There were the lonely fortified monasteries, like little arks floating and keeping the adventure afloat. There is no break in the great adventure in consciousness. Throughout the howlingest deluge, some few brave souls are steering the ark under the rainbow.
The monks and bishops of the Early Church carried the soul and spirit of man unbroken, unabated, undiminished over the howling flood of the Dark Ages. Then this spirit of undying courage was fused into the barbarians, in Gaul, in Italy, and the new Europe began. But the germ had never been allowed to die.
