Lawrence and the Christian Love

Levinas’s analysis of the face-to-face relation constitutes a radical agape ethics of responsibility for others. His formulation parallels the oldest definition of agape as disinterested love, unselfish generosity, as opposed to investment for a return. He even refers to the responsibility that requires substitution of oneself for the other as “a devotedness as strong as death”(Levinas 1988: 175). Levinas’s notion of self’s infinite responsibility toward the other is often too readily confused with the Christian ethics of “self-sacrifice”criticized by both Nietzsche and Lawrence. In fact, Levinas and Lawrence hold a common critique on the Christian way of love. Unlike the Christian belief that I should love my neighbor as myself, or the Kantian dictum according to which I should treat others with the respect that I would like to command myself, Levinas’sconception ofethicsstartsnotfrom an analogy between myselfand the other, but precisely from our difference. Likewise, for Lawrence, “the hardest thing for any man to do is for him to recognize and to know that the natural law of his

neighbor is other than, and maybe even hostile to, his own natural law, and yet is true . . . Itisthehardestlesson oflove”(STH 124).

But here the similarity ends. While Levinas dedicates his work to the victims of the Holocaust, in Lawrence’swork oneisstruck repeatedly by the relatively apparent absence of concern for community. Most of the characters in his fiction express an indifference that is almost aristocratic toward their neighbors. Both Anna and Will Brangwen of The Rainbow are oblivious to the world outside their household;

they arein a“privateretreat”thathasno nationalityand no war in South Africa.

Their daughter, Ursula, is proudly contemptuous of her classmates, knowing herself as set apart from and superior to them. In Women in Love, Gudrun shows no

compassion for the degraded miners. In this novel, community is explicitly rejected because it is in the old sense based on property and possessions. While the working classes are stunted aborigines who stare after the Brangwen sisters in the street, the upper classes are sterile and worthless. Birkin thus insists that a nation should be built on “the intrinsic otherness of individuals”(WL 104). Ursula echoes Birkin in her conviction that “one has a sort of other self, that belongs to a new planet, not to this”(WL 253). It appears that what we perceive in Birkin (and also in Ursula, though less obviously) is a human spirit engrossed in the high enterprise of perfecting itself. That being the case, the mandate of responsibility for one’s neighbor no longer dominated even theoretically.

Lawrence’s attitude toward “love of the neighbor,”though echoing Levina’s in its respect for the intrinsic otherness between oneself and the neighbor, is again, like his notion of friendship, more akin to Nietzsche’s doctrine of “flight from neighbor,”

recommended by Zarathustra to his disciples. Nietzsche claims that “superior to love of neighbor is love of those far away, those in the future”(1978a: 116). The target of Nietzsche’s attack is the Christian ethics of pity. The Christian ideal of love is agape, in the act of which the noble stoops to the vulgar, the healthy to the sick, the

rich to the poor. Yet Nietzsche speaks of pity as the agent that makes suffering contagious and thus an ethics of pity is bound to encourage weakness and mediocrity, creating a climate harmful to the cultivation of self-respect, nobility of character, and heroic virtue. Through pity and compassion, the weak succeed in imposing

themselves and their values upon the strong. Therefore, Nietzsche redefines charity:

“Help yourself: then everybody will help you”(1978b: 9). For Nietzsche, the weak can become self-helping only if pity is withheld from them. Moreover, as Nietzsche sees it, pity not only asserts, in veiled fashion, the pitier’s ego but also disguises the lust for power of the weak and parasitic. Accordingly, “stooping to”the weak by the self-confident strong is in the end the birth-act of domination and hierarchy: the re-forging of difference into inferiority.

Lawrence presents these essential traits of the Christian love most evidently in Mr. Crich, Gerald’s father, the watchwords of whose life—pity, duty, and charity—are the very ideas Nietzsche singles out for his strongest attack. Mr. Crich remains constant to his love for his neighbor:

He had been so constant to his lights, so constant to charity, and to his love for his neighbor . . . . To move nearer to God, he must move towards his miners, his life must gravitated towards theirs. They were, unconsciously, his idol, his God made manifest. In them he worshipped the highest, the great, sympathetic, mindless Godhead of humanity. (WL207)

Throughout the Christian era, the emphasis had been on altruism and self-restraint rather than self-assertion: “Perhaps he loved his neighbor even better than himself”

(WL 245). Under the armor of his pity, however, lies a horror of death and an obscene fascination with misery. Mr. Crich is like a vampire who exerts his will over and feeds upon others:

Sometimes, it seemed to Mrs. Crich as if her husband were some subtle funeral bird, feeding on the miseries of the people. It seemed to her he

was never satisfied unless there was some sordid tale being poured out to him, which he drank in with a sort of mournful, sympathetic satisfaction.

He would have no raison d’etre if there were no lugubrious miseries in the world, as an undertaker would have no meaning if there were no funerals.

(WL 217)

By preserving the weak and sympathizing with their weaknesses, pity becomes an instrument of the life-denying, nihilistic tendencies. In other words, pity is anti-life because it debilitates and weakens the natural impulse, and the result of this denial Nietzsche describes as “decay, chronic degeneration, and sickness”(1978b: 534).

Consequently, for Lawrence, as it is for Nietizsche, Christian era has been

precipitously declining into death, as is represented by Thomas Crich: “He became more and more hollow in his vitality, the vitality was bled from within him”(WL 217).

Moreover, in the characterization of Mr. Crich and Gerald, Lawrence shows how the ideals of Christian love is effective in repressing and intensifying the hatred and violence that are latent in each individual, especially in those who mask their hostility in pity. In fact, Nietzsche speaks of pity as sublimated revenge or cruelty.

To Nietzsche, agape was but an oppression born and bred by ressentiment—rancor and spite aroused by the sight of resolute and self-confident difference. By the same token, Mr. Crich hated his wife and her fierce aristocratic independence. Yet he has caged his wife in his unrelenting kindness and pity, which for him are masks for hatred and contempt: “He had substituted pity for all his hostility; pity had been his shield and his safeguard, and his infallible weapon. And still, in his consciousness, he was sorry for her, her nature was so violentand so impatient”(WL 223 ). Mr.

Crich is accordingly eaten away by a cancerous disease that is associated with the hostility he had suppressed in the name of compassion.

The hatred that Gerald embodies might be conceived as a reaction against the

charity that has governed his father’s life. In Gerald, compassion and charity no longer prevail; all that remains is the aggressive drive to subjugate nature: “He had conceived the pure instrumentality of mankind. There had been so much

humanitarianism, so much talk of sufferings and feelings. It was ridiculous. The sufferingsand feelingsofindividualsdid notmatterin theleast”(WL 215). Yet Gerald is after all his fathers’son, and he is inevitably infected with the same decay.

While seeming more rebellious, Gerald too is imprisoned by the old conception:

For Gerald was in reaction against Charity, yet he was dominated by it; it assumed supremacy in the inner life, and he could not confute it. So he was partly subject to that which his father stood for, but he was in reaction against it. Now he could not save himself. A certain pity and grief and tenderness for his father overcame him, in spite of the deeper, more sullen hostility. (WL 218-9).

Being unable to “confute”the idea of Christianity, or to “think his way out”(WL 220), Gerald is condemned to a state of chaos, with feelings of “contempt”confused with feelings of “unadmitted enmity”(WL 220). In his resort to arrogance and brutality, Gerald finally makes the machine itself the real God. For the “whole Christian attitude of love and self-sacrifice”of his father, he substitutes devotion to the “great social productive machine”(WL 258-9).

Lawrence’s critique of Christian love also lies in his repudiation of the way this universal love is bullied against the loved one and the way the Christian injunction to love one’s neighbor leads to a dissipation of the substantial, passional, independent self. For instance, Kangaroo, as an embodiment of Christian love, wants to make Australia “a kind of Church.” He loves as the Christian God loves, in defiance of human attempts to prevent him. His love thus becomes what masks willfulness: “‘I love them,’he shouted, in a voice suddenly become loud and passionate. ‘I love them.

I love you, and I defy you to prevent me’”(K 120). Like God, he loves people in

spite of themselves. In the light of his benevolent ideas, he can appear as beautiful as a god; yet he is ugly in person— when withstood, he is a superman monster, a

“horror.” Moreover, as a kangaroo he is a fraud, being capable of loving intimacy in the mode of Christian Europe but lacking a vigorous sense of his own identity, both as an individual and as the inhabitant of a new continent. The Christian altruism causes selflessness achieved by utterly subordinating the self to an object which has been apprehended through empathy. Excessive striving in this direction leads to disintegrating personalities. Kangaroo’s repulsiveness is rooted in Lawrence’s opposition to Christian idealism which made him present Thomas Crich in an

ambience of distasteful moribundity. In becoming more than either man or woman, Kangaroo has become more (and less) than human. He is for Somers like

“Abraham’s bosom”(K 117), because he will overwhelm with “love”anyone who opposes him, and engulf their being.

As it is, Kangaroo’s love is oppressive because it is Love in the abstract, which denies individuality. With Somers and Harriet working through the conflicts in their marriage, the all-embracing love of Kangaroo soon begins to appear like an

impossible idealism which cannot be applied to ordinary human life. Kangaroo tells Somers, “Either you are with me, and I feel you are with me: or you cease to exist for me”(K 213). Somers complains to Kangaroo: “You are so awfully general, and your love is so awfully general: as if one were a cherry in the syrup. Don’t love me.

Don’t want me to love you. Let’s be hard, separate men”(K 213). Ultimately, Somers comes to view Kangaroo’s universal love as positively destructive to

individual integrity for both men and women. The God Kangaroo believes is not the one that made a man realize “his own sacred aloneness”(K 224). The narrator laments after the death of Kangaroo: “If Kangaroo could have realized that too, then Richard felt he would have loved him, in a dark, separate, other way of love. But never this all-in-all thing”(K 282).

What is more, the disintegration of personality caused by the Christian mode of love results (at least partially, for Lawrence) in the chaotic aggression that

characterizes the life of the mob. In other words, mobs are made up of

agglomerations of self-disintegrated individuals who huddle together in fear, seeking to discharge the pent-up violence resulted from the dissolution of the integral forms of selfhood. This theme is explored most thoroughly in the scene where open violence breaks out between the Diggers, an active and parafascist organization, and their socialist antagonists, who, like Kangaroo, preach love as the source of social salvation.

It was at that time that Somers had realized that the ideals of “Love, Self-sacrifice, Humanity united in love”were dead. For Lawrence, modern man has become dependent on a vast, amorphous, impersonal entity which is identified in his

consciousness as the peer group. However, the peer group is really no more than a vague constellation of ideas that are projected by society. These lonely individuals seek the security of the crowd, but the group gives them neither security nor strength.

As such, it is Lawrence’s view that modern society has an unprecedented potentiality for brute violence because it sends aggression underground, providing no socially sanctioned forms for its expression. The Christian moral tradition compels a surface appearance of universal love, sympathy and fellow-feeling; it nevertheless at the same time finds expression in radically altered form, reappearing as a subtle and subterranean but corrosive force. In The Plumed Serpent, through the

characterization of Dona Carlota, Don Ramon’s wife, Lawrence shows how conformity, submissiveness, dependency, and social altruism all stem from the repression of hate. Carlota is a tormented, vindictive, guilt-ridden woman, whose life is devoted to good works within the Church, and who is full of impotent rage at Ramon’s political and religious aspirations. In this novel, she is presented as a kind of vampire who would wish to suck away the life of her husband. In her

commitment to the Christian mode of love, Carlota is incapable of loving a vigorous

man like her husband. Lawrence seems to suggests that the Christian ideal of charity, sacrifice, and identification with the suffering Christ is perverse because it is merely an inverted expression of cruel impulses.

Thus far, we might see, though both Levinas and Lawrence hold a critique on Christian altruism, their critiques are not founded on the same accounts. While Lawrence repudiates it for its bringing forth the dissipation of individuality, Levinas differentiates his own position from Christian altruism by asserting that the notion of altruism remains self-centered insofar as it finds its grounding in the individual’s own

“disciplinedattempt”to overcome one’s self-centeredness and selfish desires.³² Put differently, while Levinas claims that the assertion of and focus on self-identity of the subject is an act of irresponsibility, Lawrence’snotion oflove (either as eros, philia, or agape), though complicated and relativized in textual differences as illustrated above, remains to a large degree a self-centered preoccupation insofar as the ultimate focus ofone’sencounter with the Other is the self itself. Although Levinas attends more explicitly to the role and function of the Other within the encounter, the call to

responsibility does not adequately account for the existential freedom of the self. On the other hand, if Levinas’s serious solemnities without joyfulness and release make us uneasy, Lawrence’s gaiety with relative absence of obligation and commitment toward the other is no less disturbing. In other words, if Levinasian ethics tends to be self-effacing, Lawrence’s obsession with “enhancing the self”risks the danger of solipsism. In his insistence on self-flourishing, it seems that for Lawrence,

especially in his critique on Christian love, any response to other forces is slavish and reactive, and hence the only responsibility for the self is to become what it is.

Nevertheless, in an age wherein the weak are dominated by the strong, the poor are exploited by the rich, it seems that the problem lies more in the indifference with which responsibility toward the other is treated than in the slavish result of helping the needed. Lending a hand to others is a way of inducing dependence and of reducing

them to subservience. That is something we cannot help. We inevitably produce new evils in trying to solve existing ones. But that is not excuse not to act, not to do whatever we can. In our epoch, the widow who gives everything she needs for herself appears to be more dignified than the “noble egoist”who gives out of his overflow and abundance and who is responsible only to his self. In Levinas’s thought, there is no nihilism about re-sponsiveness, no fear of looking like a reactive slave, a lower type. Here the love of difference is the love of the other and being held hostage by the other is not considered demeaning, degrading, or ignoble but rather challenging and uplifting.

For all that, Levinas has indeed burdened us too much with infinite weights and unlimited obligation toward the other, in spite of his attempt to put limits on the self-sacrifice expected of us by his claim of justice.³³ If for Lawrence, freedom is to get away from inhibition and blockage, i.e., from everything that prevents it from dancing, for Levians, freedom is suspect, suspended, held in question. As a result, if Lawrentian way of love is inseparable from gaiety and happiness, Levinasian ethics of love is grave, serious, and even painful. Abraham’s “me voice”(“here I am”) makes him extremely passive. He does not try to assume the position of the author, the addressor. He just takes the command, in the accusative, receives it, accepts it, and stands under it. From Nietzsche’s or Lawrence’s point of view, Abraham entirely lacks the spirit of Greek beauty and autonomy because he is slavishly dependent upon instruction from the Other. For many philosophers who stand up for freedom of the self, Levinas’s idea of responsibility is extravagant and leads all too quickly to a pathological feeling of guilt. In effect, Levinas himself acknowledges that primary ethical relation to alterity is“breathless,”like an “insomniacvigilance.”

Consequently, itmay stillbenecessary to continue to callfor“good air”and to find a place for the value of self-preservation, if one wants to breathe and to sleep.

Moreover, ifoneisto inviteothersinto one’shome,onemustbeand remainin some

sensethehome’sowner, the self. Put differently, a down-to-earth ethics would include an idea of a certain self-love and self-regard, which goes along with a sense of responsibility toward the other. It is in this sense that Lawrence and Levinas

complement one another, enabling us to conceive a more adequate ethical relation to alterity—one that is based on the kind of self-love entailing, and compatible with, the love of the other.

NOTES

1 As part of the literary-critical vocabulary, eros is often employed in correlation with the notion of representation. In the 1980s, a new vocabulary is used when talking

1 As part of the literary-critical vocabulary, eros is often employed in correlation with the notion of representation. In the 1980s, a new vocabulary is used when talking