In late 1916, Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935), a British intelligence officer stationed in Cairo, was assigned as a military liaison officer to the forces of Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, the Sharif of Mecca, who, with his sons Ali, Abdullah and Faisal had initiated the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks in June 1916. Lawrence quickly adapted to the ways of his hosts and gained their trust. Under his leadership, the Arabs took the city of Aqaba in July 1917. This allowed the British to supply both their own army and the Arab rebels as they advanced on Jerusalem and Damascus. Lawrence led the Arabs as they disrupted the Hejaz Railway, and harried the Turkish army. His exploits were recorded on film and widely publicized by the American journalist Lowell Thomas, from whom came the epithet “Lawrence of Arabia.” Lawrence published a memoir of his experiences in 1927, Revolt in the Desert. A much more complete and introspective book on the Arab Revolt, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, was not formally published until after his death in 1935.

Early Life

Lawrence’s father Sir Thomas Chapman (1846-1919) was a gentleman landowner in Ireland, who had married a vindictively religious wife and fathered four daughters. In the late 1870s he hired a young Scotswoman, Sarah Lawrence, as a governess for his daughters. He soon fell in love with Sarah, who became pregnant and gave birth to a son in 1885. After his wife finally found out, Chapman decided to leave his family and moved with Sarah to Wales, where he assumed her surname for the sake of respectability. In 1888, Thomas Edward, was born. Three more sons were born and in 1896 the “family” settled in Oxford, where Lawrence and his brothers attended the City of Oxford High School for Boys.   

Lawrence read history at Jesus College in Oxford. His honors thesis on the architecture of the Crusader castles (Lawrence, 1910) was based on a 3-month walking tour of Ottoman Syria in the summer of 1909. The main conclusion of the thesis was that Crusader castles followed the principles of European fortifications and did not absorb any influences from local architecture. The illustration below shows  Lawrence’s pen-and-ink sketch of the south-east corner of Sahyun castle.  

Selim Ahmed

After graduating in 1910, Lawrence joined an archeological expedition to Carchemish to investigate the remains of the Hittite civilization (2nd millennium BCE), staying there until the outbreak of the war in 1914. While in Carchemish he took an intelligent young Arab boy, Selim Ahmed (1896-1918), nicknamed “Dahoum” (dark one), as his apprentice (Sattin, 2014, pp 200-202; Wilson 1989, pp 543-545). Selim nursed him during a severe attack of dysentery in 1911. For the last three years of Lawrence’s time in Syria, the two of them lived together, Lawrence teaching Selim mathematics, English and photography, and Selim helping Lawrence with his Arabic. Their relationship was intense; no one knows whether it remained platonic or became physical. The following paired photographs show Lawrence (left) trying on Selim’s clothes.  

In the introductory chapters of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935, pp 39-40) Lawrence recalled a visit in 1912 with Dahoum to the Qasr of Ibn Wardan, a 6^th Century Byzantine castle built by Justinian I near Hama in northern Syria (Sattin, 2024, pp 164-165 provides an earlier version of the story).

The common base of the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, ‘This is jessamine, this violet, this rose’.

But at last Dahoum drew me: ‘Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all’, and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. ‘This,’ they told me, ‘is the best: it has no taste.’ My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.

The Canadian poet, Gwendolyn MacEwen, wrote a set of poems about T. E. Lawrence. In one she recounts the visit to the Qasr of Ibn Wardani. The poem ends

                                          We call
this room the sweetest of them all,

You said.

            And I thought: Because there is nothing here.

I knew then that you possessed nothing of me, and I
             possessed nothing of you, Dahoum.
You were wealthy and stuffed with a wondrous nothing
             that filled the room and everything around.

You looked into my eyes, the windows to my soul,
             and said that because they were blue
You could see right through them, holes in my skull,
             to the quiet powerful sky beyond.

While he was in Carchemish, Lawrence began writing a book entitled Seven Pillars of Wisdom about the major cities of the Middle East (Aleppo, Beirut, Cairo, Constantinople, Damascus, Smyrna, and Medina). The title comes from Proverbs 9:1:

Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars

“Seven” had no specific meaning: it was just considered an auspicious number. Lawrence never completed the book and destroyed the drafts that he had written. He was later to use the title for his memoir of the Arab Revolt.

Soon after the war began, Lawrence enlisted and served in Cairo as an intelligence officer. Dahoum was given a stipend to stay at Carchemish to watch over the archeological site. Their halcyon days in northern Syria came to an end.

Lawrence dedicated Seven Pillars of Wisdom to S. A. He never explained who this was but almost everyone now agrees that it was Selim Ahmed (see Knightley & Simpson, 1969, pp 184-188, for reasoning). The book is prefaced with a poem to S. A. that begins

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
     and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house
     that your eyes might be shining for me
                                                          When we came.  

Dahoum died of typhus in 1918 before the Arab and British forces reached Damascus. Lawrence appears to have found this out in one of his trips behind the enemy lines. The epilogue to Seven Pillars of Wisdom begins

Damascus had not seemed a sheath for my sword, when I landed in Arabia: but its capture disclosed the exhaustion of my main springs of action. The strongest motive throughout had been a personal one, not mentioned here but present to me, I think, every hour of these two years. Active pains and joys might fling up, like towers, among my days: but refluent as air, this hidden urge re-formed, to be the persisting element of life, till near the end. It was dead, before we reached Damascus.

Selim Ahmad was the private passion driving Lawrence as he led the Arab forces in their search for freedom.   

 

The Beginnings of the Arab Revolt

In June, 2016, Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, the Sharif of Mecca, rebelled against Ottoman rule in the Hejaz (the western region of the Arabian Peninsula). By July his forces had captured the holy city of Mecca and the port of Jeddah. However, the Turks repulsed the Arabs when they tried to take Medina. The British hoped that the Arab Revolt would pin down Ottoman troops, and thereby assist the British in their advance into Palestine. In correspondence with Hussein, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, Sir Henry McMahon, made vague assurances of support for a self-governing Arabia from Palestine to the Indian Ocean and from Aleppo to Aden. The British likely thought that Husein’s revolt would not succeed, and that they would therefore not be required to fulfil their promises. Nevertheless, they sent Captain T. E. Lawrence to be a liaison officer with Hussein in October 1917. He identified Hussein’s son, Faisal bin al-Hussein bin Ali al-Hashemi, as the best leader of the Arab forces. Together they gathered together warriors from other tribes, and received supplies from the British in the Red-Sea ports of Yanbu and Weijh.

Faisal suggested that it would be much more comfortable for Lawrence to wear Arab clothes (see photograph on right):     

Suddenly Feisal asked me if I would wear Arab clothes like his own while in the camp. I should find it better for my own part, since it was a comfortable dress in which to live Arab-fashion as we must do. Besides, the tribesmen would then understand how to take me. The only wearers of khaki in their experience had been Turkish officers, before whom they took up an instinctive defence. If I wore Meccan clothes, they would behave to me as though I were really one of the leaders; and I might slip in and out of Feisal’s tent without making a sensation which he had to explain away each time to strangers. I agreed at once, very gladly; for army uniform was abominable when camel-riding or when sitting about on the ground; and the Arab things, which I had learned to manage before the war, were cleaner and more decent in the desert. Hejris [Faisal’s slave] was pleased, too, and exercised his fancy in fitting me out in splendid white silk and gold-embroidered wedding garments which had been sent to Feisal lately (was it a hint?) by his great-aunt in Mecca (Lawrence, 1935, p 126).

The following photograph shows the Arab forces at Yanbu with Faisal at the head and Lawrence (in his new white robes) on a camel behind him.

 

Aqaba

In early 1917, Lawrence convinced Auda Abu Tayeh, known as the “Desert Falcon”, to join the Arab Revolt. Auda was the leader of the Howeitat, a Bedouin tribe in the western part of the Arabian desert. Auda, Sharif Nasr of Syria, Lawrence, and a group of about 50 fighters undertook an arduous journey from Wejh north into the desert. This journey was a clandestine route toward the port of Aqaba. If the Turks noted the Arabian forces, they would likely believe that they were headed further north toward Amman or Damascus. As thy came out of the desert, they attracted many local Arabs to their cause so that their numbers swelled to several hundred. They then turned toward the southwest, crossed the railway and attacked Aqaba. The map below shows the Arab route in purple. The port was impregnable from the sea – the British Royal Navy had unsuccessfully tried to take the city earlier in the war. However, it was not well defended from a land attack. Led by Auda and Lawrence, the Arab forces captured Aqaba in July 2017. The attack on Aqaba was one of the great scenes in David Lean’s 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. For the film, the town was recreated on a beach in Spain:

 

After the capture of Aqaba, Lawrence and a few Arab companions rode by camel across the Sinai desert to Suez (dotted purple line on the map). He arranged for the British Navy to send money and supplies to Aqaba and to take the prisoners of war back to Egypt.

The British had not suggested that Lawrence urge the Arabs to capture Aqaba. Lawrence was acting on his own recognizance. The British likely wanted the Arab Revolt to stay confined to the southern regions of the Hejaz. The victory at Aqaba was crucial to the success of the Arab Revolt. Thenceforth, British could supply the Arabs as they moved northward toward Damascus.

 

The illustrations below show photographs of a flag bearer at the actual battle of Aqaba, and of Lawrence on his camel after the victory.  

After returning to Aqaba from Egypt, Lawrence spent time in Wadi Rum with Faisal, who had come to join the forces of Auda in Aqaba. Wadi Rum was soon to serve as the base for the armored cars that the British supplied to aid the Arabs. The following photographs show the striking granite and sandstone cliffs around the Wadi and a spring that Lawrence found.

Lawrence (1935, p 355) described the spring:

From this rock a silver runlet issued into the sunlight. I looked in to the spout, a little thinner than my wrist, jetting out firmly from a fissure in the roof, and falling with that clean sound into a shallow, frothing pool, behind the step which served as entrance. The walls and roof of the crevice dripped with moisture. Thick ferns and grasses of the finest green made it a paradise just five feet square. Upon the water-cleansed and fragrant ledge I undressed my soiled body, and stepped into the little basin, to taste at last a freshness of moving air and water against my tired skin. It was deliciously cool. I lay there quietly, letting the clear, dark red water run over me in a ribbly stream, and rub the travel-dirt away.

In Aqaba the Arab factions consolidated into a formidable fighting force. The main leaders of the Arab Revolt are illustrated below (photos from Arab Revolt website):

Asraq

After Aqaba was taken, Lawrence and the Arab forces moved to the north. Beginning in late 1917 Lawrence used the ruins of Qasr al Asraq about 100 km east of Amman as a desert base for attacking the Hejaz Railway and the Turkish troops that tried to keep it open.

The oasis of Asraq had been used since Roman times, though the present ruins date from 1237 CE when ‘Izz ad-Din Aybak built a fortress there using basalt stone. Lawrence was particularly impressed by the huge stone doors in the gatehouse. Though each door weighed more than a ton they still swung shut:

The door was a poised slab of thick basalt, a foot thick, turning on pivots of itself, socketed into threshold and lintel. It took a great effort to start swinging and at the end went shut with a clang and crash which made tremble the west wall of the old castle (Lawrence, 1935, p 436)  

Asraq was an oasis that the northern end of the Wadi Sirhan, the ancient trading route between Syria and Dumat-al Jandal in Arabia. Lawrence was fascinated by the site and its relation to the ancient (5^th– and 6^th Century CE) Syrian kingdoms of Ghassan and Hira:

Then the blue fort on its rock above the rustling palms, with the fresh meadows and shining springs of water, broke on our sight. Of Azrak, as of Rumm, one said ‘Numen inest’. Both were magically haunted: but whereas Rumm was vast and echoing and God-like, Azrak’s unfathomable silence was steeped in knowledge of wandering poets, champions, lost kingdoms, all the crime and chivalry and dead magnificence of Hira and Ghassan. Each stone or blade of it was radiant with half-memory of the luminous, silky Eden, which had passed so long ago. (Lawrence, 1935, p 414).

The following illustration shows some recent photographs from the site:

The following are two of Lawrence’s own photographs from his time in Asraq: one showing the explosion of a mine on the Hejaz Railway near Deraa and one showing the fort at Asraq:

 

The Incident in Deraa

The crucial episode in Lawrence’s account of the Arab Revolt in Seven Pillars of Wisdom happened in Deraa in late November, 1917. According to Lawrence (1935, Chapter 80), he went there dressed in Arab clothes together with Faris, an elderly Arab, to reconnoiter the approaches to the railway station. He was arrested by a Turkish soldier (who ignored his companion), and taken to the barracks. There he was cleaned up and, in the evening, presented to the Turkish governor (or ‘Bey’), who called him beautiful and fondled him. Lawrence vehemently rejected these advances, and was sent out for a beating to teach him “everything.” After a horrific whipping and a beating that apparently progressed to rape, Lawrence was taken back to the governor, who waved him off as “too torn and bloody for his bed.” After his wounds were treated, Lawrence was left alone. He escaped and made his painful way back to Asraq. The following passages describing his experience in Deraa are from Chapter 80 of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935):

To keep my mind in control I numbered the blows, but after twenty lost count, and could feel only the shapeless weight of pain, not tearing claws, for which I had prepared, but a gradual cracking apart of my whole being by some too-great force whose waves rolled up my spine till they were pent within my brain, to clash terribly together. Somewhere in the place a cheap clock ticked loudly, and it distressed me that their beating was not in its time. I writhed and twisted, but was held so tightly that my struggles were useless. After the corporal ceased, the men took up, very deliberately, giving me so many, and then an interval, during which they would squabble for the next turn, ease themselves, and play unspeakably with me. This was repeated often, for what may have been no more than ten minutes. Always for the first of every new series, my head would be pulled round, to see how a hard white ridge, like a railway, darkening slowly into crimson, leaped over my skin at the instant of each stroke, with a bead of blood where two ridges crossed. As the punishment proceeded the whip fell more and more upon existing weals, biting blacker or more wet, till my flesh quivered with accumulated pain, and with terror of the next blow coming. They soon conquered my determination not to cry, but while my will ruled my lips I used only Arabic, and before the end a merciful sickness choked my utterance. …

I remembered the corporal kicking with his nailed boot to get me up; and this was true, for next day my right side was dark and lacerated, and a damaged rib made each breath stab me sharply. I remembered smiling idly at him, for a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me: and then that he flung up his arm and hacked with the full length of his whip into my groin. This doubled me half-over, screaming, or, rather, trying impotently to scream, only shuddering through my open mouth. One giggled with amusement. A voice cried, ‘Shame, you’ve killed him’. Another slash followed. A roaring, and my eyes went black: while within me the core of life seemed to heave slowly up through the rending nerves, expelled from its body by this last indescribable pang. By the bruises perhaps they beat me further: but I next knew that I was being dragged about by two men, each disputing over a leg as though to split me apart: while a third man rode me astride. It was momently better than more flogging.

Lawrence concluded the account by stating that

the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost.

The incident was not mentioned in the early biographies (Thomas, 1924, Graves, 1927) and was omitted from Revolt in the Desert (Lawrence, 1927). Lidell Hart (1934) describes the beating but makes no mention of rape.

Richard Meinertzhagen (1959, pp 31-33) reported a conversation with Lawrence in 1922:

He went on to describe the indecency and degradation he suffered at the hands of the homosexual Turks. He did not intend to publish the true account of this incident as it was too degrading, ‘had penetrated his innermost nature’ and he lived in constant fear that the true facts would be known. He had been seized, stripped and bound; then sodomized by the governor of Deraa, followed by similar treatment by the Governor’s servants. After this revolting behaviour he had been flogged.

Meinertzhagen reported seeing scars on Lawence’s back: Lawrence attributed these wounds to being dragged across barbed wire in a camel accident. Unfortunately, the veracity of Meinertzhagen’s report of his encounter with Lawrence has been questioned (Lockman, 1995).

When putting together the first version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom in 1922, Lawrence wrote to his publisher Edward Garnett

If that Deraa incident whose treatment you call severe and serene (the second sounds like a quaint failure to get my impressions across, but I know what you feel) had happened to yourself you would not have recorded it. I have a face of brass perhaps, but I put it into print very reluctantly, last of all the pages I sent to the press. For weeks I wanted to burn it in the manuscript: because I could not tell the story face to face with anyone, and I think I’ll feel sorry, when I next meet you, that you know it. The sort of man I have always mixed with doesn’t so give himself away. (Lawrence, 1938, p 358)

In a later letter to Charlotte Shaw in March 1924, Lawrence wrote

About that night. I shouldn’t tell you. because decent men don’t talk about such things. I wanted to put it plain in the book, and wrestled for days with my self-respect … which wouldn’t. hasn’t, let me. For fear of being hurt, or rather to earn five minutes respite from a pain which drove me mad, I gave away the only possession we are born into the world with — our bodily integrity. Its an unforgivable matter, an irrecoverable position: and it’s that which has made me forswear decent living, and the exercise of my not-contemptible wits and talents. (Lawrence, 2000, p 70).  

What actually happened in Deraa is not known. In the play Ross by Terence Rattigan (1960), the Turkish governor recognizes Lawrence. He instigates the beating in order to break the spirit of the man, something he considers preferable to making him a martyr. Though this is an intriguing speculation, it remains just that.

David Lean’s 1962 movie followed Lawrence’s account but showed only the beating. Jeremy Wilson’s careful and exhaustive biography (1989) accepts that what Lawrence reported actually happened. Other episodes in Seven Pillars of Wisdom accord reasonably well with the historical record despite occasional exaggerations. For example, the camel ride from Aqaba to Suez was an impressive feat but it actually took longer than Lawrence described. 

Lawrence’s recounting of the event in Deraa is overwrought. Some things could not have happened the way they were described. Lawrence could not have seen the effects of the whip on his back. The Bey in Deraa at that time was not known to be a homosexual: according to Lawrence James (1990. p 213), he appears to have been more of a womanizer. Some biographers (Barr, 2008) have therefore speculated that the episode was imagined. Desmond Stewart (1977, p 244) suggested that Lawrence’s report was a “transubstantiation” of a sadomasochistic relationship with Sharif Ali ibn al Hussein, but there is no evidence for this. Aldington (1955) accused Lawrence of exaggerating his military exploits, but still chose to accept that he was tortured and raped at Deraa (see Crawford, 1998, for how Aldington’s book was denigrated by supporters of Lawrence). Korda’s biography Hero (2010) quotes from Seven Pillars of Wisdom and comments on the beating and the rape (p 349):

There seems no good reason why Lawrence would have invented the incident – on the contrary, it seems like the kind of thing that he would have suppressed, had he not been determined to tell the whole truth even when it was distasteful and damaging to him. For he does not strain himself to come out of it with credit; it is not just his body but his spirit that was broken, and much of what happened in 1918 and what became of Lawrence later, after the war, would be incomprehensible except for Deraa.

Later in his life, Lawrence submitted himself to ritual beatings as a form of penance (Knightley & Simpson, 1969, pp 219-254; Simpson, 2008, p 286-299). However, we do not know if this type of activity predated Deraa, or occurred as a result of his experience there. My personal opinion is that Deraa was the beginning of Lawrence’s masochism.

The Deraa episode is so striking that it requires interpretation. That he was tortured and raped during his captivity there makes sense with the strange and broken life that Lawrence was to lead after the war. This was likely why he included it in his book – as explanation and exculpation.

 

The Road to Damascus

While the Arab forces were harrying the Turks in the inland desert, General Edmund Allenby led British and Commonwealth forces across Sinai and into Palestine. The campaign was a marvel of logistics since the forces had to be constantly supplied with water, food and ammunition through a desert region with no railways. After several major battles with Turkish and German troops, Allenby prevailed and Jerusalem surrendered on December 9, 2017. Two days later, Allenby entered the city through the Jaffa Gate. He came on foot to show appropriate reverence for the holy city. This was the first time that Jerusalem had not been under Muslim rule since 1247.

The following illustration shows a photograph of Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem and a 1918 portrait of the general by James McBey.

In February of 1918 Lowell Thomas, an American journalist met Lawrence in Jerusalem. The two men intrigued each other. On Lawrence’s invitation, Thomas came to Aqaba, bringing with him the camera man Henry Chase. Over the next several months Thomas and Chase reported Lawrence’s exploits in the desert. The film clips and slides later formed the basis for a multimedia show “With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia” that toured America and England in the years following the war. The name and the legend of “Lawrence of Arabia” derives mainly from Thomas. Lawrence was ambivalent about his relationship to Thomas (Crawford & Berton, 1996). On the one hand he was fascinated by fame; on the other he wanted anonymity. Lawrence did not mention Thomas in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The illustration below (from Thomas, 1924) shows a photograph of the two of them in Aqaba in March 1918, and Lowell’s portrait of Lawrence in London in 1919.  

As the Arab forces grew in strength and experience, they became able to face the Turks in fixed battles as well as guerilla attacks. Their first main encounter was at Tafileh just south of the Dead Sea in January 1918. After multiple attacks, retreats and counter-attacks, the Arabs prevailed. The surviving Turks were pursued toward the railway:

As we turned back it began to snow; and only very late, and by a last effort did we get our hurt men in. The Turkish wounded lay out, and were dead next day. It was indefensible, as was the whole theory of war: but no special reproach lay on us for it. We risked our lives in the blizzard (the chill of victory bowing us down) to save our own fellows; and if our rule was not to lose Arabs to kill even many Turks, still less might we lose them to save Turks. (Lawrence, 1935, p 482)

In September 1918, the Arabs and Turks met at Tafas just north of Deraa. The Turkish troops had just massacred all the inhabitants of the village – men, women and children – as they retreated from Deraa. Tallal, one of the Arabs fighting with Lawrence, was from the village.  

Tallal had seen what we had seen. He gave one moan like a hurt animal; then rode to the upper ground and sat there a while on his mare, shivering and looking fixedly after the Turks. I moved near to speak to him, but Auda caught my rein and stayed me. Very slowly Tallal drew his head-cloth about his face; and then he seemed suddenly to take hold of himself, for he dashed his stirrups into the mare’s flanks and galloped headlong, bending low and swaying in the saddle, right at the main body of the enemy.

It was a long ride down a gentle slope and across a hollow. We sat there like stone while he rushed forward, the drumming of his hoofs unnaturally loud in our ears, for we had stopped shooting, and the Turks had stopped. Both armies waited for him; and he rocked on in the hushed evening till only a few lengths from the enemy. Then he sat up in the saddle and cried his war-cry, ‘Tallal, Tallal’, twice in a tremendous shout. Instantly their rifles and machine-guns crashed out, and he and his mare, riddled through and through with bullets, fell dead among the lance points.

Auda looked very cold and grim. ‘God give him mercy; we will take his price.’ He shook his rein and moved slowly after the enemy. We called up the peasants, now drunk with fear and blood, and sent them from this side and that against the retreating column. (Lawrence, 1935, pp 631-632)

On Lawrence’s orders, the Arabs took no prisoners that day. Lawrence had become an instrument of bloody war, and all compassion was lost in the frenzy of revenge.   

Damascus finally surrendered on October 1, 2018, The British and Commonwealth troops allowed the Arab forces to enter the city first. The war was won but the politics had only just begun:

We passed to work. Our aim was an Arab Government, with foundations large and native enough to employ the enthusiasm and self-sacrifice of the rebellion, translated into terms of peace. We had to save some of the old prophetic personality upon a substructure to carry that ninety per cent of the population who had been too solid to rebel, and on whose solidity the new State must rest.

Rebels, especially successful rebels, were of necessity bad subjects and worse governors. Feisal’s sorry duty would be to rid himself of his war-friends, and replace them by those elements which had been most useful to the Turkish government. (Lawrence, 1935, p 649)

Faisal arrived a few days after the surrender of Damascus and met with General Allenby:

They were a strange contrast: Feisal, large-eyed, colourless and worn, like a fine dagger; Allenby, gigantic and red and merry, fit representative of the Power which had thrown a girdle of humour and strong dealing round the world. (Lawrence, 1935, p 660)

Lawrence was exhausted. The following photograph shows him in Damascus. Once Feisal had arrived to take over the politics of government, Lawrence asked Allenby for leave to return to London.

 

Aftermath

With peace came politics. Fromkin’s 1989 book on the creation of the modern Middle East takes as its title, A Peace to End All Peace, a quotation from Lord Wavell who had served under Allenby, and was present at the Paris Peace Talks (1919-20):

After ‘the War to end War’ they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris at making a ‘Peace to end Peace.’

In the Middle East, the politics of power soon came into conflict with the ideals of freedom and justice. In the correspondence between McMahon and Hussein in 1916, the Arabs had been promised an independent state that stretched across the whole of the Arabian Peninsula. However, the British had not thought that the Arab Revolt would be successful. They had therefore arranged with France, in an agreement negotiated by the diplomats Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot in 1916, to divide up the Ottoman Empire between them. And in 1917, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, had also promised the Jews that they could find a “national home” in Palestine. And so, at the Paris Peace Conference (1920), Britain was given a mandate over Palestine, Jordan and Iraq, and France was given a similar mandate over Lebanon and Syria.

Arab leaders were granted titular kingships: Faisal bin Al-Hussein in Syria, and Abdullah bin Al-Hussein in Jordan. After Faisal rejected the French claim for a mandate in Syria in 1920, French forces invaded and Faisal was exiled. In 1921, the British arranged for Faisal to become king of Iraq. He remained king until his death in 1933. Abdullah was king of Jordan until his assassination in 1951. The Hashemites continue to this day as the royal family of Jordan. Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi was recognized as the king of Hejaz. His eldest son, Ali bin Al-Hussein, remained in Hejaz as his heir. However, the Hashemites were soon challenged by Ibn Saud (1875-1953), who in 1932 unified most of the Arabian Peninsula into Saudi Arabia.

In the first few years after the war, Lawrence was celebrated as a hero. He and Faisal had their portraits painted by Augustus John in 1919:

Initially, Lawrence enjoyed his new fame. He began to write his memoir of the Arab Revolt, worked in the Foreign Office, served as an adviser to Secretary of State Winston Churchill, and attended the Peace Conferences in Paris. However, he soon became deeply depressed by the ongoing politics. He believed that he had betrayed his Arab friends. He felt guilty and longed for penance and anonymity.

In August, 1922, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force as a simple aircraftman under the name John Hume Ross. He wrote about the grueling and demeaning period of basic training in The Mint (posthumously published in 1955). The title likened the experience of raw recruits being converted into useful soldiers to the stamping out of coins from blank metal.

After his identity was disclosed, Lawrence changed his alias to T. E. Shaw (likely from his friendship with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw) and enlisted in the Royal Tank Corps in 1923. He transferred back to the Royal Air Force in 1925 and served until 1935 in various locations. The photograph at the right shows him in 1928 at an air force base in Miranshah in what is now Pakistan, a lonely man in a desolate landscape 

In 1923, he had purchased a forester’s cottage (Clouds Hill) in Dorset near the Bovington Camp, where he served in the Tank Corps. Furnished with books and music, the cottage became his refuge. He returned to live there after leaving the Royal Air Force in 1935.

 

Lawrence continued to write through all these years of anonymity. He put together a limited publication (only 8 copies) of Seven Pillars of Wisdom in 1922. Writing the memoir caused much anxiety and grief. An early version of the book was lost while changing trains at Reading station in 1919, and much of it had to be completely rewritten (Meyers, 1973). The book was not formally published until after his death in 1935. However, Lawrence issued an abbreviated version of the book, Revolt in the Desert, in 1927. He also wrote a new translation of Homer’s Odyssey in 1932. An anthology of the poems he had enjoyed, Minorities (1971), and The Mint (1955) were published posthumously.

 

The Death of a Hero

Lawrence loved the experience of speed. He bought his first Brough SS100, the fastest production motorcycle in the world, in 1922, and over the years before his death owned six more models of the motorcycle, which he called Boanerges (“son of thunder,’ the name that Christ gave to his disciples, the brothers James and John). The fifth of these motorcycles (1927) is illustrated above. In Chapter 16 of The Mint (written in 1929 but not published until after his death), he describes racing on his motorcycle with an airplane:

Another bend: and I have the honour of one of England’ straightest and fastest roads. The burble of my exhaust unwound like a long cord behind me. Soon my speed snapped it, and I heard only the cry of the wind which my battering head split and fended aside. The cry rose with my speed to a shriek: while the air’s coldness streamed like two jets of iced water into my dissolving eyes. I screwed them to slits, and focused my sight two hundred yards ahead of me on the empty mosaic of the tar’s gravelled undulations.

Like arrows the tiny flies pricked my cheeks: and sometimes a heavier body, some house-fly or beetle, would crash into face or lips like a spent bullet. A glance at the speedometer: seventy-eight. Boanerges is warming up. I pull the throttle right open, on the top of the slope, and we swoop flying across the dip, and up-down up-down the switchback beyond: the weighty machine launching itself like a projectile with a whirr of wheels into the air at the take-off of each rise, to land lurchingly with such a snatch of the driving chain as jerks my spine like a rictus.

Once we so fled across the evening light, with the yellow sun on my left, when a huge shadow roared just overhead. A Bristol Fighter, from Whitewash Villas, our neighbour aerodrome, was banking sharply round. I checked speed an instant to wave: and the slip-stream of my impetus snapped my arm and elbow astern, like a raised flail. The pilot pointed down the road towards Lincoln. I sat hard in the saddle, folded back my ears and went away after him, like a dog after a hare. Quickly we drew abreast, as the impulse of his dive to my level exhausted itself.

The next mile of road was rough. I braced my feet into the rests, thrust with my arms, and clenched my knees on the tank till its rubber grips goggled under my thighs. Over the first pot-hole Boanerges screamed in surprise, its mud-guard bottoming with a yawp upon the tyre. Through the plunges of the next ten seconds I clung on, wedging my gloved hand in the throttle lever so that no bump should close it and spoil our speed. Then the bicycle wrenched sideways into three long ruts: it swayed dizzily, wagging its tail for thirty awful yards. Out came the clutch, the engine raced freely: Boa checked and straightened his head with a shake, as a Brough should.

On May 13, 1935, Lawrence had a fatal accident while riding his motorcycle from Bovington Camp to his cottage Clouds Hill. He was not driving at great speed: the inquest found that his motorcycle was in second gear when it crashed, a gear with a top speed of 38 mph. However, Lawrence had suddenly came upon two boys cycling on the narrow road: he braked, skidded, and lost control. He was thrown over the handlebars and his head struck the road. Comatose, he was taken to the hospital at Bovington Camp. Lawence never regained consciousness and died on May 19. Hugh Cairns, a young Australian neurosurgeon from Oxford, came to consult on his case. Later in his life, Cairns investigated the epidemiology of concussion and promoted the use of crash helmets for motorcyclists (Hughes, 2001)  

 

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Lawrence was deeply impressed by the power of the desert. In his introductory chapters to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he discussed how the desert had been the source for three of the world’s great religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He remarked on the Semitic people (p 39):

Their largest manufacture was of creeds: almost they were monopolists of revealed religions. Three of these efforts had endured among them: two of the three had also borne export (in modified forms) to non-Semitic peoples. Christianity, translated into the diverse spirits of Greek and Latin and Teutonic tongues, had conquered Europe and America. Islam in various transformations was subjecting Africa and parts of Asia. These were Semitic successes. Their failures they kept to themselves. The fringes of their deserts were strewn with broken faiths.

It was significant that this wrack of fallen religions lay about the meeting of the desert and the sown. It pointed to the generation of all these creeds. They were assertions, not arguments; so they required a prophet to set them forth. The Arabs said there had been forty thousand prophets: we had record of at least some hundreds. None of them had been of the wilderness; but their lives were after a pattern. Their birth set them in crowded places. An unintelligible passionate yearning drove them out into the desert. There they lived a greater or lesser time in meditation and physical abandonment; and thence they returned with their imagined message articulate, to preach it to their old, and now doubting, associates. The founders of the three great creeds fulfilled this cycle: their possible coincidence was proved a law by the parallel life-histories of the myriad others, the unfortunate who failed, whom we might judge of no less true profession, but for whom time and disillusion had not heaped up dry souls ready to be set on fire. To the thinkers of the town the impulse into Nitria [one of the earliest Christian monastic communities, located in the Egyptian desert] had ever been irresistible, not probably that they found God dwelling there, but that in its solitude they heard more certainly the living word they brought with them.

The desert provided the context to what happened to Lawrence in Arabia. The faith he sought, fought for, and ultimately lost was freedom. Swedenborg (1789, pp 59-60) had described freedom as the second of the great laws that man lives by:

The first law, that man from sense and perception shall have no other knowledge than that he is endowed with life, but shall still acknowledge that the goods and truths originating in love and faith, which he thinks, wills, speaks, and does, are not from himself but from the Lord, presupposes the second, that man has freedom, and that it is also to appear as his own.

The opening paragraphs of Seven Pillars of Wisdom provide the essence of Lawrence’s story:

Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. We were a self-centred army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man’s creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare.

As time went by our need to fight for the ideal increased to an unquestioning possession, riding with spur and rein over our doubts. Willy-nilly it became a faith. We had sold ourselves into its slavery, manacled ourselves together in its chain-gang, bowed ourselves to serve its holiness with all our good and ill content. The mentality of ordinary human slaves is terrible – they have lost the world – and we had surrendered, not body alone, but soul to the overmastering greed of victory. By our own act we were drained of morality, of volition, of responsibility, like dead leaves in the wind.

Jim Norton provides a reading of these words:

Jeffrey Myers (2016, pp 114-115) summarizes the life of Lawrence and the importance of the events described in Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926) is the story of Lawrence’s growth in personal and political awareness. The meaning of the book is determined by the juxtaposition of his psychological needs and the pattern of historical events, by the conflict between the man who acts and the conditions of his action. Lawrence’s role in the Arab Revolt combined self-discipline with freedom and power, and his devotion to the higher cause of a ‘holy war’ enabled him to define his identity. But for Lawrence this self-discovery was destructive rather than enlightening. He gradually realized that he had been transformed from a man who had once valued each human life and had given himself in the service of freedom, to one who had been caught up in a repellent and fascinating slaughter and had lost his idealism. When he was tortured and raped at Deraa, this insight deepened into the horrible realization that he had achieved sexual pleasure from physical pain.

The Deraa experience completely destroyed his elaborately constructed network of defences and exposed his all-too-human vulnerability, broke his spirit and extinguished the possibilities of creative freedom. This crucial moment — what Erik Erikson calls ‘The Event’, or culmination and turning point of a man’s experience — dramatizes the central opposition of body and will, and forms the core of Seven Pillars as well as of Lawrence’s life.

Lawrence’s post-war career — his political activities, the composition of Seven Pillars, the enlistment in the ranks, the flagellations and even the suicidal motorcycle rides — followed inevitably from the events described in the book.

As a visual summary of his life, we can consider two portrait sketches of Lawrence by Augustus John, one at the height of his fame in 1919 and one from the period of anonymity in 1929

 

References

Aldington, R. (1955). Lawrence of Arabia: a biographical enquiry. Collins.

Barr, J. (2006). Setting the desert on fire: T.E. Lawrence and Britain’s secret war in Arabia, 1916-18. Bloomsbury.

Crawford, F. D. (1998). Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia: a cautionary tale. Southern Illinois University Press.

Crawford, F. D., & Berton, J. A. (1996). How well did Lowell Thomas know Lawrence of Arabia? English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 39(3), 298-318.

Erikson, E. H. (1964). Insight and responsibility. W. W. Norton

Fromkin, D. (1989). A peace to end all peace: creating the modern Middle East, 1914-1922. André Deutsch.

Graves, R. (1927). Lawrence and the Arabs. Jonathan Cape.

Hughes, J. T. (2001). Lawrence of Arabia and Hugh Cairns: crash helmets for motorcyclists. Journal of Medical Biography, 9(4), 236–240.

James, L. (1990). The golden warrior: the life and legend of Lawrence of Arabia. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Knightley, P., & Simpson, C. (1969). The secret lives of Lawrence of Arabia. Nelson.

Korda, M. (2010). Hero: the life and legend of Lawrence of Arabia. Harper.

Lawrence, T. E. (1910, publicly printed 1936). Crusader castles. Golden Cockerel Press (also reprinted by Folio Society, 2010).

Lawrence, T. E. (1922, edited by Wilson, J., & Wilson, N., 2003). Seven pillars of wisdom: a triumph: the complete 1922 text. Castle Hill.

Lawrence, T. E. (1927). Revolt in the desert. Garden City Publishing (Doubleday, Doran).

Lawrence, T. E. (1932). The Odyssey of Homer. Oxford University Press.

Lawrence, T. E. (1935). Seven pillars of wisdom, a triumph. Garden City Publishing (Doubleday, Doran).

Lawrence, T. E. (edited by D, Garnett, 1938). The letters of T. E. Lawrence. Jonathan Cape.

Lawrence, T. E. (1955). The mint: a day-book of the R.A.F. depot between August and December 1922, with later notes by 352087 A/c Ross. Jonathan Cape.

Lawrence, T. E. (1971). Minorities: Good poems by small poets and small poems by good poets. Jonathan Cape.

Lawrence, T. E. (edited by J. Wilson & N. Wilson, 2000). T. E. Lawrence: correspondence with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw. Castle Hill Press.

Lean, D. (dir., 1962, DVD 2003). Lawrence of Arabia. Columbia Pictures.

Liddell Hart, B. H. (1934). T. E. Lawrence: in Arabia and after. Jonathan Cape.

Lockman, J. N. (1995). Meinertzhagen’s diary ruse, false entries on T. E. Lawrence. Cornerstone Publications.

MacEwen, G. (1982). The T.E. Lawrence poems. Mosaic Press/Valley Editions.

Meinertzhagen, R. (1959). Middle East diary, 1917-1956. Thomas Yoseloff

Meyers, J. (1973). The revisions of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 88(5), 1066–1082.

Meyers, J. (2016). Chapter VIII. T. E. Lawrence: Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In Homosexuality and literature: 1890-1930. (pp 114-130). Bloomsbury. 

Rattigan, T. (1960). Ross. Hamish Hamilton.

Sattin, A. (2015). The young T. E. Lawrence. W. W. Norton & Company.

Simpson, A. R. B. (2008). Another life: Lawrence after Arabia. Spellmount.

Stewart, D. (1977). T. E. Lawrence. Hamish Hamilton.

Swedenborg, E. (1760, posthumously published, 1789, anonymously translated, 1867). The Athanasian Creed. New Jerusalem.

Thomas, L. (1924). With Lawrence in Arabia. Century Co.

Wilson, J. (1989). Lawrence of Arabia: the authorised biography of T.E. Lawrence. Heinemann.

According to the book of Genesis, Yahweh created Adam and Eve to live in the Garden of Eden. He commanded them on pain of death not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. However, Eve was convinced by the Serpent to eat of the tree, and she in turn convinced Adam to do the same. For their disobedience, Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden. The interpretation of this myth has led to the Christian idea that humanity is forever tainted by “Original Sin,” and that our only hope for immortality is through the sacrifice of Christ which offers redemption from sin and entry into eternity to those who believe in him. The concept of Original Sin has become dangerously ingrained in Christian thinking, and needs reworking,   

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

The book of Genesis contains two narratives of the creation. In the second (Genesis 2:4-25), attributed to a writer/editor called J (Rosenberg & Bloom, 1990), Yahweh created Adam by breathing into a lump of earth, and placed him in a garden in Eden. He then grew the trees of the garden:

And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. (Genesis 2: 9)

Yahweh enjoined Adam not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil:

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. (Genesis 2: 16-17)

J then tells how God created Eve as a companion for Adam, and narrates the story of man’s fall from innocence (Genesis 3: 1-24). Eve was asked by the Serpent whether she and Adam must not eat from any of the trees of Eden:

And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. (Genesis 3: 2-3)

The Serpent convinces her that eating of the Tree of Knowledge would actually open her eyes to the divine knowledge of good and evil. The interaction between Eve and the Serpent is the subject of many paintings, among which is the tempera painting of William Blake (1800) in the Victoria and Albert Museum. This and the subsequent illustrations are derived from the Blake Archive:

Eve ate the fruit and gave some to Adam who likewise ate. Yahweh quickly realized how Adam and Eve had disobeyed him.

And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever
Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. (Genesis 3: 22-24)

The expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden is depicted in an 1808 watercolor by William Blake which was to illustrate the ending of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674). In this telling of the story, the archangel Michael leads Adam and Eve out of Paradise:

         For now, too nigh
The Arch-Angel stood; and, from the other hill
To their fixed station, all in bright array
The Cherubim descended; on the ground
Gliding meteorous, as evening-mist
Risen from a river o’er the marish glides,
And gathers ground fast at the labourer’s heel
Homeward returning. High in front advanced,
The brandished sword of God before them blazed,
Fierce as a comet; which with torrid heat,
And vapour as the Libyan air adust,
Began to parch that temperate clime; whereat
In either hand the hastening Angel caught
Our lingering parents, and to the eastern gate
Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast
To the subjected plain; then disappeared.
They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand; the gate
With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Though Milton’s words portray the gravity of what has happened to Adam and Eve, they are also touched with hope. They had each other; their eyes were open; they could learn to survive; perhaps they might even thrive. The world was all before them.

The story of Adam and Eve and how they disobeyed Yahweh’s commandment not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil has been retold again and again in the years since it was first written down in Judeo-Christian scripture (Greenblatt, 2017). In the Christian world it led to the idea of “Original Sin” (Boyce, 2015): because of the transgression of Adam and Eve, all human beings are doomed to die, unless they accept Christ as their savior.

One or Two Trees?

Yahweh’s prohibition and Eve’s words to the Serpent suggest that there is only one special tree in the garden: the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. One is therefore tempted to re-examine the first mention of the two trees. The conjunction between them may be translated both as “and” and as “that is to say”. Thus, the Tree of Life, may just be another name for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and Genesis 2:9 might read

the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, that is to say, the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

However, when Yahweh condemned Adam and Eve for their transgression, he did so lest they also partake of the Tree of Life and become immortal. Those supporting the existence of only one special tree in Eden have suggested that perhaps the word translated as “also” might actually mean “again.” The issues about one or two trees have been discussed by Makowiecki (2021) and Zevelt (2013, Chapter 7).   

My preferred interpretation is that there is only one special tree, that eating of that tree opens the mind to knowledge, and that, if our knowledge becomes great enough, we might somehow become immortal.

Good and Evil

The phrase “good and evil” needs two important explications. The first is that it is an example of a merism, “a figure of speech in which opposite extremes imply everything between them” (Robinson, 2024, p 77). When we say that we searched “high and low” we mean that we searched everywhere. The Bible makes frequent use of the device: the expression “heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1) includes everything between; “evening and morning” (Genesis 1:5) means the whole day (including afternoon and night); “alpha and omega” (Revelations 22: 13) means the complete alphabet of existence. Thus, the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the tree of all knowledge characterized by the extremes of good and evil.

The second point of explication concerns the word translated as “evil.” The original Hebrew word can mean both “bad” and “evil” (Kass, 2003, p 63, see also Speiser, 1964, and Rosenberg & Bloom, 1990). Both are value judgements. However, we often conceive of “evil” as pain and suffering that is intentionally rather than naturally caused. Thus, though murder is considered evil, an earthquake is not. However, this distinction becomes fuzzy if we believe the natural world to be controlled by divine intentions. Arnold (2008, p 64) points out that God created both good and evil. In the words of God proclaimed through his prophet Isaiah:   

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things. (Isaiah, 45: 7)

According to our definitions of “evil” and “bad,” knowledge of good and bad could then refer to everything, whereas knowledge of good and evil is primarily concerned with moral judgements (Hartmann, 2002, Chapter V; Laird, 2014, Chapter V). I much prefer to interpret the story of Eden in the latter sense. A moral judgement combines an assessment of what we perceive with a decision about what we should do in the light of the predicted consequences. Morality requires a consciousness of a self that can control one’s actions, or in religious terms, a soul that has free will. The very act of disobeying is an exercise of such free will.

When the eyes or Adam and Eve were opened by the knowledge of good and evil, the first thing that they noted was their shame at being naked. This combines self-consciousness with the idea that one should not unnecessarily incite the lust of others. 

Kass (2004, p 68) sums up his discussion of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad:

The knowledge prohibited is autonomous knowledge of how to live, found in or procured from one’s own garden (nature), based on human experience of the visible world. The opposite of obedience, it is the kind of knowledge that is implicit in the act of violating a prohibition, indeed, in any act of choosing for oneself.

He goes on to say that this knowledge may not be sufficient for us to behave as we should. We also require rules such as the Ten Commandments to instruct us how to live:

But this autonomous knowledge of good and bad is not true knowledge of good and bad; human beings on their own will not find true knowledge of how to live. This must be supplied by what is later called revelation.

I find myself agreeing with his initial statements and disagreeing with those that follow. The commandments were not miraculously revealed to us by Moses: that story is as mythical as the story of Eden. Rather these rules were proposed on the basis of how human beings had learned to live with each other.

Original Sin

Though it is not directly discussed in the Bible, Talmudic and Christian interpretations of the disobedience of Adam and Eve led to the idea that all their descendants were afflicted with their Original Sin and that this explains our mortality and our suffering (Boyce, 2015; Greenblatt, 2017, Chapters 5 and 6; Zevit, 2013, Chapter 1). The apostle Paul wrote

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned (Romans 5: 12)

Paul proclaimed that Christ died to save us from this fate, and that belief in him can lead to eternal life. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE) was the great champion of Original Sin. He argued against the teachings of an English theologian Pelagius (354-413 CE), who proposed that human beings are not born innately sinful, but rather free to choose between good and evil:

Day by day, hour by hour, we have to reach decisions; and in each decision, we can choose good or evil. The freedom to choose makes us like God: if we choose evil, that freedom becomes a curse; if we choose good, it becomes our greatest blessing.

When Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge they were exercising their freedom of choice … Before eating the fruit they did not know the difference between good and evil; thus they did not possess the knowledge which enables human beings to exercise freedom of choice. By eating the fruit they acquired this knowledge, and from that moment onwards they were free. Thus the story of their banishment from Eden is in truth the story of how the human race gained its freedom: by eating fruit from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve became mature human beings, responsible to God for their actions. (both quotations from Pelagius are in Boyce, 2015, p 15)

The story of Eden can thus be interpreted as Adam and Eve deciding not to remain in blissful innocence. They could have stayed in the garden, obeyed Yahweh’s commandment and led a life of simplicity and comfort. Instead, by eating of the tree of knowledge they gained insight into the complexities of a life independent of Yahweh’s care, a life wherein they made their own decisions rather than just accepting what Yahweh commanded. Their act of disobedience was an assertion of their freedom. 

However, Augustine prevailed over Pelagius. At the Synod of Carthage (418CE), Original Sin became one of the essential doctrines of the Christian Church (Denzinger, 2012, p 223). This was unfortunate. Thinking of humanity as being free to choose, as being able to learn to do what is good, is far more productive than simply considering humanity as doomed to die. 

Freedom to Choose

The story of Adam and Eve is not a realistic story of human origins. However, myths often contain true ideas about human nature. During our evolution, human beings gained a special kind of knowledge. We became conscious of ourselves as beings able to decide freely among possible actions on the basis of the good or evil these actions might entail. We also learned that with freedom comes responsibility. We must not act just for our own good for also for the good of others.

On this note I would like to conclude with a third image from the work of William Blake: Rose Albion (1795). We do not know exactly what Blake was depicting. A common interpretation is that the image represents man (or more specifically, England) freed from the shackles of materialism. It might also represent the more general idea of humanity as free to choose.

References

Alter, Robert. (2004). The five books of Moses: a translation with commentary. W.W. Norton & Co.

Arnold, B. T. (2009). Genesis. Cambridge University Press (The New Cambridge Bible Commentary).

Boyce, J. (2015). Born bad: original sin and the making of the Western world. Counterpoint Press.

Denzinger, H. (2012). Compendium of creeds, definitions, and declarations on matters of faith and morals (P. Hünermann, H. Hoping, R. L. Fastiggi, & A. E. Nash, Eds.; 43rd ed.). Ignatius Press.

Greenblatt, S. (2017). The rise and fall of Adam and Eve. W.W. Norton & Company.

Hartmann, N. (1932, reprinted 2002) Moral Phenomena. Transaction Publishers.

Kass, Leon. (2003). The beginning of wisdom: reading Genesis. Free Press.

Laird, J. (2014). A study in moral theory. Routledge.

Makowiecki, M. (2021). Untangled branches: the Edenic tree(s) and the multivocal WAW. Journal of Theological Studies, 71(2), 441–457.

Robinson, M. (2024). Reading Genesis. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Rosenberg, J., & Bloom, H. (1990). The book of J. Grove Weidenfeld.

Speiser, E. A. (1964). Genesis: introduction, translation, and notes. Doubleday (Anchor Bible).

Zevit, Z. (2013). What really happened in the Garden of Eden? Yale University Press.

 

Loss of Paradise

The ancients did not believe in progress (Bury, 1932; Pollard, 1968; Meek Lange, 2011). They had two main ideas of how the world changes over time. One was that an initial state of peace and plenty – the Garden of Eden of Genesis, the Golden Age of Hesiod, or the Arcadia of Virgil – had degenerated over time to our present world of strife and suffering.

The decline from our golden beginnings to the present age of iron might have been simply caused by the passage of time, but more often than not it was attributed to human foolishness. The Jews told the story of original sin and the Greeks recounted the myth of Pandora’s box.

Lucas Cranach (1530) portrayed the Golden Age as a time when we could dance without fear of the lion and eat of the tree of knowledge without concern for the consequences. The word “paradise” means an area enclosed by a wall. Suffering and death remained outside the wall.

Our forefathers’ second concept was that nothing ever really changes. The world may go through cycles of improvement and deterioration, but in the end everything stays about the same. The world is not perfect and never will be. The Jewish preacher Ecclesiastes (3^rd Century BCE, 1:9, KJV) claimed that all is vanity:

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (180 CE, Meditations X:I, Staniforth translation) proposed that the soul

… can encompass the whole universe at will, both its own structure and the void surrounding it, and can reach out into eternity, embracing and comprehending the great cyclic renewals of creation, and thereby perceiving that future generations will have nothing new to witness, even as our forefathers beheld nothing more than we of today.

These two ideas of history were often combined. Our original paradise cannot be regained. The beings that began in Eden now find themselves condemned forever to brief lives characterized more by suffering than by happiness, and leading inexorably to death.

Eastern religions adopted a similar view. They conceived of human life as a continual reincarnation into a world of suffering. The only escape was from the ongoing cycle of death and rebirth (samsara) was to remove oneself from the changing world (maya) by abdicating all desire and dedicating oneself to wisdom and charity.

City of God

Into the gloom that pervaded much of our ancient wisdom came the idea of salvation. Belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ would allow the believer to escape to Heaven at the end of life. Failure to believe, however, would lead to Hell. In the 5^th Century CE, Saint Augustine proposed that human beings can choose either to belong to the City of God or to remain in the Earthly City, the one founded by Cain (City of God, XV:1). People of the City of God progress “from earthly to heavenly things, and from the invisible to the invisible” (X:14).

The illustration at the right shows a terra cotta maquette from the Hermitage, a model for Bernini’s 1650 statue of Augustine in St Peter’s Cathedral. Bernini’s sculpture was meant to seen from many different perspectives. So perhaps we are not amiss in interpreting Augustine’s work in ways not intended by the saint.

The idea of Christian salvation, like the benefits of many other religions, is basically mean-spirited and divisive. An elect will go to heaven; all others will not. Membership in the elite is not awarded on the basis of achievement but gifted by the grace of God. Indeed, Augustine believed that since God is omniscient, membership in the elect is pre-ordained.

Great Chain of Being

Augustine’s thinking was embedded in the notion of a Great Chain of Being (Lovejoy, 1936) that he derived from Greek philosophers, most notably from the Neoplatonist Plotinus. God created the world. Within this world everything was arranged hierarchically from inanimate matter at the bottom through plants, animals, man, and angels, to God at the top. This concept was extensively worked out in medieval Scholasticism, but persisted long after, as evidenced by Alexander Pope’s lines in his Essay on Man (1734, Epistle I:VIII):

Vast chain of being, which from God began,
Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,
Beast, bird, fish, insect! what no eye can see,
No glass can reach! from infinite to thee,
From thee to nothing!

The hierarchy also characterized human society with the anointed King placed at the top, the lords and clergy below and the peasants at the very bottom. Society was not supposed to change: one knew one’s place, and did not move between the levels.

Enlightenment

All this began to change with the emergence in the Europe of the 16^th and 17^th centuries of a new way of thinking that questioned the authority of the past. The very idea that we may not have understood the world correctly in the past implied that we might understand it better in the future.

This way of thinking led to the Enlightenment of the 18^th Century. The new sciences had shown that we could understand more and more about the workings of the world, derive laws to predict what might happen, and harness energy to change the world which controlled us. Lives were becoming better.

The Enlightenment gave birth to our modern idea of progress. In 1750 Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de l’Aulne (1727-1781) published an essay entitled A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind. He agreed with the ancients that

All things perish, and all things spring up again; and in these successive acts of generation through which plants and animals reproduce themselves time does no more than restore continually the counterpart of what it has caused to disappear.

This sounds much like Marcus Aurelius. However, Turgot also noted that human beings were different from the rest of the world, since they can accumulate and communicate knowledge:

The succession of mankind, on the other hand, affords from age to age an ever-changing spectacle. Reason, the passions, and liberty ceaselessly give rise to new events …. The arbitrary signs of speech and writing, by providing men with the means of securing the possession of their ideas and communicating them to others, have made of all the individual stores of knowledge a common treasure-house which one generation transmits to another, an inheritance which is always being enlarged by the discoveries of each age.

This allows the idea of progress, whereby

… the whole human race, through alternate periods of rest and unrest, of weal and woe, goes on advancing, although at a slow pace, towards greater perfection (all quotations from Turgot, 1750, p. 41).

Turgot became most famous for his work on economics, his Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth being one of the foundational works of economic liberalism. Nevertheless, it is to him in particular and to the Enlightenment in general that we must trace the origin of our idea of progress (Younkins, 2006; Meek Lange, 2011). The statue of Turgot by Pierre Travaux (1853) illustrated above was appropriately photographed in the bright sunlight. Turgot was one of the giants of the Enlightenment.

Science advanced rapidly the 18^th and 19^th Centuries and by the beginning of the 20^th Century it appeared that everything was within our reach. The study of thermodynamics had led to steam engines and automobiles, the study of electricity had given us artificial lighting and telephones, and the study of medicine had resulted in anesthetics and vaccines.

Society had become more humane. To some extent a belief in progress replaced our earlier belief in salvation.

Humanism is not science, but religion – the post-Christian faith that humans can make a world better than any in which they have so far lived … Christians understood history as a story of sin and redemption. Humanism is the transformation of this Christian doctrine of salvation into a project of universal human emancipation. The idea of progress is a secular version of the Christin belief in providence. (Gray, 2003. xiii)

No one was more enthusiastic in their belief in Progress than the people of the United States. They considered it their manifest destiny to replace the simple life of the Native Americans with the railways and industry of European civilization. The 1853 painting of Progress by Asher Brown Durand of the Hudson Valley School portrayed the changing American landscape. On the left are the Native Americans and on the right the New Americans. The unspoiled wilderness gives way to the glorious future. Both are suffused in sunshine: nostalgia for paradise is balanced by hope of heaven.

March of Progress

The Theory of Evolution inverted the Great Chain of Being. God did not create the world and all that is within it. Rather, the world evolved from inanimate to animate and from simple to complex. Man descended from earlier humanoid species, that themselves had descended from monkeys. The universe developed from bottom up rather than from top down.

Religion generally rejected this world view. However some religious philosophers tried to combine evolution with divine purpose. Man was perhaps evolving toward a perfect being, an Omega Point where everything would be understood, time would cease, and God and man become one. (Teilhard de Chardin, 1959).

The evolution of man was often portrayed as a March of Progress. The most famous of these illustrations was by Rudolph Zaillinger for the Time-Life book on Early Man (Howell, 1965):

The idea of the March of Progress was conceived in much the same way as the Great Chain of Being, although the sequence was temporal rather than heirarchic. Yet it remained a chain, and we often engage in a futile search for missing links.

Zaillinger’s picture suggests a linear sequence, with each humanoid species evolving into the next. This is completely wrong. Evolution has multiple branches, with most of the branches ending with extinction. Evolutionary progress is better illustrated by a bush than by a ladder (Gould, 1989). Furthermore, the evolution of man appears to have depended much more on chance contingencies than on an inevitable path. This does not make progress directionless, but does underline its precariousness.

Brave New World

As the Enlightenment progressed, the Common Man began refused to stay subservient. The Divine Right of Kings no longer held; revolutions occurred; democracy began to flourish. In the 20^th Century governments began to grant Universal Suffrage.

However, we may have become too confident. Butterfield (1931) pointed out the human tendency to conceive of past history as necessarily progressing to the perfection of the present. Our present happiness simply confirms that our past policies were correct. The Great War shook this simple faith. Where could one place such terrible carnage in any concept of progress?

The tendency to see the present as the best of all possible worlds persists. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama announced the End of History (1989). Fascism had been defeated; communism had failed; democracy had triumphed:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

All that was then needed was to export democracy to the rest of the world. Today we live with the violent results of this idea. The world and human society are far more complex than they appear. Progress may be both desirable and possible, but it will require more foresight than we have shown so far.

Angelus Novus

Not everyone subscribed to the idea that progress is beneficial. The first half of the 20^th Century undermined everyone’s faith. The rise of fascism in Europe, the war that it unleashed, the horror of the Holocaust, and the use of nuclear weapons were strong lines of evidence that history was descending into evil rather than progressing toward good.

Walter Benjamin gave terrifying poetic voice to this possibility by evoking a 1920 painting of Paul Klee:

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin 1941, 257–8)

Benjamin’s warnings were disregarded in the years of peace and prosperity that followed World War II. In recent years, however, the idea that progress can be evil has been reconsidered:

To believe in progress is to believe that, by using the new powers given us by growing scientific knowledge, humans can free themselves from the limits that frame the lives of other animals. This is the hope of nearly everybody nowadays, but it is groundless. For though human knowledge will very likely continue to grow and with it human power, the human animal will stay the same: a highly inventive species that is also one of the most predatory and destructive. (Gray, 2003, p. 4)

If anything about the present century is certain, it is that the power conferred on ‘humanity’ by new technologies will be used to commit atrocious crimes against it. (Gray, 2003, p. 14)

It is not hard to find historical examples of progress leading to problems (Wright, 2006). For example, the invention of flint arrows facilitated hunting but may have also led to the extinction of the very game that early man was pursuing. In addition, arrows provided yet another way for human beings to murder each other. Wright considers this early weaponry an example of a “progress trap” something that initially improves our lives but ultimately makes them worse.

Many of the problems brought on by progress are linked to human failings, particularly to selfishness. Wright considers the discovery of agriculture in this light:

The invention of agriculture is itself a runaway train, leading to vastly expanded populations but seldom solving the food problem because of two inevitable (or nearly inevitable) consequences. The first is biological: the population grows until it hits the bounds of the food supply. The second is social: all civilizations become hierarchical; the upward concentration of wealth ensure that there will never be enough to go around. (Wright, 2006, p. 108).

Modern democracies base their economies on capitalism. As well as being inherently unfair, capitalism cannot survive without continually increasing consumption. This has led to our current ills of pollution and climate-change:

Capitalism lures us on like the mechanical hare before the greyhounds, insisting that the economy is infinite and sharing therefore irrelevant. Just enough greyhounds catch a real hare now and then to keep the others running till they drop. In the past it was only the poor who lost this game; now it is the planet. (Wright, 2006, p. 124).

Nevertheless

Though we must properly consider the problems that we face, we must not lose sight of the fact that we are getting better even if the pace is slow and variable. Despite the tremendous loss of life in the two world wars of the 20^th Century, we are less murderous now than in the past (Pinker, 2011, 2015). Though governments are far from perfect, the people of the present world have more rights now than in the days of kings. And even if science can lead to such terrible things as nuclear war, it has also provided us with the benefits of modern agriculture, transportation, communication and medicine.

We are right to be careful. Yet we should not do away with progress and retreat to the past. The paradise that we think we remember is not real. The future dystopias we imagine are warnings not necessary predictions.

Temple of Longing

To balance Benjamin’s vision of the angel we might conclude with another of Paul Klee’s paintings, Mural from the Temple of Longing (1922). The colors of the painting come from the desert. The surface is weathered as if by wind and sand. The shapes likely represent a mountain village in North Africa. Klee had been irrevocably changed by a brief sojourn in Tunis in the summer of 1914, and themes from that visit recur in many of his paintings. The blues of the picture suggest twilight, and the circular and semicircular shapes in the upper part of the picture may hint at a moon both full and waxing.

The various vertical constructions terminate in arrows which move away from us, upward and deeper into the space of the picture. Arrows occur many times in Klee’s paintings and mean many things: the passage of time, the movement of things, and the force of desire. Here they may represent thoughts or questions:

The father of the arrow is the thought: how do I expand my reach? Over this river? This lake? That mountain? (Klee, 1925, p. 54)

A faith in progress is necessary. We should not simply accept our present state. We should long for a better world. However, we should always question how we should change the present to the future. And we should proceed with caution.

References

Benjamin, W., (1940, translated by H. Zohn, 1969). Theses on the philosophy of history. In

Illuminations. (pp. 253–264). New York: Schocken.

Bury, J. B. (1932). The idea of progress: An inquiry into its origin and growth. New York: Macmillan. Available at Internet Archive

Butterfield, H. (1931). The Whig interpretation of history. London: G. Bell and Sons.

Fukuyama, F. (1989). The End of History? The National Interest, Summer: 3–18.

Gould, S. J. (1989). Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, New York: W.W. Norton.

Gray, J. (2003). Straw dogs: Thoughts on humans and other animals. London: Granta.

Howell, F. C. (1965). Early Man, New York: TIME-LIFE Books, (pp. 41–45).

Klee, P. (1925, translated Moholy-Nagy, S., 1953). Pedagogical sketchbook. London: Faber. (p. 54)

Lovejoy, A. O. (1936). The great chain of being: A study of the history of an idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Meek Lange, M. (2011). Progress. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. New York: Viking.

Pinker, S. (September 11, 2015). Now for the good news: things really are getting better. The Guardian.

Pollard, S. (1968, reprinted 1971). The idea of progress: History and society. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books.

Teilhard de Chardin, P. (translated by Wall, B., 1959). The phenomenon of man. London: Collins

Turgot, A.-R.-J., (1750, translated by Meek, R. L., 1973). A philosophical review of the successive advances of the human mind. In Turgot on progress, sociology and economics. Cambridge, UK: University Press. Much of this is available on Google Books

Wright, R. (2006). An illustrated short history of progress. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.

Younkins, E. W. (2006). Turgot on progress and political economy. Le Québécois Libre. 186. Available on webpage