In D. H. Lawrence's The Man who Died the Function of Allusions and Symbols

Always concerned with the problems of religion and sexual love, D. H. Lawrence, near the end of his life, tried to revive older myths as a means of revitalizing what he considered to be the sterile and misdirected Christian religion. Christianity, he felt, “had misunderstood love throughout its history.” (1) In Christian society, love — even sexual love—had become too intellectualized. The pale concepts of Christian love were without realistic basis in the deep wellsprings of being. Lawrence pled “for a denial of the intellect, a reassertion of ‘the blood’ as a source of religious experience.” (2) In one of his letters, he wrote, “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true.” (3) Equating consciousness with affective states, Lawrence, in three of his later works, The Plumed Serpent , The Man Who Died and The Apocalypse censured Christianity and championed the vitalistic paganism of the “religion of the blood.”

In the short novel The Man Who Died, D. H. Lawrence relates his version of the revitalizing experiences of Jesus after the resurrection, a version vastly different from Biblical accounts of Christ's appearances after death. (4) Although the body of Jesus has been taken down and laid in the tomb, he has not really died. But his old missionary life as teacher and savior is dead within him, and he is free to seek the true sources of human happiness in a more vital life than he has led before. He realizes that he has been saved from his own salvation, that he has neglected the needs of his own body to pursue a spiritual mission. Leaving his former followers, he