the example, not the deviate. On the other hand, it has to be considered that what Jesus was talking about was self-completeness, in which presumably sexual desire would play no part.

Lewis Ferguson

338,171 T. E. (Lawrence of Arabia), by Victoria Ocampo, translated by David Garnett, New York, E. P. Dutton & Company, Inc., 1963, pp. 128, $3.00.

This small book is a most extraordinary one, one of real significance, but it will perhaps be unintelligible to one who has not read Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, or at least seen the moving picture. It is wholly an interpretation of the character of Thomas Edward Lawrence, whom Winston Churchill considered one of the greatest men of the period, by a woman who never met him personally but really fell in love with him through his work and who has produced, according to his brother, A. W. Lawrence, "the most profound and the best balanced of all portraits of my brother."

Lawrence was a man of strange paradoxes: fine-grained and sensitive, even ascetic, he participated in the crudities and horrors of war with matchless courage and self-effacement; introverted and shunning public attention, he was probably thrown. into the limelight more than other figures of the period; scrupulously honorable, he was forced by circumstances to play a part in international affairs which was essentially false. He was sent to Arabia by the Allies. ostensibly to enlist the Arabs on their side as against the Turks and Germans, while the Arabs thought that he was a disinterested friend working to help them attain freedom from the Turks as autonomous nations.

Tillich has defined religion in our

time as profound concern with ultimates in value and meaning. In this sense Lawrence was intensely religious, although he rejected the orthodoxy of his own time. In fact he really belongs to the present age when the rejection of traditional values and the search for meaning in the universe seems to be the keynote of the period. It is this search beneath all the infinitely detailed wanderings of his strange and exotic career that makes the Seven Pillars of Wisdom one of the outstanding books of all time. That his life was snuffed out in anticlimax with no solutions or suggestions offered becomes less of a charge against Lawrence when one perceives that modern art, music, and literature are as yet no more successful than he was in finding ultimates.

The question much raised by readers of One is that of the extent to which Lawrence was a homophile. His actual work gives very little evidence one way or the other. There is only one actual homosexual episode recorded and that amounts to rape by a Turkish general whose prisoner Lawrence was for a time. On the other hand his rejection of women and his deep friendship for men, in particular Prince Feisal, seem to indicate more than a casual interest. That he grew up with four brothers. and no feminine influence except that of his mother does not offer a complete explanation. The tension and restraint which so mark the Seven Pillars may indicate an undercurrent which is never wholly revealed, and it was most certainly not due to a desire for power and honors.

In the opinion of this writer, Lawrence was a homophile in the finest sense of the word; he found pleasure in the intellectual and spiritual contact with both men and women, but abhorred the merely physical contact with either. One can never wholly

9