The Changes of Cain: Violence and the Lost Brother in Cain and Abel Literature

by Ricardo J. Quinones

Overview

Era by era, from the writings of the classical Christian epoch up to East of Eden and Amadeus, from Philo to Finnegans Wake, Ricardo Quinones examines the contexts of a master metaphor of our culture. This brilliant work is the first comprehensive book on the Cain and Abel story.

"Ricardo Quinones takes us on a grand tour of Western civilization in his admirable book, which reveals the riches of the Cain-Abel story as it develops from its Biblical origin to Citizen Kane and Michel Tournier. This is cultural history and literary criticism of the first order, finely written, formidably but gracefully erudite, and illustrating the capacity of Judeo-Christian culture and the modernity emerging from it constantly to criticize the darker side of its own foundations and realizations."--Joseph Frank

"Ricardo J. Quinones skips Biblical and Talmudic exegesis to follow Cain and Abel through later centuries, from classical times to the present. What he uncovers sheds light on important shifts of consciousness and behavior in European and American culture. . . . Quinones writes with true eloquence and conviction. . . ."--James Finn Cotter, The Hudson Review

"Quinones's study of how [the] three Cains were transformed by Romanticism and Modernism into a sometimes positive, sometimes negative, but always necessary archetype of the modern world is literary and cultural analytic history at its very best."--Choice

Ricardo J. Quinones is Josephine Olp Weeks Professor of English and Comparative Literatures, and Director of the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. He is the author of The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Harvard), Dante Alighieri (Twayne), and Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development (Princeton).

Originally published in 1991.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691605791
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1201
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

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The Changes of Cain

Violence and the Lost Brother in Cain and Abel Literature

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By Ricardo J. Quinones

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06883-1

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CHAPTER 1

CITIZEN CAIN

From the outset it must be recognized that the greatest revolution—certainly the longest-lasting—in the history of the Cain-Abel theme was the first, when the biblical brothers were transformed by Philo and later by Augustine into universal, rival, and contending principles. This was the critical moment of emergence for Cain-Abel as a theme of significance and extensiveness. Despite our own time's justifiable suspicion of dualistic thinking, it must be acknowledged that the reason for the theme's assumption of such appeal and force was precisely its dualistic properties—the very same properties that would account for its continued effectiveness in the world after Byron. Cain and Abel represent the possibilities of grand dualisms. As such, in the classical Christian era, they served to express the tensions of a genuine polarity between the reigning secular mind and the nascent strength of the religious mind.

At the beginning of his great commentary, "On the Birth of Abel and the Sacrifices Offered by Him and by His Brother Cain," Philo shows the powers of the dualistic conception of Cain and Abel (as well as his own powers of formulation):

It is a feet that there are two opposite and contending views of life, one which ascribes all things to the mind as our master, whether we are using our reason or our senses, in motion or at rest, the other which follows God, whose handiwork it believes itself to be. The first of these views is figured by Cain who is called possession, because he thinks he possesses all things, the other by Abel, whose name means "one who refers all things to God."

Four major expositions, the one indicated, the precedent commentary, "On the Cherubim, the Flaming Sword, and Cain, the First Man Created out of Man," as well as two following, "That the Worst is Wont to Attack the Better" and "On the Posterity of Cain and His Exile," are based upon this fundamental division. The expositions themselves, in the midrashic haggadic fashion, are tied to the conclusion of Genesis 3 and to Genesis 4, and raise from the texts a remarkable philosophical interpretive frame.

The superiority of the Cain-Abel polarity is evidenced in the ways that it has superseded the highly relevant struggles between Esau and Jacob. In Cain-Abel there is a legitimate polarity, with each pole representing a significant force and figure—however much Philo might demote the secular intellect, he is far from dismissing it. Esau, however, is merely abject. Despite this supersession, the later story provides retrospective illumination and even foundation support for the Cain-Abel story. In feet, it plays a crucial role not only in Philo's interpretation but, directly by way of Philo, in Ambrose's as well. It provides support for Philo's conviction that in the strife between brothers we are indeed witnessing a contest between not only rival personalities but also rival principles and that, moreover, the opposition between them is unbridgeable and irreconcilable. This confluence of Cain and Abel and Esau and Jacob will invariably have dire implications, extending even to our own time where it will be broadly invoked by Joyce in Finnegans Wake and Tournier in Les météores.

After Isaac's entreaty (Gen. 25.21), Rebecca is made fertile. The twins toss and turn within her. When she asks what this might signify, the Lord answers, "Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels...." Philo fixes upon these words in order to support his contention that Cain and Abel do represent opposing principles. In another less elaborate exposition, Questions and Answers on Genesis, Philo calls these references to "nations" and "peoples" "a most useful distinction of opposed concepts, since one of them (one of the twins, one of the nations) desires wickedness, and the other virtue." Such interpretation invokes a necessary corollary: elevated to the level of essential principles, the differences between the brothers become much more intractable. "For one of them is heavenly and worthy of the divine light, and the other is earthly and corruptible and like darkness" (Questions and Answers, p. 441). Thus, if Philo passed on the metaphor of the two ways to the Church fathers, he also introduced a difference between them that was well-nigh insuperable when translated to the level of basic, opposing principles. One belongs to the powers of light, the other to the powers of darkness.

Philo places all of these speculations within a larger philosophical frame, one beginning with Adam and Eve. If his philosophy is Platonic, it is also Jewish. The goal of his elaborate allegorical interpretations is to introduce philosophy to Genesis, but it is also to impress upon philosophical minds the wisdom of Genesis. Going beyond the literal meaning of the passage to the allegorical, Philo regards the union of Adam and Eve as that of Mind and Sense. "For there was a time when Mind had neither sense-perception, nor held converse with it, but a great gulf divided it from associated interdependent beings. Rather was it then like solitary ungregarious animals" (2.43–45). The mind was a deep-water box, a true womb of sensory deprivation, until it was united with Eve, the glittering, fluttering world of light and motion. This conjunction amounted to something of a fell, a fell into sense, not because sense is failed, but because of the attitudes of mind that followed its introduction to sense. The fell is not, as in the Platonic sense, a physical one, but is, in the biblical sense, a moral one. Far from being defective, the sense impressions were too attractive, too potent. The mind became enamored with the impressions it received and began to think that they were of its own malting. The first offspring of this union of Mind and Sense (Adam and Eve) was Cain, whose name, for Philo, is etymologically related to the word for "possession": "For the Mind thought that all these were his own possessions, all that he saw or heard or smelt or tasted or touched—all his own invention and handiwork" (p. 43). This attitude, flushed with new excitement, leads to a kind of heedlessness, arrogance, and irreverence—the attitude of Cain.

Several figures bring this new attitude from philosophy into history: they are Alexander, Pharaoh, and Laban. Of these, Alexander is the most important because in using him as a negative example Philo is confronting the basis of his own culture (in feet, confronting the political identity of humankind as enunciated by Alexander's teacher, Aristotle), and finds it wanting. The encounter is more pressing, since Philo lived in Alexandria. Early Hellenism, with a political basis of culture, is being measured against later Hellenism, with a religious basis of culture. Philo finds Alexander's statement that he is the master of all that he sees to be foolish (of course, Aristotle would have thought the same but for different reasons): "The words showed the lightness of an immature and childish soul, the soul of a common man and in truth not of a king" (p. 47). The confrontation is fer-reaching. From the background of Wisdom literature—David and Solomon are indeed the kings with whom Alexander is being compared—Alexander is found deficient. His soul is common and not kingly because it lacks a religious philosophy. It believes what it sees. But, in another sense, as a true Hellene, Philo is judging Alexander from the basis of Greek tragedy itself. He is like Tiresias confronting Oedipus and telling the ruler that he is the blind one. The true philosopher, true mind, is blind to sense, whereas unenlightened Oedipus (or Alexander) only believes what he sees.

We are reminded even more specifically of Greek tragedy when Philo, quoting Pharaoh's words from Exodus (15.9)—"I will destroy with my sword; my hand shall have the mastery"—responds, "Fool is it hidden from you that every created being, who thinks he pursues is actually pursued?" (p. 55). The remarkable irony of a tracking tragic fete haunts the presumed master of that fete. Oedipus is caught in his own castings. Philo, that genius of first-century syncretism, that master of seeking out meanings, the philosopher of the Midrash, gives expression to universal tragedy. To Laban's declaration, "the daughters are my daughters, the sons are my sons, the cattle are my cattle and all that thou seest are mine and my daughters" (Gen. 31.43), Philo responds passionately (one of the characteristics of his style is precisely this direct address, where through the centuries he confronts individuals, button-holing them, as it were, and rebukes their deluded folly): "The daughters, tell me. Do you say they are your daughters? How yours?" (p. 49). And we can imagine him like Leopold Bloom, another Hellenized Jew, in his Lear-like state of mind, concluding, "Nobody owns anything."

Philo's tragic apprehension is based upon a philosophical skepticism, perhaps in the way, which we know to be so, that Montaigne's Apologie de Raimond Sebond is so prevalent in Shakespeare's Hamlet and King Lear. How can we be said to own anything if our tenure is so fleeting, if not only objects but the very categories of our minds, our powers of reasoning and our sense impressions, are so fragile and fleeting? "Is my mind my own possession?" Philo asks rhetorically, before hastening to devastate that stronghold with a list of its failings. "That parent of false conjectures, that purveyor of delusion, the delirious, the fatuous, and in frenzy or melancholy or senility proved to be the very negation of mind" (p. 77). Earlier, in an allegorical interpretation of Laban's possessions, Philo draws up a catalog of human error and debility. We can have no mastery, not even over the fundamental testimony of our senses. Rather than being master the mind must follow the senses slavishly. Philo's expositions, as do Montaigne's, become brilliant essays whose central purpose is to attack human pretension: "In us the mortal is the chief ingredient. We cannot get outside of ourselves in forming our ideas; we cannot escape our inborn infirmities ..." The very identity that possession requires betokens essential limitation. The religious mind does not find this limitation acceptable, but the secular Cainite mind can live within the limits of such liability.

Such skepticism can never be thorough-going; it must always serve as the means to another purpose, which in Philo's case is to attack the presumptuous attitude that humankind, Cainite man, possesses or owns the qualities he most familiarly assumes to be his own: his arts, his reasoning powers, and his sense impressions. On the more immediate moral front, this can all be translated into the attitude: "I did it all by myself." This attitude is familiar in the contemporary notion that one is "self-made" or even "self-taught," as if we invent rather than acquire the forms of intelligence.

Philo is concerned to promote a religious basis to culture, one that is God-centered. Only God is, only God has being, only God can be said to belong. He has no need of anything external to himself. "Himself is His own light. For the eye of the Absolutely Existent needs no other light to effect perception ..." (67). Except for the fervor and power of Philo's expression, this concept is not unfamiliar in classical and Christian Platonic thought. What is of particular relevancy for us is the way Philo describes God's fullness of being and humankind's dependency. Philo here introduces the notion of citizenship, which, with its varieties of nuances, becomes an essential part of this theme—Citizen Cain. Cain, who aspires to possession, to rights, to identity, is the founder of the first dty. Abel then becomes the figure of the right-thinking man who knows he is a stranger and a sojourner among earthly things. The core of Augustine's thought—with two critical differences—is present here in Philo:

In relation to each other all created beings rank as men of longest descent and highest birth; all enjoy equal honor and equal rights. But to God they are aliens and sojourners. For each of us has come into this world as into a foreign city, in which before our birth we had no part, and in this city he does but sojourn, until he has exhausted his appointed span of life.... God alone is in the true sense a dozen, and all created being is a sojourner and alien, and those whom we call dozens are only so called by a license of language. But to the wise it is a sufficient bounty, if when ranged beside God, the only citizen, they are counted as aliens and sojourners, since the fool can in no wise hold such a rank in the city of God (en te tou Them polei), but we see him as an outcast from it and nothing more. (pp. 79–81)

If Philo has demoted Alexander from king to common man, he has also discounted the value of political identity, or citizenship, so dear to Alexander's teacher. Only God is a polites. The wise man does not pretend to citizenship; that is left to those who follow Cain. The wise man knows that we are all braceros, sojourners; in fact, the notion is precisely that of pilgrims. Philo does more than introduce two ways; he actually introduces three (and this will be a fundamental bequest to Augustine): that of true citizenship (God), that of false citizenship (Cain), and that of earthly alienation (Abel, who by understanding his derivative status, or better his lack of status, is thus in a better position to acquire full citizenship).

The Race of Cain

The story of Odysseus-Ulysses is a self-contained one, extending little beyond the hero and namesake of Homer's book. The book does not entertain the historical perspective; it does not engage the future. Revealing its origins in Genesis, Cain-Abel is in every way historical, announcing the beginning of history. Cain's story is not self-contained; more than an individual of a particular time, he initiates a race that will be used to account for the continuing presence of evil itself. Throughout this book, Cain and Abel will be treated as figures of historical bearing, as types for continuing processes and contrasts. In particular, despite the presence of Abel, the aim of the Cain-Abel story in many instances is to account for the origins of evil but also for its continuing career. Each of the two, but more so Cain, comes with a retinue and a repertoire.

Cain's followers are kings and philosophers. We have already seen Philo's condemnation of kings who are guilty of false appropriation. In his "The Posterity and Exile of Cain," Philo discusses the philosophers. "That the human mind is the measure of all things, an opinion held they tell us by an ancient sophist named Protagoras, an offspring of Cain's madness" (p. 349). Cain is the progenitor of sophistical reasoning, and as such he has a direct connection with the foundation of cities (centers of sophistication) and with those supreme figures of humankind's overweeningness, Nimrod and the Tower of Babel.

Since, according to a literal understanding of the biblical text, it may have been impossible for Cain to have built a city, Philo then supplies an allegorical reading of the text. What is really meant by the city are "demonstrative arguments." Philo has an antipathy to formal philosophy, to philosophy that has no moral or religious base, to philosophy that lacks sophia. Merely rational exercise of argumentation, or even critical analysis, brandishing the weapons of logic and syllogistic procedure, he regards as part of the arsenal of Cain. "With these, as though fighting from a city wall, [Cain] repels the assualts of his adversaries, by forging plausible inventions contrary to truth. His inhabitants are the wise in their own conceit, devotees of impiety, godlessness, self-love, arrogance, false opinion, men ignorant of real wisdom, who have reduced to an organized system of ignorance lack of learning and culture, and other pestilential things akin to these" (p. 357). Philo is a religious humanist who has a sense of "right reason" (ho orthos logos) and true wisdom, which are opposed to purely formal philosophy (organized systems that have no basis in religion). The natural consequence of this city founded by Cain is the Tower of Babel, with which God becomes disgusted, bringing down "upon their sophistic devices a great and complete confusion." Philo explains more specifically his allegorical point: "By a tower is meant a discourse working up each (immoral) doctrine which they introduce." In "On the Confusion of Tongues," Philo is even more elaborate about the tower and its specific descent from Cain. "But all these [the impious people who devised the tower of Babel] are descended from the depravity which is ever dying and never dead, whose name is Cain." Unlike Abel, who since he offered the firstlings of his flock gave testimony to his reliance on a First Cause, "the impious man thinks ... that the mind has sovereign power over what it plans, and sense over what it perceives." It is this self-love that Cain's children raise to the heavens. The city is the place of "vice," the tower the place of "godlessness."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Changes of Cain by Ricardo J. Quinones. Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. v
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. vii
• INTRODUCTION, pg. 3
• Chapter One. CITIZEN CAIN, pg. 23
• Chapter Two. MONSTROUS CAIN, pg. 41
• Chapter Three. CAIN AS SACRED EXECUTIONER, pg. 62
• CHAPTER FOUR. Byron's Cain and Its Antecedents, pg. 87
• Chapter Five. THE SECRET SHARER, pg. 109
• Chapter Six. DEMIAN, pg. 122
• Chapter Seven. THE NEW AMERICAN CAIN: EAST OF EDEN AND OTHER WORKS OF POST-WORLD WAR II AMERICA, pg. 135
• Chapter Eight. BILLY BUDD, pg. 155
• Chapter Nine. AMADEUS AND PRICK UP YOUR EARS, pg. 167
• Chapter Ten. ABEL SANCHEZ, pg. 173
• Chapter Eleven. CAIN OF FUTURE HISTORY, pg. 185
• Chapter Twelve. TWINNING THE TWAIN, pg. 215
• EPILOGUE, pg. 238
• NOTES, pg. 249
• INDEX, pg. 279

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the 1993 Book of the Year, Conference on Christianity and Literature

From the Publisher

"Quinones is helpful on every aspect and variant reading of the story. He carries his learning gracefully."

New York Review of Books