The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness

by Andrew Klavan

To write about murder and the imagination is to write about confronting evil, which is the absence of love, with creation, which is the telos of love—love, which is the source of every joy. Because it is not in heaven but in this world that we are called to rejoice, this world of such terrible darkness. It is here and now that we are commanded to make what we see into the beautiful. Not in a better past. There never was one. Not in a future utopia. There will be none until Christ returns. And not in the dreamy warmth of some hymn-singing Christian tale that flatters believers with a happy ending. There are no happy endings, not in this, the only life we know. No happy endings, no innocent cultures, no righteous people, no better yesterday or tomorrow. There is only this life, this moment, in which we must cultivate the peace that passes understanding and grow the creative joy that is Christ in us. We have only one sinful self to love. Only sinful others to love as we love ourselves. There is no one to point a finger at who is not our own reflection. There is no one to forgive but everyone. We are called to creation, the telos of love. We are called to peace. We are called to joy. Here. Now. In a world full of murder. In

Who has not seen, who has not heard, who has not despised the sleek, slick, smarmy, ever-so-fashionable nihilism of intellectual elites in love with the trill and antic of their own debauched philosophy as they theorize to atoms the simple sacredness of human life? The activist who dismisses the humanity of the unborn, the academic who justifies a terrorist’s slaughter, the legal scholar who cries mercy for the misguided murderer while forgetting justice for the dead—which

Again and again artists have sought to ground the transformative moment in something other than God. But this is to miss the point. Nietzsche was right. Without God—without the Christian God, without the Great Speculation that leads to the Golden Rule—the sacredness of life evaporates and sadistic power will have its day.

Whatever Freud’s personal preferences, this shame-free attitude toward sex is inherent in his materialism. In a material world, a world as Freud imagined the world to be, a world without God, without immortality, it is as Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov said: “nothing would be immoral any longer, everything would be permitted.”28 If, after all, we are nothing but bodies, the desires of our bodies are the salients of our authentic selves. Those desires must be served in order for us to exist as we truly are. Sexual behavior must therefore be “destigmatized.” It must be removed from any moral context aside from that of consent and harm. As long as everyone agrees to what is being done and no one gets hurt, all sexual behavior is not just permitted but a requirement of self-realization. In the event of guilt and shame, we must hurry to our therapists to free ourselves from the unreasoning constructs of a society that seeks to repress and control us. Surely, just on the face of it, this is an idiot’s vision. It cannot be that the most intimate of human behaviors is somehow exempt from any but the most simplistic morality. It makes no sense, for one thing. Even the moral requirement of consent assumes an inner being who has a free will to consent with. Even the prohibition against doing harm assumes something sacred in the lives of others. Given that, mustn’t it be possible that someone might desire something or consent to something that degrades her? Or suffer not just fleshly har...

After Cain’s offering was rejected because of his faithless inner state, God said to him, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.” Cain does not believe that God is just. He responds in a fury by murdering his brother. It is as if he is shouting at heaven, “Oh, so my offering is not good enough for you? Try this one on for size!” Abel is an offering of infinite value. Cain is sacrificing the image of God to God. That is what murder is. It is the killing of the imago Dei. It is to replace God’s image with our own, God’s will with our own, God’s creation with our own. It is the disobedience of Adam and Eve made flesh. That is why murder is a kind of suicide. To kill the image of God is to kill what accuses us from within.

You can read the entire Old Testament history of the Jews as God’s repeated attempts to teach them to give up human sacrifice, to stop trying to kill the image of God. God starts by replacing people with animals. He gives elaborate instructions on how the animal sacrifices should be done. He creates rituals to communicate symbol to the soul. But at the same time, he tells them his real purpose: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.”32 “If you had known what these words mean,” Jesus told the Pharisees, “you would not have condemned the innocent.”33 Again and again throughout the Old Testament, the lesson is scuttled by the natural desire of the chosen people to be like “all the other nations,”34 to be free of God’s kingship over them. Again and again the Jews and their kings “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord” and served the local gods in the “high places” with idolatry and human sacrifice. Again and again, God warns his people, “Be careful not to be ensnared by inquiring . . . ‘How do these nations serve their gods? We will do the same.’ You must not worship the LORD your God in their way, because in worshiping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the LORD hates. They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods.”35 One important example of this sin was Ahaz, a king of Judah, who “did not do what was right in the eyes of the LORD. He followed the ways of the kings of Israe...

The legacy of Cain is murder. It is the attempt to kill the accusing image of God within us and re-create the world in the image of the desires we mistake for ourselves. Seeking the freedom to mold the moral order to our pleasure and our power, we kill instead what is eternal in us and give our souls to be burned in the place of judgment.

“Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord,” writes St. Paul to the Ephesians. “For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy. . . . In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.”13 Paul is putting forward the idea that our flesh is indeed a language, but a language that expresses something beyond itself and beyond mere states of power. In Paul, the language of flesh expresses states of spiritual love. The wife surrenders herself to the husband not as a slave to a tyrant but as the body of Christ surrenders itself to God. The husband loves the wife as Christ loves the church, which is his own body. Created male and female in the image of God, the couple restore that image by becoming one flesh. Marriage—and sex in marriage and sexual roles in marriage—create humanity’s image of God.

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