Lord Byron in his Cain: A Mystery puzzles through many of the classic moral and theological problems of the Book of Genesis. Why was it fair—for instance—for Yahweh to plant the Tree of Knowledge within easy grasp of Eve and Adam, if he never intended for them to eat of it?
In the classic version of the theological problem: if Adam and Eve were tempted to sin by eating of the tree—why then did God create in them a proclivity to temptation? And if they were not tempted to sin, then they acted out of mere randomness or curiosity—so it cannot have been a guilty act.
As Stephen Crane once put it in a poem on the same subject—speaking in the voice of a bemused Adam, contemplating the arbitrariness of his divine parent: "Oh, most interesting God/ What folly is this? / Behold, thou hast moulded my desires / Even as thou hast moulded the apple."
Byron wrestles in a similar fashion (and in a similar tone of bemused skeptical irony) with the same moral riddle. Lucifer, in Byron's closet drama, seeks to exonerate himself by placing the blame for the First Parent's Fall from the Garden of Eden on Yahweh, rather than himself:
Did I plant things prohibited / Within the reach of beings innocent, and curious / By their own innocence? he asks. So who was really the wrongdoer here? And as with many of the arguments Byron puts in the mouth of Lucifer in this poem—it's rather a fair question.
Some other difficulties with the Genesis narrative Byron puzzles over are more practical. Was the Serpent in the Garden actually Satan or Lucifer? The book doesn't tell us so. It just says that it was a snake—and that it acted in a deceptive way because such is the nature of serpents.
And how about the wives of Abel and Cain? The Bible equips them each with a helpmeet. But where did they come from? As Clarence Darrow once asked William Jennings Byran—during the Scopes Monkey Trial—"did someone pull off another creation in the next town over?"
Byron is not so squeamish. He bites the bullet on the more logical implication: namely, that Cain and Abel must have both married their own sisters—"Born of the same sole womb [i.e., that of Eve's], in the same hour"—as one of them puts it, in Byron's poem.
This causes the poet to wonder how—if the second generation of humans was forced to commit incest in order to propagate the species—why did such become a sin for later generations but not for them? Why did Yahweh make forbidden what he had first allowed to the earliest people?
It's a question that—the rumors have claimed for two centuries—may have had personal significance for his Lordship. "Shall they not love and bring forth things that love / Out of their love?" Cain's wife asks of Lucifer in his poem. It has been said that Byron here may have practiced what he preached.
"What is the sin which is not / Sin in itself?" asks Cain's wife—after Lucifer explains to her that incest is fine for her and her brother's case—but will not be for their children, or their children's children, or any future generation. "Can circumstance make sin / Or virtue?" she asks.
Such puzzles are familiar by now from the pens of other skeptics—but Byron also points out a number of additional moral difficulties in the Genesis narrative that I had not before considered. In particular: what about the myth's implications for the animal side of creation?
Byron wrote his poem under the influence of the then-recent discoveries of Georges Cuvier and the other early geologists and paleontologists—and he came away from their works convinced that there had been creations prior to this one—previous generations of animals wiped out of existence.
And so—at one point in the narrative—Lucifer leads Cain to the realm of death—where he shows him the shades of all the extinct animals past. Cain beholds enormous shaggy mastodons of the kind Cuvier uncovered—as well as ancient reptiles and other relics of "pre-Adamite" creation.
I was reminded of W.S. Merwin's poem "For a Coming Extinction"—in which he imagines the species of animals hunted to annihilation by human hands—the Great Auk, the Steller Sea Cow, etc.—as all meeting somewhere in some otherworldly menagerie called "The End."
Cain here beholds "The End" just as Merwin describes it—the chaos in which the forms of extinct animals all bear out a shadowy posthumous existence. And Bryon here asks—as so few have before: what did these animals do to deserve annihilation? What was their guilt?
However skeptical we may be that the punishment of humanity for Adam's sin was just (and we can be very skeptical of it indeed—for, as Cain says in Byron's poem, "What had I done in this?—I was unborn")—it is even harder to believe Adam's disobedience could be imputed to animal kind—
Especially animal kind that came eons before him into the cosmos!
And what about that culminating scene—when Abel's animal sacrifice finds favor with Yahweh, but Cain's offering of the first fruits of the field does not?
The ancient myth may only have been intended to symbolize the superiority of the pastoral to the agricultural way of life (a notion highly flattering to the ancient Israelite herdsmen).
But Byron here offers another—more vegetarian—interpretation. Yahweh, in the poem (or really, closet drama, if you prefer) seems to prefer Abel's sacrifice because it was bloody and required the death of innocent creatures—whereas Cain's offering was bloodless and merciful.
Cain offers a "shrine without a victim, / And altar without gore"—with his first fruits of the field. But Yahweh prefers a bloody sacrifice—"see how heaven licks up the flames" of Abel's offering (says Cain), "when thick with blood!"
And this, for Byron, serves still further to underline his theme of God's injustice in the Old Testament:
His pleasure! cries Cain:
what was his high pleasure in
The fumes of scorching flesh and smoking blood,
To the pain of the bleating mothers, which
Still yearn for their dead offspring? or the pangs
Of the sad ignorant victims underneath
Thy pious knife?
Milton of course wrote his own great Scriptural Epic in an effort—as he put it—to "justify God's ways to Man." Byron's Cain seems a kind of standing riposte to Paradise Lost.
Milton argued that Adam's fall was providential, because it paved the way for humanity's later redemption. Byron's anti-hero protagonist—confronted with a similar argument, illustrated by the example of a lamb stricken with venom who is subsequently healed—counters:
I thought, that 'twere
A better portion for the animal
Never to have been stung at all, than to
Purchase renewal of its little life
With agonies unutterable, though
Dispell'd by antidotes
Bryon's feeling for animals is one of his noblest and most idiosyncratic traits—and it enables him to see a moral difficulty that many former writers had left unnoticed.
After all, skeptics have long pointed to the Problem of Evil as an argument against the existence of a benevolent Deity. But few before have observed that it is not only human suffering that gives rise to this problem—but the enormous suffering through eons of innocent animal kind.
What did humans ever do to Yahweh to merit being banished from Paradise—or later, drowned in a Flood? Byron asks—as others have done. But he also has the moral imagination to ask the further question: Let alone the ancient Mammoths and Saurians—what did they ever do to you, Jehovah?
The orthodox answer—Byron notes in Cain—would be to say that animals exist purely for the pleasure and use of humankind; and that they do not have souls anyway, so we should not trouble ourselves about their fate.
This was the kind of human arrogance that Byron most abhorred—and which makes him an early icon for the vindication of animal rights. "Man—vain insect—seeks to be forgiven," Byron wrote elsewhere—"and reserves to himself a sole exclusive heaven."
Byron's preference in life was notoriously for large, fierce animals. The beloved Boatswain—immortalized in the poem just quoted—had in life a rather cruel reputation (like his master). There was also the bear Byron reports to have kept in his chambers at Cambridge—"to sit for a fellowship."
Such anecdotes and predilections have become part of the Byron legend, and are often used to impeach his character, ostensible showing in him an affinity for violence. But no matter how many times Byron has been canceled—"in my heart I never will betray him" (to borrow a phrase from Akhmatova)—
I never will betray him because of passages like the above. I will always be his partisan because, for all his human failings, he also had almost super-human political and moral virtues. His sympathies went further than nearly all his contemporaries'—to include even animal creation.
Even the extinct mastodons were capable of moving him to pity.
We need some of that now.
Humans today—for the first time in history—are actually on the verge of recreating extinct life forms. Biotech companies have been founded around the globe for the purpose of reanimating—through genetic engineering—the dead forms of mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, and dire wolves.
Large, fierce animals all—whom one feels certain his Lordship would respect.
In short, humanity may actually be on the cusp of doing the previously unthinkable—bringing back those annihilated animals from "The End"—as Merwin called it—the cosmic menagerie—the realm of the dead which Cain beholds, chock to the brim with hairy mastodons.
But is this good? Is this wise? To what end are we bringing them back—other than to suffer and annihilate them again by our human arrogance and folly? Will we take better care of the Great Auk or the Dodo or the Steller Sea Cow if it returns a second time?
These are the questions Byron would ask us to consider—he, the first to mourn for the megafauna. For his great question of Yahweh was—why did he create animals only to destroy them? And we should ask ourselves the same question, before we play at being Yahweh ourselves.
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