Religion In Byrons Cain Philosophy Essay

faith In Byrons Cain Philosophy Es takeByron wrote his closet shimmer Cain in Italy during a period of his life that Hoxie Neal Fairchild describes as coinciding with a strong charity toward Roman universality(437). Cain dramatizes the fourth book of multiplication. After refu darknessg to offer applys to God with his family, Cain slays his blood brother Abel and receives the punishment of banishment. Before killing Abel, Cain engages in a long dialog with Lucifer on the disposition of death, the age of the universe, and the value of cognition. Byrons poem calls on several religious contr everywheresies. First, Byron depicts the contemplates of prominent f exploits of incline Christians, including the evangelicals, the latitudinarians, and the Catholics. Second, the poem criticizes the evangelistic and Calvinisticical linear perspectives of depravity and the literalness of scripture. Finally, by making Abel a figure of the priesthood and by sometimes invoking the oral communication of the Catholic Mass, Byron questions the Calvinist intellection that kind beingnesss have no capacity to offer sacrifices. Byrons exposition on the efficacy of sacrifices allows him to challenge the Calvinist doctrines of depravity and predestination. Cain is a poem that reflects Byrons typical repulsion to Evangelicalism. However, the drama in care manner expresses skepticism of the Latitudinarian confidence in kind reason, and Byron sympathizes with a Catholic, pompous version of the church and the efficacy of sacerdotal sacrifices. time critics like Fairchild bode to biographic explanations, Byrons doctrinal and theological decisions in Cain also convey governmental meanings. Byrons early re considerers sometimes recognize the politics of the poem, and some of these responses show that Byrons Italian residence, his representation of universality, and his theology touch on the position anxiety over revolution. Byrons position on rebellion engages with Rousseaus inventionion of rights and the inseparable jurisprudence. In tell apart to Rousseau, though, Byrons Cain retains the natural integrity as external to the individual who participates in it. Rejecting both(prenominal) Calvinist depravity and innovative approximations of reason and voluntarism, Cain opposes Rousseaus idea of the homo being and diverges from the narrative of rebellion in Rousseau. Byron instead postulates the created essence of humanity and the fountain of natural justice.The English Romantic tendency to distance revolution from boisterous excess appears in Charlotte Smiths The Emigrants and permeates the Romantic project in everyday. Cain, writes Paul Cantor, is like Frankenstein in its ambivalence, showing a world order that is ripe for rebellion, and nevertheless at the same time suggesting that rebellion is somehow self-defeating. (139). Cantor traces the revolutionary potential in the Romantic world order to an abandonment of the Christian mental institution account in favor of a Gnostic notional arrangeivity story and Rousseaus ideas of a return to the state of nature. Cantor sees the Romantics as lovely in a misreading of Rousseau because while Rousseau does not propose a strict return to the state of nature, the Romantic writers, fit in to Cantor, seek this primal, reposition state from which humanity gutter acquire for itself new, different meanings in opposition to the Biblical view of a fixed, created human essence. The question of human ontology, then, differs greatly in the Christian account and Rousseau. Rousseau abandons a created human essence in favor of an adaptability in which man apprise become something other than what he originally was. (6). Rousseaus idea of potentiality, which Hume and, later, Sartre also share, denies any integrity deriving from inherent nature because it proposes that the general will according to which legitimate political exertionion operates is habitual, not essen tial. Rousseau consequently also denies the traditional principle of the natural righteousness and invests in a version of political rights which, in contradiction tear down to Locke, separates political rights from a basis in human ontology.Rousseaus reversal of the natural justness rejects the notion that juridical systems derive from an innate natural law which in turn reflects a inte embossment in the eternal law. Rousseau overturns the Aristotelean tradition of the natural law in which what is natural is what has the same pull up everywhere and does not depend on peoples thinking. (93). Rousseau proposes a voluntarist model of law in which any sense of an innate, pre-existing law is very a waxment coming from the progression of historical acts. For Rousseau, there is no law apart from human will and human action. In opposition to Locke and Rousseau, in Cain, Byron opposes Rousseaus notion of the societal origin of the law.Paul Cantor identifies an ambivalence in English Romantic ideas of rebellion, besides the literalness of this ambivalence already surfaces in Rousseaus idea of the habitual characteristic of law because the capacity of the law to take on different forms according to the progress of history government agency that the law is forever and a day ambivalent and ambiguous, acquiring different values and progressing in different directions according to the movement of history. Rousseaus view thus denies the epistemological foundation of the Aristotelian concept of the natural law because Aristotles conception of the law depends on a view of hold upledge as the settling of doubt. Because it rejects Rousseaus idea of the law, Byrons Cain does not express gnostic and progressive ideas of the mutability of human nature which, in Cantors model, gave rise to hopes of mans recapturing paradise. (xiv). Rather, Cain returns to a more(prenominal) than traditional version of law and human nature which recognizes the ambivalence and ambiguit y in Rousseau and restores creation and its failures to more traditional terms than Rousseaus.The English Romantic project of re turning to tranquility, of finding meaning a expressive style from the operation of history, is both a response to the failure of the Revolution and a means of integrating progressive values to traditional religious and national narratives. Often, the vital response to the Romantics has located this tendency mainly with the early poets and especially with the Lake Poets. This turning away from immanence toward transcendence also appears in Cain. As in Frankenstein, there is a same doubt in Cain of an innate and chief(a) fictive capacity in human beings. Byron distinguishes Cain from Abel by the differing extent to which each(prenominal) is able to realize, but not to create, his capacity to participate in the sacrifice which ultimately defines his potentiality. Byron therefore breaks with Rousseau because the realization of creative potential depends on participation in a mandate that precedes the will but nevertheless requires its cooperation.In moving away from a Protestant tension on someoneal rebirth and toward a Roman Catholic idea of the focussing of a priesthood to administer sacraments, Byron distances himself from the progressive view of the law as indwelling in inhering acts. Furthermore, Byron ca-cas a connection between the Catholic priesthoods reenactment of a previously completed sacrifice and humanitys participation in a virtuous law that exists beforehand as an ontologically independent absolute.The divisions in the English Church of the nineteenth-century consist chiefly of three great parties which Newman defines in the French sport of his Apologia as the Tractarian, the Evangelical, and the Latitudinarian (72). The Tractarian party of Newmans time develops from an earlier Anglo-catholic movement which itself traces back to the Nonjurors of the s all the sameteenth century. They rested their faith, say s Geoffrey Faber, upon a two-fold revelation upon the Bible, as the Church and the councils of the Church alone knew how to interpret it, but still more certainly upon the existence and authority of the Church itself. (72). Although this group generally was foreign to Roman pretensions, and severe toward Roman abuses, (72), the incipient or covert Catholicism that the movement suggested appears in Drydens Absalom and Achitophel and persists into the late nineteenth century. The typical anxiety toward its Catholic-leaning emphasis on authority and tradition becomes part of Byrons defense of Roman Catholicism in his Roman Catholic Claims speech when he says that the worst that can be imputed to Catholics is believing not too little, but too much. (33). The Evangelical party opposed this version of Christianity. It held that the Bible alone provides everything people compulsion for salvation and that the institutional Church and its extra-scriptural rites and teachings interfere with an individuals direct, personal relationship with God. This view descends from Calvin and tends toward a literal or fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. It holds that a person can have perfect assurance of salvation. The Latitudinarian party, or the promiscuous party, put an emphasis on reason and, through Locke and Butler, associated itself with the Whigs by show social progress and the freedom of the individual will. The Latitudinarian reliance on reason and empiricism eschews literal Biblical interpretation. While rejecting Calvins predestination and the Evangelical version of an exclusively internal relationship with the supernatural, Byrons Cain also rejects the expansive Latitudinarian freedom of the will which, like Rousseau, imagines a political order that is incomplete subservient to, nor even necessarily related to, anything outside material history.In Cain, the derivative creative capacity comes from Byrons abridgment of the efficacy of sacrifices. Byron cere brate the priestly capacity to offer a sacrifice that receives its efficacy from a previous, betoken sacrifice with the ability of human beings to accession a moral law that derives from an ontological absolute. When Fairchild proposes the incompatibility of Christianity and Romanticism, he cites a Romantic impulse whose comfort could be found plainly in complete intellectual and spiritual autonomy. (3). Yet whenever a priori values interrupt an investment in creative power and the immanence of the law, autonomy struggles with its dependence on a prior, outside essence.Byrons preface to Cain begins with a discreet rejection of a six-day creation. Referring to the second act of Cain, Byron anticipates condemnation of his having Lucifer show Cain the remains, from the ages, of the extinct creatures of earth. When Lucifer responds to Cains indignation at the innuendo that the earth is not new, he tells Cain that mightier things have been extinct / To make way for much meaner. ( 158). Lucifer then shows Cain remains of the former creatures of the earth which rest myriads below its surface, and Cain acknowledges those / Mighty pre-Adamites who walked the earth.. Ian Dennis argues that Byrons plain, almost naive juxtaposition of the account of Genesis with practical and scientific data is a defiant accommodation by which Byron can express his hostility toward religion further after an act of self-abasement which allows him to reach a broad, largely religious readership by loving in religious questioning that is really beneath him (663). For Dennis, Cain is an example of the static aggressiveness according to which Byron recognizes that he must attract audiences in a pluralistic field of religious discourse even while he harbors an impulse to be offensive (655). Fairchild arrives at a similar analysis of Cain when he mentions Byrons enlistment of science against orthodoxy, but he then claims that Byron does not like to admit even to himself the full extent of his unbelief (429). While Dennis recognizes that Byron negotiates a plurality of Christian beliefs, his expectation that the perspective of science indicates Byrons hostility to Christianity overlooks the dramas skepticism of reasons primacy. Byrons rejection of literal Biblical exegesis corresponds to a rejection of Evangelicalism, but this rejection is not adequate to support Denniss reading of the play as treating theological issues insincerely. In the preface, Byron catalogs his set apart and secular sources, and he claims that Cuviers account of the ancient fossil relics is not contradictory to the Mosaic account, but rather confirms it (157). In any case, while Byrons subjective feelings are elicit, the text of Cain and its reception treat the theological and political issues in a picky context of which Byrons private disposition makes up only a part. Byrons preface rejects the idea that scientific discoveries contradict the Bible, and this rejection accompanies a reje ction of to a fault literal readings of the Bible which, in nineteenth-century England, characterize the Evangelical party. While adapting his drama from Genesis, Byron also puts forward an exegetical method for reading Genesis. This method corresponds more to the Latitudinarian and Roman Catholic method than it does to the Evangelical, and Byron expresses a Thomistic view of creation as the scattering of history from a divine essence. The extent to which Byron really accepted religious stories or any exegetical method is an interesting question, but it does not arise explicitly in his preface or his poem.In contrast to Cain and Lucifer, Cains wife Adah responds to Lucifers challenge by proposing a more flexible account of creation that resembles Aquinass philosophy of predestination. In Cain, Adah does this. When Lucifer questions her, Adah repeats the Thomistic view of the unfolding of creation according to a divine willGod hathThe angels and the mortals to make happy,And thus b ecomes so in diffusing joy.What else can joy be, but the spreading joy? (478).Cain mistrusts Adahs confidence in the unity of creation when he doubts the necessity of the division between God and Lucifer Would that there were only one of ye Perchance / An unity of purpose might make merger / In elements which seem now jarred in storms. (377). In an effort to outdistance the distinction between good and evil, Cain rejects the division of identities and powers in what Adah describes as the diffusion of creation. Cains attempt resembles the emergence of Rousseaus natural man from the natural laws bondage in order to create the law himself according to the general will. Cains impotency even in this endeavor leads ultimately to his rejecting his capacity to perform the sacrifices with Abel. When Cain finally kills Abel, the act leads not to independence from the moral law but instead to its assertion.In describing sacrifice in particular, Byron contrasts Abels view with Cains. When he offers his sacrifice, Cain resigns himself both to his own powerlessness and to the incomprehensible divine judgment that precedes and determines his life and actions. Cain does not believe his actions can affect his fate but rather takes a view similar to Bostons that even his will is bound by a divine mandate. Byron joins with burn in criticizing Bostons brand of Calvinism, and Cains distress comes in part from his disgust with his sensing of powerlessness in directing his fate. In contrast to Rousseaus notion of the human capacity to create the law and to alter human ontology, Byrons response to this scene of Calvinism calls on the efficacy of sacrifices. Byrons view assumes a fixed human nature which has access to an extrinsic source of law and redemption. It is not therefore a progressive view. Besides a return to an Aristotelian idea of the law and human nature, Byrons redemptive philosophy invests in an Aristotelian epistemology which, unlike the continuum of Rousseaus ada ptability, seeks knowledge in a finality beyond which there is no more development in being or comprehension.At his altar, Cain speaks to God and expresses his discontentednessAll rest upon thee and good and evil seem To have no powr in themselves, provided in thy will. And whether that be good or ill I know not, Not being omnipotent nor fit to judge Omnipotence, but moreover to endure Its mandate, which thus far I have endured (274).In contrast, Abel sacrifices as the watching shepherd boy who offers.(183). He asks Cain to join me and precede me / In our priesthood.(198). Abel builds altars whereupon to offer / A sacrifice to God,(96), and his sacrifices are acceptable.(352). In his description of Abel and his sacrifices, Byron makes references to the language of the Catholic Mass and its sanctioning of the power of sacrificers and their sacrifices. These references come mainly from the Offertory part of the rite and have no counterparts in the Book of Common Prayer.These refer ences and the general leaning toward the efficacy of sacrifices in Cain come during Byrons residence in Italy which Fairchild, and others say coincides with his attraction to Italian Catholicism and responsiveness to Catholic worship(425). Beyond demonstrating any biographical inclinations, though, Byrons adoption in Cain of Catholic rhetoric resonates domestically amid particularly English religious and political stancesIn adopting Aquinass view of an essence which diffuses itself in the particular elements of creation, Byron engages in essentialism, particularly about the natural law. When Lucifer tries to convince Adah that sin develops in those who replace ye in / Mortality.(379), he expresses the voluntarist ideas of Rousseau according to which moral laws develop ambiguously by the progress of history. Adah, however, questions the sin which is not / Sin in itself and asks Lucifer, Can circumstance make sin / Of virtue?(380). Byrons Cain proposes an ontological explanation of t he human being that differs from Rousseaus acceptance of humanitys creative capacity with regard to the law. Whereas Rousseau proposes that human beings reason, arising from historical circumstances, creates the law out of nothing, Byron conceives of a prior essence to which humanitys creative endeavors have access. Byron also rejects the determinism of Calvin. Byrons limited conception of creativity corresponds to Wordsworths view of the poets access to the transcendent forms which, though derivative, enable creative work, and there are links here with the commission of priestly sacrifices in Catholic theology and with the Thomistic idea of the law. In drawing on the capacity in Aristotle and Aquinas for human participation in laws and actions that are ontologically independent of human history, Byron shapes a worldview in Cain that conflicts with the progressive ideas of Rousseau. This conflict extends beyond the reshaping of progressive secularism because although Byrons concepti on of humanity shares with progressive secularism an expectation that good prevails over time, Byron relies on a supernatural, or at least metaphysical, essence beyond the material circumstances of history, participation in which determines individual success or failure, as it does for Abel and Cain. In Byrons Cain, a transcendent reality precedes the encoding of law, and the law is a concrete reality, not merely an abstraction derived from material experiences.