Philosophy & Poetry

[sMartins]

I love you all too.

[Vanos_Grozniy]

Hello friends. I am a musician and anarchist Anar Hysteric. I play melodies on various musical instruments.
https://dzen.ru/video/watch/64252ef1e590f52c875203a4

[sMartins]

Lovely, thank you!

[sMartins]

THE NODES OF LIFE: LAW, RIGHT, JUSTICE

THE LEGITIMATE USE OF FORCE

When is man born?
Let us agree with Aristotle, man is a political animal, as he says.
When is man born?
It is not a biological fact, it is also a biological fact, sure, there is an evolution of bodies, but human is a subject the moment he enters into a social relationship, we will see later what kind, with others similar to him and together they constitute a plural unity, and in this sense politics, which is, we might say, the foundation, everything else comes later.
The first problem of a child being born is to become social and thus to enter politics, understood as the government of bodies and the ends of common life, there is nothing greater, more fundamental, more decisive, more relevant, even if we sometimes tend to forget it.

However, it is a problematic point, we all know this, because when we say man is a political animal, what does political mean?
This is the point, the threshold of the political marks the human condition, but how do we define the threshold of the political?

Many scholars answer like this: political is the legitimate use of force.

Let us see if we can understand each other.
A community is political for many reasons, but normally, even if I do not entirely agree with this definition, which is nevertheless very widespread, the most widely shared one, it is political to use force that is considered just, mind you, legitimate and fair.
Law, right, justice, that is, must be straight, founded on right and at the same time fair, recognised as just.
So in an apolitical state, in a state even before the politician governs there is a kind of 'natural' force, a spontaneous force, the strongest wins, full stop, and the weakest suffers.

In the political community, on the other hand, the moment the social community becomes aware of its political nature, everyone renounces their force, Hobbes would say, and attributes this force to the state, the state that represents them, any kind of state, democracy, aristocracy, it does not matter, any kind of state guarantees the legitimate use of force, I can use force, everyone else cannot.

There is a reflection to be made right away.
If we set things up this way, and mind you we have been setting things up this way for centuries, it is evident that looking over the law's shoulder, to put it this way, looking over the law's threshold what do you expect to see?
If the law is the legitimate use of force, what is beyond the law?
What lies beyond the law is the use of force, neither legitimate nor illegitimate obviously, because it becomes illegitimate the moment you say only this one is legitimate.
Do you follow me, huh? This is a very important point.

So we imagine the thing in these terms, the moment we say, the political nature of man is to constitute himself in community, in society, and society is political because it guarantees a legitimate use of force, having said that, you are already thinking that before this threshold there is force and that's it, huh?
There is a world of force, neither legitimate nor illegitimate, but certainly a world of force where all men are 'homo hominis lupus', as they say, all are wolves with each other, where there is a situation of perennial struggle, of perennial war, of war of all against all.

That is, these imaginations arise which, as you know, are very traditional, that is, it is thought that man, before becoming political and therefore properly human, lived in a state of perennial conflict, lived in a state of perennial war.
Hobbes is the one who best of all, with Leviathan, this famous book, which would be the state, the monster state, Hobbes is the one who arrived at the concept, we can say, in a more lucid way, and said something very clear, which is worth reflecting on.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) said, but if it is the rule of law that establishes what the law can do with regard to force, that is, which force is legitimate, if it is the state that establishes it, mind you he says, there is no law that establishes what the state must do.

[sMartins]

THE STATE OF EXCEPTION

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) said, but if it is the rule of law that establishes what the law can do with regard to force, that is, which force is legitimate, if it is the state that establishes it, mind you he says, there is no law that establishes what the state must do.

This is one of the most delicate, most tragic, if you like, most terrible points of the whole human affair.
Hobbes is saying, the state is sovereign, and insofar as the state is sovereign it is from the decision of the sovereign, and when he speaks of the sovereign in Leviathan he has no interest in it being a republic, a monarchy, a dictatorship, any state, and this is very interesting. Marx greatly esteemed Hobbes for this courage of his, for this lucidity, harsh, even cynical at times, but strong, because he was very rational, I mean, Hobbes said, if it is the state that decides when force is legitimate, isn't there someone first who legitimises the state, huh? It is the state that legitimises, it is the sovereign that decides, the sovereign is the source of the law, and therefore there is no law that governs the sovereign.

Is that clear to you?
This is a classic of political thought, how can you dispute it?
Here, if we stop here, is he right? how do you refute that?
Sovereignty, however you conceive it, men agreeing among themselves to become politicians and thus attribute it to the state, however you understand it, and it sets the laws, it says what is right and what is not right, what is lawful and what is not lawful, and above all it has the dominion of force, that is, it has the privilege of enforcing the law, it enforces it because it is strong, it has the police, the armed forces, it has a power that is cogent.
Here, it is clear that this cogent power completely eludes any law, you may like it, you may not like it, of course you can overthrow the state, revolutions have always been there, and we will come back to that, just put yourself outside the state, for example you say: yes, OK, of course the state has legitimacy, but if it is badly governed, if it is governed by a ruler who is against my interests, or my group's interests, or my side's interests, I can make revolution, take over the power of the state, as Lenin did, for example.
Yes, OK, but you would reproduce the same situation, you put yourself in the place of the sovereign, you become the new sovereign, and this new sovereign tells everybody else what they have to do, what they cannot do, and if they do the same he punishes them with force, there is no other human state but this.

I remind you that this idea, of a super legem state, is much older than Hobbes, because today we are going to learn this lesson, that the root of all that we have become lies in Greece in short. We started with Aristotle, we will continue with Plato.

Well, however, going back to Hobbes' discourse, this thing that in the 1600s had its greatest expression, still in 1900 is emphasised, I say this en passant, let us not make historical analyses, rather let us use historical analyses to draw out concepts.
Even in 1900, a great jurist, much talked about, for reasons that many of you may know, that is, Carl Schmitt, who was during Nazism the president of the German jurists, who therefore compromised himself with Hitler's regime, and who after the war, in fact, was condemned, suffered a certain period of imprisonment, but who was a great jurist, still considered one of the greatest jurists of the 20th century.
Well, Schmitt, taking the situation from Hobbes, re-actualising Hobbes' thoughts, spoke of a state of exception.
The sovereignty of the law has as its paradoxical premise the state of exception, that is, a state extra legem.
What did Carl Schmitt mean by a state of exception?
Well, it is clear that this was an argument that went in favour of the Nazis, when the Nazis took power in short.
Schmitt said, there are times in the life of political society when, because of a series of conflicts, conflicting interests, worrying situations, you will remember that the Germany of Hitler's advent was the Germany of the total economic crisis, with a million you could buy a stamp, there was total devastation of the German economy following the consequences of the lost war, war reparations, etc.. it was a crazy thing because it also favoured the advent of Hitler, but in short, in such a situation it is generated what Schmitt, analysing it very well, calls the state of conflict, of exception.

The state of exception is the state in which the laws that are there and the force that supports these laws, because laws without force have no value of course, are no longer sufficient.
Precisely the situation in the Weimar Republic, constant strikes, street fights, different factions clashing as if they were armies, the use of weapons by private individuals that the law would prohibit but they used them anyway, chaos, riots, aggression, devastation. State of exception.

When there is a state of exception, therefore, a new sovereign decision is made possible, that one party in conflict, becoming stronger than the others takes power and from that moment on establishes what the order is, what the law is, what can be done, what cannot be done and what penalties we face if the law is not respected.

All this is looked at by Schmitt, not only as the situation of Germany, of the Weimar Republic, of Hitler's coming to power, but, underneath, what always happens.

[The_Blode]

Not the Calvin and Hobbes I'm used to

[sMartins]

THE SPEECH OF TRASIMACHUS

All this is looked at by Schmitt, not only as the situation of Germany, of the Weimar Republic, of Hitler's coming to power, but, underneath, what always happens.

In this, Schmitt is as cold and cynical as Hobbes.
The opinion of these people is that this is the human condition, because man is a political animal and therefore the deepest knot of life that governs all lives, and has in this dialectic its heart, its mechanism, there is nothing to be done, things go like this and can only go like this because there cannot be a law that establishes the law.
Even on a strictly logical level, if you establish the law, you who establish it are not subject to a previous law, because then another would have established it, and so on.

So the law is the most unjust thing there is.
The law is the most violent thing there is.
Do you understand the paradoxes it comes to? huh?
The law is the most inhuman thing there is.

You can understand that in contrast to this way of seeing and doing, throughout the ages, anarchic tendencies have developed, individualistic tendencies, tendencies that think that yes the state is beneficial in some respects but that it is basically a misfortune for many others.

Well, these thoughts were by no means thought by Hobbes first, and he knew it very well, because he was, by the way, a translator of Thucydides, he knew Greek culture perfectly well, but rather they are readable, in a very effective way, and now we are going to enjoy reading a page from Plato, in the Republic, Plato's masterpiece, you might say, where he reasons about justice and the state. There, Socrates, the usual protagonist of Plato's dialogues, his master, is reasoning with some interlocutors who meet one night in Piraeus, where there is the port of Athens (this is all very symbolic, the port of Athens means going down into the guts, going down into the belly of the city, where there is trade, commerce, prostitutes, thieves, but also of course entrepreneurs, workers, sailors, because politics is done there).
This dialogue, I'll just mention it, is an extraordinary thing, it's like the Divine Comedy, that is, Plato brings to life in the heart of this discussion that lasts passionately all night long touching upon themes such as, what is just and what is not just, who is the just man and who is the unjust man, well, in this regard he makes the dead speak, those who participate in the Republic are all dead, they are his brothers, Plato's brothers, they are the great tyrants who had brought Athens back under the aristocracy, and then they are the representatives of democracy, the very ones who will kill Socrates, so, all these dead, reborn in Plato's dialogue, who ask themselves, opposing each other, dialoguing strongly, what destroyed the city? That, in fact, it was destroyed, it had lost the Peloponnesian war against Sparta, it had then had the rule of the thirty tyrants, and it had then freed itself with a democratic revolution, but the democrats were more corrupt than the tyrants, they themselves had killed the most honest and good citizen of the community, Socrates.
In short, there is all this drama.

We will take a specific point, a point at which, after Socrates has spoken to the first interlocutors in this dialogue, the son of Cephalus, then his own brothers, among the various interlocutors there is the great Thrasymachus, one of the great rhetoricians, supporter of tyranny, supporter of strong government, a supporter of the need for an iron fist and thus of the authoritarian turn after the Peloponnesian War, which had been lost by the republicans, the democrats, and thus obviously the scales were tipped the other way, power was back in the hands of the powerful, aristocratic, wealthy families, who, however, were then naturally accused of being overbearing, of being corrupt, of being in many cases cruel.
Thrasymachus enters the discussion, furious at the chatter, he says, that Socrates and his friends are doing, sissy chatter, and he says, now I will explain how things are, and he says it in two moments, we will read them both, and what I invite you to do is to exercise your ear and think about us, we think that these same things are being said by one of our politicians at a rally, today, and you'll make the shocking discovery that they're just as good today, maybe they're not as fierce and bold because they don't have the guts, they're television entertainment puppets, television stars, whereas in these dialogues there's no television, but anyway what they would be very comfortable saying and what they mean underneath is just that.


Thrasymachus says to Socrates.


"Listen then, Thrasymachus began. What I say is that 'just' or 'right' means nothing but what is to the interest of the stronger party".
"Don't you know, then, that a state may be ruled by a despot, or a democracy, or an aristocracy?
And that the ruling element is always the strongest?
Well then, in every case the laws are made by the ruling party in its own interest; a democracy makes democratic laws, a despot autocratic ones, and so on. By making these laws they define as 'right' for their subjects whatever is for their own interest, and they call anyone who breaks them a 'wrongdoer' and punish him accordingly. That is what I mean: in all states alike 'right' has the same meaning, namely what is for the interest of the party established in power, and that is the strongest. So the sound conclusion is that what is 'right' is the same everywhere: the interest of the stronger party."


And Thrasymachus, again.


"Socrates, have you a nurse?
Because she lets you go about sniffling like a child whose nose wants wiping.
She hasn't even taught you to know a shepherd when you see one, or his sheep either.
Why, you imagine that a herdsman studies the interests of his flocks or cattle, tending and fattening them up with some other end in view than his master's profit or his own; and so you don't see that, in politics, the genuine ruler regards his subjects exactly like sheep, and thinks of nothing else, night and day, but the good he can get out of them for himself. You are so far out in your notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, as not to know that 'right' actually means what is good for someone else, and to be 'just' means serving the interest of the stronger who rules, at the cost of the subject who obeys; whereas injustice is just the reverse, asserting its authority over those innocents who are called just, so that they minister solely to their master's advantage and happiness, and not in the least degree to their own. Innocent as you are yourself, Socrates, you must see that a just man always has the worst of it.
Take a private business: when a partnership is wound up, you will never find that the more honest of two partners comes off with the larger share; and in their relations to the state, when there are taxes to be paid, the honest man will pay more than the other on the same amount of property; or if there is money to be distributed, the dishonest will get it all. When either of them hold some public office, even if the just man loses in no other way, his private affairs at any rate will suffer from neglect, while his principles will not allow him to help himself from the public funds; not to mention the offence he will give to his friends and relations by refusing to sacrifice those principles to do them a good turn. Injustice has all the opposite advantages. I am speaking of the type I described just now, the man who can get the better of other people on a large scale: you must fix your eye on him, if you want to judge how much it is to one's own interest not to be just. You can see that best in the most consummate form of injustice, which rewards wrongdoing with supreme welfare and happiness and reduces its victims, if they won't retaliate in kind, to misery. That form is despotism, which uses force or fraud to plunder the goods of others, public or private, sacred or profane, and to do it in a wholesale way. If you are caught committing anyone of these crimes on a small scale, you are punished and disgraced; they call it sacrilege, kidnapping, burglary, theft and brigandage. But if, besides taking their property, you turn all your countrymen into slaves, you will hear no more of those ugly names; your countrymen themselves will call you the happiest of men and bless your name, and so will everyone who hears of such a complete triumph of injustice; for when people denounce injustice, it is because they are afraid of suffering wrong, not of doing it. So true is it, Socrates, that injustice, on a grand enough scale, is superior to justice in strength and freedom and autocratic power; and 'right,' as I said at first, means simply what serves the interest of the stronger party; 'wrong' means what is for the interest and profit of oneself".



Source: The Republic of Plato

[sMartins]

ROBERTO MERCADINI

The woman
who laughed at God
And other stories from the Bible




*Translated by me, or rather with a translator and my supervision.
Happy reading.



God is not a saint


God is twofold. I mean that there are at least two: the God of theology and the God of the biblical narrative. The first is perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely loving. And, for that reason, he is useless for the purposes of a narrative. No writer knows what to do with a character who cannot evolve or even involute, is not in danger of dying, has no need to ask questions because he knows every answer, loves everyone indiscriminately. If God is, according to Aristotle's definition, 'the immovable engine', what can one make him do in a story? Nothing; or he would not be motionless. And if he is - quoting Aristotle again - 'thought of thought', what actions can he make himself the protagonist of? None. At most, he will be able to think. Nor even think an action, but thought itself. Too little adventure.

The God of the biblical narrative, on the contrary, is a magnificent character because he is constantly changing, full of flaws, limitations, fears, outbursts of anger, pettiness, excesses. It is this that made the Jesuit Jack Miles write the phrase: 'God is not a saint'. Not only that. In the Scriptures the expression 'Adonai Echàd' recurs, i.e. 'the Lord is one'. Of course, for monotheism he is strictly one. One and the same unity. But it is a unity similar to that of each one of us: full of unresolved conflicts, of lacerating inner divisions, of gut-twisting contradictions, of multiple chaos. As we shall see in these pages, over and over again God says one thing and then does another; he makes decisions he soon regrets, he performs an action only to hastily retrace his steps; he acts as if simultaneously aiming at different and sometimes opposing goals. Therein lies the irresistible charm of his character.

And, on the other hand, in this duplicity he is not alone. The God of devotion is always different from the God of the story, in all religions. Think of Zeus. Mythology describes him as an unbridled adulterer. He lies shamelessly to his wife and is often not even cunning enough or lucky enough to avoid detection. He abducts women, violates them sometimes by deception and sometimes by force. He has no qualms about lowering himself to animal or mineral forms: a bull, a swan, a shower of gold. And yet, in ancient Greece, there were temples dedicated to Zeus. And a woman who went to pray at them would have been considered pious, not lustful and faithless.

Elsewhere it is the same. Odin, the Zeus of the Norse religion, in the myths is an orbic trickster. Tepeu and Gucumatz, the creator gods of the Maya, in the Popol Vuh are two bumbling bunglers, forced to proceed by trial and error. According to a myth in Brazilian candomblé, Obatala, the father of the gods, after being given the task of creating the world, gets drunk on palm wine, falls asleep and starts snoring noisily; so that the work must be started by a lesser deity: Oduduwa. And on and on it goes.

All over the world, in all religions, sacred narratives are merciless with the gods, who are also devoutly worshipped in the cult. There is no other way to narrate seriously, whoever the characters may be. The Bible, however, is perhaps particularly radical.

In it, we find no trace of heroes nor, properly speaking, examples of moral virtue. The protagonists of the events, even the most venerable figures such as Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon, are made, as we shall see, 'in the image and likeness' of their creator: marked by a multitude of faults and destined to cover themselves with ridicule. Figures of burning truth. Protagonists of a narrative where every king is naked. Every prince has the voice of a frog. No sleeping beauty can sleep soundly.

Psalm 64 (63 by the count of the Christian Bible) reads: "A chasm is man, and his heart an abyss". Reading the Bible disregards any certainty, it pulls the ground from under our feet; we plunge into the human abyss, dark and dazzling, forced now to hold our breath, now to breathe desperately, at the top of our lungs, now to groan, now to laugh in wonder.

Bon voyage.

[sMartins]

The honesty of the snake


The ground is a deserted expanse. There is not the shadow of a blade of grass. Under the relentless howl of the sun, God stoops to the ground and scoops up some of the arid clay. He moulds a human-looking puppet; he blows into its nostrils. "And Man was a breath of life" says the text. Now the puppet moves and has a voice. Then the sculptor becomes a gardener and plants an orchard. He places the Man in the orchard, as a little girl places her doll in the miniature house. Plants spring up around the human, branch out, give flowers and fruit. Among them are two species unknown to botany: the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. On the latter it may be worth dwelling. Its full name is 'etz hadda'at tov ve ra', i.e. 'tree of Knowledge good and evil'. The expression may suggest that it is the faculty of distinguishing between good and evil, namely the moral sense. This is an acceptable interpretation, but not the only one. In the Bible, a rhetorical figure called 'merism' is often used: it consists of indicating the whole by naming two opposite parts. As when in Genesis it is said that God created "heaven and earth" to mean that He created the whole universe. Or as when in the Psalms the author turns to God to tell him: "You know when I sit and when I rise" and "you scrutinise me when I walk and when I rest" to indicate that he feels he is being watched without ceasing. In this sense, 'knowing good and evil' simply means knowing anything in general.

God warns Man that the fruit of Knowledge is most poisonous: if he tastes it, he will surely die. He makes no mention of the fruit of Life. Of that, then, will he be able to taste freely? Man remains, in the shade of the trees, alone. So God is concerned about his loneliness. He wants to give him 'edzer kenegdò: literally: "A helpmate as against him" or "close to him". Someone (or Something) to stand beside him and be like him. He proceeds by trial and error. He kneads with clay all the shapes of wild beasts and birds. Imagine the improbable sequence of unsuccessful attempts: donkey, bull, sheep, goat, wolf, lion, bear, deer, antelope, camel, dove, sparrow, eagle, vulture and so on. Among these animals, it goes without saying, must also be the snake. Nothing to be done, however. None of them are like Man and can stand beside him. So God changes strategy. He no longer takes matter from the ground, but directly from the subject. He puts him to sleep, opens up his flesh, rips something from inside him that in Hebrew is called tzelà'. What is it? Interpreters have indulged: rib, side, half, hip, iliac crest, penic bone. But the word can also be translated simply as 'part, piece'. So, to make something like Man, he takes a part of himself (perhaps an unspecified part). The result is not something identical to the starting subject, as in the reproduction of plants by cuttings, or in cloning, but something different, as in distillation and other chemical processes: the Woman. Now the two are facing each other, they are naked, but they are not ashamed of it; just as the donkey, the goat, the dove, the vulture, the wolf, the snake are not ashamed of their nakedness. They live immersed in a kind of animal unawareness.

Everything seems to be going well, but it is precisely at this point that something gets out of God's hands. One of the failed attempts, the serpent, meets the successful attempt, the Woman. (I open a brief parenthesis. It is often taken for granted that the serpent represents Satan. This, too, is a legitimate interpretation, but nothing more than an interpretation. That the serpent is Satan is nowhere stated in Genesis. Closed parenthesis).

It was said: the serpent and the Woman face each other. And the serpent asks for confirmation of a news he has heard (who knows where). The tone is between concern and indignation: "Is it true that God said: 'You must not eat of any tree in the garden'?". To be in the middle of a lush orchard and not be able to touch food. How cruel! The Woman reassures him: as often happens, word of mouth has magnified the news enormously. She and the Man can eat all the fruit they want. Of course, to tell the truth, they have a very small restriction; but it is entirely reasonable, because it is aimed at preserving their safety; they must not taste the fruits of the tree of Knowledge: otherwise they will die. Then the reptile contradicts God in the most drastic manner: "You will not die at all! On the contrary, God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will become like God, knowing good and evil". The moment is crucial. God claims that he who eats the fruit of Knowledge dies, the serpent claims that his eyes are simply opened. One of the two lies. Who?

The Woman looks at the fruit: it is beautiful, looks tasty and, if the serpent is telling the truth, gives knowledge. She plucks it from the tree, bites it and gives it to her companion as well. So? Do they die or are their eyes opened? We read: 'The eyes of both were opened. They did not die. God lied; whereas the serpent told the truth.

Now Man and Woman know they are naked and feel ashamed of it. They are no longer animals. And they create the first handicraft object in history: a skirt of woven fig leaves to cover their sex and buttocks. But while embarrassment still flushes their cheeks something even more embarrassing happens. They hear a rhythmic rustling of trampled grass. It is the footsteps of God. They run and hide in the thick foliage. God does not see them (or pretends not to see them) and calls Man with a single word: "Aiekka?". Which means "where?", i.e. "where are you?", but also "how?", i.e. "how come (I do not see you)?". The Man answers both questions: "I heard your footsteps in the orchard. I was ashamed because I am naked and I hid myself'. An absolute candour, like that of a child, betrayed him: he has already made himself known! He has eaten the fruit of Knowledge, but he must not yet have digested it, although feeling its taste on his palate was enough to open his eyes wide. God hunts him down. So he has eaten the forbidden fruit? When cornered, the male is not particularly inclined to take responsibility: "The Woman, whom thou hast put beside me, gave me of the tree, and I ate of it". That is to say, the fault, according to him, lies primarily with the Woman, secondarily with God, who had the insane idea of creating her and putting her beside him. Then God urges the Woman, and she admits: "The serpent deceived me and I ate".

At this point each of the four was cited as a co-conspirator. But God decides to exonerate himself and severely punish only the other three. The triple curse breaks out. The serpent is condemned to crawl, the Woman to the pains of childbirth and domestic subjection, the Man to the thankless labours of agriculture. Before, evidently, the earth produced food in abundance by itself. From now on, on the other hand, Man will have to drip sweat from his face to extract thorns and thistles from it.

Immediately afterwards, however, God has a tender touch: he sews two tunics and clothes his creatures in them. Even this detail is remarkable: he clothes them, as if they were children and not capable of dressing themselves. Strange behaviour indeed, that of God: first he condemns Woman and Man to the excruciating pains of childbirth and the wearisome labours of the fields, then he relieves them of the inconvenience of making their own garments and putting them on. Yet, in the blink of an eye, a new contradiction is added to this. God is tormented by a doubt. What if his creatures, who had already eaten of the tree of Knowledge, thus becoming like him, also ate of the tree of Life? Then they would be, like him, immortal. This must not happen! Man is already too much like him. Is God jealous of his own supremacy? Does he see in his creature a rival, someone who can catch up and surpass him? Is he to this extent fearful and unsure of his own superiority? The fact is that he drives the two out of the orchard so that they do not live forever. He drives them to the east and puts cherubim armed with flaming swords to guard the garden "to guard the way to the tree of Life" says the Bible. Note well. The way to be foreclosed is not the tree of Knowledge, the forbidden tree. It is the tree of Life that is the reason why they are banished from Paradise and prevented from returning. Behold, in a few moments, three actions of quite different signs have taken place: the curse, the gift of the robes, the banishment. Anger, tenderness, jealousy. How alive and true is this God, how carnal and cerebral, how terribly and wonderfully like us all!

There are many tales in myths and literature in which the desire for knowledge and ruin are intertwined. Faust who sells his soul to the Devil in order to become omniscient. Ulysses who crosses the Pillars of Hercules at the cost of his life. The four Jewish wise men who 'entered the garden': one of whom dies, another goes mad, one renounces religion by consigning himself to Hell and only the last, the greatest of all, remains unharmed. But before all these tales, more powerful than all these, lies the story of Man and Woman; where the desire to know is what truly makes us human. Our highest light and, at the same time, our darkest damnation.

[sMartins]

Story of Cain the Just


Many chapters of the Bible seem to be written inside a burning building. The scribe had to finish the work at all costs before he could get up from the table and get to safety. So his haste betrayed him; there are numerous inexcusable gaps in the plot. We are told that a character performs an action, but not why he performs it. That something happens, but not how it happens.

This jungle of omissions has been the greatest blessing and, at the same time, the greatest curse of the sacred text. To fill those voids, luminous minds, for centuries, have expended their best energies. Thus the Bible has been gifted with an endless crown of ingenious, poetic, moving, dizzying interpretations. But it has also happened that, often, the roughness of the text has been flattened with a hasty and sugary moralism. On the Procrustean bed of common sense, the Bible was amputated with diligent carelessness. The tiger's fangs and claws have been severed; the disturbing forest has become an English lawn.

What, for example, does the story of Cain and Abel tell? That Abel was good and Cain bad? And that the bad Cain killed Abel, because it is proper for bad people to do bad things, while one should, sugar-coated, be good?

Let us return to the text. Genesis, chapter 4.

Adam impregnates Eve. The text says he 'knows her': the verb has the same root we find in the name of the tree of Knowledge: iadà. The embrace of bodies can have a light of intelligence; knowledge can have the flaming vivacity of eros. But let us not digress. Eve gives birth to the first fruit of a sexual union. She calls him Cain, in Hebrew Qàin, from the verb qanàh: to gain, to acquire. "Qanìti ish" says the first mother: "I have gained a man". Indeed, for the ancients, a son is also a material good, extra strength for hunting or working in the fields. After Cain, another son is born, to whom Eve, on the other hand, gives a name that sounds quite offensive: Abel, in Hebrew Hèbhel, meaning vapour, evanescence, insubstantiality. It comes from the verb habhàl, which means to vanish, but also to act uselessly. Why such a cruel epithet? The Bible, of course, gives no explanation. One must interpret it.

The childhood of the two brothers passes in the space between one line and the next. We find them already at work: the first a farmer, the second a shepherd. Are they adults, teenagers, still children? Again, we are not told.

Cain offers a part of the harvest as a sacrifice to God. Imagine him throwing it into the fire at an altar, as was the case in the ancient biblical religion (and in many other ancient cults). Cain, then, besides being the first born of a woman, is the first to perform sacred rites: the forerunner of every religious person. Abel imitates him, and he too offers as sacrifice a part of what he possesses: first-born sons of the flock and their fat (fat was burnt on the altar among the Israelites). What do they expect from God? Must he eat this food? Must he inhale its smoke? The various translations propose different verbs: to like, to regard, to turn, and so on. But, again, let us return to the letter of the text. The verb used is sha'àh, to look. Simply to look. Here Cain and Abel appear similar to two children who make a small object, perform a flip or other simple display of skill, and want to show it to an adult. One seems to hear them squeal inside, with the desperate glee of childhood: "Look what I have made, look, look!".

And here is what happens: 'God looked at Abel and his offering, but he had not looked at Cain and his offering'. At this point, if something similar happened to you in the course of your life, if you happened, that is, that someone else was preferred over you by a parent, a person you were in love with, a friend, you should feel a little twinge at the level of your side. "God looked at Abel and his offering, but he had not looked at Cain and his offering."

We wonder what God's motive was for this behaviour. The Bible's answer, once again, is the coldest silence. The different treatment is presented as if it were simply injustice, pure arbitrariness. And Cain, indeed, is just as bitter as one who feels himself the victim of an arbitrariness. But what is even more remarkable is that it is God himself who addresses him as the victim of an arbitrariness. He reproaches him no fault. He holds no sin against him. He speaks to him in a tone somewhere between uplifting and consoling: 'Why are you angry and why is your face sad? If you act well, should you not hold it up? But if you act badly...'. Thus the mother consoles the diligent schoolboy who is upset because the teacher has disregarded his assignment and denied him a good grade. The zealous child feels neglected, regrets that he has put his efforts in vain. Then the adult usually says something like: 'If you have studied, you should be happy, because you have done your duty and learnt something new, even if no one has looked at you; if you had not studied, on the other hand, you should be sad even if you had got a good grade'. This is wise and uplifting talk, but, as we all know, it never works with children. Cain is no exception: he remains sad and angry. Of course, this is hardly surprising. Quite astonishing, however, is to see God in both roles: that of the distracted teacher and that of the consoling mother. What game is he playing?

Then Cain performs a gesture that Abel cannot imitate. He says to his brother: "Let us go into the fields". And Abel follows him. Without asking questions, without inquiring about the reason for setting out. Evidently he is used to blindly trusting the elder, who is his guide, the one who protects him. And, in the secret of the fields, Cain kills his brother. Abel's life vanishes like steam. Was that name charged with destiny? He is the first dead person in history, the first whose breath of life is dissolved.

Cain hopes that his gesture will be swallowed up by silence, that no mouth will speak of it, ever again.

Instead, many mouths are bound to open wide.

On the surface of the silence at first there is a faint crack, almost as if not to cause concern. The voice of God addresses Cain: "Where is Abel, your brother?", as if unaware of what has happened.

Cain then lies: "Lo iadà tì", "I do not know". Again the root iadà, the same as the carnal union between Adam and Eve, the same as the tree of Knowledge. "I do not know" says the murderer referring to his victim. In the same chapter, the Bible closely links carnal love to knowledge, and ignorance to violence. Then Cain adds that on the other hand, there is no reason why he should know where Abel is. "Ha-shomèr achì anokhì?", "Am I my brother's keeper?". The unasked-for justification betrays the truth. Yes, he is his brother's keeper; the one Abel followed without question, the one he trusted blindly. He lied to God. But God had also lied to him. He had pretended not to know. So he suddenly took off the mask of the ignorant and tore that of the innocent from Cain's face. Everything speaks to God. And God understands all languages: "The voice of your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground. Now be thou cursed far from the ground, which by thy hand has opened its mouth to drink thy brother's blood". The blood has a mouth to cry out. And the ground has a mouth to swallow it.

The curse seems to be a tightening of the one pronounced against Adam; it still consists of an enmity between man and the earth. To Adam, the soil would no longer bear fruit spontaneously, he would be forced to drip sweat to extract food from it, becoming a farmer. To Cain, a farmer, on the other hand, the soil will no longer bear fruit, despite the sweat he has shed. The curse sounds similar to a death sentence. What will a farmer live on if the soil no longer gives him food? He is now a foreign body in the world. "You will be a wanderer and a fugitive on the earth," God tells him.

Cain and Abel. Gain and evanescence. The first religious and his imitator. The leader and the follower. Reading the text, it is difficult to banish the idea that of the two, Cain was the better, the more virtuous. Perhaps he was righteous, and was tested as the righteous are tested by God. Like Abraham, Lot, Joseph, Job. But Cain, the test, did not pass.

What defeated him and brought him to ruin? Envy. Here it is worth dwelling on the words again. This time it is not even necessary to venture into the Hebrew. Envy: from the Latin invidère, i.e. to see wrongly: an envied person is disliked, i.e. abhorred, detested, hated. Hatred and envy are very often the same thing. Etymology and psychoanalysis are in unusual agreement in this. But there is still one piece missing, one last element for hatred to break the bank and bring destruction to the physical world: the belief that we are better, that we are right, that we act to restore justice, to improve the world.

That is how it is. Evil can be done in only one way: convinced you are doing Good. The worst deeds can be done in only one way: convinced you are better.

Every time someone kills in the name of morality, justice, truth, the supreme God; every time the crusaders, the religious fanatics, the saviours of the world, the masters of humanity have used violence against those they believed to be worse than themselves, the blood of Abel has cried out in vain.