And Moses descended from the plains of the Hardangervidda into the Setesdal and went up into the hills there, over against Valle. And the Lord shewed him all the land: from Byggland unto Evje and Åmli, from Birkenes unto Hægebostad, and all of Agder unto Arendal and the utmost sea to the south, and Grimstad and Lillesand, all the land of the south unto Kristiansand. And the Lord said unto him. This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed: I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither. So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the Setesdal, according to the word of the Lord. And he buried him in the Setesdal, over against Bykle: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.
But it is not just the geography that draws the texts of the Old Testament toward the sphere of the local, the people in them do too. Those who had in common the fact that God had appeared before them are named, they possess their own, clear character traits and personalities, from the fearful Lot to the cunning Isaac, and if nothing remains to testify to their existence outside these texts, it is not necessarily because they were figures of mythology created in the depths of popular imagination, but because the age in which they lived is so very remote. The way in which their stories are told reinforces the local aspect and anchors them in time, for there are no abstractions or systems, practically no mythological or fairy-tale-type constructions, everything conveyed is conveyed through descriptions of concrete events in the concrete world. Soil, sand, roads, houses, blood. Journeys, births, battles, flight.
Explanation is anathema in these texts, all meaning must be extracted from the events portrayed, which are not relative, only unfathomable. Why are they unfathomable? Events are not a language, though they may be conveyed by one. When we understand an event, we do so by virtue of the culture in which the event takes place. If that culture no longer exists, our understanding fails and the events are left behind, as mysterious to us as the statues on Easter Island. The stories of the Bible are ancient, and in them are traces of stories even more ancient.
When I started school at Sandnes primary in 1975, Christian studies was still one of the most important subjects, together with Norwegian, math, and the combined studies of science, history, geography, and social studies, and for the most part it consisted of our teacher, Helga Torgersen, telling us stories from the Bible, and our drawing or talking about them afterwards. It was a pastoral world we entered, dramatic and full of light. Being Christian was about being good and kind. All of us wanted that, but gradually, one by one, we fell by the wayside as we approached puberty. I held out for a long time, to me mopeds were bad, one-armed bandits were bad, even cola and peanuts were tinged with badness. To this day I remain wary of such deviations; driving above the speed limit fills me with guilt for days; killing a fly or watching a plant in the apartment die because I’ve forgotten to water it pains me unspeakably, for the desire to be good and decent has kept itself alive in me through all these years. What I know now, which I did not know then, is that there are forces inside us oblivious to good and bad, and emotions that can be so powerful as to override everything without our even knowing that we are in their grip, for the ego, the I, that thin sliver of light at the edge of our consciousness, contains our whole identity, colors our understanding of all the other forces, desires, and emotions that exist within us, much as the age in which we live colors our perception of the past, for there is no natural outside, neither in the body nor in society, and to arrive at such a place, from where we can see ourselves or the age in which we live, requires an effort, and that effort is huge, for the forces that pull on our self-awareness and on the contemporary age, drawing everything into their domain, are not gravitational, but centripetal. The Bible, however, is one such outside, particularly the texts of the Old Testament, simultaneously remote and proximate, familiar and strange. They are ancient and we are separated from the lives they portray by a chasm of thousands of years. At the same time they belong to our culture, our grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, and the generations before them, all the way back to the first millenium, read the same texts, which shaped them and their culture, in which we continue to live to this day, albeit its form has since become somewhat modified. A story such as that of Cain and Abel carries with it not only our prehistory but also the fifth century of Augustine of Hippo, the thirteenth century of Thomas Aquinas and Dante, the seventeenth century of Shakespeare and Bacon, as well as our own childhood and contemporary age. In translating that story into modern language, much of its strangeness disappears, whereas sticking closely to the Hebrew original makes it incomprehensible. A compromise might look like this:
And the man came to Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, and said, The Lord has given me a man. And she bore his brother, Abel, and he was a shepherd, and Cain a tiller of the earth. One day, when his work was done, Cain brought grain from his field in offering to the Lord, while Abel brought the fattest cuts of the first lamb of his flock. And the Lord regarded Abel and respected his offering, yet ignored Cain and his. Cain was enraged and his face fell, and the Lord said to him, Why are you angry? Why has your face fallen? Lift it up and you will be accepted; if not, sin will gather at your door and you shall be its desire and rule over it. And Cain talked with his brother Abel; they were in the field, and Cain rose up against his brother and killed him. And the Lord said to Cain, Where is Abel, your brother? And Cain replied, Am I my brother’s keeper? And the Lord said, What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries to me from the ground. And now you shall be banished from the good earth that has opened her mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. Tilling the land will no more yield its grain to you, henceforth you shall be a fugitive and a vagabond on earth. And Cain said to the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me out this day from the face of the earth, and from your face I shall be hidden; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond, and anyone who finds me may kill me. And the Lord said to him, Therefore, whoever slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest anyone finding him should try to kill him. And Cain went from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.
It is a simple story, yet strange. A man kills his brother and God sends him away, at the same time placing a mark on him to prevent anyone from killing him. What does it mean? Oh, the blood and the earth are everything here. The Lord respects the lamb, the blood sacrifice, but not the grain. Cain kills Abel, blood is shed, the Lord curses Cain but does not kill him, and wishes him not to be killed by any other, for Abel is dead, and it is Cain who lives and may pass on the blood. And the blood is bound up with the earth, firstly through their father, who bears its name, adama in the Hebrew, which is to say through a creature of God, then by way of the blood that is shed, death, and the blood’s return to the earth. The voice of the blood cries from the ground, the mouth of the earth opens to receive it. But neither the blood nor the earth are driving forces in the narrative, merely stations between which the story passes. What drives the narrative is the face and the gaze. The Lord regards Abel. Cain’s face falls. The Lord admonishes him, he must lift his face, otherwise sin will gather at his door. He disobeys, kills his brother, and from then on he will be hidden from the face of the Lord. And since surface and face are the same word in Hebrew, his banishment from the face of the earth may be taken literally, the face, or gaze, of the earth.
Cain was enraged and his face fell.
Cain is ignored, the Lord does not regard him, this is the story’s starting point. Ignored and unregarded, he is no one, and if he is no one he is dead, and if he is dead he has nothing to lose. What might he have lost? Might he have lost face? But his face was already lost. The crux lies in the void between Cain’s face not being regarded and his lowering his face so that it can no longer be seen. The fallen face is directly associated with evil, for God says, “Lift it up an
d you will be accepted.” See and be seen. If not, “sin will gather at your door and you shall be its desire and rule over it.” To turn away, which is not merely not to see, but also not to be seen, is perilous, for there, in that gap, that uncorrected reservoir of space, sin gathers.
And his face fell.
Lift it up.
* * *
The face is the other, and in its light we become. Without that face we are no one, and if we are no one we are dead, and if we are dead we can do as we please. With that face, which sees us and is seen by us, we cannot do as we please. The face puts us under an obligation. This is why God says lift it up. Take that obligation upon yourself. But Cain does not lift his face, he does not take that obligation upon himself, he oversteps the bounds of the social and kills his brother. The transgression affects them deeply, since the person he kills is his brother, which in this archaic world is to say his own blood. And such violence against the self is the most dangerous of all, since it is almost impossible to guard against; it comes from the we, not from the alien without, not from any them, but from the you of the fallen face.
Fratricide is still going on around us, brother killing brother someplace in Africa, in Asia, in Europe; yesterday, today, tomorrow; it occurs, and then the occurrence is gone. Nothing of being human has changed since biblical times: we are born, we love and hate, we die. But our archaic aspect and the things we do are sucked up by our quotidian lives in the contemporary age we have created and which we comprise, where reality is above all horizontal and the vertical only seldom glimpsed and acknowledged. Yet all we have to do is to look up to grasp it, for above us is the sun, blazing, the same sun that blazed for Cain and Abel, Odysseus and Aeneas. The fells before our eyes are of similar dizzying age. That we are but the latest in a line of ancestry reaching back thousands of generations into the past, emotionally the same as them, for the heart that beat in them beats also in us, is a perspective we are unable and unwilling to take upon ourselves, for in it our uniqueness is erased and we become merely a locus of feelings and actions, much as water is the locus of waves, or the sky of clouds. We know each cloud to be unique, each wave to be unique, yet we see only clouds, only waves. Mythology points directly into that space, since each myth is about the one, yet what it expresses applies to us all. Cain is enraged, his face falls. Cain is assailed by hatred and is made blind, he assails his own brother and kills him. The myth is about forces in the human that cannot be subsumed into the individual’s identity or the sphere of the social, instead breaking loose and running riot. It is about something out of control in the human itself, which we fear and tremble before, not unlike the way we react when confronted by the sublime in nature. This is the sublime in human nature, the wild and uncontrolled, the destructive aspect of our makeup that can be bridled neither by the individual nor by the structures of our social world, arising in one human being, who is all of us. The sublime in the one. But the sublime is also in the all, when we are one together, congregated in teeming numbers. The roar of a football crowd, the flow of mass protesters in the streets. Common to these two instances of the sublime in human nature is that both edge toward the place where what is individual and peculiar to the one ceases to exist. The place where our humanity dissolves into other forces of nature and loses itself. This is the boundary of the I, and it is the boundary of our culture, and as such it is justifiably feared. When the archaic is sucked into the quotidian and the sun that blazes in the sky is our sun, we live within culture, which relentlessly toils to confirm that idea, relentlessly drawing everything in toward the already known, whereas art quite differently is adjusted to what is beyond the boundary of the I and culture, the unfamiliar, and what used to be called the divine. Death is the gateway to the land from which we come and to which sooner or later we must return. It lies beyond language, beyond thought, beyond culture, and cannot be grasped but merely glimpsed, for example by our turning toward the mute and blind in ourselves. It is there always, even when we are having breakfast on a normal Tuesday morning and the coffee is a bit too strong, the rain is running down the windowpanes, the radio is sending out the seven o’clock news, and the living-room floor inside is littered with toys, even then the heart beats, the very muscle of the archaic, pumping its blood around the body. Culture is created to avoid that perspective, so that we might look away from the precipice at whose edge we exist, but contemporary culture, whose perspective belongs only to a couple of generations and which relates only to the most proximate history, what used to be called living memory, has never been absolute, for another age has always existed within it, the age in which nothing changes, where everything stays the same, the age of myths and rituals. That this aspect of our understanding of reality is gone does not mean that it is gone from reality. What did Hitler do when he withdrew into himself as a young man? He saw no one, and no one saw him. Not even as an adult did he attach himself to any you; when he was seen, he was seen only by a crowd, by the mass of an all, and the same was true when he wrote: Mein Kampf contains an I, contains a we, contains a they, but does not contain a you.
And his face fell.
Lift it up.
* * *
The story of Cain and Abel is about the elimination of the you as the source of violence, and the reader may stop there or continue, for it does not simply concern one brother killing another, but relates also to sacrifice: Cain slays Abel after God accepts Abel’s offering, an animal sacrifice, while ignoring Cain’s offering of grain. The French anthropologist René Girard reads the story as expressing the function of the sacrifice in respect to the act of violence. Sacrifice brings violence into relief and steps into its place as a way of controlling its otherwise unbound forces within society; Cain does not have the violence-outlet of animal sacrifice at his disposal, and kills his brother. The surrogate function of sacrifice is made plain in the narrative of Abraham offering his son Isaac in sacrifice to God, when God yields and asks him to sacrifice a ram instead. This ram, Girard writes, is in Muslim tradition the same ram as once offered by Abel. The sacrifice is a ritual, it is collective, and it construes violence as collective.
The concept of sacrifice is mythic, central to primitive cultures, abandoned in those more developed, such as our own, where violence is understood to be something individual, arising in a particular situation, among particular people, and dealt with by a judicial system that punishes the guilty individual. The most important aim of the process of socialization in any society is for the individual to control his impulses, emotions, and actions, to avoid what destroys and corrodes all structures and communities, violence among like kind, and if the individual is unable to do this, and kills one or more of his own kind, he will be punished by the community through the apparatus of law. The forbiddance of violence among like kind occurs in all societies, indeed one cannot imagine a society without it. In primitive societies the distinction between the I and the we is less clear, discriminating and legislative institutions do not exist, and the insight of violence among like kind, the peril of internal disturbance, is therefore greater perhaps, the community being that much more vulnerable to its consequences. Girard believes that the wish to deal with violence among like kind lies behind all notions of taboo, which is a means of avoiding anything that might bring it about. If this is so, rituals stand for the very opposite, being a means of venturing to the point where forces are controlled, the repetitions of the ritual nullifying the arbitrary and constraining emotion.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 78