Izaki Metropoulos
The legacy of poet George Gordon Byron carries with it many associations, primarily those of controversy. He was, to quote Clara Drummond, the definitive nineteenth-century “bad boy”: a man known for his gambling habits, promiscuity, purported incestuous relationships, and ownership of many exotic animals, among those a tame bear which he kept during his days at Trinity College (Francis, “Bears”). However, Byron was also a deeply political figure who lived during a tumultuous time of radical political experimentation that challenged the last bastions of theocracy in Great Britain. Consequently, revolutionary politics meant everything to the Romantics—especially for Byron’s close friend, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who ardently declared the French revolution the “master theme of the epoch in which we live” (qtd. in Bainbridge 16). The relative instability of the period had tremendous intellectual consequences that gave rise to a form of radical politics in Britain. As John Barnard observes, the “storming of the Bastille, the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789… and the consequent political crisis in Britain dislocated readerships” (77). Furthermore, due to the widespread availability of print, access to literature ceased to be an upper-class luxury, and political and religious reformists saw an opportunity to disseminate propaganda among the increasingly literate masses. An anonymous publication in Blackwood Magazine, for instance, described the British readership as “an inquisitive, doubting and reading people” (Barnard 77). In other words, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain witnessed what Jacques Rancière sees occurring during the French Revolution of 1848—a reconfiguration of society’s “sensible texture” (8), or a type of equalization of the conflicting political narratives of British society.
Among those ideas challenged was the political efficacy of religious tactics, partially spurned by a literary movement keen on satirizing the Book of Genesis, a key example of which was Byron’s Cain: A Mystery (1821). Peter A. Schock identifies a catalyst of this literary movement in Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (1794), which “ridicules the Christian story of the origin of evil by the hand of Satan” and “systematically reduces the narratives of the war in heaven, the Fall of man, and the Redemption to the level of mere fable (15). However, the ideas of Paine and his contemporaries—such as William Hone and Robert Carlile—were met with militant opposition, earning them trials for blasphemous libel in the late 1810’s (Schock 87). As a result of their irreligious publications, Byron and Shelley were accused by poet Robert Southey of being “[m]en of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who […] have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society,” and ultimately of being the founders of the new “Satanic school” of audacious writers (xix-xxi). As a political response to the punishment of irreligion, Britain witnesses what Schock has termed “a resurgent fascination in the Satanic.” Integral to this trend was a reimagining of Milton’s Satan as a sort of sympathetic hero, not merely to combat conservative religious voices directly, but to reimagine and interpret prominent philosophical ideas. Central to the works of the Romantics is the notion of the “sublime,” which built upon the philosophical foundation of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant (Johnston).Yet, Kant’s sublime appears to be the most prominent philosophical bedrock of Cain, a historically plausible idea given Byron’s relationship to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poet who described Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) as a work that “took possession of [him] as with the giant’s hand” (264). Furthermore, Byron was heavily involved in the “Coppet circle,” an intellectual gathering at the salon of Madame de Staël (Rosa 356). Known there informally as “his Satanic Majesty,” Byron would have encountered August Wilhelm Schlegel, who may have shared his own assessment of Kant’s Critique of Judgment.
However, despite evidence of the connection between Kant’s ideas and Byron’s late period works, surprisingly little has been written on the subject. To attempt to fill this void in current scholarship, this essay will: outline the sublime as presented in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, examine the relationship of Kant’s ideas to Cain, and, finally, understand the ways in which Byron challenges the aesthetic dimensions of eighteenth-century political consciousness. In Cain: A Mystery, Lucifer becomes a facilitator of the sublime experience as understood by Immanuel Kant. Only through this sublime experience does Cain obtain what Kant describes as “dominion,” or autonomy, gained through the realization of the power of cognition.
1790: A Sublime Odyssey
Kant’s Second Book of his Critique of Judgment, entitled “Analytic of the Sublime,” diverges from his analysis of the beautiful and instead attempts to define and categorize the mind’s experience of the sublime. The sublime, Kant prefaces, is “that which is absolutely great” in magnitude, or “great beyond comparison” (132). Nevertheless, Kant’s sublime cannot be reduced to the quality of an object; for example, the crashing of waves does not render the sea sublime in and of itself. Rather, the sublime is a phenomenon of the limitations of the imagination as it tries to comprehend the violence or infinitude of nature itself (Johnston). By contrast, the experience of beauty for Kant is one that involves the harmony, or “free play” (Kant 102),between the faculties of understanding and imagination— or a perceived unity between subject and nature— while the sublime is a phenomenon that disrupts or disconnects one’s ability to have this type of aesthetic experience. As Kant writes, the sublime can be interpreted as an act of unpleasant “violence” (142) inflicted upon reason, limiting the imagination’s ability to comprehend the infinite. However, as reason begins to cognize the object, a type of “negative pleasure” arises (129); counter-intuitively, “the subject’s own incapacity reveals the consciousness of an unlimited capacity of the very same subject” (142). In other words, the sublime is ultimately an experience of the unlimited creative capacity of the human mind itself, only possible through a paradoxical understanding of its limitations.
Critique of Judgment further differentiates two types of the sublime: the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime (131). First, the mathematically sublime is an experience of the limitations of the imagination to comprehend that which is “absolutely great” in magnitude or size. To illustrate, Kant mentions the sense of “bewilderment” when encountering the Pyramids of Egypt or St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome (135-36). Common examples also include the enormity of mountains or the seemingly endless sea: “Nature is thus sublime in those of its appearances the intuition of which brings with them the idea of its infinity” (138). When the imagination struggles to comprehend infinity, reason intervenes in its demand for “totality for all given magnitudes” (138) and thus exerts its sublime superiority.
Conversely, the dynamically sublime is more abstract and concerned with the power relationships between the subject and nature, specifically the “dominion” of the thinking subject. Kant distinguishes that, “[power] is called dominion if it is also superior to the resistance of something that itself possesses power” (143). One way to illustrate this concept is through Kant’s dichotomy of fearfulness vs fear presented in Critique of Judgment though a religious framework. A devout Christian subject may recognize God as “fearful,” that is, capable of releasing plagues, turning water into blood, or killing all first-born children. The “virtuous” subject (143) understands his resistance to be “completely futile,” yet he also understands his dominion, autonomy, or independence from a powerful object by recognizing the power of cognition itself. The same can occur in the natural world: while we hypothetically understand that a meteor could strike Earth, killing us all instantly, for Kant, this understanding reveals to us “a capacity for resistance of quite another kind, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all powerfulness of nature” (144-45). This power of resistance is the source of negative pleasure within the experience of the sublime: it is the relief through realization, the freedom from pain that only the power of reason can provide. For Kant, reason is the faculty which renders the subject as separate from the all-powerful object, thus reminding itself of its own power to resist the illusory irresistibility of nature’s power.
To proceed with a reading of Byron’s Cain in light of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, it is necessary to understand the necessity of the sublime experience in attaining aesthetic freedom. While the sublime interrupts one’s ability to have an aesthetic experience, the experience of incapacity reveals the unlimited capacity of the mind to generate ideas or conceptions about the world. For Kant, the world is fundamentally conceptual, and many of these concepts function a priori—that is, the subject proceeds through daily life without the awareness that these concepts are informing reality. However, there was a moment in history where these concepts did not exist. For Kant the sublime experience is one which disrupts conceptual reality, and through this experience of liminality, there is room for reconceptualization. And the power to reconceptualize a seemingly fixed conceptual world is the reflective power of judgment: it is the ability to find the universal for a given particular. As Robert Doran summarizes, inherent to Kant’s philosophy is “the idea that man can transcend the limitations placed on him by his sensuous nature and natural causality, thereby realizing the essential freedom on which rational moral consciousness is grounded” (221). But without the understanding of limitations, there is nothing to transcend, nothing to strive to overcome. The subject becomes like Cain in the first act of Byron’s drama, merely sensing his own limitations without any mechanism to surpass them: “I / despise myself, yet cannot overcome— / And so I live” (1.1.113-15). Rather, Lucifer becomes a facilitator of the sublime by subjecting Cain to the experience of his own insignificance, and although this knowledge may seem debilitating or depressing, it is what allows him to be free to conceptualize the world on his own terms.
Cain in Space: The Final Frontier
Act Two of Cain offers a striking depiction of the mathematical sublime through a dramatized exploration of the universe, contemporary scientific developments, “the mysteries of Death” (2.1.140), and the obscuration of time itself. Cain, having agreed to Lucifer’s promise of revealed truth, follows him to where he dwells: the infinite “Abyss of Space” (2.1.0). As they traverse through space, or the “unimaginable ether” (2.1.99), as Cain describes, Cain is bewildered by how small and insignificant the Earth appears among the stars: “Oh God! or Demon! or whate’er thou art, / Is yon our earth?” (2.1.26-7). It quickly becomes a “small blue circle, swinging in far ether,” that “appear[s] to join the innumerable stars / Which are around us; and as we move on, Increase their myriads” (2.1.35-43). Here, Cain witnesses what Kant refers to as key elements of the mathematical sublime—the qualities of greatness in both magnitude and multitude (132)—through the observation of the boundless universe and the limitless stars that occupy it. Cain’s imagination fails to conceptualize the infinitude of the universe, even if he is experiencing it firsthand, and hence he undergoes the first stage of the sublime experience as understood by Kant: that of the displeasure associated with the subjective feeling of insignificance. Witnessing the limitations of his mind to comprehend such infinitude, Cain soliloquies,
Oh thou beautiful
And unimaginable ether! And
Ye multiplying masses of increased
And still-increasing lights! what are ye? What
Is this blue wilderness of interminable
Air, where ye roll along, as I have seen
The leaves along the limpid streams of Eden?
Is your course measured for ye? Or do ye
Sweep on in your unbounded revelry
Through an aërial universe of endless
Expansion—at which my soul aches to think—
Intoxicated with eternity. (2.1.98-109)
In this passage, Cain undergoes an experience of the sublime through his experience of space; its form is “unimaginable” and “unbounded,” its objects are seemingly “multiplying” and “interminable,” and, finally, its existence is “intoxicated with eternity” or free from the bounds of time itself. Yet, he is also able to judge aesthetically the vastness of the cosmos without being in any direct danger and is thus able to postulate its status as a mere “object of fear” (144). Yet there is also an oscillation between attraction and repulsion; Cain is not having an experience of the beautiful but something that distances himself into the capacity for aesthetic judgment, the experience to view himself in relationship to the powerful world.
Next, Lucifer trivializes the importance of humankind by postulating the existence of other, greater worlds. He proposes,
And if there should be
Worlds greater than thine own—inhabited
By greater things—and they themselves far more
In number than the dust of thy dull earth,
Though multiplied to animated atoms,
All living—and all doomed to death—and wretched,
What wouldst thou think? (2.1.44-49)
Here, one finds instances of both the mathematically and dynamically sublime: there are entire worlds that are greater than Earth in magnitude, beings that trump the Adamites in terms of power and intellect. However, Cain intuitively responds, “I should be proud of thought / Which knew such things” (2.1.49-50). This reply, under the Kantian purview, is evidence of reason’s capacity to comprehend totality. After the sublime experience, Cain posits that the faculty of cognition is something to be proud of; he is beginning to understand the revealed unlimited capacity of the imagination through the paradoxical experience of his own insignificance. In the face of greater objects, Cain is reminded of the superiority of reason, and his “capacity for resistance.”
Lucifer and Cain eventually reach the land of Hades, the “world of phantoms” (2.1.174) and “beings past,” when Cain is paralyzed at the sudden disappearance of the stars. A cosmos once illuminated by “lights innumerable” has now faded into a “dreary twilight”; even the “deep valleys and vast mountains” appear to have faded into the distance.” Cain attributes the ability to see to a “fearful light” (2.1.175-185), again acknowledging the aspect of fearfulness without fear, retaining the power of aesthetic judgment due to being in no real danger. Lucifer then reveals the truth of the Pre-Adamites: they were
Intelligent, good, great, and glorious things
as much superior unto all thy sire
Adam could e’er have been in Eden, as
The sixty-thousandth generation shall be,
In its dull damp degeneracy. (2.2.68-72)
Again, Lucifer trivializes the importance of the Adamites by dismissing their capacity to evolve even tens of thousands of generations into the future. However, there are multiple layers of rhetorical minimization which encompass the equalization of divine forces. Not only does Lucifer undermine the story of Genesis and divine authority by presenting a race superior to the one created “in the image of God,” he even trivializes the greatness of these supposedly “great” beings. Ultimately, every being, from “past Leviathans” that occupied “immeasurable liquid space / of glorious azure” (2.2.178-89), to the future “unborn myriads of conscious atoms” (2.2.43) is reduced to nothingness. Even the fundamental anatomy of living organisms, as mere collections of atoms, is something that is difficult for the imagination to comprehend in its totality. “And this should be the human sum / Of knowledge,” Lucifer proclaims, “to know mortal nature’s nothingness” (2.2.421-22).
Yet, after his rather demoralizing tour of the mathematically sublime universe, Lucifer ends the voyage on a compelling closing note:
One good gift has the fatal apple given,—
Your reason:—let it not be overswayed
By tyrannous threats to force you into faith
‘Gainst all external sense and inward feeling:
Think and endure,—and form an inner world
In your own bosom—where the outward fails;
So shall you nearer be the spiritual
Nature, and war triumphant with your own. (2.2.459-466)
Ultimately, Lucifer, the drama’s spiritual and scientific authority, reminds Cain, and ultimately the reader, of reason’s role in establishing autonomy in defiance of divine law. By encouraging Cain to protect his reason from tyrannous threats, he is informing him that the capacity for resistance is entirely within the power of the human subject. Inherent to Cain is the notion that an “inner world” is always possible; a world free from the seeming domination of a priori concepts, a world that is redefinable once discovered. The “fatal apple” Lucifer describes mirrors the potentiality of the sublime experience: while it is initially unpleasant, it is the only way to reconfigure the conceptual network of the natural world. Eventually, Cain, disillusioned by the knowledge of the true nature of his condition, returns to his wife Adah and his sleeping child, and, following the events of the original biblical source, murders Abel during a sacrifice. Finally, Cain is condemned to “the eternal Serpent’s curse,” the existence of a “vagabond on earth” by a visiting angel (3.1.403; 480). Yet this act of condemnation is equally Cain’s potential for autonomy.
Cain ultimately does not shy away from accepting responsibility for his brother’s murder: “Tis blood—my blood— / My brother’s and my own; and shed by me! / Then what have I further to do with life, / Since I have taken life from my own flesh?” (3.1.345-8). However, in the acceptance of responsibility is equally Cain’s first successful attempt at establishing agency. For example, Cain appropriates the divine word by taking authorship or ownership of scripture itself: “That which I am, I am” (3.1.509)echoes the words of God to Moses in Exodus 3:14. While it is simple, perhaps intuitive, to conclude that Cain: A Mystery is a sort of didactic Faustian tale: one in which knowledge is exchanged for a desolate future of damnation, the drama instead challenges this exchange by offering the potential of aesthetic liberation. Through the experience of the mathematical sublime, and the unpleasant splitting of his subjectivity, Cain can traverse into the unknown with the power to reconceptualize the world free of the divine laws that once governed a priori. And, by extension, Cain: A Mystery alludes to the possibility of reconceptualizing our world itself.
Judgment Day: Cain’s Critical Reception
Considering Cain’s possibilities for changing the landscape of political consciousness, it is no surprise that Byron’s closet drama was challenged by his theocratic contemporaries. Two years after Cain’s publication, a satirical print created by Charles Williams attempted to portray Byron as the subject of a Faustian bargain. The engraving, entitled, “A Noble Poet—Scratching Up His Ideas,” depicts Byron pensively scribbling away at his tawny wooden desk; a hooved devil, colloquially referred to as ‘Old Scratch,’ perches upon Byron’s head, physically imparting to him a form of demonic wisdom (“A Noble”). For Williams, Byron is as equally associated with irreligion as he is political subversion: not only does a painting of the “End of Abel” hang on the adjacent wall, but an edition of The Liberal, a radical publication, lies in a stack of books on the floor (Schmidt 57). Similarly, press articles by religious conservatives showed that they were less than thrilled with Byron’s drama. Bishop Reginald Heber proclaimed in The Quarterly Review that Byron “devoted himself and his genius to the adornment and extension of evil” (Schock 101), and similarly Henry Crabb Robinson, an English lawyer, decried the drama as “calculated to spread infidelity” (qtd. in Garrett 48). These criticisms come as no surprise, as Cain possesses a seditious type of moral obfuscation. Lucifer, Byron’s herald of the sublime, even claims that “Evil and Good are things in their own essence” (2.2.452), further distancing the protagonist from divine law’s claim to objective universality. Yet, Lucifer’s act of obfuscation is rendered even more provocative when combined with Byron’s claim to biblical authenticity. The poet claims in his ‘Preface’ to “preserve the language […] taken from actual Scripture [making] little alteration, even of words” (208). “I take the words as I find them,” Byron ironically proclaims, “and reply […] Behold the Book!’” Ultimately, Byron knows no one is falling for this charade and, using his familiarity with the Hebrew Bible acquired in his religious upbringing, manufactures a closet drama tailored to attract contention. And, as Ralph O’Connor describes, it comes to no surprise that this “particularly dangerous” work was extraordinary popular (148).
Yet despite Cain’s thinly veiled blasphemy, its radical implications ultimately belong to its experiment with political consciousness. The Byronian sublime, as exemplified through Lucifer, creates a potentiality for reflective judgment. The sublime liberates Cain from the objective universality of divine law; he instead, to borrow the language of Walter Johnston, becomes free to “experience the process in which the faculties [of the mind] begin to account for an unknown experience.” Cain’s exile is then to be understood as a curse enacted by an authority whose legitimacy is ultimately baseless, his departure symbolizing a shift into a different aesthetic mode of experiencing the world: a mode of infinite possibility. And this overturning of divine authority—this neutralization of hierarchy—precisely elucidates the political ramifications of the sublime as understood by the Romantics. There is, as Rancière has coined, an attempt at a transformation of the “aesthetic of politics,” a fundamental reconstruction of the relationship between a subject to his political environment (8). Cain’s ideology, if implemented on a larger scale, beckons a redistribution of the sensible and a neutralization of theocratic hierarchies within political discourse. Lucifer reduces God’s dominion to a type of Platonian noble lie, of which “its power rests on its own absence of legitimacy” (Rancière 11). Hence, scripture, stripped of its ontological potency, becomes a mere mechanism to explore the human experience in secular terms. Reframed, the sublime reality of knowledge in Cain informs us that, while no longer at the center of a divinely orchestrated universe, we are, as Kant posits, the creators and masters of our limitless conceptual world.
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