DEMIAN and the Cainites

 

Resuming my way through Hesse's text. The central consciousness of this book, Emil Sinclair, has a conversation when he is ten with a slightly older schoolmate, Demian.  The conversation concerns a Bible lesson, about Cain and Abel. 

Demian takes what seems to Emil a shockingly heterodox view: that Cain is the protagonist  of the story. "The strong man kills a weaker one," in a story loosely expressing a moment in history when "a race of fearless and peculiar men" had made their presence known in a way quite embarrassing to their contemporaries. Demian avows that his sympathies lie not with the embarrassment but with the fearless sources thereof. 

Soon thereafter, a crisis passes because Demian does Emil a favor I will not describe here. Emil and Demian are thereafter no longer in regular contact.  Emil tells his father, in a confessional spirit, that he has heard that there are people who declare Cain to be better than Abel. 

Dad (a pastor) is a little surprised that his son has heard such a thing, and he replies that it is an ancient heresy, an attempt of the devil to undermine our belief in the God who plainly preferred Abel.  The old Cainites used to profess that the God of the Bible "is not the true and only God, but a false one," he says, and Dad urges Emil not to let such ideas occupy his attention any further. 

Hmmm.  I don't believe I had heard of "Cainites," under that name, but this sounded like something the old-school gnostics, or the somewhat later Manicheans, might have said.  As soon as a lot of Christians decided they should throw off their "Jewish sect" identity, ("Are you angry at those stubborn Zealots?  We have nothing to do with them!") there arose a concomitant desire to disassociate themselves from the Creation ("it was an evil God who created this material world, not the good one, the Savior God, we worship!"). So it seems plausible that the conscious uncoupling reached the enmity of Cain and Abel. 

Gnosticism, or this sort of cosmological dualism, was rejected as heretical by the 'main line' that leads through the centuries to Emil's father.  A cynic might say that Christians learned that they can have their anti-semitism without jettisoning the Creator God.

Such were my thoughts while reading of the conversation between Emil and his father. Later, the novel confirms my association of ideas.  Emil acquires another older mentor, named Pistorius.  From one of his conversations with Pistorius he learns, and we learn, of the critical role self-consciousness plays in human growth. And there is this gem, "A madman can have ideas which remind one of Plato, and a pious little boy in a Moravian boarding school will recreate in his thought profound mythological ideas which occur in the gnostics or in Zoroaster. But he does not realize it!  He is a tree or a stone."  

We are to gather, then, that Emil and Demian -- although neither was in a boarding school at the time of their Cain/Abel talk -- were pious little boys unwittingly recreating gnostic profundities. 

There will be another post on this book.  It will be my final say.