Darkness that points to the light

Beauty is a magnet that draws us to God. Whether we encounter that beauty in nature, in the bond of a man and his wife or a woman and her child, in bold acts of charity and self-sacrifice, or in the arts of poetry, painting, and music, we recognize the imprint of the divine—the creative hand of a loving God. But what about the darkness, the evil, and the pain? Can these teach us anything about God, or about us, the only creatures on this earth to have been made in His image?

In The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness (Zondervan, 272 pp.), Andrew Klavan believes they can. Klavan is a bestselling author of crime novels who has also written screenplays in the same gritty, violent genre, and today he’s best known as a political commentator and satirist who hosts a popular show on The Daily Wire. But the titles of his previous two nonfiction books cut to the core of who he is and what makes him the right person to defend darkness as a pointer to God: The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ (2016); The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England’s Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus (2022).

Klavan grounds his study in a Biblical account of fratricide (Cain and Abel), a Russian novel about a man who commits a heinous, remorseless act (Crime and Punishment), a nihilistic German philosopher (Nietzsche), three American films about psychotic killers (Rope, Psycho, and Halloween), and three shocking, era-defining murders that embody the very nature of evil (Pierre Lacenaire, Leopold and Loeb, and Ed Gein). He tells these macabre tales well, linking them together in a way that simultaneously exposes man’s depravity and moral sense.

Dostoevsky was inspired to write Crime and Punishment when he read about Lacenaire: a sophisticated, droll, seemingly gentleman thief who, after brutally killing a petty blackmailer and his innocent, sick, elderly mother, passed himself off to the jury as a sensitive, Lord Byron-like rebel against a cruel, heartless society. Reflecting on Lacenaire’s case from the point of view of a Christian who had seen the dark underbelly of the world, Dostoevsky created the character of Raskolnikov, a decent man who gets kicked out of law school and sinks into poverty and “a feverish lethargy of depression. [As he] stews in bitter helplessness at the injustice all around him . . . [his] faltering mind reasons its way out of morality.”

His abandonment of what Klavan dubs the Great Speculation—“the self-evident truth that other people are as real to themselves as you are to you and all are equally dear to God”—leads Raskolnikov to bludgeon his landlady to death along with a mentally disabled woman who witnesses the murder. In the end, Raskolnikov is set on the painful road to repentance, but his story was read by a brilliant philosopher who, it seems, never repented. Nietzsche, an avid reader of Dostoevsky’s work, particularly Notes From Underground, realized that both he and the Russian “were radical realists who fearlessly faced the central truth of their moment. Christian faith was fading away … Both writers understood that without Christ, the moral framework of European culture would collapse and be replaced by something absolutely different.”

And yet, how differently they faced this dilemma. Dostoevsky dramatized in his work a redemptive way out of the darkness of nihilism. Nietzsche embraced the dark, believing that only an Übermensch (“overman” or “superman”) like Raskolnikov could rise above the slave ethic of middle-class morality to assert his will to power and so “create a new morality that would put the masters back in their rightful place.”

In 1924 Chicago, two young men named Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb became convinced “that they were the supermen, the ubermenschen whose coming Nietzsche had foretold”; they “proved” it by senselessly murdering a schoolboy in a manner that reflected the crimes of Raskolnikov. Their “crime of the century” inspired, in turn, a play and then a Hitchcock film titled Rope in which two would-be supermen kill someone for fun and leave the body in a trunk upon which they host a dinner.

The dinner party includes a philosophical nihilist (Cadell) who touts the very Nietzschean ideas that led the young men to commit the murder—until the body is revealed. Cadell then changes his tune and accuses them of sin and blasphemy. “It’s a great moment,” writes Klavan. “Faced with the body, faced with death and the dead, faced with—what is the word we’ve forgotten? Oh yes. Evil—all of Cadell’s effeminate affectations fall away, all his pronouncements on society’s corruption fall silent, his debased ironies are shredded and something raw and real, insistent and everlasting, comes back to defiant vibrancy inside him: the true man. He—and with him we—remember who he is.” Evil reveals itself as something more than a social problem or a topic for sophisticated conversation.

Meanwhile, in the American Midwest, Ed Gein, who is at once more ordinary and more brutal than Lacenaire or Leopold and Loeb, commits murders that are almost too awful to conceive. His murders inspire another novel and another Hitchcock film, Psycho. Klavan hails the film for its cinematic brilliance, but he detects something troubling in its closing scene. After dramatizing the evil of a man who kills two people in the persona of the controlling mother he murdered years earlier, Hitchcock undoes the moral-spiritual nature of his film. “A psychiatrist, played by theater actor Simon Oakland, delivers a smug monologue full of sort-of-Freudian insights. Everything that can be explained is explained away in materialist terms.”

In sharp contrast, John Carpenter’s “open homage to Hitchcock’s Psycho,” Halloween, restores, quite unexpectedly, a moral and spiritual dimension to the Ed Gein source material. Carpenter’s psychiatrist, it turns out, had treated the film’s serial killer 15 years earlier when he was only 6 years old. Even then, the psychiatrist could see in the child’s eyes that he was evil, a veritable incarnation of the devil. “This is not Psycho’s headshrinker who explains it all,” comments Klavan. “This is a psychiatrist rejecting the idea of psychiatry altogether. The killer is suffering from a spiritual condition. He is evil.”

My brief overview only brushes the surface of Klavan’s complexly woven narrative, which also includes incisive reflections on Woody Allen, Foucault, and the Marquis de Sade. Again and again, Klavan drives home the message that pervades the crimes he retells, the novels and films he analyzes, and the philosophies he deconstructs: “That without belief in God, a loving God, an essentially Christian God who appeared in the world as the least among us, moral systems, all human systems, are based on the will to power, which is the will to survival, pleasure, and life.” Whether or not the evil is acknowledged by the criminal-author-philosopher, its presence is felt and cannot be simply brushed under the carpet.

The evil is real, and Klavan traces its source back to two incidents recorded in the early chapters of Genesis: Adam and Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit and Cain’s murder of his brother Abel. By reflecting on those two primal acts of disobedience and rebellion, Klavan achieves a rare clarity on the nature of our fallen world and on what it means to be stranded in the Kingdom of Cain.

Many reflections on the problem of pain highlight the fact that our perspective differs from that of God and that, as a result, we are unable to see the bigger picture. Klavan accepts that analysis, and then complicates it by reminding us that God dwells in eternity and that eternity does not mean a long time, but all time at once. “In eternity,” he suggests to those grieving the loss of a friend or family member, “you may not be reconnected to your lost loved ones, you may find you never lost them at all. In eternity, you may not find that God makes good out of evil, you may find that it was always good, you simply did not see it complete.”

Klavan then extends this insight to take in the Fall and its consequences. “The knowledge of good and evil is a curse to man, not a gift, because he sees it in time where it makes no sense. In his ignorance, all he knows is the injustice of the moment. His only possible response is anger and bitterness and despair and, finally, murder.” Could this sense of entrapment in a world that seems senseless have motivated the crimes of Cain, Leopold and Loeb, and Ed Gein? Do we despair and murder because we lack vision, and do we lack vision because we lack faith in the God who dwells in eternity?

At one point in his meditations, Klavan suggests that there was death in the Garden of Eden before we fell. (J.R.R. Tolkien made a similar suggestion in some of his letters, though I do not think Klavan is aware of it.) “What if,” Klavan asks, “Adam and Eve would have loved and labored, suffered, had sex and reproduced and died there just as we do today? But with one difference. They would have done these things in the context of eternity.” If that were the case, they would have known that death is not the extinction of life but the path to a greater, more embodied life. They would have seen the life in the death, the good in the evil. And that, if I may borrow a line from Gandalf, is an encouraging thought.

But what of murder? What is it, and why do we do it? Klavan offers what I consider his most original and resonant insight when he deals directly and unflinchingly with Cain’s murder of Abel. Both siblings, because of the sin of their parents, live in time, but Abel’s faith allows him to perceive God’s eternity and so be content. Cain, because he lacks his brother’s faith “can see nothing but the present darkness, a world of injustice and evil.” Cain cannot conceive why God rejects his offering, but that is because his lack of faith prevents him from realizing his lack of faith. The only way he can get back at God is to kill his brother, whose faith he lacks.

“By killing Abel,” Klavan explains, “Cain is killing the accusing image of the faith he does not have, the joy he cannot feel, the image of a good God he does not experience within himself. He is killing himself as he would be if he were faithful. … That is what murder is. It is the killing of the imago Dei. It is to replace God’s image with our own, God’s will with our own, God's creation with our own. It is the disobedience of Adam and Eve made flesh. That is why murder is a kind of suicide. To kill the image of God is to kill what accuses us from within.”

The journey Klavan takes us on in The Kingdom of Cain is at once thrilling and uncomfortable. It cuts very close and does not allow us to escape unscathed. Which of us can say that he has never felt the confusion and anger of Cain? That he has never wanted to silence that inner voice that accuses him for his lack of faith or joy or gratitude? That he has not wanted to put himself in the place of God?

If you are willing to explore that dark side of yourself, or at least to wrestle with its appearance in literature, film, and the daily newspaper, then Klavan’s book needs to be on your reading list. But beware: You may not like what you see.