This is a meaty commentary from Dr Andrew Kania valuable at a number of levels. Firstly it is simply a good summary of another of those classics in literature, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. The heart of the commentary though is an exploration of the thinking of an important French philosopher, René Girard, who came up with a new way of understanding Jesus Christ and why he was killed. Dr Kania, through the works of Dostoyevsky and Girard, explores the role played by scapegoats in human behaviour. If Jesus Christ arrived to live in our community tomorrow would we "follow the mob" and treat him as a scapegoat also?

Dostoyevsky's tale of murder and brutality…

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Rodion Raskolinikov, the central figure of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's, Crime and Punishment (Преступлен и еинаказание, 1866), is an impoverished university dropout. So financially poor is he that he has had recourse to Alyona Ivanova, in Raskolnikov's words, 'an old crone' who is a local pawnbroker – a woman renowned for preying on the misery of others – a woman well aware of the sway she holds over the lives of those she cheats. As is the fate with many siblings, Alyona's sister, Lizaveta, is of a distinctly different sort, a not-too-unattractive-woman, a simple soul, a gentle woman, who because of a combination of her simplicity of character and her relatively good features, has found herself pregnant on numerous occasions owing to favours being given to this or that transient lover.

The novel opens with Raskolnikov paying Alyona a visit; the reader undertanding that there are two reasons behind his call: the overt – to call upon Alyona for a loan; and the covert – to 'case the joint'. But what is to be the extent of his criminal plan? Is it to frighten Alyona? Is it to rob her? Or is it something far more sinister? As the novel unfolds, Raskolnikov decides on his course of action. His sewing into his coat a small axe, leaving the reader in no doubt as to the extreme measures he will go to in order to satisfy whatever lust is in his heart. But does he have the nerve to carry out his plan? Will his hand be steady? He was of course for a while a university student, a person of steadily refined sensitivities. What follows in the scene at Alyona's apartment is sheer brutality. Not only does he smash the 'crone's' skull with the axe, but after he has clumsily sought his bounty, he hears a noise in the room in which the slain Alyona is lying in rivulets of blood. On entering he sees Lizaveta, the younger sister staring in horror at the scene below her feet. The reader is affronted as Raskolnikov takes to Lizaveta – slaying her in a single stroke. A pity Raskolinikov thinks, and not according to his original plan, but a necessary adjunct to what he had begun. A noise. Raskolinikov hides. Then an opportunity to escape – and so he does; walking back through the murky streets and into the ever darkening night he fades. No one, he thinks, has seen him; no one will suspect this frail and sickly dropout; no one that is with the exception of Porfiry Petrovitch, a wily, (in the term's truest sense) detective.

But Dostoyevsky's novel is far more than a Mike Hammer story – vastly more.

Petrovitch, basing suspicions on the account of a witness who placed Raskolnikov in the area of the night of the crime, seeks to corner Raskolinikov. He understands that in front of him is a man as intelligent as himself. A man of cunning; a man of ideas. To convict him he must, for want of witnesses to the actual crime, have an admission of guilt. He needs to hear Raskolinikov, not in any feverish state, but in a cool and calm manner, tell him that he killed the two women.

Under a deliberately thin guise of naivety, he insinuates without accusing; he vacillates between appearing to know everything, and then being ignorant. So intricate and well-thought out is Petrovitch's plan that Raskolnikov is unsure as to whether he is dealing with an imbecile or a brilliant mind. In frustration at this unknowing, Raskolinikov becomes enraged – thinking to himself at times that he will declare his guilt, to rid himself of the almost unbearable tension; yet when he feels that Petrovitch is only clutching at straws, he seeks to hide his tracks and shift culpability, to some other poor fool or vagrant.

The heart of the story — the "chosen one" -vs- the scapegoats…

As the reader soon discovers, Raskolnikov's crime has nothing to do with being impoverished, nor was it an act of passion. The murder of the Ivanova sisters is in fact an act of idealism – an intellectual activity. Raskolnikov has even written a paper, a well-publicized tract, it would seem, among university circles at least, on the disparity of value that can be placed on human life according to the type of person that belongs to a particular life. Petrovitch has a copy of the article in his possession. In the privacy of his thoughts, Raskolinikov perceives himself to be a Napoleon, minus of course an army, for want of opportunity. Yet, he muses, under the same life circumstances, the "Little Corporal", would have also committed the double murder. Escaping for a time from these grandiose and silent thoughts, Raskolnikov seeks to tell Petrovitch part thereof: "Generally, there are remarkably few people born who have a new thought, who are capable, if only slightly, of saying anything new – strangely few, in fact. One thing is clear, that the ordering of people's conception, all these categories and subdivisions, must be quite correctly and precisely determined by some law of nature. This law is yet unknown, of course, but I believe that it exists and may one day be known. An enormous mass of people, of material, exists in the world only so that finally, through some effort, some as yet mysterious process, through some interbreeding of stocks and races, with great strain it may finally bring into the world, let's say, at least one somewhat independent in a thousand" (Dostoyevsky, 1993, p. 263). Evidently, he, Raskolinikov is that man, that one in a thousand, and most others who populate the surface of the planet are, scapegoats, 'things' to be used and disposed of in order for the Chosen One, Raskolinkov, to fulfil his and humanity's destiny.

Understanding Christ as scapegoat
through the mind of philosopher René Girard…

René Girard More info: Stanford University Wikipedia

Owing much to Dostoyevsky's work, the notion of the 'scapegoat' was later made into a specific theory by the French philosopher René Girard in the 20th Century. In fact, Girard's theory even turned the death of Christ around from being God the Father sacrificing God the Son, to the death of Christ being a result not of any sacrificial lust on the part of the Father, but rather brought about by the violence lodged within the human heart and society - humanity's historical lust for scapegoats. As Girard wrote in Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde, in 1978 (Trans. Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 1987): "When Jesus says: 'Your will be done and not mine,' it is really a question of dying. But it is not a question of showing obedience to an incomprehensible demand for sacrifice. Jesus has to die because continuing to live would mean a compromise with violence. I will be told that 'it comes to the same thing'. But it does not at all come to the same thing. In the usual writings on the subject, the death of Jesus derives, in the final analysis, from God and not from men – which is why the enemies of Christianity can use the argument that it belongs within the same schema as all the other primitive religions. Here we have the difference between the religions that remain subordinated to the powers and the act of destroying those powers through a form of transcendence that never acts by means of violence, is never responsible for any violence, and remains radically opposed to violence" (Girard, 2007, p. 187).

Girard's God is therefore a God of love, who could not contemplate the actual sacrifice of His Son – but who instead sends His Son into a world filled, with the reality of violent (as well as good) men and women. Humans, even though being made in God's image, are capable, and do acts of violence; acts of gross injustice; acts of hatred, for reasons that have been hereto inexplicable, but which Girard now attempts to rationalize. Girard in Le Bouc émissaire, of 1982 (Trans. The Scapegoat, 1986), develops this thesis, as to why and how we choose scapegoats:

"Disability belongs to a large group of banal signs of a victim, and among certain groups – in a boarding school, for example – every individual who has difficulty adapting, someone from another country or state, an orphan, an only son, someone who is penniless, or even simply the latest arrival, is more or less interchangeable with a cripple. If the disability or deformity is real, it tends to polarize 'primitive' people against the afflicted person. Similarly, if a group of people is used to choosing its victims from a certain social, ethnic, or religious category, it tends to attribute to them disabilities or deformities that would reinforce the polarization against the victim, were they real. This tendency is clearly observable in racist cartoons. The abnormality need not be only physical. In any area of existence the behavior abnormality may function as the criterion for selecting those to be persecuted. For example there is no such thing as social abnormality, here the average defines the norm. The further one is from normal social status of whatever kind, the greater the risk of persecution. This is easy to see in relation to those at the bottom of the social ladder … Extreme characteristics ultimately attract collective destruction at some time or other, extremes not just of wealth or poverty, but also of success and failure, beauty and ugliness, vice and virtue, the ability to please and displease. The weakness of women, children, and old people, as well as the strength of the most powerful, becomes weakness in the face of the crowd. Crowds commonly turn on those who originally held exceptional power over them". (Girard, 2007, p. 113)

Understanding the scapegoating tendency within our nature…

In the case of Crime and Punishment, Raskolinkov chooses a scapegoat so as to rid society of what he perceives to be a social vermin; in the case of racism, we choose a scapegoat in order to feel more powerful, more normal; in the case of professional jealousy we create scapegoats in order not to feel inadequate; in the case of the Crucifixion of Christ, we create a scapegoat so as not to have our consciences pricked by a Truth that questions our way of living, our way of being. Girard would reason that our greatest social reformers, often are victims of violence, for in the end, something within the human condition finds their message insufferable; and we seek their blood, in order to break off contact with that fountain from which the message is showering down on us. Gandhi, Luther King Jr., Rabin, Thomas More, John Fisher, Edmund Campion, Oscar Romero, Theodore Romza, Hryhorij Lakota; all these individuals became scapegoats for the darker side of human nature.

In the end, if a person is to be known, (according to the adage) for the friends and the enemies that he or she makes, should not yet another criterion be made, that he or she should be known by the scapegoats they create? For a simple equation does exist that whoever bears the brunt of our 'scapegoatism' must in some way serve as an indicator as to a particular deficiency that exists deep within ourselves. The racist must feel inferior; the individual who suffers from professional jealousy, must feel unfulfilled or unappreciated; those who executed Christ, must have wished to hold on to their old ways rather than have a metanoia.

The fundamental drive of scapegoatism is thus a strong sense of being threatened — and no one is ever threatened by something or someone less powerful than themselves. Rasklonikov's Napoleon-complex found itself as unable to be Alyona's minion; as the Pharisees found themselves unable to admit that God could have come down to earth in the form of a carpenter's son from Nazareth. Thus the individual we seek to scapegoat is in reality a distorted mirror of all we most despise of in ourselves; they look back at us — peering deep into that part of our ego, that is insecure, incompetent and frightened. They seem to know us, more than we wish to be known — they seem to know the extent to which we lie and the extent to which we tell the Truth.

Image Credits:
Clicking on the images in the body of the article will take you to the original source. The background images used in the headline were sourced from londonkoreanlinks.net

©2008 Dr Andrew Thomas Kania

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