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compassion, forgiveness, God, human experience, hurt, Jacques Lacan, Juvenal, retaliation, revenge, vengeance
“Revenge is always the weak pleasure of a little and narrow mind” – Juvenal
The other day my oldest son came in the house visibly frustrated. He told me he’s done playing or having anything to do with his long time friend. The reason: his friend mistreated and hurt him in front of the other kids. His friends’ actions were clearly wrong, but what should my son’s attitude be? Should I tell him to stand up for himself and not allow this to happen? Should he reciprocate and pay back? Should he give his friend the silence treatment and ignore him in front of the other kids? Should he end their friendship? In short, I had to take a position to encourage my son either toward revenge in some form or forgiveness and grace.
Unfortunately, more often than not revenge seems to be our choice for responding to the wrongs done to us, intentionally or unintentionally, from individuals to larger groups. Hollywood seems to thrive on movies that celebrate vengeance. Ironically, at first sight it appears to be an issue of justice. We invoke the cosmic balance where for every action there must be a corresponding reaction, for every decision there must be a consequence, bad has to be dealt with bad. It’s not right, we say, for evil to go unpunished. Evil has to be RE-PAYED or PAID-BACK.
When we look at revenge more closely, however, we notice that it doesn’t really have anything to do with justice. The goal of revenge usually consists of forcing the perceived wrongdoer to suffer the same or greater pain than that which was originally inflicted. It is the eye for eye retaliatory kind of system.
Instead of bringing justice, revenge has proven to be more of a clash of egos, hasn’t it. I cannot take the fact that my ego (my image, my reputation, my honor, my standing in the group etc.) has been threatened, so I retaliate.
| The French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, taught that aggression results as a psychological defense against threats of fragmentation. That is, as infants, we are just a jumble of diverse biological processes over which we have no authority, and our first task in life is to develop a coherent identity which “pulls together” this fragmented confusion. This identity may give the appearance of a unified personality, but it really is just a psychological illusion that hides our essential human vulnerability and weakness. And so, when anything or anyone threatens us with the truth of our essential fragmentation, the quickest, easiest, and most common defense available—to hide the truth of our weakness and to give the illusion that we possess some sort of power—is aggression. |
By inflicting pain (in whatever form) I am telling the other party to stop doing this in the future or else. So revenge becomes, supposedly, a mechanism for self defense. The problem is that from the dawn of time revenge has not ended hostility, but has jumpstarted a cycle of violence, inflicting more hurt, causing more damage.
Although those who seek revenge are thought to be strong and powerful people, revenge shows weakness not strength. If you know who you are (which admittedly is not an easy task!) you don’t need to defend it by taking out those around you, by putting them down so you can stand above. A better attitude when hurt by someone is compassion, a sense of feeling sorry for the person’s insecurity and vulnerability, a sense of empathy and of embrace resulting in forgiveness, in letting go.
If vengeance doesn’t really produce anything good, if our human history has shown it to be a malady, a source of destruction, a reflection of insecurity, a narcissistic struggle, then what are we to do with the idea of a vengeful God? Does revenge belong to God? Can God and revenge co-exist? That’s what we will deal with in our next post.
Until then, what are your thoughts, experience on revenge?
Theology Gym 
Franciscan Richard Rohr has opened my eyes on this topic of revenge, which he rightly calls “scapegoating” in his teaching, “Culture, Scapegoating and Jesus” (available as an MP3 download on his web page: http://www.cacradicalgrace.org/). Here’s the description:
In this teaching based on reflections of Rene Girard’s groundbreaking work, Sacred Violence, Fr. Richard says, “This is the biggest breakthrough in understanding Jesus that I have ever heard.” Girard has discovered that the central dynamic of human history has been the scapegoating mechanism, where group cohesion requires some outside group to hate. This has led to an endless cycle of hurts and revenge that goes on and on to nowhere. Jesus the Scapegoat destabilized human history. Jesus as the forgiving victim of history receives unto himself our hatred and refuses to give it back. He never asked his followers for vengeance. He took from his followers the need to scapegoat: ‘Love Your Enemy.’ When you can wake up in the morning and never need to hate anybody, to exclude, or to shame anybody, even in your mind, this is what it means to be ‘saved’, ‘redeemed’, or ‘enlightened.’
Also, this is from one of Rohr’s Daily Meditations:
THE SCAPEGOAT
Question of the Day:
Whom do I scapegoat?
On the Day of Atonement (see Leviticus 16:21-22) a goat was brought into the sanctuary. The high priest would lay his hands on the goat and all the sins and failures of the people from the last year were ceremonially laid on the goat, and the goat was sent out into the desert to die. The assumption here is that evil can be expelled elsewhere, and the goal of religion is personal “purity.”
What immediately follows from the scapegoat story (the “escaping” goat) of Leviticus 16 is what is called “The Law of Holiness” (Leviticus 17-27), which largely defines holiness as separation from evil—which is exactly what they had just ritualized. In general, this is the pattern of most first-stage religion.
Three thousand years later, human consciousness hasn’t moved a great deal beyond that, despite the message of the cross. Jesus does not define holiness as separation from evil as much as absorption and transformation of it, wherein I pay the price instead of always asking others to pay the price.
From the cross, Jesus is shouting to history, “No more scapegoats! Look how wrong you can be.”
THE SCAPEGOAT
Question of the Day:
How does dualistic thinking create violent people?
We Christians, who dare to worship the scapegoat, Jesus, became many times in history the primary scapegoaters ourselves—of Jews, heretics, sinners, witches, homosexuals, the poor, the natives in the New World, slaves, other denominations, and other religions. It’s rather hard to believe that we missed such a central message.
The pattern of exporting our evil elsewhere, and righteously hating it there, with impunity, is in the hardwiring of all peoples. After all, our religious task is to separate from evil, isn’t it? That is the well-disguised lie! Any exclusionary process of thinking, any exclusively dualistic thinking, will always create violent and hateful people on some level.
This I state as an absolute, and precisely because the cross revealed it to me. The crucifixion scene is our standing icon stating both the problem and the solution for all of history.
(Adapted from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, p. 143)
Maybe I’m jumping ahead of your next post, Florin, but IF we are seeing God’s nature revealed in Jesus as a way of absorbing and ending the cycle of violence instead of passing it on, perhaps our ideas of a “vengeful God” are only a projection of our own failure to understand True Love?
Like everything else in the human quest to finding the Truth, to define and then find the place of the revenge in a christian life is not simple. It cannot be thought of from a maniheistic point of vue.
I cannot say what Bible or God really says about it as I am not a Bible scholar, not even a regular churchgoer.
I like the psichological point of vue though. Children really are incomplete human beings and revenge is part of their formation into adults, part of their instinctive fight for a place among the various peer groups.
The same can be said about the kidults (adults not fully or not rightly grown-up). I believe every adult is more or less behaving like a child at times and this can be best seen in conflict situations when their inner balance is broken.
On another hand I could see a benefit from letting the revenge instinct manifest under a certain self-control setup, as a way of “letting the kid out” therapy for the part of our character not enough developed.
A few thoughts thrown in not a very organised manner I’m afraid.
As we progress into the 21st century, the study of the mind will transform our understanding of the story that is already there. Biology will reveal that our true purpose is to rule over the self and these emotional components. It’s already in the story. We’re just now discovering it.
The Mystics have known it for centuries! 😉
Great post! My tentative answer is that theism is an idea we came up so we could have something to personify our own desire for vengeance, while allowing us to not appear vengeful ourselves. The idea of an external God lets us off the hook for our vengeful actions. “God did it” and “God told me to do it” have become our favorite excuses for everything from wars, to racism, to economic oppression.
Mike, are you referring to the very idea of God as made up or certain notions of God (i.e. idols)?
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