Shattered Voices. Teresa Godwin Phelps
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the Furies by Athena’s side, while it simultaneously worked to regulate and limit its fulfillment in action. The private settlements may be seen as an advancement over violence for violence yet these practices also met with disapproval and condemnation.67 Although the state vied to interfere and to regulate, at this time it still remained unthinkable for any authority outside the kinship group to act; the state had neither the power nor the approval of the people to take action68—until the emergence of the “pollution doctrine.”
The pollution doctrine was perhaps the most effective argument the state could make in its effort to regulate vengeance.69 In effect, the pollution doctrine began the process of state retribution in that it depersonalized harm and spread the revenge requirement from the individual or the clan to the entire community. In this doctrine, a crime became an insult to and a stain against the community at large. “Much as the religions of the Athenians and Hebrews differed, their doctrine … was … that the land is polluted by the shedding of innocent blood and no expiation can be made for the land but by the death of the offender. It is the duty of the nearest kin to obtain revenge for the slain and the presence of the slayer in the land destroys its fertility.”70 The pollution doctrine may be seen as a bridge between private blood feud revenge and state retribution in that it expresses a compromise between tribal traditions and the slowly evolving power of the state.71 Because the pollution doctrine saw the wrong as committed against the community, private settlement of any sort—violent revenge, compensation, or even pardon—was not exclusively a personal matter. Although the actual taking of revenge might still be enacted by a family member, this action would occur under state aegis.72
The conception of pollution was very Semitic and is essentially the biblical approach to revenge: a wrong is a stain against the community and no payment may be taken to balance the transgression.73 God instructs Moses as the Israelites approach Canaan as to the appropriate sanctions for homicide: “Blood defiles the land, and expiation cannot be made on behalf of the land for blood shed on it except by the blood of the man that shed it.”74 Not the individual or the clan but God, as the ruler of the tribal Israelites, alone is entitled to take vengeance.75 In this respect, revenge and justice are not contraries, but are related. While the God of the Old Testament is sometimes described as “compassionate [and] long-suffering,”76 God is also depicted as having a “sword steeped in blood” awaiting a “day of vengeance”77 and as showing “unfailing love” by causing enemies’ “life-blood [to] spurt[ed] over [his] garments.”78 In the world revealed in the Old Testament, revenge seems requisite to reestablishing the natural order: “And the sun stood still and the moon halted until a nation had taken vengeance on its enemies.”79 Revered Old Testament figures such as Samson80 and Deborah81 are renowned for their acts of heroic revenge. The New Testament likewise ratifies God’s right to avenge; Paul writes that God will “pay every man for what he has done…. [T]here will be the fury of retribution…. trouble and distress for every human being who is an evil-doer.”82 The principle of God’s justice is inextricably aligned with willingness to take revenge.
Although virtues such as courage and fidelity remained important in early societies, with the emergence of the pollution doctrine, blood vengeance and the duty to one’s clan was reluctantly ceded to the polis, or city-state. As the state managed to characterize itself as the victim, it could argue more effectively that the needs of the individual victim and family were less significant than a balancing within the state itself. If the state claims that it must reestablish the natural order that has been disrupted by the crime, then the importance of the victim’s need for some personal balancing becomes virtually insignificant. Like Euripides’ Orestes or Dorfman’s Paulina, the victim must be willing to forgo any personal desire for vengeance so that the state can function in an orderly fashion for some larger good. State punishment, then, carried an important message related to the pollution doctrine: a wrong was committed not just against the individual but also against the social unit itself—in many cases the state embodied in the person of the king.83
Gradually, the complete suppression of private revenge came to be presented as being essential to the advancement of civilization, as requisite to an ordered society. When the state takes revenge in the form of retribution, however, the passion leaches out of it; revenge is passionate, retribution is dispassionate.84 Over time, revenge, once an important component of justice systems, became justice’s polar opposite. Thus the powerful image in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the emotional drive for revenge taking its rightful place at wisdom’s side, is unrealized.
This ragged history reveals that revenge did not always have a bad reputation. Humankind was not always embarrassed by a desire to balance a harm with a comparable harm in an act of revenge. What, then, occurred that created the polarization? And why was it seen as necessary?
Chapter Two
The Demonizing of Revenge
If thou didst ever thy dear father love—
…
Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
In the present age … we are inclined to think that civilized people are not given to hatred and to an anger so intense that it generates the desire for revenge.
—Jeffrie Murphy, Forgiveness and Mercy
The first quotation, spoken by the ghost of Hamlet’s father at the initial meeting between the prince and the ghost, was written around 1600, the second in 1988. In less than 400 years, the beliefs, in Western culture at least, that surround the taking of revenge have metamorphosed from viewing revenge as a natural and necessary component of love and the requisite mark of kinship to an all-out condemnation of revenge as unfit for “civilized people.” What happened in the interim? Revenge had a nearly sacrosanct place in early conceptions of justice. What changed the popular opinion concerning revenge from recognizing it as a mark of honor to judging it a desperate and illegal act?
The willingness of people to abdicate the right to take personal revenge was contingent upon the strength of the central authority. The people’s obedience also depended on the sovereign’s willingness and ability to take on revenge as a state responsibility. By the twelfth century, in most places in the Western world, the state had grown strong enough to fully usurp the right to take vengeance. Private revenge became extralegal as the state claimed a monopoly on legal violence. Homicide ceased to be a private wrong calling for familial response in the form of a death or compensation, but rather became a capital offense, a crime against the state as well as the individual or family. Centralized in this way, revenge became what is commonly called retribution, that is, revenge enacted by the state.1 Additionally, the state acting in a person’s behalf—taking on one’s violent act, so to speak—became synonymous with justice. To get justice meant getting the state to punish the wrongdoer.
The degree of private restraint, nonetheless, was always proportional to the strength of the sovereign. The strong arm of the law alone, however, could not convince people to give up what they had regarded as a sacred privilege and duty. The story of the state’s usurpation includes great resistance from people accustomed to righting their own private wrongs. Because revenge was deeply connected to a sense of kinship, family loyalty, and courage, other more subtle maneuvers were necessary to complete the transfer.
While the pollution doctrine might provide the state with a rationale to justify its participation in punishment, that rationale alone cannot eliminate the desire for private revenge that has been so deeply part of human culture. Paulina does not argue against the state’s right to prosecute, but she does insist that her own needs be taken into account. When she asks Gerardo (standing in for the official state as head of the government commission), “What about my good?” Gerardo has no reply except to ask for her sacrifice. How else can he respond? In the legal system he serves, Paulina’s “good” has no standing. Paulina issues another unanswerable challenge: “Why is it always people like me who always have to sacrifice, who