PRIEST AS SCAPEGOAT
449
despair in the child. He looks elsewhere for
his
circle of authority and
tests the law personified by his teachers and later by the police. 'The
young delinquent,' says Dr. Winnicott in another paper on
Delin–
quency Research,
'values and loves the policeman.' And he points
out that
The thiefs inability to keep and enjoy what is stolen
is
well known. The boy who steals apples from an orchard and
who eats the apples himself is not ill, is not a delinquent. He
is just greedy, and his greed is relatively conscious. The anti–
social child steals apples and either wastes them or gives them
away. Intermediate is the boy who eats them and is sick, the
sickness being a bodily form of feeling guilty.
I am afraid that these considerations may seem a little remote from
the subject proposed in the title of this essay. I offer them in elucida–
tion of the first statement I have taken from Dr. Winnicott. This is
entirely germane to my purpose.
What I had been thinking about Bemanos was that all the priests
who are central characters in his novels are employed as scapegoats in
a quite primitive, magical sense. Then I began to compare Bernanos
with other Catholic writers and with non-Catholic writers, and after
a while it began to seem to me that
all
the key characters in fiction
were scapegoats in one sense or another. Indeed, I began to wonder
whether the whole of our narrative and dramatic literature were not
a concerted effort to find and employ scapegoats.
I fancied that somewhere there must exist a heavy thesis by a
German professor in which all this is set forth, but I have been unable
to find it. Instead, I found 'Tommy' in Dr. Winnicott's Oxfordshire
hostel, a link between primitive ritual and sophisticated literature,
and I felt that the argument had already become a great deal less
far-fetched. I opened
The Golden Bough
with an easy mind. The
original scapegoat was Jewish.
On the Day of Atonement, which was the tenth day of the
seventh month, the Jewish high-priest laid both his hands on
the head of a live goat, confessed over it all the iniquities of
the Children of Israel, and, having thereby transferred the sins
of the people to the beast, sent it away into the wilderness.
Frazer is full of the most enchanting details of the use of animal
and inanimate creatures for the private and communal expulsion of
sin or sickness among the peoples of every part of the world, but of
course a human scapegoat is the most efficient.
