When justice betrays itself

But the condemnation of Jesus is not just a miscarriage of justice. It is also a social response to the crisis of the times. Because when an order falters and when tensions become unmanageable, societies often look for a point on which to converge the disorder, a body on which to unload widespread anguish. Someone is needed to pay for the widespread blame. Someone on whom to focus resentment. It does not matter if he is really guilty. It is enough that his elimination appears as a way out capable of restoring a temporary peace. René Girard has given a precise name to this mechanism: the scapegoat. The violence of all against all is recomposed into the violence of all against one. The group pacifies around the victim. Order is reborn on sacrifice. In this light, the Cross is not only a religious event, it is also the revelation of a social grammar. When we cannot bear indeterminacy, we look for a culprit to make the world readable again.

It is not difficult to recognise this dynamic even outside the sacred texts. Every era constructs its own providential culprits: minorities, foreigners, dissidents, the poor. The figures are different, but the function is the same. It is a matter of absorbing collective anxiety, transforming disorder into imputation and restoring a momentary sense of unity to the community. Sacrifice does not only belong to the past. It changes language, it changes scene, it changes liturgy, but it keeps its own logic intact.

And it is here that the symbolism of Christian Easter introduces a decisive break. For the Gospel narrative does not stop at condemnation. It does not consign the victim to his pacifying function. It does not allow the sacrifice to close with order re-established and power re-confirmed, as so many other sacrifices in history have closed. Instead, it introduces an aftermath. And this after does not coincide with the simple rehabilitation of the innocent. There is no appeal, there is no revision of judgement, there is no corrective judgement issued by a higher court. Resurrection does not fix the mechanism. It radically disproves it.

This is perhaps the most radical provocation of Easter. It does not show human justice finally capable of correcting itself. It shows the limit of justice when it claims to be sufficient for itself. It shows that there is something that the law alone cannot produce. The full recognition of the innocent, the interruption of the sacrificial cycle, the liberation from that moral accounting for which someone, sooner or later, must pay for everyone.

The Grand Inquisitor fully understands the danger. He knows that the problem is not error, but excess. It is that Christ who embodies an ungoverned freedom and a non-negotiable dignity. We must govern men, says the Inquisitor, not expose them to the abyss of freedom. One must keep the world in balance, not open it to impossible demands.

And yet, on that page, Dostoevsky's strength lies not only in the words of the Inquisitor. It lies above all in Christ's silence. To that reasoning so coherent, so persuasive, so politically sophisticated, Jesus does not respond with a refutation. He does not oppose a counter-system. He does not enter into the same grammar of power. He does not speak the truth. He is the truth. He responds with a kiss. Love that conquers all. An act that does not challenge the order on its own ground, but disarms it. It does not found a new institutional architecture, but shows that all architecture, when it forgets the human face, is destined sooner or later to turn into a sacrificial machine.

In his diary of 1958, Mark Rothko - the protagonist in these weeks of a beautiful exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi - identified the essential elements of his poetics: a clear preoccupation with death, sensuality, tension, irony, wit, the fleeting and the accidental, and finally hope, but only 'for 10 per cent'. Just enough,' he wrote, 'to make the tragic bearable. There are no promises of easy salvation. The night is not obliterated in the glow of consolatory rhetoric. But rather it says that even in the darkest hour, in the thousand nights of Good Friday, there can remain a minimum space of openness, a slit, a remnant not totally absorbed by despair. It is not much ten per cent, but it is there. It is there. It is a hope that does not erase the darkness but passes through it.

Like the Christian Easter that does not eliminate evil, but robs it of the right to the last word. And so, returning to the theme of (in)justice, after the law has spoken, after the procedure has been accomplished and the sacrifice has been consummated, something still remains that cannot be dismissed. A wound remains. A void followed by a question. Rothko's large backgrounds seem to educate the eye to precisely this. Not to fill the darkness too quickly and not to mistake silence for absence. The Interfaith Chapel in Houston does not simply construct a space to hang paintings. There, Rothko constructs an inner environment, a place of crossing. The large dark surfaces impose no doctrine. They only demand a discipline of the gaze. It is a place into which one enters alone, as in every decisive passage, and in which the visitor is called upon to confront darkness before being able to understand light.

It is difficult not to detect an Easter resonance. Not because Rothko paints the resurrection, nor because he translates Christianity into abstract painting. But because his work stubbornly tends beyond the pure closure of death. In designing the Chapel, Rothko had in mind the tension between judgement and promise, between tragedy and hope. It is this dialectic that makes his work so close, at least in terms of spiritual analogy, to the movement of Easter, which represents not, after all, the removal of the negative, but its crossing over in search of a 'beyond'.

Rothko worked on the Chapel but never saw it completed. He died before it was inaugurated. That space, so deeply marked by his confrontation with blackness, silence and the limit, was dedicated in 1971, when the artist was no longer there. There is no need to force this biographical coincidence. It is enough to recognise that it condenses a profound truth of his research. His work closest to a 'beyond' of death is born under the sign of incompleteness, entrusted to others, to time, to a fulfilment that exceeds its author.

This is why Rothko's darker canvases are not simply images of the end. They are surfaces in which, if one agrees to pause, the darkness reveals itself to be less compact than it seems. Vibrations, depths, edges, a restrained light appear. The same experience one can have when visiting the rooms that the Tate Modern in London has dedicated to the painter. One does not find there an easy consolation, but a resistance. Not a denial of the tragic, but a refusal to let it degenerate into nihilism.

Beauty - Dostoevsky reminds us again - is not the opposite of the tragic. It is what prevents the tragic from closing in absolute despair. That is why, quoting the Russian again, it saves the world. That is why we understand Rothko as never before. He does not spare us the crisis, but he rescues us from the temptation, so modern, to confuse the crisis with the ultimate truth of things.

And this Easter, perhaps, asks the same of us. Certainly not to deny death, but to reject its absolute sovereignty. We must not forget the conflict, but we must certainly remove it from the logic of the necessary. The Friday of the cross - in Easter logic - does not have the last word. Similarly, Rothko's canvases force us to make the severe, stubborn, very modern effort to pass through blackness without pausing to worship it. We glimpse death by denying it the right to be definitive.

Easter offers us no simple consolation. It does not tell us that everything will be made right in the end. It does not promise that the pain of the innocent will be magically transformed. It forces us to admit the scandal of a justice that believes itself to be just but is not. And how many times even today? How many times does an irreproachable procedure generate an intolerable outcome? How often does the language of responsibility serve to mask the renunciation of compassion? And how often, while everything seems to proceed according to the rules, do we stop seeing the concrete person overwhelmed by those same rules?

Contemporary societies like to think of themselves as immune from these drifts because they have refined forms, multiplied guarantees, and made decision-making processes more impersonal. But impersonality alone does not save from violence. Sometimes it simply makes it more opaque. The suffering inflicted by a procedure may be less visible than that imposed by a tyrant, but it is no less real. On the contrary, the very absence of an obvious perpetrator makes it more difficult to name it, to contest it, to interrupt it.

Perhaps this is the most restless and most fertile legacy of the trial of the cross. True justice needs to allow itself to be wounded by violated innocence, to recognise when respect for form is becoming indifference to substance, to escape the age-old seduction of necessary sacrifice.

The Easter question is all here. What remains when justice fails? What remains, first of all, is the truth of that failure. There remains the possibility of not calling just what is not just, even when it has consent, force, rule on its side. There remains the memory of the sacrificed innocent. And there remains, above all, the possibility, fragile and never definitive, of breaking the reflex that leads us, in hours of fear, to look for a victim instead of the truth.

Happy Easter.