C. S. Lewis is right to remind us that revenge is a perversion of something good. Revenge, he writes, ‘wants the evil of the bad man to be to him what it is to everyone else’. This is why the avenger not only wants the guilty party to suffer, but ‘to suffer at his hands, and to know it, and to know why’. The lex talionis of the Old Testament, which seeks an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, is superseded in the gospels by Jesus Christ and his turning of cheeks. An intuition for justice is not inherently shameful; it’s just that in baking our enemies into pies, we run the risk of losing
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