Images of Christ: The sea of faith

Rowena Loverance considers a work by Holman Hunt

When I was planning this series of articles, however I framed them, this work by William Holman Hunt always kept turning up on the list. It is not because I think it’s a great work – I don’t. It’s clearly intended to be grotesque, but I think it only succeeds in being absurd, with the massively overcoloured background and the mangy goat. (This is the Manchester Art Gallery version; Holman Hunt also painted a larger version, now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Ellesmere Port, in which the colours of both background and goat are slightly toned down.)

It’s partly that I wanted to include a symbolic image of Jesus, since these have played such a huge part in the Christian art tradition. The idea of Christ as the Lamb of God, in particular, has had huge traction for artists down the centuries – in an international version of this series, I would be hard put to decide whether to send you all off to Belgium to marvel at the complexities of the Ghent Altarpiece, or to the Prado in Madrid practically to feel the fleece of Francisco de Zurbarán’s superlative Agnus Dei.

This, of course, is not a lamb – it’s a goat. A scapegoat, to be precise. Jewish use of the scapegoat is explained in Leviticus 16:20-22: on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a priest would confess the sins of the people during the previous year and transfer them to a goat which would then be abandoned in the wilderness. It was part of the ritual of cleansing, to make the people fit to be ‘before the Lord’. The sin was represented by a red cloth tied to the goat’s horns, which it was believed it would turn white when God accepted the offering.

The idea of Jesus as the ultimate scapegoat is heralded in Isaiah’s ‘suffering servant’ passages: ‘He himself bore the sin of many’ (Isaiah 53:12) and spelled out in John’s Gospel, ‘it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish’ (John 11: 50). Despite such textual references, however, Quakers have not been alone in arguing that the Atonement, the propriatory understanding of the Crucifixion, completely misunderstands the nature of Christ’s sacrifice. René Girard, the French philosopher, spent a lifetime arguing that Christ died so that humanity could finally break free of the notion of sacrificial religion, and bring the cycle of violence to an end.

René Girard’s work made clear that the notion of the scapegoat, far from coming to an end when the Jewish Temple was destroyed, is actually a key element in human relations. The philosopher became a Catholic partly as the result of the impact of his own theories: he wrote that Christianity was the only religion that had examined scapegoating and sacrifice from the victim’s point of view. But William Holman Hunt’s overwrought works offer an insight into that fraught period in the mid-nineteenth century when European Christianity started its long decline. He made them in 1854-55; Matthew Arnold had written Dover Beach a few years before, though it was not published until 1867. Holman Hunt painted The Scapegoat beside the Dead Sea, a long way from Arnold’s ‘distant northern shore’, but it has always seemed to me that, consciously or not, they were both describing the same landscape and hearing the sea of faith’s same ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.’

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