One of Shakespeare’s tragedies reminds me of the story of Alvaro Castillo. Here’s the plot:

• A melancholy young man (depressed, that is) is troubled by his parents’ behavior. He’s torn between hating and loving his mother.
• He recently flunked out of college (as opposed to the National Guard) and has begun to put on weight. He no longer has any friends. At one point he becomes convinced that two young men he knows are homosexual, and he shuns them. He seems to have turned against everyone, including his girlfriend, who soon goes insane and commits suicide by drowning herself.
• The young man has thoughts of suicide: “To be or not to be,” he worries. “To die, to sleep, perchance to dream, no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, — 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wish'd.” He thinks of suicide and death in terms of sexual imagery.
• He obtains a weapon, a sword. He kills an innocent elderly man with the sword under a paranoid delusion that someone is lying in wait for him.
• In the end, he goes on a killing rampage and succeeds not only in killing his stepfather but also committing “suicide by cop” (in a manner of speaking).

This, of course, is Hamlet.

The Castillo murder and shooting rampage are not new stories. No more than any of the school shootings before  or after Columbine were. You can find these themes in ancient Greek literature as well as in the Old Testament.

That’s why I can’t help but wonder if there were any English majors on the Castillo jury.

The Scourge of God

One of the issues that the prosecution and its experts raised was Alvaro Castillo’s seemingly contradictory statements about his religious beliefs. On the one hand, Castillo repeatedly asked for forgiveness. On the other, he said the killings he planned were “sacrifices.” The prosecution and its psychiatrists took these statements to be proof that Castillo was fabricating the notion that he was performing God’s will by sacrificing innocents.

A competent English major would have recognized these statements as being in the literary tradition of “the scourge of God.” It was a favorite motif in Renaissance literature (when Shakespeare wrote).

By “scourge” is meant two things: 1) literally a whip and 2) a person who purges society of evil through violence and sacrificing himself. In the Middle Ages, penitential Christians would literally scourge themselves (beat themselves with whips) to purify their souls of sin. During the Reformation this sort of self-flagellation grew into disfavor. Simultaneously the rise of humanism made it possible for playwrights to conceive of heroic human beings who could purge society of its sins by violently sacrificing evil-doers and the innocent alike (because, of course, there are no truly innocent human beings – we are all sinners). These heroic characters derive from Biblical figures such as Samson, who literally pulled vengeance down on the heads of the society of evil-doers.

Every devout Christian learns about this theme, whether or not they learn to call it “the scourge of God.” The essence of religious sacrifice in Christian tradition is that both good and sinful people must sometimes be sacrificed for the greater good.

Hamlet was Shakespeare’s version of “the scourge of God.” Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine was his version of "the scourge of God.”

In my humble opinion, as a literary scholar of the Renaissance, this is “the logic” in Alvaro Castillo’s statements that he was planning to sacrifice people for their own good and was sorry for what he had done.

I’m not saying that I feel this justifies Castillo’s crimes. I’m not saying that modern Christians hold this notion. And I’m certainly not claiming that Castillo’s remarks reflect reasonable theology.

This way of thinking is completely insane, in my opinion. It proves to me that Castillo did not know the difference between right and wrong.