Three types of killing

From a spiritual perspective killing falls under three classes:

• killing to protect life,
• killing out of error,
• killing for gain.

Killing to protect life occurs in upholding order, in war, in persecution and in need. Spiritually it teaches a man the weight of life. Killing for gain lets a man accept that the world is for the taking and spiritually that isolates him, because there can be no place for giving under that assumption: once it's allowed to take what you want, a gift is no more meaningful than throwing a banknote up in the wind. In a sense it's rather ironic that those, who crave the world the most, end up in a state in which the world is nothing but a phenomenon to please their senses, that is they become in this respect exactly like those, who don't know what to do with their lives, not out of a lack of will, but because their will has shut down its own venues. Only that man can bless the world who believes the world to consist of personalised gifts, possible sharing of these gifts, possibly to different degrees, notwithstanding.

And whatever isn't killing to protect life or killing for gain is killing out of error. That is the point of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. It is spiritually quite impossible to come to any middle ground. Killing for the common good without actually protecting life does not exist. There are only three spiritual states after killing, namely either

• pity,
• remorse or
• emptiness,

and so Raskolnikov can only find remorse. This trinity of spiritual states applies of course for other sins as well. Oscar Wilde wrote a rather silly individualised version of Crime and Punishment titled The Picture of Dorian Gray in which he substituted personal betterment through experience for the common good and debauchery for murder. Silly, because that is of course completely unrealistic, whereas Dostoevsky was 51 years ahead of his time.

Some films express pity, usually about law enforcement or war, after killing, hardly any express remorse, though there are of course film versions of Crime and Punishment. Emptiness is difficult to show in a film, because it needs a while to become apparent. Instead, if a film wanted to be realistic, it would have to show an almost animal hunger for life after the killing. Few films do that though. Plein Soleil comes to mind. In general, however, killing isn't followed by much emotion in movie theatres. And most deeper depictions, like Shadow of a Doubt, don't know where they are going, that is they oscillate between the three spiritual states. It is a little strange that, this ubiquitousness without any real interest in the subject. Perhaps owed to a predilection for rumour and slander? Wanting to talk about something without knowing what it is? A very immature way of making sense of the world.