Guilt is felt intimately. If we feel guilty it is because we have become at the same time accuser and accused, condemned and executer, victim and perpetrator. As the Catholic philosopher Paul Ricoeur says: Guilt becomes a way of putting oneself before a sort of invisible tribunal which measures the offense, pronounces the condemnation, and inflicts the punishment; at the extreme point of interiorization, moral consciousness is a look which watches, judges and condemns; the sentiment of guilt is therefore the consciousness of being inculpated and incriminated by the interior tribunal; it is mingled with the anticipation of the punishment. In short, guilt is self-observation, self-accusation, and self-condemnation by a consciousness doubled back on itself.7.
This means that in a way there is a splitting of the person who, as Ricoeur says, judges himself. This judgment implies knowledge that I have done something of my own free will, that what I have done constitutes a fault, that I could have done otherwise, and finally that the fault is bad enough that it requires some kind of punishment, which will redeem me from my fault. So if we see the fault as a stain8, then redemption is the cleansing of that stain in order to restore the subject back to what the Catholic Church calls the State of grace. Thus, understanding guilt is essential to understanding redemption, because without guilt there is no possibility for redemption. Guilt is the motivation to achieve redemption; it is the sentiment that arises from the consciousness of being stained and in need of cleansing.
Redemption is so important to Catholic theology that it has its own discipline: soteriology (from the Greek soteria, deliverance, preservation). Scorsese's cinema is in its own way a soteriology, not a sacred soteriology but a secular one. In Scorsese's cinema man is free, man is liable, man commits faults and man needs redemption, but it is not through divine grace that this is achieved, but through his own actions here on earth.
