Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
vestige of lucidity. It almost seems as if violence is always able to conceal the truth about
itself, whether by causing the mechanism of transference to operate and reestablish the
regime of the sacred, or by pushing destruction as far as it will go.
R.G.:
Either you are violently opposed to violence and inevitably play its game, or you are
not opposed to it, and it shuts your mouth immediately. In other words, the regime of
violence cannot possibly be brought out into the open. Since the truth about violence will not
abide in the community, but must inevitably be driven out, its only chance of being heard is
when it is in the process of being driven out, in the brief moment that precedes its destruction
as the victim. The victim therefore has to reach out at the very moment when his mouth is
being shut by violence. He has to say enough for the violence to be incited against him. But
this must not take place in the dark, hallucinatory atmosphere that characterizes other
religions and produces the intellectual confusion that helps conceal their founding
mechanism. There must be witnesses who are clear-sighted enough to recount the event as it
really happened, altering its significance as little as possible.
For this to happen, the witnesses must already have been influenced by this extraordinary
person. They themselves will not escape the hold of the collective violence; but it will be
temporary. Afterward, they will recover and write down in a form that is not transfigured the
event that is primarily a transfiguration.
This unprecedented task of revealing the truth about violence requires a man who is not
obliged to violence for anything and does not think in terms of violence -- someone who is
capable of talking back to violence while remaining entirely untouched by it.
It is impossible for such a human being to arise in a world completely ruled by violence and
the myths based on violence. In order to understand that you cannot see and make visible the
truth except by taking the place of the victim, you must already be occupying that place; yet
to take that place, you must already be in possession of the truth. You cannot become aware
of the truth unless you act in opposition to the laws of violence, and you cannot act in
opposition to these laws unless you already grasp the truth. All mankind is caught within this
vicious circle. For this reason the Gospels and the whole New Testament, together with the theologians of the first councils, proclaim that Christ is God not because he was crucified, but
because he is God born of God from all eternity.
J.-M.O.:
To sum up: the proclamation of Christ's divinity, in the sense of nonviolence and
love, is not in any way a sudden disconnec-
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tion or a break in the logic of the texts that we are elucidating. In fact, it forms the only
possible conclusion to this logic.
R.G.:
The authentic knowledge about violence and all its works to be found in the Gospels
cannot be the result of human action alone. Our own inability to grasp knowledge that has
been waiting there for two millennia confirms theological intuitions that are no less certain
for being incapable of setting out explicitly their foundations in reason. These rational
foundations can become intelligible only if we proceed beyond the sacrificial version of
Christianity and are guided by the nonsacrificial reading which can emerge when the other
one has fallen away.
G.L.:
So theology is not being hyperbolic when it proclaims the divinity of Jesus. The belief
is not just an excessive piece of praise, the product of a kind of rhetorical overkill. It is the
only fit response to an inescapable constraint.
R.G.:
To recognize Christ as God is to recognize him as the only being capable of rising
above the violence that had, up to that point, absolutely transcended mankind. Violence is the
controlling agent in every form of mythic or cultural structure, and Christ is the only agent
who is capable of escaping from these structures and freeing us from their dominance. This is
the only hypothesis that enables us to account for the revelation in the Gospel of what
violence does to us and the accompanying power of that revelation to deconstruct the whole
range of cultural texts, without exception. We do not have to adopt the hypothesis of Christ's
divinity because it has always been accepted by orthodox Christians. Instead, this hypothesis
is orthodox because in the first years of Christianity there existed a rigorous (though not yet
explicit) intuition of the logic determining the Gospel text.
A nonviolent deity can signal his existence to mankind only by becoming driven out by
violence -- by demonstrating that he is not able to remain in the Kingdom of Violence.
But this very demonstration is bound to remain ambiguous for a long time, and it is not
capable of achieving a decisive result, since it looks like total impotence to those who live
under the regime of violence. That is why at first it can have some effect only under a guise,
deceptive through the admixture of some sacrificial elements, through the surreptitious
reinsertion of some violence into the conception of the divine.
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One of the important aspects of Girard's reading of the Gospels, which he approaches
from the standpoint of his mimetic anthropology, is his concern with Satan. If this seems
surprising, it should not be; it goes along with the illumination of mimetic rivalry,
scandal, and collective violence that he undertakes in his work. He points out that Satan
is a reality, expressing a source of transcendence. In his analyses of Satan he has
bracketed and set aside the question of the "existence" or "reality" of Satan apart from human systems of order and the threat of disorder. Both order and disorder revolve
around mimesis and mimetic rivalry. In this essay, published originally as "How Can
Satan Cast out Satan?" in G. Braulik, W. Gross, and S. McEvenue, eds.,
Biblische
Theologie und gesellschaftlicher Wandel
( Freiburg: Herder, 1993), 125-41 (here
slightly revised), Girard focuses on Satan anthropologically as the personification of the
principles both of order and disorder: of order, because he embodies the self-organizing
system that keeps mimesis within the bounds that will perpetuate the system; of
disorder, because the order is based on a lie, a mode of representation as old as "the
foundation of the world" which controls mimesis through victimage and scapegoating in
order to maintain the "world" of which Satan is the
archē/archōn
, the "prince." The Christian revelation exposes Satan as "the father of lies" by disclosing not only the
innocence of one victim, Jesus, but of all victims. Satan attempts to cast out Satan
through murder, especially collective violence, but he is defeated in principle by the
Cross. This defeat is accomplished because the disciples, with the aid of the Paraclete,
the Spirit of God as defender of the falsely accused, break away from the mimetic
consensus of the social order that is undergirded and constantly regenerated by the
scapegoat mechanism.
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In Mark 3:23 Jesus asks a question that he does not answer: "How can Satan cast out
Satan?" In the modern period we pride ourselves on our superior knowledge and
rationality, so the question of Satan and expelling Satan is an embarrassing puzzle for
us. But the solution to the puzzle may be found in the Gospels, and in the Gospels we
must go to the center of all significance, the Passion. Jesus calls it the hour of Satan.
Why? Because it is Satan's attempt to cast out Jesus, to expel him as if he were another
Satan, a worse Satan than Satan himself.
This is the real answer to Jesus' question, but we do not really understand what it means.
The reason for our puzzlement is that the Passion as a violent process, a demonic
expulsion, has always been ignored. But theologians and modern critics have tacitly
assumed that the Gospels intend to represent a violence so unique and incomparable that
it can only be approached theologically or anti-theologically. It cannot be studied
phenomenologically; it cannot be compared to any other violence.
I believe that it can. Far from presenting the Passion as an isolated event, the Gospels
surround it with other acts of violence, collective or collectively inspired violence.
The Parable of the Vineyard is one example. After planting his vineyard, the owner
entrusts it to tenants and departs for some distant land. From time to time, he sends
messengers to collect his share of the crop but, each time, they are cast out of the
vineyard, violently expelled by all the winemakers. And then, finally, acting collectively
once again, the winemakers cast out and kill the last messenger, the owner's own son.
The last violence is unique in respect to the victim's identity, but it is not unique as
violence; it is similar to all previous acts of violence.
When. Jesus says that he will die like all prophets before him, it means that his death
will repeat the ancient pattern of collective violence that we have in the Parable. The
prophets are the same people as all the messengers sent by the owner of the vineyard
before he sends his son. The same point is repeated time and again. "You have killed all
the prophets," Jesus says to his listeners, "and now you are going to kill me."
The Gospel passages I just mentioned, and the others I am about to mention, are rarely
quoted nowadays, except by those who want to show that the Gospels are anti-Semitic.
Those who have no such intention find these texts embarrassing. They seem to single
out the Jews as collective murderers not only of Jesus but of all holy men.
The emphasis is on the Jews in the immediate context, but the whole human race is
always implicitly or even explicitly part of the picture.
This is the case in Matthew's phrase about the "righteous blood" of all the prophets that
was shed
epi tēs gēs
. This expression means the entire earth, the whole human world.
This is also the case in Luke's phrase about the prophets whose blood was shed "from
the foundation
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of the world, the blood of Abel the just." At the time of Cain and Abel, the Jewish
people did not exist.
Even when the wording seems to support the idea of an exclusively Jewish violence, the
context makes this interpretation impossible. The collective murders are presented as
worldwide since the dawn of history. The Gospels are really alluding to a specific
phenomenon, an identifiable type of violence, with its own characteristic features. In
order to achieve a correct understanding of the type as type, we must apprehend and
gather all characteristic features.
Can we do this with the Passion alone? I am certain that we could but we do not have to.
The Passion is not the only detailed account we have of a collective or collectively
inspired murder in the Gospels. In two out of four we have a second murder, the
beheading of John the Baptist. Our investigation must take this second murder into
account.
The process behind John's death greatly resembles the process behind the Cross. In both
instances it all begins with those people whose hostility to the two victims predates the
actual event, in the case of Jesus the Jewish religious leaders, in the case of John a single
individual, Herodias. The small beginning contrasts with the bigness of the phenomenon
itself, the polarization of many people, a whole crowd, against a victim who, until then,
had not been an object of hostility and even, in the case of Jesus, only a few days before,
had been greeted with enthusiasm by the very same crowd. The polarization is the real
event, the essential phenomenon, not the way in which it is triggered.
What is the force behind this hostile polarization? Is it God himself? Do the Gospels
intend to portray a violence ordained and manipulated by God for the purpose of having
an innocent victim sacrificed? If this were true, the God of the Gospels would greatly
resemble the gods who incite the Greek and Trojan warriors against each other in the
Iliad
.
The hostile polarization against John the Baptist is facilitated by Salome's dancing. The
Gospels certainly do not regard this dancing as divinely inspired. In pagan sacrifices the
immolation is often preceded by ritual dances. Their purpose is to prepare the
participants for this violent action. Salome's dancing has this kind of effect, which the
Gospels regard as evil, as something satanic rather than divine.
The effects of dancing, traditionally, are defined as mimetic. Herod's guests are
mimetically possessed by the dancer. There is no counterpart to Salome's dance in the
Passion, but the two accounts relate the same mimetic effects of someone joining the
hostile crowd. Peter's denial of association with Jesus is the most striking instance of
this.
Peter is very much like us modern men. He wants to be religiously correct. He cannot
stand the disapproval of his neighbors. When we want to make friends with a group of
people, we first show them that we all have the same friends, but this is not enough; we
must also show that