Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
-196-
we have the same enemies. That is why Peter mimics the crowd's contempt for Jesus.
His vulnerability to mimetic pressure is not exceptional but typical. Peter, however, is
not just any member of that crowd; he is the individual with the greatest spiritual
investment in Jesus. If fidelity and steadfastness can be expected from anyone, they
must be expected from Peter. The purpose of the scene is not to humiliate Peter but to
reveal the immense power, the evil power of mimetic contagion.
The two collective murders portrayed in the Gospels are mimetic and so are the deaths
of the biblical prophets that the Gospels explicitly associate with Jesus. There, too, a
mimetic consensus is part of the picture. The Suffering Servant dies at the hands of a
community mimetically united against him ( Isaiah 53). Another example is Jonah, who
does not die but, as we all know, is swallowed by a whale. This whale, however, would
not swallow Jonah if he had not been cast into the sea by the unanimous crew of the ship
on which he has embarked. This expulsion is a collective casting out similar to the
Passion. The whale is an image of the violent crowd, and this is what Hobbes obviously
understood when he entitled his famous work
Leviathan
.
Instead of one collective murder, we now have many, and their mimetic nature is the
reason for their similarities. What is the relevance of this mimetic violence to the idea of
Satan casting out Satan?
Besides collective violence, there is also violence and conflict on a smaller scale in the
Gospels, violence between two or a few individuals. This violence also has a mimetic
dimension, like the collective violence, and Satan is also involved.
Not unlike Jesus, Satan says to us: "Imitate me" and he, himself, is an imitator. His
ultimate model is God the Father, the same model that Jesus has.
Imitation is characteristic of both Jesus and Satan. We always imitate someone when we
desire, either Jesus or Satan. In the Gospels, therefore, desire itself is mimetic. It is
rooted not in the desiring subject, not in the desired object but in a third party, the model
of our desire. If this model influences us through his own desire, we both desire the
same object. We become rivals.
Since Jesus recommends imitation, mimetic desire is good, it is even very good, the best
thing in the world, since it is the only road to the true God. But it is the same as human
freedom, and it is also the road to Satan. What is the difference between the mimetic
desire of Jesus and the mimetic desire of Satan? The difference is that Satan imitates
God in a spirit of rivalry. Jesus imitates God in a spirit of childlike and innocent
obedience and this is what he advises us to do as well. Since there is no
-197-
acquisitive desire in God, the docile imitation of God cannot generate rivalry.
When mimetic rivalry is triggered, the two competing desires ceaselessly reinforce each
other and violence is likely to erupt. But mimetic rivalry is not satanic to begin with, it is
not sinful per se, it is only a permanent occasion of sin.
In order to designate the exasperation of mimetic rivalry, the Gospels have a marvelous
word that, at times, seems almost synonymous with Satan,
skandalon
. The idea comes
from the Bible and it means the obstacle against which one keeps stumbling. The Greek
word appears first in the Greek Bible and it comes from a verb that signifies to limp.
The more we stumble against an obstacle, the easier it should be to avoid further
stumbling but, frequently, the opposite happens: we stumble so much that we seem to be
limping.
The
skandalon
designates a very common inability to walk away from mimetic rivalry
which turns it into an addiction. The
skandalon
is anything that attracts us in proportion
to the suffering or irritation that it causes us. It is even the aching tooth that we cannot
stop testing with our tongue, even though it hurts more and more. The
skandalon
is all
kinds of destructive addiction, drugs, sex, power, and above all morbid competitiveness,
professional, sexual, political, intellectual, and spiritual, especially spiritual.
The old translation, "stumbling block," made all this as clear as it can ever be. The
disappearance from modern Bibles of the English expression "stumbling block" or, from
the French Bibles, of its French equivalent,
pierre d'achoppement
, is a great and
completely unnecessary loss. The new translations do not convey the idea of something
that simultaneously attracts and repels. I do not know what has happened in German but,
in English and in French, they are as deceptive as they are flat.
Like many contemporary Christians, the translators of the Bible are greatly intimidated
by all the fashionable theories that would finally succeed in discrediting the Bible if they
were not first discredited themselves. Christians are excessively impressed by all the incessant and crude propaganda against biblical ideas, notably against the
skandalon
which is often accused of being the child of Victorian puritanism, a remarkable
accusation to say the least. Modern theories are secretly jealous because the
skandalon
easily achieves everything that our psychoanalyses and psychopathologies vainly try to
achieve. This jealousy is the true reason for the rather ludicrous slander. The enormous
range and power of
skandalon
makes it easy to refute these attacks. This is what we are
now going to see.
-198-
Scandals, Jesus says, must happen. When scandals start happening they proliferate to
such an extent that the world seems to come to an end. But the world endures and some
counter-force must be at work, not powerful enough to do away with scandals forever,
which would prevent them from happening, powerful enough, though, to moderate their
effects, to keep scandals under some form of control.
If Satan could indeed cast out Satan, it means that Satan himself and not God would be
the policeman who keeps his own disorder in check. This necessarily means that, at
some point in the crisis that scandals generate, they must turn, somehow, into a force for
order. This idea sounds impossible and even crazy but a careful examination of the
various uses of
skandalon
reveals that it is both possible and true.
Just before his Passion, Jesus warns his disciples that he is about to become a scandal to
them. As a group, the disciples do not behave as badly as Peter but at the time of Jesus'
arrest, they all scatter ingloriously and they do not reappear until after the resurrection.
Whereas Peter, at least for a while, becomes an active persecutor, the other disciples are
passive accomplices of the persecutors.
This passivity is a limited form of participation in the Passion, but it is participation
nevertheless. It is fascinating that the word "scandal" would apply in this case. It truly
applies to all degrees of participation in the Passion.
Scandals, we found, are permanently conflictual relationships' in our individual lives.
Now we see that the word also applies to the participation in the mimetic consensus
against Jesus. This use is disconcerting. We tend to feel that our private rivalries, our
intense conflicts, do express something genuinely personal and unique in us. The
conflictual nature of scandals seems to guarantee that they are what the existentialists
would call an authentic modality of human existence, that they cannot turn gregarious at
the drop of a hat.
We feel this way because, as a rule, we are scandalized. Jesus is not and he feels
differently. He knows that scandals are mimetic from the start and they become more so
as they are exacerbated. They become more and more impersonal, anonymous,
undifferentiated, and therefore interchangeable. Beyond a certain threshold of
exasperation, scandals will substitute for one another, with no awareness on our part.
If we look carefully at the operation of scandals in the Gospels, we will have to
conclude that they are very much the same thing as demonic and satanic possession,
which is also characterized by a process of transference, as in the case of the Gerasa
demons, for instance. Jesus, I believe, prefers to speak the language of scandals, whereas his disciples feel more at home in the language of Satan and his demons.
Once again, Peter is a good example. When Jesus first announces that
-199-
he will suffer at the hands of the people, Peter is scandalized. His ideal is the same as
ours, worldly success, and he tries to instill it into his master. He turns his own desire
into a model that Jesus should imitate. This is how Satan operates, of course. Hence the
famous words: "Move behind me Satan, because you are a scandal to me." If the
scandalized disciple had succeeded in mimetically transmitting his own mimetic desire
to his master, he would have scandalized Jesus straight out of his divine mission.
Peter's behavior is the combined effect of his preexisting scandal, which is mimetic, and
the additional mimetic push provided by the crowd.
All those who join a belligerent crowd act more or less like Peter. They all transfer their
private scandals to some public target. Men become so burdened with scandals that they
desperately, if unconsciously, seek the public substitutes upon whom to unburden
themselves. As they become more numerous, the target's attractiveness as a target
increases, and the process becomes irresistible.
The notion of scandal bridges the gap between individual and collective violence. The
mobility of scandals, their tendency to unite around a common victim, provides a
mediation, a communication between the two levels.
The violent unanimity of the Passion results from a massive transference of scandals, a
snowballing so powerful that its effects become inescapable.
When this unanimity is achieved, the guilt of the victim becomes an absolute certainty
to the participants and the expulsion and destruction of that victim is experienced by
each one as a destruction of his or her own scandal, a personal liberation. When this
happens, peace immediately returns and the mob is no more.
These effects of the mimetic consensus are recorded in the account of the Passion. After
Pilate submits to the crowd, all agitation subsides. The death of Jesus becomes a show at
the end of which the mob peacefully disperses.
The unanimous violence produces a peace of its own, rooted in the mimetic consensus.
In the specific case of the Cross, this violence, ultimately, is not unanimous. At first, the
disciples are contaminated by it; they almost become a part of the consensus, but they
finally break away from it. As a result, the Passion is not a perfect example of what it
nevertheless illustrates, the unanimous collective murder. It comes close enough,
however, to provide the readers with all the information required for a full
understanding of the phenomenon.
Understandably, the Gospels pay more attention to the Christian communion around the
resurrected Jesus than they do to the unholy communion of the persecutors, but they are
not completely indifferent
-200-
to this last phenomenon. Luke, in particular, mentions a most significant instance of this
unholy communion.
When Herod turned Jesus over to Pilate, Luke informs us that "from this day, Herod and
Pilate, who had been enemies, became friends" ( Luke 23:12). From a historical
viewpoint the information is insignificant but, in regard to the effects of the unanimous
mimetic violence upon the participants, it is enormously significant.
The Christian communion is rooted in a passionate rejection and critique of what the
other communion uncritically espouses, the guilt of the victim. It would be difficult to
find two attitudes farther apart than these two.
The communion of mimetic rivalry is Satan's work. The word "Satan," originally,
signifies the accuser, the one who brings a law suit against someone else. In the Gospels,
Satan's power is his ability to make false accusations so convincing that they become the
unassailable truth of entire communities. To call this process "Satan," which is what the
Gospels really do, is highly appropriate.
The Christian communion is based on the rejection of the false accusation, on the
understanding that it is false. According to John, this understanding must be ascribed not
to men alone but to the Holy Spirit, whose name is highly appropriate, too, as
appropriate as Satan for the other communion, since he is called the "Paraclete," a Greek
word that simply means the lawyer for the defense, the defender of victims. Jesus is the
first man who decisively disrupts the mimetic consensus against the most innocent of all
victims, himself. That is why he is called the first Paraclete. After he is gone, a second
Paraclete will continue his work.
Our understanding of the difference between the mimetic communion of the persecutors
and the Christian communion depends upon the Paraclete. In the modern world, this
understanding is either absent -- and that explains why the modern world has never
discovered the true difference between Christianity and the other religions -- or it is