Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
present in forms that disguise its Christian origin. Instead of comparing innocent victims
to the lamb of God, as we would do if we were willing to acknowledge the real source
of our insight into social violence, we often say that these victims are "scapegoats." We
use this word not in the ritual sense of Leviticus but in the everyday modern sense which
is much more interesting, the sense of a victim unjustly persecuted by a semi-conscious
or unconscious group of human beings.
We can now go back to the question with which I began this presentation: "How can
Satan cast out Satan?"
From the beginning, you will recall, my answer has been that Satan casts out Satan
through the collective violence of the Passion and all
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similar murders. This answer, now, should be fully intelligible. When scandals
proliferate too much at the local level they come together, they converge upon a
necessarily irrelevant or totally innocent victim and a consensus is established at the
expense of that victim. The order that is thus born, or reborn, in this fashion is less
violent as a rule than the disorder it overcomes but it is violent and unjust nevertheless;
it is never entirely free of arbitrary violence. When Jesus accepts to die on the Cross he
accepts being one of the innumerable unknown victims upon which human order has
always been based.
The idea that Satan is both the exorcised demon and the exorcist, the one cast out and
the one who does the casting out is not a logical impossibility, a mythological absurdity
unworthy of our scientific outlook.
In the twentieth century, some scientists have developed the theory of the so-called self-
organizing systems, complex entities in which the principle of order and the principle of
disorder are one and the same. As soon as disorder reaches a certain threshold in these
systems, the forces of disruption turn into a force for reintegration and reordering.
The Satan of the Gospels is a self-organizing system. The words are not the same, of
course, but the idea of Jesus is obviously the same. Jesus might very well have said:
How can Satan cast out
himself
? but he chose to repeat the noun "Satan." All three
synoptic Gospels repeat the word "Satan." This repetition is more pleasant to the ear, no
doubt, but it is not for esthetic reasons that Jesus does it. Stylistic considerations are
subordinate to his primary purpose, which is to emphasize the paradox implicit in his
own question. This paradox is the oneness of order and disorder.
Far from being afraid of this paradox, as the now scientifically outmoded thinking of a
Rudolf Bultmann would be, the thinking of Jesus focuses our attention upon this
apparent scandal:
How can Satan expel Satan?
Who will be foolish enough to believe
that such a thing is possible? According to the traditional conception of straight
causality, it is impossible, but Jesus knows exactly what he is doing. He emphasizes
what is the most original feature in his conception of Satan. Both the disorder and order
of human culture are from the same source which is not directly divine and this, to my
knowledge, is unique to the Gospels, so unique that, to my knowledge, it has never been
really understood.
Satan, therefore, represents a source of transcendence. From the point of view of the
Gospels, this transcendence is false in the sense that it is not really supernatural but it is
real in the sense that the power of political and social institutions rooted in pagan
religion is quite real. In order to designate these strange combinations of religious
illusion and social reality, the Gospels have a number of labels such as "the powers of
this
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world," "celestial powers," "thrones," "dominations," "principalities," "rulers of this world," "angels," and, of course, "Satan."
These powers are always presented as united in their decision to crucify Jesus. This is no
propagandistic trick to inflate the historical importance of the Passion. The reference to
the Cross is a definition of the powers in terms of the mimetic runaway and founding
murder in which they are inevitably rooted even if they have not participated directly in
the death of Jesus.
Even though theologians have not made this doctrine explicit, it upholds orthodox
attitudes against what may be called the two great temptations of modern Christianity.
The first consists in divinizing the social order, with the reactionary Christian thinkers of
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as Joseph de Maistre and Carl Schmitt.
The second is still in full swing and it consists in divinizing the social disorder and
revolution in the name of liberation.
These two currents oppose one another fiercely and continuously but they are very much
alike at bottom. They are the two antithetical versions of
modernism
, a distortion and
mutilation of Christianity which is the ransom of a real but still incomplete discovery of
the founding role played by religion in human society. "Modernism" must be defined as
the almost universal illusion in our world that society is everything and that religion
ultimately boils down to political and social questions.
The phrase concerning "the blood shed since the foundation of the world," shows the
enormous scope of the idea I am trying to explore. It would be foolish to suppose that
the coupling in the Gospels of the first collective murder and the first human culture
suggests only a fortuitous conjunction of the two. The message is clear. From the
beginning, human culture was rooted in the murders triggered and manipulated by
Satan.
The story of Cain perfectly illustrates this vision. Cain has two titles to fame. The first is
Abel's murder and the second is the foundation of the first civilization, or culture. A
look at Genesis shows that the two events are one. The first law is promulgated as a
result of the murder, and it is the first human law against murder. The word "Cain"
stands not for a single murder but for the entire community unified by the first culture.
My thesis is really that the Gospels view Satan as the principle -- if not the entire reality
-- of human culture since the foundation of the world. In order to clinch this thesis and
to confirm the coherence of the Gospels, we need a text that would explicitly link Satan
to the other two themes which are already linked by the texts we have already quoted,
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the collective murder and "the foundation of the world," the invention of human culture.
The synoptic Gospels have no such text, but John has one that seems somewhat obscure
at first but is really the richest of all. It sums up and makes more complete a doctrine
regarding Satan and the founding murder that is the same in all four Gospels, as is
always the case with everything essential.
Like all our previous texts, this one must be read in the context not of Judaism alone but
of mankind as a whole:
You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desire. He was a
murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no
truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. ( John 8:44)
The "devil" means the same thing as " Satan." The "beginning" (
archē
) means the same thing as "the foundation of the world" (
katabolē tou kosmou
) i.e., the origin of human culture, not creation ex nihilo.
The devil is alien to all truth because he was a murderer from the beginning, a murderer
of the collective type we are investigating. Satan's lie is his false accusation and the
unanimous conviction of the human murderers that their victim is really guilty.
The foundation of the first culture was the moment when this lie began to envelop
mankind in the sense not simply of some false information but of a "system of
representation" that still permeates our thinking, long after primitive institutions are
gone. This is an imprisonment that men do not passively inherit from their ancestors;
they continuously revive it, even if only in attenuated and nonlethal, but fundamentally
unaltered forms, as a result of their mimetic rivalries and scandals.
Men are forever rooted and rerooted in the foundational violence that makes a vicarious
removal of scandals possible. To say that our human will is to do the desires of our
father, the devil, is another way of saying that we cannot really cut loose from the
primordial lie, from the effects of the primordial murder. We still cannot acknowledge
our dependence on primordial violence. Satan is not merely "the father of lies" but, as
some manuscripts have it, the "father of liars," which really means all men, insofar as
men still do not understand what Jesus is talking about in the lines we are reading. Just
as they did in the days of Jesus, they confidently assert that it must be sheer nonsense,
some kind of magical belief in which modern man cannot share because he has become
too "rational."
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Let me reiterate my main point: when the disorder of scandals gets worse and worse, it
automatically brings back the unanimous victimage that generates a new order or
regenerates the old. If this is true, human history, before the Christian revelation, must
be an endless alteration of order and disorder in all parts of the world. When one cycle is
accomplished, everything returns to the crisis of scandals or, in mythical terms, to
"primordial chaos," but then a new collective murder is triggered that initiates a new
cycle.
From a Christian viewpoint, ancient theories of the Eternal Return contain some truth
since they know about these cycles, which are the same thing as the "self-organizing
system" of Satan, but they cannot discover the engine that powers the cycles, the
foundational power of the mimetic consensus, or victimage mechanism, or generative
scapegoating.
The end of this circular time, the shift from an eternally recurring world to a time which
has a real beginning and a real end is inseparable from the revelation of the force that
until the Judaic and Christian revelation had powered the cycles but now loses its
effectiveness as a result of being revealed.
We must envisage this shift from a circular to a linear temporality in conjunction with the idea that the Cross is a decisive defeat for Satan, the end of his kingdom, which
follows logically from the whole mimetic interpretation. This idea is part of the system
of thought we are outlining, the total doctrine of Satan in the Gospels and the New
Testament. It has nothing to do with a comforting illusion, an instance of wishful
thinking that anti-Christian thinking could easily demystify.
This is the supreme theme regarding Satan, the most amazing and the most difficult to
believe, the idea that the Cross is a decisive victory over Satan, the end of his power. Far
from being absurd, this theme flows logically from everything we have learned so far.
Once we realize that the power of Satan is dependent upon a lie, which will not remain
effective unless it is firmly believed by all men, an untruth that is always mistaken for a
sacred truth, everything else follows. In order to remain credible, this untruth, this
satanic lie must remain hidden. It must be protected from human curiosity.
The founding murder is shrouded in darkness. Initially, this darkness springs from the
collective madness and hallucination that characterize the transferential runaway and the
unanimous violence. This is the darkness of myth and of mythical origins. The violence
at the heart of myth resembles the violence of the Passion, but the victim is always
guilty. Even when such mythical victims as Oedipus become gods, they are still guilty
of whatever they were guilty to start with. They become gods of violence, gods of the
violent sacred.
Only later, very much later, does the darkness of mythical origins give way to more
decorous forms of befuddlement and self-deception, those
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of philosophies and ideologies. There is a sophisticated darkness of modern knowledge
that is continuous with the darkness of mythology, and it is fitting that it would rely
more and more on mythological expression, on the Oedipus myth, for instance, that may
well be the myth par excellence of our post-Christian and neo-pagan confusion.
Satan would not be the prince of this world if he were not, first of all, the prince of
darkness. The Christian revelation dissipates the darkness of the founding murder by
showing the innocence not only of one victim, Jesus, wrongly accused by Satan, but of
all such victims. The Christian revelation undermines the power of Satan, slowly at first
but then faster and faster.
The texts on the subject all claim that mankind, thanks to the Cross, for the first time in
its history, is no longer in bondage to Satan. Since Satan's power is revealed by the
Passion, it has to be identical with the Passion in some essential respect and this identity
can only related to the violent process we have uncovered, the mimetic polarization and
unanimous murder which is the process of Satan casting out Satan. This is the secret that
the Gospels force out of hiding merely by their faithful representation of one collective