Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
murder typical of them all, typical of the process that has dominated human culture
since the foundation of the world.
The spotlight upon Satan makes it impossible for him to fool humanity any longer. Once
the secret is revealed, it loses all its value. It even looks pathetic in comparison with its
enormous historical effects. Paul never quite manages to define this secret, and the
reason is not that he has doubts, or that he hesitates, or that his thinking is not up to the
task, but the words he needs simply do not exist. There is no appropriate vocabulary for
what he is saying. Here is how Colossians 2:13-15 articulates the whole question:
And you . . . God made alive together with Christ, having canceled the bond which
stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the Cross. He
disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing
over them in him.
The metaphor of a legal document that would be the charter of our bondage is suggested
to Paul, I suppose, by the legal tinge given to the whole question of victims by the very
names of Satan and the Paraclete, one being the prosecutor, as I suggested before, and
the other the lawyer for the defense. The nailing of this document to the Cross is a first
attempt to say that the principalities and powers, in other words Satan, are defeated and
even ridiculed by the Cross.
Let me repeat this essential point: once we understand that Satan's secret is the founding
murder and the scapegoat mechanism, the idea
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that Satan's power is reduced to nothing by the Cross makes perfect sense. By providing
us with an accurate portrayal of the mimetic process behind the death of Jesus, and
secondarily the death of John the Baptist, the Gospels reveal something which, in the
long run, is bound to discredit not one particular lie about one particular victim of
collective persecution only but all lies rooted in the victimage mechanism, in the
grotesquely deceptive scapegoat misunderstanding. Satan becomes a ludicrous
nonentity.
The idea that the Cross was really a trap set by God himself in order to lure Satan flows
logically from the preceding: Since Jesus, almost every time he opens his mouth, reveals
the secret of Satan's power, he becomes, in the eyes of Satan, a most intolerable source
of disorder; he must be silenced once and for all. In order to reach this goal, Satan only
has to resort to his favorite trick, which is exactly what is needed in this case, the very
trick about which Jesus is talking so much, the traditional trick of the mimetic murder
and scapegoat mechanism. Since this trick has always succeeded in the past, Satan sees
no reason why it would not succeed in the case of Jesus.
Everything turns out as anticipated by Satan except for one thing. With the help of the
Paraclete, Jesus' disciples finally break away from the mimetic consensus and provide
the world with a truthful account of what should remain hidden in this affair, at least
from the perspective of Satan.
In the light of this reading, 1 Corinthians 2:7-8, which is the crucial text, becomes fully
intelligible:
But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages
for our glorification. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they
would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
The rulers of this age are the same thing as the powers of this world and Satan himself.
Had they foreseen that the crucifixion would deprive them of the powerful tool with
which they had been operating all along, their first order of business would have been
the protection of the scapegoat mechanism, and they would have refrained from
crucifying Jesus. They would have become even before the Passion what they now have
become, hypocritical lawyers for the defense; they would have imitated Jesus in a
satanic way. They would have become the Antichrist much earlier than they have.
The idea that an ignominious death such as the Cross is really a victory, and a victory
over Satan, seems so impossible to modern commentators that they see nothing but
foolish triumphalism in the two texts I last quoted. They are inclined to ridicule the
thinking of Paul and the entire New Testament. They reduce it to vulgar propaganda.
They
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see the first Christians as a bunch of power-hungry narcissists, so depressed by their
lack of worldly importance that they need some psychic compensation.
These commentators are typically modern for their brutality and bad taste, but they have
illustrious Christian predecessors, at least up to a point. The theme of the Cross
victorious over Satan has never been popular with the Western fathers. Being more
rationalistic than their Greek counterparts, they were dissatisfied, I suppose, with what
appeared to them as a magical handling of the theme by the Eastern fathers and they
quietly dropped it. Their example has been widely followed in later centuries.
What Paul and the whole New Testament are really saying is that, once the Cross has
revealed the mimetic violence at the root of human society, and the misunderstanding of
this violence, the world can never be the same.
Paul and the New Testament were and are still right. The world at large has never been
the same after the Cross. It has been enormously affected by the Christian revelation of
the scapegoat mechanism, regardless of the inability of the wise and learned to
understand what Jesus was really talking about.
The specific character of the modern world can be ascribed to the victory of the Cross
over Satan in the sense of a growing concern for victims everywhere in the world. This
concern remained feeble and highly tentative for a long time, but then it became
stronger and more focused. We do not realize how anthropologically unique our modern
attitude toward victims is. In no other culture has anything even remotely similar ever
existed.
It is possible to read the history, first of the Christianized West, then of the Westernized
planet, our modern history, as dominated by the consequences of the victory defined
first by Jesus himself, then by Paul and others, a process of vindication and
rehabilitation of more and more persecuted victims. New hidden victims of society are
continuously being brought to light; the consensus against them always dissolves after a
while. First it was slaves, then the lower classes, then people of different ethnic and
religious backgrounds. Today the victimization of ethnic groups, of women, of
handicapped people, of the very young and the very old, is coming to light. The
unveiling of mimetic violence has had a more and more powerful influence on our
history and on the entire modern world.
Injustice and arbitrariness are still with us, no doubt, and the greatest massacres in
history, the most scandalous persecutions are just as characteristic of our world as the
vindication of victims. There is no denying that immense forces have tried and are still
trying to nullify our concern for victims, and these forces are not only outside of us but
in all of us.
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All such facts, however, do not contradict but confirm the paramount importance of
victims in any serious definition of our world.
Another indirect testimony is the very perversion of that concern for victims which is
highly visible in our world, the constant effort on the part of many groups and
individuals to usurp the now privileged position of the most victimized victim, and thus
to turn the concern for victims into an instrument of power and even into a paradoxical
tool of persecution. All this reveals the infinite resourcefulness of man when it comes to
transforming the best into the worst, but it does not provide us with an excuse for not
acknowledging the best, in the world around us and in our own lives.
Far from promising peace on earth and presenting Christianity as a combination of
welfare state and tourist paradise, the Gospels present the Christian future as full of
division and strife. Far from announcing a peaceful world, Christ says that he brings a
sword. All that he claims is that the truth of victims is out and that victimage patterns,
systems of scapegoating will not provide the stable form of culture that they have had in
the past. This is being verified every day. All of Western and then world history can be
interpreted as a turbulent, chaotic, but constantly accelerating process of devictimization
that is unique in all of world history and it can be traced only to Christianity.
The Satan who is defeated by the Cross is the prince of this world, Satan as a principle
of order. We must remember that Satan is also the prince of disorder and this other
Satan is still intact, and can even be said to be "unleashed," not by God, but by the
greater and greater loss of scapegoat effectiveness that characterizes our world more and
more with the passing of time. This world may well come to resemble the man in the
Gospels from whom one demon was cast out but who failed to fill his life with divine
things and the original demon came back with seven brothers, all more sinister than
himself.
In order to make full sense out of eschatological and apocalyptic themes, we must never
forget that whatever is happening to our world, coming as it does from the Gospels,
must ultimately be good. Our being liberated from Satan's bondage means that the
supernatural power of Satan and his demons is an illusion, that Satan does not exist.
The end of Satan is something we owe to the Gospels: it is part of what the Gospels call
the victory of the Cross. The negation of Satan becomes bad only when it is
accompanied by a minimization of mimetic contagion, by the illusion that, simply
because, as a rule, we no longer believe in Satan, we are really independent thinkers, free from what Satan ultimately means, the enormous power of mimetic contagion and
scandals, the inability of most of us to criticize the ideas that now rule the world.
After being afraid of Satan for many centuries, the Christians have
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become ashamed of him, and because of him, they often are ashamed of the Gospels
themselves. Non-Christians point to Satan as proof that the Gospels are outmoded and
the always timid Christians obediently try to censor Satan out of their own Scriptures.
We must do the very reverse; we must focus on Satan and discover that the Gospels are
their own best source of modernization.
We must focus on Satan to realize that far from being the archaic myth that we imagine,
the defeated Satan of the Gospels in an enormously powerful critique of all archaic
myths, a conception of culture and history so rich that its relevance to our own world is
still unfathomable.
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Chapter 14 The Question of Anti-Semitism in the Gospels
The accusation of anti-Jewishness in the New Testament Gospels is one of the favored attacks
on the Gospels among many biblical critics, feminist critics, and other intellectuals. The
agents of this hostile criticism range from certain members of the Jesus Seminar engaged in a
renewed quest of the "historical" Jesus to practitioners of a more rarefied ideology criticism
that appears in academic journals like Semeia. This now fashionable accusation was
anticipated by Friedrich Nietzsche, who saw quite clearly that Christianity at its very core,
stemming from the crucifixion of Christ, opposed the violent imposition of power and
authority and held to a doctrine of divine concern for the weak and oppressed. He understood
this morality, which took its Jewish legacy to a radical extreme, as the origin of ressentiment
or the sublimated mimetic rivalry and desire for revenge stemming from envy of those who
are powerful. In his view this resentment characterized the decadence of European culture.
Nietzsche argued that Christianity, in its twofold inculcation of the desire for truth and for
identification with the plight of the other, was in the process of destroying itself. His insights
were prophetic if we view them in relation to recent postmodern theology and biblical
criticism
.
The following selection is an essay by Girard which appeared under the title "Is There Anti-
Semitism in the Gospels?" in Biblical Interpretation 1 ( 1993): 339-52, with two pages
deleted in order not to duplicate other material in this Reader. He points out that in the
Gospels mimetic rivalry, scandal (the dead-end of the model-obstacle), crowd contagion, and
the public need for order are set in a Jewish context, and involve primarily Jewish people (as
well as the Roman government in some important instances), but the primary point is not to
indict the Jews for the fate of Jesus;
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it is rather to reveal things hidden since the foundation of the world, to expose all the
murders since Cain and Abel, the beginning of human culture. If the significance of the
founding murder is not understood in reading and interpreting the Gospels, many Christians
will see their only options as an anti-Jewish Gospel or no Gospel at all. "What is needed,"