Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
Nietzsche, obviously. This insight provided students of religion with a powerful focus for
comparative analysis. There is no sacrificial religion without a drama at the center, and the
more closely you observe it, the more you discover that the features common to the
martyrdom
of Dionysus and Jesus are also common to an immeasurable number of other cults
not only in Greek or Indo-European religions but in the entire world.
This remarkable similarity is one important reason why the later Nietzsche can resort to a
single symbol, Dionysus, for countless mythological cults. To say that Dionysus stands for
some kind of nonbiblical monotheism is a little ludicrous really and unworthy of Heidegger.
Even though anthropologists never discovered why all these cults had that collective drama
as a center, they felt entitled to draw some preliminary conclusions from its constant
presence. They were positivists, of course, men who believed in facts and nothing but hard
facts.
If the facts are the same in all these cults, it can be safely assumed, or so they thought, that
these religions must be the same. And this element of sameness is obviously present in the
Judaic religion with its ritual sacrifices, and even more spectacularly in the Christian religion.
The Passion of Jesus certainly constitutes the heart of the Gospels, and what is it if not one
more instance of these collective murders that are the daily bread of religions all over the
world?
This point was made in almost all great works of religious anthropology between 1850 and
World War I. Even today, it remains the hidden
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basis and principal argument, at least potentially, for what has become a popular cliché
regarding the many religions of mankind. All of them are "more or less alike."
Although, or rather because Nietzsche shared this comparative insight regarding collective
murder and sacrifice, he refrained from the habitual conclusion. The only other thinker who
also did, at least up to a point, was Freud.
Nietzsche rejected that conclusion because he was no positivist. He knew that the "facts"
mean nothing unless and until they are interpreted. The martyrdom of Dionysus is interpreted
by the adepts of his cult in a manner quite different from the Christian interpretation of Jesus'
Passion.
In the case of Jesus, the emphasis lies on the
innocence
of the victim and, as a consequence,
on the guilt of his murderers. One could object that Dionysus, too, was martyred wrongly and
that the Titans were just as guilty from the standpoint of the myth as the murderers of Jesus,
and they must have been indeed, since they were destroyed by the thunder of Zeus.
Nietzsche did not even mention this objection because he saw its superficiality. In all the
other episodes of the Dionysus cycle, there is a collective
diasparagmos
, a martyrdom similar
to the martyrdom of Dionysus at the hands of the Titans. In all of these, however, the god is
not the victim but the instigator of mob lynching.
Every time Dionysus appears, a victim is dismembered and often devoured by his or her
many murderers. The god can be the victim and he can also be the chief murderer. He can be
victimized and he can be a victimizer. This change of roles, which also occurs in most
primitive religions, clearly confirms what Nietzsche thought regarding the indifference of
mythology toward biblical morality.
From the one episode in which Dionysus himself is the victim, one cannot conclude that the
Dionysian as such condemns violence in the sense that the Gospels do. It is inconceivable
that Jesus could become the instigator of some "holy lynching." When the possibility of
lynching occurs in the Gospels, as in the case of the adulterous woman about to be stoned (
John 8:2-11), Jesus forestalls the violence and disperses the mob.
At some point, no doubt, with the orphic tradition, the murder of the little Dionysus became a
symbol of the human propensity to evil, in a manner that could be said to approximate
somewhat the Christian view of the Passion, but this view was completely alien to the
Dionysus that Nietzsche opposed to "the Crucified": It is a reinterpretation of the old myth that must have occurred under the influence of the Bible.
There are two types of religion, according to Nietzsche. The first one, the pagan, understands that "life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recur-
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rence, creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilate," and it says yes to all this; it
assumes willingly the worst together with the best. It is beyond good and evil. "It affirms
event he harshest suffering," as Nietzsche puts it.
The second type of religion rejects this same suffering, Nietzsche thought. It is interesting
that Nietzsche would have condemned Christianity for rejecting suffering. The habitual
criticism is that Christianity encourages suffering. Nietzsche saw clearly that Jesus died not
as a sacrificial victim of the Dionysian type, but against all such sacrifices. Nietzsche accused
this death of being a hidden act of
ressentiment
because it reveals the injustice of all such
deaths and the "absurdity" not of one specific mob only but of all "Dionysian" mobs the world over. The word "absurdity" is Nietzsche's own.
When Nietzsche keeps repeating that the Passion of Jesus is "an objection to life," or "a formula for its condemnation," he understands that the Christian Passion is a rejection and an
indictment of everything upon which the old pagan religions were founded and with them all
human societies worth their salt, in Nietzsche's estimation, the societies in which "the strong
and the victorious" were not prevented by the downtrodden masses from enjoying the fruits
of their superiority.
Nietzsche, in short, espoused the common ethnological understanding of his time regarding
the presence of violence at the heart of most religious cults but he rejected the positivistic
conclusion that puts all these cults in the same bag. He singled out the biblical and the
Christian not because Jesus' martyrdom is different but because it is not. It has to be the same
for that martyrdom of Jesus to be an explicit allusion to the genesis of all pagan religions and
a silent but definitive condemnation of pagan order, of all human order really.
The Christian Passion is not anti-Jewish as the vulgar anti-Semites believe; it is anti-pagan; it
reinterprets religious violence in such a negative fashion as to make its perpetrators feel
guilty for committing it, even for silently accepting it. Since all human culture is grounded in
this collective violence, the whole human race is declared guilty from the standpoint of the
Gospels. Life itself is slandered because life cannot continue and organize itself without this
type of violence.
The Jewish Bible, the Old Testament of the Christians, is similar to the New in respect to the
issue discussed in fragment 1052. A positivistic anthropologist sees no real difference
between the Romulus story and the Cain story. In both stories, a brother kills his brother and
a human community is founded. The data of the stories are the same but in the Bible, the
interpretation is unique. It is not the same thing to interpret the same murder as a glorious
deed with the Romans and to interpret it as a crime with the Bible.
In the Bible, the story of Cain is symbolical not of one human society
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only but of many. It is a statement about human culture in general. And it may be more pertinent than all other discussions of anthropological origins. Either the vast number of
brothers killing brothers and other similar crimes in innumerable founding myths signifies
nothing at all, or it points to a violent origin of human society passively reflected and
assumed by mythological cultures whereas it is denounced and rejected by the Bible and the
Christian Gospels.
All mythological heroes are fundamentally the same. If you call them Cain, however, your
interpretation of mythology is not the same as if you call them Dionysus. Nietzsche is not
satisfied with ignoring the Bible in the sense that his time is beginning to do; he is trying to
reverse it and to rehabilitate the violence of Cain.
Cain, Romulus, and Dionysus commit the same deed and, from the standpoint of the Gospels,
they must be given the same name. It is not the name of a monotheistic god but the name of
the one "who was a murderer from the beginning" ( John 8:44), Satan, a word that really
means the false accuser, whereas the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit of the Christians, really means
the lawyer for the defense, the one who turns all martyrs into witnesses to the truth of the
Gospels, therefore to the untruth of their own violent deaths.
All four Gospels explicitly link the innocent death of Jesus to the death of all previous
collective victims beginning with "Abel the just." The violence of Cain is part of a long chain of murders that leads to the Passion conceived as a return of the same reenacted, this time, in
the full light of a revelation that spells the doom of "the prince of this world," or "the powers of this world," or "the celestial powers." All this refers to the end of the type of society grounded in the Dionysian attitude, in the docile acceptance of the scapegoat process and of
its violence.
We do not have to share Nietzsche's value judgment to appreciate his understanding of the
irreconcilable opposition between the Bible and mythology, his disgust with the bland
eclecticism that dissolves all sharp issues and dominates the atheism of our time, as well as
its vague and shapeless religiosity.
Nietzsche is a marvelous antidote to all fundamentally anti-biblical efforts to turn mythology
into a kind of Bible, and that is the enterprise of all the Jungians of this world, or to dissolve
the Bible into mythology, and that is the enterprise of more or less everybody else.
You find nothing in Nietzsche that recalls the saccharine idealization of primitive culture that
began at the end of the eighteenth century and that we have so successfully revived. At the
very height of the great syncretic mishmash of modernity, Nietzsche drew attention to the
irreconcilable opposition between a mythological vision grounded in the perspective of the
victimizers and a biblical inspiration that from the beginning tends to side with the victims
and produces not only
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very different results from the ethical but also from the intellectual standpoint.
Nietzsche's value judgment is untenable. Pious efforts to exonerate the thinker from the
consequences of his own thinking are misguided. It is undeniable that he himself extended
the scope of this judgment to political and ethical questions in a manner that can only provide encouragement to the worst ideological aberrations.
Hundreds of texts can be quoted that show beyond all doubt that Nietzsche's fierce
stubbornness in opposing the inspiration of the Bible in favor of victims logically and
inexorably led him toward the more and more inhuman attitudes of his later years which he
espoused, in words of course rather than in deeds, with a fortitude worthy of a better cause.
There is a tendency for critics to play hide and seek with the later writings of Nietzsche. It
would be more interesting to investigate the inner compulsion that has led so many
intellectuals to adopt inhuman standards in the last two centuries. No one exemplifies this
tendency with the perfection that Nietzsche does.
Ressentiment
has to be part of the picture of course. One essential thing about
ressentiment
is that its ultimate target is always
ressentiment
itself, its own mirror image, under a slightly different mask that makes it
unrecognizable.
Ressentiment
is the interiorization of weakened vengeance. Nietzsche suffers so much from it
that he mistakes it for the original and primary form of vengeance. He sees
ressentiment
not
merely as the child of Christianity, which it certainly is, but also as its father which it
certainly is not.
Ressentiment
flourishes in a world where real vengeance ( Dionysus) has been weakened.
The Bible and the Gospels have diminished the violence of vengeance and turned it to
ressentiment
not because they originate in the latter but because their real target is vengeance it all its forms, and they have succeeded only in wounding vengeance, not in eliminating it.
The Gospels are indirectly responsible; we alone are directly responsible.
Ressentiment
is the manner in which the spirit of vengeance survives the impact of Christianity and turns the
Gospels to its own use.
Nietzsche was less blind to the role of vengeance in human culture than most people of his
time, but nevertheless there was blindness in him. He analyzed
ressentiment
and all its works
with enormous power. He did not see that the evil he was fighting was a relatively minor evil
compared to the more violent forms of vengeance.
His insight was partly blunted by the deceptive quiet of his postChristian society. He could
afford the luxury of resenting
ressentiment
so much that it appeared as a fate worse than real vengeance. Being absent from the scene, real vengeance was never seriously apprehended.
Unthinkingly, like so many thinkers of his age and ours, Nietzsche called