Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
status is a preferential sign of victimage in this particular myth, but not necessarily
everywhere.
So if some sort of marginality or vulnerability is present in the myth, so much the better. The
evidence of such signs piles up. But it is not absolutely necessary to the identification of a
"scapegoat."
J.W.:
Let's move on to questions arising from currents of suspicion and opposition. First,
some people ask, in effect, "How could a sacrificial reading be dominant for two thousand
years -- if it has been dominant -- and then all of a sudden Girard discovers the true
nonsacrificial reading." How do you reply to this implied accusation of
hubris
?
R.G.:
I have come to be more positive about the word "sacrificial," so I would like first of all to make a distinction between sacrifice as murder and sacrifice as renunciation. The latter is a
movement toward freedom from mimesis as potentially rivalrous acquisition and rivalry.
Well, I think a nonsacrificial reading, or a sacrificial one expressing genuine renunciation, is
found in many passages in the writings of the church fathers. It is not the only one, to be sure.
And then this reading is not mine first of all, it is Nietzsche's. Nietzsche was the first thinker
to see clearly that the singularity of Judeo-Christianity was that it rehabilitates victims that
myths would regard as justly immolated. Of course for Nietzsche this was a dreadful mistake
that first Judaism, then Christianity had inflicted on the world. Nietzsche chose violence
rather than peace, he chose the texts that mistook the victim for a culprit. What he could not see was the scapegoat mechanism.
J.W.:
Is there any indication in any of Nietzsche's writings that he understands Jesus as
culpable in some way, thus responsible for his fate?
R.G.:
No. In his book entitled
The Antichrist
it is clear that he considered Jesus honest and sincere. Nietzsche thought it was wrong for
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2. Girard's essay on this myth is included as chapter 9 of the Reader.
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Christianity to speak of the innocence of the victim, not because sacrificial victims are really
guilty, but because societies need sacrifice. He saw the central religious issue as no one else
did. He understood that the gods and heroes immolated in pagan mythology were similar in
form to the killing of Christ. But he thought Christianity's witness to the innocence of Christ
was socially harmful and that the world needs the sacrifice of the victim as part of life's
eternal return, which includes destruction.
Nietzsche was the first to see this problem clearly, but he was perverse in choosing the
violent lie instead of the peaceful truth of the victim.
J.W.:
Isn't it ironic that he is a real scriptural source for many academics upholding "political correctness"?
R.G.:
Yes, the upholders of PC can find a strange kind of support in his writings. He was
entranced with violent differentiation. You know, in his own time he lashed out at those who
were among the first to embrace PC. He confused PC with authentic Christianity.
J.W.:
Back to the question about the nonsacrificial reading of Christianity: to what other
evidence do you point? Are there other persons and texts between the fathers and Nietzsche
who understand the nonsacrificial approach?
R.G.:
All those who have tried to follow the way of Christ and the Kingdom of God, living
as nonviolently as possible, have understood, though not necessarily intellectually.
J.W.:
But on the other hand, you have stated a number of times and in a number of ways that
institutional Christianity and the majority of Christians have turned the Cross into a sacrificial
instrument used to punish and eliminate minorities and enemies. It has been turned against
the Jews, which has become a crucial matter since the Holocaust.
R.G.:
This is true, but I do not single out historical Christianity as the sole culprit, as many Christians seem to believe. I am just repeating what Paul says about all of us being guilty so
that God can save us all. Concerning the Jews, the complexity of the New Testament texts is
never recognized either by hatemongers and persecutors or by critics and theologians caught
up in the cult of PC. We have already noted that Peter says to the Jewish crowd in Jerusalem,
"And now, brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers." The Jews
are implicated no more than the minions of Caesar or lynchers all over the world. Therefore
one cannot say that all the Jews in Jerusalem were innocent of Jesus' death while the Romans were guilty. If to implicate some of the Jews also in Jesus' death makes the New Testament
antiSemitic, well it would make just as much sense to hold that it is antiBritish to condemn
the burning of Joan of Arc. Because no one, no, not one, can escape implication in the death
of the one who died for all. And then all lynchings are alike as well, whether they take place
in
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Palestine during the Roman Empire or in the American South after the Civil War.
Even Euripides will tell you in
The Bacchae
that Dionysus was right and Pentheus the victim
was wrong to rebel against the god.
Or take the myth of Purusha in the Vedas: he was killed by a great crowd of sacrificers, and
out of this sacrifice the three great castes of India appeared. The parts of the body were
divided, with the head as the higher caste, then the chest as the middle, warrior caste, and
finally the legs as the lowest caste. Now the myth does not tell you Purusha was guilty, but it
doesn't tell you he was innocent either -- and this is what the Gospels alone tell you, that
Jesus was innocent. "We were wrong," says the New Testament community, "to the extent
that we were involved in that."
J.W.:
The picture of the Servant in Isaiah 53 also includes the confession of the people.
Those speaking confess they were wrong about the Servant, and that he was innocent.
R.G.:
Yes, you are right. Isaiah 53 is a key revelatory text. There is already a foreshadowing
of the Servant in the story of Joseph and his brothers when Judah offers himself in place of
his younger brother.
J.W.:
Is this the Gospel?
R.G.:
Yes, this is already the Gospel.
J.W.:
To shift to another question, one pertaining to the events of history and ethics, do you
think the Holocaust sensitized the Western world to the plight of the victim? Someone like
you comes along with your idea or set of ideas only after World War II. Of course, other
momentous events have occurred. One thinks immediately of the civil rights movement in
this country during the 1950s and 1960s. Is there something peculiar about the period from
World War II to the present?
R.G.:
The revelation of the sacrificial mechanism continues to penetrate deeper and it
deprives human culture of a certain protection, the protection of ritual, rules, mediating
institutions. More and more freedom is given to individuals and communities. Therefore there
is more and more that is good and at the same time more and more that is bad in culture and
social life. Indeed, our situation is increasingly apocalyptic as freedom increases. The
Gospels have brought about this freedom, but you cannot blame them for it; you cannot ask
human beings to become enslaved again to the scapegoat mechanism. Of course people can
try to go back to Dionysus. The Gospels cannot guarantee that people will act the right way;
they are not some kind of recipe for the good society. What the Gospels do is to offer more
freedom and to set the example, above all through witness to the message, death, and
resurrection of Christ, about how to use this freedom wisely.
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You could say that the Gospels may increase violence, in the sense of Jesus' saying, "I have
come not to bring peace but a sword" ( Matt. 10:34). So the Gospels do not promise eternal
peace; they don't lend themselves to an election campaign. The Holocaust is a radical
example of how a cultural crisis is used for evil; it is used to destroy the effect of the Gospels.
You know, there are two forms of totalitarianism. One tries to destroy the concern for victims
openly and directly. Its proponents basically attempt to kill as many victims for as little
reason as possible. Then there is the insidious totalitarianism. Communism in many of its
forms was insidious, but it will probably be replaced by ideologies still more insidious which
outflank the Gospel on the left, presenting themselves as better than the Gospel, trying to
show that the Gospels do not side with the victims, but demonize them. Some of these people
see themselves as super-Christians, but they are heirs of the predecessors of Marx who
thought they could achieve a new humanism. Feuerbach, for example. But they laid the
groundwork for a disrespect of truth. I think it would be helpful to study Feuerbach, who was
a primary agent of the transformation of Christianity into Marxism.
J.W.:
Could we talk for a few minutes about feminist critics? They argue that your mimetic
model is only for males or that you are gynophobic because you use only male examples in
the texts and other data you cite. What is your response to these accusations?
R.G.:
I find it strange that women so badly want participation in the male power of archaic
societies, for it is precisely their real superiority that women don't appear, for the most part,
as the primary agents of violence. If they want now to join the power games of the males, and
that is understandable, are they not losing their real moral superiority?
As important as the apostles are in the Gospels, the women around Jesus are just as important
but in a different way: they are that part of humanity which has nothing to do with
scapegoating him. They are the ones who stick with him through the crucifixion. Or in
The
Bacchae
of Euripides, there may be a slander of women as the perpetrators of the paroxysmic
violence.
J.W.:
You mean there is a misrepresentation of the Bacchic ritual?
R.G.:
No, there is a misrepresentation of the events that precede and justify
The Bacchae
. In
Violence and the Sacred
I suggested that there could be a similarity to what used to happen
among the Amazonian Yanomamö. When the tribes visited each other games of rivalry were
usually followed by violence. When it began the women fled the village. This is perhaps what
happened in the real event behind
The Bacchae
. Just as the Yanomamö women fled when
violence began, so the mass
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migration of women to Mount Cithaeron in Dionysian lore may originally have been in order
to escape the violence precipitated by a mimetic crisis, which was essentially a
masculine
phenomenon.
In
Violence and the Sacred
I also mentioned something else, the structure of the Bororo villages in Brazil. The men's house was in the center, and there they stuck feathers on
themselves and played war games. The houses of the women were separate, on the periphery.
The married men went back and forth to these houses on the periphery several times a day,
but the women were forbidden to enter the men's house located in the center of the village. So
the plan of a Bororo village symbolized the status of women: they were on the outside, or as
marginal as could be and still belong to the social structure. They played no role in the games
of violence and the sacred, which is their superiority. Their marginality was inseparable from
their nonparticipation in male violence.
If anything my hypothesis is pro-woman. It is peculiar how people moved by new ideologies
want to be part of the power structure even retrospectively, and to be seen as responsible for
some of the horrors that have left their mark on us. This greed to participate in the violence of
men is incomprehensible to me.
J.W.:
Some feminists and others argue that women were often -- perhaps even the most
frequent -- sacrificial victims, but you ignore this in the examples you discuss.
R.G.:
I do not. There were female victims since there were female gods. It is simply not true
that I don't talk about female victims. There is the Venda myth of the snake god and his two
wives [see chapter 9]. There is also the Dogrib myth of the women who is a mother of dogs
. 3.
She is a great goddess. When she has puppies the community banishes her. But the puppies
turn out to be children. When they are undressed she takes their skins away, and so they are
forced to keep their human identity. Here the woman god was a scapegoat whose
victimization generates the human community, according to the myth.
I think the objection that I leave women out of the mimetic scapegoat theory is a red herring.
It's based on a reading not of my books, but of some hostile reviews which are mimetically
repeated by fellow-travelers.
J.W.:
There are some male thinkers whom feminists gravitate toward, Foucault for example.
R.G.:
His systematic anti-Western stance fits the ideological temper of our intellectual elites.
J.W.:
. . . and there are those who are anti-Christian, who attract large followings, Freud and Derrida for instance, also Heidegger.