Eu via Satanás cair como um relâmpago

by René Girard

Em um de seus textos mais esclarecedores, René Girard discute as diferenças fundamentais entre os mitos e os relatos dos Evangelhos. Sua análise se baseia na antropologia, na teologia e na filosofia e formaliza conceitos que o consagraram, como os de bode expiatório e desejo mimético. Um estudo aprofundado e revolucionário sobre como se dá a violência nas sociedades e que revela como a tradição judaico-cristã possui diferenças inconciliáveis em relação à mitologia.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Theology, Nonfiction, Christianity, Anthropology, Psychology

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

René Girard was a French-born American historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science whose work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy.

He was born in the southern French city of Avignon on Christmas day in 1923. Between 1943 and 1947, he studied in Paris at the École des Chartres, an institution for the training of archivists and historians, where he specialized in medieval history. In 1947 he went to Indiana University on a year’s fellowship and eventually made almost his entire career in the United States. He completed a PhD in history at Indiana University in 1950 but also began to teach literature, the field in which he would first make his reputation. He taught at Duke University and at Bryn Mawr before becoming a professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. In 1971 he went to the State University of New York at Buffalo for five years, returned to Johns Hopkins, and then finished his academic career at Stanford University where he taught between 1981 and his retirement in 1995.

Girard is the author of nearly thirty books, with his writings spanning many academic domains. Although the reception of his work is different in each of these areas, there is a growing body of secondary literature on his work and his influence on disciplines such as literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, psychology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy.Girard’s fundamental ideas, which he has developed throughout his career and provide the foundation for his thinking, are that desire is mimetic (all of our desires are borrowed from other people), that all conflict originates in mimetic desire (mimetic rivalry), that the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture, and religion was necessary in human evolution to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry, and that the Bible reveals these ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism.

In 1990, friends and colleagues of Girard’s established the Colloquium on Violence and Religion to further research and discussion about the themes of Girard’s work. The Colloquium meets annually either in Europe or the United States.

René Girard died on November 4, 2015, at the age of 91 in Stanford.

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

In our rational, scientific world, the coronavirus pandemic, while unprecedented, is well-understood. We know that the virus originated in China and, through the science of epidemiology, we were able to track its rapid spread. In response, (most) world governments moved swiftly to contain the virus through a blitzkrieg of public health measures. Now, as the world cautiously begins reopening, global pharmaceutical companies are racing to find a vaccine.

Thanks to modern science, then, we can call this case (more or less) closed. How then, can Girard, an obscure scholar of mythology and Scripture, and his book, published over 20 years ago, be relevant in 2020? Consider the following story.

Some two centuries after Jesus died, the Athenian city of Ephesus was afflicted by a virulent and persistent plague epidemic. The Ephesians try all manners of remedies – natural and supernatural – but none succeed in eradicating the plague. According to the Greek historian and philosopher Philostratus, it was not until the Athenian guru Apollonius of Tyana performed his miracle that the city was cured.

So it goes, Apollonius gathers a crowd of Ephesians and leads them to a shrine dedicated to Hercules, where a blind beggar sits. He commands the city to pick up stones to throw at the beggar, in order to kill him. The peaceful Ephesians are at first reluctant. Persisting, Apollonius eggs them on, denouncing the vagrant as the demonic incarnation of the plague. After the first few stones are cast, the mob follows on, and soon there remains only a mound of bloody rocks. Amazingly, the plague is cured, and the people thank Hercules for his divine intervention.

As fantastical and superstitious as this anecdote may seem to the modern mind, perhaps there is some truth in it. Primarily, if we concede the historicity of the event, we must assume that the “plague” was not purely bacterial in nature, and that it also must have had a social dimension manifest in the unrest in the city and the accompanying breakdown in social relations. And once we refrain from our typical modern dismissal of ancient mythic stories, we might just see how the ancients understood things we do not. So what might this public stoning suggest about the way in which plagues are resolved? About the way ours might be?

In a sense, Girard could be said to be a scholar of lynch mobs and their tendency toward public executions. He is known primarily for his theory of mimetic violence and scapegoating. In “I See Satan Fall Like Lightning”, he describes it as having three parts. First, intensifying mimetic rivalries cause warring adversaries to become increasingly undifferentiated, homogeneous, and indistinguishable from one another. At some point, this reciprocal, exponentiated exchange of anger culminates in the warring sides joining forces to slay an innocent victim. Finally, peace is restored, and the two sides, in awe of the return to normalcy precipitated by the murder, deify the victim. From then, ancient societies built rituals fashioned from this peacemaking event, mimicking the original murder to restore peace in times of crisis.

The universality of this basic structure of peacemaking across ancient cultures suggests that there is something deeply ingrained in the human mind that predisposes it toward such cycles of violence. Lest the reader is skeptical, consider the stories of Apollonius (above), Cain and Abel (wherein Cain kills his twin Abel, after which the first world culture according to the Jewish creation story begins), and Romulus and Remus (wherein Romulus kills his twin Remus, subsequently founding Rome).

Girard’s analytical approach could be described as jointly anthropological (insofar as it is undergirded by studies in comparative mythology) and theological (in that it asserts that the “myths” of Judaism and Christianity are unique, and uniquely good, among world myths). In marrying these two disparate approaches, Girard distinguishes himself from both modern/postmodern readers (who prefer a sort of Weberian materialist/historicist or postmodern “deconstructionist” approach to reading history, free of value judgments) and theologians (who may see the encroachment of social science as a degradation of religious metaphysics).

This willingness to defend theology in so-called “natural” or anthropological terms is precisely what is bold and refreshing about Girard’s work. To borrow the words of Simone Weil, Girard sees Scripture as offering a theory of man (an “anthropo”-logy) before it offers a theory of God (a “theo”-logy). To this end, the atheistic or agnostic reader can read the text without rolling their eyes at any dogmatic religious claims. And, if one is open-minded enough to do so, then perhaps they will discover some disturbing truths about human organization and conflict. For if the sociological and psychological descriptions and predictions of violence from Scripture are to be believed, then…

Returning to the content of the book, Girard builds the case for the uniqueness of Jewish and Christian scripture. In particular, he contends that the human condition is far from the war of “all-against-all” that the original Enlightenment liberals conceived of. Rather, it often becomes the war of "all-against one", and he claims Judaism and Christianity were the first religions to recognize and eschew the war of all-against-one. He invokes, over the course of the book, the Gospel story of Jesus saving the adulterous woman from Pharisaic stoning (which he notes is the inverse of the story of Apollonius above), the Genesis story of Joseph and his brothers, and the story of Job. In each of these, as with other stories, there is the mechanism of mimetic violence causing a mob of “dumb cattle following the herd in the expulsions of” marginalized individuals. But, far from using mob violence as a cathartic bloodletting to create temporary peace, Girard notes that Scripture chooses the side of the victim each time.

Girard credits monotheism for averting this cycle. This is because if Girard is right that, for the ancients, gods were created through mimetic violence and scapegoating and reinforced through subsequent ritual sacrifice, the proclamation that there is only one God outside of the realm of (but acting through) human affairs decisively obviates the role for human scapegoat sacrifices, and therefore the possibility of new “false” gods.

For Girard, what emerges from this understanding of mimetic violence and scapegoating and from his reading of Scripture is the realization that what the Bible calls “Satan” is in fact the principle of mimetic violence that is capable of simultaneously creating disorder and restoring peace. In light of such a reading, the names historically given to Satan make sense: accuser, deceiver, prince of this world, the principle of this world, etc. In particular, “Satan” is a deceiver because the efficacy of the scapegoating mechanism is only brought to bear when the participants are unaware that they are taking part in it. This is why, Girard contends, non-Judeo-Christian myths always paint the victim as deserving of their punishment: Oedipus after all, despite being an effective ruler, did commit patricide and incest.

According to Girard, only the Christian revelation was able to illuminate and name this dynamic in a way that has rendered such willful ignorance of the scapegoating mechanism increasingly untenable. Although superficially the crucifixion of Jesus seems to follow the tripartite model of divine victimhood described, Girard claims that Jesus (who, unlike the victims of mythology, was definitively innocent) subverts it. This is in part because of His innocence and the lack of unanimity in condemnation following His death.

What happens, then, when the primary peacemaking mechanism of human civilization is rendered obsolete? Is it everlasting peace, like some think Christianity promises but fails to deliver? No, Girard responds – it is quite the opposite. Mimetic rivalries have arguably intensified in our globalized world, and ever more subtle ways of concealing the scapegoat mechanism have emerged. This is perhaps why Jesus said:

Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn “a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.”

and perhaps why Girard said:

The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and “radicalizes” the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be “revolutionary” now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions.

This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves. In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims.

How then can we recognize scapegoating and mimetic violence when it happens? If it is as Girard says, and perpetrators of collective violence are unaware of their role in mimetic contagion, then perhaps one must be highly suspicious when they find themselves holding or among those who hold the majority opinion. And if it is the tendency for violent mobs to become homogeneous and indistinguishable from one another, then perhaps one ought to learn to recognize the effects of mimetic contagion – that is, when people are becoming more similar, and less differentiated.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has long been fashionable to regard Christianity as myth, no different in substance than many other ancient myths. Sometimes this is done to glibly dismiss Christ’s message; sometimes it is done in sorrow, viewing, as C. S. Lewis did before his conversion, Christianity as one of many lies, even if was “breathed through silver.” René Girard entirely rejects this idea, offering an anthropological, rather than spiritual, argument for Christianity being a true myth, and for the complete uniqueness of Christianity, as well for as its centrality to the human story. Girard’s appeal is that his framework explains the core of all human societies, and thus explains, at any moment, the present. Therefore, though he died in 2015, Girard says much about America in 2021.

Girard was a devout Roman Catholic, a Frenchman who spent much of his academic career in the United States. (He has gotten some extra attention from the fact that he taught Peter Thiel, who became a big admirer of Girard and who gave a eulogy at his funeral.) Girard first published his theory of mimetic contagion in 1978, in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. I was going to read that book, but was encouraged to start with the more recent, and much shorter, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. So here I started, although I glanced at Things Hidden from time to time, as well as at several other books Girard wrote. This edition of I See Satan Fall contains an excellent Foreword by James G. Williams, summarizing the basics of Girard’s thought on mimetic contagion, making it is doubly a good place for a novice to start.

Girard begins by announcing his intent to explore and highlight, rather than minimize as most devout people do, the similarities and parallels between the Gospel and pagan myths, and for good measure his intention to dismantle Friedrich Nietzsche. He then outlines his theory of mimetic contagion, using as his frame the Tenth Commandment, “You shall not covet. . . .” “Covet” for Girard means not an untoward desire, but simply any desire for what others have. He identifies this not as God’s mere prohibition on greed, but rather, far more fundamentally, as a unique early attack on the internal cycle of violence that is the basis of all human societies.

One of Girard’s purposes has nothing to do with religion, and that is to explain how human societies began, namely in violence, a specific kind of violence with a specific kind of purpose. But as can be seen from his dissection of the Decalogue, his other purpose is to prove that Christianity (and to a lesser extent, Judaism) is unique among all human religions, able to release mankind from the prison into which the forms of violence the underpin all human societies have placed us. Christ’s death on the Cross was fully as meaningful as Christians would have it—even if Christ was not, in fact, as he claimed, the Son of God, his sacrifice upended the entire anthropological order of the world. He showed a path of redemption, both secular and divine (reflecting the hypostatic union) previously unknown to mankind.

Violence in human societies arises because we desire what our neighbor has, because our neighbor desiring it makes it desirable in our eyes. “Our neighbor is the model for our desires. This is what I call mimetic desire.” That is to say, despite our own perception that our desires are internally generated, in most instances they arise by imitation; we desire what others desire, not what we independently want. (A related principle is well-known in the context of how wealthy people feel about their wealth, but Girard’s vision is far broader.) My neighbor, however, by his possession of what I desire, thwarts my desire, at the same time my desire, in a reflection of my own actions, perceived by my neighbor, intensifies my neighbor’s desire for what he already has. Girard calls this “double desire,” and the rivals are “mimetic doubles,” very similar to each other but perceiving unreal huge differences. (This insight is part of why Thiel admires Girard; it has obvious applications in many human realms, including business.) We perceive ourselves as autonomous, when in fact we are “enslaved to our mimetic models.”

This spiral of rivalry and its consequences Girard calls “scandal,” and he says this process inevitably engulfs entire societies through a process of “violent contagion,” citing Matthew 18:7, “Scandals . . . must come.” The original rivalries are often forgotten entirely as new ones arise with blinding speed, eventually converging on one society-wide scandal. This violent contagion convulses a society; it will tear itself apart in mass violence unless something is done. That something is to identify a single innocent on whom the concentrated fury of the accumulated rivalries can be directed, through the killing of the innocent by the society acting as a whole. This killing produces a superbly cathartic effect on the society, and peace is restored, for a time, as everyone in society congratulates himself on a job well done—even though this killing is invariably, in reality, utterly unjust. (Girard focuses on a “single victim,” but elsewhere suggests that the victim can be more than one individual, and just as easily a large identifiable group.)

Girard thus sees social conflict as normal, not accidental. It is inevitable in the nature of man. Not for Girard fantasies of peaceful societies of the distant past; he would not be surprised at the evisceration of such silliness by Lawrence Keeley in War Before Civilization, and he would no doubt agree with Carl Schmitt’s thoughts on the friend-enemy distinction. But it is not any violence that is Girard’s focus, but this very specific kind of violence. At the same time, he sees mimetic desire, because it allows us to choose what we desire, as what makes us human, rather than animals driven purely by instinct, and therefore of itself intrinsically good. “Our unending discords are the ransom of our freedom.”

Girard then turns to the Passion of Christ, demonstrating that the behavior of the men surrounding Christ’s death, from Saint Peter to Pontius Pilate, and even the Jews who had so lately cheered Jesus, are examples of mimetic contagion, where the players are driven to give in to the rising violence even when that is not their intention, and in fact wholly contrary to their declared and actual intention. Neither Peter nor Pilate wants Christ crucified, yet they are swept up in the contagion. In this the death of Christ is entirely unexceptional, and it echoes a long list of similar episodes in the Bible, both of the persecution of various Old Testament prophets (and of the prefiguring Suffering Servant of Second Isaiah), and of, more recently in Biblical time, the death of John the Baptist.

From whence comes mimetic contagion? It comes from Satan. Now, it is never precisely clear, at least in this book, if Girard sees Satan as an individual and entity. It does, in fact, appear not; at one point, Girard refers to the Devil as “totally mimetic, which amounts to saying nonexistent as an individual self” (italics in original). Yet as a devout Roman Catholic he probably did (my guess is this is addressed elsewhere, perhaps in the several books of interviews of Girard that have been published recently). Maybe this apparent confusion results from Girard’s stated intention to make his book wholly scientific, rather than theological, in focus. Regardless, Girard heaps contempt on modern attempts to write Satan out of the Bible and Christianity; in his view, Satan is the hinge around which our temporal world turns. Satan is responsible for mimetic crisis, by showing us what we desire and then blocking our acquisition of what we desire, thereby creating scandal. Girard cites the episode in Matthew 16 where Peter “invites Jesus, in short, to take Peter himself as the model of his desire,” and Jesus responds, “Get behind me, Satan, for you are a scandal to me.” Jesus instead demands we, like him, avoid mimetic rivalry by focusing our desire on the desires of the Father.

But, in the words of Mark 3:23, Satan can cast out Satan. He initiates the cycle of mimetic violence, and also, through the catharsis that follows the killing of the scapegoat, restores order and harmony to society, a feeling of having been purified. This is the key to his being the prince of this world, for if he merely brought chaos and anarchy, he would have no power. Yet he continuously plays both sides of the game, thereby maintaining his power. The Crucifixion is an exemplar of this process; “[w]hat makes the mimetic cycle of Jesus’s suffering unique is, not the violence, but the fact that the victim is the Son of God.” His sacrifice ended the rule of Satan—because it broke the cycle of mimetic violence that was the formation of all human societies prior to Christianity, founding an entirely new anthropology. Jesus is wholly different, because he invited his disciples to desire what he desired, however that desire was not a mimetic rivalry, but the desire to imitate the Father in all things. If accepted, this protects us from mimetic rivalries entirely, and is thus an upgrade to the Tenth Commandment.

After outlining this cycle, Girard proceeds to contrast myth and Christianity, what he calls a study in comparative religion. He does this by analyzing the hagiographical Life of Apollonius by Philostratus, a militant pagan. (Apollonius was a wonderworking guru of the first century A.D., a great favorite of shallow-thinking New Atheists, such as Matthew Ridley in his execrable The Evolution of Everything, who think that the parallels to Christ in the supposed life of Apollonius disprove the existence of Christ.) Girard discusses at length how Apollonius ended a plague in Ephesus by egging on the pagan Ephesians to stone to death a crippled beggar, overcoming their hesitation by enticing them to throw the first stone, whereupon the dead beggar was revealed to have been a demon, and the plague ended, with the intervention of the god Heracles. Girard believes this was a real episode, though certainly no demon was revealed and no god intervened, but the plague, one not of disease but scandal resulting from mimetic rivalries engulfing the city, was still by this blood sacrifice cured. Moreover, contrasting Christ’s defusing of the proposed stoning of the woman caught in adultery (John 8), Girard notes that even the process of killing itself is the result of mimetic contagion—it is difficult to get the stoning started, but once it begins, it becomes unstoppable.

From this jumping-off place Girard moves backward, to earlier myths, such as those of Oedipus and those surrounding the cult of Dionysus. Girard interprets various founding myths that involve a murder followed by the divinization of the object of the murder, often in a form of resurrection, as evidence of the universal pattern of mimetic contagion resulting in a crisis existentially tearing at the social fabric and its cure through the single victim mechanism. (His book The Scapegoat analyzes many more examples.) Through this mechanism false gods are often created, because it seems divine how the victim can bring society together, and these new gods underpin the creation of human societies. This is the “founding murder”; the story of Cain and Abel is one, as is that of Romulus and Remus. Girard takes these myths as representative of multiple cycles of mimetic violence surrounding the formation of societies and ensuring their stability. Religion forms the core of every social system; it is essential to humanity, not a parasite upon the real mechanisms of societal formation. Girard has no truck with theories of social contract, and no doubt thinks equally little of other theories of societal formation, such as Francis Fukuyama’s.

Turning back to Christianity, Girard analyzes passages from the New Testament that suggest the Gospel writers recognized, for the first time in human history, the “powers and principalities,” that is, Satan, as complicit in this process of societal formation. A key point of Girard is that Gospel passages that seem opaque or obvious are often nothing of the sort, but rather encapsulate enormous insights we typically miss. His book is filled with passages from both the Old and New Testaments that could be seen as banal but into which Girard breathes life. The passages Girard cites are often read as superstitious or magical thinking, but he rather interprets them as deeply insightful into human nature and conduct, and what is more, aware of how Jesus, true man and true god, upended this age-old human mechanism.

It is to this last point that Girard devotes the final third of his book. He directly attacks the view that the Gospels are just another myth. Anti-Christian apologists have long tried to show that the Gospels differ only in the particulars of myth; the broad themes are just the same as all other myths. In a jujitsu move, however, Girard entirely agrees with these critics—the Gospels are substantially identical in their form to other myths, because both the myths and the Gospel are part of a larger, essential truth, that of the cycle of mimetic violence. The difference of the Gospels is that that Christ completely inverts, and thereby utterly destroys, the universal pattern that existed before his sacrifice.

To demonstrate this, Girard steps back to the story of Joseph . . . [Review completes as first comment.]

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review:

November 2008

Girard, Christianity, and Nietzsche

Since previous reviewers (here on Amazon) have already provided good reviews of Girard and this book I thought I might speak on a (perhaps) not minor point that has yet to be mentioned. It is little remarked, although it really should be noted more often, how well (and not without a note of admiration too!) some of the best Christian thinkers have read Nietzsche. Girard is one example, the theologian Karl Barth is another.

"Nietzsche was the first philosopher to understand that the collective violence of myths and rituals (everything he named "Dionysos") is of the same type as the violence of the Passion. The difference between them is not in the facts, which are the same in both cases, but in their interpretation." (p. 171)

Indeed, Girard goes so far as to say that, "he discovers the truth that I only repeat after him, the truth that dominates this book: in the Dionysian passion and the Passion there is the same collective violence. But the interpretation is different..."

Girard goes on to quote Nietzsche at length at this point. Later Girard observes,

"...myths are based on a unanimous persecution. Judaism and Christianity destroy this unanimity in order to defend the victims unjustly condemned and to condemn the executioners unjustly legitimated.

As incredible as it may seem, no one made this simple but fundamental discovery before Nietzsche - no one, not even a Christian!" (p. 172)

Similarly, Barth (ahem) 'admires' (in a digression in the 'Church Dogmatics' that needs to be read more often) for seeing clearly (and saying loudly) the difference between a humanity in which each individual is focused on his own sovereign self and a humanity dedicated to the 'fellow-man'.

"The new thing in Nietzsche was the fact that the development of humanity without the fellow-man [...] reached in him a much more advanced, explosive, dangerous, and yet also vulnerable stage..." (Karl Barth, "Church Dogmatics", excerpted as an essay in "Studies in Nietzsche and the Judaeo-Christian Tradition", James C. O'Flaherty, editor.)

For both Barth and Girard, Nietzsche clearly sees Christianity as it is (or was) in the Greek New Testament. By speaking his opposition to it, as clearly as he did, he helped Christianity achieve a greater understanding of itself.

For Barth, Nietzsche is "...the most consistent champion and prophet of humanity without the fellow-man. It is another matter, and one that objectively considered is to the praise of Nietzsche, that he thus hurled himself against the strongest and not the weakest point in the opposing front. With his discovery of the Crucified and His host he discovered the Gospel itself in a form which was missed even by the majority of its champions, let alone its opponents, in the nineteenth century. And by having to attack it in this form, he has done us the good office of bringing before us the fact that we have to keep to this form as unconditionally as he rejected it, in self-evident antithesis not only to him, but to the whole tradition on behalf of which he made this final hopeless sally." (Barth, in above, pp. 373-374)

The 'tradition' Barth refers to is embodied in the history of the secret, but (according to Barth) true meaning of European history from the Renaissance through German Idealism. It is a line that goes from Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia through Goethe and Hegel and then reaches its highpoint in Nietzsche.

It is still too soon to tell if these 'services' Nietzsche performs for Christianity (the uncovering of the true meaning of all myth - and the opposition of Christianity to it; and the radical championing by Christianity of the helpless, the neighbor, the 'fellow-man', against the great of the world) were the first step toward a Christian reawakening or - its demise.

But this struggle between Nietzsche and Christianity is but a subset of the agon between Philosophy and Christianity. (Which is itself a part of the even greater argument between Philosophy and Religion.) In the ancient world Apollonius of Tyana was regarded as a philosopher. In his essay on him Girard calls him a sage. Briefly, Apollonius finds himself in a City in Crisis; he 'solves' this Crisis by the sacrifice (i.e., the stoning) of an innocent but unimportant man. After the stoning the City is restored to health...

To the Christian all men have intrinsic value, they are, after all, 'children of God'! Philosophy rejects this selfishness. In the final analysis to the philosophers (I should here say 'perhaps') there are no important individuals... "All that matters are the results", Nietzsche has said. With those words alone Apollonius is absolved. Indeed, one even suspects that the the philosophical 'value' of the Nietzschean Overman derives from his utility for human culture and (or) civilization. In other words, the Overman Himself is also a tool...

That is in itself interesting, but it too does not explain why so many religious people read Nietzsche with such interest. It is not merely Nietzsche's keen insight into the true nature of Christianity, to which both Barth and Girard attest, that accounts for this. Nietzsche, with his 'god' Dionysus, recognizes that there is something beyond the reach of both science and reason. And if there always is this 'Something Else', some Unknown, then Religion is the permanent recognition of (and response to) this 'Other'. Indeed, how many modern philosophers would have exclaimed "I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus -- I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence", as Nietzsche does towards the end of his "Twilight of the Idols"? Ultimately, Nietzsche is no modern atheist; if he were he would never have written his Zarathustra or spoken of Dionysus and Eternal Return.

"Have I been understood?-- Dionysus versus the Crucified..." (Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Why I am a Destiny, section 9.) Yes, now we understand. Myth replaces myth, utility supplants utility. Can you say "Eternal Return of the Same"? Nietzsche, the great enemy of Christianity, has in his books covertly conceded the necessity of Religion. At bottom, it is this concession, and the fact that it is the concession of a philosopher, that continually fascinates religious minds with his thought.

This book is among Girard's best. If you have the slightest interest in Christianity it is worth reading more than once. This note of mine was concerned with the connection between Nietzsche and Christianity and I certainly do not want to leave the impression that this was all Girard has to say. He is justly famous for his explication of myth through his original work on mimetic violence. For that alone one should read this book.

[Philippe Malzieu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a total fan of Girard. Since his death, I try to read oll his book I did not read.
The mimetic desire is a fantastic key for analyse the world. You can adapt it to social organization, international relation, even couple, it is really marvelous.
Why this doubt after it. I was struck by the pessimism of the last book I read, the one on Clausewitz. After 11/09 Girard planned the return in an archaic model of scapegoat. Innocents are going to be sacrificed. After the november attacks, it took a particular résonnance. In fact, I thing I reproach to Girard to be true. Because this constatation is umbearable. I thing also that as a scientific, a so perfect theory is not possible. Karl Popper taught to us that any scientific theory has to be falsifiable. I shall want to find theoretical objections .
In fact, his description of a world returning to the archaic model of scapegoat frightens me.

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Dionysos is the same thing as Hades.”

- Heraclitus

Human beings are the only creatures who do not know, by instinct, what to desire. Our sentience endows us with an existential freedom that is both profound and precarious: a depth of longing that transcends the will to survival, but one without a determined object. Instead of pursuing our own self-generated desires, as the modern myth of individualism maintains, we imitate the desires of others. The objects of our desire retain the power to transfix us only by virtue of the extent to which they are desired by others. This imitative desire, which Girard calls “mimetic desire”, is necessary for social cohesion and continuity—children become socialized through the mimetic instruction of their parents and peers—but is also, paradoxically, a force that trends inexorably toward social acrimony and disintegration, because once we are sufficiently in thrall to our mimetic desires, the models from whom we take those desires become, in our eyes, rivals and obstacles to their fulfillment.

These irresolvable mimetic rivalries, or “scandals” in the etymological sense of a stumbling-block, begin first as localized animosities between specific people, but quickly snowball into an unimpedable wave of collective mutual resentment. When the society as a whole is thoroughly saturated by scandal, it dissolves into an undifferentiated mass of jealous hostility*, a Hobbesian war of all against all. A culture of “autonomous” individualism, far from standing in opposition to the mimetic contagion, is in reality the most decadent phase of the most sinister form of collective derangement. Autonomism is the final stage of the pathology of social rivalry, in which each person is indistinguishable from every other in his rivalrous self-assertion. Hyper-individualism is a prelude to totalitarianism. When the mimetic contagion reaches a point of crisis, threatening the foundations of the social order, a sacrificial victim is found and put forward as the source of the collective tumult. The war of all against all becomes a war of all against one, and the society discharges its unanimous and amorphous rage through the murder of the scapegoat, which operates as a release valve for the antagonisms that threatened social stability and restores public peace—until the mimetic cycle begins anew.

Because the murder of the scapegoat has a pacifying and restorative effect, the victim himself is endowed, in the eyes of his persecutors, with divine power. And this, according to Girard, is how the gods are born. Behind all of the celebrated pagan mythologies; behind the gods and heroes of ancient Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia; behind every chaos demon slain by a champion of cosmic order in some elusive archaic age is a real, hapless human being—or a group of them—who was scapegoated for the pathologies of his society and murdered accordingly. Through the necessarily-unconscious process of scapegoating and redemptive sacrifice, pagan mobs operated under the illusion that their victims were both truly divine and truly guilty of some appalling transgression for which they were rightfully punished. The more perfectly this illusion was maintained, the more likely the victim was to become an object of worship; the more threatening the victim had seemed, the more powerful a deity he became after his death. In the pagan world, and still to some extent even in ours, human sacrifice was the foundation of culture.

The most significant anthropological contribution of the Jewish and Christian scriptures was to expose and make conscious the workings of these mimetic cycles by presenting the social dynamics of scapegoating and lynching not from the perspective of the persecutors operating under the illusion of the victim’s guilt, but rather from that of the persecuted victim, revealing his innocence and discrediting the lie at the heart of pagan civilization.

Cain murders Abel and goes on to found the first city, but God takes the part of Abel, putting a curse on Cain and giving Seth to Adam and Eve as a kind of replacement. Joseph is scapegoated by his brothers, sold into Egyptian slavery, and falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife, but perseveres to become the prime minister of Egypt and forgives his brothers for their betrayal after one of the brothers, Judah, refuses to repeat the scapegoating process by allowing Benjamin to be sacrificed as Joseph was. The Tenth Commandment, rounding out and in some sense recapitulating the Decalogue, may be read as a prohibition on all forms of “coveting”; another term for mimetic rivalry. The Psalms, according to Girard, are the first texts in world literature presented from the first-person perspective of a solitary, alienated man who is hunted by a unanimous band of persecutory enemies, having only God in whom to confide his innocence. The prophets preached on the offensiveness of sacrifices to God, and Isaiah spoke of a Suffering Servant who is persecuted by his people but offers no resistance to them.

But the most decisive revelation—and subversion—of the falsity of the single-victim mechanism comes from the Gospels, and more specifically from the Passion narratives. Jesus is thoroughly isolated—feared by the authorities, hated by the mob, abandoned by his followers—and is condemned to an ignominious death that appeases his persecutors—who had previously been striving against one another—and brings them closer together. The sacrificial mechanism, now identified with Satan—the Accuser, the Father of Lies, the Prince of Darkness, the Murderer from the Beginning—appears at first to have won another victory, achieving another conciliatory human sacrifice and allowing the cycle of mimetic contagion to repeat itself in perpetuity. But the perfect innocence of the victim as God Incarnate, the encounter of the disciples with the resurrected Christ—which allowed them to finally see through the pathology to which they themselves had fallen prey—and the true testimony of the Gospels decisively and irrevocably exposed the Satanic functionality of the scapegoat mechanism, inaugurating a long historical process by which the power of Satan to “cast out” himself by his own power, as both mimetic rivalry itself and the single-victim mechanism that discharges it onto the innocent, has gradually been rendered inoperable.



The Christian legacy has made the concern for victims the absolute value of our global civilization. Every social structure, every institution proclaims, however mechanically or hypocritically, its commitment to victims of all stripes; the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed, and the untolerated. The overt attempts made in modernity to displace the Christian ethos and repaganize the world—namely, by Nietzsche in the intellectual realm and Hitler in the political one—have gone down, it seems, in decisive defeat. But Satan, though deprived of his old tricks, has adopted new ones, now more subtle and pernicious. This takes the form of what Girard describes as “the other totalitarianism”: a new ideology of victimism that seeks to subvert Christianity by purporting to beat it at its own game, introducing a new kind of mimetic rivalry with the ostensive object of defending victims:

“The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and ‘radicalizes’ the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be ‘revolutionary’ now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions. This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves.”

In a world in which Christian revelation has become inevitable, Satan no longer pushes forcefully against the scapegoat, but instead hides himself within it, creating a simulacrum of the Christian ethic that turns out, in practice, to invert it by castigating Christianity itself (on Christian terms) as a vehicle of oppression and denouncing its moral prohibitions as intolerant and persecutory, even when—or because—these prohibitions serve to inhibit the spiraling of mimetic contagion. Modern victimism hugs the ideology of tolerance so tightly that it ends up unchaining the very social desires—sexual, acquisitive, reputational, etc.—that make the cycle of sacrificial violence inevitable. But with the unveiling of the Satanic secret by the Cross, the power of the scapegoat mechanism to dispel the violent antagonisms of our societies is being increasingly diminished. Satan’s days are numbered, but his kingdom of destructive, power-seeking rage lacks the means or the desire to inhibit its aggression in the hearts of men. The kingdom of this world will be superseded by the Kingdom of God, but not before it expends itself in an apocalyptic, Hitlerian crescendo of violence.

We’d best be ready.





*This brings to mind a quote from C.S. Lewis: "How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints."

[Davis Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not only one of the finest and most brilliant interpretations of the Gospel, but a remarkable Christian apologetic from the standpoint of cultural anthropology. It may well be the first book I would recommend to an intelligent atheist who bases his objections to religion off philosophy and psychology. Along with books like George Steiner's Real Presences, it is an attempt to get the world of humanities scholarship to take Christianity seriously again, and I think it is capable of doing so. I have some theological objections (i.e. Girard spends no time on the concepts of the Fall, the image of God, and original sin, which is baffling), and I wish the concept of "mimetic desire" was fleshed out more toward the beginning, but man, is this a powerfully and cogently argued book. And in the latter chapters, Girard's diagnosis of the perpetual battle between "paganism" and Christianity on the trajectory of the West is stunning. I didn't realize until I was well into it than it was written at the dawn of the 21st century. That makes Girard's prescient analysis of cultural Marxism, wokism, and the irrational rage that accompanies it all the more significant:

"The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and 'radicalizes' the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be 'revolutionary' now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions...[they] boast of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually, what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion, euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc. Neo-paganism would like to turn the Ten Commandments and all of Judeo-Christian morality into some alleged intolerable violence, and indeed its primary objective is their complete abolition." (180-181)

Until quite recently, I thought that the anti-woke and anti-progressive hysteria coming from conservative circles was a bit over the top. I had come to the opposite conclusion before reading this, but if you're a well-intentioned Christian who thinks that, Girard just may cure you of that illusion. The Christian concern for victims, without an actual Christianity that looks inside oneself for the source of evil instead of to human scapegoats, must inevitably become pagan and utterly destructive of all that is human.

[Lieutenant · Rating 5 out of 5]

René Girard is far from a typical “feel-good” Christian thinker. His work goes into some of the most profound and unsettling questions about human existence—particularly the nature of desire, the origins of conflict, and the role of violence and sacrifice in human culture. His insights reveal that practices like human sacrifice in ancient societies are not simply irrational and barbaric, but deeply structured responses to the dynamics of human desire.

According to Olavo de Carvalho, in an article, Girard’s intellectual project is nothing less than a coup. He dares to unseat the profane tetrad—positivism, Marxism, structuralism, Freudianism—that has ruled the human sciences like a priesthood. And what does he put in its place? Christianity—not the sentimentalized, privatized version, but the raw, primordial Christian force that reveals the foundational violence of culture itself. Girard, a quiet professor exiled in California, bypasses the Parisian salons entirely and yet manages to strike at the heart of academic orthodoxy with surgical precision. As Nietzsche wrote, “One only really conquers what one replaces.” Girard does not waste time arguing with the reigning theories—he replaces them wholesale by offering a deeper, more encompassing explanation of the very phenomena they claimed to master.

The book begins by pointing out the central error of May 1968, the rejection of prohibitions—expressed in the famous slogan “it is forbidden to prohibit”—without understanding the vital anthropological and cultural function of these prohibitions, especially those of the Decalogue. Girard argues that the tenth commandment, by prohibiting the desire for the goods of others, recognizes and attempts to contain the main source of human violence: mimetic desire, that is, the desire that arises from the imitation of the desire of others. This desire, when left unregulated, generates rivalry, envy, jealousy, escalation of conflicts and, finally, the four great acts of violence: theft, adultery, false testimony and murder—all of which were already foreseen in the previous commandments. Therefore, by mocking traditional prohibitions and proposing an absolute freedom of desire, May 1968 would have ignored the imitative and conflictive nature of human desire, disarming society against its greatest threat: uncontrolled mimetic rivalry. The modern refusal of prohibition, for Girard, is naive and dangerously blind to the anthropological reality of the human being, leading to a society fragmented and hostile, this increase in hostility and polarisation is becoming more evident today.

To forestall such hostility and collapse, archaic societies stumbled upon a violent solution that worked with terrifying efficiency: scapegoating. By focusing collective aggression on a single victim—innocent, defenseless, and above all, unavenged—these societies created peace through murder. Violence became the cornerstone of order, and from this mechanism sprang the entire architecture of ritual, myth, and even law.

The scapegoat, originally reviled, becomes sacred in retrospect. The act of killing is remembered as divine intervention. Sacrifice is ritualized, institutionalized, and eventually sanitized with symbolic substitutes—animals, offerings, liturgies. But the underlying logic remains: peace through exclusion, unity through blood.

Girard argues that Satan, like Christ, seeks to be imitated, but through seduction and by encouraging humans to pursue their desires without moral restraint. This imitation leads to escalating mimetic rivalry, where individuals mirror each other’s desires, resulting in conflict and chaos. As the process unfolds, Satan undergoes a transformation—from a seductive model to a rival and obstacle—giving rise to what the Gospels call “scandals.”

Jesus identifies Satan with scandal, notably when He rebukes Peter for trying to steer Him away from His destined suffering. Satan’s most terrifying power, according to Girard, lies in his ability to provoke social crises through mimetic desire and then resolve them via the “victim mechanism”: the community unites by unanimously turning against and expelling a scapegoat. This mechanism, which appears to bring peace and unity, is in fact the foundation of Satan’s power. Jesus’ question, “How can Satan expel Satan?” points to this paradox, in which violence (disorder) is used to restore order. This cycle is vividly illustrated in the crucifixion, where Jesus becomes the scapegoat, and His death temporarily calms the crowd, fulfilling political expectations (as seen in Pilate and Herod).

Satan maintains his dominion by sowing discord and then offering a false peace through sacrifice. In John 8, Jesus tells His listeners they are children of the devil because they follow his desires, not God’s. Mimetic desire must always imitate a model—either God or the devil.

The Gospel, for Girard, uniquely exposes the victim mechanism behind myths and archaic religions. Unlike myths, where victims are falsely blamed and later deified, Jesus is proclaimed innocent. His divinity breaks from myth: not born from violence, but from truth and love. The Hebrew Bible begins this shift; the Gospels complete it. Jesus is God as victim, revealing a nonviolent God. His resurrection exposes, not conceals, founding violence. A minority, not the mob, proclaims his divinity. The Trinity unites God’s oneness with Jesus’ innocence and the Spirit’s witness. The Gospel doesn’t mythologize, it reveals what myths hide. Thus, Christianity is the final unveiling of human violence and divine love.

Christianity, whose vocation is the defense of the innocent, has itself become the new victim of a system that radicalizes this very vocation. The phenomenon identified by Girard—the emergence of an "other totalitarianism"—does not consist of a brutal and overt attack, like that perpetrated by Nazism, but of a subtler and more effective strategy: the appropriation of the language of compassion to establish a new form of ideological oppression.

Nazi totalitarianism, the extreme expression of sacrificial violence, sought to destroy the Christian inheritance by showing it could kill the weak without consequences: Jews, the weak, the sick, the "impure." If the Nazis had won, Girard argues, they would have eventually celebrated the Holocaust to prove that concern for victims—the central moral legacy of Judaism and Christianity—was no longer the guiding force of history. Their genocidal logic was a conscious attempt to demonstrate that the Christian valorization of the innocent victim could be reversed, and that civilization could be built once again on the foundation of satanic violence, as in the ancient myths. But the failure of Nazism gave way to a new form of hostility: a totalitarianism that, rather than denying the defence of innocent victims, exalts it to the point of delirium, corrupting its original Christian meaning.

Girard draws attention to the anti-Christian nature of this process. The rhetoric of victimization, which in its Christian origin seeks to protect the innocent and denounce the scapegoat, is now used to justify the destruction of the very tradition that gave way to it. Christianity is accused of hypocrisy due to its history marked by human errors (the inquisition, colonialism), and these accusations serve as the basis for rejecting not only corrupted practices but the entirety of its moral framework: respect for life, sexual distinction, the value of redemptive suffering, the sanctity of marriage, and the ideal of self-mastery.

In the name of victims, a new paganism is legitimized. The defense of abortion, euthanasia, sexual indifference, and unlimited hedonism is promoted as liberation, when in reality it constitutes a real slavery to the passions and a return to the mimetic processes of dissolution, rivalry and division. Christian love, which expresses itself as care, responsibility, and sacrifice, is replaced by permissiveness disguised as compassion. This is a perverse imitation of Christ, what tradition calls the Antichrist: a power that speaks in the name of justice and peace but transforms them into instruments of persecution and moral control.

The Antichrist need not oppose Christ directly: it is enough to outflank Him from the left, accusing Him of not being just enough.

His theory does not flatter our sensibilities. It confronts us with the horrifying truth of our complicity, our desires, our need for victims. But in doing so, it offers not despair, but the only hope that is not built on another corpse.

What power overcomes violent mimeticism? The Gospels say it is the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. The disciples did not “come to their senses” on their own—the Spirit seized them. John’s Gospel calls the Spirit the Paraclete, meaning advocate or defender in court. The Spirit defends the innocent, revealing to persecutors what they have done. He fulfills Jesus’ words: “They do not know what they are doing.” The Paraclete opposes Satan, whose name means “accuser.” Satan fuels mythology; the Spirit reveals the truth behind it. The Passion narratives reflect the Spirit’s defense of unjust victims. The anthropological and theological revelations are inseparable in Christ. This unity is affirmed by the doctrine of the Incarnation. The mimetic lens clarifies original sin and deepens theology. Two key conversions highlight the Spirit’s role: Peter and Paul. Paul hears: “Saul, why do you persecute me?” and recognizes his violence. Both conversions expose their ignorance of collective persecution. They realize they were swept up in the crowd’s violence. The Resurrection opens their eyes to this complicity. True Christian conversion begins with Jesus’ haunting question: “Why are you persecuting me?” Revealing God as the ultimate victim of human violence.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Girard brings his understanding of anthropology to the Bible in a way that is insightful and faithful to the text. Girard sees the world in terms of mimesis--the imitation of others, driven by envy and lust for what they possess.

Mimesis is a drive to possess what others possess. He argues that the tenth commandment is meant to contain this desire. But it is not easily contained, for it is the fundamental driver of civilization. The pressure of mimetic desire builds and bursts out in violence--which Girard terms mimetic contagion.

This mimetic contagion is captured, harnessed, and "redeemed" by myth. Girard exposes the supposed miracle of Appolonius in Ephesus. The city was in the throes of a plague--which we often think of as physical disease, but Girard argues is more appropriately understood as more of a social disease than physical one. Appolonius' miracle was to heal the city of its plague by urging them to stone a poor, blind beggar. At first the crowd was reluctant, but after the first stone was thrown, they came in a torrent. Soon the man was dead, having been beaten to a pulp. After they took the rocks off of him he had turned into a dog--showing he was no man to begin with, but instead a demon.

Girard's argument is that this was an act of mimetic desire that exploded into violence--the beggar became the unifying scapegoat that restored the city to peace. Thus, "Satan expelled Satan." What Girard means by this, is that Satan drove himself out and restored order, only so that he could creep back in with the city unaware that it had just committed an appalling act of murder in the name of peace and unity. The crowd had all been pacified, believing they had killed a demon and thus done right.

Naturally, this kind of violent murder is covered up--by myth and religious piety. The victim is typically later deified. Girard mentions in passing many such myths, though he does not explain them, as would have been helpful.

The power of myth and the sacrificial victim is the founding moment of human civilizations. He argues that it is no coincidence that Cain was the founder of culture and civilization after having killed his brother, Abel. All human civilizations are built on the scapegoat murder and the victim's subsequent deification.

But the course of history was radically changed by the death and resurrection of Christ--for Christ was the victim of this same explosion of mimetic passion. Like all victims of mimetic violence, he was innocent. But the difference was his divinity and his resurrection from the dead. Instead of his murderers being able to justify their murder, his resurrection caused a minority to expose the injustice of the mimetic violence and created a new world order where the power of Satan was exposed and mocked.

For it was not only Christ that was crucified--but death and Satan himself. Satan was exposed for the wicked deceiver and mocker he is. This destroyed Satan's cover and his power--for wherever the gospel has gone forth, myth and the order of mimetic desire has been exposed and defeated.

This has consequently, and somewhat ironically, created a social milieu where Christ's atoning death actually reeks to many--for in it, they see (wrongly) a continuation of the old order where an innocent victim is killed for the health of the community. What they fail to see, is the truth of the old order masked by myth. They do not see that paganism is replete with the horrors of mimetic violence. Their distance from the myth and their perception of myth as story--not as an explanation of actual history, blinds them to the majesty of Christ's atoning death and its defeat of the old order and creation of a new.

There are two ways in life--the imitation of Christ and his order, or loyalty to Satan's mimetic system--constantly hungering for its next victim. One cannot fight Satan merely by being aware of his tactics, for by doing so, one will fall headlong for it--for no man can oppose the power of the crowd. We see in the Bible itself how the apostles, Peter, worst of all, fell for this very same power in his three denials of Christ after his arrest.

This is a powerful work that will help you understand the importance of desire in the heart of man and the importance of desiring Christ and his kingdom through obedience and conformity to the Word of God.

"...be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect." Romans 12:2

[Ben Zornes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Folks have been telling me for years now that "It's all in Girard, man." Finally, I've gotten around to reading one of Girard's books, and whattya know...it's all in Girard, man.

Of course, there are caveats to be made. In particular, Girard reads Scripture as an anthropologist. He undertakes to argue that the profound change which Jesus' ministry and death wrought in the world doesn't necessarily hang on anything supernatural; this is, of course, as they say in Mexico, "el problemo." He admits that the resurrection was indeed a miracle and supernatural intervention by God, but also tries to argue that from an anthropological viewpoint, the miraculous nature of the Gospels is not necessary in exposing the mimetic cycle that mankind is caught in. The short hand is that Girard's view of Scripture's inspiration is weak sauce.

That said, his observations of how fallen man operates, and how the Gospel exposes Satan's fundamental need for innocent victims, is incredibly salient, shrewd, and like I've said already and will continue to say, "It's all in Girard, man."

The first, and most important, takeaway is that when a mob makes up its mind on something, you'd find it easier to stop a Kanye rant at an awards show. In other words, when a crowd gets moving in a direction, there's no reasoning with the mob. The "violent contagion" will spread and grow until a unanimous victim is chosen and scapegoated. Then, and only then, will the mob's bloodlust subside into calm...until the next cycle begins.

Second takeaway is that it is because of Christ and the spread of the Gospel throughout the world that mankind has come to prize concern for victims. In fact, Girard forcefully argues that it is Christianity that gave the world a concern for victims. Now, however, Satan has corrupted that conscience and we now hunt for the hunters of victims, in order to slake our appetite for human sacrifice. Our concern for victims is poisoned, and society still wants to scapegoat someone for not being concerned enough about this or that victim group.

Third, Girard points out that the hub of human strife is always desire. I want what you have, and because you know I want it you now want to hold onto it more. Thus is born a mimetic rivalry, which inevitably comes to blows. The Apostle James gets at this very thing in his epistle, and Girard certainly builds on that fundamental principle of our envy and desire being a spark which ignites our violence towards our neighbor.

All said, Girard is wonderful. Even though he's weak sauce on the atonement, the inspiration of Scripture, and the Resurrection, he is a tremendously helpful at pointing out what's laying there, out in the open, for any with eyes to see: mankind needs Jesus to set us free from all our strife, envy, and vengeance towards our neighbor.

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 4 out of 5]

The recently deceased Rene Girard presents readers with an astonishing commentary on biblical narratives, especially the Passion. The central thrust of this book and much of Girard's thought revolves around mimetic desire - the yearning we have for what others possess, which is both good and bad (Girard interacts with the Tenth Commandment, noting its length compared to the four preceding commandments). Girard bases his anthropology (and unlike many Christian thinkers, anthropology has precedence in Girard's thought over theology) on this mimetic desire which, if left unchecked, can change into mimetic rivalry and eventually violence. Girard, a literary critic, analyzes how the phenomenon of a "scapegoat" - the one on whom all the blame is placed for any given disaster, ordeal or affliction - is used to quash violence in human societies. He does this by exploring classic mythology (in modern literature, this is depicted in Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" and in history, in Hitler and the Nazis scapegoating of the Jews, blaming them for Germany's loss in the First World War and subsequent economic stagnation and misfortune). In myths, a victim was made the scapegoat, the one sacrificed, and expelled or executed by the majority, thus restoring order and peace (Girard speculates that the ancient gods had begun as human beings who were made scapegoats and whose deaths became celebrated because they resulted in the restoration of the people, thus leading the people to celebrate and revere these deceased victims as deities). But Girard asserts that Christianity is radically unique in that for the first time, Jesus, the victim is the one who is INNOCENT while the majority, those who called for Christ's crucifixion, are the guilty ones; in all the previous myths, this situation has been reversed. Girard also makes some interesting comments about Satan. He chastises modern theologians for downplaying Satan, although Girard himself doesn't seem to believe the Devil is an actual figure; rather, perhaps drawing from Augustine's idea, Satan is a parasite. Satan sows discord and is associated with such phrases as the "powers and principalities" (though Girard must be given credence, like his fellow Frenchman Jacques Ellul, for taking these powers and principalities seriously). As Girard explains:

"The Satan expelled is that one who foments and exasperates mimetic rivalries to the point of transforming the community into a furnace of scandals. The Satan who expels is this same furnace when it reaches a point of incandescence sufficient to set off the single victim mechanism. In order to prevent the destruction of his kingdom, Satan makes out of his disorder itself, at its highest heat, a means of expelling himself.

Because of this extraordinary power, Satan is the prince of this world. If he could not protect his domain from the violence that threatens to destroy it, even though it is essentially his own, he would not merit this title of prince, which the Gospels do not award him lightly. If he were purely a destroyer, Satan would have lost his domain long ago. To understand why he is the master of all the kingdoms of this world, we must take Jesus at his word: disorder expels disorder, or in other words Satan really expels Satan. By executing this extraordinary feat, he has been able to make himself indispensable, and so his power remains great."

This explanation also highlights how staggering the Crucifixion is. Borrowing an idea from the Eastern Church that the Cross "duped" Satan, Girard remarks:

"The idea of Satan duped by the Cross is therefore not magical at all and in no way offends the dignity of God. The trick that traps Satan does not include the least bit of either violence or dishonesty on God’s part. It is not really a ruse or trick; it is rather the inability of the prince of this world to understand the divine love. If Satan does not see God, it is because he is violent contagion itself. The devil is extremely clever concerning everything having to do with rivalistic conflicts, with scandals and their outcome in persecution, but he is blind to all reality other than that. Satan turns bad contagion into something I hope not to do myself, a totalitarian and infallible theory that makes the theoretician deaf and blind to the love of God for humankind and to the love that human beings share with God, however imperfectly.”

Girard ends the book by showing how thoroughly Christian culture is because now that the Crucifixion of Christ has revealed that the victims in the myths were innocent, we now place such great emphasis on protecting the victim. The ancients were never constrained in this way, they freely sacrificed victims to the gods.

This book certainly requires more than one read. I am not sure I understand it all. The forward by James G. Williams is EXTREMELY helpful in introducing the reader to Girard's thought. I appreciate how Girard is able to weave together literary and biblical criticism with anthropology and philosophy. He uses the myth of Apollonius of Tyana especially, comparing Apollonius' miraculous healing of an epidemic which only occurs through Apollonius ordering people to stone a beggar (the scapegoat) with Jesus' adamant refusal to have the woman caught in adultery stoned. In his book "A Beginner's Guide to New Testament Exegesis," Fuller professor Richard Erickson recommends his audience read at least 1-2 ancient literary works to acquaint themselves with the imagination of the ancient world; Girard's analysis of myth and the Bible has certainly inspired me to do this. Girard admits that myths and Christianity share some similarities, including resurrection accounts, but they have a fundamental difference. As Girard writes elsewhere:

"The true Resurrection is based not on the mythical lie of the guilty victim who deserves to die, but on the rectification of that lie, which comes from the true God and which reopens channels of communication mankind itself had closed through self-imprisonment in its own violent cultures. Divine grace alone can explain why, after the Resurrection, the disciples could become a dissenting minority in an ocean of victimization—could understand then what they had misunderstood earlier: the innocence not of Jesus alone but of all victims of all Passion-like murders since the foundation of the world."

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading this book for months in discussion with a few friends. Girard is someone who has long intrigued me; I have read books about his theology but nothing by him. One of the most impressive things about this book is that it is not too dense or difficult. It is certainly profound and challenging. Some authors seem to want to impress with many words, confusing paragraphs and hard to follow arguments, as if merely leading people into meandering confusion (albeit, there can be brilliance in the confusion) is a good thing. Girard is brilliant and this brilliance shows in being able to share his ideas in a readable way.

Basically, Girard argues that mimetic violence is at the root of human religion and relationship. We learn what we want from observing what others want and this brings us into conflict. In other words, when my two-year-old plays with a toy that his sister forgot existed, but then when she sees him she wants it more than anything, and a fight starts - that's mimetic desire! We see it everywhere.

Girard then says that early human society risked destroying itself. To avoid this the scapegoat developed. Everyone united against one person (or group) that was blamed as the cause of all the violence and disorder. So instead of everyone fighting everyone, everyone fights this one person. For this to work though, society has to believe this one person is guilty. Thus, we end up with a victim who deserves it. At the same time, since destroying this one person leads to peace, this person is worshipped.

The biggest thing though is that the victim is guilty. Here is where Girard makes his biggest move, for he discovered that in the Jewish and Christian scriptures alone do we see innocent victims. These scriptures begin to unmask the whole scapegoat mechanism. And this culminates in the story of Jesus, the clearest and most innocent victim. In Jesus we see that the whole system is false, for the victims are innocent.

Finally, Girard speaks about how Christianity changed our civilization. In no other civilization has there been a care for victims. Our concern for victims arose due to the story of Jesus and influence of the church. This happened even when the church has forgotten (all too often) its own roots in worship of the innocent victim.

Girard challenges me because, well, scapegoating is so easy. We see it everywhere. Half the country blames the other half, and vice versa, for all the problems. Our country looks to other countries or groups. We blame people in our neighborhoods. We separate from anyone different from us and create groups where we can be safe and the same. Girard's telling of the Jesus story challenges us to overcome this, to reach out and embrace the innocent victims.

Definitely worth a read.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Primarily, as Girard himself says towards the end, this is a book about anthropology: about the human impulse to imitate, to envy, to seek an outlet for the collective violent impulses of a community against a common victim. He argues in wonderful detail that in all ancient civilizations this impulse manifested itself in "scapegoating," in the practice of deliberately selecting an innocent victim, and, under the pretext of guilt, venting the rage of the community upon it. Only in the Bible, he points out, do we see a counter-narrative that resists this impulse, alluding throughout the Old Testament to a wrongfully persecuted victim who sometimes undergoes a symbolic resurrection. Then, of course, in the New Testament we see a more explicit subversion, where the unanimous hatred of the community is directed against an innocent victim who paradoxically triumphs through his sacrifice. Girard then takes these insights and applies them in fascinating ways to theology, sociology, politics, and art. Only through the Cross, he argues, can we have genuine concern for victims and subvert the sinful drive of human nature towards violence.

[Philemon Schott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ich bin hin- und hergerissen von Girard. Einerseits ist der Blick auf mimetisches Begehren (und damit eingeschlossen sein ganzes Repertoire, u.A. Konflikt, Sündenbock) ein tolles Deutungsmuster für scheinbar alles, andererseits ist es mir viel zu absolut gesetzt, wirkt auch nach dem zweiten Buch, das ich von ihm gelesen habe, zu unterkomplex und monokausal. Das liegt vielleicht an seinem deduktiven Ansatz, der sich durch sein Werk durchzuziehen scheint. Er hat seine Welterklärung gefunden und überprüft sie, indem er sich bestimmte Mythen, Theorien, die Bibel u.v.m. sehr kleinteilig anschaut. Das Buch hier behandelt hauptsächlich Mythen und die Bibel.

Was er hier etwas unbefriedigend in Bezug auf Nazideutschland angerissen hat, der Bezug seiner Theorie auf die Geschichte, würde eine Lücke füllen. Das sind die Fragen, mit denen ich nach der Lektüre rausgehe: Wie könnte man seine Theorien empirisch testen? Wo finden sie sich in der Geschichte wieder?

Und für mich besonders wichtig: Was ist mit anderen Deutungsmustern wie etwa einer materialistischen Analyse? Letztlich ist es ja nicht eine abstrakte, universelle Begierde, die den größten Schaden anrichtet. Die Begierde eines alleinerziehenden Elternteils, das für nen Hungerlohn 6 Tage die Woche arbeiten muss, richtet nicht im Ansatz so viel Schaden an, wie die Begierde von den Musks und Scholzen dieser Welt. Selbst wenn also das Christentum das Problem der Gewalt gelöst hat, wie Girard postuliert, wie geht seine Generallösung die Ungleichheit der Machtverhältnisse, die Ungleichheit der Auswirkung von Begierde an?

An sich find ich das alles aber schon ziemlich nice. Ich hoffe die offenen Fragen lösen sich, wenn ich mir angucke, wie Girard in aktuellen Entwürfen rezipiert wird.

[César · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinario. Un ensayo que adopta la forma de análisis antropológico de los Evangelios siguiendo las tesis de Girard sobre el deseo mimético, el chivo expiatorio y los ciclos de violencia colectiva. Dichas tesis iluminan la Revelación cristiana: ésta sería el desvelamiento y desmitificación del ciclo mimético, esencialmente satánico y mitológico, y la puesta en claro de la inocencia de la víctima considerada como chivo expiatorio y la culpabilidad, en tanto implicados activos, de todos nosotros.

Es un libro accesible -no parece ser así el resto de la obra de Girard- y con el potencial suficiente como para cambiar radicalmente la manera de ver la realidad humana y captar de forma atinada la trascendencia del cristianismo.

Las palabras que yo pueda decir sobre el libro se quedan muy cortas. Sólo queda recomendar con fervor su lectura.

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Glorious.

[ThePrill · Rating 4 out of 5]

This took me a while to get into, but the wait was well worth it, and ended up being pretty glorious. As Girard built his argument, I struggled to see where he was leading it to. Comparing the death of Christ to a host of deaths across mythology made me slightly squeamish. However, Girard does brilliantly to explain why the death of Christ is like unto those myths, and yet is not. How the Bible is full of underdogs, while myths are full of heroes. How the Bible roots for the righteous, while myths (think Oedipus, Apollonius, etc.) constantly expose and uphold the justification behind killing off the ‘heroes’. How myths end in the killing off of the hero and the triumph of the mob, but the Bible sees the triumph of the true Victim and the rise and expansion of a small group. Its comparisons are actually excellent. Satan does indeed fall like lightning, for the light exposes the darkness, and thus the darkness can no longer be covert, but must, in turn, expose itself. I quite liked this one.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first started reading this because so many people in my online circles kept mentioning key Girardian terms like "mimetic desire", "scapegoat", "contagion", "violence" and what what - and when I interacted with them it seemed that I didn't have a sufficient grasp on the context of what these terms meant. To be honest, haha, I read Girard half in annoyance and half in the hope that once I understand this apparently purely anthropological take, I can refute it better in discussions. Alas... things did not go as I planned. I think Girard is a genius, and though his take is anthropological, it need not be used to reduce religion to that all the time. Many of his ideas that apply explicitly on the societal level can roughly also be seen on other levels of experience, most notably on the individual level. His notion of scapegoating (a form of "violence") is something all of us have experienced first hand. Just as there is agitation in a group of people, there can be agitation in your body, that you converge on one individual (the "single victim mechanism") when you take your anger out on them. There is never any true justification for that since doing that perpetuates "violence" - what's to stop that individual from not doing the same, taking their newly ignited anger or pain out on you in turn, or on some other person? It is therefore only "bearing your cross (suffering)" that can really prevent that lashing out in yourself - and here we are back at Christianity being the solution.

This book has really given me a lot of terminology and new, powerful ways of thinking about society, especially in the current moment of social media, Covid, protests etc. in a way that's complementary to my understanding of modernism, myth, Christianity and Symbolism in general. I even miss reading it and might reread it again. The last few chapters were especially interesting, with Girard making astonishingly accurate predictions about the rise of victimology in response to the second world war. From what I can see social media is freakishly powerful in increasing mimetic desire as well as aggravating resentment between opposing parties of a discussion, movement or political landscape. It facilitates virtue signalling and victim culture in ways we have never seen before, while it also does nothing to nurture true connection, true virtue or common understanding and sense-making. How long can that chaotic matrix hold peace? I think we're in for one helluva scapegoating in the coming decades... It's very clear, especially upon reading this book, that we're in the chaos part of the pendulum swing, and order is coming yet again... it's just a matter of time. God help us.

And on that note, I'd recommend getting some light reading on the side to help get you through if such realisations come about while reading Girard.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Girard's accessible presentation of the gospel's power in exposing the cycle of mimetic violence. He approaches the bible anthropologically and shows how it is unique in it's ability to unmask mimetic desire, scapegoating, and what he calls the 'single victim mechanism' vis-a-vis pagan myth which conceals and hides these same systems of violence. And while so much can be said about this short book (Girard covers tons of ground) one of it's great contributions to theology can be summed up by the following conclusion,

"Humankind is never the victim of God; God is always the victim of humankind." (191)

Thus Girard's work helps to unveil the truth that the cross was a result of human violence not the necessary satisfaction of an angry god.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic. If you want to see what a field like anthropology/social science can look like submitted to Christ, here it is. Girard’s work has definitely affected the way that I see human history, and it sheds a whole new light on the significance of Jesus on the cross. It’s pretty dense so I’ll need to read it again or maybe some of his other books.
It’s a bit speculative in many cases, as he’s delving into the origins of human society and religion, but so is all social science. This one is at least grounded in biblical truth.

[Rick Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Girard has some wonderful insights into the nature of mimetic rivalry and violence. Once you read his explanations and arguments, you start to see it everywhere. I think he goes wrong in trying to universalize it and make it the source of all myth, religion, and violence. He discovered a really great hammer, and suddenly everything looked like a nail.

Also, though he was a professing Christian, his thought does not sit comfortably with the Old Testament ceremonial law given to Israel by God or with the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement.

[Travis K · Rating 5 out of 5]

“By depriving the victim mechanism of the darkness that must conceal it so it can continue to control human culture, the Cross shakes up the world. Its light deprives Satan of his principal power, the power to expel Satan. Once the Cross completely illuminates this dark sun, Satan is no longer able to limit his capacity for destruction. Satan will destroy his kingdom, and he will destroy himself” (142).

The most brilliant thing I’ve had the privilege of reading in a very long while, Girard the [scape]goat for this one fr

Put anthropology back into theology and save history in the process!!

[Jared Mcnabb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m about 20 years late to the Girard party. Although I’ve heard about many of his themes over the years I still found this work enlightening.

[Alexandru Jr. · Rating 3 out of 5]

girard is very repetitive :)
in a way that's good, because you get new aspects of his argument with each repetition.
but, at the same time, this is a little bit boring.

the book is, basically, another retelling of his arguments about the scapegoat and the "anthropological reading" of the gospels.

in summary, he says that the human beings are defined by mimetic desire.
we desire what others have / represent. and thus we become rivals, adversaries.
and desire mediated by the other is replaced with conflict.
sometimes, this conflicts takes over the whole society. a kind of war of all against all.
at a certain moment, the violence is directed against one victim. the scapegoat. the mechanism starts only if the whole community is unanimous in demonizing the scapegoat. and it expels or sacrifices him / her. and feels good afterwards. the crisis is replaced by calm.
and this calm is felt like an epiphany. the victim is deified.
and when the need is felt (when another crisis is imminent) a new victim is selected and offered as a sacrifice to the original victim.
this schema is, according to girard, the explanation of almost everything - from the first human society to myths to religions to greek tragedy and so on.

the schema was suggested to him by a reading of the gospels, which, according to him, expose this mechanism (and he interprets the old testament in this sense, too).
for him, this is the fall of satan.
satan is the mechanism of mimetic violence, the accuser, the creator of myths which justify this violence.
but the old testament and the gospels expose this mechanism, thus justifying all the victims. according to them, unanimous violence is inspired by the devil and is always lying. the victims are innocent. so, the victims are rehabilitated.

and gradually all this evolves in a preoccupation for victims, generalized in the contemporary society. a good example in this sense would be the west's preoccupation for victims of the totalitarian regimes in the near east :)

in a way, the caring for victims, for giving them a voice, the efforts to help them, is the christian essence of the contemporary society. in this sense, he reads nietzsche and nazism, for example, as trying to oppose that, to reverse that. to justify again, against christianity, the right of the strong ones to dispose of the weak.
and a certain humanitarian left also tries to emulate the christian charity, almost saying 'we are the true christians' - but for him this is just another trick of satan, who is trying to come back :)

i strongly disagreed with some of his interpretations, he seemed to twist the texts he was citing in order to make them conform to his theory, but it is really interesting and insightful. and can be applied as an explanatory schema to a lot of phenomena.

[Stephen Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

March 2024:

It’s difficult for me to convey the the experience of reading this book as anything other than apocalyptic; I found this to be true upon first reading Girard seven years ago and again this week (a remarkable book for Holy Week, I must say). There is nothing new under the sun, yet the time in between the two reads seems to have catalyzed an even tighter spiral of mimetic contagion/scapegoating in the world than was present in 2017. Our digitized lives are no doubt at the root of much of this. Indeed, an extensive analysis applying Girard’s anthropology to our specific digital age would be most welcome.

Even so, reading Girard’s original work seems necessary to the nth for all who would understand the history of man. He only have I found capable of giving a simultaneous and full-throated Christian defense of victims while condemning the totalitarian machinations of the modern pagan powers who seek to co-opt victimhood for their own devices — to indeed foment more scandal. Scandal must come, but so also must the Resurrection, and thus Girard’s work is ultimately both a warning and a beacon of eschatological hope.

“[Jesus] is an unsuccessful scapegoat whose heroic willingness to die for the truth will ultimately make the entire cycle of satanic violence visible to all people and therefore inoperative. The "kingdom of Satan" will give way to the "kingdom of God." Thanks to Jesus' death, the Spirit of God, alias the Paraclete (a word that signifies "the lawyer for the defense"), wins a foothold in the kingdom of Satan. He reveals the innocence of Jesus to the disciples first and then to all of us. The defense of victims is both a moral imperative and the source of our increasing power to demystify scapegoating. The Passion accounts reveal a phenomenon that unbeknownst to us generates all human cultures and still warps our human vision in favor of all sorts of exclusions and scapegoating. If this analysis is true, the explanatory power of Jesus' death is much greater than we realize, and Paul's exalted idea of the Cross as the source of all knowledge is anthropologically sound.”

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plug for this book here.

Read David Lyle Jeffrey's review here.

Forward (by James G. Williams)
ix: Girard starts w/ anthropology, which "focuses first on [mimetic] desire & its consequences"; those we (want to) imitate are "models"
x: imitative/mimetic desire leads to conflict, which leads to violence; in the Bible, Jesus Christ becomes a victim; disciples are converted from the mimetic contagion of the crowds to imitating Christ; questions & answers to better understand Girard
Q1 (p. x): What is the chief identifying characteristic of human beings?
A: mimetic desire; 10th commandment in Ex. 20 & Deut. 5 (all desire); mimetic desire begins w/ infants/parents & is not sinful per se (it's necessary to "become" human)
Q2 (p. xi): How does mimetic desire lead to conflict & violence?
A: We strongly desire to be/have what the model is/has; religion & culture provide "safeguards for breaking desire," lest we become competing rivals
Q3 (p. xi): What does Girard mean by "scandal"?
A: "stumbling block," "trap"/"snare"; people feel blocked/obstructed from "some specific object of power, prestige, or property" that they desire (can't displace the model, or other competitors get in the way—see Hobbes's "war of all against all" on p. 8); a victim is the one blamed for the scandal; Satan sets up the "single victim mechanism" (Satan is that process)
Q4 (p. xii): What or who is Satan, & how is he related to scandal?
A: Satan's accusations lead to blame & the punishing of a substitute; Satan leads to disorder (mimetic desire —> conflict/violence) & order (scapegoating to relieve pressure); Satan has no being but is a parasite on the being of humans & God; scandal is desiring/stumbling/blaming/victimizing, & Satan is the process of accusing & lynching a victim
Q5 (p. xiii): How is mythology related to Satan & scandal?
A: this book is a study in comparative religions; such studies often miss the fact that "myths disguise real violence" (myths always take the side of the people, who really believe that the victim is guilty & that they are innocent), or dismiss Christianity as a religion that merely borrows from other ANE myths (but similarities lead us to notice a significant difference: the Gospels are different in that they take the side of the victim)
Q6 (p. xiv): What is the role of sacrifice in Girard's thought?
A: sacrifice comes from "the victim mechanism"; victims are sacrificed or scapegoated; "founding murder" myths (e.g., Marduk & Tiamat & Kingu) cover up the original human actors, according to Girard (see p. 42)
Q7 (p. xvi): How is it that human beings became gods?
A: "double transference" of the victim, who gets the blame for the scandal & the credit for the peace (relief, euphoria) brought through sacrifice (only a higher being can do all this)—origin of the gods; origin of kings: people wanted to preserve the victim (the one w/ the power to receive both blame & credit)
Q8 (p. xvii): How is the Bible unique?
A: "God takes the side of the victim"; Joseph's retaliation would have annihilated the Israelites [my observation]; Psalms as the first world literature to highlight the cries of victims; Job as a scapegoat; prophets reject the sacrifice of children; the scapegoat in Isaiah 52–53; Jesus as the epitome of scapegoated victims; Cain the murder built the first city (civilization); "The cross of Christ is the sign of salvation, which is revealed as the overcoming of mimetic desire & violence through the nonviolence of love & forgiveness" (xviii)
Q9 (p. xix): How are the Gospels unique?
A: "The formal structure of the Gospels . . . is much like that of a myth," but the significant difference is that the myth does not unite the whole social order [at first]; perspective (point of view) is also different—the victim is innocent; "The New Testament Gospels are the starting point for a new science of knowledge of humanity. This new knowledge begins w/ faith in Christ the innocent victim, & it becomes the leaven that will work itself out & expand to the point that the concern for victims becomes the absolute value in all societies molded or affected by the spread of Christianity"
Q10 (p. xx): What is the basis for saying that the concern for victims is the new absolute value?
A: both the OT (e.g., Joseph's exile & return, & the deliverance out of Egypt) & the NT (e.g., blessed are the meek, lost sheep are sought) show that the God of history cares for victims—Jesus is the prime example (even though the disciples are stuck in the old model of envious retaliation until they realize that Jesus is a different kind of hero); Nietzsche hated this new paradigm (concern for the victim) that he acknowledged had been adopted by Christians; political correctness & the connection to concern for the victim (especially in higher education)—"Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power" (xxii–xxiii); there are Christian elements to concern for victims, but Satan is able to powerfully twist that concern in detrimental ways; Paul in 1 Corinthians 1: the cross is a stumbling block (scandal)

Introduction
1: similarities between the Gospels & mythology disturb some Christians, but the similarities provide opportunities to examine differences & see the uniqueness of Christianity; myths see victims as guilty, whereas the Bible sees the Victim as innocent (& the people as culpable); mythology conceals scapegoating, but the Bible reveals it
2: victims are deified as beings w/ the power to save & destroy; mythology doesn't make the people look bad, but the Bible does (victims are listened to); Jesus' resurrection undoes the cycle of violence
3: victims are defended in Christianity; scapegoating is concealed in mythology & revealed in Christianity, showing its uniqueness; this book is an anthropological apology for Christianity

Part 1: The Biblical Knowledge of Violence
Ch. 1: Scandal Must Come
7: second half of Decalogue prohibits violence against neighbors—the tenth commandment prohibits desire, not just an action [cf. Hitchens, who hated the idea of thought-crime]; word for covet in Ex. 20:17 is the same word used for how Eve views the fruit in Gen. 3:6
8: the prohibition of desire does not stem from a perverse need to repress people (as some moderns, prizing total autonomy, might think)—war would rage constantly if desiring our neighbor's things were permitted (Hobbes's "war of all against all"); desiring what others have/desire is a natural human tendency
9–10: the tenth commandment is intended to prevent perpetual community violence; objects desired are too numerous to list, so neighbor takes the place of the objects & "is the model for our desires" ("mimetic desire")
10: "opposition exasperates desire"; imitation > rivalry > mimetic rivalry; "concealment doesn't work"; our dead desires (for our own "possession") come to life when someone else desires what we have
11: eternal desire makes the neighbor an idol (cultic hatred), & that idolization, plus our idolization of ourselves (double idolatry), causes human violence
12: respect commandment 10, & we won't have to worry about 6–9
13: tenth commandment signals a revolution that is fulfilled through Jesus—His command to imitate Him isn't because He's narcissistic, but because it turns us away from mimetic rivalries; Jesus imitates His Father & invites us to imitate His imitation
14: God's desires are not greedy/egotistical; "The goal of the Law is peace among humankind"; prohibitions make us want to transgress them; protective model > prohibition
14–15: our aspiration to autonomy makes us slaves to our mimetic models
15: "Mimetic desire is intrinsically good"; our desires require us to borrow others' desires
15–16: because children choose to imitate adult models, language & culture continue; we are both better & worse than animals because of mimetic desire
16: scandals (obstacles) make us desire things even more; scandal comes from a word that means "to limp"—someone limping appears to constantly collide w/ his own shadow
16–17: scandals cause endless mimetic rivalries because each response requires a stronger reaction
17–18: Jesus warns about scandals (Matt. 18) & uses hyperbole; in communities, scandals ("stumbling blocks") inevitably lead to mimetic crises

Ch. 2: The Cycle of Mimetic Violence
19: crowd welcomes Jesus to Jerusalem, then turns on him (mimetic contagion); Peter the prime example in mimetic contagion (in his hostile turn against Jesus); [he's not the rock—that's a misunderstanding of a pun in Matt. 16:18]
19–20: we can't blame Peter's temperament or psychology, because to do so would be to assume that we would have acted differently (to do so would to be like the Pharisees in their moral superiority when they claim that they would not have murdered the prophets as their ancestors did)—resistance to this truth, paradoxically brings about a reenactment [cf. Oedipus]
20: Pilate's "political skill" lay in his avoidance of the mob's anger (mimetic contagion)
21: the two thieves also join the mob (mimetic contagion); a sovereign God behind the human actions of the Crucifixion sounds like a deity from Homer's Iliad; Girard distances God the Father from Jesus' Passion & blames mimetic contagion (cf. pp. 119, 121) [see Acts 2:23, 4:27–28]
21–22: mimetic contagion results in mimetic snowballing, leading to violence & scapegoating
22: individuals forget the object of their fight & turn against each other; warring brothers of mythology (Romulus & Remus)
23: for Paul, the Cross is the best example of a scandal (see p. 45)
23–24: Jesus warns His disciples that they will succumb to mimetic contagion
25–26: Girard thinks that it’s anti-Semitic to say that the Jews are to blame for Jesus’ death [see John 1, where the Jews rejected the One Who came to save them; see Caiaphas, who whipped up the Jewish mob; see Rom. 9, where Paul mourns the Jewish rejection of Jesus; one can both assign real blame to the Jews in their rejection of Jesus, & accept the reality that all people would have rejected Jesus]
26: people decide on a victim who is/seems different from them
26–28: parallels between the mimetic contagion leading to the deaths of both John the Baptist & Jesus (initial crisis, angry mob, reluctant leader w/ power to execute but who concedes to mob)
27: for the Greeks, dancing has high mimetic power to turn a crowd against a victim
28–31: parallels between Isaiah 40 (prepare the way) & 52–53 (suffering servant) & the Gospel story from John the Baptist (prepare the way) to Jesus (suffering servant); mimetic cycle (crisis > lynching of victim > tranquility > another crisis)

Ch. 3: Satan
32: Satan is Hebrew, & "the devil" (diabolos) is Greek; Bultmann's "demythologizing" didn't demythologize Satan enough; Satan seduces us into imitating him, making prohibitions seem tyrannical; Satan sounds like a progressive & likable educator (we feel liberated at first)
33: Satan is both a seducer & an adversary; Jesus calls Peter "Satan" (a stumbling block)
34: Jesus speaks of Satan casting out Satan in Mark 3; Jesus predicts the end of Satan's continuous self-expulsion (cycle of disorder/order)
35: "single victim mechanism" (see Caiaphas's statement on p. 36); Satan could not be the prince of this world if he were only a destroyer, so he makes himself indispensable; he's the accuser in Job (see p. 41)
37: the Crucifixion initially seems to fit into Satan's single victim mechanism (Pilate maintains/restores order); Hollywood's blood-lust; Aristotle's catharsis originally had to do w/ purification from blood sacrifice
38: medieval legends have stories that follow the mimetic cycle (old man who offers peace at the price of a single victim) [cf. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"?]; the single victim mechanism prevailed in pagan societies
39–41: John (see Ch. 8) is often derided as being superstitious & vindictive (see p. 42); "father" language in John 8 has to do w/ a model for imitation (God & Satan are the two primary models); the shift to murder in v. 44 seems strange unless you see the mimetic cycle (desire > scandal/obstacle > crisis > violence)
41: Cain vs. Abel
42: Satan has no being—he's a parasite (see pp. 44–45, where Girard asserts that Christian theology has always said this!); John 8 gives us a choice of models (God or Satan)
43: Satan as the cause & antidote (see p. 51n3—pharmakon); the structure of the Passion is anthropological (this informs our theology of the Incarnation—Simone Weil says that the Gospels are anthropological first, & theological second)
44: Satan's most prized resource is the single victim mechanism [I thought Satan was the mechanism]—we cannot free ourselves from this on our own (see p. 49), & this mechanism controlled the world until Christ came
44–45: Satan isn't a creator, but a parasite (he's an ape of God)
45: the synoptic Gospels (scandal, but no Satan) complement the Gospel of John (devil, but no scandal)
46: w/ Satan's single victim mechanism, it's never impersonal (it's always a person)—cf. p. 69 & see Tolkien's "On Fairy-stories"

Part 2: The Enigma of Myth Resolved
Ch. 4: The Horrible Miracle of Apollonius of Tyana
49–50: Philostratus's story about how Apollonius convinced Ephesians to kill a beggar (demon) & end their epidemic (story framed by Heracles); Julian the Apostate loved & circulated this story in the 4c
50–51: details are too realistic to be totally invented
51–52: metaphors: letting off steam, abscess of fixation, catharsis, scapegoat/ pharmakos (see footnote 3 on p. 51)
52: "plague" isn't always medical (sometimes it's social)
52–53: background of the story shows an introductory emphasis on mimetic rivalry (good & bad)
54–58: Eusebius of Caesarea (first great church historian) critiqued this story; Jesus never emphasized His miracles, & He tries to stop stoning (John 8); the mimetic significance of the first stone (it's a model)—Jesus emphasizes the first stone, & Apollonius deemphasizes it; mimetic contagion is powerful in our day too
58–59: Jesus transcends the law, but goes in its direction, not against it
59–60: importance of averting eyes (Jesus & Ephesian beggar)

Ch. 5: Mythology
62: Pilostratus's account is more realistic than Ovid's stories
63: Lévi-Strauss misses the connection between twins & violence in myths
65: the theory that lynch mobs were primitive forms of justice reverses the order—lynchings are spontaneous, not products of justice
65–66: victim's transformation from evildoer to divine benefactor (see "double transference" on p. 72)
66–68: because beggar isn't deified in Philostratus's story, it's not a true myth (doesn't have both parts); in the Oedipus story, Apollo functions as the divine part (cf. Heracles in Philostratus's story)
68–69: we tend to glorify myths today (assuming that they weren't that violent); because Philostratus's story doesn't have the deification part, contemporary audiences are horrified by the story; Pan ("all" or "every") & panic (n2) [note the privatization of panic today—an individual can have a panic attack]
69–70: the gospels speak of a personal being named Satan, but Satan has no being; the gods of mythology come from deified victims

Ch. 6: Sacrifice
71–72: when the double transference (demonization & deification) is not present, the second transfer (deification) drops away
72: medieval panics victimized marginal/excluded people: Jews, lepers, foreigners, the disabled
73: medieval witch-hunt is a good example of the first kind of transfer
74: Christ's Passion clearly reveals the violence behind mimetic contagion; Greek myths seem noble only because we have forgotten their violence origin (just as horrible as the Oedipus story & medieval witch-hunts, which all have similar structures)
76–77: ritual sacrifice & pharmakos; reference to Thargelia
77–78: theater/culture/tragedy aims at a cathartic effect on the audience
78–79: sacrifices were intended to please the gods & restore order/peace; sacrifices aimed to imitate/reproduce the original act of violence; similarities between sacrifice rituals across the world
80–81: often rituals skip imitating the original crisis (don't want the imitation to be too realistic); original sacrifices were probably humans, not animals (less effective); reference to Plutarch's history of the Battle of Salamis

Ch. 7: The Founding Murder
82: lots of origin stories have single victims who are murdered (Sumer, Egypt, China, Germany); victim as a seed, which much decompose before germination (cf. John 12:24)
83: Mircea Eliade & "creative murder"; founding murder in the Bible too (Cain & Able)—it's an interpretation of all founding myths & the beginning of culture
83–84: Gen. 4:14 shows that many other people were alive ("Cain" is the first community gathered around a founding murder [I guess he doesn't have any being either, like Satan]); the penalty of a seven-fold death is a ritual sacrifice (imitation of murder) to prevent vengeful violence
85–86: passages in Matthew & Luke that talk about murders since the foundation of the world (murder as the foundation of culture)
88: one murder can't bring lasting peace, but ritual sacrifice has a chance; Enlightenment rationalism (Descartes) thinks that religion is just superstition (Voltaire thinks priests are deceitful) & doesn't see that religious ritual gave rise to social institutions (see 90–91)
89: Girard hits modern rationalism (& its anti-religious nature) hard; contemporary society ascribes little to no value to ritual, ancient/medieval societies thought that rituals strengthened institutions, & primitive/archaic societies had rituals w/o secular institutions
90–91: sacrifice is an obvious distinction between humans & animals, who have instincts, but not mimetic desire; all religious rituals are based on sacrifice (death & resurrection) & arose prior to secular institutions
91–92: burial mounds of stones (by-product of ritual stoning & precursor to tombs?); development of "sacred kingship" (intelligent/commanding victim's execution is delayed, & he becomes politically powerful); legend of bear, formed by licks; victims are turned into gods or kings
93–94: modern hostility to religion; institutions come from ritual sacrifice (it's not just "social contract"); ironically, resistance to religion (because of its divisiveness) is a kind of religious ritual in trying to eliminate violence; shift from animal instincts to human mimetic desire sounds evolutionary

Continuation here.

[Sabin · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Cei șaptezeci s-au întors cu bucurie și au zis: „Doamne, chiar și demonii ni se supun în Numele Tău!” Isus le-a zis: „L-am văzut pe Satana căzând din cer ca un fulger. Iată, v-am dat putere să călcați peste șerpi și scorpioni și peste toată puterea vrăjmașului; și de nimic nu veți fi vătămați."
(Luca 10:17...)

Eseul lui RG care mi-a fost recomandat ca rezumand macroscopic filosofia sa.
Cartea expune teoria sa privitoare la ciclul/rivalitatea/dorinta mimetica. Cadrul central al cartii este Patimirea Lui Christos. RG se foloseste de a sa teorie mimetica a violentei pentru a demonstra caracterul original al invataturii crestine, pentru a "demitiza" crestinismul si a explica triumful Crucii: cum a fost posibil ca Satana sa fie pacalit de insusi mecanismul al carui stapan este...
Face acest lucru apeland, printre altele, la comparatii dintre pilde biblice si mituri, cum ar fi pilda lui Iosif si mitul lui Oedip. Abordarea este, cum spune si el, ne-teologica, antropologica, si intr-adevar nu mi-a dat impresia de prozelitism. E o lucrare onesta intelectual, as zice recomandabila si ateilor non-edgelords, ca avem destui si de o parte si de alta.

[Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe mind-blowing is hyperbolic, but this one is certainly mind-expanding.

It starts off slow as Girard carefully explains his thesis, which takes some time to understand and absorb, but as the book progresses the implications of his groundbreaking insight begin to dawn, and they are staggering.

Thankfully, other GR reviewers have already done the hard work of summarizing Girard’s ideas, so I’ll just tack them onto the end of my review.

This is a book that will forever change my outlook on ideas of envy, community violence, scapegoating, and the perception of victims. And a book that deserves a reread.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[John Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is far outside the window of things I’d usually read, but it had me completely gripped the entire time. I don’t know what it says about me that I enjoyed this so much, and I’m not sure what is required of me now. Do I have to read more philosophers? Should I incorporate “mimetic” in my day to day vocabulary? Should I study French so I can enjoy Girard in his native tongue? This is all very overwhelming.

But anyways. This book is sick. It explores the broken dynamic in interpersonal relations and suggests that the core of many conflicts is the violation of the 10th commandment, envy.

I’ve found that this squares pretty well with a lot of the Family Systems material I’ve been into lately. The suggestion that we project our internalized insecurities on others, forming rivalries and creating an anxious environment that can only be remedied with the killing of a scapegoat feels very Friedman-esque.

The theological tie ins were what had me sold though. I’m utterly captivated by any prescription of human behavior that points to the Christ story as the transcending balm of the human disease, and this book does so in a really special way. To present Jesus as the scapegoat to end all scapegoats, and the One who utterly foils the plans of Satan by pure redirection and hi-jinx is freaking brilliant.

[joan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is well worth reading, although its core idea seems to be bunk. Worth reading because it’s a puzzle to get to grips with, it had me rereading chunks of Scripture, some myths, stuff about myths. And then there’s Peter Thiel, and other people grappling with our declining age, where you’ll recognise Girard’s ideas. It promises to bind you to Scripture via anthropology and psychology - Jordan Peterson’s pitch.

And Girard makes the boldest claim: that he has discovered the mechanism by which humans, and culture, came into being. Of course he’s wrong! He cleaves history in two: Pagan and JudeoChristian. Blind possession by the Accuser, or freedom under the guidance of the love of the Paraclete. I’m happy to agree that Christianity brought something new to the world, but this is far too short a book to work. Is Exhortation perhaps... A big problem I had is that he talks a lot about ‘myths’, which are, he says, records of god-creating episodes of communal bonding-through-violence. In which case, scapegoats being numberless in human history, gods and demigods ought to be legion. He should be able to furnish 100s of examples, but he stands on 2: Oedipus, who isn’t anyone’s deity but stars in a successful myth, and an event in the life of Apollonius of Tyana, me neither, to illustrate a sort of mythical misfire.

The book's thesis is that Jesus didn't so much die for all people's multifarious sins (the vicarious forgiveness that many people find offensive) but rose again to expose one collective sin archetype, which is taking part in what Girard calls "mimetic contagion". It seems to me that he has to, and fails to, show that everyday personal sins are homologous to great, society-wide surges of sin, pogroms and mob frenzies, and that they get resolved by the creation of some small personal scapegoat. I mean, I'll be bearing the idea in mind, but I'm not persuaded.

The book does catch fire towards the end when he gets to our current obsession with victims. Is this Christianity gone wrong, or gone into overdrive and living out its creed finally? I mean, it IS bizarre, but no more than “consider the lilies of the field.” Despite his optimism (writing in the 1990s) for globalism, Girard sees Satan at work, imitating Christ only too well, creating a culture with a competitive vanity of compassion, that scapegoats itself.

I found myself wondering about Girards own history, his antecedents and allies. He seems very French, all paradoxes, inversions, doublings. And at the same time perhaps a throwback to the Sorbonne of the 12th century, or something.

[Léo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good, lots of meaningful insight into Christianity and its relation to myth. The third part "The Victory of the Cross" is my favorite. I think I'll revisit this when I'm more well read on Nietzsche to better understand the final chapters.