I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

by René Girard

The desire that lives through imitation almost always leads to conflict, and this conflict frequently leads to violence. The Bible unveils this process of imitative desire leading to conflict and violence, and its distinctive narratives reveal at the same time that God takes the part of victims.

Girard calls the identification and lynching of a victim the “single victim mechanism.” This mechanism or operation is the community's unconscious way of converging upon someone it blames for its troubles. When this happens, the community actually believes the accusation it makes against the unfortunate person. One way to put this, in the language of the Bible, especially the Gospels, is that this entire single victim process is the work of Satan. Indeed, it is Satan.

The various myths of humankind typically maintain the viewpoint and voice of the crowd, or the community, as it tries unawares to keep its victim mechanism in place. Myths are generally the narrative articulation of the basic human method of dealing with scandal. It is no wonder that Christian thought has perceived mythology as satanic and rejected it.

The story in Genesis 4 tells us, in effect, that the sign of Cain is the sign of civilization. The cross of Christ is the sign of salvation, which is revealed as the overcoming of mimetic desire and violence through the nonviolence of love and forgiveness.

The more desperately we seek to worship ourselves and to be good “individualists,” the more compelled we are to worship our rivals in a cult that turns to hatred.

If the Decalogue devotes its final commandment to prohibiting desire for whatever belongs to the neighbor, it is because it lucidly recognizes in that desire the key to the violence prohibited in the four commandments that precede it.

Envy, jealousy, and hate render alike those they possess, but in our world people tend to misunderstand or ignore the resemblances and identities that these passions generate.

The commandment to imitate Jesus does not appear suddenly in a world exempt from imitation; rather it is addressed to everyone that mimetic rivalry has affected. Non-Christians imagine that to be converted they must renounce an autonomy that all people possess naturally, a freedom and independence that Jesus would like to take away from them. In reality, once we imitate Jesus, we discover that our aspiration to autonomy has always made us bow down before individuals who may not be worse than we are but who are nonetheless bad models because we cannot imitate them without falling with them into the trap of rivalries in which we are ensnarled more and more.

In refusing the mimetic interpretation, in looking for the failure of Peter in purely individual causes, we attempt to demonstrate, unconsciously of course, that in Peter's place we would have responded differently; we would not have denied Jesus.

The children repeat the crimes of their fathers precisely because they believe they are morally superior to them.

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.

The devil's “quintessential being,” the source from which he draws his lies, is the violent contagion that has no substance to it. The devil does not have a stable foundation; he has no being at all. To clothe himself in the semblance of being, he must act as a parasite on God's creatures. He is totally mimetic, which amounts to saying nonexistent as an individual self.

The same human groups that expel and massacre individuals on whom suspicions fall switch over to adoring them when they find they are calm and reconciled.

I think the principal reason is that the human subjects as individuals are not aware of the circular process in which they are trapped; the real manipulator of the process is mimetic contagion itself. There is no real subject within this mimetic contagion, and that is finally the meaning of the title “prince of this world,” if it is recognized that Satan is the absence of being.

The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims. What prevents researchers from discovering this truth is their refusal to grasp the real violence behind the texts that represent it. The refusal of the real is the number one dogma of our time. It is the prolongation and perpetuation of the original mythic illusion.

The famous linguistic methods are much appreciated nowadays because they replace the search for truth with structuralist word games.

As James Williams observes, the “sign of Cain is the sign of civilization. It is the sign of the murderer protected by God.”

Throughout history religion is the constant element in diverse and changing institutions. Therefore we cannot discount it in favor of the pseudo-solution that takes it as a mere nothing, the fifth wheel of all the coaches, without coming to grips with the opposite possibility, disagreeable as it is for modern antireligion. This possibility is that religion is the heart of every social system, the true origin and original form of all institutions, the universal basis of human culture.

Everything we call our “cultural institutions” must stem originally from ritual acts that become so refined over the years that they lose their religious connotations and are defined in relation to the type of “crisis” they are intended to resolve. By dint of repetition the rituals are modified and transformed into practices that human reason alone seems to have worked out, whereas in reality they have a religious origin.

This thesis gives anthropology the temporal dimension missing in its approach to social origins, and it agrees with the doctrines of the religions about themselves. From the moment when the prehuman creature, the human-to-be, passed over a certain threshold of mimetic contagion and the animal instinct of protection against violence collapsed (the dominance patterns), mimetic conflicts must have raged among humankind, but the raging of mimetic conflict quickly produced its own antidote by giving birth to the single victim mechanism, gods, and sacrificial rituals.

My point of departure from the Gospels is not in order arbitrarily to favor Christianity and reject paganism. The discovery of the mimetic cycle in myths does not at all confirm the old Christian belief in the absolute uniqueness of Christianity and seems initially to make it more improbable and indefensible than ever. The Gospels and myths recount the same type of mimetic crisis, which is resolved by the same type of collective expulsion and concluded by an epiphany or revelation that is repeated and commemorated by rituals similar in structure.

THE QUESTION is so important that I am going briefly to repeat the point: when we compare a sacred revelation that the Gospels regard as false, mythical, satanic, to the sacred revelation that they regard as true, we can see no significant discrepancy. In both cases we are dealing with mimetic cycles, all of which end with scapegoats and resurrections. So what allows Christianity to define pagan religions as satanic or diabolic but to exclude itself from this definition?

In the myth the expulsions of the hero are justified each time. In the biblical account they never are. Collective violence is unjustifiable.

only did Joseph not have sex with the wife of Potiphar, but he did everything he could to resist her advances. She is the guilty one, and behind her the Egyptian crowd, like dumb cattle following the herd in the expulsions of young immigrants who are isolated and without means or political pull.

Far from being minor, the divergence of the biblical account and the myth of Oedipus, or whatever other myth, is so great that no greater difference could exist. It's the difference between a world where arbitrary violence triumphs without being recognized and a world where this same violence is identified, denounced, and finally forgiven. It's the difference between truth and deception, both of them absolute.

In the biblical world human beings are generally just as violent as in the mythic worlds, and single victim mechanisms abound. What stands against any world of contagion and violence is the Bible itself, the biblical interpretation of these phenomena.

The only violence that scandalizes these professional redressers of wrong is the purely verbal violence of victims at the point of being lynched.

What is most important in the book of Job is, not the murderous conformity of the multitude, but the final audacity of the hero himself, whom we see hesitate at length, vacillate, then finally take hold of the mimetic contagion and defeat it. In doing this, Job not only resists totalitarian contagion but wrests the deity out of the process of persecution to envision him as the God of victims, not of persecutors. This is what Job means when he affirms, “As for me, I know that my Defender lives” (19:25).

Once we apprehend the biblical criticism of mimetic contagion and its results, we can understand the biblical profundity of the talmudic principle that Emmanuel Lévinas often cites: “If everyone is in agreement to condemn someone accused, release him for he must be innocent.” Unanimity in human groups is rarely a vehicle of truth; more often it is nothing but a mimetic, tyrannical phenomenon.

We should always take Jesus at his word. He expresses the powerlessness of those caught up in the mimetic snowballing process to see what moves and compels them. Persecutors think they are doing good, the right thing; they believe they are working for justice and truth; they believe they are saving their community.

FROM AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STANDPOINT I would define Christian revelation as the true representation1 of what had never been completely represented or what had been falsely represented: the mimetic convergence of all against one, the single victim mechanism with its antecedent developments, particularly “interdividual”2 scandals.

The victorious general here is Christ, and his victory is the Cross. What Christianity conquers is the pagan way of organizing the world.

When Paul asserts that he wants to know nothing besides Christ crucified, he is not engaging in “anti-intellectualism.” He is not announcing his contempt for knowledge. Paul believes quite literally that there is no knowledge superior to knowing the crucified Christ.

No text can illuminate the process of mimetic snowballing on which it is based; no text can have its basis in the violent contagion it illuminates.

A myth is a lie in the sense that it is the deceptive nonrepresentation that mimetic contagion and its victim mechanism generate by means of the community that becomes their instrument. The mimetic contagion is never objectified; it is never represented in the mythic narrative. It is its real subject, therefore, but it is always concealed as such. It is what the Gospels call Satan, or the devil.

This knowledge, which Paul says comes from the Cross, is not esoteric at all. To grasp it, we need only ascertain that we all now observe and understand situations of oppression and persecution that earlier societies did not detect or took to be inevitable.

We ferociously denounce the scapegoating of which our neighbors are guilty, but we are unable to do without our own substitute victims. We all try to tell ourselves that we have only legitimate grudges and justified hatreds, but our feeling of innocence is more fragile than our ancestors’.

The idea of a society alien to violence goes back clearly to the preaching of Jesus, to his announcement of the kingdom of God. This ideal does not diminish to the extent that Christianity recedes; to the contrary, its intensity increases. The concern for victims has became a paradoxical competition of mimetic rivalries, of opponents continually trying to outbid one another.

We do not all have the same experience as St. Peter and St. Paul, who discovered that they themselves were guilty of persecution and confessed their own guilt rather than that of their neighbors.

Whether we examine the matter attentively or not, we easily see that everything people say about our world is true: it is by far the worst of all worlds. They say repeatedly—and this is not false—that no world has made more victims than it has. But the opposite proposition is equally true: our world is also and by far the best of all worlds, the one that saves more victims than any other. In order to describe our world, we must multiply all sorts of propositions that should be incompatible but now are true simultaneously.

What we have a foreboding of, at least vaguely, is the possibility that any community whatever may persecute its own members. This happens whenever crowds mobilize suddenly against anyone, anywhere, anytime, in any way, no matter what the pretext. It also happens, more frequently, when societies become permanently organized on a basis that privileges the few at the expense of the many, when unjust forms of social life continue for centuries, even for millennia. The concern for victims seeks to protect us against the countless varieties of the victim mechanism.

The most effective power of transformation is not revolutionary violence but the modern concern for victims.

We can compare ancient societies to one another, but the global society now in the making is truly unique. Its superiority in every area is so overwhelming, so evident, that it is forbidden, paradoxically, to acknowledge the fact, especially in Europe. This prohibition stems from the fear of a return to tyrannical pride. It is also the fear of humiliating nations that don't belong to the privileged group. In other words, it is once again the concern for victims that dominates what it is permissible and impermissible to say.

Our world did not invent compassion, it is true, but it has universalized it. In archaic cultures it was practiced within extremely circumscribed groups. Their borders were always marked by victims. Mammals mark their territorial borders with their excrement. Human beings have long done the same thing with that particular form of excrement that we call their scapegoats.

Christian truth has been making an unrelenting historical advance in our world. Paradoxically, it goes hand in hand with the apparent decline of Christianity.

We are always prepared to translate all our conflicts, even those that don't lend themselves at all to it, into the language of innocent victims. The debate over abortion, for example: whether we are for it or against it, we always have to choose our side in the interest of the “real victims.”