I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

by René Girard

Here Peter becomes the sower of scandals, the Satan who diverts human beings from God for the sake of rivalistic models. Satan sows the scandals and reaps the whirlwind of mimetic crises. It is his opportunity to show what he is capable of doing. The great crises lead us to the true mystery of Satan, to his astonishing power, which is that of expelling himself and bringing order back into human communities.

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.2 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.

How do we comprehend this idea? Let us go back to the moment when the divided community, at the height of the mimetic process, reestablishes its unity against a single victim who becomes the supreme scandal because everyone, in a mimetic fervor, holds this one to be guilty. Satan is the violent contagion that persuades the entire community, which has become unanimous, that this guilt is real. He owes one of his most ancient and traditional names to this art of persuasion. He is the accuser of the hero in the book of Job, before God and even more so before the people. In transforming a community of people with distinct identities and roles into a hysterical mass, Satan produces myths and is the principle of systematic accusation that bursts forth from the contagious imitation provoked by scandals....

No one in the community has an enemy other than the victim, so once this person is hunted, expelled, and destroyed, the crowd finds itself emptied of hostility and without an enemy. Only one enemy was left, one who has been eliminated. Provisionally, at least, this community no longer experiences either hatred or resentment toward anyone or anything; it feels purified of all its tensions, of all its divisions, of everything fragmenting it.

The persecutors don't know that their sudden harmony, like their previous discord, is the work of contagious imitation. They believe they have on their hands a dangerous person, someone evil, of whom they must rid the community. What could be more sincere than their hatred? Thus the mimetic ganging up of all against one, or the single victim mechanism, has the amazing but logically explicable property of restoring calm to a community so disturbed an instant earlier that nothing appeared capable of calming it down.

The high priest Caiaphas alludes to this mechanism when he says, “It is better that one man die and that the whole nation not perish.” The four accounts of the Crucifixion thus enable us to witness the unfolding of the working of the single victim mechanism. The sequence of events, as I have already said, resembles numerous analogous phenomena whose director and producer is Satan.

The Crucifixion is one of those events in which Satan restores and consolidates his power over human beings. The shift from “all against all” to “all against one” permits the prince of this world to forestall the total destruction of his kingdom as he calms the anger of the crowd, restoring the calm that is indispensable to the survival of every human community. Satan can therefore always put enough order back into the world to prevent the total destruction of what he possesses without depriving himself for too long of his favorite pastime, which is to sow disorder, violence, and misfortune among his subjects.

theater or of modern film, as captivated by the bloody spectacle as our contemporaries are by the horrors of Hollywood. When the spectators are satiated with that violence that Aristotle calls “cathartic”—whether real or imaginary it matters little—they all return peaceably to their homes to sleep the sleep of the just.

The Gospels enable us to see that human communities are subject to disorders that recur periodically and that can be resolved by the phenomenon of the unanimous crowd when certain conditions are satisfied. Such a resolution is rooted in mimetic desire and the scandals that always make human communities break down. The mimetic cycle begins with desire and its rivalries, it continues through the multiplication of scandals and a mimetic crisis, and it is resolved finally in the single victim mechanism, which is the answer to the question asked by Jesus: “How can Satan expel Satan?”

God and Satan are the two supreme models, “arch models,” whose opposition to one another corresponds to what I have already described: one between models who never become obstacles and rivals for their disciples because they desire nothing in a greedy and competitive way and models whose greed for whatever they desire has immediate repercussions on their imitators, transforming them right away into diabolic obstacles. The first verses of our text are therefore an explicitly mimetic definition of desire and of the options for the human race that stem from it.

The text from John is a new definition, ultrarapid but complete, of the mimetic cycle. In us and about us scandals proliferate; sooner or later they carry us along toward mimetic snowballing and the single victim mechanism. It makes us unknowingly the accomplices of unanimous murders, all the more deceived by the devil because we are not aware of our own complicity, which is not conscious of itself. We continue to imagine ourselves alien to all violence.

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 devil is also the father of lies; in certain manuscripts he is the father of “liars” because his deceitful violence has repercussions for generation after generation in human cultures. These cultures remain dependent on their founding murders and the rituals that reproduce them.

After its mimetic definition of desire, the Gospel of John makes the consequences of this desire explicit—satanic murder. The impression that Christian animosity toward the Jews produced this text is due to our misunderstanding of its content, so we imagine a series of gratuitous insults. This effect of our ignorance is often compounded by a preconceived hostility toward the gospel message.3 We project our own resentment upon Christianity. John is talking to all humankind, not just to the Jews Jesus immediately addressed. This is usually the case in all the Gospels.

THE DEVIL, OR SATAN, signifies rivalistic contagion, up to and including the single victim mechanism. He may be located either in the entire process or in one of its stages. Modern exegetes, not recognizing the mimetic cycle, have the impression that since the word “Satan” means so many different things, it no longer means anything. This impression is deceptive. If we take up one by one the propositions I have analyzed, we easily see that this teaching is coherent. Far from being too absurd to deserve our attention, this Gospel theme contains incomparable knowledge of human conflict and the societies that are generated by the violent resolution of such conflict. Everything I have said about Satan corresponds to what the prior analysis of scandals enables us to understand. When the trouble caused by Satan becomes too great, Satan himself becomes his own antidote of sorts: he stirs up the mimetic snowballing and then the unanimous violence that makes everything peaceful once again.

This parable confirms my definition of the Crucifixion. Jesus’ death is one example among many others of the single victim mechanism. What makes the mimetic cycle of Jesus’ suffering unique is, not the violence, but the fact that the victim is the Son of God, which is certainly the main thing from the standpoint of our redemption. However, if we neglect the anthropological substructure of the Passion, we will miss the true theology of the Incarnation, which makes little sense without this anthropological basis. The concepts of the mimetic cycle and the single victim mechanism give specific content to an idea of Simone Weil. She held that even before presenting a “theory of God,” a theology, the Gospels offer a “theory of man,” an anthropology.

What is the cure-all of the prince of this world, his most clever trick, perhaps his only resource? It is the mimetic all-against-one or single victim mechanism. It is the mimetic unanimity that, at the highest pitch of disorder, brings order back into human communities. This sleight of hand remained hidden until the Jewish and Christian revelation. In fact, it has, to an extent, remained hidden after the Christian revelation up to our own time since it remains almost universally misunderstood. Thanks to this deception, human communities are indebted to Satan for the shaky relative order that they enjoy. They are thus always in his debt and cannot free themselves on their own.

Satan imitates the same model as Jesus, God himself, but in a spirit of arrogance and rivalry for power. Satan has succeeded in perpetuating his own satanic kingdom for the better part of human history, thanks to God's forbearance. However, the mission of Jesus among human beings marks the beginning of the end for the prince of this world. The kingdom of Satan corresponds to that part of human history that precedes the death and resurrection of Christ, almost entirely governed by the single victim mechanism and the false religions it produces.

The mimetic concept of Satan enables the New Testament to give evil its due without granting it any reality or ontological substance in its own right that would make of Satan a kind of god of evil. Satan does not “create” by his own means. Rather he sustains himself as a parasite on what God creates by imitating God in a manner that is jealous, grotesque, perverse, and as contrary as possible to the upright and obedient imitation of Jesus. To repeat, Satan is an ...

A more horrible miracle would be hard to find! If the author were Christian, he certainly would have been accused of slandering paganism. But Philostratus is a militant pagan, resolved to defend the religion of his ancestors. He obviously viewed the murder of the beggar as able to lift up the morale of his coreligionists, to reinforce their resistance to Christianity. From the standpoint of public opinion, his calculation was sound. His book was so successful that Julian the Apostate put it back into circulation in the fourth century, as he made his last attempt to save paganism.

The miracle consists of triggering a mimetic contagion so powerful that it finally polarizes the entire population of the city against the unfortunate beggar. The initial refusal of the Ephesians is the sole ray of light in this dark text, but Apollonius does everything he can to extinguish it, and he succeeds in doing so. The Ephesians start stoning their victim with such rage that they finally see him as Apollonius demands, the source of all their misfortunes, the “plague demon” that must be expelled in order to heal the city.

The more the Ephesians obey their guru, the more they are transformed into a violent mob and the more they let off steam, releasing their rage against the unfortunate beggar.

Apollonius's miracle embodies the kernel of a teaching rightly termed religious, which would escape us if we took the miracle to be imaginary. By no means an unheard-of phenomenon, alien to what we know about the Greek world, the stoning of the beggar recalls certain religious facts that are specifically Greek, the sacrifices of people called pharmakoi.3 These sacrifices were real collective assassinations of individuals similar to the beggar of Ephesus. I will return to this shortly.

In the ancient and medieval world the word “plague” was often used in a sense that is not strictly medical. Almost always it included a social dimension. Until the Renaissance, wherever “real” epidemics occurred, they disrupted social relations. Wherever social relations were disrupted, epidemics could occur. The fact that both kinds of plague are contagious facilitates the confusion.

In short, there are good rivalries, and there are bad ones. There is the healthy emulation of those who “rival one another only in efficiency, each one doing his duty.” There are the unhealthy rivalries of those who “do not master themselves.” Not contributing at all to the smooth operation of societies, these unrestrained rivalries only weaken them. Those given over to them “will impersonate the storm.” It's not external enemies that ruin societies; it's the unlimited ambitions, the unbridled competitions, that divide human beings rather than unite them. Philostratus does not define mimetic conflicts as extensively and powerfully as Jesus in his discourse on scandals, but he evidently speaks of the same type of conflict, and he speaks about it with unquestionable competence.

I have already suggested that the plague of Ephesus is not necessarily bacterial. It is an epidemic of mimetic rivalries, an interweaving of scandals, a war of all against all, which, thanks to the victim selected by the diabolical cleverness of Apollonius, is transformed “miraculously” into a reconciliation of all against one. Guessing the illness the Ephesians are suffering, the guru arouses violence against a miserable beggar. He expects from this violence a cathartic effect superior to that of ordinary sacrifices or of the tragic dramas that were performed, no doubt, in the theater of Ephesus in the second century of our era.

Eusebius sets out to show particularly that the miracles of Apollonius are not impressive at all. He never denounces the monstrous stoning, as we would expect of him. He reduces the debate, just like the partisans of the guru, to a mimetic rivalry between miracle workers. This helps us understand why Jesus always refused to emphasize his own miracles.

Never does Eusebius really define what decisively separates Apollonius and Jesus. When confronted with victims being stoned, Jesus is poles apart from Apollonius. Jesus doesn't instigate stonings; rather he does all he can to prevent them. Never does Eusebius really say what strikes the eyes of the modern reader.

In the “miracle” of Apollonius the first stone is plainly the principal worry of the guru, since no Ephesian has the resolve to cast it. This worry is easy to detect, although it never becomes explicit. Apollonius finally resolves the difficulty in the way he desires, but he has to take great pains and work insidiously like the very devil he is. Jesus also overcomes the difficulties confronting him, but contrary to the guru, he exerts his influence against violence.

Jesus explicitly mentions the first stone. In fact, he emphasizes it as much as he can since he places it at the very end of his one-sentence intervention, prolonging its echo as long as possible, one might say, in the memory of his hearers: “Whoever is without sin among you, let him cast at her the first stone.” The modern reader, skeptical, suspects a purely rhetorical effect: the first stone is proverbial. Cast the stone, cast the first stone: this is one of those expressions that everyone repeats.

With a ridiculous grandiloquence he denounces the beggar as an “enemy of the gods.” To make the violence possible, he must demonize the individual he has selected as victim. And finally the guru succeeds. He obtains what he desires: the first stone.

Once it is thrown, Apollonius can take a nap or whatever, for now violence and deceit are bound to triumph. The same Ephesians who had pity on the beggar a moment earlier now demonstrate a violent emulation of one another that is so relentless, so contrary to their initial attitude, that our surprise can only equal our sadness.

Not purely rhetorical, the first stone is decisive because it is the most difficult to throw. Why is it the most difficult to throw? Beca...

When Jesus finally responds, the first stone is the last obstacle that...

In calling attention to it, in mentioning it expressly, Jesus does all he can to reinforce this obstacle and magnify it. The more those thinking about throwing the first stone perceive the responsibility they would assume in throwing it, the greater...

Once the first stone is thrown, thanks to the encouragement of Apollonius, the second comes fairly fast, thanks to the example of the first; the third comes more quickly still because it has two models rather than one, and so on. As the models multiply, the rhythm of the stoning accelerates.

Saving the adulterous woman from being stoned, as Jesus does, means that he prevents the violent contagion from getting started. Another contagion in the reverse direction is set off, however, a contagion of nonviolence.

From the moment the first individual gives up stoning the adulterous woman, he becomes a model who is imitated more and more until finally all the group, guided by...

Our two texts are as opposed to one another as possible in spirit, and yet they resemble each other since they are two examples of mimetic escalation. Their independent origin makes this resemblance very significant. The texts help us better understand the dynamic of crowds that must be defined, not pri...

The fact that Jesus’ saying continues to play a metaphorical role universally understood in a world where ritual stoning no longer exists suggests that mimetic contagion remains as powerful today as ...

The symbolism of the first stone is still understandable because the mimetic definition of collective behavior remains just as valid now as it was two thousand years ago, even if th...

In order to suggest the tremendous role of violent contagion in human culture, Jesus does not resort to the abstract terms that we can hardly do without: imitation, contagion, mimesis, etc. The first stone suffices. This unique saying permits him to point to the true principle not...

Apollonius must induce one or the other of the Ephesians—it doesn't matter which one—to throw the first stone. But he doesn't want to call too much attention to it, and this is why he says nothing expressly about the first stone. Apollonius thus shows his duplicity. He is silent for reasons that match yet oppose Jesus’ motive ...

In order to trigger unanimous violence the instigator must hide its mimetic nature, and this is what Apollonius does. But to discourage this same violence, light must be shed upon that same nature. The truth about it must be expressed. This is what Jesus does when he emphasizes “the first stone.”

THIS SAYING OF JESUS, like many memorable sayings, is not original and novel in the way that the modern world appreciates when it demands of its writers and artists an originality in the sense of what has never been said or heard—novelty at all costs. The response of Jesus to the challenge thrown up to him is not original in that sense. Jesus does not invent the idea of the first stone, but he draws it from the Bible; he is inspired by his religious tradition.

Jesus transcends the Law, but in the Law's own sense and direction. He does this by appealing to the most humane aspect of the legal prescription, the aspect most foreign to the contagion of violence which is the obligation of the two accusers to throw the first two stones. The Law deprives the accusers of a mimetic model.

Failing to save a victim threatened with collective lynching, being the only person at her side in face of the crowd, is to run the risk of suffering her fate also.

Before responding to those who ask his advice about the obligation to stone adulterous women that is written in the Law of Moses, Jesus bends over toward the ground and writes in the dust with his finger. It is not with the intention of writing, in my opinion, that Jesus bends over. It is rather because he is bent that he writes. He bends over to avoid the gaze of these men with bloodshot eyes.

If Jesus returned their looks, these angry men would not see his look as it really is but would transform it into a mirror of their own anger. Their own challenge, their own provocation, is what they would read in the look of Jesus, no matter how peaceable it really is, and they would feel provoked in return.

The confrontation could no longer be avoided and would bring about what Jesus is trying to prevent, the stoning of the victim. Jesus avoi...