I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

by René Girard

Friedrich Nietzsche knew this. He cast off the Christian faith of his Lutheran ancestors, but he recognized that a new perspective on the world and a new kind of religious personality were born in the traditions and Scriptures of the Jewish people and came to fruition in the teachings of Jesus and the way in which his followers perceived his death. Nietzsche would have none of it. He maintained a certain admiration for Jesus as a molder of human minds and hearts, but he detested the Jewish-Christian "slave morality," the ethics of affirming the worth and dignity of every person, no matter how lowly. He despised the idea of the equality of all souls before God. Nietzsche reaffirmed pagan virtues, especially from ancient Greek culture, and he held that for the human race to evolve toward the "Overman" (beginning with him and his poetic creation, Zarathustra) people must be willing to sacrifice human lives that stand in the way of this. He did not mean offering them in sacrifice on an altar, but sweeping aside the weak who were unable to contribute to creating new traditions and institutions and waging war.

Jesus is not divinized by the false unanimity that puts only a temporary end to collective violence. He 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.

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.

our neighbor is the model for our desires. This is what I call mimetic desire.1

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.

Rather than beginning with the cause and pursuing then the consequences, like a philosophical account, the Decalogue follows the reverse order, tackling the most urgent matter first: in order to avoid violence it forbids violent acts. It turns then to the cause and uncovers the desire that the neighbor inspires. The Decalogue prohibits this desire but is able to prohibit it only to the extent that the objects desired are legally possessed by one of the two rivals. It cannot discourage all the rivalries of desire.

THE TENTH COMMANDMENT signals a revolution and prepares the way for it. This revolution comes to fruition in the New Testament. If Jesus never speaks in terms of prohibitions and always in terms of models and imitation, it is because he draws out the full consequences of the lesson offered by the tenth commandment. It is not due to inflated self-love that he asks us to imitate him; it is to turn us away from mimetic rivalries.

What Jesus invites us to imitate is his own desire, the spirit that directs him toward the goal on which his intention is fixed: to resemble God the Father as much as possible.

The best way of preventing violence does not consist in forbidding objects, or even rivalistic desire, as the tenth commandment does, but in offering to people the model that will protect them from mimetic rivalries rather than involving them in these rivalries.

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 nonethe less bad models because we cannot imitate them without falling with them into the trap of rivalries in which we are ensnarled more and more.

Without mimetic desire there would be neither freedom nor humanity. Mimetic desire is intrinsically good.

The only culture really ours is not that into which we are born; it is the culture whose models we imitate at the age when our power of mimetic assimilation is the greatest.

The children repeat the crimes of their fathers precisely because they believe they are morally superior to them. This false difference is already the mimetic illusion of modern individualism, which represents the greatest resistance to the mimetic truth that is re-enacted again and again in human relations. The paradox is that the resistance itself brings about the reenactment.

The more one is crucified, the more one burns to participate in the crucifixion of someone more crucified than oneself.

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.

Jesus wants to make his hearers reflect on its implications. If it is true that Satan expels Satan, how does he go about it? How is this tour de force possible?

The repetition of the word "Satan" is more eloquent than its replacement by a pronoun, but it is not a taste for fine language that inspires it; it is rather the desire to emphasize the fundamental paradox of Satan. He is a principle of order as much as disorder.

Many people believe they are faithful to Jesus, and yet they address superficial reproaches to the Gospels. This shows that they remain subject to mimetic rivalries and their violent one-upmanship. If we don't see that the choice is inevitable between the two supreme models, God and the devil, then we have already chosen the devil and his mimetic violence.

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.

The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims.

THE THEME of the founding murder is not only mythical but also biblical. We find it in the book of Genesis, in Cain's murder of his brother, Abel. The account of this murder is not a founding myth; it is rather the biblical interpretation of all founding myths. It recounts the bloody foundation of the beginnings of culture and the consequences of this foundation, which form the first mimetic cycle narrated in the Bible.

All this agrees perfectly with what we learned before about Satan, or the devil, namely, that he is a kind of personification of "bad contagion" just as much in its conflictive and disintegrative aspects as in its reconciling and unifying aspects. Behind all of these phases, Satan, or the devil, is the one who foments disorder, the one who sows scandals, and then at the height of the crises that he himself provokes, Satan suddenly brings them to an end by expelling the disorder. Satan expels Satan by means of innocent victims whom he succeeds in having condemned. Satan is the master of the single victim mechanism, and so he is the master of human culture, whose origin is none other than this act of murder. At the origin not only of the Cainite culture but of all human cultures is ultimately the devil, namely, the bad contagion that results in violence and is expelled thanks to the unanimous misinterpretation of the founding murder.

Human societies are the work of the mimetic process that has been disciplined by ritual. Human beings know very well that they cannot master mimetic rivalries by their own powers. That is why they attribute this mastery to their victims, whom they take for gods. In a strictly matter-of-fact sense, they are wrong; in a deeper sense, they are right. Humanity, in my view, is the child of religion.

The myth and the biblical story are in basic opposition over the decisive question that collective violence poses: Is it warranted? Is it legitimate? In the myth the expulsions of the hero are justified each time. In the biblical account they never are. Collective violence is unjustifiable.

The same question underlies both narratives: does the hero de-serve to be expelled? The myth answers at every point "yes," and the Bible answers no, no, an no. The career of Oedipus ends in an expulsion whose finality confirms his guilt. Joseph's career ends in a triumph whose finality confirms his innocence.

The biblical story condemns the general tendency of myths to justify collective violence, which is part and parcel of the accusatory, vindictive nature of foundational myths.

The refusal to deify victims is inseparable from another aspect of the biblical revelation, the most important of all: the deity is no longer victimized. For the first time in human history the divine and collective violence are separated from one another. The Bible rejects the gods created by sacralized violence. In certain biblical texts, particularly in the historical books, there are residues of sacred violence, but these are vestiges without a future.

Most astonishing of all, the Resurrection and the Christian divinization of Jesus correspond exactly, at the structural level, to the mythic divinization of victims whose falsity the Gospels reveal. Far from transforming or deforming or falsifying or hiding the mimetic process of the myths, the resurrection of Christ sheds the light of truth on everything that had always been concealed from human beings. Only the Resurrection, because it enlightens the disciples, reveals completely the things hidden since the foundation of the world, which are the same thing as the secret of Satan, never disclosed since the origin of human culture: the founding murder and the origin of human culture.

Christian faith consists in this: to think and believe that the resurrection of Christ owes nothing to human violence, by contrast to mythic resurrections, which really stem from collective murders. The resurrection of Christ comes about after his death, inevitably but not immediately; it happens only on the third day, and if we look through a Christian lens, it has its origin in God himself.

As Satan was making humans obligated to him, putting them in his debt, he was making them accomplices in his crimes. The Cross, by revealing the lie at the bottom of Satan's game, exposes human beings to a temporary increase of violence, but at a deeper level it liberates them from a servitude that has lasted since the beginning of human history, since "the foundation of the world."

Christ does not achieve this victory through violence. He obtains it through a renunciation of violence so complete that violence can rage to its heart's content without realizing that by so doing, it reveals what it must conceal, without suspecting that its fury will turn back against it this time because it will be recorded and represented with exactness in the Passion narratives.

In the triumph of a victorious general the humiliating display of those who are conquered is only a consequence of the victory achieved, whereas in the case of the Cross this display is the victory itself; it is the unveiling of the violent origin of culture. The powers are not put on display because they are defeated, but they are defeated because they are put on display.

To be a victim of illusion is to take it for true, so it means one is unable to express it as such, as illusion. By being the first to point out persecutory illusion, the Bible initiates a revolution that, through Christianity, spreads little by little to all humanity without being really understood by those whose profession and pride are to under-stand everything. This is one of the reasons, I believe, Jesus speaks the literal truth when he exclaims: "I thank you, Father ... that you have hidden these things from the wise and clever and revealed them to babes" (Matt. 11:25).

Mythical-ritual societies are prisoners of a mimetic circle that they cannot escape since they are unable to identify it. This continues to be true today: all our ideas about humankind, all our philosophies, all our social sciences, all our psychological theories, etc. are fundamentally pagan because they are based on a blindness to the circularity of mimetic conflict and contagion. This blindness is similar to that of mythical-ritual systems.

Medieval and modern theories of redemption all look in the direction of God for the causes of the Crucifixion: God's honor, God's justice, even God's anger, must be satisfied. These theories don't succeed because they don't seriously look in the direction where the answer must lie: sinful humanity, human relations, mimetic contagion, which is the same thing as Satan. They speak much of original sin, but they fail to make the idea concrete. That is why they give an impression of being arbitrary and unjust to human beings, even if they are theologically sound.

The Greek Fathers had it right in saying that with the Cross Satan is the mystifier caught in the trap of his own mystification.

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.

When we suspect people around us of giving in to the temptation of scapegoating, we denounce them indignantly. 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'.

dead letter

In France humanism developed in opposition, of course, to the Christianity of the prerevolutionary regime, which was accused of complicity with those in power, and quite rightly so. From one country to the other the sudden turns of fortune are different, but they cannot conceal the true origin of our modern concern for victims; it is quite obviously Christian. Humanism and humanitarianism develop first on Christian soil.

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. The more Christianity besieges our world, in the sense that it besieged Nietzsche before his collapse, the more difficult it becomes to escape it by means of innocuous painkillers and tranquilizers such as the "humanistic" compromises of our dear old positivist predecessors.

To bury the modern concern for victims under millions and millions of corpses there you have the National Socialist way of being Nietzschean. But some will say, "This interpretation would have horrified poor Nietzsche." Probably, yes. Nietzsche shared with many intellectuals of his time and our own a passion for irresponsible rhetoric in the attempt to get one up on opponents. But philosophers, for their misfortune, are not the only people in the world. Genuinely mad and frantic people are all around them and do them the worst turn of all: they take them at their word.

The Resurrection is not only a miracle, a prodigious transgression of natural laws. It is the spectacular sign of the entrance into the world of a power superior to violent contagion. By contrast to the latter it is a power not at all hallucinatory or deceptive. Far from deceiving the disciples, it enables them to recognize what they had not recognized before and to reproach themselves for their pathetic flight in the preceding days. They acknowledge the guilt of their participation in the violent contagion that murdered their master.