I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

by René Girard

René Girard offers a new way of seeing ourselves and our biblical heritage. His method is to begin, not with theology or the revelation of God, but with an understanding of human beings and human relations that the Bible and the early Christian tradition disclose. This understanding of humankind he articulates is an anthropology ("anthropologos," or discourse about what it means to be human).

Girard's anthropology focuses first on desire and its consequences. He calls it "mimetic desire" or "mimesis."

The desire that lives through imitation almost always leads to conflict, and this conflict frequently leads to violence.

In the Gospels the process of unveiling or revelation is radicalized: God himself, the Word become flesh in Jesus, becomes the victim. The innocent victim who is crucified is vindicated through his resurrection from the dead.

The tenth commandment of the Decalogue in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy addresses mimetic desire directly. The tenth commandment does not prohibit simply one desire, "coveting," but deals with desire as such. Desire is not an instinct; it is not some-thing programmed into us, so it doesn't work like instincts in other creatures. It is rather a potential that must become activated for an infant to become human, and it becomes actual for the infant as he or she observes and imitates the other, the "neighbor." We want what our neighbor possesses.

This desire that comes into being through following models of desire is not bad; it is good. To desire what models desire is necessary if the child is to be able to learn and love and deal with the world. But it can and does lead to conflict and violence.

What does Girard mean by "scandal"? Answer: "Scandal" translates words from both Hebrew and Greek that mean "stumbling block," something that people stumble over. (It can also mean "trap" or "snare," a closely related meaning.) Girard means specifically a situation that comes about when a per-son or a group of persons feel themselves blocked or obstructed as they desire some specific object

of power, prestige, or property that their model possesses or is imagined to possess. They cannot obtain it, either because they cannot displace the model and acquire what he or she has or because the rivalry with others in the group is so in-tense that everyone prevents everyone else from succeeding. When this kind of situation occurs often enough, there is an accumulation of scandals to the point that those involved must "let off steam" or the social fabric will burst. Then all those involved in this tangle of rivalry turn their frustrated desire against a victim, someone who is blamed, who is identified as an offender causing scandal.

"Satan casts out Satan" at this moment in extremis, just before the community explodes.

Satan has no real being; he exists always as a parasite on the being of humankind, just as theology tells us that he exists as a parasite on the being of God. Satan is imagined and symbolized as a person, as "someone," because satanic power becomes attached to the victim as the victim mechanism does its work. The victim is viewed as a devil or demon.

A great deal of the language and symbolism in myth is fantastic by rational and empirical criteria we ordinarily use in any kind of research or scientific work. Girard admits that much of myth is fantastic but holds that anthropologists and historians of religion have unfortunately held to a "one rotten apple spoils the whole barrel" approach. That is, because there are rotten apples, unbelievable things, in the stories and texts studied, then everything about them must be unbelievable. But this is not the case. There are still at least two good apples, and these are very important apples, indeed. One is evidence of real social crisis, violent contagion and disorder.

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. In a sense, the gods of mythology are the product of Satan, of the working of accusation and the victim mechanism. Mythology is a justification of sacrifice for the sake of retribution and the victim mechanism. The Christian gospel is a proclamation of

God's offering of himself to human beings in and through Jesus Christ. It is a different kind of sacrifice.

Leviticus 16, which involves intentionally transferring the sins of the people onto a he-goat and driving the goat into the wilderness.

It is well documented, for example, that the ancient Greeks practiced a ritual requiring that one or more persons be selected, set aside for a period, beaten, and then murdered.

So sacrifice and scapegoating are two different expressions of the same reality, the victim mechanism by which human societies have typically operated. The mechanism is the origin of human culture, or "founding murder." A tremendous number of myths portray this founding murder, although the human reality is usually disguised and distorted. For example, in the ancient Babylonian myth of the origin of the world the god Marduk defeats Tiamat, the goddess of the salt water, splits her body, and places half of it over the sky and half under the earth. He kills Tiamat's consort, Kingu, and makes human beings out of his blood. This so...

Girard calls the transferring of blame onto the victim and then the transferring of credit for the new peace and prosperity "double transference." Now if the victim could cause all their troubles and yet also produce such peace and prosperity, he or she must be a different sort of being, a higher, more powerful sort. This is the birth of the gods. It was not a conscious process but began reflexively and developed and crystallized eventually into ritual representation of what had worked in the past. By the time the human ability to think critically had emerged in prophetic preaching or philosophical criticism, the origins of religion and culture were screened, covered, concealed, disguised. It's all there in the texts and other data, but not easy to spot.

Given the victim's inherent power in the community's eyes, if there was a delay between selection of the victim and the act of sacrifice, the victim would have had time to pull some people into his or her orbit. They became the victim's followers and wanted, not to sacrifice but to preserve the victim, at least for a much longer period of time. This, according to Girard, is the origin of

They became the victim's followers and wanted, not to sacrifice but to preserve the victim, at least for a much longer period of time. This, according to Girard, is the origin of kingship. Kings and queens have great power, but as those "far above" everyone else they are vulnerable.

kingship. Kings and queens have great power, but as those "far above" everyone else they are vulnerable. They can take credit for what goes right, but they can be blamed for what goes wrong. Either because of this vulnerability or their original victim status, or both, monarchs in primitive societies were often ritually slain, either periodically or occasionally. But in the biblical tradition, beginning with the ...

The brothers waylay Joseph and sell him into exile in Egypt. Later he is unjustly accused of rape by his Egyptian master's wife and thrown into prison. When Joseph finally gains prestige and power, he uses them to save Egypt and to save his family. Though his brothers expect him to retaliate by taking their lives, he forgives them and affirms the providence of God working through his sufferings.

The New Testament Gospels are the starting point for a new science or knowledge of humanity.

or knowledge of humanity.

Moses is "marginal" in that he is a Hebrew but was raised as an Egyptian and comes from a slave class but has become identified with the Egyptian ruling class. He flees from Egypt because he kills an Egyptian mistreating a Hebrew, and he marries a Midianite woman. We can understand why

the Hebrews mistrust him at first. But God speaks to him at the burning bush at Mt. Horeb: "I have witnessed the affliction of my people in Egypt and have heard their cry of complaint against their slave drivers, so I know well what they are suffering" (Exod. 3:7).

What began like a mustard seed or bit of leaven now begins to move in human history from its Jewish beginnings into the whole world. 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.

One of the proofs that the concern for victims is the absolute value of the modern Western world,

and the absolute value wherever Western influence has had a deep impact, is a negative one: Nietzsche's interpreters avoid the subject. They circumvent Nietzsche's actual position on this subject. They revere Nietzsche; they look to him as the source of wisdom and his writings as a kind of holy scripture. However, it is extremely rare to find a "postmodern" follower of Nietzsche who raises a question about the very thing that Nietzsche railed against: the concern for victims that stems from Judaism and Christianity.2 The concern for victims has become such an absolute value that not only do those Nietzsche influenced not attack it, but it has become the unspoken dogma of "political correctness" and "victim-ism." Political correctness surrounds most of our public institutions, including above all colleges and universities, with an aura that prohibits using any word or allowing any discussion that might offend some minority group or victim or potential victim. It tends to stifle public discussion and debate of ideas and issues. Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power. Both political correctness and victimism stem from an authentic reality from the standpoint of the Christian faith. That reality is God's/ revelation through Jesus Christ of the victim mechanism and the way into God's new community of love and

nonviolence. But Satan has a tremendous ability to adapt to what God does and to imitate God, and so Satan the ancient and tremendous power of the victim mechanism that expels violence through violence is able ...

In the Gospels, the revealing account of scapegoating emanates not from the unanimous crowd but from a dissenting few. Initially, Jesus' disciples almost surrender to the mimetic power of the many, but on the third day, thanks to the Resurrection, they secede from the deluded mob and proclaim the innocence of their Lord. In mythology no dissenting voice is ever heard.

Doesn't the tenth commandment succumb to that gratuitous itch to prohibit, to that irrational hatred of freedom for which modern thinkers blame religion in general and the Judeo-Christian tradition in particular?

what would happen if it were permitted rather than forbidden? There would be perpetual war in the midst of all human groups, subgroups, and families. The door would be wide open to the famous nightmare of Thomas Hobbes, the war of all against all.

In other words, we must think that humans are naturally inclined not to desire the goods of their neighbors. To understand that this premise is false, all we have to do is to watch two children or two adults who quarrel over some trifle. It is the opposite premise, the only realistic one, that underlies the tenth commandment of the Decalogue: we tend to desire what our neighbor has or what our neighbor desires. If individuals are naturally inclined to desire what their neighbors possess, or to desire what their neighbors even simply desire, this means that rivalry exists at the very heart of human social relations.

internal violence.

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

but the rivals do all they can to conceal from each other and from themselves the cause of this intensification. Unfortunately, concealment doesn't work. In imitating my rival's desire I give him the impression that he has good reasons to desire what he desires, to possess what he possesses, and so the intensity of his desire keeps increasing.

mine. That man whose wife I desire, for example, had perhaps ceased to desire her over time. His desire was dead, but upon contact with mine, which is living, it regains life. The mimetic nature of desire accounts for the fragility of human relations. Our social sciences should give due consideration to a phenomenon that must be considered normal, but they persist in seeing conflict as something accidental, and consequently so unforeseeable that researchers cannot and must not take it into account in their study of culture. Not only are we blind to the mimetic rivalries in our world, but each time that we celebrate the power of our desire we glorify it. We congratulate ourselves on having within us a desire that "will last forever," as Baudelaire put it ("l'expansion des choses infinies"), but we do not see what this "forever" conceals: the idolization of the neighbor.

IF WE EXAMINE the prohibitions of archaic societies in the light of the tenth commandment, we find that although they are not as lucid as the latter, they attempt likewise to prohibit mimetic desire and its rivalries. The prohibitions that appear arbitrary stem neither from some sort of "neurosis" nor from the resentment of grumpy men eager to prevent young people from having a good time. The prohibitions have nothing of the capricious or the mean about them; they are based on an intuition analogous to that of the Decalogue, but they are subject to all sorts of confusions. Many archaic laws, notably in Africa, put to death all twins who are born in the community, or sometimes only one twin of each pair. Without doubt this law is absurd, but in no way does it prove the truth of cultural relativism. The cultures that do not tolerate twins confuse their natural resemblance in the biological order with the leveling effects of mimetic rivalries. The more these rivalries are aggravated, the more the roles of model, obstacle, and imitator become interchangeable at the heart of the mimetic conflict.

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 is the basis of imitating Jesus? It cannot be his ways of being or his personal habits: imitation is never about that in the Gospels. Neither does Jesus propose an ascetic rule of life in the sense of Thomas a Kempis and his celebrated Imitation of Christ, as admirable as that work may be. 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.

Contrary to what we ourselves claim, he does not claim to "be himself"; he does not flatter himself that he obeys only his own desire. His goal is to become the perfect image of God. There-fore he commits all his powers to imitating his Father. In inviting us to imitate him, he invites us to imitate his own imitation. Far from being a paradox, this invitation is more reasonable than that of our modern gurus, who ask their disciples to imitate them as the great man or woman who imitates no one. Jesus, by contrast, invites us to do what he himself does, to become like him a perfect imitator of God the Father.

If we imitate the detached generosity of God, then the trap of mimetic rivalries will never close over us. This is why Jesus says also, "Ask, and it will be given to you.... "

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

We do not each have our own desire, one really our own. The essence of desire is to have no essential goal. Truly to desire, we must have recourse to people about us; we have to borrow their desires.

Mimetic desire enables us to escape from the animal realm. It is responsible for the best and the worst in us, for what lowers us below the animal

level as well as what elevates us above it. Our unending discords are the ransom of our freedom.

words that designate mimetic rivalry and its consequences are the noun skandalon and the verb skandalizein. Like the Hebrew word that it translates, "scandal" means, not one of those ordinary obstacles that we avoid easily after we run into it the first time,

The Greek word skandalizein comes from a verb that means "to limp." What does a lame person resemble? To someone following a person limping it appears that the person continually collides with his or her own shadow.

Each consistently takes the opposite view of the other in order to escape their inexorable rivalry, but they always return to collide with the fascinating obstacle that each one has come to be for the other.

Scandals are responsible for the false infinity of mimetic rivalry. They secrete increasing quantities of envy, jealousy, resentment, hatred—all the poisons most harmful not only for the initial antagonists but also for all those who become fascinated by their rivalistic desires. At the height of scandal each reprisal calls forth a new one more violent than its predecessor. If nothing stops it, the spiral has to lead to a series of acts of vengeance in a perfect fusion of violence and contagion.