I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

by René Girard

Jesus reserves his most solemn warning for the adults who seduce children into the infernal prison of scandal.

To the glory that comes from God, invisible in this world, the majority prefer the glory that comes from humankind, a glory that multiplies scandal as it makes its way. It consists in gaining victory in mimetic rivalries often organized by the powers of this world, rivalries that are political, economic, athletic, sexual, artistic, intellectual . . . and even religious.

Yet as soon as the apostle is plunged into a crowd hostile to Jesus, he is unable to avoid imitating its hostility. If the first of the disciples, the rock on which the Church will be established, succumbs to the collective pressure, how will the others around Peter, just average people, be able to resist? To indicate that Peter will deny him, Jesus refers expressly to the role of scandal mimetic conflict in the apostle's life. The Gospels show him to be the puppet of his own mimetic desire, incapable of resisting pressures that work upon him from moment to moment.

PILATE HIMSELF is also ruled by mimetic contagion. He would prefer to spare Jesus. If the Gospels insist upon this preference, it is not to suggest that the Romans are superior to the Jews,

in other words: to allot good and bad points to the persecutors of Jesus.

He demonstrates "political skill," as they say. This is true, no doubt, but why does political skill almost always consist of giving in to violent contagion?

Even the two thieves crucified at either side of Jesus are no exception to universal contagion: they too imitate the crowd; like it they shout insults at Jesus. The most humiliated persons, the most crushed, behave in the same fashion as the princes of this world. They howl with the wolves. The more one is crucified, the more one burns to participate in the crucifixion of someone more crucified than oneself.

The more the antagonists desire to become different from each other, the more they become identical. Identity is realized in the hatred of the identical. This is the climactic moment that twins embody, or the enemy brothers of mythology such as Romulus and Remus. It is what I call a confrontation of doubles.

Jesus warns his disciples they will all succumb more or less to the contagion that seizes the crowd, they will all participate to some extent in the Passion on the side of the persecutors.

Pilate's principal concern is not to prevent the death of an innocent man, but to limit as much as possible the disorder that threatens to harm his reputation as an administrator in the higher imperial circles.

Once the unanimity comes about, the crowd seizes on the victim who emerges from the process, and it refuses exchange for another victim. The time for substi¬tutions is over, and the moment of violence has sounded. Pilate comprehends this. When he sees that the crowd rejects Barabbas, he immediately hands over Jesus.

Many people now think that if the Gospels report the death of Jesus as similar to that of the prophets, their goal is to stigmatize the Jewish people alone. This is of course what medieval anti-Semitism already imagined because it was based, like all Christian anti-Semitism, on an inability to understand the true nature and eminently typical character of the Passion.

IF JOHN THE BAPTIST is a prophet, then to conform to Jesus' teaching John's violent death must resemble the violent death of Jesus. That is, we should find in John's death the mimetic contagion and other essential features of the Passion. And indeed they are found there. We easily verify the presence of all the features in the two Gospels that narrate the death of John the Baptist. These are the two oldest ones, Mark and Matthew.

everything stems from a mimetic crisis. Concerning the prophet, it is the crisis of the marriage of Herod to Herodias. John reproaches Herod for his illegal marriage to the wife of his brother; Herodias desires revenge but Herod protects John. To force his hand, at his birthday banquet Herodias stirs up the crowd of guests against her enemy. To whip up the mimetic contagion of this gathering and transform it into a bloody pack, Herodias resorts to the art that the Greeks took to be the most mimetic of all, the most apt at a sacrifice to motivate participants against the victim: dancing.

WHAT WE DISCOVER in the Gospels, in the death of Jesus as well as the death of John the Baptist, is a cyclic process of disorder and reestablishment of order that reaches its high point and ends in a mechanism of victimary unanimity. I am employing the word "mechanism" to signify the automatic nature of the process and its results, as well as the incomprehension and even the unconscious obedience of the participants. The most interesting biblical texts in relation to the victimary process are those that the Gospels themselves connect to the life and death of Jesus, those that recount the life and death of the figure named the Servant of Yahweh or the Suffering Servant.

Just as the rocks are transformed into sand, so the people are transformed into an amorphous mass incapable of understanding "the voice crying in the wilderness," yet they are always ready to eat away at the heights and to fill up the depths in order to remain at the surface of all things, to reject greatness and truth.

As troubling as this leveling of differences may be, this overwhelming victory of the superficial and the uniform, the prophet invokes it because of the great transformation for which it paradoxically prepares the way, a decisive manifestation of Yahweh: And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together,

for the mouth of the LORD ...

The proof that the same sequence is indeed found in the life and death of Christ, as the four Gospel writers saw it, is that we encounter in the four Gospels a description of the mimetic crisis that is liter-ally the same as the description in Second Isaiah. This description constitutes the heart of what John the Baptist prophesies concerning Jesus. To remind the audience of this chapter of Isaiah, to have them think of that description of crisis and that announcement of the divine epiphany, is the same thing as prophesying Jesus: it is to announce that the life and death of Jesus will be similar to the life and death of the prophet of former times.

"Mimetic doubles" refers to the situation in which rivals become so obsessed with each other that they mirror each other's emotions and actions. The doubles are alike but they mistakenly see a great difference between them. Mimetic doubles are quite dangerous to one another and to others and can be quite self-destructive. —Trans.

In the period when the German theologian Rudolf Bultmann had such great influence, all the theologians who were up to date "demythologized" the Scriptures with all their might, but they didn't even do the prince of this world the honor of demythologizing him.

If we listen to Satan, who may sound like a very progressive and likeable educator, we may feel initially that we are "liberated," but this impression does not last because Satan deprives us of everything that protects us from rivalistic imitation. Rather than warning us of the trap that awaits us, Satan makes us fall into it. He applauds the idea that prohibitions are of no use and that transgressing them contains no danger.

The first was Jesus himself in a scathing rebuke to Peter: "Get behind me, Satan, for you are a scandal to me."

Peter invites Jesus, in short, to take Peter himself as the model of his desire. If Jesus were to turn away from his Father to follow Peter, he and Peter both would quickly fall into mimetic rivalry, and the venture of the kingdom of God would melt away in insignificant quarrels.

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.

"How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, it cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, it cannot be maintained. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot endure and is finished." (Mark 3:23--26)

Accusing a rival exorcist of expelling demons by the power of Satan must have been a common accusation in that period.

Jesus does not deny the reality of Satan's self-expulsion; he asserts it. The proof that Satan possesses this power is the affirmation, frequently repeated, that this power is coming to its end.

it is rather the desire to emphasize the fundamental paradox of Satan. He is a principle of order as much as disorder.

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.

The torture of a victim transforms the dangerous crowd into a public of ancient 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.

Whether it’s real or fictional matters little?

Certain medieval legends and traditional tales contain echoes of the Gospel concept of Satan. We see in these a kindly, generous man, always ready to lavish benefits on people for little in return, or so it seems. His only request is that one soul, only one, be reserved for him. Sometimes it is the daughter of the king whom he demands, but it doesn't really matter who it is. Anyone will do just as well as the most beautiful of princesses.

John inserts a short speech of fifteen verses. Though in it we find all that we analyzed in the synoptic Gospels, its form is so elliptical and condensed that it occasions even more misunderstanding than the Gospel statements that I have just examined. In spite of differences of vocabulary, which make it appear more difficult, the Johannine doctrine is the same as that of the synoptics.

What John does, however, is to define anew, abruptly indeed but also without hostility, the consequences for human beings of rivalistic imitation. In this discourse Jesus enters into dialogue with some people who will soon abandon him because they do not understand his teaching. Many of the first followers who listened to Jesus are already scandalized:

"If God were your Father, you would love me, for I proceeded and came forth from God; I did not come forth of my own accord, but he himself sent me. Why don't you understand what I'm saying? It is because you are unable to hear my word. You are of your father the devil and it is the desires of your father that you wish to do. From the beginning he was a murderer and had nothing to do with the truth because the truth is not in him. When he speaks lies, he draws them from his own nature, because he is a liar and the father of lies."

(John 8:...

Jesus tells these people, who still think of themselves as his disciples, that their father is neither Abraham nor God, as they avow, but the devil. The reason for this judgment? These people have the devil for a father because it is the desires of the devil that they want to fulfill and...

We continue to imagine ourselves alien to all 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 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.

To repeat, Satan is an imitator in the rivalistic sense of the word. His kingdom is a caricature of the kingdom of God. Satan is the ape of God.

To affirm that Satan has no actual being, as Christian theology has done, means that Christianity does not oblige us to see him as someone who really exists. The interpretation that assimilates Satan to rivalistic contagion and its consequences enables us for the first time to acknowledge the importance of the prince of this world without also endowing him with personal being. Traditional theology has rightly refused to do the latter.

"Single victim mechanism" is a translation of the French mécanisme victimaire. It refers to the unconscious snowballing process that reaches a point of crisis and ends the disorder of human rivalries and scandals by expelling or lynching a victim. It could, of course, select more than one victim, perhaps a minority group, foreigners, et al., but for purposes of analysis and discussion Girard wishes to keep a clear focus on the simplest instance of the mechanism, which is also exemplary: convergence upon a single victim.

3. See 1 John 3:10, which speaks of "children

of God and children of the devil" as a way of distinguishing those who love God and obey him and thos...

Among the pagans his miracles were viewed as superior to those of Jesus. The most spectacular is certainly his healing of a plague epidemic in the city of Ephesus.

And there he saw what seemed an old mendicant artfully blinking his eyes as if blind, and he carried a wallet and a crust of bread in it; and he was clad in rags and was very squalid of countenance. Apollonius therefore ranged the Epheseians around him and said: "Pick up as many stones as you can and hurl them at this enemy of the gods." Now the Ephesians wondered what he meant, and were shocked at the idea of murdering a stranger so manifestly miserable; for he was begging and praying them to take mercy upon him. Nevertheless Apollonius insisted and egged on the Ephesians to launch themselves on him and not let him go. And as soon as some of them began to take shots and hit him with their stones, the beggar who had seemed to blink and be blind, gave them all a sudden glance and showed that his eyes were full of fire. Then the Ephesians recognized that he was a demon, and they stoned him so thoroughly that their stones

were heaped into a great cairn around him. After a little pause Apollonius bade them remove the stones and acquaint themselves with the wild animal which they had slain. When therefore they had exposed the object which they thought they had thrown their missiles at, they found that he had disappeared and instead of him there was a hound who resembled in form and look a Molosian dog, but was in size the equal of the largest lion; there he lay before their eyes, pounded to a pulp by their stones and vomiting foam as mad dogs do. Accordingly the statue of the Averting god, namely Hercules, has been set up over the spot where the ghost was slain.

A more horrible miracle would be ...