I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

by René Girard

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.

Girard is approaching this from his anthropological viewpoint, and he tries very hard to stay there. I think it's a both/and situation when it comes to Satan; we are responsible for our own evil, and can self-initiate like anyone else. Satan is not the originator of evil, but the first to practice it, and encourages our desire for it. But I'm fascinated by the implications of this, and if Satan needs 'our permission' to enter into a realm expressly given to our stewardship.

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.

Satan and scandal thus overlap, but scandal describes primarily the process of desiring, then stumbling over models who are rivals and obstacles, and finally assigning blame, which leads to victimization. Satan describes primarily the mechanism of accusing and lynching a victim. Satan and scandal are key terms for understanding mythology.

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.

The Bible is unique in its disclosure of the standpoint of the victim, which means that from the standpoint of the narratives, God takes the side of the victim.

God's siding with victims is especially prominent in the book of Psalms, which contains the first sustained outcries in world literature of the single victim who is persecuted by enemies.

So from a purely anthropological

viewpoint, the Bible unveils the victim mechanism that lies behind polytheism and mythology, but not only behind polytheism and mythology, for its full expression underlies everything we know as human culture.

The story in Genesis 4 tells us, in effect, that the sign of Cain is the sign of civilization.

The story in Genesis 4 tells us, in effect, that the sign of Cain is the sign of civilization.

But the disciples encounter Jesus as risen from the dead, and this encounter amounts to a true conversion, particularly as narrated in Luke and Acts. The mythic power of the victim mechanism is now subverted in principle. As human history continues, this satanic mechanism will be subverted more and more. The New Testament Gospels are the starting point for a new science or knowledge of humanity. This new knowledge begins with faith in Christ the innocent victim, and it becomes the leaven that will work itself out and expand to the point that the concern for victims becomes the absolute value in all societies molded or affected by the spread of Christianity.

Only when the disciples know that the innocent victim is not simply like all the other thousands and millions who have been tortured and expelled and killed since the foundation of the world, only when they experience him as the Risen One and confirm that he is indeed Lord and Messiah, the Son of God, is a new religious vision and a new set of values fully born in human history.

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. The "kingdom of Satan" will give way to the "kingdom of God."

The appearance of a rival seems to validate the desire, the immense value of the object desired. Imitation becomes intensified at the heart of the hostility, 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. As a general rule, quiet and untroubled possession weakens desire.

Mimetic rivalries can become so intense that the rivals denigrate each other, steal the other's possessions, seduce the other's spouse, and, finally, they even go as far as murder.

If we respected the tenth commandment, the four commandments that precede it would be superfluous.

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.

Why does Jesus regard the Father and himself as the best model for all humans? Because neither the Father nor the Son desires greedily, egotistically. God "makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and he sends his rain on the just and on the unjust." God gives to us without counting, without marking the least difference between us. He lets the weeds grow with the wheat until the time of harvest. 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.

The 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, but a paradoxical obstacle that is almost impossible to avoid: the more this obstacle, or scandal, repels us, the more it attracts us. Those who are scandalized put all the more ardor in injuring themselves against it because they were injured there before.

It is clearly mimetic contagion that explains the hatred of the masses for exceptional persons, such as Jesus and all the prophets; it is not a matter of ethnic or religious identity.

"Get behind me, Satan, for you are a scandal to me." Peter becomes the object of this rebuke when he reacts negatively to the first prediction of the Passion. Disappointed by what he takes to be the excessive resignation of Jesus, the disciple tries to breathe into him his own desire, his own worldly ambition. 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.

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. The imminent fall of Satan, prophesied by Christ, is one and the same thing as the end of his power of self-expulsion.

"If Satan expels Satan." 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.

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.

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...

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 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.

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.

God and Satan are the two supreme models, "arch models,"

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.

The devil is obviously untruthful, for if the persecutors under-stood the truth, the innocence of their victim, they could no longer get rid of their own violence at this victim's expense.

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.

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.

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.

Simone Weil. She held that even before presenting a "theory of God," a theology, the Gospels offer a "theory of man," an anthropology.

Since it takes complete chaos in

the community to set off the single victim mechanism, the Satan who expels and reestablishes order is really identical to the Satan who foments the disorder. Jesus' st...

Thanks to this deception, human communities are indebted to Satan for the shaky relative order that they enjoy.

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.

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.

When Jesus finally responds, the first stone is the last obstacle that prevents the stoning. 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 the chance that they will let their hands fall and drop the stone.

Once the first stones are thrown, all the community must join in the stoning. To maintain order in ancient societies, there was sometimes no other means than this mechanism of contagion and mimetic unanimity. The Law resorts to this without hesitation, but as prudently, as parsimoniously as possible.

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 victims who arouse the most terror in the first phase arouse the most relief and harmony in the second.

In reality the "wild pranks" are the traces of crimes similar to those of Oedipus and other divinized scapegoats: parricide, incest, bestial fornication, and other horrible crimes. All of these are accusations typical of witch-hunts, with which primitive mobs are permanently obsessed, as are modern crowds seeking to find victims. The "wild pranks" are essential to the primitive phenomenon of divinity.

To avoid arousing reprisals, the torturers choose social nobodies: the homeless, those without family, the disabled and ill, abandoned old people, all those in short who bear the preferential signs for being selected as victims, the signs I discussed in The Scapegoat.' These signs or features change hardly at all from one culture to another. Their constancy contradicts cultural relativism.

In having the beggar stoned, Apollonius inflicted on a human victim the unanimous violence that most sacrifices no longer reproduced in his period except on animal victims.

The idea that the gods have instructed humans to offer them sacrifice is universal, and it is easy to see what justifies this.

We thus understand why those offering sacrifice, almost universally, saw their sacrifices as awesome acts. They realized that the only "good violence," the violence that ends violence rather than intensifies it, is unanimous violence.