I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

by René Girard

Contemporary thinkers, still under Nietzschean influence, have the habit of seeing the myths as kindly texts, sympathetic, cheerful, and lively. Mythology is regarded as superior in every way to the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, which are dominated, not by a legitimate concern for justice and truth, but by morbid suspicion. Most intellectuals in the present world seem to adopt this perspective. What sells this view is the apparent absence of unjust violence in the myths or the aesthetic transformation of violent deeds. By contrast, the Jewish and Christian Scriptures come across as so obsessed with persecutions that their relationship to them must at least suggest their own guilt. To grasp this misunderstanding in its enormity, we must see it in light of a case of unjust condemnation of a victim.