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A great mass of evidence, theoretical, textual, and archeological, suggests that in the beginnings of humanity the sacrificial victims were human. With the passing of time animals more and more re-placed humans, but almost everywhere human communities viewed animal victims as less efficacious than human victims. In cases of extreme danger, in classical Greece, for instance, there was a reversion to human victims.
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.
The founding murder teaches the murderer(s) a kind of wisdom, a form of prudence that moderates their violence. God takes ad-vantage of the lull by promulgating the first law against murder: "If anyone kills Cain, he shall be avenged sevenfold" (Gen. 4:15). The foundation of Cainite culture is this first taw against murder: each time a new murder occurs, the community will immolate seven victims in memory of the original victim, Abel. Even more than the crushing character of the retribution, it is the ritual nature of the sevenfold sacrifice that reestablishes the peace.
The law against murder involves nothing other than the repetition of murder. What distinguishes it from primitive vengeance is its intention rather than the intrinsic nature of the act performed. In place of a vengeful repetition that arouses new avengers, it establishes a ritualized, sacrificial repetition of the unity forged in unanimity, a ceremony in which the entire community participates.
James Williams observes, the "sign of Cain is the sign of civilization. It is the sign of the murderer protected by God."2
the first human culture has its roots in an initial collective murder, a murder similar to the Crucifixion.
These three phrases, two from Luke and one from John, signify the same thing: they indicate that between the origin and the first collective murder there is a relation that is not accidental. The murder and the origin are the same thing. If the devil is a murderer from the origin, that means that he continues to be during the rest of time. Each time a culture appears, it begins by the same type of murder.
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
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This possibility is that religion is the heart of every social system, the true origin and original form of all institutions, the universal basis of human culture.4
Sacrifice lies behind everything distinguishing humans from animals, behind everything enabling us to substitute properly human desire for animal instinct, namely, mimetic desire. If becoming human involves, among other things, acquiring mimetic desire, it is obvious that humans could not exist in the beginning without sacrificial institutions that repress and moderate the kind of conflict that is inevitable with the working of mimetic desire.
The true guide of human beings is not abstract reason but ritual. The countless repetitions shape little by little the institutions that later men and women will think they invented ex nihilo. Actually it is religion that invented human culture.
Humanity springs forth from religion, i.e., from many "founding murders" and the rituals that spring from them. The modern tendency to minimize religion could well be, paradoxically, the last remnant among us of religion itself in its archaic form, which seeks to keep the sacred at a safe distance.
The theme common to both myth and Gospel is the mimetic cycle, and it is found only partially in the Old Testament accounts. The mimetic crisis and collective violence are there, but the third phase of the mimetic cycle is absent: the sacred revelation, the resurrection that reveals the divinity of the victim. To repeat, only the first two phases are present in the Hebrew Bible. It is quite evident in these texts that the victims never rise again: God is never victimized, nor is the victim divinized.
In the biblical world human beings are generally just as violent as in the mythic worlds, and single victim mechanisms abound. What stands against any world of contagion and violence is the Bible itself, the biblical interpretation of these phenomena.
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.
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.
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
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THE VICTIM MECHANISM is not a literary theme like many others; it is a principle of illusion. As such, it cannot appear at all in the texts it controls.
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).
In triggering the victim mechanism against Jesus, Satan believed he was protecting his kingdom, defending his possession, not realizing that, in fact, he was doing the very opposite. He did exactly what God had foreseen. Only Satan could have set in motion the process of his own destruction without suspecting anything was wrong.
The real source of victim substitutions is the appetite for violence that awakens in people when anger seizes them and when the true object of their anger is untouchable. The range of objects capable of satisfying the appetite for violence enlarges proportionally to the intensity of the anger.
Our society is the most preoccupied with victims of any that ever was. Even if it is insincere, a big show, the phenomenon has no precedent. No historical period, no society we know, has ever spoken of victims as we do.
The idea of a society alien to violence goes back clearly to the preaching of Jesus, to his announcement of the kingdom of God. This ideal does not diminish to the extent that Christianity recedes; to the contrary, its intensity increases. The concern for victims has became a paradoxical competition of mimetic rivalries, of opponents continually trying to outbid one another.
The concern for victims leads us to the sound opinion that our progress in "humanitarianism" is very slow and we should certainly not glorify it, in order not to slow it down even more. The modern concern for victims obligates us to blame ourselves perpetually. Our concern for victims is characteristically never satisfied with past successes. It never praises itself or tolerates its own praise. It tries to turn attention away from itself because we should be attentive only to victims. Our concern denounces its own laxity, its Pharisaism. Our concern for victims is the secular mask of Christian
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When a catastrophe occurs at some spot on the globe, the nations that are well off feel obligated to send aid or to participate in rescue operations. You may say these gestures are more symbolic than real and reflect a concern for prestige. No doubt, but in what era before ours and under what skies has international mutual aid constituted a source of prestige for nations.?
Inventing the hospital meant dissociating for the very first time the idea of victim from all concrete ethnic, regional, or class identity. It is the invention of the modern victim concept.
We can compare ancient societies to one another, but the global society now in the making is truly unique. Its superiority in every area is so overwhelming, so evident, that it is forbidden, paradoxically, to acknowledge the fact, especially in Europe. This prohibition stems from the fear of a return to tyrannical pride. It is also the fear of humiliating nations that don't belong to the privileged group. In other words, it is once again the concern for victims that dominates what it is permissible and impermissible to say.
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.
The spiritual goal of Hitler's ideology was to root out of Germany, then all of Europe, that calling that the Christian tradition places upon all of us: the concern for victims.
Between Dionysos and Jesus there "is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom." In other words, the accounts of the Passion recount the same kind of drama as the myths, but the "meaning" is different. While Dionysos approves and organizes the lynching of the single victim, Jesus and the Gospels disapprove.
As incredible as it may seem, no one made this simple but fundamental discovery before Nietzsche no one, not even a Christian! So on this particular point we must give Nietzsche his just due. But beyond this point, sad to say, the philosopher becomes delirious. Rather than recognizing the reversal of the mythic scheme as an indisputable truth that only Judaism and Christianity proclaim, Nietzsche does all he can to discredit the Christian awareness that this type of victim is innocent.
Nietzsche the philosopher was unable to sit back comfortably in the monstrosities into which the need to minimize his discovery was driving him. And so he took refuge in madness.
in a world where relativism has seemingly defeated religion and every "value" that is religious in origin, the concern for victims is more alive than ever.
If the concern for victims has fully appeared, it is because all the great expressions of modern thought are exhausted and discredited.
The fact that our world has become solidly anti-Christian, at least among its elites, does not prevent the concern for victims from flourishing just the opposite.
No one ever detects in the myths the stench of corpses badly buried. The myths are never the objects of the least suspicion.
The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and "radicalizes" the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be "revolutionary" now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions.
Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims. Satan imitates Christ better and better and pretends to surpass him. This imitation by the usurper has long been present in the Christianized world, but it has increased enormously in our time.
The Antichrist boasts of bringing to
human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually, what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion, euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims,
Jesus does not announce the immediate end of Satan, not yet at least. It is rather the end of his false transcendence, his power to restore order through his false accusations, the end of scapegoating.
Christ cannot bring us a peace truly divine without depriving us first of the only peace at our disposal. His peace entails this troubling historical process through which we are living.
To break the power of mimetic unanimity, we must postulate a power superior to violent contagion. If we have learned one thing in this study, it is that none exists on the earth. It is precisely because violent contagion was all-powerful in human societies, prior to the day of the Resurrection, that archaic religion divinized it. Archaic societies are not as stupid as we tend to think. They had good reasons to mistake violent unanimity for divine power.
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.
WHAT IS THIS POWER that triumphs over mimetic violence? The Gospels respond that it is the Spirit of God, the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. The Spirit takes charge of everything. It would be false, for example, to say the disciples "regained possession of themselves": it is the Spirit of God that possesses them and does not let them go.
The principal meaning of pacrakletos is "lawyer for the defense," "defender of the accused."
The birth of Christianity is a victory of the Paraclete over his opposite, Satan, whose name originally means "accuser before a tribunal," that is, the one responsible for proving the guilt of the defendants. That is one of the reasons why the Gospels hold Satan responsible for all mythology.
What the two converts become capable of seeing, thanks to their conversions, is the violent social instinct, the adherence to the will of the crowd, which neither knew possessed him. This is the violent contagion that compels us all to participate in the Crucifixion.
