rene girard & genesis

insights and contributions

on a rediscovery of the Bible

rene girard

AnthropologistLiterary Scholar

Cultural Historian

See also:Michael Hardin

James AlisonTony Bartlett1

1. Imitation

Humans are imitative (mimetic) creatures.

“Acquisitive mimesis” - What you want, I want. What I want, you want.

We become mirrors or doubles of one another’s competitive desires. Will we - supposed friends - become enemies?

Because of proximity, a dangerous friend is more frightening than an enemy.

1. Imitation2. Rivalry

The reduction of canine teeth to their current dimensions occurred a long time before the appearance of homo sapiens, suggesting that stones had replaced dentition in most of their uses, including intra-species combat.... If instead of throwing branches at one another as they sometimes do, chimpanzees were to learn to throw stones at one another, their social life would be radically shaken. Either the species would disappear, or like humanity it would have to impose its own prohibitions. (TH 86-87)

1. Imitation2. Rivalry3. Violence and Anxiety

Rivalry creates the constant danger of “all against all” outbreaks of violence, which in turn creates constant anxiety ...

“The more you get along together, the less you get along together.”

How will this anxiety be relieved?

1. Imitation2. Rivalry3. Violence and Anxiety4. Scapegoating

The Victimage Mechanism

The opposition of everyone against everyone is replaced by the opposition of all against one. Where previously there had been a chaotic ensemble of particular conflicts, there is now the simplicity of a single conflict: the entire community on one side, and on the other, the victim.

The community finds itself unified once more at the expense of a victim.... The sacrifice is simply another act of violence, one that is added to a succession of others, but it is the final act of violence, the last word. (TH 24)

The aggressive transference [focusing a group’s general social anxiety upon one individual] is followed by the reconciliatory transference [which] sacralizes the victim... Because the popular imagination tends to polarize its hopes and enthusiasms, and of course its fears and anxieties, around a chosen individual, the power of the individual in question seems to multiply infinitely, for good or ill. Such an individual does not represent the collectivity in an abstract manner, but rather represents the state of turmoil, restlessness, or calm of the collectivity at any given moment of representation. (TH 37)

The peace created through scapegoating is counted as sacred, supernatural, divine ...

1. Imitation2. Rivalry3. Violence and Anxiety4. Scapegoating5. Religion, Prohibitions, Ritualization

Through prohibitions and taboos, societies seek to avoid the conflict and competition of acquisitive mimesis.

Through rituals, societies seek to diffuse the social tensions that arise from that conflict and competition - especially through ritualized sacrificial scapegoating.

Religion is nothing other than this immense effort to keep the peace. The sacred is violence, but if religious man worships violence it is only insofar as the worship of violence is supposed to bring peace; religion is entirely concerned with peace, but the means it has of bringing it about are never free of sacrificial violence. (TH 33)

People do not wish to know that the whole of human culture is based on the mythic process of conjuring away man’s violence by endlessly projecting it upon new victims. All cultures and all religions are built on that foundation, which they then conceal, just as the tomb is built around the dead body that it conceals.... The tomb-religion amounts to nothing more or less than the becoming invisible of the foundations, of religion and culture, of their only reason for existence.

Since [many people] do not see that human community is dominated by violence, people do not understand that the very one of them who is untainted by any violence and has no form of complicity with violence is bound to become the victim.

... people fail to understand that they are indebted to violence for the degree of peace they enjoy.(210-211)

... the primitive deity is essentially monstrous.” (35)[God becomes an object of fear that is more frightening than the threat of a competitive neighbor.]

Religious systems form a whole in this sense, such that the infraction of any particular rule, no matter how absurd it may seem objectively, constitutes a challenge to the entire community....

In societies that do not have penal systems capable of halting the spread of mimetic rivalry and its escalation into a vicious cycle of violence, the religious system performs this very real function. (TH 41)

[T]he common origin of all institutions ... is the reproduction of generative* violence. (79)

*Intentional, controlled, sanctioned violence whose intent is to prevent

unintentional, uncontrolled, unsanctioned violence

1. Imitation2. Rivalry3. Violence and Anxiety4. Scapegoating5. Religion, Prohibitions, Ritualization6. The Hebrew Scriptures - law/priesthood and/vs prophets

From the first lines of Genesis, we have the theme of the warring brothers or twins: Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his eleven brothers, etc.

... It is always by violence, by the expulsion of one of the brothers, that the crisis is resolved, and differentiation returns once again.

... In the sacrifice of Isaac the necessity of sacrifice threatens the most precious being, only to be satisfied, at the last moment, with a substituted victim, the ram sent by God.

What the prophets come down to saying is basically this: legal prescriptions are of little consequence as long as you keep from fighting one another, so long as you do not become enemy twins. This is the new inspiration ... Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself (Lev 19, 18). [154-155)

So the three great pillars of primitive religion - myth, sacrifice and prohibitions - are subverted by the thought of the Prophets, and this general activity of subversion is invariably governed by the bringing to light of the mechanisms that found religion: the unanimous violence against the scapegoat. (TH 155)

In the prophetic books, this conception [of God] tends to be increasingly divested of violence characteristic of primitive deities.... in the Old Testament we never arrive at a conception of the deity that is entirely foreign to violence. (157)

... The sacrifices are criticized, but they continue; the law is simplified and declared to be identical to love of one’s neighbor, but it continues. And even though he is presented in a less and less violent form, and becomes more and more benevolent, Yahweh is still the god to whom vengeance belongs. The notion of divine retribution is still alive. (TH 158)

1. Imitation2. Rivalry3. Violence and Anxiety4. Scapegoating5. Religion, Prohibitions, Ritualization6. The Hebrew Scriptures7. Jesus and the gospels

The Old Testament [was] a first step outside the sacrificial system, and the first gradual withering of sacrificial resources. At the very moment when this adventure approaches its resolution, Jesus arrives on the scene - Jesus as he appears in the gospels.

From now on, it becomes impossible to put the clock back. There is an end to cyclical history, for the very reason that its mechanisms are beginning to be uncovered. (206)

Behaving in a truly divine manner, on an earth still in the clutches of violence, means not dominating humans, not overwhelming them with supernatural power; it means not terrifying and astonishing them in turn, through the sufferings and blessings on can confer; it means not creating difference between doubles and not taking part in their disputes. ‘God is no respecter of persons.’ He makes no distinction between ‘Greeks and Jews, men and women, etc.’ This can look like complete indifference and can lead to the conclusion that the all-powerful does not exist, so long as his transcendence keeps him infinitely far from us and our violent undertakings. But the same characteristics are revealed as a heroic and perfect love once this transcendence becomes incarnate in a human being and walks among men, to teach them about the true God and to draw them closer to Him. (234)

[The text of the Gospels] speaks incessantly of everything we have said ourselves; it has no other function than to unearth victims of collective violence and to reveal their innocence. [TH 138]

Satan = Destructive Imitation, ViolenceIt is no abstract metaphysical reduction, no descent into vulgar polemics or lapse into superstition that makes Satan the true adversary of Jesus. Satan is absolutely identified with the circular mechanisms of violence, with man’s imprisonment in cultural and philosophical systems that maintain his [way of life] with violence. That is why he promises Jesus domination provided that Jesus will worship him... Satan is the name for the mimetic process seen as a whole. (162)

Mary = NonviolenceIn innumerable episodes of mythical birth, the god copulates with a mortal woman in order to give birth to a hero. Stories of this kind always involve more than a hint of violence.... the birth of the gods is always a kind of rape... The orgasm that appeases the god is a metaphor for collective violence.

... No relationship of violence exists between those who take part in the virgin birth: the Angel, the Virgin and the Almighty.... The complete absence of any sexual element has nothing to do with repression ... All the themes and terms associated with the virgin birth convey to us a perfect submission to the non-violent will of the God of the Gospels. (220-221)

The Death of Jesus = End of Sacrificial ReligionThe Gospels only speak of sacrifices in order to reject them and deny them any validity. Jesus counters the ritualism of the Pharisees with an anti-sacrificial quotation from Hosea: “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice’” (Matthew 9:13).

There is nothing in the Gospels to suggest that the death of Jesus is a sacrifice, whatever definition (expiation, substitution, etc.) we may give for sacrifice. At no point in the Gospels is the death of Jesus dfined as a sacrifice.... Certainly the Passion is presented to us in the Gospels as an act that brings salvation to humanity. But it is in no way presented as a sacrifice. (181)

Jesus = Nonviolent Word of GodIf love and violence are incompatible, the definition of the Logos must take this into account. The difference between the Greek Logos and the Johannine Logos must be an obvious one, which gets concealed only in the tortuous complications of a type of thought that never succeeds in ridding itself of its own violence. (270)

The gospel interpretation of the Old Testament can be summed up in this approach ... the replacement of the God that inflicts violence with the God that only suffers violence, the Logos that is expelled.... When the consequences of this substitution finally come to fulfillment, there will be incalculable results. (275)

The sacrifical interpretation of the Passion must be criticized and exposed as a most enormous and paradoxical misunderstanding - and at the same time as something necessary - and as the most revealing indication of mankind’s radical incapacity to understand its own violence, even when that violence is conveyed in the most explicit fashion. (181)

To say that Jesus dies, not as a sacrifice, but in order that there may be no more sacrifices, is to recognize in him the Word of God, ‘I wish for mercy and not sacrifices’.... Where violence remains master, Jesus must die. Rather than become the slave of violence, as our own word necessarily does, the Word of God says no to violence. (210-211)

A non-violent deity can only signal his existence to mankind by having himself driven out by violence - by demonstrating that he is not able to establish himself in the Kingdom of Violence.

But this very demonstration is bound to remain ambiguous for a very long time, and it is not capable of achieving a decisive result, since it looks like total impotence to those who live under the regime of violence. That is why at first it can only have some effect under a guise, deceptive through the admixture of some sacrificial elements, through the surreptitious re-insertion of some violence into the conception of the divine. (219-220)

1. Imitation2. Rivalry3. Violence and Anxiety4. Scapegoating5. Religion, Prohibitions, Ritualization6. The Hebrew Scriptures7. Jesus and the gospels8. The violent reversion of “historical/sacrificial Christianity”

What turns Christianity in on itself, so that it presents a hostile face to all that is not Christian, is inextricably bound up with the sacrificial reading. (225)

Historical Christianity covers the texts with a veil of sacrifice. Or, to change the metaphor, it immolates them in the (albeit splendid) tomb of Western culture. (249)

But the process requires an almost limitless patience: many centuries must elapse before the subversive and shattering truth contained in the Gospels can be understood world-wide. (252)

... there has never been any thought in the West but Greek* thought, even when the labels were Christian. Christianity has no special existence in the domain of thought. Continuity with the Greek Logos has never been interrupted... everything is Greek and nothing is Christian. (273)

*i.e. imperial, with centralized, sanctioned, institutional violence

Sacrificial Christianity still believes in divine thunderbolts, while its progressive double completely stifles the apocalyptic dimension and so deprives itself of the most valuable card that it has in its hands, under the flimsy pretext that the first priority is to reassure people. (442-443)

- Beware resurrecting what you are trying to lay to rest:

If we believed that we were justified in condemning sacrificial Christianity we would be repeating the very error to which sacrificial Christianity itself succumbed. We would be taking our stand on the Gospels and the non-sacrificial perspective they introduce, yet beginning all over again the abominable history of anti-semitism, directed this time at Christianity. We would be starting up the victimage mechanism once again, while relying on a text that, if it were really understood, would put that mechanism out of use once and for all. (245)

1. Imitation2. Rivalry3. Violence and Anxiety4. Scapegoating5. Religion, Prohibitions, Ritualization6. The Hebrew Scriptures7. Jesus and the gospels8. The violent reversion of “historical/sacrificial Christianity”9. Our apocalyptic moment

The Christian religion doesn’t understand its own gospel:

[The Gospel] discredits and deconstructs all the gods of violence, since it reveals the true God, who has not the slightest violence in him. Since the time of the Gospels, mankind as a whole has always failed to comprehend this mystery, and it does so still. (429)

The ancient and violent violence-management system is breaking down ...

In contemporary society ... no more taboos forbid one person to take what is reserved for another and no more initiation rites prepare individuals in common, for the necessary trials of life. (291)

Our weapons have achieved divine status -

A truly wonderful sense of the appropriate has guided the inventory of the most terrifying weapons to choose names that evoke ultimate violence in the most effective way: names taken from the direst divinities of Greek mythology, like Titan, Poseidon, and Saturn, the god who devoured his own children. We who sacrifice fabulous resources to fatten the most inhuman form of violence so that it will continue to protect us... how can we have the extraordinary hypocrisy to pretend that we do not understand those people who ... made it their practice to throw a single child, or two at the most, into the furnace of a certain Moloch in order to ensure the safety of the others? (256)

Either we are moving to ineluctably toward nonviolence, or we are about to disappear completely.... The genuinely new element is that violence can no longer be relied upon to resolve the crisis. Violence no longer guarantees a firm base. For violence to be capable of carrying out its cyclical development and bringing back peace, there must be an ecological field that can absorb the damage done in the process.... The environment can no longer absorb the violence humans can unleash. (258)

As for the terrors of the Apocalypse, no one could do better in that respect nowadays than the daily newspaper. (260)

1. Imitation2. Rivalry3. Violence and Anxiety4. Scapegoating5. Religion, Prohibitions, Ritualization6. The Hebrew Scriptures7. Jesus and the gospels8. The violent reversion of “historical/sacrificial Christianity”9. Our apocalyptic moment10. The challenges before us

- A new kind of Christianity must be resurrected from the old:

... this sacrificial concept of divinity must ‘die,’ and with it the whole apparatus of historical Christianity, for the Gospels to be able to rise again in our midst, not looking like a corpse that we have exhumed, but revealed as the newest, finest, liveliest and truest thing that we have ever set eyes upon. (235-236)

- We must rediscover Jesus as the nonviolent Word of God

- Reflecting on John 1

There is no privileged stance from which absolute truth can be discovered... That is why the Word that states itself to be absolutely true never speaks except from the position of a victim in the process of being expelled.... [F]or two thousand years this Word has been misunderstood, despite the enormous amount of publicity it has received. (435)

- We must make a break with all violent images of God:

[T]he complete break between the sacrificial god and the non-sacrificial God - the Father who has been made known to us only through Christ - in no way excludes a continuity between the sacrificial religions and this universal renunciation of violence to which all humanity is called.... There is an absolute separation between the only true deity and all the deities of violence, who have been radically demystified by the Gospels alone. But this should not prevent us from recognizing in the religions of violence, which are always in search of peace, anyway, the methods that initially helped humanity to leave the animal state behind and then to elevate itself to unprecedented possibilities, though they are combined with the most extreme dangers. (410)

- We must rediscover the primacy of love:

The New Testament contains what amounts to a genuine epistemology of love, the principle of which is clearly formulated in the first Epistle of John:

He who loves his brother abides in the light, and in it there is no cause for stumbling. But he who hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes. (1 John 3:10-11)

... Only Christ’s perfect love can achieve without violence the perfect revelation toward which we have been progressing.... (277)

- We must not slip into another cycle of fruitless scapegoating:

I do not think that we should mince our words. We must refuse all the scapegoats that Freud and Freudianism have offered to us: the father, the law, etc. We must refuse the scapegoats that Marx offers: the bourgouisie, the capitalists, etc. We must refuse the scapegoats that Nietzsche offers: slave morality, the resentment of others and so on. All of modernism in its classic stage ... merely offers us scapegoats. (287)

- We must practice the opposite of scapegoating - the sacred protection (rather than sacrifice) of victims:

... there can be no victim who is not Christ, and no one can come to the aid of a victim without coming to the aid of Christ. (429)

- We must rediscover the Bible:

Pascal writes somewhere that it is permissible to correct the Bible, but only by invoking the Bible’s help. That is exactly what we are doing when we re-read Genesis and the whole of the Old Testament, and the whole of culture, in the light of these few lines from the Prologue of John. The immense labor that went into the inspired text of the Bible (which is also the onward march of humanity toward the discovery of its own truth) can all be summed up in this repetition of the first sentence of Genesis and the ‘slight’ rectification it carries out. (276)

We were able to detect a series of stages in the Bible that invariably pointed toward the attenuation and later elimination of the practice of sacrifice. (443)

- Genesis in a New Light:

Good creation (no violence)Knowledge of good and evil (dualism, us-them anxiety, judgment, accusation, expulsion, violence)Adam and Eve

Acquisitive mimesis - partners, destructive imitationFruit - violence?

Cain and AbelHagar and SarahIsaac and IshmaelAbraham and IsaacJacob and EsauJoseph and brothersGenesis 50

50:15 Realizing that their father was dead, Joseph’s brothers said, ‘What if Joseph still bears a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the wrong that we did to him?’ 16So they approached* Joseph, saying, ‘Your father gave this instruction before he died, 17“Say to Joseph: I beg you, forgive the crime of your brothers and the wrong they did in harming you.” Now therefore please forgive the crime of the servants of the God of your father.’

Joseph wept when they spoke to him. 18Then his brothers also wept,* fell down before him, and said, ‘We are here as your slaves.’ 19But Joseph said to them, ‘Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? 20Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today. 21So have no fear; I myself will provide for you and your little ones.’ In this way he reassured them, speaking kindly to them.

In [the] future, all violence will reveal what Christ’s Passion revealed, the foolish genesis of bloodstained idols and the false gods of religion, politics, and ideologies. The murderers remain convinced about the worthiness of their sacrifices. They, too, know not what they do and we must forgive them. The time has come for us to forgive one another. If we wait any longer there will not be enough time.

The Scapegoat, 212