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I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

René Girard and James G. Williams

Last accessed on Wednesday April 6, 2022

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The desire that lives through imitation almost always leads to conflict, and this conflict frequently leads to violence.

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Both political correctness and victimism stem from an authentic reality from the standpoint of the Christian faith. That reality is God's revelation through Jesus Christ of the victim mechanism and the way into God's new community of love and nonviolence.

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The commandment that prohibits desiring the goods of one's neighbor attempts to resolve the number one problem of every human community: internal violence.

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The children repeat the crimes of their fathers precisely because they believe they are morally superior to them. This false difference is already the mimetic illusion of modern individualism, which represents the greatest resistance to the mimetic truth that is reenacted again and again in human relations. The paradox is that the resistance itself brings about the reenactment.

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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 confrontation could no longer be avoided and would bring about what Jesus is trying to prevent, the stoning of the victim. Jesus avoids thus even the shadow of provocation.

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As ritual traditions continue through time, a period inevitably arrives when the countless repetitions “wear out” their sacrificial effectiveness.

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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 replaced humans, but almost everywhere human communities viewed animal victims as less efficacious than human victims.

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talmudic principle that Emmanuel Lévinas often cites: “If everyone is in agreement to condemn someone accused, release him for he must be innocent.” Unanimity in human groups is rarely a vehicle of truth; more often it is nothing but a mimetic, tyrannical phenomenon. It resembles unanimous elections in totalitarian countries.

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TO SUMMARIZE THE MAIN POINT about the Bible and mythology: in the myths an irresistible contagion compels the unanimous communities to see their victims first as guilty and later as divine. The divine stems from the deceptive unanimity of persecution. In the Bible, by contrast, the confusion of the victimization process and the divine is dissolved and gives way to an absolute separation of the two. As already noted, the Jewish religion no longer turns victims into divinities or divinity into a victim. Monotheism is both the cause and the consequence of this revolution.

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Around the mythic deities we never see the community divide into two unequal groups, of which only the smaller one would proclaim the divinity of the god. The structure of the Christian revelation is unique.

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Scandals are above all a kind of inability to see, an insurmountable blindness. The First Epistle of John defines them by the darkness that spreads about them: Whoever says he is in the light, yet hates his brother, is still in the darkness. Whoever loves his brother remains in the light, and there is no scandal in him. (1 John 2:9–10)

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THE GOSPEL REVELATION is the definitive formulation of a truth already partially disclosed in the Old Testament.

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Scapegoating phenomena cannot survive in many instances except by becoming more subtle, by resorting to more and more complex casuistry in order to elude the self-criticism that follows scapegoaters like their shadow. Otherwise, we could no longer resort to some wretched goat to rid ourselves of our resentments. We now have need of procedures less comically evident.

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The concern for victims does not operate on the basis of statistics. It operates on the Gospel principle of the lost sheep for whom the shepherd will abandon all his flock if need be.

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The true engine of progress is the slow decomposition of the closed worlds rooted in victim mechanisms. This is the force that destroyed archaic societies and henceforth dismantles the ones replacing them, the nations we call “modern.”

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Societies that did not see the need for transforming themselves are nonetheless altered, always in the same direction, in response to the desire to make amends for past injustices and to bring about more “humane” relations among their members. Each time a new frontier is crossed, those whose interests are damaged oppose this change intensely. But once the situation has been altered, the results are never seriously contested.

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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.

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For centuries the justice we owe to the concern for victims has freed our energies, increased our potentials. But this concern presents temptation to which we usually succumb, such as colonial conquests, abuses of power, the murderous wars of the twentieth century, the pillage of the planet, etc.

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Nietzsche, to discredit the Jewish-Christian revelation, tries to show that its commitment to the side of victims stems from a paltry, miserable resentment. Observing that the earliest Christians belonged primarily to the lower classes, he accuses them of sympathizing with victims so as to satisfy their resentment of the pagan aristocrats. This is the famous “slave morality.”

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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.

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Through Christianity, the individual was made so important, so absolute, that he could no longer be sacrificed: but the species endures only through human sacrifice…. Genuine charity demands sacrifice for the good of the species—it is hard, it is full of self-overcoming, because it needs human sacrifice. And this pseudo-humaneness called Christianity wants it established that no one should be sacrificed.3 Weak and ill as he was, Nietzsche never misses an occasion to flagellate our modern concern for the weak and the ill.

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We are always prepared to translate all our conflicts, even those that don't lend themselves at all to it, into the language of innocent victims. The debate over abortion, for example: whether we are for it or against it, we always have to choose our side in the interest of the “real victims.” Who deserves our sympathy more—the mothers who sacrifice themselves for their children or the children sacrificed to contemporary pleasure-seeking and “self-fulfillment”? There you have the question.

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No one has achieved success in making the concern for victims “outdated,” and this is because it's the only thing in our world that is not the creation of current fashion (although fashions often arise from it).

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The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition.

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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, etc.

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Neo-paganism locates happiness in the unlimited satisfaction of desires, which means the suppression of all prohibitions.

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In all the titles and functions attributed to Satan, we see reappearing all the symptoms of desire and its sickness, the evolution of which Jesus diagnoses. These titles and functions include the “tempter,” the “accuser,” the “prince of this world,” the “prince of darkness,” the “murderer from the beginning,” and all of them together explain why Satan is the concealed producer-director of the Passion.

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Why is the true principle of demystification stated fully only in one religious tradition, the Christian tradition? Isn't this intolerably unfair in the era of “pluralisms” and “multiculturalisms”? Isn't the main thing to make no one jealous or envious? Aren't we supposed to sacrifice truth to the peace of the world in order to avoid the terrible wars of religion for which we must get ready everywhere, so it is said, if we are going to defend what we believe to be the truth?

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In the Gospel of John the name given to this Spirit admirably describes the power that tears the disciples away from this all-powerful contagion: the Paraclete. I have commented on this term in other essays, but its importance for what I am doing in this book is so great that I must return to it. The principal meaning of parakletos is “lawyer for the defense,” “defender of the accused.”

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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.

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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.

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For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but for those who are being saved, for us, it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart.” Where is the sage? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since the world, in the wisdom of God, did not recognize God by means of wisdom, it has pleased God to save those who believe by the folly of preaching. For the Jews demand signs and the Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a scandal to the Jews and folly for the Gentiles, but for those who are called, Jews as well as Greeks, it is Christ who is the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. (1 Cor. 1:18–25, emphasis mine)

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