Originally posted on Goodreads.
In our rational, scientific world, the coronavirus pandemic, while unprecedented, is well-understood. We know that the virus originated in China and, through the science of epidemiology, we were able to track its rapid spread. In response, (most) world governments moved swiftly to contain the virus through a blitzkrieg of public health measures. Now, as the world cautiously begins reopening, global pharmaceutical companies are racing to find a vaccine.
Thanks to modern science, then, we can call this case (more or less) closed. How then, can Girard, an obscure scholar of mythology and Scripture, and his book, published over 20 years ago, be relevant in 2020? Consider the following story.
Some two centuries after Jesus died, the Athenian city of Ephesus was afflicted by a virulent and persistent plague epidemic. The Ephesians try all manners of remedies – natural and supernatural – but none succeed in eradicating the plague. According to the Greek historian and philosopher Philostratus, it was not until the Athenian guru Apollonius of Tyana performed his miracle that the city was cured.
So it goes, Apollonius gathers a crowd of Ephesians and leads them to a shrine dedicated to Hercules, where a blind beggar sits. He commands the city to pick up stones to throw at the beggar, in order to kill him. The peaceful Ephesians are at first reluctant. Persisting, Apollonius eggs them on, denouncing the vagrant as the demonic incarnation of the plague. After the first few stones are cast, the mob follows on, and soon there remains only a mound of bloody rocks. Amazingly, the plague is cured, and the people thank Hercules for his divine intervention.
As fantastical and superstitious as this anecdote may seem to the modern mind, perhaps there is some truth in it. Primarily, if we concede the historicity of the event, we must assume that the “plague” was not purely bacterial in nature, and that it also had a social dimension manifest in the unrest in the city and accompanying breakdown in social relations. And once we refrain from our typical modern dismissal of ancient mythic stories, we might just see how the ancients understood things we do not. So what might this public stoning suggest about the way in which plagues are resolved? About the way ours might be?
In a sense, Girard could be said to be a scholar of lynch mobs and their tendency toward public executions. He is known primarily for his theory of mimetic violence and scapegoating. In “I See Satan Fall Like Lightning”, he describes it as having three parts. First, intensifying mimetic rivalries cause warring adversaries to become increasingly undifferentiated, homogeneous, and indistinguishable from one another. At some point, this reciprocal, exponentiated exchange of anger culminates in the warring sides joining forces to slay an innocent victim. Finally, peace is restored, and the two sides, in awe of the return to normalcy precipitated by the murder, deify the victim. From then, ancient societies built rituals fashioned from this peacemaking event, mimicking the original murder to restore peace in times of crisis.
The universality of this basic structure of peacemaking across ancient cultures suggests that there is something deeply ingrained in the human mind that predisposes it toward such cycles of violence. Lest the reader is skeptical, consider the stories of Apollonius (above), Cain and Abel (wherein Cain kills his twin Abel, after which the first world culture according to the Jewish creation story begins), and Romulus and Remus (wherein Romulus kills his twin Remus, subsequently founding Rome).
Girard’s analytical approach could be described as jointly anthropological (insofar as it is undergirded by studies in comparative mythology) and theological (in that it asserts that the “myths” of Judaism and Christianity are unique, and uniquely good, among world myths). In marrying these two disparate approaches, Girard distinguishes himself from both modern/postmodern readers (who prefer a sort of Weberian materialist/historicist or postmodern “deconstructionist” approach to reading history, free of value judgments) and theologians (who may see the encroachment of social science as a degradation of religious metaphysics).
This willingness to defend theology in so-called “natural” or anthropological terms is precisely what is bold and refreshing about Girard’s work. To borrow the words of Simone Weil, Girard sees Scripture as offering a theory of man (an “anthropo”-logy) before it offers a theory of God (a “theo”-logy). To this end, the atheistic or agnostic reader can read the text without rolling their eyes at any dogmatic religious claims. And, if one is open-minded enough to do so, then perhaps they will discover some disturbing truths about human organization and conflict. For if the sociological and psychological descriptions and predictions of violence from Scripture are to be believed, then…
Returning to the content of the book, Girard builds the case for the uniqueness of Jewish and Christian scripture. In particular, he contends that the human condition is far from the war of “all-against-all” that the original Enlightenment liberals conceived of. Rather, it often becomes the war of “all-against one”, and he contends Judaism and Christianity were the first religions to recognize and eschew the war of all-against-one. He invokes, over the course of the book, the Gospel story of Jesus saving the adulterous woman from Pharisaic stoning (which he notes is the inverse of the story of Apollonius above), the Genesis story of Joseph and his brothers, and the story of Job. In each of these, as with other stories, there is the mechanism of mimetic violence causing a mob of “dumb cattle following the herd in the expulsions of” marginalized individuals. But, far from using mob violence as a cathartic bloodletting to create temporary peace, Girard notes that Scripture chooses the side of the victim each time.
Girard credits monotheism for averting this cycle. This is because if Girard is right that, for the ancients, gods were created through mimetic violence and scapegoating and reinforced through subsequent ritual sacrifice, the proclamation that there is only one God outside of the realm of (but acting through) human affairs decisively obviates the role for human scapegoat sacrifices, and therefore the possibility of new “false” gods.
For Girard, what emerges from this understanding of mimetic violence and scapegoating and from his reading of Scripture is the realization that what the Bible calls “Satan” is in fact the principle of mimetic violence that is capable of simultaneously creating disorder and restoring peace. In light of such a reading, the names historically given to Satan make sense: accuser, deceiver, prince of this world, the principle of this world, etc. In particular, “Satan” is a deceiver because the efficacy of the scapegoating mechanism is only brought to bear when the participants are unaware that they are taking part in it. This is why, Girard contends, non-Judeo-Christian myths always paint the victim as deserving of their punishment: Oedipus after all, despite being an effective ruler, did commit patricide and incest.
According to Girard, only the Christian revelation was able to illuminate and name this dynamic in a way that has rendered such willful ignorance of the scapegoating mechanism increasingly untenable. Although superficially the crucifixion of Jesus seems to follow the tripartite model of divine victimhood described, Girard claims that Jesus (who, unlike the victims of mythology, was definitively innocent) subverts it. This is in part because of His innocence and the lack of unanimity in condemnation following His death.
What happens, then, when the primary peacemaking mechanism of human civilization is rendered obsolete? Is it everlasting peace, like some think Christianity promises but fails to deliver? No, Girard responds – it is quite the opposite. Mimetic rivalries have arguably intensified in our globalized world, and ever more subtle ways of concealing the scapegoat mechanism have emerged. This is perhaps why Jesus said:
Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn “a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.”
and perhaps why Girard said:
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.
This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves. In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims.
How then can we recognize scapegoating and mimetic violence when it happens? If it is as Girard says, and perpetrators of collective violence are unaware of their role in mimetic contagion, then perhaps one must be highly suspicious when they find themselves holding or among those who hold the majority opinion. And if it is the tendency for violent mobs to become homogeneous and indistinguishable from one another, then perhaps one ought to learn to recognize the effects of mimetic contagion – that is, when people are becoming more similar, and less differentiated.