session 1 from january adventure

5. rene girard
insights and contributions
on a rediscovery of the Bible

6. Anthropologist
Literary Scholar
Cultural Historian
See also:
Michael Hardin
James Alison
Tony Bartlett1

7. 1. Imitation
Humans are imitative (mimetic)
creatures.

8. “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.

9. 1. Imitation
2. Rivalry

10. 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)

11. 1. Imitation
2. Rivalry
3.Violence and Anxiety

12. 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?

13. 1. Imitation
2. Rivalry
3.Violence and Anxiety
4. Scapegoating

14. 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)

15. 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 ...

16. 1. Imitation
2. Rivalry
3.Violence and Anxiety
4. Scapegoating
5. Religion, Prohibitions, Ritualization

17. 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.

18. 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)

19. 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.

20. 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)

21. ... 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)

22. [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

23. 1. Imitation
2. Rivalry
3.Violence and Anxiety
4. Scapegoating
5. Religion, Prohibitions, Ritualization
6. The Hebrew Scriptures - law/
priesthood and/vs prophets

24. 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.

25. 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)

26. 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)

27. 1. Imitation
2. Rivalry
3.Violence and Anxiety
4. Scapegoating
5. Religion, Prohibitions, Ritualization
6. The Hebrew Scriptures
7. Jesus and the gospels

28. 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)

29. 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)

30. [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]

31. Satan = Destructive Imitation,Violence
It 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)

32. Mary = Nonviolence
In 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)

33. The Death of Jesus = End of Sacrificial Religion
The 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)

34. Jesus = Nonviolent Word of God
If 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)

35. 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)

36. 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)

37. 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)

38. 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)

39. 1. Imitation
2. Rivalry
3.Violence and Anxiety
4. Scapegoating
5. Religion, Prohibitions, Ritualization
6. The Hebrew Scriptures
7. Jesus and the gospels
8. The violent reversion of
“historical/sacrificial Christianity”

40. 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)

41. 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)

42. ... 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

43. 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)

44. - 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)

45. 1. Imitation
2. Rivalry
3.Violence and Anxiety
4. Scapegoating
5. Religion, Prohibitions, Ritualization
6. The Hebrew Scriptures
7. Jesus and the gospels
8. The violent reversion of “historical/
sacrificial Christianity”
9. Our apocalyptic moment

46. 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)

47. 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)

48. 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)

49. 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)

50. 1. Imitation
2. Rivalry
3.Violence and Anxiety
4. Scapegoating
5. Religion, Prohibitions, Ritualization
6. The Hebrew Scriptures
7. Jesus and the gospels
8. The violent reversion of “historical/
sacrificial Christianity”
9. Our apocalyptic moment
10. The challenges before us

51. - 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)

52. - 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)

53. - 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)

54. - 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)

55. - 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)

56. - 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)

57. - 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)

58. - 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
imitation
Fruit - violence?
Cain and Abel
Hagar and Sarah
Isaac and Ishmael
Abraham and Isaac
Jacob and Esau
Joseph and brothers
Genesis 50

59. 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.’

60. Joseph wept when they spoke to him.
18
Then 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.

62. 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