The Girard Reader (38 page)

identical with the Word, while other people, even if they hear it, are incapable of conforming

to it.

R.G.:
So Jesus is the only man who achieves the goal God has set for all mankind, the only

man who has nothing to do with violence and its works. The epithet "Son of Man" also

corresponds, quite clearly, to the fact that Jesus alone has fulfilled a calling that belongs to all

mankind.

If the fulfillment, on earth, passes inevitably through the death of Jesus, this is not because

the Father demands this death, for strange sacrificial motives. Neither the son nor the Father

should be questioned about the cause of this event, but all mankind, and mankind alone. The

very fact that mankind has never really managed to understand what is involved reveals

clearly that the misunderstanding of the founding murder is still being perpetuated, as is our

inability to hear the Word of God.

That is indeed why people are constrained to invent an irrational requirement of sacrifice that

absolves them of responsibility. According to this argument, the Father of Jesus is still a God

of violence, despite what Jesus explicitly says. Indeed he comes to be the God of unequaled

violence, since he not only requires the blood of the victim who is closest to him, most

precious and dear to him, but he also envisages taking revenge upon the whole of mankind

for a death that he both required and anticipated.

In effect, mankind is responsible for all of this. Men killed Jesus because they were not

capable of becoming reconciled without killing. But by this stage, even the death of the just

no longer had the power to reconcile them. Hence they are exposed to a limitless violence

that they

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themselves have brought about and that has nothing to do with the anger or vengeance of any

god.

When Jesus says: "Your will be done and not mine," it is really a question of dying. But it is not a question of showing obedience to an incomprehensible demand for sacrifice. Jesus has

to die because continuing to live would mean a compromise with violence. I will be told that

"it comes to the same thing." But it does not at all come to the same thing. In the usual writings on the subject, the death of Jesus derives, in the final analysis, from God and not

from men -- which is why the enemies of Christianity can use the argument that it belongs

within the same schema as all the other primitive religions. Here we have the difference

between the religions that remain subordinated to the powers and the act of destroying those

powers through a form of transcendence that never acts by means of violence, is never

responsible for any violence, and remains radically opposed to violence.

Presentations of Christ's Passion as obedience to an absurd sacrificial order disregard the

texts that show it involves, of necessity, the love of one's neighbor, demonstrating that only

death can bring this love to its fullest expression:

We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. He who

does not love abides in death. Any one who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know

that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. By this we know love, that he laid down his

life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. ( 1 John 3:14-15)

Not to love one's brother and to kill him are the same thing. Every negation of the other leads,

as we have shown, toward expulsion and murder. The basis for all of this lies in the

fundamental human situation of a mimetic rivalry that leads to a destructive escalation. That

is the reason why killing and dying are simply one and the same thing. To kill is to die, to die

is to kill -- for both stay within the circle of evil reciprocity, in which reprisals inevitably take

place. Not to love is to die, therefore, since it is to kill. Cain -- who is mentioned in the

Epistle a few lines earlier -- said: "Now that I have killed my brother, everyone can kill me."

Everything that could be taken for a rupture in the text that we are following is in reality part

and parcel of all the rest within the terms of the Gospel logic. There must be no hesitation

about giving one's own life in order not to kill, so as to break out, by this action, from the

circle of murder and death. It is quite literally true, when we are concerned with the

confrontation of
doubles
, that he who wishes to save his life will lose it; he will be obliged, in effect, to kill his brother, and that means dying in a state of fatal misunderstanding of the

other and of himself. He who

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agrees to lose his life will keep it for eternal life, for he alone is not a killer, he alone knows

the fullness of love.

J.-M.O.:
There is also a contradiction between what Jesus says about his relations with the

Father, which do not involve any violence or any concealed element, and the assertion of a

need for sacrifice that has its origin in the Father and requires the obedience of the Son. This

economy of violence, which is not human but divine, can be rooted, from the standpoint of

the Gospel, only in a projection of human violence on to God.

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The divinity of Christ is the full truth of the innocent victim. It is a truth which cannot abide

in human culture, but must be inevitably expelled. The full disclosure of this truth can occur

only in the moment it is being driven out. It is the Passion of Christ that is the key to revelation and it is the resurrection of Christ that confirms the work of God the Father rather

than just another in the long line of victims transformed into gods by their lynchers.

If we human beings are entrapped in a mimetic predicament, then the revelatory act that saves

us must be performed by the God-Man. As Girard says in the following excerpt from
Things

Hidden
, 215-20, "Christ is the only agent who is capable of escaping from these structures and freeing us from their dominance" (219). This only agent must be human, because we are

capable of comprehending only the human within the structures of existence. But this agent

must also be God, for only God is able to subject himself to human desire and violence,

overcome them, and show us the way to life.

R.G.:
The Gospels tell us that to escape violence it is necessary to love one's brother

completely -- to abandon the violent mimesis involved in the relationship of doubles. There is

no trace of it in the Father, and all that the Father asks is that we refrain from it likewise.

That is indeed why the Son promises men that if they manage to behave as the Father wishes,

and to do his will, they will all become sons of God. It is not God who sets up the barriers

between himself and mankind, but mankind itself.

G.L.:
Does not that amount to eliminating any barrier between God and humanity -- which

would be the same as making humans godlike, in the same way as Feuerbach and the

nineteenth-century humanists did?

R.G.: To hold that view you have to believe that love, in the Christian sense of the term --

Nygren's
agape
 1. --
is like common sense for ____________________

1. Anders Nygren,
Agape and Eros
( New York: Harper, 1969).

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Descartes: the thing that is, of all others, most common among human beings. In effect, love

of this kind has been lived to its end only by Jesus himself. On this earth, therefore, only the

Christ has ever succeeded in equaling God in the perfection of his love. Theologians do not

take note of the founding murder and the way in which everyone is trapped by violence, in

complicity with violence; that is why they are fearful of compromising divine transcendence

by taking the words of the Gospels at face value. They have no need to worry. Nothing in

these words risks making the divine too accessible to humankind.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all

your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love

your neighbor as yourself. ( Matt. 22:37-39; Mark 12:28-31; Luke 10:25-28)

The two commandments are like one another because love makes no distinctions between

beings. Jesus himself says this. And we can repeat it after him with no fear of "humanizing"

the Christian text overmuch. If the Son of Man and the Son of God are one and the same, it is

because Jesus is the only person to achieve humanity in its perfect form, and so to be one

with the deity.

The Gospel text, especially John but also to a certain extent the synoptic Gospels, establish beyond any doubt the fact that Jesus is both God and Man. The theology of the Incarnation is

not just a fantastic and irrelevant invention of the theologians; it adheres rigorously to the

logic implicit in the text. But it only succeeds in becoming intelligible if we read the text in

nonsacrificial rather than sacrificial terms. This is, in effect, the only time that this notion of a

fullness of humanity that is also a fullness of divinity makes sense in a context that is as

"humanist" as it is "religious." If Jesus is the only one who can fully reveal the way in which the founding murder has broadened its hold upon mankind, this is because at no point did it

take hold upon him. Jesus explains to us mankind's true vocation, which is to throw off the

hold of the founding murder.

The nonsacrificial reading allows us to understand that the Son alone is united with the Father

in the fullness of humanity and divinity. But it does not imply that this union is an exclusive

one, or prevent us from envisaging the possibility of mankind becoming like God through the

Son's mediation. Indeed, this process could only take place through him, since he is the only

Mediator, the one bridge between the Kingdom of violence and the Kingdom of God. By

remaining absolutely faithful to God's Word, in a world that had not received the Word, he

succeeded in transmitting it all the same. He has managed to inscribe in the Gospel text the

reception that mankind in its slavery to violence was obliged to offer him -- a reception that

amounted to driving him out. If we

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go beyond this point, we would become involved in questions of
faith
and
grace
, which our anthropological perspective is not competent to address.

The nonsacrificial reading is not to be equated with a humanist reading, in the ordinary sense,

one which would try to cut the distinctively religious aspects out of the Gospel text. Although

it brings to light the powerful demystificatory aspect of the Gospels, it has no difficulty in

drawing attention to the religious aspects as well and in demonstrating their crucial

importance, just as it draws attention to the great canonical statements about Jesus' divinity

and his union with the Father.

Far from eliminating divine transcendence, the nonsacrificial reading shows it to be so far

from us, in its very closeness, that we did not even suspect it to be there. Invariably, it has

been concealed and covered up by transcendent violence -- by all the powers and

principalities that we have stupidly identified with it, to some extent at least. To rid ourselves

of this confusion, to detect transcendent love -- which remains invisible beyond the

transcendent violence that stands between -we have to accept the idea that human violence is

a deceptive worldview and recognize how the forms of misunderstanding that arise from it

operate.

This differentiation between the two forms of transcendence appears negligible and absurd

from the point of view of the violent mentality that possesses us -- a mentality concerned with

detecting the structural similarities between the Gospel enactment and the basic workings of

all other religions: workings that we have ourselves been concerned to expose. These

analogies are real ones, just as are analogies between the evil reciprocity of violence and the

benevolent reciprocity of love. Since both surpass all cultural differences, the two structures,

paradoxically, amount to very much the same thing, which is why it is possible to pass from

one to the other by means of an almost instantaneous conversion. But at the same time, there

is also a radical, an abysmal opposition between them, something that
no form of structural
analysis can detect
: we see in a mirror, darkly,
en ainigmate
.

J.-M.O.:
Precisely because the revelation of violence has always been greeted with

incomprehension, it becomes easier to understand why the Christian text puts before us

someone who triumphs over violence by not resisting it, and as the direct emissary of the God

of nonviolence, shows his message emanating directly from him.

Within the human community, which is the prisoner of unanimous violence and of mythical

meanings, there is no opportunity for this truth to be entertained, let alone to carry the day.

People are most open to the truth at the stage when false differences melt away, but this is

also the point when they are most in the dark, since it is the point at which violence becomes

even more intense.

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Whenever violence starts to reveal itself as the basis of the community, it is accompanied by

the manifestations one might expect at an acutely violent crisis, when mankind lacks the least