If I’m giving the impression that God is playing cat-and-mouse with us, or if you prefer, tiger-and-mouse, I’ve explained myself poorly. To try to understand the relationship between the call that comes from God, on the one hand, and on the other, the interplay of mimetic desire and freedom, I’m going to do a little textual analysis. We’re going to take one of the best-known gospel narratives, the one about the adulterous woman who is saved from being stoned. It’s a slightly mysterious text, because it’s not in the oldest manuscripts of John. Many commentators think it recalls Luke’s style rather than John’s, and that seems pretty accurate to me. ‘In any event,’ says the Bible of Jerusalem, ‘nobody doubts its canonicity.’ Here it is:
"The scribes and Pharisees brought a woman along who had been caught committing adultery; and making her stand there in the middle they said to Jesus, ‘Master, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery, and in the Law Moses has ordered us to stone women of this kind. What have you got to say?’ They asked him this as a test, looking for an accusation to use against him. But Jesus bent down and started writing on the ground with his finger. As they persisted with their question, he straightened up and said, ‘Let the one among you who is guiltless be the first to throw a stone at her.’ Then he bent down and continued writing on the ground. When they heard this they went away one by one, beginning with the eldest, until the last one had gone and Jesus was left alone with the woman, who remained in the middle. Jesus again straightened up and said, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ ‘No one, sir,’ she replied. ‘Neither do I condemn you,’ said Jesus. ‘Go away, and from this moment sin no more.’"
Mosaic law prescribes the stoning of those condemned to death. I of course interpret this method of execution as the ritual imitation of a founding murder, that is to say of an initial stoning which, in the distant past, reconciled the community. It’s because the community was reconciled that it has made this unanimous violence into a ritual model, a model of unanimity. Everyone must throw stones. This is obviously how the mimetic hypothesis explains the existence of institutionalized stoning such as can be found codified much later in Leviticus.
Stoning was only required for adulterous wives, not for husbands. In the first century of our era, that prescription was challenged. Some found it too harsh. Jesus is faced with a terrible dilemma. He is suspected of having contempt for the Law. If he says no to the stoning, that will appear to confirm those suspicions. If he says yes, he is betraying his own teaching, which is aimed entirely against mimetic contagion, against the violent escalation of which this stoning, if it took place, would be an example, in the same way as the Passion. Jesus is repeatedly under threat of stoning in the scenes that foreshadow and prepare the way for the Passion. The revealer and denouncer of the founding murder cannot fail to intervene in favor of all victims of the process that will finally overcome him.
If the men who question Jesus didn’t want to bring about the stoning, they wouldn’t display the guilty party ‘for all to see,’ they wouldn’t exhibit her so obligingly. They want the power of scandal that stems from adultery to radiate out onto the crowd and any passers-by. They want to push the mimetic escalation that they have triggered to its fatal conclusion.
To set the stage for his intervention, to make sure it works, Jesus needs to meditate a little, to buy some time, and he writes in the dust with his finger.
Everyone always wonders what he might have written. It’s a silly question as far as I’m concerned. We can leave it to those who are infatuated with language and writing. There’s no point in going back to the Middle Ages.
Jesus doesn’t bend down because he wants to write, he writes because he’s bending down. He’s bending down so as not to look his challengers in the eye. If Jesus looked back at them, the crowd would feel that it was being challenged in turn, it would think that it was seeing its own defiant look and its own challenge in Jesus’s eyes. The face-off would lead straight to violence, which is to say to the death of the victim whom Jesus is trying to save. Jesus avoids giving even the slightest hint of provocation.
And finally he speaks: ‘Let the one among you who is guiltless be the first to throw a stone at her!’ Why the first stone? Because it’s the key. The one who throws it has nobody to imitate. There’s nothing easier than imitating an example that’s already been provided. Providing that example yourself is something altogether different.
The crowd is mimetically mobilized, but there’s one threshold it still has to cross, the threshold of real violence. If someone threw the first stone, there would immediately be a shower of stones.
By attracting attention to the first stone, Jesus’s words reinforce the final obstacle to the stoning. He gives the best among those in the crowd the time to hear what he’s saying and to examine themselves. If their self-examination is real it cannot fail to uncover the circular relationship between victim and executioner. The scandal that the woman represents in their eyes is already present in those men, and they’re projecting it onto her in order to rid themselves of it, which is all the easier in that she is truly guilty.
To stone a victim willingly, you have to believe that you are different from that victim, and I note that mimetic convergence is accompanied by an illusion of divergence. It’s this real convergence combined with the illusion of divergence that triggers what Jesus is seeking to prevent, the scapegoat mechanism.
The crowd precedes the individual. Only he who escapes violent unanimity by detaching himself from the crowd truly becomes an individual. Not everyone is capable of such initiative. Those who are capable detach themselves first, and in doing so, prevent the stoning.
There is something authentically individual about this imitation. The proof is that the time it takes varies from individual to individual. The birth of the individual is the birth of individual temporalities. So long as they form a crowd, these men stand together, speak together, and say exactly the same thing, all together. Jesus’s words dissolve the crowd. The men go away one by one, according to how long it takes each of them to understand the Revelation.
Because most people spend their lives imitating, they don’t know what they’re imitating. Even those who are most able to take the initiative almost never do so. It takes an exceptional situation such as an aborted stoning to show what an individual is capable of.
‘The eldest’ are the first to cede. Perhaps they’re not as hot-blooded as their younger counterparts, perhaps the proximity of death makes them less strict with others and more strict with themselves. Anyway, it’s not important.
The only important distinction is the one between the first ones and all the others.
Once the eldest have left, the less old and even the youngest leave the crowd, faster and faster, as the models increase in number. Whether we’re throwing stones or, to the contrary, not throwing them, only the beginning has any value. That’s where the real difference lies.
For the first imitators of those who started, it’s still possible to speak of a decision, but in a sense that grows ever weaker as the number of those who have made up their minds increases. Once it is imitated, the initial decision quickly becomes pure contagion, a social mechanism.
Alongside the individual temporalities, then, there is still a social temporality in our text, but it is now aping the individual temporalities; it’s the temporality of fashions and political and intellectual fads. Time is still punctuated by mimetic mechanisms.
To be the first to leave a crowd, to be the first not to throw stones, is to run the risk of becoming a target for the stone-throwers. The reverse decision would have been easier because it went with the current of the mimetic escalation that had already started. The first stone is less mimetic than the following ones, but it is still carried along by the wave of mimetic desire that generated the crowd.
And the first ones to decide against the stoning? Should we think that at least in their case there isn’t any imitation? Certainly not. It’s present even in them, because it’s Jesus’s suggestion that leads these men to act as they do. The decision against violence would remain impossible, Christianity tells us, without the Divine Spirit that is called the Paraclete, which is to say, in everyday Greek, ‘the defense lawyer,’ which is exactly the role that Jesus himself plays here.
And he lets it be understood that he is the first Paraclete, the first defender of victims. Above all through the Passion, which is of course the subtext here.
The mimetic theory places emphasis on the universal tendency to follow, on people’s utter inability not to imitate the easiest and most popular examples, because that’s what predominates in every society. But it shouldn’t be concluded that it denies the existence of individual freedom. By situating true decisions in their real context, which is that of omnipresent mimetic contagion, the theory causes decisions that are not mechanical, yet that are in no way different on a formal level from those that are, to stand out in a way they do not in the work of thinkers who never stop talking about freedom and who, for this very reason, thinking that they’re extolling it, devalue it completely. If you glorify decisiveness without seeing what makes it so difficult, you never get out of the emptiest sort of metaphysics.
Even the renunciation of violent mimetic desire cannot spread without being transformed into a social mechanism, into blind imitation. There is a stoning in reverse that is symmetrical to actual stoning and it, too, is violent to some extent. That’s what our era’s travesties clearly demonstrate.
All the people who would have thrown stones if there had been someone to throw the first one are mimetically induced not to throw any. For most of them, the real reason for nonviolence isn’t stern self-examination or renunciation of violence: it’s mimetic desire, as usual. There is always mimetic escalation in one direction or another. Rushing pell-mell in the direction already chosen by their models, the “mimic men” congratulate themselves on their decisive and independent frame of mind.
We mustn’t deceive ourselves. Though we live in a society that no longer stones adulterous women, a lot of people haven’t really changed. Violence has decreased, and it is better hidden, but it remains structurally identical to what it has always been.
Rather than an authentic exit from mimetic desire there is mimetic submission to a culture that advocates that exit. In any social venture, whatever its nature, the proportion of authentic individualism is necessarily minimal, but not nonexistent.
It must not be forgotten that the mimetic desire that spares victims is infinitely superior, objectively and morally speaking, to the mimetic desire that kills them by stoning. The game of false moral equivalencies should be left to Nietzsche and to decadent aestheticisms of all stripes.
The story of the adulterous woman helps us see that social behaviors that are identical in terms of form and even to some degree in terms of content, because they’re all mimetic, can nonetheless be infinitely different. The proportion of mechanicalness and freedom they contain is infinitely variable.
But this inexhaustible diversity does not prove that human behaviors are incomparable or unknowable. Everything we need to know in order to resist automatic social reflexes and runaway mimetic contagion is accessible to our understanding.
— René Girard, A Method, A Life, A Man, from "All Desire is a Desire for Being"
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