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The mortality of desire, its finitude, is the real problem in our world since it destabilizes even the most fundamental institutions, beginning with the family. Our psychological and psychoanalytical theories do not even acknowledge the reality of this problem. Desire according to Freud is immortal, eternal, since human beings desire only substitutes for their parents and cannot cease to desire them. Freud is silent about the death of desire. Only great literature has a lot to say about that subject.
The individualism of our time is really an effort to deny the failure of desire. Those who claim to be governed by the pleasure principle, as a rule, are enslaved to models and rivals, which makes their lives a constant frustration. But they are too vain to acknowledge their own enslavement. Mimetic desire makes us believe we are always on the verge of becoming self-sufficient through our own transformation into someone else. Our would-be transformation into a god, as Shakespeare says, turns us into an ass. In Pascal’s terms, it becomes “Qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête” — “Whoever tries to act like an angel turns into a beast.”
Understanding the real failure of desire leads to wisdom and ultimately to religion. Many philosophies and all religions share in that wisdom which modern trendiness denies. Great literature shares in that wisdom because it does not cheat with desire. It shows the necessary failure of undisciplined desire. The greatest literature shows the impossibility of self-fulfillment through desire. Mimetic obsessions are dreadful because they cannot vanquish their own circularity, even when they know about it. They are the mother of all addictions such as drugs, alcohol, obsessive sexuality, etc. One cannot get out of the circle even as its radius becomes smaller and smaller and our world becomes more narrowly obsessive.
Unlike most philosophies which are fundamentally stoic or epicurean, Judaism and Christianity preach no kind of self-fulfillment or self-absorption. Nor do they preach self-annihilation in the manner of Oriental mysticism. Christianity acknowledges the ultimate goodness of imitation as well as the goodness and reality of the human person. It teaches that instead of surrendering to mimetic desire, by following the newest fashion and worshipping the latest idol, we should imitate only Christ or Christ-like noncompetitive models.
If one is badly caught up in this circularity and wants to get out of it, one must undergo an experience of radical change which religious people call a conversion. In the classical view of conversion, it is not something of our own doing but the personal intervention of God in our lives. The greatest experience for Christians is the experience of becoming religious under a compulsion that they feel cannot come from themselves but from God alone. What makes conversion fascinating to those who have this experience (but also to those who do not) is the feeling that at no time in the lives of human beings is God closer to us and actually intervening in our lives.
This experience is not necessarily identical with the Christian experience. Many good Christians never experience it, either because, as far back as they can remember, they have always believed, or because even though they became Christians in their adult life, they never experienced anything dramatic enough to be labeled a conversion. The religious experience of these people is not necessarily less profound or even less intense than the experience of those who benefited from a dramatic conversion.
Nevertheless the idea of conversion enjoys great prestige with all people religiously inclined because there is no doubt that the Gospels emphasize conversion. The Pauline idea of the new man, and Paul’s theme of salvation through faith can be interpreted in terms of radical conversion. Almost everything in Paul can be so interpreted.
There is a problem with the word we use to describe that experience, the word conversion itself, or the Greek word metanoia. According to my dictionaries, the Latin word conversio was used for the first time in the Christian sense by Augustine. But Augustine, curiously, did not use it in his Confessions which are the story of his own conversion. He used it for the first and last time in The City of God (VII, 33) in a phrase which refers to Satan’s efforts to prevent us from achieving our conversion to the true God.
The problem with the Latin word conversio is that it does not really mean what we all mean by a Christian conversion and what Augustine himself undoubtedly meant. It means turning around in a circle; it refers to a full circular revolution that ultimately brings you back to your point of departure. This is not what a Christian conversion is. A Christian conversion is not circular; it never returns to its point of origin. It is open-ended; it is moving toward a totally unpredictable future. It seems to me that the real Latin significance of the word is characteristically pagan in the sense that it reflects the pagan conception of history and time itself which is circular and repetitive. This conception is always reminiscent of that Eternal Return which can be found in the Puranas and elsewhere in the East. Various versions of it are also present in some of the pre-Socratic philosophers in Greece, especially Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Empedocles.
The Latin word conversio refers to reversible actions and processes, such as the translation of a text into another language, and also to mythical metamorphoses. When Christians adopt the word, they change its connotation from a circular to a linear phenomenon which is open-ended. It now means a change that takes place once and for all, with no conceivable return to the starting point. Therefore it should be irreversible.
The Greek metanoia was first used in Greek-language churches to designate a certain type of penance. It does not designate a circular motion but it is not very good either at signifying Christian conversion. It is too weak a word.
Meta-noeo means to change one’s mind about something; to have second thoughts regarding something that seemed settled; to perceive a mistake too late, when it can no longer be changed. It can mean therefore regret, but nothing as strong as Christian repentance when the convert hears the question that Paul heard on the road to Damascus, “Why do you persecute me?”
The Christian conversion is a transformation that reaches so deep it changes us once and for all and gives us a new being, so to speak. The result is so superior that it is not possible to cancel that change, either by moving back or going around in a circle. To us Westerners moving in a circle is a fate worse than death. It is hell. The idea of conversion is much more than reform, repentance, re-energizing, repair, regeneration, revolution, or any other word beginning with “re” which suggests a return to something that was there before and which therefore limits us to a circular view of life and experience. In the Christian conversion, a positive change is connoted which is not caught inside a circle.
Christians give the notion of conversion a depth and a seriousness that must be recognized in order to appreciate the significance of an important episode in the history of early Christianity, the Donatist heresy. The Donatists were fourth-century Christians in North Africa who took Christian conversion so seriously that, after periods of persecution, they refused to reintegrate into the Church those people who had not been heroic enough to accept martyrdom and had recanted. They regarded Christian conversion as something so momentous that it could occur only once in a lifetime. One didn’t have a second chance. The Donatists felt that people who did not have enough courage to face the lions in the Roman circus and die gladly for their faith were not good enough to be Christians at all.
These people had such an exalted view of the Christian conversion that the idea of its happening twice was blasphemous. In their eyes, it debased the whole process and made a mockery of the Christian faith. The Donatists were condemned by the Church and were certainly wrong from an evangelical viewpoint. If their absolutist principle had applied to Peter on the night of Jesus’ arrest, after his triple denial of Christ, he would not have been reintegrated. He would never have become the leader of the Church. The Donatists were wrong. To condemn their intransigence was certainly the right thing to do for the early Church, but their appeal to such great Christians as Tertullian gives us a clue as to how seriously the notion of conversion was taken in early Christianity.
— René Girard, Literature and Christianity: A Personal View, from "All Desire is a Desire for Being"
Amity as the Author of our Variance
But the problem is still there in all Shakespeare. It is not just a question of love and erotic matters. Take, for example, Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare offers a definition through a secondary character. This is before Antony and Octavius become enemies, but that they are going to become enemies is prophesied by Enobarbus, who says: ‘you shall find the band that seems to tie their friendship together will be the very strangler of their enmity’.
This sentence poses a problem that psychologists have not yet defined. It has nothing to do with Freud and nothing to do with Jung. It comes relatively late in Shakespeare’s career and he is so happy to have discovered the real formula for defining the problem that he repeats it, two lines further on: ‘that which is the strength of their amity shall prove the immediate author of their variance’.
If that which is the strength of our amity can prove the immediate author of our variance, what sort of creatures are we? We have to ask questions about ourselves because we are likely to be in such situations. We manage to put the whole blame on our partner and we usually talk of conflict in terms of differences. When people are in conflict, we say they have their differences. When people have their non-difference, it is even worse. They are caught in a vicious circle, imitating each other’s desire. So what is going to happen?
When you are the model of my desire, you are the friend I admire and I am going to desire what you desire. And the friend is going to oppose this desire and say ‘no’. That ‘no’ is shattering and is going to increase our desire instead of making it less. As our desires increase we are going to move more forcefully towards the object we both desire and we cannot both have. Therefore, our model is going to have his hostility increased and his desire as well.
In this bad reciprocal game, the model becomes the imitator of his imitator and the imitator becomes the model of his model. This results in a relationship based on total misunderstanding. In reality there is more and more identity between the two characters who are fighting, of which they are unaware. They try to interpret their conflict in terms of differences. But they are rivals – the word ‘rivals’ refers to people who live on the two sides of the same river and they are fighting all the time. The fights between nations, like the fights between individuals, are fights about borders; they are rivalries about the same object. The main human conflict is not difference of ideology or opinion, or about mugging in the streets, but rivalry. We are constantly faced by rivalry in the modern world. We compete. It is very difficult to retain your friendship with someone you are competing with. Unless you are a very strong person, you will be unable to interpret your relationship in terms of difference. You will never face the identity.
Our rivalry increases because we both collaborate to make it more intense. As I regard the object as more desirable, you are going to regard it as more desirable too. As a matter of fact, the modern world has adopted this as the main mechanism of its economic system, which is the stock market. In the stock market we are buying stocks because other people are buying them and we are buying them as everyone buys them and pushed to extremes this is called a speculative bubble.
Rosalind is incensed with a couple she overhears in which the girl is playing hard to get and increasing her value by rejecting her suitor. Rosalind advises her to ‘sell when you can; you are not for all markets’. You would believe this was written by Lord Keynes, not Shakespeare, but Shakespeare understood the relatedness between romantic and economic games. You can create capital with mimetic rivalry, as long as you do not kill each other, as long as it remains some kind of economic game which can be productive up to a point, but which can also be very destructive psychically and physically and in every way.
In other words, we have a great problem of rivalry in our world, as de Tocqueville understood so well when he visited America. He discovered the democratic system, which as you know is the worst of all systems, except for all others, and the democratic system is the system where it is safer to unleash rivalry up to a point; in other words, where people know where to stop and usually do not kill each other. Rivalry becomes incredibly productive not only in the economy, but in science, in the arts and in all sorts of other fields as well, as long as it does not go too far.
— René Girard, Victims, Violence, and Christianity, from "All Desire is a Desire for Being"
“. . . [This memory] accompanies me as a presence at once sweet and thrilling. It will accompany me to my dying hour. A mere glance is enough to bring it back to life, a glance toward the window of the apartment building in Neuilly where my family lived. How old was I? Fourteen, I believe. One evening, in my little bedroom, I felt with an incredible force, leaving no room for any hesitation, that I was loved by God and that life, [. . .] there before me, was a marvelous gift. Suffocated by happiness, I fell to my knees.”
Even at a half-century’s distance, Father Carré cannot evoke that evening without awakening within himself the emotion of the original experience. As a general rule, in what we call “memory,” the traces of the remembered event are just barely sufficient to prevent forgetting. Here, on the other hand, they are so profound that the word memory seems upon reflection to be inadequate. Immediately after the passage I have just read, Father Carré returns to the Neuilly experience and, without noting his own about-face, defines it as the opposite of a memory:
“An absolute beginning (or that which is closest to being one): that is how, more than fifty years after the fact, I would characterize the only event that ever gave me certainty about my faith, the event, too, that brought me a joy that no other joy was subsequently able to surpass.”
...The first feature is the passive, involuntary character of the mystical experience. No warning precedes it and it requires no effort. A second aspect is joy, “that no other joy was subsequently able to surpass.” A third is the impression of eternity that it gives, which is inseparable from its infinite power of renewal, its extraordinary fecundity. The last feature sums up all the others and it is the intuition of a divine presence.
For those who turn away from mystical experience, its “imprecision” is, I think, only a pretext for avoiding the controversies that the notion inevitably arouses. For staunch nonbelievers, it is necessarily an illusion or a sham. Without excluding these possibilities, believers add another: real, authentic mystical experience. It is then the pearl of great price spoken of in the Gospel, so precious that everything must be sacrificed to its acquisition.
— René Girard, The Mystic of Neuilly, from "All Desire is a Desire for Being"
When they came, he looked on Eliab and thought, “Surely the Lord's anointed is before him.” But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”
— 1 Samuel 16:6-7
But a man named Ananias, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property, and with his wife's knowledge he kept back for himself some of the proceeds and brought only a part of it and laid it at the apostles' feet. But Peter said, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? Why is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to man but to God.” When Ananias heard these words, he fell down and breathed his last. And great fear came upon all who heard of it. The young men rose and wrapped him up and carried him out and buried him.
After an interval of about three hours his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. And Peter said to her, “Tell me whether you sold the land for so much.” And she said, “Yes, for so much.” But Peter said to her, “How is it that you have agreed together to test the Spirit of the Lord? Behold, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out.” Immediately she fell down at his feet and breathed her last. When the young men came in they found her dead, and they carried her out and buried her beside her husband. And great fear came upon the whole church and upon all who heard of these things.
— Acts 5:1-11
Each time mimetic rivalries appear to be reigniting, or even when other kinds of catastrophe threaten, communities endeavor to ward them off by once again triggering, through replacement victims, the mechanism that got them out of trouble the first time: the scapegoat mechanism. This mechanism is thus transformed into a ritual technique—universal until today—of blood sacrifice. Through sacrifice, religion creates culture. It seeks to prevent or cure unfettered violence by administering sacrificial violence.
In my opinion, all social relationships of belonging originate in ritual and sacrifice. Indeed, that is why, in archaic societies, such relationships depend on what are known as rites of initiation or rites of passage. Candidates are put through trials that recreate the original mimetic crisis and its resolution in victimhood. In prevailing over such trials, the candidates demonstrate that they will be able to overcome the crises that await them and are worthy of belonging to the culture that initiates them. Primitive societies are characterized by the multiplicity and rigidity of ritual and religious relationships of belonging (e.g., matrimonial groups). This multiplicity is intended to prevent desires from converging on the same objects, as a safeguard against mimetic rivalry. What I am saying, in short, is that relationships of belonging always re-emerge from the crises that threaten to destroy them, through scapegoats against whom and then around whom communities beget or renovate their religious and ritualistic systems. As they weaken, our systems of belonging are moving further and further away from this model of radical crisis and violent regeneration.
All that I have just said is directly valid only for archaic societies. In historical and modern societies, an opposing influence is at work: that of Judaism and Christianity, which explains the constant weakening of relationships of belonging.
Christianity condemns sacrificial violence as I have just defined it, since it condemns the death of Christ. The Gospels make manifest cultural violence by presenting the death of Jesus as a mob phenomenon caused by a mimetic frenzy. They tell a truth about human culture that all mythical religion conceals. Christ proposes that humans abandon scapegoating by resisting mimetic reprisals, giving up the spirit of vengeance and replacing sacrifice with the rules of the kingdom of God—i.e., by voluntarily seeking to escape from mimetic rivalry and its consequences. The realistic and mimetic description of the Passion stops the victimizing mechanisms working by revealing their absurdity. Christ is divinized not as a guilty and saving scapegoat, like the pagan gods, but for opposite reasons: because he reveals and upsets the violent mechanisms that moderate mimetic crises.
Christianity weakens all relationships of belonging by revealing that their origin is in no way authentically sacred. It is thus Christianity that weakens the principle of victimhood; and, today, it is not Christianity itself that is weakening: it is the sacred violence with which Christianity is confused.
The weakening of relationships of belonging is an essentially positive phenomenon because it lowers barriers between human beings. It works against exclusion, against the making of scapegoats. But it also has adverse and violent effects: by removing ritualistic mechanisms and the barrier of prohibitions, it further reduces resistance to mimetic rivalry. In the contemporary world, these positive and negative aspects combine in such a complex way that, while the weakening of relationships of belonging paves the way for increasing global unification, such unification entails an increase in rivalry. No longer separated from one another by insurmountable barriers, groups and individuals frenetically imitate one another and acute conflicts—whether national, ethnic, economic, social, religious, etc.—are on the rise.
Since such conflicts are always justified on the basis of some traditional, ethnic, religious, or national belonging, people think relationships of belonging are more alive and virulent than ever. In most cases, however, this is not the least bit true. This is also why, in self-justifying rhetoric, relationships of belonging easily replace one another: they are rarely anything more than excuses. While no one knows definitively whether the Bosnian war broke out for reasons of ethnic, national, or religious belonging, everyone believes that one of these relationships of belonging was the true reason for the conflict; consequently, traditional relationships of belonging appear stronger than ever. On the contrary, it seems to me that their weakening, and the resulting and ever worsening non-differentiation after forty years of Communism, is more important than what remains of their reality.
All conflicts are conflicts between enemy brothers. The only wars are civil wars, between groups whose relationships of belonging are no longer binding enough to truly separate them, and which are henceforth too visible—too ingrained in human thinking—to enable them to unite.
— René Girard, Belonging, from "All Desire is a Desire for Being"
Sociologists rarely pay as much attention to the dual nature of relationships of belonging as the subject deserves—or if they do, they treat it simplistically as a political, social, or racial injustice that could easily be rectified by establishing a more egalitarian regime. In doing so, they fail to see that, for reasons of general interest, our societies cannot give up selecting the most competent.
While the violence of exclusion is nowadays very visible and hotly debated, contrary to what we tend to think, it is not the only violence associated with relationships of belonging. Neither is it the most widespread or the worst. There is another form of violence of which we are largely unaware and that can be said to exist inside relationships of belonging. By bringing individuals closer to each other, and by encouraging them to pursue the same goals, all manner of associations—professional, educational, recreational, sporting, and so on—give rise to agreement between those they unite by inspiring in them the same desires. In so doing, they also give rise to a certain type of conflict.
If we desire the same things, we feel close to one another, and this closeness, which constitutes agreement on the spiritual level, can become disagreement on the concrete level. Indeed, there are two possibilities: either the object that two or more of us desire can be shared and we agree to share it, in which case there is no conflict; or the object is one that we cannot or will not share, in which case conflict is inevitable.
I call this conflict mimetic rivalry. It presupposes common relationships of belonging that, by the very fact of bringing us together and setting us in opposition to one another, not only foster this type of conflict but also provide it with a battleground in which to rage. Mimetic theory affirms that people’s desires are not really rooted in either desired objects or the subjects who desire those objects, but rather in a third party: the model or mediator of our desires. As long as the imitator and his or her model have relatively few relationships of belonging in common, they are not threatened by mimetic rivalry. They are like two stars that, while they may dream about each other, remain light years apart. If, on the other hand, imitator and model have many relationships of belonging in common, they are exposed to the temptations of rivalry. We are always close to our rivals, and the more we compete with them, the more we resemble them, and the more our two identities become one and the same. If models only inspired in their imitators a desire for objects that they then agreed to share with them, violent rivalry would be avoided. What makes such rivalry inevitable is the thirst for exclusive possession, which most often characterizes the imitator’s desire precisely because it already characterizes the desire of his or her model.
Voltaire’s Candide contains a thousand examples of mimetic desire with disastrous consequences. The young hero’s private tutor, the philosopher Pangloss, teaches his naive student the optimistic system of his idol, the great Leibniz. Pangloss will unknowingly also serve as a model for a less philosophical activity: passionate love. Indeed, as the tale opens, the beautiful Cunégonde—like Candide, a student of Pangloss—stumbles across the master making love to a castle servant under a bush. Inspired by this scene, the young lady plucks up the courage to declare her love to Candide, who responds enthusiastically to her ardor. But the two lovers are in turn caught unawares by the baron, who would like to provide his daughter with a more aristocratic husband than the unfortunate Candide, whom he unceremoniously boots out.
When a faithful disciple catches his revered master caressing a pretty girl, it is not hard to see how he desires to do the same. And, in his desire to be even more faithful, he ends up being completely unfaithful: he tries to steal his model’s partner. This is when the most dreadful conflicts erupt.
While mimetic rivalry can be sexual, contrary to what Freud and his disciples would have us believe, it can also be professional, intellectual, spiritual, aesthetic, sporting, philatelic . . . in short, it can exist in all kinds of forms. As Shakespeare tells us in Hamlet, men can fight to the death over an eggshell. The playwright takes up the same image again in Coriolanus because he is obsessed by the futility of mimetic rivalry. Perhaps it was this Shakespearean eggshell that gave the satirist Jonathan Swift—another great revealer of mimetic rivalry—the original idea for his inexpiable war of the eggs, between those who break them at the larger end and those who prefer to start at the smaller end.
In short, far from guaranteeing peace, even the most insignificant relationships of belonging arouse not only the external violence of exclusion but also the internal violence of rivalry between individuals who, all desiring the same thing, however absurd, become obstacles to one another and can no longer stop quarreling.
Our capacity for mimetic absorption is not confined to those behaviors that our models wish us to imitate. The violent side of relationships of belonging is the flip side of their positive function. Relationships of belonging thus contain a seed of self-destruction—the basis of their own collapse—which is explained by the mimetic nature of human desire and the resulting rivalry.
— René Girard, Belonging, from "All Desire is a Desire for Being"
The Biblical ‘Difference’
The Hebrew Bible and the Christian Gospels are the only religious texts that contain reversals of this mythical scheme. The mobs in the Jewish and Christian scriptures think and behave exactly like the mobs in archaic myths. The difference is not in the events but in their interpretation. In myths, the victims have really committed the crimes of which their persecutors accuse them. In the Jewish and Christian scriptures, mobs are blamed for persecuting innocent victims.
In the prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible, the perspective of the mob is condemned and reversed. For example, Joseph’s brothers turn into a kind of ugly mob in their behavior towards him. Job’s entire community acts with the solidarity of a mob. In many psalms, the narrator watches helplessly as mobs surround him for the purpose, it seems, of killing him. Many of the prophets were persecuted and even killed by hostile mobs. The most spectacular example is the killing of the Suffering Servant (Isaiah 52–53), whom the Gospels compare with Jesus. The prophetic literature is a long march away from this violent social phenomenon that seems to have played an enormous role in human cultures before and even after the arrival of judicial systems.
The Gospels contain the same overall sequence as myths. Once again, there is a great crisis at the beginning, the crisis of the small Jewish state under Roman occupation, and it culminates in the drama of a single victim, Jesus, who is collectively killed and later divinized by the Christians. But the difference is that the Gospels reverse the verdict of the crowd in myths: the victim is innocent, and the mob is guilty. Especially striking in the Gospels is the fact that the two perspectives—the mob’s and the victim’s—are displayed side by side. Almost everybody agrees with the local mob. The dissenters are very few, but precarious as their perspective seems at first, it ultimately triumphs for one essential reason, in my view: it happens to be true.
I use the word ‘truth’ here in an anthropological and social context, not in a religious context. All rational human beings would agree, no doubt, that mobs are notoriously unreliable as judges of right and wrong, especially when it comes to their own victims. It was not the discovery of some authentic criminal, as claimed by myths, that reconciled these archaic communities, but the illusion of such a discovery. The communities mimetically transferred all their hostilities to the single victim and became reconciled on the basis of the resulting illusion.
Since the victim is innocent, what is the force that unites, each time, a large group of violent men against an irrelevant victim? The answer is once again imitation, mimetic contagion.
Whereas myths submit to the mimetic contagion against the single victim, the biblical interpreters resist that same contagion and rehabilitate the victim who is indeed innocent. The biblical resistance to the mimetic contagion reveals the essential deceptiveness of archaic religions, the spirit of the mob that dominates them. This unique power to demystify the unanimous violence is applicable not merely to the specific victims represented in these texts—Joseph, Job, the Suffering Servant, or Jesus—but, potentially, to all similar victims of collective victimization wherever they happen to occur. To demystify a myth, all we need to do is to slip, for example, the account of the Crucifixion beneath its text and compare the one with the other.
The (synoptic) Gospels make it obvious that all witnesses of the Crucifixion behave mimetically. Peter’s denial is a spectacular example: as soon as he finds himself surrounded by people hostile to Jesus, he imitates their hostility. His triple denial is a mimetic phenomenon. Pilate is poles apart from Peter and yet, in the end, he behaves just like the apostle. Even though he would personally prefer to save Jesus, he surrenders to the mob; he imitates the mob and orders the Crucifixion. The two thieves crucified with Jesus (only one in Luke) are another, even more caricatured example of crowd imitation. Instead of sympathizing with the man whose dreadful fate they share, they insult Jesus in imitation of the crowd, in a last, desperate effort to rejoin the crowd, to deny their own crucifixion.
The modern world does not perceive this biblical demystification. Just the opposite. Biblical texts are often believed to be equivalent to myths because they do, indeed, resemble myths. In reality, far from ensuring the sameness of all the religious doctrines rooted in all these texts, the presence everywhere of a victimization mechanism opens up the possibility of an enormously significant difference. The tendency to define all texts as mythical is due to the inability of most modern researchers to go beyond the themes and motifs of these texts and to see that the surrender or resistance to the mimetic contagion is the most important factor in the type of text ultimately produced. A text can conceal the deceptiveness of the victimization mechanism and be itself deceptive, or it can reveal that same deceptiveness and, together with it, the injustice of the mob and the undeserved suffering of the victim. The first way is the way of mythology, and the second is the way of biblical texts and, most explicitly, of the Gospels.
The picture of the human world conveyed by myths is rosier than the biblical picture precisely because it reflects the persecutors’ deceptive perspective, rather than the more truthful victims’ perspective. The only philosopher who realized that this preference for mythology was equivalent, in fact, with siding with the persecutors was Friedrich Nietzsche. But, far from inciting him to shift to the side of the victims, this discovery reinforced his bias in favor of unjust violence and, at least indirectly, his writing on the subject encouraged some of the worst abominations of the twentieth century.
The prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels stands in absolute opposition to the mythical and sacrificial mentality of archaic religion. Many statements and formulae confirm this opposition. Hosea attributes the following words to Yahweh: ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice’ (Hosea 6:6). Jesus advises his listeners to become reconciled with their brothers before they bring their sacrificial offerings to the altar. He warns them, in other words, that they should not count on sacrifices any more as an artificial means of getting along with their neighbors. The truth of sacrifice, which is about to be revealed in the Crucifixion, will destroy once and for all, in the long run, the effectiveness of all sacrifices. As it becomes impossible to elude violence with ritual, a face-to-face reconciliation becomes the only means to avoid the destructive unleashing of mimetic violence.
The Modern Evolution Away from Violence
The non-violent side of the biblical inspiration can be seen quite directly in the long-range historical evolution of our Western societies. In some important respects, ever since the high Middle Ages, our historical world has been moving in the direction of less and less violence. Our world has abolished serfdom and slavery. Our penal legislation has become more humane, the status of women has been raised, and we protect children and the aged. We have invented such things as the hospital, free medical care, and various forms of social protection for the weak and the handicapped. However feeble these mitigations of violence may seem compared with our aspirations, they are without precedent in all of human history.
Our world has become progressively more aware of arbitrary victimization, and our social, political, and legal institutions are making greater and greater efforts to avoid it. The preoccupation with victims often becomes, in the contemporary world, the object of a novel kind of mimetic rivalry that encourages exploitative distortions and turns the whole thing into a caricature. In spite of these faddish aspects, the modern concern for victims, which has been in the making for many centuries, is a major historical development. We are constantly accusing ourselves of persecuting victims not only at the present time but also in the past of our nations, our religious traditions, and our ethnic traditions. We are rewriting history from the standpoint of victims. We often manage, I repeat, to turn this remarkable concern into more mimetic rivalry, and we spend a good deal of time throwing old corpses at each other’s heads, in a renewed attempt to justify ourselves at the expense of our neighbors, but these regrettable aspects should not obscure the larger significance of these phenomena.
While our world is less violent than any previous world, I do not have to remind you that this is only one aspect of the world in which we live. The other aspect is the very reverse: a tremendous increase in violence and in the threats of violence. The two opposite trends have been developing simultaneously for quite a few centuries, no doubt, and the gulf between them is forever widening. Our world both saves more victims than any previous world and kills more victims than any previous world. The twentieth century not only had the greatest wars in human history, but it was the century of death camps, genocides, and nuclear weapons. And every day, it seems, new and even worse threats confront us, such as the possibility that our most monstrous weapons will fall into the hands of terrorists ready to die in order to kill the greatest possible number of innocent people.
How can these two aspects characterize our world simultaneously? Is it not a terrible indictment of the biblical tradition that it has proved unable to make peace among us? Is it not true therefore that even the most peaceful-sounding religions do cause violence after all? Many people answer with a resounding ‘yes’ without taking into account or even suspecting what we discovered earlier regarding sacrifice and the sacrificial values that still permeate our society.
The violence that is slowly undermined by the biblical demystification of sacrifice is sacrificial violence, in other words, the violence that ‘contains’ violence and has long kept the worst forms of violence in check and, to a certain extent, still does. We are always in debt to sacrificial violence, therefore, and when we get rid of it in a great burst of self-righteous indignation against hypocrisy, it may be a worse violence that, unwittingly, we help unleash.
Because of the sacrificial background, one must refrain from evaluating the influence of the biblical religions and of other religions from the standpoint of a simple opposition between violence and non-violence. The elimination of sacrificial violence is not simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’; it is an ambiguous and ambivalent progress in the struggle against violence, which may include regressive aspects if the human beings whom this violence restrained in the past become more violent as a result of this development. The peace that has been available to us until recently often rests on a sacrificial violence, which is no longer present in the form of blood sacrifice, of course, in this country, but in institutions such as the police, the American army, the superior American power, and the respect it still inspires throughout the world.
When one eliminates the violence of sacrifice, or even weakens it, one cannot avoid weakening the peaceful effects of this violence just as much as the violent aspects. The rejection of sacrificial violence is certainly something good in principle, the result of a righteous battle against the hypocrisy of religious, social, and political institutions always suffused with sacrificial values. But the more we succeed in this undertaking, the more we destroy traditional institutions and the more we weaken the stability of our own world. The more we promote individual freedom, the more all individuals should feel that they have to prevent violence themselves by non-violent means; we must avoid without outside help the disorders that sacrificial cultures prevented through legal violence.
The disappearance of sacrificial limitations and religious prohibitions facilitates the unleashing of mimetic rivalries not only at their most creative, in scientific competition for instance, but also at their most destructive, in the suicidal forms of terrorism that turn the marvels of modern technology into indiscriminately murderous weapons.
Conclusion
Even if my observations are too sketchy to convince you that the mimetic theory of religion is the breakthrough I believe it is, you will agree, I hope, that even the most obviously ‘untrue’ religions are worthy of our respect. Archaic religions are not simply false explanations of the universe. They always had more urgent business to attend to than satisfying the curiosity of idle men. They have always been in charge of keeping the peace. Even if they had to resort to violent means to reach their goal, these means were not really their own invention; they were provided more or less ready-made by the spontaneous course of human relations. We cannot condemn these religions as something alien to our modern humanity. Even as we try to do better than the old religions did, we understand that the task is infinitely more difficult than it was thought a hundred years ago. The violence we would love to transfer to religion is really our own, and we must confront it directly. To turn religions into the scapegoats of our own violence can only backfire in the end.
— René Girard, Violence and Religion: Cause or Effect?, from "All Desire is a Desire for Being"
Nietzsche’s only error, a properly Luciferian error (in the sense of ‘bringer of light’), was to have chosen violence against the innocent truth of the victim, a truth that Nietzsche himself was the only one to glimpse, in contrast with the blind positivism of all the atheist ethnologists and the Christians themselves. To understand that the twentieth century and its genocides, far from killing Christianity, make its truth all the more dazzling, you just have to read Nietzsche from the proper angle and to situate all the disasters caused by our Dionysian and sacrificial choices along the axis of his writings, the first of those disasters being the madness that was getting ready to swoop down on the thinker himself – a madness every bit as significant as the political and historical insanity that followed.
— René Girard, A Method, A Life, A Man, from "All Desire is a Desire for Being"
I’ve never known a holiday to compare to that day of deliverance. I thought I was dead, and, all at once, I was resurrected. And what was most amazing for me about the whole thing was that my intellectual and spiritual conviction, my true conversion, had occurred before my great Lenten scare.
If it had occurred afterwards, I would never have truly believed. My natural skepticism would have convinced me that my faith was a result of the scare I had received. As for the scare, it could not be due only to faith. My dark night of the soul lasted exactly as long as the period prescribed by the Church for the penance of sinners, with three days—the most important of all—mercifully subtracted, no doubt so that I could calmly and quietly reconcile myself with the Church before the Easter holiday.
God had called me to order with a jot of humor that was really just what my mediocre case deserved. In the days that followed Easter, which the liturgy reserves for the baptism of catechumens, I had my two sons baptized, and I arranged for a Catholic wedding ceremony. I’m convinced that God sends human beings a lot of signs that have no objective existence whatsoever for the wise and the learned. The ones those signs don’t concern regard them as imaginary, but those for whom they are intended can’t be mistaken because they’re living the experience from within. I understood at once that, if I escaped it, the memory of the ordeal would sustain me for the rest of my days, and that’s exactly what happened.
From the beginning, my Christianity was bathed in an atmosphere of liturgical tradition. There are some conventionally anti-Christian people who want nothing but the best for me and who try at all costs, so as to defend my reputation in intellectual circles, to make me out to be a dyed-in-the-wool heretic, a ferocious enemy of ‘historical Christianity,’ ready to plant bombs in all the baptismal fonts.
By saying that the Church remained sacrificial for a long time, did I really deliver a ritual kick after the example of all the asses who are savagely bent on hounding our Holy Mother at present? It must be admitted that I probably displayed some mimetic demagogy in the way I expressed myself.
I would have done better to situate my remarks in the context of our entire religious history. But I didn’t want to repeat the error of the Pharisees that I was talking about earlier, the ones who say: ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we wouldn’t have taken part alongside them in the founding murder.’ The last thing I want to do is to condemn the faithfulness, obedience, patience, and modesty of ordinary Christians or the virtues of the generations that came before us. We’re terribly lacking in those virtues. I’m too much a man of my era to possess them myself, but I revere them. Indeed, nothing seems more conformist or more servile to me these days than the hackneyed mythology of ‘revolt.’
Remnants of avant-gardist jargon are sprinkled through my books, but my true Christian readers weren’t led astray: Father Schwager, Father Lohfink, von Balthazar in his late period, Father Corbin, Father Alison, and many others.
— René Girard, A Method, A Life, A Man, from "All Desire is a Desire for Being"
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"
Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence create torment, destruction, the will to annihilation. In the other case, suffering — the “Crucified as the Innocent One” counts as an objection to this life, as a formula for its condemnation … (The Will to Power, no. 1052)
The difference is not in the martyrdom … In other words, the collective murder is present in both cases. But the positivists who deduce from this identity the equivalence of all religions neglect, as always, the role of interpretation. Collective violence speaks powerfully but it does not say the same thing to those who inflict it and to those who suffer it.
Christianity represents the viewpoint of the innocent victim concerning a collective murder which Dionysus and all of Paganism conceive from the perspective of the persecutors.
The viewpoint of the Passion is not only the opposite of that of Dionysus, it is an engine of war against the latter and against all paganism; it is an effort to discredit the collective murder, to ruin its basis, to destroy all non-Christian religions by showing that they are founded on an arbitrary violence.
Far from taking Christianity to be just another sacrificial religion, Nietzsche reiterates several times that its great fault is to “prevent sacrifice,” to render impossible the acts of violence necessary to the smooth functioning of society. Nietzsche is very close to seeing the mechanisms and the effects of the surrogate victim, and above all to seeing that the Gospels see them and, seeing them, discredit and derail them. The Gospel reveals “things hidden since the foundation of the world,” and through the intermediary of Nietzsche this revelation begins to become self-aware.
Christianity is always accused of justifying suffering, of glutting itself on it. Nietzsche sees quite well that nothing of the sort is true. It is pagan religion which “affirms even the harshest suffering; it is sufficiently strong, robust and divinizing for that” (op. cit.). The greatness of Nietzsche is that he apprehends the truth of Christianity with incomparable force. Nietzsche’s drama, and his madness, is his obstinate preference for Dionysus, his conscious choice of violence, pursued with too much intellectual rigor not to culminate in the atrocious texts of the Twilight of the Idols and other writings:
The individual was taken so seriously, he was posited as such an absolute principle, that he could no longer be sacrificed: but the species only survives thanks to human sacrifices …
The conception of aphorism 125 could not have been simple. It must have been transformed during the course of its elaboration. I would readily accept the supposition that Nietzsche started out from the modern situation. He was thinking first of all of the death of the Christian God, in a banal sense analogous to that of the aphorism’s exegetes.
The death changes on the way into a murder by virtue of the Christian Passion, a true object of “repression” that accomplishes its return. A moment ago, I pointed out an anomaly. The first death of God does not lead to the restoration of the sacred and of the ritual order, but to a decomposition of meaning so radical and irremediable that a bottomless abyss opens beneath the feet of modern man.
The aphorism gives one the impression that this abyss closes up again when the second announcement leads this time to the order of Zarathustra and the superman. The aphorism affirms the eternal recurrence. But it reveals its engine, the collective murder of arbitrary victims. It goes too far in its revelation. It destroys its own foundation.
The engine driving the cycles is of course the surrogate victim whose innocence, once revealed, prevents our believing in the soundness of the basis for other victims’ suffering and, breaking thereby the mainspring of the eternal recurrence, leads us this time to the idea of an end without a new beginning.
The knowledge is not quite present in the aphorism, yet it is already there implicitly in the role of scapegoat which the Madman plays because he reveals the truth of the collective murder. The Madman is an image of himself which Nietzsche only appears to control. Like all images of himself, it transforms itself irresistibly into an imago Christi of unusual relevance.
Aphorism 125 proclaims the victory of the eternal recurrence over Christianity. But by the very fact that it founds the eternal recurrence on the collective murder, its true foundation which must remain hidden if it is to remain foundational, the victory is undermined, secretly subverted by the very Christianity over which it believes it has triumphed. At the first announcement of the murder, the world spins out of its orbit because the collective murder has been revealed.
The power of the aphorism derives from its hesitation between the solution that is adopted and the opposite resolution. I perceive in it a kind of muted premonition of the “God of the Jews, you have won” which Nietzsche strives desperately to reduce to silence in the last fragments but which resounds from them none the less like the trumpet of the Last Judgment.
The two announcements of the murder are not quite on the same plane. They do not really have the same meaning; the first is infinitely formidable because it is the Christian one; the second alone carries the reassurance of the eternal recurrence. In the end Nietzsche understands that the revelation of the innocent victim marks the definitive end of the eternal recurrence. The first announcement cancels the second. The eternal recurrence is the past which Christianity has abolished. History from now on treads the bottomless spaces of Christian knowledge.
One finds the same ambiguity at the conclusion of the Twilight of the Gods. One does not know if the colossal finish marks the end of a cycle only, the promise of a thousand renewals, or if it is truly the end of the world, the Christian apocalypse, the bottomless abyss of the unforgettable victim.
— René Girard, The Founding Murder in the Philosophy of Nietzsche, from "All Desire is a Desire for Being"
For a hundred years the best minds turn aphorism 125 round and about in every direction and never do they come upon the horrible bogey that haunts me unceasingly. The second apparition is more sinister than the first. The blood spilling . . . the knife . . . It is all in very bad taste. Nietzsche, decidedly, does it on purpose.
Having written ‘God is dead,’ Nietzsche returns immediately and overwhelmingly to his idea — or maybe to mine, I no longer know which. One would say that he is seeking to prevent the kind of falsification to which his aphorism has always been subjected. He can guess his readers’ desire to escape the murder. Shrewd as they are, they will take advantage of the somewhat too-neutral formula ‘God is dead’ which the author has imprudently handed them. To forestall this danger, Nietzsche insists once again on the murder. The caricatural, Grand Guignol quality of the description contradicts categorically the connotations that the habitual consumers of the aphorism have always conferred on ‘God is dead,’ its connotations that exclude collective violence.
‘God is dead’ is not incorrect in its context. In writing this sentence, Nietzsche says nothing that contradicts his message or in any way attenuates it. Of someone who has got himself murdered one can always say, among other things, that he is dead. There is no risk of making a mistake. The passive formula is always accurate. Whether someone who dies is murdered or not, the result is the same. But, death from natural causes being the most common sort, that is quite obviously what is understood when it is said simply that somebody has died without its being specified how.
In the aphorism, ‘God is dead’ is framed by two thunderous announcements of collective murder. Taken out of context, ‘God is dead’ slips quietly back into meaning the natural death of God. The murder is dropped as if by an inadvertent gesture which passes without notice. One must admire the efficacy of the maneuver, which is all the more deft for being ignorant of its own cunning. A quotation from Nietzsche is provided which is in appearance accurate and complete but in reality truncated, due solely to the fact that it is emphasized separately, made into the title of the aphorism. The ‘God is dead’ which circulates in this world does not sum up the Madman’s words, it grossly falsifies them.
For the philosophy of the Enlightenment, God can only die a natural death. Once the naive period of humanity is behind us religion ceases to be ‘credible,’ as we say these days. Rationalist optimism is supposed to be long dead, fallen victim in principle to the epidemic triggered by the death of God. In reality, it survives in the very idea of a God who dies of senile exhaustion. This first idea supposes a second: modern atheism is more reasonable than its predecessor, religion. For beings who have attained the ‘maturity’ on which we pride ourselves, such atheism alone is truly ‘credible.’ Other beliefs are purely medieval, not to say antediluvian.
The ‘death of God’ maneuver evacuates the Nietzschean idea to return on tiptoe to the easy idea, the banal idea, the vulgar idea. Nietzsche is careful not to cross his t’s. Part of him fully enjoys being the misunderstood madman. The aphorism lays a kind of trap for us which everyone identifies but falls into all the same: the trap of vulgar atheism.
The real difference between the crowd’s atheism and the Madman’s thinking is none other than the difference between death and murder.
Through the intermediary of the formula ‘God is dead,’ all those who start out by making fun of the Madman end up co-opting the aphorism and cutting it down to the size of their own thinking. They claim to distance themselves from the vulgar atheism but then reinstall it serenely in the very text which repudiates it, with a mighty helping hand from the incantatory formula ‘God is dead . . . God is dead.’
If the interpreters quote only the first lines of the aphorism that is because, in the rest, there is no longer any question of anything but collective murder. At the first appearance of the latter everyone runs away, like the disciples at the time of the Passion. And the same reasons which render this rout universal render it invisible to those who participate in it. Insist on the murder and you will immediately be taken for a ‘madman.’ It happens to me all the time . . .
— René Girard, The Founding Murder in the Philosophy of Nietzsche, from "All Desire is a Desire for Being"