René Girard’s Theory of Christ the Scapegoat
Girard’s Life
René Girard is a French academic who has lived for most of his life in the United States. Born in Avignon on Christmas Day 1923, he studied mediaeval history in Paris. In 1947, aged 23, he had an opportunity to spend a year in America, and stayed on. He taught history and French literature at Indiana University and subsequently at other universities. His mother was a Catholic, but from the age of 10 he had nothing to do with the Church until he was 35, when he was writing his first book and he suffered a cancer scare: he underwent both an intellectual and a spiritual conversion, and returned to Christianity at Easter 1959.
He has written a large number of books and articles developing his theory, usually in French, though all the main ones have been translated into English. He has drawn particularly on his study of literature, first of all the great European novels and Shakespeare, later especially the myths of many cultures, and finally the Bible. He retired from university teaching in 1995, but continues to write as he approaches 90. He has received many honours, including election to the Académie Française, and has a large following of academics, theologians and psychologists, some of whom formed an organization called ‘COV&R’ (Colloquium on Violence & Religion) which holds annual conferences.
Mimetic Rivalry
The starting point of his theory is what he calls ‘mimetic desire’. (‘Mimesis’ means ‘imitation’, and ‘mimetic’ simply means ‘imitative’.) He observes that human beings, particularly in their formative years, learn almost everything by imitating others. Apart from a few built-in instincts, like the baby’s need to suck her mother’s breast, that includes learning what to want, what to value, what to strive for. The child watches his parents, his teachers, other children, any other role models he respects, and he values or desires the things they value or desire. That may be love, kindness, honesty, commitment; it may be security, pleasure, wealth, ambition, status symbols. He doesn’t learn his values from what they say but from what they do. And, to a greater extent than perhaps we realise, we continue to absorb the values of those around us and the society in which we live, and to have role models whom we would like to emulate. Girard has said, ‘If human beings suddenly ceased imitating, all forms of culture would vanish’[1].
Sometimes our role model desires something we cannot have. Then we begin to see our role model as a rival. There are plenty of common examples of this. For instance, a baby gets his mother’s undivided love and attention; when he gets a bit older and is no longer totally dependent on her, he begins to notice that she loves other people too, notably the child’s father; desperate to keep her to himself and experiencing elements of infantile sexuality, the toddler sees his father as a rival, but finds he does not really have the means to fight him and has to suppress his childish rage. This is called the oedipal phase of child development, and most children get over it and move on to the next stage of development. (Those who don’t, and become fixated at this stage suffer as adults from an Oedipus complex resulting in irrational hatred of authority figures.) Another example might be the boy who falls in love with his best friend’s girl-friend, not because she shows any interest in him, nor because she is particularly beautiful, but just because the person he respects and admires is clearly in love with her, and that makes her seem supremely desirable. The literature Girard studied was full of examples of such triangular relationships between subject, object and rival. Typically, none of those involved understand what is happening and why, and the rivalry can become so intense that the object (in the last example, the girl-friend) can be forgotten as what was formerly a relationship of respect turns to bitter conflict.
I cannot begin here to give you the arguments and evidence that Girard and his supporters have set out at length. But it should be noted that he sees mimetic desire, with its potential for rivalry and destructive conflict, as a ubiquitous feature of human relationships, an inescapable part of the human condition. Everyone’s character and personality is developed and shaped by other people, but each of us tries throughout our life to assert our own identity and individuality – to define ‘me’ as different from other people. The Dominican theologian James Alison sees this tension as the basis of original sin[2].
The Scapegoat Mechanism
Since mimetic rivalry is a poison that can affect all human relationships, though its nature and even its existence have been almost entirely unrecognized in the past, it has constituted a threat to harmony and good order in human societies, for as long as they have existed. Anthropologists have discovered much about primitive societies, how they were structured and their institutions, one of which was, almost always, a religion of taboos (prohibitions) and rituals (such as some form of sacrifice).
Girard sees such religions as designed to protect early societies from threats to their continued existence, primarily the threat of internal disorder and violence. When other institutions that maintain social order, like a rigid class system or territorial boundaries or property rights, break down – perhaps as a result of external factors such as a plague or a crop failure – mimetic conflict and violence are liable to break out and can destroy the society.
Even if originally the mimetic rivalry is limited to a small minority – for instance a few people without wealth or status or power wanting to be like those who have it – such conflict is contagious. Those who have some power or wealth or status value it more and protect it more fiercely because they are envied for it, and in turn they envy those with greater power, wealth or status than they have. (Even in the modern world, where there is a much greater understanding of social dynamics than there was in primitive societies, we have seen violence feed upon itself and on the violent responses it evokes. We might think of the Nazi persecution of Jews, of Senator Joe McCarthy’s hunt for ‘Communists’, or Islamophobia today.)
When such internal conflict reaches crisis point, so that there is a real danger of the society tearing itself apart in civil war, there is a pressing need to find some way of reuniting the warring factions by redirecting them to a common enemy. This may be external – a neighbouring tribe or nation – but this is a risky choice, unless the society in crisis can guarantee to defeat the enemy in warfare. The more common response is to look for an individual or group within the society who can be blamed for all the trouble, a victim or scapegoat, who may in fact have had nothing to do with the crisis but who cannot defend himself. This is not a planned or conscious strategy: the mimetic process, the unconscious habit of copying others, gradually swings one person after another, and eventually the whole population, away from civil war and into pointing the finger at the (arbitrarily chosen) scapegoat, who is then expelled or destroyed by the mob. This is enough to save the society, and to restore peace and harmony. (But, it should be noted, this mechanism depends for its success on the blindness of its participants to what is really going on: they have to believe in the guilt or dangerous nature of the one expelled or killed.) At this point, paradoxically, attitudes to the victim change. He (or she or they) is seen not so much as the cause of the crisis, but as having averted it by their death or expulsion. They become ‘sacred’ or may even be worshipped as ‘divine’.
Primitive religions start by prohibiting forms of imitative behaviour which might spark off conflict – including laws that make little sense to us, such as a ban on making images or the purity laws of Leviticus, but which the experts can explain in these terms. Rituals seem to do the opposite: they break the prohibitions and (in a controlled way) mimic the violence they aim to prevent. Girard’s account of this is quite complicated, but in the end he agrees with the conclusion that all prohibitions and rituals can be related to mimetic conflict[3]. Very frequently, religious rituals include a sacrifice, either of animals or of humans, thus re-enacting in a formal way the means by which the society was saved by the victim.
Myths and the Bible
When a crisis of mimetic conflict is long over, when memories of the violence begin to fade and peace and harmony are established again, then the imagery of the rituals becomes more symbolic than realistic, their connection with an actual historic event is forgotten or glossed over. In an oral tradition with no written records of the event, stories of the crisis and its resolution are told and retold, but the details are changed so that they are no longer about actual people, the ancestors of the community, but about mythical heroes or gods. The original victim becomes a sinner or criminal whose removal is totally justified, the scenes of mob violence are often transformed into harmless activities, and the meaning of the myth is completely lost to following generations. But Girard has shown us how to decipher such myths, looking for traces in the story that match stereotypes of persecution: a crisis of institutional collapse that obliterates hierarchical and functional differences in society, a mob seeking an enemy to blame for the crisis, and a victim or victims that are in some way different – ethnic or religious minorities, strangers, physically disabled, those in some other way marginalized, even occasionally the rich and powerful such as a monarch or dictator.
An obvious example is the myth of Oedipus in Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex. A plague is ravaging Thebes: the social crisis. Oedipus is held to be responsible because he has killed his father and married his mother; the oracle declares that, to end the epidemic, the abominable criminal must be exiled: these unnatural crimes are the mob’s justification for holding him responsible for the plague. Oedipus has the marks of a victim: he has a disability – he limps (his name means ‘club foot’), he arrives in Thebes an unknown stranger from another country, though in fact he is the son and legitimate heir of the king of Thebes. When as an infant he was left on a hillside to die because of his club foot, the oracle foretold that eventually he would be expelled by his community – he was always destined to be a victim of mob violence. Girard has no doubt that this is a distorted and ‘sanitized’ account of a real persecution long ago when Theban society had collapsed and riots had broken out following an epidemic.
This is an easy myth to interpret. He analyses other myths from Greek, Roman, Scandinavian, Aztec, Hittite and other ancient cultures, and reports of actual events in second century Ephesus and mediaeval France. The common feature is that the evidence of persecution and victimisation is disguised so that the authors of these accounts clearly do not understand them in those terms, but tell stories that seem to them perfectly reasonable and justifiable. Without realizing it, the authors are siding with the mob (which is not even mentioned).
When Girard turned to the Bible, he expected to see similar stories of victimisation underlying the religion of prohibitions and sacrificial rituals. And they do exist. The Bible is a very mixed collection of books, not only stylistically but also in terms of the beliefs expressed. It shows the history of a people moving slowly from an understanding of God very similar to that of the pagans around them towards what we now recognise as the Christian God. The God of the Old Testament is sometimes seen as a jealous God, promising to take vengeance on the enemies of Israel, and helping them slaughter tens of thousands of Gibeonites[4], Canaanites, Perizzites[5], Moabites[6], Midianites[7], Philistines[8], and others, whose only fault seems to have been to live in the lands promised by God to his chosen people. He lays down harsh laws of retaliation and demands animal sacrifices.
But Girard noticed an important difference between the myths of other cultures and the Bible. Again and again in the Bible, God is shown as on the side of the victims, the oppressed, the persecuted, rather than (as in the myths) that of the victorious majority. Obvious examples include the Book of Job, where his so-called friends represent the mob in trying to persuade Job that he is guilty and deserves persecution because God is on their side, but he refuses and places his trust in a God who supports the victim. There are many passages in the prophets, such as Isaiah’s suffering servant, and many of the psalms are the voices of victims complaining about their persecutors. Girard analyses the story of Joseph in the Book of Genesis (which has many parallels with Greek myths like Oedipus), and shows that the myths find the victim guilty whereas the Bible finds him innocent, and this is not just the whim of the storyteller, but a deep cultural difference. There are insights in the Old Testament into the danger of mimetic desire leading to victimisation: Girard analyses the Ten Commandments to show that the prohibitions against murder, adultery, theft, false witness (that is stealing your neighbour’s good name), culminate in a general prohibition of the underlying cause – desiring anything of your neighbour’s.
The Christian Revelation
But the main explanation of mimetic desire and its consequences, and the demonstration of how to overcome it, are in the New Testament. There are many warnings by Jesus which Girard interprets for us, and many examples of mimetic contagion and scapegoating in the gospel stories, such as the beheading of John the Baptist, the change in mob behaviour from Palm Sunday to Good Friday, Peter’s threefold denial, Pilate’s reluctant condemnation, the taunts of the thieves crucified with Jesus, and above all the drama of Jesus’ own crucifixion. (These elements have led some anti-Christian commentators to say that the Gospels and the rest of the Bible are all myths and hence unreliable.) The clearest statement of it is in the debate of the chief priests and Pharisees on what to do about Jesus. As the Jerusalem Bible puts it, ‘One of them, Caiaphas, the high priest that year, said, “You don’t seem to have grasped the situation at all; you fail to see that it is better for one man to die for the people, than for the whole nation to be destroyed.” He did not speak in his own person, it was as high priest he made this prophecy that Jesus was to die for the nation – and not for the nation only, but to gather together in unity the scattered children of God.’[9]
By spelling out the working of the mimetic cycle and the scapegoat mechanism, which previously men had concealed from themselves, the Gospel deprives it of its effectiveness. More importantly, by offering himself as an innocent victim, in full knowledge of how the mechanism worked, Jesus showed that it need not succeed, that it could be overcome, and that human beings could be released from its power and the power of the culture of death that it implies. The proof to his disciples that this was not just a futile act of bravado, that rejection of mimetic desire can free people from a cycle of violence and death, can give them eternal life, was his resurrection. It was only after that that they slowly began to grasp the full implications of Christ’s life and death. The Swiss Jesuit Raymund Schwager suggests that Jesus’ death was the inevitable result of his exposing the underlying will to kill in those who rejected his message of unconditional love and non-vengeance: he was, in a sense, a ‘necessary scapegoat’.
Some implications for us today
Christ in the New Testament definitively revealed, or unveiled, the previously hidden scapegoat mechanism, which had enabled societies to suppress, at least temporarily, the violence that threatened to destroy them. Although we cannot claim that Western society is Christian, parts of the Christian message have percolated into our culture over the past 2000 years. In his book ‘Violence Unveiled’, Gil Bailie examines some of the consequences of that revelation.
One result is that, today, we cannot simply shut our eyes to victims of persecution. (Indeed, empathy with victims is such that sometimes every minority group seems to be claiming the status of victim.) But the human drives underlying the mimetic cycle have not gone away – mimetic desire, rage and violence, the search for someone to blame. (After the city riots in August 2011, the people I heard blamed for them on radio and TV included: black gangs, teenage mothers, absentee fathers, the police, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, MPs collectively, bankers, and obese women teachers[10].) By removing the veil of respectability that ancient civilizations could place on violence, the old religious remedy of the ritual sacrifice of an innocent victim is no longer available. Girard has pointed out that the fact we can no longer believe in or practise ritual sacrifice means we have lost a once useful protection for our societies, a sort of safety-valve. He has written, ‘The idea of “limitless” violence, long scorned by sophisticated Westerners, looms up before us. … For the first time, [humanity faces] a perfectly straightforward and even scientifically calculable choice between total destruction and the total renunciation of violence.’[11] Another word for ‘revelation’ is ‘apocalypse’, and Girard does not shrink from quoting the apocalyptic texts that abound in the gospels. ‘Today, violence has been unleashed across the whole world, creating what the apocalyptic texts predicted: confusion between disasters caused by nature and the man-made: global warming and rising waters are no longer metaphors today.’[12]
Following a different track of Girard’s thinking, James Alison sees human culture, from the beginning of time, dominated by the idea of death. We see our lives as ending in death; our ambitions are to achieve something before we die; we marry and have children to leave something after our death; we use the threats of death and violence or imprisonment (our form of expulsion from society) to enforce our wills and bring order to our societies; many see God as part of this system of punishment. Alison believes Jesus came to bring us a radically different imagination of God: a God who is brilliantly alive and is life itself, who has nothing to do with death or violence, for whom life and death are not opposites – they are unrelated. After Jesus’ resurrection, his disciples gradually underwent that radical change of imagination themselves. Alison writes, ‘If God has nothing to do with death, then death is only a purely human cultural reality, and no reflection of what you did and who you were. This means that what is good is in no way defined by death, and you are free to act in a way which doesn’t reflect the limits of good and evil which are imposed by living in the shadow of death.’[13] Another way of putting it might be, if you were able to live, like a child, as if death did not exist or did not matter, you would have grasped the secret of eternal life.
Conclusion
I have tried to give you a flavour of René Girard’s thinking and a few implications that people have drawn from it. But his own works are far richer and more persuasive. In case you would like to find out more or engage with his ideas directly, I am distributing a short list of books (all available from Amazon).
Notes:
[1] Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, p 7.
[2] Raising Abel, pp 113-4; and The Joy of Being Wrong, passim.
[3] Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, p 21.
[4] Joshua 10: 10.
[5] Judges 1: 4.
[6] Judges 3: 20.
[7] Judges 7-8.
[8] Judges 15: 16.
[9] John 11: 49-52.
[10]Harriet Sergeant, author of a 2009 Centre for Policy Studies book ‘Wasted: the betrayal of white working class and black Caribbean boys’, discussed the feminisation of our schools on the Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme on Saturday 13th August 2011. She criticised the fact that ‘80% of teachers in schools are women, combined with an ideology that goes against everything that boys need, competition, sport, structure, hierarchy, which, ironically a lot of the boys I have interviewed get from gangs.’ She had been in touch with a South London gang for three years: ‘A lot of the boys in my gang are now in prison, and they love prison because it is the first time in their lives they are spending time with adult males.’ She reported that she had spent a week in a primary school, where the same group of boys were chucked into the corridor every afternoon for behaving badly and were learning nothing. The teachers, all sitting around the staff room told her, ‘Oh well, boys always behave badly in the afternoon’, as if it were a fact of nature that could not be changed. When she suggested they extend the lunch break and organize a hard game of football to tire them out so that they could then concentrate on their lessons, the teachers looked at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. She commented that they were all women and all two stone overweight.
[11] Violence and the Sacred, p 240.
[12] Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, tr Mary Baker (East Lancing, Michigan State University Press, 2010).
[13] Raising Abel, p 42.
Trailer for next session
Girard would claim to be a student of literature, history and ethnology, not a theologian. Next week we will turn to perhaps the greatest Catholic theologian of the 20th Century, said to have been much admired by Pope John Paul II, Fr Karl Rahner SJ. In particular we will consider his proposal that, instead of thinking of Christ as ‘God become man’, we may instead think of him as ‘the man who became God’. Does this lead us to look again at our faith, our life goals or our attitudes to other people?
Select Bibliography
Books by René Girard
Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1977 – French original published 1972) – first full statement, with illustrations from Aeschylus and Shakespeare, of how mimetic rivalry applies to social behaviour – ‘the sacred’, including prohibitions, rituals and myths, is society’s way of controlling violence, and includes the ‘scapegoat mechanism’.
Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World* (London, The Athlone Press, 1987 – French original 1978) – a long, fairly technical, conversation between Girard and two psychiatrists about (a) the plausibility of the scapegoat theory in the light of modern social sciences, (b) sacrifice in the Judaeo-Christian scriptures, contrasting the meaning of ‘Logos’ in Heraclitus and St John’s gospel, (c) ‘interdividual psychology’ expanding mimetic desire into a theory of sexuality and making clear Girard’s differences from Sigmund Freud. Not an easy book to read.
The Scapegoat (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press 1986 – French original 1982) – a guide to recognizing (often disguised or suppressed) signs of persecution and scapegoating in different literary texts – first a mediaeval poem, then various world myths, and finally some key gospel passages. Probably not the first book to read to understand Girard’s theories, but a very helpful explanation of the role of myth.
The Girard Reader, edited by James G Williams (New York, Crossroad, 1996) – selections from his writings up to 1996 with a commentary by Williams giving an overview of the three different parts of his theory, plus a new interview on ‘the anthropology of the cross’, a glossary and a bibliography. The best resource if you want to know about all aspects of his theory.
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll NY, Orbis Books 2001 – French original 1999) – an exposition of the biblical revelation by which scapegoating is challenged and overcome, beginning with an interpretation of the Ten Commandments as prohibiting mimetic desire. A short book, easy to read, which gives a good flavour of Girard’s method of arguing, and deals with one of the most important parts of his theory – recommended as a good way into Girard’s thought.
Books about or strongly influenced by Girard’s theories
Discovering Girard, by Michael Kirwan (London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 2004) – an excellent short introduction to his theories.
Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads, by Gil Bailie (New York, Crossroad, 1994) – the application of Girard’s theories to the modern world, with illustrations, many from American society and culture.
Knowing Jesus, by James Alison (2nd edition, London, SPCK, 1998) – a very readable analysis of Jesus’ life in Girardian terms.
Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination, by James Alison (2nd edn, London, SPCK, 2010) – eternal life from a Girardian perspective – also easy to read.
The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin through Easter Eyes, by James Alison (New York, Crossroad, 1998) – a Girardian reworking of original sin. A more academic study using technical language drawn from post-modern philosophy.
These three books of theology by James Alison suggest some interesting implications of a Girardian worldview that Girard himself does not address directly.
Must There Be Scapegoats? : Violence and Redemption in the Bible, by Raymund Schwager (Leominster, Gracewing, 2000 – German original 1978) – a detailed analysis of the Bible and especially the New Testament, showing how passage after passage supports Girard’s account.
Jesus of Nazareth: How He Understood His Life, by Raymund Schwager (New York, Crossroad, 1998 – German original 1991) – A story of Jesus’ own life, imagining Jesus’ own thoughts – although Schwager does not mention Girard or his theories, they are clearly behind his account.
Jesus in the Drama of Salvation: Toward a Biblical Doctrine of Redemption, by Raymund Schwager (New York, Crossroad, 1999 – German original 1990) – a scholarly companion to the above, showing how biblical research supports his account of Jesus’ self-understanding.
Goodness Gracious 