Unveiling Mythological Violence

Through its similarity to myth, the difference of the Gospel shines forth all the brighter

Are myths just allegorical and symbolic? Are the Gospels simply mythical? And should we read the Gospels in light of mythology or the myths in light of the Gospels? According to the French thinker René Girard, modern academia suffers from “a systematic prejudice against the real,”¹ meaning that all myths are indeed just allegories, the Gospels are too similar to myths not to be mythical, and therefore all things should be reduced to the mythological. Leaning heavily on Girard, I would like to show that while myths and the Gospels share many similarities, it is through these similarities that the exceptional difference of the Gospels shines forth all the clearer. So, what do the Gospels illuminate for us about human nature that the myths do not? The universal and collective violence of human communities against the scapegoat.

Allow me to first introduce a few basic concepts of Girard’s theory, beginning with mimetic desire and violence. Through his study of anthropology, Girard realizes that human desire is rarely, if ever, a linear process. Instead, we seem to desire according to the desire of “the other”—that is, desire is triangular and mimetic (derived from the Greek word mimesis which roughly means “mimic”). Mimetic desire is not a bad thing and seems to be inherent to human nature; without it, we would hardly learn anything as children since we must learn what it is we ought to desire. However, just like most good things, it can become a bad thing. In a world of limited goods and resources that are desired by all humans, rival desires clash, whether it is two babies fighting over food, several men fighting over a beautiful woman, or armies fighting over a piece of land. Practically speaking, mimetic desire leads to conflict. We might all desire the same things, but there is only so much of a good thing to go around. Furthermore, a rival’s desire for something tends to strengthen, or, in counter-reaction, repel, our desire for that same thing.

This then leads to two more of Girard’s basic concepts: scapegoating and the single victim mechanism. Scapegoating arises when mimetic conflicts, which breed scandal, proliferate throughout a society to the point that an inevitable, uncontrollable crisis unfolds and social chaos precipitates. Fingers are pointed and accusations abound. Girard argues that these societal crises are often symbolized as the “plagues” and “epidemics” of which we hear in ancient writings and myths. To manage these crises and to release the implosive nature of growing mimetic conflict and scandal, a singular person or thing, marked by some noticeable difference, something that distinguishes them as “other,” becomes the scapegoat.

From here, this scapegoat becomes the target of all the converging conflicts. “This victim,” writes Girard, “effectively replaces all those who were in conflict just a little earlier in a thousand scandals gathered here and there and who now are all mustered against a single target.” This war of all against all is transformed into a war of all against one, whether it is one person, one group, or one thing. Whether this victim is guilty of the purported crime, furthermore, does not matter. All that matters is the perception of guilt born from the blinding nature of scapegoating.

This method of “letting off steam” temporarily restores order within society, at least until the internal mimetic conflict grows out of control once again, as it inevitably does in the “mimetic cycle.” The perennial issue with scapegoating, as you can imagine, is that it does not ultimately get to the root of the issue; it only numbs it temporarily as a sort of cathartic anesthesia. It may be a wonderful method of crisis management, but it comes with hidden costs—it increases the debt that society cannot seem to pay off. (I believe the mythical figures Cetus and the Minotaur are good examples of this: to stop each of them from destroying the community in either tale, certain victims must be offered up so that the community may live.) This societal process of redirecting internal tensions upon a scapegoat is what Girard calls “the single victim mechanism”—there must be a single victim whereupon the community can direct all its conflicting scandals—and this mechanism is the function of violence hidden inside myth and brought to light by the Gospels.

The violence we read about in mythic tales, then, is not just an allegory and the violence is not simply symbolic. In his book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard concludes chapter 5 with a bold claim:

“The people of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims. What prevents researchers from discovering this truth is their refusal to grasp the real violence behind the [mythical] texts that represent them.”

The deconstructionists of his time, Jacques Derrida in particular, were set on dismantling the truth claims of Western literature; they believed there could be no “real” meaning behind the literature of mythology. In the words of Derrida, for example, “there is nothing outside the text.”² As they went about deconstructing myths and razing their truth claims, these same scholars meanwhile became infatuated by them, seduced by the mischievous pranks and churlish “play” of the gods. From this, they developed the belief that myth was to be presupposed—when scrutinizing the ancient texts with this mythic confirmation bias, all they could see was myth. It should be no wonder, then, that when they turned their attention to the Gospels and saw shared similarities with the mythic tales, their myth sensors started flashing.

According to Girard, however, it is through the Gospels, preceded by the Old Testament, that the misty veil of mythology is dissipated, and the violence of scapegoating is revealed. “Though these myths are structured in the same fashion, they are falsely perceived as indecipherable. The truth is, they have been deciphered for two thousand years. The Gospel Passion accounts have solved the riddle.” Yes, the Gospels and myths both appear similar in form, but Girard believes it is only through their likeness—both involve mimetic violence, scapegoating, and the single victim mechanism, for example—that the crucial difference of the Gospels shines forth all the clearer. In the Gospels, collective violence against the innocent victim is not justified. In myths, however, we find disguised accounts of self-justified violence against the innocent victim. “The persecutors always seem to have a valid cause to persecute their victims,” says Girard, and they get away with it too because the victims are always the minority and cannot write the history—it is the persecuting mob who writes it, and this history is infected with the mythic illusion of justified violence.

In the case of the Gospels, however, the minority, seemingly defeated, overcomes this mythic illusion to proclaim that Christ has conquered death and Satan (satan is a Hebrew word that means “accuser,” which suggests that Satan is the chief accuser, and the father of scapegoating), and along with these the mimetic cycle of violence and scapegoating—symptoms of original sin. Christ becomes the scapegoat, the truly innocent victim, to awaken us to our sin, to our own scapegoating. “You hypocrite,” declares Christ, “first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye” (Mt 7:5). Should we fail to remove the log in our own eye, innocents are bound to be crucified upon it. We have already crucified Christ Jesus upon it.

“The honest man is he who is always trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable; but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to come out of it.” ~ G.K. Chesterton, “The Mystagogue”

1. René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

2. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology