Análisis de resultados

50 Robert Hamerton-ͨ͊ΛΛϳ ̮θͼϡ͊μ φΆ̮φ GΉθ̮θ͆ ϡμ͊μ φΆ͊ φ͊θΡ ͡ΊϡθθΩͼ̮φ͊ ΟΉ̼φΉΡ͢ φΩ ͆͊μΉͼ΢̮φ͊ ̮ μεΩ΢φ̮΢͊Ωϡμ psychological mechanism by which we transfer violence to a victim. In a diachronic development of humankind it is the conflictual mimesis that happens when rivals converge no longer on the object that divides them but on the victim that unites them.

51 Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, 25

In the life of a community a person comes to meet a lot of stumbling blocks to one’s desires creating a situation of conflict where unconsciously everyone blames everyone as the cause of the situation. This results into violence since desirers can no longer stand the scandals.

The violence becomes so contagious that it ends up into Hobbesian “war of all against all.”⁵³ Girard argues that “the resulting violence of all against all would annihilate the community if it were not transformed, in the end, into a war of all against one, thanks to which the unity of the community is reestablished.”⁵⁴ Consequently, the spiral of violence or this whole process which Girard calls ‘Satan’ becomes a way of life. If Satan has to sustain himself he has to sustain the community on whose life he depends. If the community is wiped away in a wave of violence on which violence feeds then Satan dies out. Therefore “every kingdom divided against itself will be laid to waste (Mt 12: 25), if Satan casts out Satan his kingdom will not stand. Therefore Satan from the beginning put in place a mechanism which will sustain the community and himself.

This mechanism Girard calls the “scapegoat” or “single victim mechanism.” Girard argues that

“when I use the term “mechanism,” as in ‘scapegoat mechanism,’ I mean basically and simply a generative principle which works unconsciously in culture and society. As Peter says, ‘And now, brothers, I know that you acted out of ignorance, as did your rulers’… (Acts 3:17-19)”⁵⁵ The point is that everyone is guilty but none is responsible for it.

In instances of violence the community cites a victim in whom all the scandals converge.

Thus, the whole community descends on this single victim in blame as the cause of the entire

53 René Girard, I See Satan Fall like Lightning, 8

54 Ibid., 24

55 René Girard, The Girard Reader), 266

catastrophe. Satan’s role is to accuse, inflame or snowball the entire community against a single victim who will have to be lynched or killed for peace to return to the community. Girard states:

Because our desires are mimetic, they resemble each other and cluster together in systems of opposition that are obstinate, sterile, and contagious. This is how scandals come to be. As they become fewer and bigger, scandals plunge communities into crises that are inflamed more and more. This inflammation reaches the crucial moment when unanimous convergence of the community against a single victim results in total scandal, the ‘abscess of fixation’ that pacifies the violence and puts together again the harmony that was torn apart.⁵⁶

Satan fulfilling his role as the accuser, the Father of lies, a murderer from the beginning turns the crisis of violence of the whole community into violence against one victim who shoulders all the violence of the community by being sacrificed or expelled from the community.

He (Satan) is the accuser of the hero in the book of Job, before God and even more so before the people. In transforming a community of people with distinct identities and roles into hysterical mass, Satan produces myth and is the principle of systematic accusation that bursts forth from the contagious imitation provoked by scandals. Once the unfortunate victim is completely isolated, deprived of defenders, nothing can protect her or him from the aroused crowd. Everyone can set upon the victim without having to fear the least reprisal.⁵⁷

What Satan does is to make the crowds unknowingly accomplices in the murder of an innocent victim. The crowds which in the first instance had no intention of being executioners are deceived by Satan not to see themselves as accomplices and to imagine themselves as alien to the violent murder they are to commit. Satan snowballs the community into hysterical anger and bloodthirstiness. Then, he lets loose the community as a pride of rabid lions to charge and tear to pieces an individual victim who is accused of all filth and as the source of all degeneration. It is only after this that there is presumably reconciliation in the community brought about by the murder. The greatest example of what we have said is after the condemnation and passion of Jesus, Luke’s Gospel reports the reconciliation between Herod and Pilate who were archenemies.

56 Ibid., 94

“And that same day Herod and Pilate became friends, for before this they had been enemies”

(Luke 23:12). Jesus became the scapegoat of a political rivalry between the two rulers though this kind of reconciliation is usually violent and above all temporary.

The community again attains its tranquility by transferring the condemnation on the supposed cause of scandal, the victim, in the process rendering the violent community innocent.

Mythology always takes sides with the unanimously violent community against the randomly chosen victim. Basing on mythology as we have argued above, the choice of the victim is dependent on the fact that the victim has no one to come to his/her defense or mourn for him/her.

This is done in order to avoid reprisal from the family or group to which they belong. Therefore it is the nobodies, the homeless, those without family, the disabled and ill, abandoned old people who are marked for lynching. In classical Greek they used the nobodies as Pharmakoi, these were people selected to be sacrificial or ritual victims during the time of crisis to revert the calamity. Girard finds in “the Pharmakos a close relationship with the Pharmakon (pharmacy) which means both ‘antidote’ and ‘poison,’” ⁵⁸depending on how it is used. Therefore the victim of sacrifice carries these two roles as poison to the community leading it into severe crisis but at the same time she/he is the antidote to the crisis through the ritual violence. The cause of violence expels violence; Satan expelling Satan. This victim becomes the antidote to the violence of the community because it is deemed to have pacifying and purifying efficacy. This purifying efficacy like in all ancient sacrifices satisfied two elements: “(1) to please the gods, who had prescribed them to the community, and (2) to consolidate or restore, if need be, the order and

58 René Girard, I See Satan Fall like Lightning, 37

peace of the community.”⁵⁹ The entire institution of sacrifice in many ancient communities hanged on these two points.

The sacrifice of the randomly chosen victim serves to reproduce acts of violence in an exact manner deserved by the original perpetrator of an act of violence who is being substituted by the victim of unanimity. The gods are always invoked because of the tranquility that unanimous sacrificial violence has produced in the past and is capable of producing now. The reconciliation of the community renders the hand of the gods present in the sacrifice and hence making the victim of violence acquire a divine status. “In short it is always an effective “single victim mechanism” that works as model for the sacrifices, because it has really ended a mimetic crisis, an epidemic of multiple act of vengeance that the community could not control.”⁶⁰ It is certainly collective violence which inspired sacrifice regardless of all the variations which occurred in different communities. Sacrifice was actually conceived by many ancient communities as “good violence” because it was a kind of violence that ended violence rather than escalating it because of its unanimous character. It is the unanimous agreement to commit murder evident in sacrifices offered in primitive religions that washes clean the hands of individuals who take part in sacrificial violence.

From sacrifice religion is born because the victim of unanimity who was in the first place the cause of crisis becomes the source of reconciliation which can only be brought about by a divine personality. It is only a god that has power to cause crisis and to reconcile a community in crisis. Although religion is born through the repetition of the reconciling murders of the past which ended the mimetic crisis, religion itself enhances this whole process by repeating it, at

59 Ibid., 78

each time disguising the violence done to the victim by calling the sacrificed victim sacred.

Religion uses violence (violence to the sacrificial victim) in order to stop violence. Satan survives on this continued action of religion. The Sacralization of the scapegoat is an unintended outcome of the identifying and finally the lynching of the victim. For Girard religion in culture has an important function to bury the original acts of violence against the victim. In Genesis it is expressed by Cain’s cover up of Abel’s murder which comes as a result of Cain’s desire to have the being of Abel and what Abel had from God. “We should envisage the possibility that all human institutions, and therefore humanity itself, are rooted in sacrifice. Humanity springs forth from religion, i.e., from the founding murders (anyone killed not as retaliatory act, Abel…Jesus) and the rituals that spring from them.”⁶¹ The true source of culture is located in the violence endemic to mimesis itself.

This led Girard to argue for a ‘non-sacrificial’⁶² reading of the death of Jesus Christ, a position that dissatisfied many exegetes because there was no way that the death of Jesus Christ could not be understood in sacrificial terms. In his Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, Girard categorically spurns the idea of understanding the death of Christ and reading the gospels in a sacrificial manner because in his view the gospels are aimed at unveiling the lie of the scapegoat mechanism on which sacrifice is built. This led him to deny all allusions to Christ’s death as another sacrifice. A position he has reconsidered in his interview with James Williams recorded in The Girard Reader. He answers Williams’ question on his position on non-sacrificial reading of the Gospel by saying, “I have come to be more positive about the word

‘sacrificial,’ so I would like first of all to make a distinction between sacrifice as murder and

61 Ibid., 93

62 René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 180

sacrifice as renunciation.”⁶³ Sacrifice as a renunciation is a movement toward freedom from mimesis as potentially acquisitive and rivalry. Girard here acknowledges Schwager’s critique as the most sober one. Schwager argues that Girard’s non-sacrificial interpretation of the gospels is justified on the pretext that Christ’s death is different from the sacrifices in the context of primitive societies. “Christ’s self-offering has nothing in common with that process whereby those sacrificing unconsciously offload their collective aggression onto some victim… the new meaning of sacrifice emerged above all in the course of the Old Testament, the notion of sacrifice was progressively linked to the idea of obedience (Gen. 22:1-19; Sam 15:22; Is 1:11-17).⁶⁴ It is founded on the obedience of the Son to the Father in the Spirit, in their eternal self-emptying love, on solidarity with the victims of sin and evil whom Christ substitutes and does not want to leave isolated and abandoned by God. Girard concludes his long project of unveiling the mechanisms of the culture of death by positing that the Bible especially the gospels expose the false mystification of the scapegoat mechanism.