Presupuestos parciales

The Bible (both the Old Testament and the gospels) reveals to us that all human beings are terrible scapegoaters and rivalrous imitators (Gen. 3:1-7; Lev. 16: 5-10; Ex. 20: 17-20; Jn. 8:

1-8; 8:30-44). It is only through God’s action in Jesus Christ that things can be different because he has revealed the mimetic character, the covetousness, and the rivalry of all human desires.

68 René Girard, I See Satan Fall like Lightning, 172

69 Ibid., 172

The tenth commandment and the gospel of John chapter eight demonstrate how the Bible reveals the lie of Satan. Girard argues that we can find a summary of the mimetic anthropology of the synoptic gospels made manifest in the attitudes of the Pharisees and scribes (Mt 23:13, hypocrites, Mt 23:29-33 children of the murderers of the prophets, working to complete their ancestor’s work, people of hard hearts like those in the parable of the evil vine-growers Mk 12:1-12). All this is condensed in a conversation between Jesus and his Jewish opponents in the fourth gospel (Jn 8:30-44). In a pericope of only fifteen verses John defines anew the consequences of rivalistic imitation.

Jesus challenges his opponents who think that they are children of Abraham, and hence God alone is their father. Jesus argues that their behavior evidently portrays who their father is, Satan.

Jesus said to them, ‘If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now I am here. I did not come on my own, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot accept my word. You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies (John 8:42-44).

Schwager sums up the accusation Jesus makes against his opponents in three distinct elements found in the text. “Their self-interpretation is false, because 1) they have a satanic spirit, with its tendencies 2) to murder, and 3) to lie.”⁷¹ John sums up the synoptic gospels where Jesus always pointed to the actions of the Pharisees as hypocritical and vehemently charged them as the sons of the murderers of the prophets, and builders of the tombs of the prophets as if they disapprove their fathers’ deeds, by arguing that they are from their father the devil. All they do is to disguise who they are, murderers themselves.

71 Ά̮ϳΡΩ΢͆ Ί̼Άϭ̮ͼ͊θ΁ ͡ΆθΉμφ͞μ D̮͊φΆ ̮΢͆ φΆ͊ ΃θΩεΆ͊φΉ̼ θΉφΉηϡ͊ Ω͔ Ί̮̼θΉ͔Ή̼͊΁͢ 114

Schwager makes a connection between the actions of the Jews and Cain who murdered his brother Abel as acts in imitation of Satan, murderer from the beginning. “The Jews are dominated by a very specific basic principle impulse: Satan’s spirit, a murderous spirit. The formulation ‘murderer from the beginning’ could very well be an allusion to the murder of Abel.

Jesus bears witness to the Jews that they are possessed by the same spirit as Cain was. They are in no way better than the first murderer.”⁷² John sharpens this accusation in its three forms by saying they do the desire of their father which is to lie and to murder. In the synoptic gospels Jesus is accused of blasphemy (Mk 14:16), in John the opponents level the same accusation against Jesus even in a more radical way. “Merely a man, he had made himself out to be God (Jn 10:33; 19:7), something which is an essential characteristic of Satan. Now all is applied to him, all that he had uncovered in his opponents. He had shown their sin to be due to 1) their satanic spirit, 2) in lying, 3) and murder, and he himself is accused of 1) having a satanic spirit, 2) he is condemned by the lies of perjured witnesses, and 3) violently executed.”⁷³ In this analysis God and Satan are two arch-models, with Satan as of a treacherous spirit, a model of deception, and murderous intensions.

Girard draws from ethnological and anthropological analyses all these three elements in a phrase, “scapegoat Mechanism.” In the final analysis it is established in Girard that Jesus is condemned and executed as a scapegoat. However, Schwager makes an intriguing remark about any reference to Jesus as a scapegoat. He says:

In contrast to the purely sociological mechanism, there is in what happens to Jesus a universal process at work, which is directed not against some accidental victim, but intentionally against

72 Raymund Schwager, Must there be Scapegoats: Violence and Redemption in the Bible, 158

one who proclaims a God of unconditional love of the enemies, and against one who in a unique way understands himself as a Son of God the Father. As such he does not allow himself to be integrated into his opponents’ system of lies and to be interiorly conquered by them. He can no longer be sacralized, but must be “satanized,” and so is able to fully reveal his hidden truth at Easter.⁷⁴

Schwager makes an important point here because what Jesus reveals is more than merely sociological, it is ontological. Jesus unveils not only the sociological mechanism of repudiating violence but more than this he reveals his ontological relation with the Father in the Spirit, a relationship of love. We will return to this point at a proper time.

From the Old Testament perspective, Girard argues that the story of the Fall in Genesis and the second half of the Ten Commandments prohibit violence against the neighbor. The commands are you shall not: kill, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness against your neighbor. All these commands are directed to the property of the neighbor but the tenth commandment prohibits not simply acts against the neighbor but desire itself. “You shall not covet the house of your neighbor. You shall not covet the wife of your neighbor, nor his male or female slave, nor his ox or ass, nor anything that belongs to him” (Exod. 20: 17). Girard says,

“the Hebrew term translated as ‘covet’ means just simply ‘desire.’ This is the word that designates the desire of Eve for the prohibited fruit, the desire leading to the original sin.”⁷⁵ In the story of the Fall we recognize the trajectory which desire takes: “But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate” (Gen. 3:4-6). In a single moment the contagiousness of

74 Ibid., 116

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

mimetic desire made the tree become good for food, delightful to the eyes, desirable for its possibility to bequeath wisdom and above all its ability to make them gods. This is all because God was now rendered a rival who did not want Eve and Adam to appropriate what God enjoyed. This is why in (Exod. 20:17) it is simply desire that is prohibited in the command. The word ‘covet’ for Girard should be understood simply as ‘desire’ with no other ideas of a perverse longing which surround this notion in modern reading of the term. The whole argument here is that desire for the neighbor’s property is the most common thing and if it was not forbidden, then in every community there would have been war of all against all because of the other.

The state of affairs is that humans desire what others have or are or what others desire.

Therefore human rivalry lies at the heart of most human relationship such that forbidding desire for the things and indeed the person of the neighbor prevents internal violence. The neighbor is important because it is the neighbor’s things or desires that are desired. The things and the desires of the neighbor can pass away but the neighbor doesn’t, making his/her presence the source of desire. It is for this that the tenth commandment in the final analysis turns to the neighbor who endures rather than things which pass. “Since the objects we should not desire and nevertheless do desire always belong to the neighbor, it is clearly the neighbor who renders them desirable. In the formulation of the prohibition, the neighbor must take the place of the object, and indeed he does take their place in the last phrase of the sentence that prohibits no longer objects enumerated one by one (wife, slave, ox or ass) but ‘anything that belongs to him (the neighbor).”⁷⁶ Here the tenth commandment unveils what we have already treated at length that it is the neighbor who is the model of our desires.

Desire leads to idolization of the neighbor, the sin of Adam and Eve who idolized God by desiring to be gods. This was Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s (1775-1854) mistake when he thought of God as an idolized (idealized) self because he looked at God as model of his desire to becoming an actualized human being. Therefore the tenth commandment is the completion or the explanation of the first commandment which forbids worshiping other gods because idolatry is based on mimetic desire. Through mimetic desire you render divine the neighbor whom you unconsciously worship and whom you must eventually destroy if you are to be as he/she is. The Bible is a reverse of the violent mimetic contagion because its goal is that we might become the image of Christ whose only desire is not to do his own will but to desire the Father’s pure desire.

Jesus is the perfect imitator of the Father who “makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust” (Mt 5: 45). This shows us another way of imitation because it is directed by mutual self-emptying love for the other, not rivalry. For God prefers mercy to sacrifice. Unconditional love is the nature of God and it is the original object and form of imitation, distorted by the father of lies. So, we can conclude that “the best way of preventing violence does not consist in forbidding objects, or even rivalristic desire, as the tenth commandment does, but in offering to people the model that will protect them from mimetic rivalries rather than involving them in these rivalries.”⁷⁷ Christ, the manifestation of God in flesh is such a model of the nonviolent contagion, the contagion of love.