“You shall bring the goat whose lot falls to the LORD and sacrifice it as a sin offering. But the goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be presented alive before the LORD to be used for making atonement by sending it into the desert as a scapegoat.” (Leviticus 16: 9-10)
Wolfgang Palaver (from Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory):
Jesus is the innocent victim par excellence because he is not bound to violence and owes nothing to it. It was thus necessary for Jesus to be completely independent of the world for him to uncover the mechanism of violence at work in human culture and for him to become a victim of this violence. In other words, Jesus’ insight into the order of violence had to come from a source outside the human realm. Girard refers to this as "the transcendence of love, a form of transcendence that never acts by means of violence, is never responsible for any violence, and remains radically opposed to violence." Jesus is not dependent on the world of violence in which human beings are trapped. Jesus originates entirely from a God of love and nonviolence.
Only with the help of the grace of God can humanity free itself from the dungeon of scapegoat logic. Jesus’ resurrection is the spectacular sign of the entrance into the world of a power superior to violent contagion.
How, throughout the history of Christianity, did events so often take place that followed the pre-Christian pattern of collective persecution? How could biblical revelation lead to a cultural tradition that radically persecuted minority groups such as Jews and witches? For Girard, historical Christianity is characterized by a sacrificial interpretation of the Gospel Passion and the salvation brought by Jesus, whose death is thus misread as a sacrifice equivalent to those found in archaic religions. Christian theology often interprets the crucifixion of Jesus as a sacrifice ordered from on high to appease the wrath of God. As Girard puts it, “Thanks to the sacrificial reading it has been possible for what we call Christendom to exist for ten or twenty centuries; that is, a culture has existed that is based, like all cultures, on the mythological forms engendered by the founding mechanism of scapegoating. Mankind relies upon a misunderstanding of the Gospel to re-establish cultural forms which remain sacrificial.”
The persecution of other groups is one of the characteristics of sacrificial Christianity; the systematic persecution of Jews, heretics, and witches, as well as all inquisitions, crusades, and religious wars are the direct result of this decisive misunderstanding of scripture. According to Girard, this form of Christianity is a regression to Old Testament conceptions of sacrifice; it is an intermediate form between myth and the gospels.
The equality of all humans before God no longer allows any containment of mimetic rivalry by means of hierarchical differences. With the dawn of modernity, these hierarchical orders collapsed, and the crisis of violence present at the foundation of civilization re-emerged, e.g., Thomas Hobbes’ conception of human equality as a state in which anyone can kill anyone else.
The modern world is at once both better and worse than its predecessors. The biblical unmasking of the scapegoat mechanism does not lead automatically to paradise on earth, but rather to dangers even greater than those that previously existed. The biblical demystification of the world has given rise to modern science and technology, which have provided mankind with the capability to annihilate itself.
Girard references the increasingly virulent struggle in the modern world to be viewed as the victim, a kind of "radicalized victimology". According to Girard, Nietzsche was correct in saying that persecution, in the future, would only take place in the name of victims. The radicalization of the biblical concern for victims is ultimately opposed to the Christian spirit. Girard: “This new totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. Its adherents denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves.” The proponents of this ideology seek the abolition of the Ten Commandments and all other prohibitions in the effort to enable the boundless fulfillment of desire. Mass consumerism constitutes a complete unbridling of desire and threatens a sacrifice of nature in its entirety.
Girard does not preach impending doom, nor does he secretly hope for any act of divine vengeance; instead, he argues that "a radically Christian appropriation of history can only be apocalyptical," as the world is more and more liberated from ancient forms of servitude but also deprived of sacrificial protection.
Girard: “If men turn down the peace Jesus offers them—a peace that is not derived from violence and that, by virtue of this fact, surpasses human understanding—the effect of the gospel revelation will be made manifest through violence, through a cultural crisis whose radical effect will be unprecedented since there is no longer any sacralized victim to stand in the way of its consequences.”
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High on the hill stood a lonely scapegoat...
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