A Millennial critique of Rene Girards thesis on scapegoating

SEPTEMBER 01, 2008 RICHARD LANDES 20 COMMENTS

N.B.: The following is an essay I wrote several years ago while working on early Christian
millennialism. Its a critique of Ren Girards work on the subject, in particular, the ideas he
delineated in a book with the modest title of Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World.
Im posting it here partly because Yaakov of Breath of the Beast is working through some of
Girards ideas and we have come to similar critiques of this seminal thinkers provocative work. I
also welcome any suggestions or criticisms from readers, even though this is not in the main
stream of this blogs focus. The essay is neither polished, nor fully footnoted; consider it a draft.
According to Girard, the New Testament (NT) stands apart from all previous thinking on
sacrifice, with the partial exception of Judaism, because, rather than declare the sacrificial victim
guilty, the victim is the very image of purity and innocence. Thus a mythical implosion occurs.
This unjust sacrifice of the innocent extinguishes the self-regenerating mentality of sacrificing
the guilty, thus putting an end to scapegoating. The notion has problems with handling Jewish
materials, something especially evident in the work of Hamerton-Kelly, whose anti-Judaic
tendencies flourish under his apologetic pen.
What strikes the millennial scholar here, however, is the depiction of Jesus as innocent. Granted
Girard is working with the myth of Jesus, indeed, Girard regularly and, I think, revealingly,
refers to not to Jesus but to Christ.1 But the myth is self-consciously embedded in a historical
discourse about millennial hopes and apocalyptic expectations which surely much to
amazement of all sides at the time were they to know it but not retrospectively to Girard
continues to flourish to this very day.
From the millennial, that is from the historical rather than mythical point of view, Jesus is not
innocent. On the contrary, he was wrong about the imminence of the apocalypse and,
whatever his intentions, dangerous to those who brought their demotic millennial hopes to the
surface in a prime divider society profoundly hostile to such sentiments, in the case of Jesus,
during the pax romana, whose peace the Romans nailed down, literally, with crucifixion. The
kingdom was not at hand, and he got crucified for simple and predictable reasons by Romans
who had no doubt of his guilt. There may well have been Jewish aristocrats who shared this
perspective, and even invoked the safety of the people (given Roman rule), for their
conservative, prime-divider politics. The disciples, those who developed the myth as well as
those who wrote it down, needed above all to save their faith in their own salvation. And they
chose to do so by denying Jesus error and in so doing, denying their own continuing and
continuously fruitful error of anticipating the end at any moment.
The sacrificial victim in this process of denial was Judaism, especially Pharisaic (later rabbinic)
Judaism. This sacrificial Judaism was judged guilty by Christians for the mere fact that they did
not accept the divine, blameless and faultless messiah of the Christians. Thus, far from putting
an end to scapegoating, NT narratives actually imbedded a new kind of scapegoating into its
very history and salvific myth. For Christians, Christ, Jesus sacralized, was innocent, the Jews
guilty of the double crime of killing the man and denying the God.
Thus it cannot be merely the Saducees who are guilty of killing Jesus, it must be the Pharisees
who are responsible for killing Christ. For the sake of saving themselves from the rocky shores
of cognitive dissonance, Christians consigned their religious parent to perpetual guilt, and, as
we shall see, when Christians gained power, to oppression, prison and death. Girard, despite
his usual acuity in such matters, does not perceive any of this disguised sacrificial activity in the
text, partly because it is crucial to his own reading of the Crucifixion, partly because his entire
effort aims at showing that this text presents the end of sacrificial constructions. Thus he
repeatedly refers to and analyzes the Gospel and the text as if it only needed direct
interpretation, not deconstruction for its silent and disguised sacrificial activity.
Girard accepts the myth because, in his mind, it puts an end to myth. This mimetic desire for a

myth to end all myths shows up in his claims to have the key exegesis that has escaped
everyone before him or as Blake said of Swedenburg, to think that he was the only one who
broke a net. Reading him recalls McLuhans commentabout the works of Freud and Jung as a
laborious translation of the non-literate awareness into literary terms (p. 72). One would have
to imagine a uniformly duped commoner population to imagine that, below the prime divider,
there were not many people with an intuitive sense of what Girard argues about sacrifice. And
among them, the commoners whose elites remained the most committed to articulating those
insights were the Jews.
Such reflections bring us to the intellectual tragedy of Girard, one I think shared by many leftist
intellectuals. He purchases his radical reading, his egalitarian liberation from the constraints of
his elite culture at the price of cutting those insights off from their Jewish origins and social
matrix. Thus he needs to have the Pharisees stand not for mankinds allies, but for mankinds
sinfulness. Their significance lies precisely in the fact that the Pharisees represent the best
that there is and yet still fall short of what Christ now permits/demands (pp. 158-63). In
responding to the disconcertingly harsh and vengeful quality of the curses on the Pharisees
that the Gospels report, he remarks:
There is no contradiction between the choice of the Jews, as it is reaffirmed in the Gospels, and
the texts like those of the curses. If anywhere in the world a religious or cultural form managed
to evade the accusations made against the Pharisees not excluding those that confess Jesus
himself [Christians are also guilty] then the Gospels would not be the truth about human
culture (p. 175).
Girard acknowledges that Judaism has challenged more aggressively than any other extant
religion the mechanisms of scapegoating violence, blaming the sacralized victim, dissembling.
But he then makes the shortcoming of the Old Testament (OT) symptomatic of the whole worlds
failure, and the Christian myth of the innocent sacrifice as the worlds ultimate solution.
His own, supposedly secular, analytic, and undogmatic (indeed he sees himself as a freethinker) but nonetheless totalizing discourse replicates the theology he supposedly
deconstructs. In so doing he creates the necessity of seeing Jesus as divine the only man
who ever, completely broke the chain of mimetic violence and dispenses with any need to pay
attention to a reading that remains within the social framework of those who produced the texts
upon which the NTs discourse is based Jewish communities. On the contrary, they must be
guilty for Christ to be meaningful. Christianity, the religion, he readily admits, fell victim to the
logic it was supposed to transcend, but this Girard reads as the result of a failure of exegesis of
the texts, not of their composition, a cognitive error of readers, not a social betrayal of
composers. He thus replicates the very scapegoating he believes that his reading of the
Gospels at long last permits us to transcend.
Thus, in a typically brilliant but convoluted manner, Girard chides enlightened, post-Holocaust
Christians for their embarrassment before the textual passages that lay the blame on the Jews
indeed the Pharisees for killing Jesus. We must look them straight in the face, he argues, and
realize that we are also as responsible as they for the crucifixion. But rather than apply his own
razor sharp acumen, with which he has faulted and deconstructed all other religious traditions,
including the remarkable if incomplete efforts of OT Judaism, on these NT texts, he treats the
NT with unrestrained reverence, much like a Church father.
Thus he does not discuss nor do his Platonic-style interlocutors bring up the irony that as
they proclaim a Gospel of love these texts scapegoat the Jews indeed the Pharisees for
killing Jesus, how they betray the presence of the very mimetic rivalry and jealous violence that,
Girard has assured us, mark all religions and all cultures and explain their compulsive need to
identify and dispatch sacrificial victims. One could do an extensive analysis of how the very
texts and rituals that early Christian communities came to embrace as the core of their textual
communities, represent the killing of the parent (Judaism), the sacrilizing of the child (a divine

Jesus), and the sacrifice of that child as dissembling seal (crucifixion of innocent God-Man
commemorated and re-enacted in the salvific Eucharist).
In divinizing Jesus, reshaping this extraordinarily consistent transformative demotic millennial
leader who was wrong about the time into a human incarnation of YHVH, early Christians
sealed their break with Judaism. Jews would and did view such an account of the past as
blasphemy and idolatry. Thus in the same breath with which they spoke about a divine Jesus,
Christians cut themselves off from the only communities systematically prepared for a world that
renounces unjust sacrifices and the prime divider societies they consecrate. They won their
struggle with cognitive dissonance at the price of a social rupture that cut them loose from their
demotic millennial roots.
For Girard, apparently, these texts are true (presumably as the Gospel truth, but in Girards
terms, an exegetical truth). He does not think that the mimetic violence and scapegoating that,
he readily admits, mark the behavior and writings of later Christians, comes from the imbedded
example of the text and the symbolic sacrificial rituals with which the community established and
maintained itself. It is due, rather to the fallacious readings that these communities give to the
text. The Christian misinterpretation makes the text one last victim. If we only understand that
it applies to Jews, Christians and everyone else, we can transcend the violence that lies at the
heart of all culture.
The reading is at once a-historical, and a striking lapse in exegetical sophistication for a
deconstructive analyst. It identifies Jesus, the Christ, with his presentation in the Gospels (enter
the Christ of the Gospels), and has no regard for the impact on a community that does not
(cannot?) understand these issues because of how much denial of their acute cognitive
dissonance might have effected the very composition of the texts. With no deconstruction of the
Gospels, Girard replicates the journey of the theologians Jewish guilt, innocent and divine
Jesus, radical, liberating break with an oppressive past. In a sense, his determination to reduce
all desire to mimetic desire, just one of the axiomatic moves that makes his soteriology work,
resembles nothing so much as Augustines determination to project his own psychological
dilemmas onto humanity as an original hence universal sin.2
But this Gospel account of hypocritical and violent Pharisees, whose truth is so important to
Girards account of how we transcend scapegoating, is in fact one of the most powerful
examples of scapegoating and projection in the history of religion. It dismisses precisely those
who have come closest to the building blocks of civil society, and accuses them of killing their
prophets, when they alone among nations, all of whom had prophets, did not repudiate them
and eliminate them, but rather encouraged them, recorded them, preserved and canonized their
radical voice. The Pharisees are the intellectual and spiritual children precisely of these
prophets who form a central element of their religiosity, not of those who killed the prophets.
To claim this prophetic inheritance as Christian (Jesus is the last, the greatest prophet), and
the Pharisees as the inveterate persecutors, was to make a narcissistic claim to purity while
projecting onto the Pharisees the very violence for which Christians were preparing themselves
as they identified with the aggressor and blamed the victim of the Roman prime divider. Instead
of seeing the Pharisees and their rabbinic descendants as representatives of a school dedicated
to precisely the transcendence of scapegoating violence that he himself seeks, Girard and his
disciples like Robert Hammerton-Kelley view them as the enemy par excellence, dissociate
themselves from (later, more grotesque examples of) Christian scapegoating a sacrificial
(mis)reading of the texts and offer anti-myths that mythify history and recycle the blame-game.
But this time, they target the mostly innocent Pharisees as slayers of a sacrifice whose
sacralization makes Him purely innocent rather than guilty of the understandable but
nonetheless deeply embarrassing and dangerous error of announcing the imminence of the
kingdom when it was not imminent.
The story as it played out in the first century was a devastating moral tale that has only in the
last century, especially since the holocaust, begun to get attention. As Frances Parkes put it

eloquently, anti-semitism [I would say anti-Judaism] is the original sin of Christianity.

Understandably, Christians who cherish the great wisdom and loving spirituality of their tradition
prefer not to look these matters too closely. Girard is braver. He scolds them for such an
aversion. Unfortunately, his agenda is not to confront the built-in Christian tendency to
scapegoat directly, but to realize that these texts, taken as (anti-)myths, enable us to transcend.
Such a paradoxical and cerebral approach (no social dimension to any of this) necessarily
cannot handle precisely that which, historically explains both the nature of the sacrifice of Jesus,
and its sacralization into the redemptive sacrifice of Christ. It completely ignores and cannot
analyze apocalyptic expectation and its disappointment, that is the hope of a world without
violence (Girards avowed dream) and the perdurance of the saeculum as a world governed by
violence.
Girard cannot handle the Christian apocalyptic tradition since for him Christs deeds and the
Gospel texts renounce all vengeance, all need for redemptive violence: the NT God has
renounced all of it, even where justifiable (i.e., with the truly wicked). Thus the Second Coming
has no significance for Girard, and the apocalyptic tradition is explained away as a mis-reading
of the Gospel texts. There is no room here for Revelation as a Christian text. This may work for
him, but obviously did not for early Christians. In a sense, Girard is a demotic millennialist with a
transformational apocalyptic scenario made possible by the passage of the two eventful
millennia this book tries to examine. But rather than acknowledge such a (Jewish)
descendance, and link it to an early, optimistic stage of Jesus thinking that could only have
arisen in a culture that had pushed the kind of anti-mimetic thought as far as Jewish iconoclastic
monotheism had, he prefers to see it as a reflection of Jesus the Christs thought, sub specie
aeternitatis. In this sense, he is very much like many Christians of the transformational strand:
as they reject Nietzsche, they demonstrate Nietzsches analysis.
I would not argue that Girard is merely a theologian in the guise of a post-modern culture critic,
although I do think that to be the case. I would argue, rather, that Girard saw in the Gospel texts
a symbolic solution to the deeply discouraging reading of the historical record of religious
discourse that he has articulated around the twin notions of mimetic desire and scapegoating
sacrifice. That he became enamored of the symbolic dare I say mythical dimension of it, and
ceased deconstructing in an enthusiastic rush for exegetical salvation, may reflect his
overwhelmingly cerebral approach to his issues.
Once he reaches the Gospel message, the world of social cohesion falls to the wayside and his
focus turns entirely upon the individual. And this individual becomes at once a locus of spiritual
perfection he must renounce all violence and love unreservedly without even the agreement of
his neighbor and, if the kingdom is to come, the task of all men. For all Girards acuity on the
deep-seated structures of violence in human society, we have no treatment of the anxieties, the
solitude, the intolerable sense of insufficiency, the paranoia that must threaten anyone who tries
to meet such demands while surrounded by people who continue to operate according to the
dominating imperative. It is a kind of liberal apocalypse the loving individual reigns supreme
and society vanishes. And the Jews, who both theologically and psychologically would predict
its failure and avoid its siren call, must be punished for being right.
In a sad irony, Girard is unwilling to apply his own analysis to the Gospel texts. In insisting, after
the Holocaust, that the Gospels continues to offer us the only solution to the problem of selfperpetuating mimetic desire he sounds much like the FBI agent speaking of the Waco debacle:
We didnt do anything wrong and we wont do it again. Such sentiments, understandable as
they may be in people still driven by a mimetic desire to preserve their reputation, still seduced
by a brilliant and totalistic solution to all the worlds ills, ill-suit a sincere modern Christian.
Perhaps one of the superior officers of a police organization concerned with maintaining public
order, and still a carrier of a prime-divider mentality, can take such a stand. But surely not
people committed to a gospel of unqualified love and forgiveness of all, even ones enemies,

one imploring believers to remove the beam in their own eyes before pointing to the mote in the
others.
It may be a difficult task to really break the net, but at this point, necessary. Without it, the
generation of the desert will continue to enter a Promised Land filled with coercion,
ressentiment, and hatred, because Christians treat Jews i.e., those who will not agree with
them as Amalekites. It is time, in other words, for Christianity in both its traditional forms and
its post-modern avatars like Girards, to grow up.
Footnotes:
1. Love of this kind [complete love of ones brother than alone escapes the violent mimesis
involved in the relationship of doubles], has been lived to its end only by Jesus himself. On this
earth, therefore, only the Christ [italics mine] has ever succeeded in equaling God in the
perfection of his love (Things Hidden, p. 215. After citing the NT version of commandments
about loving others as oneself already stated in the Hebrew Bible, Girard then concludes: If the
Son of Man and the Son of God are one and the same, it is because Jesus is the only person to
achieve humanity in its perfect form, and so to be one with the deity (discussion, 215-20).
2. Indeed, one of Augustines anecdotal proofs of original sin is that one can see jealousy on the
face of an infant. This not only illustrates Girards notion of mimetic rivalry, and calls to mind the
first murder Cains sibling rivalry over approval from above but illustrates the role of ADD II
(cant get enough attention). While I do think that ADD II is a universal tendency, I neither think it
is the only motivator in the human psyche, nor do I think it is an inescapable urge. Theories to
the contrary like Augustines original sin and Girards mimetic desire strike me as projection..