Pascal on the War Between Violence and Truth

"It is a strange and tedious war when violence attempts to vanquish truth. All the efforts of violence cannot weaken truth, and only serve to give it fresh vigor. All the lights of truth cannot arrest violence, and only serve to exasperate it."

Blaise Pascal, Pensées: Provincial Letters, trans. W.F. Trotter and Thomas M'Crie (New York: The Modern Library, 1941), letter 12, p. 498.

Pascal on the Human Condition

"The knot of our condition takes its twist and turns in this abyss, so that man is more unintelligible without this mystery than this mystery is unintelligible to man."

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004), p. 37.

Girard: Money Replaces the Scapegoat

"What symbolizes the link among people and prevents them from 'coming to blows' also has a sacred origin: money replaces the victim on whose head people used to find reconciliation."

René Girard, "Duel and Reciprocity" in Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010), p. 59.

Girard on the Passing of Politics' Capacity to Control War

"Once he has described the trend to extremes, Clausewitz thus has difficulty convincing us that politics can still control war. History is accelerating beyond our control. We have to accept that its course will increasingly escape rational management."

René Girard, "Duel and Reciprocity" in Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010), pp. 53-54

Girard on the Future of Europe

"This kind of French positivism, which still lingers today, is all the more ridiculous in that it refuses to see that France has not been among the 'superpowers' leading the world since 1940. Either Europe will emerge as a whole, or its components will become pathetic specks of dust, like the Greek cities under the Roman Empire and the Italian status until Napoleon III."

René Girard, "Clausewitz and Hegel" in Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010), p. 41.

René Girard on the Ease by which Violence Infiltrates Reality

"Clausewitz.... reminds us that the more rationalist we become, in other words, the more we forget perceptible reality and history, the faster and more violently reality and history are brought back to mind."

René Girard, "Clausewitz and Hegel" in Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010), p. 37.

René Girard on Consciousness

"It is obvious that, for there to be recognition, the master, who makes me exist simply by looking at me, must not be killed! Human consciousness is not acquired through reason, but through desire."

René Girard, "Clausewitz and Hegel" in Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010), p. 31.

Foucault on Events

"An event is neither substance, nor accident, nor quality, nor process; events are not corporeal. And yet, an event is certainly not immaterial; it takes effect, becomes effect, always on the level of materiality.... Let us say that the philosophy of event shoudl advance in the direction, at first sight paradoxical, of an incorporeal materialism."

Michel Foucault, "The Discourse on Language"

Girard on the Antichrist

"The other totalitarianism does not openly oppose Christianity but outflanks it on its left wing. [...] The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and 'radicalizes' the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be 'revolutionary' now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions. [...] The New Testament evokes this process in the language of the Antichrist."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), pp. 180-181.

Girard on Intelluctual's Adoration of Paganism

"Since the Renaissance, paganism has enjoyed among our intellectuals a reputation for transparency, sanity, and health that nothing can shake. Paganism is favorably perceived as always opposes to everything 'unhealthy' that Judaism and Christianity impose. [...] The intellectuals and other cultural elites have promoted Christianity to the role of number one scapegoat."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 179.

The Parodox of Christianity's Retreat in Girard

"This disintegration entails the retreat of religion almost everywhere, and this includes, paradoxically, the retreat of Christianity itself because 'sacrificial' vestiges from the past have contaminated it for such a long time that it remains vulnerable to the attacks of numerous enemies."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 179.

Girard on PostChristendom

"The majestic inauguration of the 'post-Christian era' is a joke. We are living through a carcatural 'ultra-Christianity' that tries to escape from the Judeo-Christian orbit by 'radicalizing' the concern for victims in an anti-Christian manner."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 179.

Girard and Modernity's Absolute

"The rise of 'victim power' coincides, not at all by accident, with the arrival of the first planetary culture. [...] I connect it with modern to underline the paradox of a value whose recent historical arrival in no way prevents it from asserting itself as the immutable and eternal. There were those who told us not long ago that human life existed in an absolute void of meaning. True enough, the old absolutes have collapsed - humanism, rationalism, revolution, science itself. And yet even today this absolute void does not prevail. There is the concern for victims, and it is that value, for better or worse, that dominates the total planetary culture in which we live. The world becoming one culture is the fruit of this concern and not the reverse."

"This new stage of culture has come about due neither to scientific progress nor to the market economy nor to the 'history of metaphysics.' [concern for victims] has directed the evolution of our world behind the scenes. If the concern for victims has fully appeared, it is because all the great expressions of modern thought are exhausted and discredited. After all the ideological collapses, our intellectuals believed they could settle down into the easy life of a nihilism without obligations or sanctions. But our nihilism is a pseudo-nihilism."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), pp. 177-178.

Girard on the Modern Absolute

"Since the concern for victims becomes widespread only in the modern world, we might think that it would marginalize us in relation to the past, but this is not so. It is the concern for victims that marginalizes the past. We hear repeated in every way that we no longer have an absolute. But the inability of Nietzsche and Hitler to demolish the concern for victims and then later the embarrassed silence of the latter day Nietzscheans show for sure that this concern is not relative. It is our absolute."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 177.

Girard on Hitlerism and Nihilism

"In spite of its victims without number, Hitler's murderous enterprise ended in failure. It has had a twofold effect: it has accelerated the concern for victims, but it has also demoralized it. Hitlerism avenges its failure by making the concern for victims hysterical, turning it into a kind of caricature. yet in a world where relativism has seemingly defeated religion and every 'value' that is religious in origin, the concern for victims is more alive than ever. [...] but a dark pessimism took over the second half of the twentieth century. Although understandable, this reaction is as excessive as the arrogance preceding it."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 176.

Girard on the Pardox of Christianity's Advance and Decline

"Christian truth has been making an unrelenting historical advance in our world. Paradoxically, it goes hand in hand with the apparent decline of Christianity. The more Christianity besieges our world, in the sense that it besieged Nietzsche before his collapse, the more difficult it becomes to escape it by means of innocuous painkillers and tranquilizers such as the 'humanistic' compromises of our dear old positivist predecessors."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 174.

Girard on Knowledge as Social Transformation

"The most effective power of transformation is not revolutionary violence but the modern concern for victims. [...] it is the knowledge that separates the ritual meaning of the expression 'scapegoat' from its modern meaning. it deepens continually, and soon the mimetic reading of the structure of persecution will become more and more widespread. [...] Each time a new frontier is crossed, those whose interests are damaged oppose this change intensely."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 168.

Girard on the Effect of the Modern Victim Concept

"The cultures that were still autonomous cultivated all sorts of solidarity - familial, tribal, and national - but they did not recognize the victim as such, the anonymous and unknown victim, in the sense in which we say 'the unknown soldier.' Prior to this discovery there was no humanity in the full sense except within a fixed territory. Today all these local, regional, and national identities are disappearing: 'Ecco homo.' The essential thing in what goes now as human rights is an indirect acknowledgment of the fact that every individual or every group can become the 'scapegoat' of their own community. Placing emphasis on human rights amounts to a formerly unthinkable effort to control uncontrollable processes of mimetic snowballing."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), pp. 167-168.

Girard on Victimization in the Modern World

"The victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors. And our neighbors do the same... In our world, in short, where we are all bombarding each other with victims... From now on we have our antisacrificial rituals of victimization, and they unfold in an order as unchangeable as properly religious rituals. First of all we lament the victims we admit to making or allowing to be made. Then we lament the hypocrisy of our lamentation, and finally we lament Christianity, the indispensable scapegoat, for there is no ritual without a victim, and in our day Christianity is always it, the scapegoat of last resort. As part of this last stage of the ritual, we affirm, in a nobly suffering tone, that Christianity has done nothing to 'resolve the problem of violence.'"

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 164.

Girard on Modern Pyschology

"this insight regarding scapegoats and scapegoating is a real superiority of our society over all previous societies, but like all progress in knowledge it also offers occasions to make evil worse. [...] Scapegoating phenomenon cannot survive in many instances except by becoming more subtle, by resorting to more and more complex casuistry in order to elude the self-criticism that follows scapegoaters like their shadow. [...] In a world deprived of sacrificial safeguards, mimetic rivalries are often physically less violent, but they insinuate themselves into the most intimate relationships... they become relationships of doubles, of enemy twins. This text enables us to identify the true origin of modern 'psychology.' [...] yes, we have changed a little since the time of archaic rituals but less than we would like to believe."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), pp. 159-160.

Girard on the Legacy of Christianity

"The modern understanding of 'scapegoats' is simply part and parcel of the continually expanding knowledge of the mimetic contagion that governs events of victimization. The Gospels and the entire Bible nourished our ancestors for so long that our heritage enables us to comprehend these phenomenon and condemn them."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 155.

Girard on the Mimetic Circle and Modernity

"Mythical-ritual societies are prisoners of a mimetic circle that they cannot escape since they are unable to identify it. This continues to be true today: all our ideas about humankind, all our philosophies, all our social sciences, all our psychological theories, etc. are fundamentally pagan because they are based on a blindness to the circularity of mimetic conflict and contagion. [...] To be a 'child of the devil' in the sense of the Gospel of John, as we have seen, is to be locked into a deceptive system of mimetic contagion that can only lead into systems of myth and ritual. Or, in our time, it leads into those more recent forms of idolatry, such as ideology or the cult of science."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), pp. 149-151.

Palm Sunday - Reconstructing Triumph

Matthew 21:1-11

“When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, ² saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. ³ If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” ⁴ This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying,

⁵ “Tell the daughter of Zion,
Look, your king is coming to you,
    humble, and mounted on a donkey,
        and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

⁶ The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; ⁷ they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. ⁸ A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. ⁹ The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting,

“Hosanna to the Son of David!
    Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

¹⁰ When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” ¹¹ The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”

Sermon:

          This past week I went onto Amazon and ordered a DVD miniseries from the late 1970’s called, The Winds of War. It was a short TV series created as an adaptation of a two-volume novel by the same name. I saw the series for the first time a number of years ago with my parents, but it had been on my mind a lot lately so I decided to order it. When I tried to explain to my roommates why I had made such an unusual purchase, I tried to sum it up by saying that the series could basically be described as a “Jane Austin novel written by a dude who likes war stories.” One of my roommates looked at me, blinked, and then said, “So, basically nothing like Jane Austin.”

          The point I would like to get to though is a scene from the first volume of the series. Early on in the movie, one of the protagonists, a Navy Commander who everyone calls “Pug” sets sail on a German ship with his wife to head to a new posting as the Naval Attaché in Nazi Germany. While on board, Pug becomes friendly with a German General who ensures that they are able to dine at a better table. When it comes time to toast Hitler, a British diplomat immediately sits down in a rather dramatic display. This is soon followed by a discussion between the German General, the British diplomat, and the U.S. Commander. One of the most fascinating parts of the conversation, however, is a comments the German makes when he states, “You made Hitler, you know, with your Versailles Treaty. Democracy, dictatorship, monarchy, they’re all variations on the same theme – please the mob!” It’s a catchy line precisely because there’s something to it. It is, obviously, far too simplistic and yet most of us would probably agree that every form of government has to please the mob. If you had to read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in High School, it’s a principle you would understand well.

          The event described in today’s scripture touches on this theme. It’s the beginning of a sequence of events that spiral into Christ’s trial, execution, and resurrection. There is a paradox, an intrinsic contradiction, in the event that we celebrate today. We, the heirs of this story and this tradition, are privileged because we already know the course of events and what their significance is. The crowd in this story, however, is not aware of the paradox that they are enacting. We know that they were celebrating the entry of someone they believed to be the new King of the Jews – the Messiah who would liberate them from the clutches of Roman imperial control. They understood the significance of the symbolism inherent to this kind of entry – the donkey, the cloaks, the palm branches. For nearly a hundred years they had been yearning for a leader who could lead a military revolt, like the Maccabees, but many had tried and failed. Even some of Jesus’ own disciples believed that this was the “Kingdom of Heaven” that Jesus so often referred to.

          So, when we read about this scene where people line the streets and celebrate the entrance of their Messiah, we are seeing something that is incredibly ironic. They are celebrating the entrance of a man who they will crucify at the end of the week. They are not, in fact, celebrating the coming Kingdom of God, but the kingdom that they themselves hope to build. They are celebrating a nationalistic, militaristic, ethnocentric, political vision of their own salvation. This is the paradox. The crowd is, in fact, celebrating something that they don’t understand. In all likelihood, they are celebrating something that they would likely abhor. And yet, they do so because it fulfilled the words of the prophets who their ancestors killed and whose fate Jesus is tied to at the end of today’s scripture when Matthew writes, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.” This is why Jesus calls attention to the people’s hypocrisy only two chapters after today’s passage when he states that:

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous, ³⁰ and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ ³¹ Thus you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets. ³² Fill up, then, the measure of your ancestors. ³³ You snakes, you brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell? ³⁴ Therefore I send you prophets, sages, and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town, ³⁵ so that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. ³⁶ Truly I tell you, all this will come upon this generation.” (Matt. 23:29-36)

Jesus takes a moment here to teach us that children often repeat “the crimes of their fathers precisely because they [believe that they] are morally superior to them.”[1] When community’s gather around a scapegoat to kill it, they are enacting a form of violence that stands at the center of human origins. That is why Jesus refers to the murder of Abel. Abel’s murder results in the first law and ritual that prohibits murder. Most of us know this, but the part that we often forget is that Abel’s murder also creates the first nation – a people set apart by a mark and a crime.

          When the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote the Leviathan soon after the English Civil War he was not far off from the Biblical account when he suggested that the origins of civilization rest in “the war of all against all.” The crime of Cain is the crime of humanity. If we look to the Ten Commandments, we will notice that the second half are directed at one’s relationship to one’s neighbor.

          You shall not kill.

          You shall not commit adultery.

          You shall not steal.

          You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

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)

There’s a reason why this last commandment is the longest and most explicit. It’s the most important, precisely because it is our desires that generate all of those other sins. We are shaped by the people around us. Their desires affect our desires and their possessions retain a quality that we too often wish to possess. Rivalry exists at the heart of human relations. This is even evident when we look at our own mythologies of “keeping up with the Jones’” or the “American Dream.” There is something fundamental to this and it feeds into the ways that crowds behave.

          But this is also where the Biblical witness is unique among all world religions. The Judeo-Christian tradition is full of stories where the “turmoil” that we hear about in verse 10 of today’s passage turns into a chaotic scene where the crowds must release their anxiety in a violent assassination of a victim, which the Bible calls a ‘scapegoat.’ Matthew ends today’s passage with a foreshadow of what is to come precisely because it is a repetition of what we can find throughout the stories that precede it. Crowds become frustrated by the inhibition of their own desires and they find targets to kill as a result. John the Baptist was beheaded because the daughter of his wife whipped a crowd up into a frenzy with a dance. The Suffering Servant in Second-Isaiah dies at the hands of a hysterical mob that lynches him. The Bible is, in fact, full of stories about the collective lynching of a prophet and the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is essentially the same.

          And this is precisely what makes Christianity unique. Christianity shines a light upon this fundamental human tendency and exposes the crime for what it is. Christianity asserts that the victims are, in fact, innocent. It is the first religion to protect the weak, the vulnerable, and the marginalized. Almost all world religions have a single victim at the source of their theology.

“[In] India: the dismemberment of the primordial victim, Purusha, by a mob offering sacrifices produces the caste system. [And] We find similar myths in Egypt, in China, among the German peoples – everywhere.”[2]

Humanity has universally emerged out of the idea that the body of a victim often germinates to produce new life. But Christianity is unique in its protest. Why all the other world religions, particularly paganism, highlight the efficacy of sacrifice Christianity points out the sin at the heart of all of this. The victim is not demonized and then transformed into something else. The victim, the marginalized person, who is targeted by a community experiencing chaos is always held up as a descendent of Abel.

          Christianity is unique because it says that God Himself, came to earth, to die and suffer at the hands of a race enraptured with this practice of objectification and scapegoating. And in the process God offered us something else in the person and work of Jesus Christ. He offered us a different path – a path of peace and illumination. When we look to a theology of the cross, what we really find is a spotlight. The cross is a spotlight that shines onto each and every one of our personal moments of triumphal entry. When we rise up to celebrate ourselves and our own desires, the cross has the power – through the witness of the Resurrection – to show us a reflection of ourselves. It has the power to make us stare into the painting that killed Dorian Gray.

          The only way to celebrate Palm Sunday properly, is to look forward. We celebrate the coming of a King who represents a Kingdom not our own. We celebrate the coming of a King who offers us the opportunity to transform ourselves into something far more beautiful. We celebrate a Messiah who offers us a salvation far beyond what we could imagine for ourselves. When we wave our palms, and sing our songs we do so from this side of history, a side that sees this moment as the transformational event it really is. This is precisely why the German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche hate Christianity. He recognized that is intrinsically associated with democracy and holds an absolute concern for victims. Judaism and Christianity are unique in this regard and this is precisely where their power lies. Christ compels us to follow in His Way, which through the power of the Holy Spirit, leads us towards a path that moves us beyond our own narrow-minded shortcoming, and towards a vision of the world as God sees it.

---

[1] Réne Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 20.

[2] Réne Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 82.

Girard on the Paradox of Hostility Toward Religion

"The modern tendency to minimize religion could well be, paradoxically, the last remnant among us of religion itself in its archaic form, which seeks to keep the sacred at a safe distance. The trivialization of religion reflects a supreme effort to conceal what is at work in all human institutions, the religious avoidance of violence between members of the same community."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 93.

Girard on the Woman Caught in Adultery

"Jesus transcends the Law, but in the Law's own sense and direction. He does this by appealing to the most humane aspect of the legal prescription, the aspect most foreign to the contagion of violence, which is the obligation of the two accusers to throw the first two stones. The Law deprives the accusers of a mimetic model."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), pp. 58-59.

Girard on Cyclical Violence

"The more one is crucified, the more one burns to participate in the crucifixion of someone more crucified than oneself."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 21.

René Girard on why we think we are superior to Peter

"The children repeat the crimes of their fathers precisely because they believe they are morally superior to them. This false difference is already the mimetic illusion of modern individualism, which represents the greatest resistance to the mimetic truth that is reenacted again and again in human relations. The paradox is that the resistance itself brings about the reenactment."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 20.

René Girard on the Disappearance of Real Differences

People "have ears only for the deceptive celebration of differences, which rages more than ever in our societies, not because real differences are increasing but because they are disappearing."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 13.

René Girard on the Paradox of Desire

"The more desperately we seek to worship ourselves and to be good 'individualists,' the more compelled we are to worship our rivals in a cult that turns to hatred."

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 11.

Being in Plato's 'Sophist'

"Then since we are in perplexity, do you tell us plainly what you wish to designate when you say “being.” For it is clear that you have known this all along, whereas we formerly thought we knew, but are now perplexed. So first give us this information, that we may not think we understand what you say, when the exact opposite is the case."

Plato, Sophist, 244a.

Heidegger on the Relation of Being and Time

"[F]initude is not some property that is merely attached to us, but is our fundamental way of being."

Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 5.

Epicurus on Death

"So death, the most frightening of bad things, is nothing to us; since when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist. Therefore, it is relevant neither to the living nor to the dead, since it does not affect the former, and the latter do not exist."

Epicurus, The Epicurus Reader, eds. B. Inwood & L.P. Gerson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), p. 29.

Montaigne on Death and Philosophy

"To philosophize is to Learn How to Die... study and contemplation draw our souls, somewhat outside ourselves, keeping them occupied away from the body, a state which both resembles death and which forms a kind of apprenticeship for it."

Michel de Montaigne, "To Philosophize is to learn How to Die" [1580] in The Essays: A Selection, ed. M.A. Screech (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 17.