I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by Rene Girard & James G. Williams

Author:Rene Girard & James G. Williams [Girard, Rene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbis Books
Published: 2012-07-12T04:00:00+00:00

OUR INSTITUTIONS have to be the outcome of a slow process of secularization, which is the same thing as a sort of "rationalization," and this process suggests to the functionalists that all culture should be interpreted in terms of utility and practical implementation. Mod-ern research would have found their true origin long ago if it had not been handicapped by its irrational hostility to religion.

We should envisage the possibility that all human institutions, and therefore humanity itself, are rooted in sacrifice. Indeed, to es-cape from animal instinct and arrive at mimetic desire with all its dangers of mimetic conflicts, humans have to discipline their de-sire, and they cannot accomplish that except by means of sacrifices. Humanity springs forth from religion, i.e., from many "founding murders" and the rituals that spring from them. 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 the members of the same community.

The idea of a founding murder often passes for a bizarre invention, a recent aberration, a whim of certain modern intellectuals who are strangers just as much to common sense as to cultural realities. And yet this idea is common to the great stories of origin throughout the world, to the Bible and the Gospels. It is more likely than the various modern theories concerning the origin of societies, which all go back in one form or another to the same persistent, but implausible, idea of the "social contract."

To rehabilitate the belief of the religions that there was a founding murder and to make it scientifically plausible, we must add to this murder the cumulative effects of rituals and to take into account the plasticity of these rituals over an extremely long period of time. Turning this murder into ritual is the first institution and the most fundamental one. It is the mother of all the others, the decisive development in the invention of human culture.

The power behind the emergence of humankind is the repetition of sacrifices in a spirit of cooperation and harmony, and such cooperation and harmony are what make the sacrifices so fruitful. This thesis gives anthropology the temporal dimension missing in its approach to social origins, and it agrees with the doctrines of the religions about themselves. From the moment when the pre-human creature, the human-to-be, passed over a certain threshold of mimetic contagion and the animal instinct of protection against violence collapsed (the dominance patterns), mimetic conflicts must have raged among humankind, but the raging of mimetic conflict quickly produced its own antidote by giving birth to the single victim mechanism, gods, and sacrificial rituals. In spite of their own violence, the sacrificial rituals not only moderated violence but channeled it in positive, humanizing directions.

Because our desires are mimetic, they resemble each other and cluster together in systems of opposition that are obstinate, sterile, and contagious.

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