I.

Violence and the Sacred showed that virtually every god or hero of classical myth boasts an ambiguity of character that previous theories of myth could not fully resolve. Thus Apollo both sends plagues and restores health; Oedipus saves Thebes from a monster and then perpetrates a monstrosity that threatens to destroy Thebes. As mentioned, many readers of Violence and the Sacred judged the book a scandal on the interpretation that Girard condoned the violence he had unearthed at the foundation of social order and sacred narrative. Things Hidden since the Beginning of the World (1977) set the record straight, as did The Scapegoat (1981). In both, Girard advanced the argument that the tragic plight of the sacrificial order (social cohesion dependent on a murder) could only be overthrown by a new religious dispensation that he located in the Old Testament and the Gospel. The function of this new dispensation is revelatory: the prophets and later Jesus, through His Passion, lay bare the sacrificial structure of society; by rehabilitating the victim, as Girard says, the Passion rendered “the scapegoat mechanism” overt and cancelled its effectiveness except under a kind of bad faith. The Passion never ended sacrifice, but the working of the Gospel Logos in Western society has, century by century, made it more difficult to blame social ills on victims, the old stock-in-trade of myth and diatribe. The Scapegoat culminates Girard’s main phase, but his later work returns to the basic insights of the 1960s and 70s in reflective, distanced ways that are especially valuable for those coming to terms with Girard for the first time.

Consider, for example, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (2001), with its nuanced return to such themes as mimesis, dissimulation, the scapegoat mechanism, and the “anti-sacrificial” character of Jewish and Christian revelation.

The book’s title comes from Luke (10:18), “I see Satan fall like lightning,” but the author intends also a Miltonic resonance, with implications for a politicized century. The Biblical name Satan, says Girard, designates the scapegoat mechanism and the knot of human problems that ritual murder brutally addresses. The Bible radically opposes the persecution of innocent parties that characterizes primitive and archaic religion: “The opposition between the scapegoat concealed in mythology and unconcealed in Judaism and Christianity illuminates not only archaic religions, not only many neglected features of the Gospel, but above all the relation between the two, the unique truth of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Turning to the Old Testament, Girard examines the Decalogue, with special attention to the tenth commandment, and the story of Cain and Abel, both from the perspective of his scapegoat theory. The tenth and longest—and in Girard’s analysis the chief—commandment abjures the faithful in the second person: “Not [to] 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” (Exodus 20:17).

Girard notes that the archaic English verb to covet “suggests that an uncommon desire is prohibited . . . but the Hebrew term translated as ‘covet’ means just simply ‘desire.’” The same verb occurs in Genesis where it describes Eve’s ardent gusto for the contraband apple. “The notion that the Decalogue devotes its supreme commandment . . . to the prohibition of a marginal desire reserved for a minority is hardly likely,” Girard argues; it follows that, “the desire prohibited by the tenth commandment must be the desire of all human beings—in other words, simply desire as such.” The nineteenth century novelists merely sustain the interest of civilized people in the phenomenon of mimesis. One of the precursors of all novelistic vanity-stories, the Biblical saga of the mimetic rivalry between Cain and Abel, recounts a conflict so generative that the Old Testament author boldly derives from it the totality of culture.

“When we examine the great stories of origin and the founding myths,” Girard writes, “we notice that they themselves proclaim the fundamental and founding role of the victim and his or her unanimous murder.” The Oedipus saga supplies an exemplary case, especially in Sophocles’ dramatic retelling, which unfolds like an episode of Crime Scene, complete with a review of the supposed evidence. In Oedipus at Colonus, the exiled sinner even becomes a god. The Genesis story of Cain and Abel distinguishes itself from myth, however, by being “the biblical interpretation of all founding myths,” bringing forward motifs that the myths, as such, take care to conceal. First exposed is the explicit cause of the murder, Cain’s covetousness of his brother, whose hunter’s offerings appear to please God more than Cain’s farmer’s offerings. Like a secondary character in a Stendhal or Dostoyevsky or Proust novel, Abel seems to the primary character to monopolize status and being. Cain murders his brother and tries to conceal his act. Girard remarks that details of Genesis make it clear that “the human race is not limited at that time to Cain and his two parents”; rather, “the name ‘Cain’ designates the first community gathered around the first founding murder.” Only on this hypothesis can one explain Cain’s anguished recognition, on being discovered as a homicide, that now he has set the bloody precedent, he himself will likely fall violently at the hand of another.