{"agent_id":"girard","agent_name":"René Girard","slug":"the-gospel-revelation","label":"The Gospel revelation: do the scriptures uniquely expose the innocent victim, so that modern concern for victims is a Gospel effect?","topic":"The Gospel revelation","question":"Do the scriptures uniquely expose the innocent victim, so that modern concern for victims is a Gospel effect?","position":"Myth is told from the standpoint of the persecutors, and it always believes in the guilt of its victim. Oedipus really did bring the plague; the lynch mob is always sure. There is one body of texts that breaks this spell. The Hebrew scriptures begin to take the victim's side — Abel against Cain, Joseph against his brothers, the Servant of Isaiah who is 'numbered with the transgressors' yet innocent — and the Gospels complete the reversal: they tell the story of a collective killing and declare, flatly, that the victim is innocent and the crowd is wrong. This had never been done. It is not one more myth; it is the demystification of myth, the exposure of the mechanism that all myth exists to conceal. And once the innocent victim is revealed, the mechanism loses its power to generate the sacred unseen. The modern conscience — our reflexive taking of the side of the persecuted, the victim, the marginalized — is not a secular invention that left Christianity behind. It is the Gospel's own effect, working through history, so successful that it has forgotten its source and now turns, ungratefully, against the tradition that produced it. I do not offer this as a believer's confession. I arrived at it as an anthropologist, following the texts.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Myth is told from the standpoint of the persecutors, and it always believes in the guilt of its victim.","n":[]},{"t":"Oedipus really did bring the plague; the lynch mob is always sure.","n":[]},{"t":"There is one body of texts that breaks this spell.","n":[]},{"t":"The Hebrew scriptures begin to take the victim's side — Abel against Cain, Joseph against his brothers, the Servant of Isaiah who is 'numbered with the transgressors' yet innocent — and the Gospels complete the reversal: they tell the story of a collective killing and declare, flatly, that the victim is innocent and the crowd is wrong.","n":[]}],[{"t":"This had never been done.","n":[]},{"t":"It is not one more myth; it is the demystification of myth, the exposure of the mechanism that all myth exists to conceal.","n":[]},{"t":"And once the innocent victim is revealed, the mechanism loses its power to generate the sacred unseen.","n":[]},{"t":"The modern conscience — our reflexive taking of the side of the persecuted, the victim, the marginalized — is not a secular invention that left Christianity behind.","n":[]}],[{"t":"It is the Gospel's own effect, working through history, so successful that it has forgotten its source and now turns, ungratefully, against the tradition that produced it.","n":[]},{"t":"I do not offer this as a believer's confession.","n":[]},{"t":"I arrived at it as an anthropologist, following the texts.","n":[1,2,3,4,5]}]],"texts":"Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978 — the biblical text as the reversal of the mythological lie); The Scapegoat (1982); I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999 — the Gospels against myth, the modern concern for victims as an unacknowledged Christian inheritance). Reception: the charge that this is Christian apologetics smuggled into anthropology (that Girard proves his own faith true by a circular reading); the secular genealogy of human rights and victim-concern (as Enlightenment achievement) against Girard's Gospel-effect claim; Gianni Vattimo's appropriation of Girard for a post-metaphysical Christianity; the Nietzschean objection that concern for victims is slave-morality resentment, which Girard inverts.","works":["Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978 — the biblical text as the reversal of the mythological lie)","The Scapegoat (1982)","I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999 — the Gospels against myth, the modern concern for victims as an unacknowledged Christian inheritance)"],"reception":"the charge that this is Christian apologetics smuggled into anthropology (that Girard proves his own faith true by a circular reading); the secular genealogy of human rights and victim-concern (as Enlightenment achievement) against Girard's Gospel-effect claim; Gianni Vattimo's appropriation of Girard for a post-metaphysical Christianity; the Nietzschean objection that concern for victims is slave-morality resentment, which Girard inverts.","status":"This is Girard's most provocative and most disputed claim, the point where his anthropology and his Catholicism meet. Supporters find in it a powerful genealogy of the modern concern for victims and a non-dogmatic case for the singularity of the biblical revelation. Critics charge circularity and apologetics — that Girard has proven his own faith true by privileging the texts he was raised to revere, and that the concern for victims has a perfectly good secular genealogy in the Enlightenment. The Nietzschean objection cuts the other way: that siding with victims is resentment dressed as virtue, exactly the slave-morality Nietzsche despised — a charge Girard accepts the terms of and inverts, holding that Nietzsche saw the Gospel's effect clearly and chose the persecutors' side. The debate over whether this is science, theology, or theology disguised as science is unresolved and probably unresolvable.","era":"1923-2015","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Sacrifice","page":"pp. 85–87","canonical":"","quote":"If the scapegoat is important when it remains dissimulated, it must be more important still when it is displayed in broad daylight, when it draws attention to itself. In the accounts of the Passion, instead of being hidden it is laid bare; it dominates everything. This conclusion appears inevitable, but in reality it is not; it is even completely false.","label":"Sacrifice, pp. 85–87"},{"n":2,"work":"Oedipus Unbound","page":"pp. 167–168","canonical":"","quote":"Historians are fully aware of this when they deal with historical documents, but mythologists have not yet become aware of the possibility that mythology as a whole could be tied to the same type of phenomenon. If I were to examine other myths here, we would discover that they too very much resemble the perspective of deluded persecutors.","label":"Oedipus Unbound, pp. 167–168"},{"n":3,"work":"The Scapegoat","page":"p. 41","canonical":"","quote":"Instead of bearing certain faintly monstrous characteristics, the victim is hard to recognize as a victim because he is totally monstrous. This difference should not lead us to decide that the two types of texts cannot have a common source.","label":"The Scapegoat, p. 41"},{"n":4,"work":"Sacrifice","page":"pp. 87–88","canonical":"","quote":"They attribute this appeasement to the victim and divinize him without ever discovering the miscarriage of justice of which they are guilty. The jury indulges the divinized hero, granting him some \"extenuating circumstances,\" but nothing more, and the myth remains essentially a mendacious justification of collective violence.. Oedipus remains defined by his double crime, today more than ever.","label":"Sacrifice, pp. 87–88"},{"n":5,"work":"The One by Whom Scandal Comes","page":"pp. 37–38","canonical":"","quote":"Th e \"sins\" of mythical heroes are too reminiscent of the ones associated with bloodthirsty crowds not to be the product of the same mentality. If myths fool us by standing the true relation between victims and communities on its head, Judeo-Christian texts reestablish, or perhaps Mimetic Th eory and Th eology establish for the first time, a truth that in every case is detected by reversing the original reversal.","label":"The One by Whom Scandal Comes, pp. 37–38"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"mimetic-desire","label":"Mimetic desire: is human desire borrowed from a model rather than spontaneous?"},{"slug":"the-scapegoat-mechanism","label":"The scapegoat mechanism: is human culture founded on collective violence against a surrogate victim?"},{"slug":"sacrifice-and-the-cross","label":"Sacrifice and the Cross: is Christ's death a sacrifice demanded by God, or the exposure of the sacrificial mechanism?"},{"slug":"apocalypse","label":"Apocalypse: with the mechanism exposed, has humanity lost its protection against its own violence?"}]}