What is the significance of the Passion of Jesus Christ for today?
Nothing! will answer most readers of this blog. The event is merely an ancient myth. Science shall eventually prevail and put religion out of business.
The author of I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, René Girard (1923-2015), doesn't entirely disagree, for the Passion is indeed very much myth-like, differing only in one very important way.
Mr. Girard, an anthropologist, was born and educated in France, though he eventually received his PhD in the US, after which his academic career was entirely in America. He retired from Stanford in 1995. His important works are all written in French--the current tome is translated by James G. Williams, who also pens a useful foreword.
Mr. Girard's anthropological interest was the study of primitive and pagan religions and myths. It is only late in life that he converted to Roman Catholicism, and began writing religious books, such as I See Satan..., published in 1999. It may be described as a work of Christian apologetics.
There are two parts to this religion thing: God and Man. Belief in the former requires faith, and can't be derived from reason alone. Mr. Girard makes no effort to "prove the unprovable," and accordingly God is barely mentioned in this book. The latter subject, Man, reduces to anthropology--or at least it has to get the anthropology right. This, of course, is Mr. Girard's wheelhouse--he tells us a lot about Christian anthropology.
A key to understanding the Bible--both Old Testament and New--lies in the tenth commandment:
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
Covetousness is the way Satan enters the world--I'll provide a modern example. Consider the rivalry between Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos,
- Donald envies Jeff for his great wealth, perhaps a hundred-fold greater than what Donald possesses.
- Jeff envies Donald for his charm, charisma and power.
Each envies the other for what he doesn't have. Ultimately, they both want the same thing--to be the richest man in the world who is also president of the United States. In other words, they become like twins--they share the same goals and are in intense competition with each other.
Mr. Girard calls this mimetic rivalry, and pagan myths are replete with brothers, often twins, fighting to the death to successfully imitate the other. Cain murdered his brother Abel. Romulus murdered his twin brother Remus. Joseph was exiled by his jealous brothers (Gen. 37-50). Mr. Girard asserts that such stories are common among primitive peoples around the world--presumably this is documented in his previous anthropology works.
It gets worse. Mimetic rivalry can grow into mimetic contagion, i.e., groups of people competing with other groups. Republicans envy Democrats, and vice versa--which ultimately reduces them both to something twin-like. Tweedledum and Tweedledee is how my Trotskyist friends like to describe them. Mimetic contagion is the source of social conflict, discord, and disorder.
If there is good news here, it's that Satan doesn't really exist--or at least not like a person or an angel. There is not a little devil on your shoulder urging you to do naughty things. What does exist is this inborn, mimetic covetousness that leads us to take sides and hate our neighbors. It is covetousness that results in the other sins described in the ten commandments--murder, adultery, etc.
Satan exists as collective behavior as mimetic contagion--today we'd call him an
emergent phenomenon--the product of covetousness.
Yet Satan--described in the Bible as the Prince of this World--has a problem. His power depends on some level of social cohesion. Failing that, everything will end up in nuclear holocaust, and Satan will be dead along with the rest of us. So the disorder and conflict can't get too far out of hand. Satan has to curb his enthusiasm--or as Mr. Girard puts it, loosely quoting the Bible, Satan expels Satan.
How does Satan do that? It's something that Mr. Girard describes as the single victim mechanism, which he again claims is ubiquitous in primitive and pagan practice. We might recognize it as human sacrifice. The archetype example presented by Mr. Girard is the story of Appolonius of Tyana upon his visit to Ephesus. He found the city suffering from a severe "epidemic," though not of a biological kind. Instead it was riven by feuds and discord caused by mimetic contagion. (Spoiler alert--the full story quoted in I See Satan... is much more horrifying than my abbreviated account.)
Appolonius perceives a solution, and fingers a poor beggar as the culprit. "See," he says. "That man there is the cause of your troubles. He should be stoned." He does eventually convince somebody to throw the first stone--after which the stones fall fast and heavy. The beggar is murdered, but because the mob truly believes that he really was the guilty party, the "epidemic" quickly fades away, eventually to be replaced by renewed mimetic contagion. The beggar is a scapegoat.
The mimetic conflicts are all laid upon a single victim--inevitably somebody who has no friends or relatives to defend him or her: beggar, leper, widow, foreigner, etc. They're all ritually killed, one by one, or perhaps several at a time--and as long as the mob believes, it works. Social solidarity is temporarily restored. Satan has expelled Satan.
Sometimes the effect--civic restoration--is so sudden and beneficial that the citizens are deeply grateful to the victim. He or she is posthumously deified, and occasionally even resurrected. Mr. Williams, in the foreword, explains that pagan gods (such as those of Greek mythology) are usually just deified, resurrected victims.
The Hebrew Bible understood that at least some victims weren't guilty--they were innocent. Joseph--a victim not murdered but instead exiled--was not guilty. Job is set upon from all directions--yet the Bible proclaims his innocence. The Jews have through the ages disproportionately served as victims, and according to Mr. Williams the Psalms are poems sung by innocent victims. (This insight has put the Psalms in a whole new light for me.)
But now consider the Passion--which follows the single victim mechanism almost to the letter. Jesus is both a foreigner and a pain in the ass. Jerusalem is beset with conflict and strife. The mob is convinced that Jesus is the source of their problems--and so are Herod and Pontius Pilate. The latter orders him ritually tortured unto death. "Forgive them," Jesus says, "for they know not what they do." They don't, because if they did the single victim mechanism wouldn't work.
But the disciples knew--and they proclaimed it loud and clear upon Jesus' resurrection (another echo of the pagan myth). Now you may not believe in the resurrection, but what you believe is in this matter irrelevant. There is no doubt that the disciples and the apostle Paul believed in the resurrection, and they proclaimed it far and wide. The resurrection was for them also proof of Jesus' innocence. He didn't call himself a scapegoat, but he picked a much better term: lamb of God. What can be more innocent than a lamb?
The Passion has destroyed the single victim mechanism for all time. Post-Passion, it's been impossible to sacrifice human beings (and increasingly, also animals) because it won't work. Since Jesus, people no longer believe the victim is guilty--instead he or she is innocent! Killing an innocent victim is murder--and it will no longer absolve one of one's sins. Satan can no longer expel Satan.
Satan has lost his power to expel Satan, but he still exists and still sows havoc--the political polarization in US politics is a case in point. But Jesus has taught us that victims are innocent--far from blaming the victim as the pagans used to do, we now compete to become the most victimized of all victims. Even white males are today becoming victims because of "reverse racism," or "critical race theory." Our world is full of victims, all trying to imitate each other to become the victim to end all victims. "The first shall be last, and the last shall be first." We're in a mimetic competition to be "last."
That is the significance of the Passion for today! I don't think Mr. Girard is wrong.
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