As readers of this blog (if there are any) will have deduced, I have become a Girardian. The following is a lengthy excerpt from Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. It explains much.
R.G. : Let us turn to the gospel themes that are on the surface most mythical in character, like the virgin birth of Jesus as it appears in Matthew and Luke. We notice at once that behind a superficial appearance of recounting fabulous events, the Gospels are always giving us a message exactly opposite to the one conveyed by mythology: the message of a non-violent deity, who has nothing in common with the epiphanies of the sacred.
Everything that is born of the world and of the 'flesh', as the prologue of John's Gospel puts it, is tainted by violence and ends up by reverting to violence. Every man is the brother of Cain, who was the first to bear the mark of this original violence.
In innumerable episodes of mythical birth, the god copulates with a mortal woman in order to give birth to a hero. Stories of this kind always involve more than a hint of violence. Zeus bears down on Semele, the mother of Dionysus, like a beast of prey upon its victim, and in effect strikes her with lightening. The birth of the gods is always a kind of rape. In every case we rediscover various structural features that have already been touched upon; in particular, the feature of monstrosity. In every case we find the doubling effects, the mad oscillation of difference, and the psychotic alternation between all and nothing. These monstrous couplings between men, gods and beasts are in close correspondence with the phenomenon of reciprocal violence and its method of working itself out. The orgasm that appeases the god is a metaphor for collective violence.
G.L. : And not the other way round, as psychoanalysis would have us believe!
R.G. : Monstrous births provide mythology with a way of alluding to the violence which always haunts it and that gives rise to the most varied meanings. The child whose birth is at the same time human and divine is a particularly relevant metaphor for the thunderous resolution of reciprocal violence as it passes into unanimous, reconciliatory violence and gives birth to a new cultural order.
To put its message across, no doubt the virgin birth of Jesus still resorts to the same 'code' as do the monstrous births of mythology. But precisely because the codes are parallel, we should be able to understand the message and appreciate what is unique to it -- what makes it radically different from the message of mythology.
No relationship of violence exists between those who take part in the virgin birth: the Angel, the Virgin and the Almighty. No one here is playing the role of the mimetic antagonist, in the sense of the 'enemy twins': no one becomes the fascinating obstacle that one is tempted to remove or shatter by violence. The complete absence of any sexual element has nothing to do with repression -- an explanation thought up at the end of the nineteenth century and worthy of the degraded puritanism that produced it. The fact that sexuality is not part of the picture corresponds to the absence of violent mimesis with which myth acquaints us in the form of rape by the gods. This idol -- what we have called the model-obstacle -- is completely different.
In fact, all the themes and terms associated with the virgin bith convey to us a perfect submission to the non-violent will of the God of the Gospels, who in this way prefigures Christ himself:
'Hail, O favoured one, the Lord is with you!' (Luke 1, 28)
The unprecented [sic] event brings no scandal with it. Mary does not set up any obstacle between herself and the Word of God:
'Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word' (Luke 1, 38)
The various episodes around the birth of Christ, make palpable the humble beginnings of the revelation, its complete insignificance from the standpoint of the mighty. Right from the start the child Jesus is excluded and dismissed -- he is a wanderer who does not even have a stone on which to lay his head. The inn has no room for him. Informed by the Magi, Herod searches everywhere for him in order to put him to death.
Throughout these episodes, the Gospels and the Christian tradition, taking their cue from the Old Testament, place in the foreground beings foredoomed to play the part of the victim -- the child, the woman, the pauper and domestic animals.
The Gospels can make use of a mythological code in this account of the birth of JEsus without being brought down to the level of the clumsy mystification and 'mystical naivety', which our philosophers customarily see in them.
Our own period's summary dismissal of them is in fact quite revealing, because reactions have become outmoded for the violent mythologies. We may congratulate ourselves on having made some progress, but this still leaves the message of non-violence out of account -- among all the others, the Christian message alone is universally despised and rejected.
G.L. : So the only religion it is still permissible to disdain and ridicule, in intellectual circles, is also the only one that expresses something different from violence and a failure to come to terms with violence. We can hardly fail to ask ourselves what such a blind spot might imply in a world dominated by nuclear weapons and industrial pollution. Are the beliefs of our intellectuals as out of tune as they themselves like to think with the world that has brought them into being?
R.G. : There is no more telling feature than the inability of the greatest minds in the modern world to grasp the difference between the Christian crib at Christmas-time and the bestial monstrosities of mythological births. Here, for example, is what Nietzsche writes in The Anti-Christ, after he has drawn attention, as a good follower of Hegel, to what he terms the 'atemporal symbolism' of Father and Son that in his view dominates the Christian text:
I am ashamed to recall what the Church has made of this symbolism: has it not placed an Amphitryon story at the threshold of the Christian 'faith'?
We could well ask why Nietzsche might be ashamed to discover in the Gospels something he acclaims enthusiastically when he comes across it somewhere else. After all, the Amphitryon myth is one of the most splendidly Dionysiac myths of all. The birth of Hercules seems to me to square very well with the will to power, and indeed it contains all the elements that Nietzsche praises in the The Birth of Tragedy and other writings.
It is important to try and explain the reason for this shame. It tells us a good deal about the double standard that all modern thought -- taking after Nietzsche and his rivals -- applies to the study of Christian 'mythology'.
A great many modern theologians succumb to the terrorism of modern thought and condemn without a hearing something they are not capable of experiencing even as 'poetry' any more -- the final trace in the world of a spiritual intuition that is fast fading. So Paul Tillich dismisses in the most peremptory way the theme of the virgin birth because of what he calls 'the inadequacy of its internal symbolism'.
In Luke the theme of the virgin birth is not all that different when you come down to it, from the PAuline thesis defining Christ as the second Adam, or the perfect Adam. Saying that Christ is God, born of God, and saying that he has been conceived without sin is stating over again that he is completely alien to the world of violence within which humankind has been imprisoned ever since the foundation of the world: that is to say, ever since Adam. The first Adam was himself also without sin, and it was he who, in becoming the first sinner, caused humankind to enter the vicious circle from which it has never been able to break out. Christ is thus in the same situation as Adam, facing the same temptations as he did -- the same temptations as all humanity, in effect. But he wins the struggle against violence; he wins, on behalf of all humankind, the paradoxical struggle that all people, in the succession of Adam, have always been fated to lose.
If Christ alone is innocent, then Adam is not the only one to be guilty. All men share in this archetypal state of blame, but only to the extent that the chance of becoming free has been offered to them and they have let it slip away. We can say that this sin is indeed original but only becomes actual when knowledge about violence is placed at humanity's disposition.
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