Transcript of Girard Lecture V | The Christian Revelation

0. Introduction

David Perell: When I was a kid, I used to march around my religious studies classes thinking I was brilliant for rejecting biblical ideas. I used to say things like, “Moses didn’t really part the Red Sea” or “Cain and Abel weren’t real historical figures,” and “These stories didn’t literally happen.” And so, I dismissed them for decades.

But discovering Girard was a turning point for me, and I started taking the Bible seriously, if not literally. For example, Girard showed me how the same Cain and Abel story that I’d always dismissed revealed a pattern of mimetic rivalry that was showing up in my own life. And whether literal or not, I saw how these stories spoke to the constants in the human condition.

Furthermore, I learned how every Westerner bathes in the waters of Christian thinking. And Girard shows us that even secular philosophical assumptions of modernity, like say – the concern for victims – are Christian through and through. And to the extent that Christian ideas like compassion sometimes feel obvious. It’s not because they’re trivial, but because they’ve been so influential.

So I hope that Girard’s unorthodox reading of Jesus Christ will help you see Christianity in a new light, as it did I.

---

Johnathan Bi: In the last lecture, we’ve discussed our past: pagan religion. In the next lecture, we’re going to understand the present, modernity, and the lecture after that, we’re going to discuss the future, apocalypse. Christianity then is the rupture which bridges our pagan past with our modern present and apocalyptic future.

If modernity seems eerily similar to the pagan societies that we’ve discussed last lecture, but also clearly distinct in important ways, then you can thank – or perhaps blame – Christianity for that distinction. In so far as our society doesn’t resemble the violence, the deceit, the arbitrariness, the injustice of pagan society – that all comes from Christianity.

For Girard, Christianity is the one true religion amongst a sea of false gods. It is the pivot point where history gets taken out of a cyclical view and thrown into a linear trajectory. It is a necessary fulcrum for us to lean against if we are to grasp the direction and meaning of history and to make sense of our present. That is why understanding Girard’s Christianity is the focus of this lecture.

This lecture will proceed in three steps. First, we’re going to understand why Girard thinks that stories in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, are drastically distinct from the pagan religions of yore and what message they are trying to communicate. Whatever message we will find, we will find it stunted and incomplete in very important ways. And so second, I will give you Girard’s argument for why Jesus is the completion of the Hebrew message, and even stronger, what makes him the one true God. After these two moves, I will finish painting Girard’s Anthropology of the Cross to see how he translates the most important Christian phenomena into digestible and readily understandable cultural, psychological, and social language.

1. The Myth Vaccine

Johnathan Bi: Our first task today then, is to show that the stories in the Hebrew Bible are radically different from the religious pagan myths of yore. This is a terribly difficult task on its own, but made all the more challenging by Girard’s own understanding of how pagan religions are created. Let me provide you with a brief summary of this process that we covered last lecture. First, societies would descend into chaos, a mimetic contagion. Then, a scapegoat would be unconsciously chosen to inherit all the blame and be killed. This is the founding murder. This founding murder would bring back a peace so miraculous that people attributed the saving force to the victim, deifying it. The pagan deity would be defined by its power while being both good and evil – causing and ending the chaos at the same time. Myths would be created out of this event, and out of these myths spawned the core institutions of pagan society: prohibitions prevented violence, and rituals acted as release valves for violence. 

Both the scapegoating and deification are equally deceitful in pagan religion. The victim neither had the power to cause nor end the chaos – it’s all a psychological projection by the crowd, grounded on nothing but unanimity. And importantly, this deceitfulness is always occluded by myth, because myth is written from the perspective of the persecutor. The persecutor writes from the perspective of the crowd. And from that vantage point, all of this would seem real – the blame, the praise, the deification are all deserved and not mere projections. Importantly, none of this could be revealed  – because gods, pagan gods, would lose their power if people realized that it was they themselves who through unanimity projected that power onto them.

The story of how pagan religions are formed presents to us an immediate problem: doesn’t this track the biblical story of Christ quite clearly? After all, there’s a civil unrest when Christ gets into Jerusalem. What is that if not the mimetic contagion? There’s clearly the unjust scapegoating of Jesus and murder on the cross. That’s the founding murder. There’s a resurrection and divinization. There’s a mythologization through the Bible and an institutionalization through the Catholic Church and its many varied rituals and prohibitions. So how can the Christian story be true, but the pagan religions be false?