Rene Girard Quotes & Sayings

Silence is the only conduct truly befitting a solipsist, the only one, however, that he cannot bring himself to adopt. — Rene Girard

The more one approaches madness, the more one equally approaches the truth, and if one does not fall into the former, one must end up necessarily in the latter. — Rene Girard

If Jesus returned their looks, these angry men would not see his look as it really is but would transform it into a mirror of their own anger. Their own challenge, their own provocation, is what they would read in the look of Jesus, no matter how peaceable it really is, and they would feel provoked in return. The confrontation could no longer be avoided and would bring about what Jesus is trying to prevent, the stoning of the victim. Jesus avoids thus even the shadow of provocation. When — Rene Girard

We condemn the Inquisition in the name of Christian values. After all, we can't condemn it in the name of the Mahabharata, which is comprised of a series of alternating murders, rather like the Iliad! — Rene Girard

But an absolute value is not proven by logic or metaphysical arguments; it is accepted, believed (even when not discussed), and hedged about with taboos to protect it. — Rene Girard

The essence of desire is to have no essential goal. Truly to desire, we must have recourse to people about us; we have to desire their desires. — Rene Girard

You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Lev. 19:18) ; that is, you shall love your neighbor neither more nor less than yourself. The rivalries of desires tend to become exasperated, and as they do, they tend to contaminate third parties who are just as addicted as we are to the entanglements of mimetic rivalries. — Rene Girard

He thought against Napoleon, in both senses of the word. See how fruitful resentment can be, and how it can make one — Rene Girard

Why is it the most difficult to throw? Because it is the only one without a model. When — Rene Girard

It is the Other whom one must love as oneself if one does not desire to idolize and hate the Other in the depths of the underground. — Rene Girard

If the Gospels were mythical themselves, they could not provide the knowledge that demythologizes mythology. — Rene Girard

What Jesus invites us to imitate is his own desire, the spirit that directs him toward the goal on which his intention is fixed: to resemble God the Father as much as possible. — Rene Girard

The Church has never been a scapegoat more than it is today. But one must see the symbolic value of this: whatever the Church may have lost by its compromises with the world, its enemies now give back by obliging it to play the same role as Christ. This is its true vocation. And now that it has been reaffirmed, it will enable the Church to shake off the indolence and decadence of the age that is now drawing to a close. MSB — Rene Girard

The underground appeared in this novel as the failure and reversal of Christianity. — Rene Girard

The high priest Caiaphas alludes to this mechanism when he says, "It is better that one man die and that the whole nation not perish." The four accounts of the Crucifix-ion thus enable us to witness the unfolding of the working of the single victim mechanism. The sequence of events, as I have already said, resembles numerous analogous phenomena whose director and producer is Satan. The — Rene Girard

He is an unsuccessful scapegoat whose heroic willingness to die for the truth will ultimately make the entire cycle of satanic violence visible to all people and therefore inoperative. The "kingdom of Satan" will give way to the "kingdom of God." Thanks to Jesus' death, the Spirit of God, alias the Paraclete (a word that signifies "the lawyer for the defense"), wins a foothold in the kingdom of Satan. He reveals the innocence of Jesus to the disciples first and then to all of us. The defense of victims is both a moral imperative and the source of our increasing power to demystify scapegoating. The Passion accounts reveal a phenomenon that unbeknownst to us generates all human cultures and still warps our human vision in favor of all sorts of exclusions and scapegoating. If this analysis is true, the explanatory power of Jesus' death is much greater than we realize, and Paul's exalted idea of the Cross as the source of all knowledge is anthropologically sound. The — Rene Girard

The preference that cultures grant to themselves, in other words, must be perpetuated at any cost. This preference is inseparably bound up with the identity, the autonomy, the very existence of these cultures. — Rene Girard

The most recent phase of the alternation between Occidentalism and primitivism has therefore concealed the essential thing, the universality of violence. A selective blindness in one of two forms has obscured the fact that all cultures, and all individuals without exception, participate in violence; that violence is what structures our collective sense of belonging and our personal identities. — Rene Girard

The distance between Don Quixote and the petty bourgeois victim of advertising is not so great as romanticism would have us believe. — Rene Girard

The true threat to the world today comes from the mad ambitions of states and capitalists bent on destroying non-modern cultures. It is the so-called developed countries that plunder the planet's resources without showing the least concern for consequences they are incapable of foreseeing. — Rene Girard

2. "Mimetic doubles" refers to the situation in which rivals become so obsessed with each other that they mirror each other's emotions and actions. The doubles are alike but they mistakenly see a great difference between them. Mimetic doubles are quite dangerous to one another and to others and can be quite self-destructive. - Trans. — Rene Girard

The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims. — Rene Girard

Moralists advise us all to avoid violence, of course, but only insofar as this is possible. They authorize us, at least tacitly, to reply to obvious provocations by the measured counterviolence that I described earlier, and which seems to us always justified. — Rene Girard

Rivalistic desires are all the more overwhelming since they reinforce one another. The principle of reciprocal escalation and one-upmanship governs this type of conflict. This phenomenon is so common, so well known to us, and so contrary to our concept of ourselves, thus so humiliating, that we prefer to remove it from consciousness and act as if it did not exist. But all the while we know it does exist. This indifference to the threat of runaway conflict is a luxury that small ancient societies could not afford. — Rene Girard

The goal of religious thinking is exactly the same as that of technological research
namely, practical action. Whenever man is truly concerned with obtaining concrete results, whenever he is hard pressed by reality, he abandons abstract speculation and reverts to a mode of response that becomes increasingly cautious and conservative as the forces he hopes to subdue, or at least to outrun, draw ever nearer. — Rene Girard

If we choose Jesus as our model, we simultaneously choose his own model, God the Father. Having no appropriative desire, Jesus proclaims the possibility of freedom from scandal. But if we choose possessive models we find ourselves in endless scandals, for our real model is Satan. A seductive tempter who suggests to us the desires most likely to generate rivalries, Satan prevents us from reaching whatever he simultaneously incites us to desire. — Rene Girard

Imitation becomes intensified at the heart of the hostility, but the rivals do all they can to conceal from each other and from themselves the cause of this intensification. Unfortunately, concealment doesn't work. In imitating my rival's desire I give him the impression that he has good reasons to desire what he desires, to possess what he possesses, and so the intensity of his desire keeps increasing. — Rene Girard

Humankind is that creature who lost a part of its animal instinct in order to gain access to "desire," as it is called. Once their natural needs are satisfied, humans desire intensely, but they don't know exactly what they desire, for no instinct guides them. We do not each have our own desire, one really our own. The essence of desire is to have no essential goal. Truly to desire, we must have recourse to people about us; we have to borrow their desires. — Rene Girard

Why does Jesus regard the Father and himself as the best model for all humans? Because neither the Father nor the Son desires greedily, egotistically. God "makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and he sends his rain on the just and on the unjust." God gives to us without counting, without marking the least difference between us. He lets the weeds grow with the wheat until the time of harvest. If we imitate the detached generosity of God, then the trap of mimetic rivalries will never close over us. This is why Jesus says also, "Ask, and it will be given to you ... " When Jesus declares that he does not abolish the Law but fulfills it, he articulates a logical consequence of his teaching. The goal of the Law is peace among humankind. Jesus never scorns the Law, even when it takes the form of prohibitions. Unlike modern thinkers, he knows quite well that to avoid conflicts, it is necessary to begin with prohibitions. — Rene Girard

Far from being a paradox, this invitation is more reasonable than that of our modern gurus, who ask their disciples to imitate them as the great man or woman who imitates no one. Jesus, by contrast, invites us to do what he himself does, to become like him a perfect imitator of God the Father. — Rene Girard

The commandment that prohibits desiring the goods of one's neighbor attempts to resolve the number one problem of every human community: internal violence. — Rene Girard

The resistance to the mimetic contagion prevents the myth from taking shape. The conclusion in the light of the Gospels is inescapable: myths are the voice of communities that unanimously surrender to the mimetic contagion of victimization. — Rene Girard

Woe to the one by whom scandal comes!" Jesus reserves his most solemn warning for the adults who seduce children into the infernal prison of scandal. The more the imitation is innocent and trusting, the more the one who imitates is easily scandalized, and the more the seducer is guilty of abusing this innocence. Scandals are so formidable that to put us on guard against them, Jesus resorts to an uncharacteristic hyperbolic style: "If your hand scandalizes you, cut it off; if you eye scandalizes you, pull it out" (Matt. 18:8-9). — Rene Girard

Those who protest against "Western ethnocentrism" imagine themselves to owe nothing to the West, since after all they rage furiously against it. But in fact theirs is the most Western perspective of all, more Western than that of their adversaries.

Not only is the revolt against ethnocentrism an invention of the West, it cannot be found outside the West. — Rene Girard

It is a mistake to suppose that he rejected poetry for aesthetic reasons. What is overlooked in all of this is that Plato came between an older tradition of philosophy and Christianity. He saw the danger of violence much more clearly because of his proximity to the pre-Socratics. The understanding of the danger is essential, vital in Plato. — Rene Girard

Some primitive societies avoid striking out at the true guilty party because it might awaken the spirit of vengeance. Channeling violence toward a sacrificial victim as if toward a lightning rod doubtless stops violence, but it's not very pretty. — Rene Girard

The hatred of the West and of everything that it represents arises not because its spirit is really foreign to the peoples of the third world, nor because they are really opposed to the "progress" that we embody, but because the competitive spirit is as familiar to them as it is to ourselves. Far from turning away from the West, they cannot prevent themselves from imitating it, from adopting its values without admitting it to themselves. They are no less consumed than we are by the ideology of individual and collective success. — Rene Girard

Only in humans, alone among the animals, did violence make victim mechanisms necessary and bring them into being. If original sin created the problem of violence, it found a solution in archaic religion. The paradox of human cultures is that violence expels violence: Satan casts out Satan. MSB — Rene Girard

The commandment to imitate Jesus does not appear suddenly in a world exempt from imitation; rather it is addressed to everyone that mimetic rivalry has affected. Non-Christians imagine that to be converted they must renounce an autonomy that all people possess naturally, a freedom and independence that Jesus would like to take away from them. In reality, once we imitate Jesus, we discover that our aspiration to autonomy has always made us bow down before individuals who may not be worse than we are but who are nonetheless bad models because we cannot imitate them without falling with them into the trap of rivalries in which we are ensnarled more and more. — Rene Girard

Vengeance succeeds in spanning generations and encompassing the world. It transcends time and space. One should not be surprised that in the ancient world vengeance was taken to be sacred. — Rene Girard

The experience of death is going to get more and more painful, contrary to what many people believe. The forthcoming euthanasia will make it more rather than less painful because it will put the emphasis on personal decision in a way which was blissfully alien to the whole problem of dying in former times. It will make death even more subjectively intolerable, for people will feel responsible for their own deaths and morally obligated to rid their relatives of their unwanted presence. Euthanasia will further intensify all the problems its advocates think it will solve. — Rene Girard

Imitation is human intelligence in its most dynamic aspect. — Rene Girard

War is a total social phenomenon. In this respect, Clausewitz's analysis is a precursor of Durkheim's sociology. Clausewitz has things to teach us about "mass" violence and contagion. — Rene Girard

The mimetic nature of desire accounts for the fragility of human relations. Our social sciences should give due consideration to a phenomenon that must be considered normal, but they persist in seeing conflict as something accidental, and consequently so unforeseeable that researchers cannot and must not take it into account in their study of culture. — Rene Girard

He exclaims, "Happy is the one not scandalized by me." There will be throughout Christian history a tendency of Christians themselves to choose Jesus as an alternative scandal, that is, a tendency to lose themselves and merge into the mob of persecutors. For St. Paul, consequently, the Cross is the scandal par excellence. I would observe that the symbolism of the traditional cross, the crossing of the two branches, renders visible the internal contradiction of the scandal. The — Rene Girard

That's why he's called Legion - in a way he's the embodiment of the crowd. It's the crowd that comes out of him and goes and throws itself off of the cliff. We're witnessing the birth of an individual capable of escaping the fatal destiny of collective violence. — Rene Girard

In a truly global world, the renunciation of violent reprisal is bound to become, in a more and more obvious way, the indispensable condition of our survival. — Rene Girard

We are not capable of foreseeing the creative possibilities that this kind of deconstruction - the deconstruction of the old sacrificial system - produces. I think that we must examine our history and try to see whether, beneath what has already occurred, there are not additional layers of phenomena waiting to be revealed; whether some aspects of life that used to be constrained by the old sacrificial system are not going to flourish, other domains of knowledge, other ways of living. Everything that the Passion undid in the cultural sphere might well be an opening, an extraordinary source of enrichment. I am certain it is. One must also keep in mind what Jesus called the "signs of the times."4 — Rene Girard

Jesus transcends the Law, but in the Law's own sense and direction. He does this by appealing to the most humane aspect of the legal prescription, the aspect most foreign to the contagion of violence, which is the obligation of the two accusers to throw the first two stones. The Law deprives the accusers of a mimetic model. Once — Rene Girard

It is not difference that dominates the world, but the obliteration of difference by mimetic reciprocity, which itself, being truly universal, shows the relativism of perpetual difference to be an illusion. — Rene Girard

In myth, violent death is always justified. — Rene Girard

MT: That also makes me think of Jesus's "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." And yet, doesn't Christ also speak of violence? RG: "I didn't come to bring peace but war, I came to separate the son from the father, the daughter from the mother, and so on" doesn't mean, "I've come to bring violence," but rather, "I've come to bring a kind of peace that is so utterly free of victims that it surpasses what you are capable of and eventually you'll have to come to a reckoning with your victimary phenomena." These texts are the religious texts of the modern world. They're not just Western. They don't belong to anyone, they're universal. MT — Rene Girard

Where the successful or failed dialogues between Christianity and other cultures are concerned, we could go on for hours. — Rene Girard

Finally there is the topic we talked about earlier, which is of great interest to me at the moment, the relationship between biology and culture. I've been reading the work of the late philosopher and theologian Claude Tresmontant. Tresmontant was a Christian, but his books interest me for what they have to say about genetic programming. He situates Christianity at the point of transition between genetic programming - dominant in archaic societies with regard to territorial defense, sexual and hoarding instincts, and so forth - and a new kind of evolutionary programming contained in culture rather than in genes. The argument is suggestive, but it needs to be developed further. Tresmontant doesn't take into account archaic religion, which he conflates with genetic programming in animals. Room has to be made for one more stage. MSB — Rene Girard

Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power. — Rene Girard

There is nothing in the Gospels to suggest that God causes the mob to come together against Jesus. Violent contagion is enough. Those responsible for the Passion are the human participants them-selves, incapable of resisting the violent contagion that affects them all when a mimetic snowballing1 comes within their range, or rather when they come within the range of this snowballing and are swept along by it. We don't have to invoke the supernatural to explicate this. The war of all against all that transforms communities into a war of all against one that gathers and unifies them is not limited solely to the case of Jesus. — Rene Girard

If we ceased to desire the goods of our neighbor, we would never commit murder or adultery or theft or false witness. If we respected the tenth commandment, the four commandments that precede it would be superfluous. — Rene Girard

Passive, submissive imitation does exist, but hatred of conformity and extreme individualism are no less imitative. Today they constitute a negative conformism that is more formidable than the positive version. More and more, it seems to me, modern individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he professes to love but more often despises. — Rene Girard

Our concern for victims is the secular mask of Christian love. — Rene Girard

Christ's death represents the loss of Satan's kingdom: the Satanic circle is broken, and the truth and grace of Jesus can now descend on those who are not afraid of accepting it. The Holy Spirit, which is to say the defender of victims, acts first on Peter and the other apostles, telling them that Jesus is innocent and that they are mistaken. Subsequently it acts on other persecutors, showing them that they too are persecutors, making them see the victim's innocence. What we call conversion is, finally, the experience of the scapegoat becoming the subjective experience of the persecutor. MSB — Rene Girard

Instead of reorganizing the demoniac, rearranging it a bit, like a psychoanalyst, you do away with it entirely. — Rene Girard

To escape responsibility for violence we imagine it is enough to pledge never to be the first to do violence. But no one ever sees himself as casting the first stone. Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to a violence committed in the first instance by someone else. — Rene Girard

The world's myths do not reveal a way to interpret the Gospels, but exactly the reverse: the Gospels reveal to us the way to interpret myth. — Rene Girard

Many people believe they are faithful to Jesus, and yet they address superficial reproaches to the Gospels. This shows that they remain subject to mimetic rivalries and their violent one-upmanship. If we don't see that the choice is inevitable between the two supreme models, God and the devil, then we have already chosen the devil and his mimetic violence. Our — Rene Girard

Mimetic theory explains the presence of disabilities and infirmities in a great many mythical stories. When there is no ground for making a victim of someone - because he isn't guilty of anything - people act as children do and make a scapegoat of someone who is physically unattractive, or who is an outsider. The number of outsiders in myths is quite extraordinary. And why are so many victims lame? My work is scientific because it tries to solve the puzzle constituted by these clues, to explain why outsiders, many of them handicapped, are made into victims and forcibly expelled from a community. The burden falls on anyone who doubts my theory to supply a better explanation, or else to adopt mine for want of a more satisfactory one. — Rene Girard

Christ is the only man to overcome the barrier erected by Satan. He dies in order to avoid participating in the system of scapegoats, which is to say the satanic principle. After his resurrection, a bridge that did not exist before is established between God and the world; Christ gets a foothold in the world through his own death, and destroys Satan's ramparts. His death therefore converts satanic disorder into order and opens up a new path on which human beings may now travel. In other words, God resumes his place in the world, not because he has violated the autonomy of man and of Satan, but because Christ has resisted, triumphed over Satan's obstacle. — Rene Girard

More and more, it seems to me, modern individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he — Rene Girard

Only two possible reactions to the mimetic contagion exist, and they make an enormous difference. Either we surrender and join the persecuting crowd, or we resist and stand alone. The first way is the unanimous self-deception we call mythology. — Rene Girard

The Cross is the equivalent of the Ephesus stoning. To say that Jesus identifies himself with all victims is to say that he identifies himself not only with the adulterous woman or the Suffering Servant but also with the beggar of Ephesus. Jesus is this poor wretch of a beggar. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - — Rene Girard

Our unending discords are the ransom of our freedom. — Rene Girard

Christianity does the opposite of Plato. The rejection of reality by philosophy today is the most astonishing thing imaginable. Perhaps it is the proximity of revelation, the ever greater pressure it exerts, that feeds this impulse. But I think that revelation is going to become obvious in the "end times," precisely because the Apocalypse marks the end, the pulling down of the mythological and philosophical screen that was erected against the truth. And since most people do not want to know the truth, this end can come about only in a violent fashion. The — Rene Girard

Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take their anger out on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them. — Rene Girard