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77 CHAPTER 7 The Goat and the Idol Pagan Religion and Christian Theology The revelation of the scapegoat progressively disables the religious forms and cultural institutions that depend for their efficacy on its occlusion. One of the first casualties is pagan religion, with its mythology and overtly sacrificial rites. We recall the Roman world of the apostolic age, its temples, shrines, and sacred groves, its games and festivals in honor of the gods from every corner of the empire. Under the roomy pavilion of religious life in the imperial period, the storied denizens of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian myth lounged comfortably alongside local and familial divinities, some of them in more than one regional or civic embodiment, many with priesthoods devoted to their veneration. “There was also no pagan concept of heresy,” notes Roman historian Robin Lane Fox.1 “Pagans performed rites but professed no creed or doctrine. They did pay detailed acts of cult, especially by offering animal victims to their gods, but they were not committed to revealed beliefs in the strong Christian sense of the term.”2 Honours for the gods were like dealings on an ever more complex heavenly exchange. Everybody invested, hoping to profit and sometimes to enjoy the gods’ close protection. . . . In this pagan religiousness, there is, I believe, a common core despite the many variations in local practice. . . . From Britain to Syria, pagan cults aimed to honour the gods and avert the 78 Chapter 7 misfortunes which might result from the gods’ own anger at their neglect. . . . Any account of pagan worship which minimizes the gods’ uncertain anger and mortals’ fear of it is an empty account. This fear did not preclude thanksgiving, but thanks in Greek prayer . . . were interwoven with ideas of propitiation. These ideas centered on the offering of gifts. . . . The gods were concerned with honour and the due offering of gifts. . . . They were not just superior patrons, but powers of immense superiority: they were particularly touchy, then, about honour.3 Many gods presided over Rome as bestowers of blessing and bringers of curse. The empire’s replete paganism could therefore be seen as a late, fully blown religious expression of something that transpires at the dawn of history, on the margin of human self-awareness, in a constitutive act of murder—an act transfigured by its very power to save. Thus victims presided, each in his or her own way mercurial and Janus-faced, benignant and bloodthirsty, over a fear-ridden but reconciled people from time immemorial. Within a few hundred years of Jesus’ coming all this is gone, at least in the West, though not quite without vestige. Because the death of Jesus so closely resembles that of innumerable mythic victims, it lends itself to what Girard calls “secondary and superficial mythological crystallizations.”4 We could push the implications of Girard’s insight here, turning back to where we began with the early Church Fathers and Justin, whose Christus Victor overwrites the stories of the gods and their exploits in what seems at first glance an indistinguishably mythic idiom. Its main features are familiar from the many etiological myths staging the rivalry of two mythological characters over some contested object. One deceives the other, takes possession of the object, and flees. A pursuit follows that ends in murder. This death “is conceived as the origin of the cultural order” and the “source not only of sacred rites” but of all the rules that constitute the basis of communal life.5 Girard notes that “the mythical narrative sometimes takes the form of a contest or game, a quasi-sportive or pugilistic event,” behind which we glimpse “the outline of reciprocal violence, gradually transformed into a unanimous act.” If we apply this insight to the evolving story of how Christ saves, it quickly becomes evident that with Christus Victor we are still at the stage of discrete, reciprocating attacks. Satan deceives humanity, absconding with God’s people. God deceives Satan and retakes possession of them. The fathersprovideahostofdetailsthatrenderthecontestants,theirmotivations, and ploys in all too familiar colors. All the strategies of scandalized desire are on full display, from the Devil’s envy of Eden’s blessedness and inveiglement The Goat and the Idol 79 of human credulity, to the feigned inadvertence of Christ’s exposure to death and his rival’s homicidal covetousness, which he outfoxes. All belong to a repertoire of narrative devices at once purely mythic and cannily descriptive of human conflict. The divine hero...

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