-
Chapter 10. God, Freedom
- Michigan State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
91 CHAPTER 10 God, Freedom MT: Why was it necessary for Christ to die? Was it the last guiltless sacrifice before the abandonment of sacrificial systems? RG: Well, the other previous victims weren’t guilty either. Christ dies because he refuses to submit to the law of violence, he denounces it whenever he speaks, and human beings, by refusing his Revelation, necessarily direct their violence back at him. They put the law of violent mimetic desire into action against him. They make him into one more scapegoat. That’s the anthropological foundation of the Passion, and it’s nothing more. If the Passion were only something human, the voice of Christ would have been smothered, or he would have become a pagan divinity like the rest, a sacralized scapegoat. His real message would never have made it to us. His voice was heard, his disciples were reconverted, and, instead of joining his persecutors, as they were beginning to do during the Passion, they finally proclaimed the innocence of Jesus, and all of this was possible thanks only to the Resurrection and to the Paraclete, which taught them the truth. This specifically religious dimension calls for a form of religious consent that dogma says is possible only through divine grace. Christ thus died to save us, to put us in a position to take advantage of that grace. God asks of all 92 Chapter Ten human beings that they behave like Jesus, which is to say that they abstain from violence and proclaim the Kingdom. We never manage to gain access to the religious dimension through the meager power of reason alone, but we can see that it’s rational, and that its effects are too. We see that myths become legible. We see that structural violence is on the wane, even if anarchic violence is once again on the upswing. We observe these results and we clearly see that Jesus is not an archaic divinity, a sacralized scapegoat. What he brings to us cannot come from human beings, and therefore can come only from God. That’s why dogma affirms that Christ is not only a man but the Son of God eternally begotten of the Father. Jesus is not divinized in his capacity as the scapegoat of human beings. The people who imagine that the divinity of Christ is the result of the Passion have a mythical outlook, Christianity says the opposite. Like the light, he is at once what we must see and that which makes it possible to see him. MT: That’s all very brilliant, but when you say that “Christ is eternally begotten of the Father,” you either believe it or you don’t: it’s a matter of faith. If you don’t have that faith, even if you concede that Jesus isn’t an “archaic divinity,” even if you consider his Revelation to be the most important message in all history, that doesn’t necessarily imply that it comes from some elsewhere called God—couldn’t it just come from him, from his own genius? RG: I’m not the one who says it, the dogma does. But it’s important to show that the saying corresponds to real effects in many areas, effects that have nothing to do with myth, and everything to do with their destruction. Christianity has good reasons to consider itself absolutely unique. You can believe that without being an ethnocentric simpleton. Myths are religions of victorious false accusation. The Gospel narrative refutes not only the guilt of Jesus but all lies of the same kind, for example the one that makes Oedipus out to be a parricidal, incestuous plague-spreader. Christianity sends back to human beings the violence that they have always projected onto their divinities. That is why we accuse it of guilt-tripping us. And on this point we are right, but the Gospel narrative is even more right because to defend our victims it is obliged to condemn their persecutors , which is to say ourselves. God, Freedom 93 In Greek, as I said, the Holy Spirit is “the Defender of Victims,” and Satan is “the Accuser.” Gospel symbolism fits admirably with the mimetic reading. Jean-Marie Domenach thinks that I’m trying to give a scientific demonstration of faith. I know that faith is indemonstrable, but it’s not alone. There’s also intelligence, and the great Christian tradition has always maintained that there is a fundamental agreement between faith...