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218 Charles Mabee inculcated within each worldview. Does the absence of the Passion from these traditions, whether it is explicit or implied within them, eliminate them from Christian or Girardian appropriation? The answer, I am convinced, is “not at all!” The basis of my optimism is tied up with understanding the Passion narrative as dramaturgy, that is, God’s act (read “Revelation” in traditional theological language), which uncovers the hidden wellsprings of an all too humanly constructed culture. The distinctive Christian message is surely intimately bound up with this act that lays bare the lies that culture perpetuates in its own cover-up and the myriad loads of fool’s gold that it would sell us to keep the cultural game going. But, the drama enacted on the Cross is not simply a spiritualized version of show and tell. If it reveals anything at all, it reveals more about us than it does about God. (Calvin had it backwards: the purpose of “man” is not to glorify God; rather, it is the purpose of God to glorify humanity through the crucifixion of Jesus. What this means in nontheological language is that the cross not only reveals to us who we are but, more pedestrianly, the heresy of prioritizing thinking over doing. In this way mimetic theory reveals to us one super-idea: thinking as such is not simply the human skill; it is simultaneously the human problem. How so? Thinking is symbolic, and semiotics as such are already rooted in violence; in other words, language participates in violence by deferring it and referencing it in language, rather than striving to overcome it. In this way, Jesus’s act of willingly submitting himself to cultural violence, thereby revealing the primary murder upon which culture is established, not only condemns culture but also condemns language itself. The problem is we think sacrificially: the crucifixion “shows us” that. By murdering Jesus, we don’t have to murder someone else. Jesus dying for us recognizes that while someone has to die, it doesn’t have to be one of us. In this way, the act of Jesus is both community effecting (reenacting the murder act of community) and revelatory to us with regard to our true nature (reenacting the founding act of culture.) This dramaturgic aspect of the Passion carries the implication that nothing metaphysically happened to the structure of the cosmos as a result of the Cross. In that sense, Christ is not cosmic in the metaphysical, transcendental sense. He is “merely” human. Learning to be “merely” human is what all of the great hermeneuticians of suspicion have been teaching us for generations in various ways. The great paradox that Christianity maintains is that God would choose to valorize humanity rather than glorify God’s self. This mystery is really the bedrock of Christian nontriumphalism. To believe otherwise is to return to the world of Christian sacrificial thinking and the myths that this position inspires. In other words, claiming that the cosmos was somehow Dispatch from the Girardian Boundary 219 structurally changed as a result of Jesus’s Passion represents a remythologization that harbors as much destructive power as the cultural mythologies it seeks to replace. The effect of this would be to establish a new foundation for Christian violence, perhaps more insidious than the myths it seeks to displace, because it is no less armed with the legitimation of the Creator of the universe (“with God on our side”). The fact that Jesus willingly offered up his body on the Cross easily opens up the interplay of mimetic theory and science—another frontier issue in mimetic thought. It is to that matter that I now turn for a few suggestive remarks at the conclusion of this brief essay. Biology is the queen of the Big Sciences. Vast amounts of money are poured into biological studies in the United States, greatly exceeding the amounts spent in other scientific disciplines . Biology is, of course, closely tied to issues of bodily health—always a subject of special prominence among America’s middle and upper classes. In this age of the biological discovery of the “secret of life,” most provocatively embodied in the human genome project, it is highly unlikely that a “scapegoat gene” will be found. Nonetheless, the study of the biological origins and nature of the human brain does have relevance for a mimetic understanding of the human condition. Biology teaches us that the human brain has two primary...

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