René Girard Quotes

There is always an attempt to move away from the Cross, that is, to perpetuate man’s misrecognition of his violence and protect his pride from the revelation. Without the Cross, there is no revelation of the fundamental injustice of the scapegoat mechanism, which is the founder of human culture, with all its repercussions in our relationships with each other.

The God of Christianity isn’t the violent God of archaic religion, but the non-violent God who willingly becomes a victim in order to free us from our violence.

The aggressor has always already been attacked. Why are relations of rivalry never seen as symmetrical? Because people always have the impression that the other is the first to attack, that they are never the ones who begin, though in a way they are always the ones. Individualism is a formidable lie. We make others understand that we recognize the signs of aggressiveness which they manifest, and they in turn interpret our posture as aggression.

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

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.

Even in the most closed cultures men believe that they are free and open to the universal; their differential character makes the narrowest cultural fields seem inexhaustible from within. Anything that compromises this illusion terrifies us and stirs up the immemorial tendency to persecution.

the book of Leviticus contains the famous commandment “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18); that is, you shall love your neighbor neither more nor less than yourself.

MSB: You're saying, then, that the coming of Christ, by fatally undermining the regime of violence, ought to have the consequence either that from now on heaven and earth are separate, ushering in the Apocalypse, or, to the contrary, that the immanence of the divine order, in the Hegelian sense, must now be considered to have been made actual? RG: It's not clear. Sacrificial interpretations are always interesting, because they take into account what you have just said: they reflect the power of God in a world that, from the historical point of view, obviously remains pre-apocalyptic. Attempts will continue to be made, one after the other, to establish a divine order on earth. The error of idealists is to unfailingly believe that these attempts will succeed — whereas violence remains embedded in the world. The triumph of the Cross is the unfinished work of a tiny minority. Even if Satan is conquered each time an individual is saved, his power endures. It's my Jansenism coming out, you see. Satan has been conquered. But humanity, instead of bringing into existence the order of things that it desires, threatens to completely destroy the world instead. This order of things is historical. Luke calls it “the times of the Gentiles,”8 which is to say the age of those who are going to convert, only in the wrong way. Ignoring the apocalypse of the Revelation to John amounts to converting to Pelagianism — you know, the theory of that old Englishman who believed in the excellence of the world and who took issue with the doctrine of original sin and of grace. MSB

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!

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

Human culture is fundamentally and originally religious, rather than secondarily and supplementally.

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.

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.

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.

Kahraman, gururun aldatıcı ilahından vazgeçerek kölelikten kurtulur ve sonunda mutsuzluğun hakikatine erişir. Bu vazgeçiş, yaratıcı vazgeçişten ayırt edilemez. Romantıik bir yazarı gerçek romancı yapan metafizik arzuyu yenmesidir.