If the patriarchal system, when compared to primitive systems, seems to represent a “lesser” degree of structuralization, then Western civilization s… - René 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.

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

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