Perhaps I
should have shortened quotations from Nietzsche … but then the reader wouldn’t
be really tasting The Antichrist’s bitter flavor. To get relief, toward
the blog’s end witness Girard seemingly having an easy task of turning the
tables on Nietzsche while we (may) cheer him on – but is it fully justifiable?
xxx
“God is
dead and it is we who have killed him… Who will wipe this blood from our
hands?” (Gay Science, Aphorism 145, Friedrich
Nietzsche). In the Scapegoat interview with David Cayley Rene Girard interprets
this statement and question as referring to the foundation of Christianity, in line with what he himself has posited as a general rule: the birth of
a religion through the death of the victim.
Girard knew
Nietzsche’s thought very well, and possibly appreciated it even more than he
has led us to believe; some of Girard’s thought parallels that of Nietzsche
very closely (e.g., as regards the structural role of ressentiment), while some
is its mirror image, with features reversed left to right (the very role of
innocent victim or martyr, epitomized in the notion of “the truth of the
victim”).
xxx
Let us
begin, however, almost from the very end, and from a reverse perspective, with
a Nietzschean gloss on Girard – with a development that it is easy to imagine
would have been lost on Nietzsche, while preoccupying Girard toward the end of
his intellectual career: Having clearly seen the arc of Christianity’s workings
as that which must needs end in humanity’s final Apocalypse, Girard
nevertheless chose toward the end of his intellectual career to ascribe
differential values to points on the fine end of the spectrum of an
intensifying undifferentiation that has been the religion’s legacy. And while of
course there are those who discount Christianity’s role in the push towards
equal rights of all sorts, and they might be entitled to see the religion as a
reactionary force – as many people obviously do, Girard has been adamant in his
claim that it is Christianity that has been the chief leveler, having also been
the initial stimulus in that direction, and Nietzsche would obviously concur. But
whereas Girard was ultimately ambivalent on the issue, Nietzsche of course
assigned unequivocally negative value to the development.
What then
might be the point in Girard’s identifying a totalitarianism on the Left, which
he calls super-Christianity, that is ostensibly upping the ante as a true
defender of victims while also more than occasionally accusing historical Christianity
as being a force of oppression?
If that has
not been done for purely apologetic reasons, as very well it may have, at least
to some extent, the rationale might have been Girard’s (unwitting?) search for
a locus of stability on the trajectory towards the Apocalypse. But if anything,
his thought would allow only for a temporary one… Then again, one might argue,
a temporary reprieve is better than nothing, and why not then to seek refuge in
a tradition that has been credited with sensitizing humanity to victims’ plight
in the first place – even if some are not persuaded and see it as continually
sacrificial?
Now it
would only be natural to imagine that the fine distinctions made both by Girard
and his (would-be) detractors on the Left would have been totally lost on
Nietzsche. But would they? Internecine struggle among those he saw as having
slave mentality was not something that he could not see happening, as indeed he
had. Here is a fragment from The Antichrist
that may lend itself to such an interpretation:
“Let us not be led astray: they
say "judge not," and yet they condemn to hell whoever stands in their
way. In letting God sit in judgment they judge themselves; in glorifying God
they glorify themselves; in demanding that everyone show the virtues
which they themselves happen to be capable of—still more, which they must
have in order to remain on top—they assume the grand air of men struggling for
virtue, of men engaging in a war that virtue may prevail. "We live, we
die, we sacrifice ourselves for the good" (—"the truth,"
"the light," "the kingdom of God"): in point of fact, they
simply do what they cannot help doing. Forced, like hypocrites, to be sneaky,
to hide in corners, to slink along in the shadows, they convert their necessity
into a duty: it is on grounds of duty that they account for their lives of
humility, and that humility becomes merely one more proof of their piety…. Ah,
that humble, chaste, charitable brand of fraud! "Virtue itself shall bear
witness for us."…One may read the gospels as books of moral seduction:
these petty folks fasten themselves to morality—they know the uses of morality!
Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose!—The
fact is that the conscious conceit of the chosen here disguises itself as
modesty: it is in this way that they, the "community," the
"good and just," range themselves, once and for always, on one side,
the side of "the truth"—and the rest of mankind, "the
world," on the other…. In that we observe the most fatal sort of
megalomania that the earth has ever seen: little abortions of bigots and liars
began to claim exclusive rights in the concepts of "God," "the
truth," "the light," "the spirit," "love,"
"wisdom" and "life," as if these things were synonyms of
themselves and thereby they sought to fence themselves off from the
"world"; little super–Jews, ripe for some sort of madhouse, turned
values upside down in order to meet their notions, just as if the
Christian were the meaning, the salt, the standard and even the last
judgment of all the rest…. The whole disaster was only made possible by
the fact that there already existed in the world a similar megalomania, allied
to this one in race, to wit, the Jewish: once a chasm began to yawn
between Jews and Judeo–Christians, the latter had no choice but to employ the
self–preservative measures that the Jewish instinct had devised,
even against the Jews themselves, whereas the Jews had employed them
only against non–Jews. The Christian is simply a Jew of the
"reformed" confession.”
“[The Jews]
put themselves against all those conditions under which, hitherto, a
people had been able to live, or had even been permitted to live; out
of themselves they evolved an idea which stood in direct opposition
to natural conditions—one by one they distorted religion,
civilization, morality, history and psychology until each became
a contradiction of its natural significance. We meet with the
same phenomenon later on, in an incalculably exaggerated form, but only as a
copy: the Christian church, put beside the "people of God," shows a
complete lack of any claim to originality. Precisely for this reason the Jews
are the most fateful people in the history of the world: their
influence has so falsified the reasoning of mankind in this matter that today
the Christian can cherish anti–Semitism without realizing that it is no more
than the final consequence of Judaism.”
Both Girard
and Nietzsche see an outflanking mechanism at work and they even seem to agree
as to the valuation of its elements, both clearly favoring the outflanked
element to the outflanking. Yet of course Nietzsche is here rather disdainful
of both (though much less toward the Jews, on account of their putative
vitality), whereas for Girard the currently being outflanked (historical Christianity)
is the acme of man’s spiritual development, whereas the outflanking
super-Christianity is an outrageous and dangerous perversion.
xxx
But back to
the innocent victim… According to Nietzsche there was one in history, namely
Jesus. But he chose his victimhood, says Nietzsche, which fact may cast doubt
on the true nature – and innocence – of his sacrifice, while Girard for the
longest time would not accept any sacrificial connotation attaching to Jesus’
death on the Cross (eventually nuancing his position under the influence of Raymund
Schwager). Yet Nietzsche makes a crucial distinction between Jesus and
Christianity: Jesus is free of ressentiment, and thus also of slave mentality
that pervades the latter and is constitutive of it.
“The fate
of the Gospels was decided by death—it hung on the "cross."… It was
only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only the cross, which
was usually reserved for the canaille only—it was only this appalling paradox
which brought the disciples face to face with the real riddle: "Who was
it? what was it?"—The feeling of dismay, of profound affront and injury;
the suspicion that such a death might involve a refutation of their
cause; the terrible question, "Why just in this way?"—this state of
mind is only too easy to understand. Here everything must be
accounted for as necessary; everything must have a meaning, a reason, the
highest sort of reason; the love of a disciple excludes all chance. Only then
did the chasm of doubt yawn: "Who put him to death? who was his
natural enemy?"—this question flashed like a lightning–stroke. Answer:
dominant Judaism, its ruling class. From that moment, one found one's self in
revolt against the established order, and began to understand Jesus
as in revolt against the established order. Until then this militant, this
nay–saying, nay–doing element in his character had been lacking; what is more,
he had appeared to present its opposite. Obviously, the little community
had not understood what was precisely the most important thing of
all: the example offered by this way of dying, the freedom from and superiority
to every feeling of ressentiment—a plain indication of how little he was
understood at all! All that Jesus could hope to accomplish by his death, in
itself, was to offer the strongest possible proof, or example, of his teachings
in the most public manner…. But his disciples were very far
from forgiving his death—though to have done so would have accorded
with the Gospels in the highest degree; and neither were they prepared
to offer themselves, with gentle and serene calmness of heart, for a
similar death…. On the contrary, it was precisely the most unevangelical of
feelings, revenge, that now possessed them. It seemed impossible that the
cause should perish with his death: "recompense" and
"judgment" became necessary (—yet what could be less evangelical than
"recompense," "punishment," and "sitting in
judgment"!). Once more the popular belief in the coming of a messiah
appeared in the foreground; attention was riveted upon an historical moment:
the "kingdom of God" is to come, with judgment upon his enemies…. But
in all this there was a wholesale misunderstanding: imagine the "kingdom
of God" as a last act, as a mere promise! The Gospels had been, in fact,
the incarnation, the fulfilment, the realization of this
"kingdom of God." It was only now that all the familiar contempt for
and bitterness against Pharisees and theologians began to appear in the
character of the Master—he was thereby turned into a Pharisee and
theologian himself! On the other hand, the savage veneration of these
completely unbalanced souls could no longer endure the Gospel doctrine, taught
by Jesus, of the equal right of all men to be children of God: their revenge
took the form of elevating Jesus in an extravagant fashion, and thus
separating him from themselves: just as, in earlier times, the Jews, to revenge
themselves upon their enemies, separated themselves from their God, and placed
him on a great height. The One God and the Only Son of God: both were products
of ressentiment….”
It is worth
noting here that, for the sake of pummeling the nascent Christian movement,
Nietzsche finds what in effect amounts to approbatory words for a notion he
normally considers utterly pernicious, namely “the Gospel doctrine, taught by
Jesus [a person free from ‘every feeling of ressentiment’], of the equal
right of all men to be children of God,” which, he claims, his disciples were
not able to fully appreciate and practice. It seems that the doctrine might validly
obtain among those who are truly ressentiment-free, yet he saw Christians as
unable to attain to that lofty goal. But of course from a Christian perspective
to do so would require constantly practicing the (ultimate) virtue of humility,
whereas Nietzsche’s Overman would get there by unabashedly allowing free play to
his natural will to power. Can those two perspectives meet in a meaningful way?
Without employing sophistry I doubt it.
xxx
What follows may serve as Nietzsche’s commentary on the notion of “the truth of the
victim,” as he zeroes in on a special kind of victim, a willing victim, namely
the martyr. According to him instead of contributing to or constituting a
revelation of truth, as it does for Girard, martyrdom serves to obscure or
distort it:
“It is so
little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth of a cause
that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything to do with the
truth at all. In the very tone in which a martyr flings what he fancies to be
true at the head of the world there appears so low a grade of intellectual
honesty and such insensibility to the problem of "truth,"
that it is never necessary to refute him. Truth is not something that one man
has and another man has not: at best, only peasants, or peasant–apostles like
Luther, can think of truth in any such way. One may rest assured that the
greater the degree of a man's intellectual conscience the greater will be his
modesty, his discretion, on this point. To know in five cases,
and to refuse, with delicacy, to know anything further…. "Truth,"
as the word is understood by every prophet, every sectarian, every
free–thinker, every Socialist and every churchman, is simply a complete proof
that not even a beginning has been made in the intellectual discipline and
self–control that are necessary to the unearthing of even the smallest
truth.—The deaths of the martyrs, it may be said in passing, have been
misfortunes of history: they have misled…. The conclusion that all idiots,
women and plebeians come to, that there must be something in a cause for which
any one goes to his death (or which, as under primitive Christianity, sets off
epidemics of death–seeking)—this conclusion has been an unspeakable drag upon
the testing of facts, upon the whole spirit of inquiry and investigation. The
martyrs have damaged the truth…. Even to this day the crude fact of
persecution is enough to give an honorable name to the most empty sort of
sectarianism.—But why? Is the worth of a cause altered by the fact that someone
had laid down his life for it?—An error that becomes honorable is simply an
error that has acquired one seductive charm the more.”
While for
Girard Christianity is the only instance of globalization he seems to endorse,
though he sees dangers attendant on that dynamic, e.g., its apparent
culmination in an ostensibly totalitarian super-Christianity, for Nietzsche it constitutes
a globalization of decadence and resentment from the start:
“The
Christian movement, as a European movement, was from the start no more than a
general uprising of all sorts of outcast and refuse elements (—who now, under
cover of Christianity, aspire to power). It does not represent the
decay of a race; it represents, on the contrary, a conglomeration
of décadence products from all directions, crowding together and
seeking one another out. It was not, as has been thought, the corruption
of antiquity, of noble antiquity, which made Christianity possible;
one cannot too sharply challenge the learned imbecility which today maintains
that theory. At the time when the sick and rotten Chandala classes in the
whole imperium were Christianized, the contrary type, the
nobility, reached its finest and ripest development. The majority became
master; democracy, with its Christian instincts, triumphed…. Christianity
was not "national," it was not based on race—it appealed to all the
varieties of men disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere.
Christianity has the rancor of the sick at its very core—the instinct against
the healthy, against health. Everything that is well–constituted, proud,
gallant and, above all, beautiful gives offence to its ears and eyes. Again I
remind you of Paul's priceless saying: "And God hath chosen
the weak things of the world, the foolish things of the
world, the base things of the world, and things which are despised":
this was the formula; in hoc
signo the décadence triumphed.—God on the cross—is man
always to miss the frightful inner significance of this symbol?—Everything that
suffers, everything that hangs on the cross, is divine…. We all hang on
the cross, consequently we are divine…. We alone are divine…. Christianity
was thus a victory: a nobler attitude of mind was destroyed by it…”
xxx
For
Nietzsche it all boils down to “the poisonous doctrine [of] ‘equal rights
for all,’” which ultimately stems from the belief, misguided in his eyes, in an
"immortal soul," whereas for Girard as a Christian the latter remains
an unquestionable tenet – even if he might not like some of its logical and on
the ground or practical ramifications for the universality of – ever expanding
– equal rights.
"One thing
only is necessary"…. That every man, because he has an "immortal
soul," is as good as every other man; that in an infinite universe of
things the "salvation" of every individual may lay claim to
eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the three–fourths insane may
assume that the laws of nature are constantly suspended in their
behalf—it is impossible to lavish too much contempt upon such a magnification
of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to insolence. And yet
Christianity has to thank precisely this miserable flattery of
personal vanity for its triumph—it was thus that it lured all the botched,
the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole refuse and off–scouring
of humanity to its side. The "salvation of the soul"—in plain [English]:
"the world revolves around me."…The poisonous doctrine,
"equal rights for all," has been propagated as a Christian
principle: out of the secret nooks and crannies of bad instinct Christianity
has waged a deadly war upon all feelings of reverence and distance between man
and man, which is to say, upon the first prerequisite to every step
upward, to every development of civilization—out of
the ressentiment of the masses it has forged its chief weapons
against us, against everything noble, joyous and high–spirited on earth,
against our happiness on earth…. To allow "immortality" to every
Peter and Paul was the greatest, the most vicious outrage upon noble humanity
ever perpetrated.—And let us not underestimate the fatal influence that
Christianity has had, even upon politics! Nowadays no one has courage any more
for special rights, for the right of dominion, for feelings of honorable pride
in himself and his equals—for the pathos of distance…. Our politics is
sick with this lack of courage!—The aristocratic attitude of mind has been
undermined by the lie of the equality of souls; and if belief in the
"privileges of the majority" makes and will continue to
make revolutions—it is Christianity, let us not doubt,
and Christian valuations, which convert every revolution into a carnival
of blood and crime! Christianity is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the
ground against everything that is lofty: the gospel of the
"lowly" lowers…”
The Jews’
“vitality,” mentioned above, is both praised by Nietzsche and seen, in a
circular way, as the ultimate source of its perversion, though perhaps an
understandable one, done with a view to assuring their preservation. But as
such the following analysis justifiably lends itself to be placed among
conspiracy theories. Of course Girard’s take on the role of the Jews in history
is entirely different, a revelatory one rather than serving to dissimulate
reality:
“In my
"Genealogy of Morals" I give the first psychological explanation of
the concepts underlying those two antithetical things, a noble morality
and a ressentiment morality, the second of which is a mere product of
the denial of the former. The Judeo–Christian moral system belongs to the
second division, and in every detail. In order to be able to say Nay to
everything representing an ascending evolution of life—that is, to
well–being, to power, to beauty, to self–approval—the instincts
of ressentiment, here become downright genius, had to invent
another world in which the acceptance of life appeared as the most evil
and abominable thing imaginable. Psychologically, the Jews are a people gifted
with the very strongest vitality, so much so that when they found themselves
facing impossible conditions of life they chose voluntarily, and with a
profound talent for self–preservation, the side of all those instincts which
make for décadence—not as if mastered by them, but as if detecting in
them a power by which "the world" could be defied. The Jews are
the very opposite of décadents: they have simply been forced
into appearing in that guise, and with a degree of skill approaching
the non plus ultra of histrionic genius they have managed to put
themselves at the head of all décadent movements (—for example, the
Christianity of Paul—), and so make of them something stronger than any party
frankly saying Yes to life. To the sort of men who reach out for
power under Judaism and Christianity,—that is to say, to
the priestly class—décadence is no more than a means to an end. Men
of this sort have a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in confusing the
values of "good" and "bad," "true" and
"false" in a manner that is not only dangerous to life, but also
slanders it.”
“I call
Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one
great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret,
subterranean and small enough,…”
“One now
begins to see just what it was that came to an end with the death on
the cross: a new and thoroughly original effort to found a Buddhistic peace
movement, and so establish happiness on earth—real, not merely
promised. For this remains—as I have already pointed out—the essential
difference between the two religions of décadence: Buddhism promises
nothing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises everything, but fulfils
nothing.—Hard upon the heels of the "glad tidings" came the worst
imaginable: those of Paul. In Paul is incarnated the very opposite of the
"bearer of glad tidings"; he represents the genius for hatred, the
vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. What, indeed, has not
this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Savior: he nailed him
to his own cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the death of
Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole gospels—nothing was left of all
this after that counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his uses.
Surely not reality; surely not historical truth!…Once more
the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated the same old master crime against
history—he simply struck out the yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity,
and invented his own history of Christian beginnings. Going further, he
treated the history of Israel to another falsification, so that it became a
mere prologue to his achievement: all the prophets, it now appeared, had
referred to his "Savior."…Later on the church even
falsified the history of man in order to make it a prologue to Christianity….
“The order
of castes, the order of rank, simply formulates the supreme law of life
itself; the separation of the three types is necessary to the maintenance of
society, and to the evolution of higher types, and the highest
types—the inequality of rights is essential to the existence of any
rights at all.—A right is a privilege. Everyone enjoys the privileges that
accord with his state of existence. Let us not underestimate the privileges of
the mediocre. Life is always harder as one mounts the heights—the cold
increases, responsibility increases. A high civilization is a pyramid: it can
stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly
consolidated mediocrity.
“Whom do I
hate most heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the
apostles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman's instincts, his
pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existence—who make him
envious and teach him revenge…. Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in
the assertion of "equal" rights…. What is bad? But I have
already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy,
from revenge.—The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry…”
xxx
This line
of reasoning reaches its culmination in Nietzsche’s apparently extolling
slavery as benefitting “the weak–willed man, and especially woman,” though
they, in their (perverted) conscience, are unable to appreciate that – unless
it is the slavery of “faith,” but even then they are not able to see their
faith for what it really (in his opinion) is.
“Every sort
of faith is in itself an evidence of self–effacement, of self–estrangement….
When one reflects how necessary it is to the great majority that there be
regulations to restrain them from without and hold them fast, and to what
extent control, or, in a higher sense, slavery, is the one and only
condition which makes for the well–being of the weak–willed man, and especially
woman, then one at once understands conviction and "faith." To the
man with convictions they are his backbone. To avoid seeing many
things, to be impartial about nothing, to be a party man through and through,
to estimate all values strictly and infallibly—these are conditions necessary
to the existence of such a man. But by the same token they are antagonists of
the truthful man—of the truth…. The believer is not free to answer the
question, "true" or "not true," according to the dictates
of his own conscience.”
xxx
As one
proceeds with reading the above and other passages one may feel less and less inclined
to discuss or refute them one by one, or analyze them from the standpoint of
mimetic theory, for that matter – even if some of them by themselves might
merit doing that. And it is not from standing in awe of them. The impression
one increasingly gets is that of a battle being fought by a man filled not so
much with the pride of a noble spirit, though there is a lot contempt – that
flip side of pride – in evidence, as increasingly with resentment and
bitterness. This is not to say that it was the primary motivation of his
lifelong crusade against Christianity, but he certainly seems at times to have succumbed to resentment,
in a mimetic fashion, against those who in a power dynamic of the world at
large must have been recognized by him as gaining the collective upper hand. Resentment
and contempt are intertwined. Nietzsche ascribed resentment to the lowly, the
servile and feeble of spirit, for whom he claimed to have only the purest of
contempt. But he was so preoccupied with them, so strongly and emotionally
railed against them on so many occasions, to justify arguing that what he felt
towards them was at times nothing short of resentment itself. In this world of
ours’ never-ending mimetic dance, it is relative power in human relations, both
individual and collective, that decides when and whose turn it is to contemn
and when and whose turn it is to resent. We all are marionettes on the stage of
life – only rarely realizing that, still more rarely able to take reprieve from
it for a while.
What can be said for Nietzsche is that he must
have been keenly aware of that (vide, “no one is such a liar as the indignant
man,” on the negative side, and on the “positive” side: “Every select man
strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy, where he is free from the
crowd, the many, the majority—where he may forget “men who are the rule,” as
their exception;—exclusive only of the case in which he is pushed straight to
such men by a still stronger instinct, as a discerner in the great and
exceptional sense. Whoever, in intercourse with men, does not occasionally
glisten in all the green and grey colors of distress, owing to disgust,
satiety, sympathy, gloominess, and solitariness, is assuredly not a man of
elevated tastes; supposing, however, that he does not voluntarily take all this
burden and disgust upon himself, that he persistently avoids it, and remains,
as I said, quietly and proudly hidden in his citadel, one thing is then
certain: he was not made, he was not predestined for knowledge. For as such, he
would one day have to say to himself: “The devil take my good taste! but ‘the
rule’ is more interesting than the exception—than myself, the exception!”),
– yet he
chose to stay involved and risk succumbing to emotions from which he must have
cringed in abomination: “And he would go down, and above all, he would go
“inside.” The long and serious study of the average man—and consequently much
disguise, self-overcoming, familiarity, and bad intercourse (all intercourse is
bad intercourse except with one’s equals):—that constitutes a necessary part of
the life-history of every philosopher; perhaps the most disagreeable, odious,
and disappointing part.” (Beyond Good and Evil)
And, one might add, risk facing dangers,
mimetic and otherwise, that one cannot hope to always be able to successfully
navigate – even being on the will to power trip of an aspiring Overman or one
in the making. I imagine Nietzsche knew that, and was aware when it was
happening (and not only in his relations with Wagner), though some of his
notions of what constitutes a mimetic danger must have been very different as
compared with those of Girard. Or being on a lifelong saintly voyage actuated
by Christian humility, for that matter, something Rene Girard certainly appreciated.
xxx
Despite valuing his insights highly, Girard was
not, however, as magnanimous as one might perhaps expect him to be with regard
to Nietzsche’s mimetic self-awareness and ability to resist some of the base
mimetic impulses (or, rather, lack thereof, as he saw it). His statements: “Nietzsche
shared with many intellectuals of his time and our own a passion for
irresponsible rhetoric in the attempt to get one up on opponents,” and “Since
Nietzsche is blind to mimetic rivalry and its contagion, he doesn't see that
the Gospel stance toward victims does not come from prejudice in favor of the
weak against the strong but is heroic resistance to violent contagion. Indeed,
the Gospels embody the discernment of a small minority that dares to oppose the
monstrous mimetic contagion of a Dionysian lynching” (both from I See Satan
Fall Like Lightning), pale in comparison with his insistence that what actuated
Nietzsche on many occasions, but especially toward the end of his intellectual
career, was nothing short of resentment itself. One may argue that it is precisely
when analyzing Nietzsche’s alleged resentment that Girard is able to get as
clear an insight as any in terms why Christianity was mimetically resisted
by him and many of his peers:
“There is a tendency for critics to play hide
and seek with the later writings of Nietzsche. It would be more interesting to
investigate the inner compulsion that has led so many intellectuals to adopt
inhuman standards in the last two centuries. No one exemplifies this tendency
with the perfection that Nietzsche does. Ressentiment has to be part of the
picture of course. One essential thing about ressentiment is that its
ultimate target is always ressentiment itself, its own mirror image, under
a slightly different mask that makes it unrecognizable.
“Ressentiment is the interiorization of
weakened vengeance. Nietzsche suffers so much from it that he mistakes it for
the original and primary form of vengeance. He sees ressentiment not merely
as the child of Christianity, which it certainly is, but also as its father
which it certainly is not.”
While the first sentence above is a sharp
reflection on Nietzsche’s apparent blindness, the second one is priceless in
its own right when the attention is turned toward Christianity. Girard then
elaborates:
“Ressentiment flourishes in a world where real
vengeance (Dionysus) has been weakened. The Bible and the Gospels have
diminished the violence of vengeance and turned it to ressentiment not because
they originate in the latter but because their real target is vengeance it all
its forms, and they have succeeded only in wounding vengeance, not in
eliminating it. The Gospels are indirectly responsible; we alone are directly
responsible. Ressentiment is the manner in which the spirit of vengeance
survives the impact of Christianity and turns the Gospels to its own use.”
Having denied his insight whereby Christianity
had begotten resentment, Girard then turns the tables on Nietzsche portraying
him as a godfather-like figure of the vengeful violence that ensued shortly
after his death – on August 25, 1900, at the turn of a century of unspeakable
violence, whose shadow continues to haunt us:
“Nietzsche was less blind to the role of
vengeance in human culture than most people of his time, but nevertheless there
was blindness in him. He analyzed ressentiment and all its works with enormous
power. He did not see that the evil he was fighting was a relatively minor evil
compared to the more violent forms of vengeance.
“His insight was partly blunted by the
deceptive quiet of his post-Christian society. He could afford the luxury of resenting
ressentiment so much that it appeared as a fate worse than real vengeance.
Being absent from the scene, real vengeance was never seriously apprehended.
“Unthinkingly, like so many thinkers of his age
and ours, Nietzsche called on Dionysus, begging him to bring back real
vengeance as a cure for what seemed to him the worst of all possible fates,
ressentiment.
“Such frivolity could flourish only in our
privileged centuries, in privileged parts of the world where real vengeance had
retreated so much that its terror had become unintelligible. But sincere
prayers are never in vain, and the prayers of those who desired the return of
vengeance have finally been heard.
“Real vengeance is back among us in the shape
of nuclear and other absolute weapons, reducing our planet to the size of a
global primitive village, terrified once again by the possibility of unlimited
blood feud. Real vengeance is so awesome that even the most vengeful men do not
dare to unleash it, knowing perfectly well that all the dreadful things they
can do unto their enemies, their enemies can also do unto them.
“Compared to this, ressentiment and other
nineteenth-century annoyances pale to insignificance, or rather their only
significance is the increasing rage everywhere that turns ressentiment back
into irrepressible vengeance that can unleash the unspeakable.
“At more and more levels of reality, the
urgency of the Gospel message can no longer be disregarded with impunity. Those
thinkers who, like Nietzsche, unthinkingly appealed to real vengeance in their
itch to get rid of ressentiment resemble these foolish characters in fairy
tales who make the wrong wish and come to grief when it comes true.” (The
Girardian Reader, ed. J.G.Williams)
xxx
Is there a blind spot in Girard in all of the
above? There might be. He certainly was in no position to laugh with Nietzsche,
as I surmise the
latter would have when seeing the current putative cult of victimhood being
itself accused of being a perversion of Christianity. Of course Girard wouldn’t
have join Nietzsche in this exercise because it was he himself who leveled that
charge, whereas for Nietzsche the whole phenomenon would most certainly amount
to nothing more than inner jockeying for pole position among the slaves that
infest a world that, save for their dominance – via democracy, could be a place
of growth and nobility of spirit.
So: was
there a residue of resentment in Girard himself when he would ascribe
totalitarian mentality to super-Christianity, as he collectively termed those
seeing veritable victims beyond what he himself was able to recognize? Or,
rather, is it somewhere here that mimetic analysis – having superbly
illuminated the sinister mechanics behind man’s utmost wickedness and iniquity,
those of the scapegoat mechanism, yet of necessity in terms that may only be
general – finds its limit in terms of its usefulness, and we all have to delve
into our individual consciences to see what is proper and what is not – hoping
and praying, with no assurances, with innermost moral signposts sometimes only
dimly visible, if discernable at all as to its specific workings on the ground,
in any particular situation where claims of victimhood and one’s honest
discernment thereof and sensitivity thereto may be at cross purposes, that we
do not succumb to a polarized and polarizing mimetic atmosphere of our mob-like
world at large?
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