Two Princes on Good Friday

Today is Good Friday, the day the Church marks the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

In the focus on the event of the crucifixion, or the love that is shown by Christ in submitting Himself to the crucifixion, we could quite easily lose sight of the processes that led to the crucifixion. In doing so, we run the risk of underestimating both the drama, love and power displayed by God in this Paschal season.

Against this backdrop, I found re-reading Girard’s I See Satan Fall like Lightning incredibly helpful (I made reference to this book in my previous post). More specifically, I found that shifting my focus away from Christ and onto Satan just momentarily rather helpful.

At the beginning of I See Satan…, Girard took pains in that volume to explain one of Satan’s titles afforded by the Bible, namely the “Prince of this World”. The use of the word “Prince” is more than simply a reference to royalty. In another reading, the word is also a reference to the hinge upon which the integrity of the status quo is maintained. How is this done?

In my previous post, I made reference to the gist of Girard’s mimetic theory, where rivalries find a safety valve by turning the “all against all” into the “all against one” - a scapegoat mechanism - which brings an amity back to previously rivaling factions. In I See Satan…, Girard puts on another inflection on this mechanism, and he does so with reference to Mark’s Gospel reading of the healing of the demoniac, which readers might find familiar. In response to Jesus’ healing of the possessed, he is accused of using the power of the prince of demons to cast out demons, an accusation that receives a retort:

How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, it cannot stand…and if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot endure and is finished (Mk 3:23-26).

At first blush, readers of this passage might interpret this passage as Jesus ridiculing the suggestion that Satan is casting out himself. Girard reads it very differently, arguing that Jesus is not denying the idea. Indeed, says Girard, Jesus acknowledges it. Indeed, “he asserts it” (34). In asserting the reality of Satan casting out Satan, Jesus seeks to draw our attention to the way that Satan works: by inserting himself into the cycle of mimetic rivalry and its inevitable escalations. This he can do, Girard says, precisely because

The devil does not have a stable foundation; he has no being at all. To clothe himself in the semblance of being, he must act as a parasite on God’s creatures. He is totally mimetic. (42)

In other words, Satan is more than able to hook onto the desires of his creatures, and churn the rivalries the copying of those desires generate within them - he that is totally mimetic can would naturally breed and forment mimetic desire. Furthermore, he is able to make these rivalries radiate out to encompass whole communities, stoking them into a collective frenzy that threatens to break that community down…

…that is until a scapegoat is found…and herein lies the biggest twist for Girard.

For Satan presents himself as the scapegoat. Satan, who is pure mimesis, and also pure division, would find no problem with being divided against himself by being his own scapegoat. But in being his own scapegoat - which once expelled, brings a peace between the rivals - Satan also provides “order as much as disorder” (34). It is this self-expulsion to heal the rivalry he generates that gives him extraordinary power as an - actually the sole - ordering principle, thereby making him the Prince of this World.

This is the reality that Jesus highlights in Mark’s Gospel. In so magnifying the power of Satan, however, Girard thereby highlights the drama at play in Jesus’ salvific work.

In the first instance, it shows the extent of the power that Jesus is facing down. Jesus is doing nothing more than exposing the very hinge by which all our human societies have, up till now, have been organised. In so exposing this hinge, it also erases its power, it no longer has a hold over those societies (138).

In the second instance, Jesus highlights the love involved by submitting Himself to crucifixion as the means by which God exposes Satan’s hinge. For God did not choose to erase Satan’s power by over-powering Satan and eliminating by fiat the cycle of mimetic rivalry, which would have meant inserting God into a rivalry with Satan - and God has no rivals. Instead, for Girard, God chooses to do something else entirely - He inserts himself into the cycle of mimetic rivalry and becomes the scapegoat.

Girard thereby puts a new spin on Pope Leo’s sermon on the crucixion, penned a millenium and a half ago. It especially highlights the significance of this line: “By dying He submitted to the laws of the underworld”. Jesus submits himself to Satan’s regime, inserts himself into it, plays by its logic, and becomes what Satan should have been, namely the guilty thing to be cast out. In the words of the Second Letter to the Corinthians, “He who was sinless, became sin on our behalf” (2 Cor 5:21).

In so submitting to this Satanic process however, Jesus highlights a point that many might miss in the reading of the Passion narratives: he is completely innocent. Bringing his innocence to light is of the utmost importance for Girard, for the victim’s innocence is what exposes the lie beneath the ordering of this world, that is, the accusation that leads to the expulsion of the accused. Girard puts it like this:

Jesus, in showing his innocence in the Passion accounts, has ‘cancelled’ this accusation; he ‘set it aside’. He nails the accusation to the Cross, which is to say that he reveals its falsity. Though ordinarily the accusation nails the victim to a cross, here by contrast the accusation itself is nailed and publicly exhibited and exposed as a lie. The Cross enables the truth to triumph because the Gospels disclose the falseness of the accusation; they unmask Satan as an imposter…they discredit once and for all the untruth of the principalities and powers in the wake of the Cross.

In the wake of this passage, this brings to mind why Jesus is afforded by Isaiah the title of “Prince of Peace” (Isa 9:6). Jesus Christ breaks Satan’s monopoly as an ordering principle, becoming another hinge upon which the world could be organised. It is an ordering that does not rely upon Satanic accusation and expulsion. Indeed, it is not reliant on any rivalry at all. On the Cross, Christ gives us a model of desire that Friedrich Nietzsche found so repulsive, the desire to turn away from rivalry and its urge to overpower others, and desiring instead the lowest place, even victimhood and death.

A blessed Pasch to all.

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