Casting Satan
Some time ago, my morning devotions led me to the passage in Mark’s Gospel where the Scribes hurled the accusation that Jesus had Beelzebul in him and that “it is through the prince of devils that he casts devils out” (3:22).
The reply Jesus gave began with the famous question: How can Satan cast out Satan? (3:23)
This is then followed by this discourse:
If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come. (3:24-26)
For as long I remember hearing this Gospel passage read out in liturgies, I assumed the meaning of the passage to be that, because a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand Satan, wanting to maintain the unity of his kingdom, does not cast himself out. In asking “How can Satan cast out Satan?”, Jesus is therefore denying the notion of Satan’s self-expulsion.
This impression of the Gospel came under challenge after reading Rene Girard’s I See Satan Fall like Lightning, which reads the Gospel references to Satan in light of Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry, in a way that not only directly contradicts the impression I had of this passage, but also in such a way as to expose the subtlety, power, but eventual futility of Satan.
In the context of the Gospel passage, Girard positions Mark’s question “How can Satan cast out Satan” alongside Matthew’s subtle rephrasing of the question into a conditional clause, that is, “IF Satan casts out Satan…”. What Girard is seeking to bring out here is the idea that what Jesus is doing is not deny the reality of Satan’s self-expulsion. If anything, the passage that follow make him appear to be asserting it as a reality, especially in light of Matthew’s version of the discourse (34).
By way of background, Girard’s mimetic theory posited that our desires are shaped by and imitations of the desires of others (hence his designation of these others as “models” of our desire). However, in the course of this mimesis, what started out as our desirable model makes a shift to become the obstacle for that desire’s fulfilment. In Girards words:
Because our models suggest their own desire to us, they inevitably oppose the resulting desire (33).
This sets in train what Girard calls a mimetic rivalry between ourselves and our models.
In a similar vein, Girard speaks of Satan as a seducer, a model for our desire, though in a way that is ironically mimicking Jesus as a model for our desire (Girard does after all, regard Satan as a “parasite on God’s creatures” and therefore “totally mimetic”[42]). As indicated above, however, a time will come when Satan makes the switch from being a seducer to a rival, setting off a cycle of mimetic rivalry and escalation. Interestingly, Girard indicates that this is why, when Peter tells Jesus that anything other than the path of a political messiah cannot happen to him, Jesus responds with the rebuke “get behind me Satan” (Matt 16:23; Mk 8:33). For Girard, Peter is:
…invit[ing] Jesus…to take Peter himself as the model of his desire [in this case, a desire for his own worldly ambition]. If Jesus were to turn away from His Father to follow Peter, he and Peter both would quickly fall into mimetic rivalry (33).
As this mimetic rivalry escalates, what is needed is a scapegoat, a focal point upon which all this mimetic energy can converge, to be expelled like excess pressure through a safety valve, thereby restoring the equilibrium that came before.
This is where Girard identifies the subtety of Satan, for here Girard says that he not only becomes the model and then rival, he also becomes his own scapegoat. In other words, he becomes both the sower of scandal rivalry and disorder. In his role as his own scapegoat, he also becomes the instiller of a semblance of order, hence the title that Scripture sometimes affords to Satan, namely the “Prince (that is the fulcrum) of this world”.
But in the same subtle way that Jesus is describing Satan’s power, there is also a subtle undoing of that very power. In acknowledging that “Satan casts out Satan”, Jesus is also exposing the lie of Satan’s self-expulsion, that it can never last. It cannot last because, as we will see later in the Passion (and later the Resurrection), Jesus exposes the lie of scapegoating as the surefire means of maintaining order. Thus in Girard’s words:
The proof that Satan possesses this power is the affirmation, frequently repeated, that this power is coming to its end. The imminent fall of Satan, prophesied by Christ, is one and the same thing as the end of his power of self-expulsion (34).
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