I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

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148 effective, it demands the ignorance of persecutors who "do not know what they are doing." It demands the darkness of Satan to function adequately. The myths are not aware of their own violence, which they project upon the higher transcendent level by demonizing and then deifying their victims. It is just this transfigured violence that becomes visible in the Bible. The victims are seen as true victims, no longer guilty but innocent. The persecutors are seen as true persecutors, no longer innocent but guilty. It is not merely our predecessors whom we unceasingly accuse who are guilty; we all stand in need of pardon. A myth is a lie in the sense that it is the deceptive nonrepresenta- tion that mimetic contagion and its victim mechanism generate by means of the community that becomes their instrument. The mimetic contagion is never objectified; it is never represented in the mythic narrative. It is its real subject, therefore, but it is always concealed as such. It is what the Gospels call Satan, or the devil. THE PROOF that it is difficult, or perhaps too easy, to understand what I have just said is that Satan himself did not understand it. Or rather, he understood it, but too late to protect his realm. His slowness has had tremendous consequences for human history. Paul writes to the Corinthians: "If the princes of this world had known [the wisdom of God] they would not have crucified the Lord of glory" (1 Cor. 2:8). "The princes of this world" are here the same thing as Satan; they crucified the Lord of glory because they expected the results of this event to be favorable to their interests. They were hoping that the victim mechanism would function as usual, protected from any suspicions, and that they would thus rid themselves of Jesus and his message. At the beginning of the matter they had very good reason to think that everything would happen cleanly and quickly. The crucifixion of Jesus is a victim mechanism like the others; it is set in motion and develops like the others. Yet its outcome is different from all the others. Until the Resurrection no one could foresee the reversal of the violent contagion that almost completely overcame the disciples themselves. The princes of this world could rub their hands in sat- isfaction, and yet it turned out that their calculations were undone. Instead of conjuring away once more the secret or the single victim mechanism, the four accounts of the Passion broadcast it to the four corners of the world, publicizing it whetever they were read and proclaimed. Starting from Paul's statement that I have just quoted, Origen and many of the Greek Fathers elaborated a thesis that played a great role as the first centuries of Christianity unfolded, that of Satan duped by the Cross. 4 Satan means the same in this formulation as those St Paul names as the "princes of this world." In Western Christianity this thesis has not met with the same favor as in the East, and finally, as far as 1 know, it disappeared. Western theologians suspected it of being "magical thought." They have wondered whether it attributes a role to God that is unworthy. The thesis interprets the Cross as a kind of divine trap, a ruse of God that is even stronger and cleverer than Satan's ruses. Certain Fathers amplified this idea into a strange metaphor that contributed to the distrust in the West. Christ is compared to the bait the fisher puts on the hook to catch a hungry fish, and that fish is Satan. The role this discourse ascribes to Satan troubles the Western thinkers. As times passes, the devil's place shrinks in Western theo- logical thought. His disappearance is troublesome to the extent that Satan is the same thing as mimetic contagion, which alone can clar- ify the true meaning and validity of the patristic metaphor of Satan duped by the Cross. The discovery of the mimetic, or satanic, cycle enables us to understand that this metaphor contains an essential insight. It takes into account the fact that mimetic conflicts and mimetic pride are the main obstacle to the Christian revelation. Mythical-ritual societies are prisoners of a mimetic circle that they cannot escape since they are unable to identify it. This continues 149
150 151 to be true today: all our ideas about humankind, all our philoso- phies, all our social sciences, all our psychological theories, etc. are fundamentally pagan because they are based on a blindness to the circularity of mimetic conflict and contagion. This blindness is similar to that of mythical-ritual systems. The Passion accounts, allowing us to understand the single victim mechanism and its mimetic cycles, enable us to find and identify our invisible prison and to comprehend our need for redemption. Since the "princes of this world" were not in communion with God, they did not understand that the victim mechanism they un- leashed against Jesus would result in truthful accounts. If they had been able to read the future, not only would they not have en- couraged the Crucifixion, but they would have opposed it with all their might. When the princes of this world finally understood the real import of the Cross, it was too late to turn back: Jesus had been crucified, and the Gospels had been written. Thus Paul is right to affirm: "If the princes of this world had known [the wisdom of God] they would not have crucified the Lord of glory." Western theology, in rejecting the idea of Satan tricked by the Cross, has lost a pearl of great price in the sphere of anthropology. Medieval and modern theories of redemption all look in the direction of God for the causes of the Crucifixion: God's honor, God's justice, even God's anger, must be satisfied. These theories don't succeed because they don't seriously look in the direction where the answer must lie: sinful humanity, human relations, mimetic contagion, which is the same thing as Satan. They speak much of original sin, but they fail to make the idea concrete. That is why they give an impression of being arbitrary and unjust to human beings, even if they are theologically sound. Once we identify the bad contagion, the idea of Satan duped by the Cross acquires a precise meaning that the Greeks obviously sensed without succeeding in articulating it in a completely satisfy- ing fashion. To be a "child of the devil" in the sense of the Gospel of John, as we have seen, is to be locked into a deceptive system of mimetic contagion that can only lead into systems of myth and ritual. Or, in our time, it leads into those more recent forms of idolatry, such as ideology or the cult of science. The Greek Fathers had it right in saying that with the Cross Satan is the mystifier caught in the trap of his own mystification. The single victim mechanism was his personal property, his very own thing, the instrument of self-expulsion that put the world at his feet. But in the Cross this mechanism escapes once and for all from the control Satan exercised over it, and as a result the world looks completely different. If God allowed Satan to reign for a certain period over humankind, it is because God knew beforehand that at the right time Christ would overcome his adversary by dying on the Cross. God in his wisdom had foreseen since the beginning that the victim mechanism would be reversed like a glove, exposed, placed in the open, stripped naked, and dismantled in the Gospel Passion texts, and he knew that neither Satan nor the powers could prevent this revelation. In triggering the victim mechanism against Jesus, Satan believed he was protecting his kingdom, defending his possession, not realiz- ing that, in fact, he was doing the very opposite. He did exactly what God had foreseen. Only Satan could have set in motion the process of his own destruction without suspecting anything was wrong. All we need to make the thesis of Satan duped by the Cross intelligible is a clear definition of what imprisons human beings in the realm of Satan: mimetic contagion and its outcome in the victim mechanism have provided us with that definition. We should not conclude that to identify the truth is enough to liberate us from the lies in which we are all imprisoned. The apostle Paul's text, from which I took the sentence that I just commented on, is the expression of extraordinary inspiration. Paul there intuits the existence of a divine plan that bears on all of human history, but he cannot quite formulate it. He goes into what may almost be called "ecstatic stammering" for lack of a language that could perform the task. He evokes
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