“It was the biblical empathy for victims that aroused a truly historical interest in ‘actual historical events,’ and it is this interest that helped define the world’s first counter-cultural culture — what we call ‘Western culture'” (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, p. 131).
Murderous Myth or Gospel Unveiled
“The spirit born of the sacrificial murder inspires the community of its perpetrators to remember the murder as holy and creative. The Spirit of the Gospels, on the other hand, remembers the false accusations, sordid plots, the sham trials, and the weak faith of those who fled” (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, p. 130).
The Gospel Bars the Old Way Out
“Wherever and whenever the biblical tradition morally incapacitates a culture’s sacrificial system, the aggravating effects of mimetic desire flourish precisely because there is no reliable way to focus them on one flamboyant object of lust or loathing and eliminate them at his or her expense” (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, p. 110).
With No Release Mechanism But War
“Not only can we no longer believe, with the Aztecs, that our victims are gods, but the belief that our victims are incarnate devils is one we can sustain only for as long as the social contagions that so designate them last. ‘As early as the next morning’ we begin the process of coming to …
Instead of “A Life for an Eye, a Life for a Tooth”
“As a matter of fact, the imitation involved in revenge tends toward more violence, for it tends to repay the violence it avenges ‘with interest.’ It tends to escalate the violence. The ancient injunction, ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ was an attempt to keep revenge from spinning out of control” …
Trying to Get the Center to Hold
“When a culture’s sacrificial rituals ‘work,’ they transfer the existing rivalrous antagonisms onto one figure against whom all can unite, an act that miraculously dissolves existing tensions and replaces them with a social bond” (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, p. 88).
Rallying Points
“Whether it is a public hanging, a war, or a televised glorification of violence, a culture’s righteous violence will fascinate its onlookers. It will be a spectacle. Regardless of the rhetoric and details of its justification, if a society can heighten that fascination and bring it to a cathartic sacrificial conclusion, then the sacrificial violence …
Hostility As Distraction
“One is that the ‘us versus them’ motif can be manipulated to revive a group’s esprit de corps and to ‘divert attention from internal problems.’ That is to say, communal violence is an antidote for internal strife and the ‘civil’ or domestic violence to which it might otherwise lead. Campaigns against outsiders or evildoers revive …
Autonomy in Modernity
“Since modernity is practically defined by its reluctance to recognize the degree to which we humans are imitative, Girard’s insistence on the central role of mimesis in human affairs goes against the grain of much of today’s popular cultural discourse” (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, p. 51).
Staying Power
“What is distinctive about the contest between myth and gospel, therefore, is that myth is fragile and survives only when its premises are accepted uncritically, while the gospel can be trashed and betrayed and corrupted almost beyond recognition without fatally compromising its inherent demythologizing power. Time and again, the gospel has been turned into a …