The Cross and the End of Sacred Violence. Why Christianity Was the Greatest Rupture in the History of Human Thought

I am writing this lecture for people who live in a time when civilization is under threat. I do not mean civilization in general. I mean yours specifically. I mean that since 24 February 2022 all of us have been living inside one long clarification about what happens to civilizations when they stop holding. So I am not going to pretend objectivity.

Western civilization, whose heir is the country in which I am writing this and probably the country in which you are reading it, holds together on one very specific impulse. On one idea no other civilization in history has had. The idea is so radical that we have almost forgotten it — the way a fish does not notice water. So it is worth saying out loud. It runs:

The victim is innocent. The mob is guilty. God is on the side of the victim.

This sounds banal, because we all grew up in a culture that has repeated this sentence a billion times. But historically, it is a revolution. Before this revolution, human civilization worked the exact opposite way.

I will try to tell you how it worked and how it was broken. I am going to lean mostly on a French literary critic who became an anthropologist, who became a Christian, and who, in my opinion, explained what happened in Jerusalem in the year 33 better than anyone else in the twentieth century. His name was René Girard. He died in 2015. If anything in this lecture changes something in you, read him.

Girard begins with the simplest observation, one we miss because it is too close to us.

We do not know what we want by ourselves. We learn to want by watching others.

A child plays alone in a room full of toys and is bored. Give a toy to another child, and the first one will immediately want it. The toy did not change. The second child's desire ignited the first child's desire. Girard calls this mimesis — imitative desire.

This is not a pathology. It is normal human nature. We are all mimetic. We want what our parents want, what our schoolmates want, what our colleagues want, what fashions want, what advertising wants, what novels want. It is the mechanism by which culture is transmitted across generations. Without mimesis there would be no language, no morality, no learning, no civilization. It is the engine of human community.

But this engine has a fatal flaw. If two people want the same thing, and there is not enough for both, conflict begins. And the more they compete, the more they begin to resemble each other. Two boys fight over the same girl and gradually start walking, talking, dressing the same way. Two brothers compete for parental love and become as tyrannical as one another. Two neighboring states war over a strategic territory and each becomes the caricature of the other.

Girard calls this a mimetic crisis. The longer the rivalry runs, the more the participants lose their individuality. They become mirror twins of each other — what he calls doubles, warring twins. In myth these are the fratricidal pairs: Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, Eteocles and Polyneices. There are always two who mirror each other, and one of them always dies.

Now picture this not in two but in a community of a hundred. The mimetic crisis spreads. Each person watches the next, copies his tension, copies his anger. The community enters what Girard calls a crisis of undifferentiation: everyone is the same, everyone hates everyone, no one remembers anymore where the quarrels began. This is how families fall apart. This is how city-states fall apart. This is how countries fall apart.

Somewhere in pre-literate prehistory humanity stumbled, by accident, onto a way out of this. The way out lies at the foundation of every archaic religion, without exception, all across the planet — from Australia to the Andes, from Siberia to Africa.

The way out is this. When a community is in the crisis of undifferentiation — when all hate all — the mimesis that helped create the crisis begins to run in reverse. Instead of each hating the other, gradually all begin to hate one. How? At random. Someone points a finger first. Another copies. A third copies. The mob converges in an instant.

This victim is the scapegoat. In the ancient Hebrew tradition the term is literal — a goat, on which the priest symbolically laid the sins of the community and drove out into the wilderness. But the gesture has a billion pre-Christian variants: ritual murder of a war captive, ritual sacrifice of a king, ritual stoning of a child. Every ancient culture had its own.

And it worked. That is the horror. It worked! A community on the verge of tearing itself apart would flare up in a final, shared act of hatred — and that hatred would heal it. Converging on one victim, a hundred people found something to agree on: this one is guilty. The victim died. The crowd dispersed. Tomorrow morning, peace.

And then the community, transfixed by what had happened, did what only a human being can do: it divinized the victim. Because this victim had given them peace. This beggar, this child, this foreigner — he brought a divine gift. He had power. He was sacred.

The first gods are divinized scapegoats. The first religions are systems that preserved the memory of the killing and repeated it in ritual form, to keep peace in reserve.

Girard called this the founding murder (meurtre fondateur). On this murder every archaic community stands. In Greece — Romulus kills Remus, because Remus leapt over the wall (Romulus founds Rome on his brother's corpse). In the Bible — Cain kills Abel and then builds the first city. In Scandinavia — the gods kill Ymir and build the world from his body. In the Vedas — the gods kill Purusha and build society from him. Everywhere the same. Civilization stands on a body.

Here is the smartest part of Girard's analysis. He says: all myths are told from the mob's point of view. All of them.

Think about Oedipus. Oedipus is a man Thebes complains about, that through his sins the city is sick. It turns out Oedipus really is guilty: he killed his father and married his mother. The city, in complaining about him, was right. Oedipus deserved exile. The plague ends. Applause.

Girard says: wait. Look how the story is structured. The plague begins with the crowd looking for someone to blame. Then they find Oedipus. Then they cast him out. Then the plague ends. That is the structure of the scapegoat. Oedipus is not a man who did some specific wrong and paid for it. Oedipus is a foreign limping king (note that — limping, physically marked) onto whom the community has unloaded its crisis. And then — and this is the key — the community has persuaded itself that he really was guilty, because otherwise it would have to admit that it killed an innocent man, and that admission would destroy its functioning.

Every myth does this. Look at Prometheus — stole from the gods, now chained to a rock, the eagle eats his liver, oh how just. Look at Bacchus, killed by his own followers — he deserved it for bringing a foreign religion. Look at Pentheus, king of Thebes, torn apart by women in Euripides' Bacchae — he deserved it for mocking Dionysus.

Every myth begins with the victim really being guilty. Otherwise the myth would fall apart. The victim has always deserved her death. Because the crowd is always right.

And then — here a unique event in human history happens. In one people. On one small piece of land. One people started telling other stories.

The first book of the Bible tells the story of Cain and Abel. Cain kills Abel. A standard mythological structure: the murderer-brother builds the first city.

But — and here the miracle begins — the narrator does not stand with Cain. God comes to Cain and asks: "Where is your brother Abel?" And when Cain says "Am I my brother's keeper?" the voice of God answers: "The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground."

In every other myth, the blood of the victim does not cry. It is silent. It is taken for granted, because the victim was guilty. In the Bible — blood cries. That first cry of the innocent is the beginning of something entirely new in human consciousness.

The Bible returns to this structure again and again:

— Joseph, sold into slavery by his brothers — and the book says plainly: the brothers were wrong. — Job, whose friends keep insisting he suffers for his sins — and God at the end says: "Job was not wrong. You were wrong." — The Psalms: again and again the psalmist is in the position of the persecuted, the slandered, the surrounded. "Dogs have surrounded me" — that is not the voice of Pharaoh. That is the voice of the one Pharaoh beats. — Isaiah's pages on the Servant of the Lord: "He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief… He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions."

This is the most audacious translation of viewpoint from the mob to the victim in the entire history of literature. Isaiah is writing six centuries before Christ. He already sees that the victim onto whom the crowd has unloaded its sins is innocent, and that this innocence is divine.

Girard says: the Bible is the gradual unveiling of the scapegoat mechanism. Cautiously at first (Abel). Then more strongly (Joseph). Then more strongly (Job). And then — in the Gospels — finally.

Around the year 33, in Jerusalem, at Passover, an event takes place that by every standard ought to have been one more routine instance of the scapegoat mechanism.

A young rabbi from Galilee has come to the capital and for three years has been preaching something strange. He says: "Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are the persecuted." He eats with prostitutes. He heals on the Sabbath, breaking the law. He drives the money-changers out of the Temple, infuriating the religious establishment. One night on the Mount of Olives he is arrested.

From this moment on, everything proceeds according to the classic scapegoat script. The community is in crisis — Jerusalem under Roman occupation, the religious leadership in fear, the people in unease. The mimetic mob wants someone — anyone. The procurator Pontius Pilate tries to talk them out of it. He cannot. The crowd shouts: "Crucify Him! Crucify Him!" Classical convergence. Everyone points at one man.

Now watch closely. If this were a mythological story, the narrator would stand with the mob. He would explain how this Jesus really was guilty — he broke the law, provoked Rome, promised a new temple in three days. In a mythological framing Pontius Pilate is the wise ruler at last restoring order. The sacrifice takes place. Peace is restored. On with life.

This did not happen. The Gospels, written by this man's disciples, tell the story from the opposite side. They say plainly: the mob was wrong. The Jewish authorities were wrong. The Romans were wrong. The disciples themselves — Peter, who denied; the others, who ran — were wrong. Everyone was wrong. The one they killed was innocent.

And then — most radical of all — the dying man spoke for himself. Not in myth, where the victim is silent. Not on a cross, where the Roman damned hung howling. This tortured Jew said aloud: "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."

Notice the construction of that sentence. He forgives the mob. He says the mob is acting unconsciously. This is the most precise anthropological statement in history: they do not know what they are doing. They do not understand the mechanism that runs them. They think they are restoring order. They are in fact repeating what humans have been repeating since prehistory: killing an innocent to vent their own tension.

And He — on the cross — sees this, and forgives. By that forgiveness He does two things. First, He strips the mask from the mob. Second, He makes future self-justification impossible. Because now everyone knows.

Someone will say: but people went on killing each other. Yes. Girard knew this. He does not say the cross stopped violence. He says something cleverer: the cross made violence visible.

Before the cross, persecutors could gather around a victim with a clean conscience. They could say: "she is a witch," "he is a traitor," "they are foreigners," and everyone believed it, including themselves. After the cross, every such persecution drags a shadow. You can always ask: what if this victim is like that one? What if we, the mob, are wrong — like they were?

This is unprecedented. Look at the history of the civilization that inherited Christianity. How many other civilizations produced a movement to abolish slavery that came from below? The Incas had slavery. The Khans had slavery. The Ottomans had slavery. The Maya, the Aztecs had slavery and human sacrifice. Only one civilization began, slowly, painfully, to pay attention to the victim and to feel ashamed. This did not happen by chance. It happened because this civilization read the Gospels and could not entirely forget what "Crucify Him" had meant.

Look at the protection of children. The protection of the mad. The protection of the sick. No archaic culture protected them. Archaic culture put the weak on the sacrificial stone. Only in a civilization reading the Gospels did hospitals, orphanages, wheelchairs appear. This is not coincidence. This is consequence.

And here — the worst. Look at the twentieth century. The two largest totalitarian systems — Nazism and Stalinism — were attempts to restore the pagan order. Hitler wanted a return to the age of heroes. Stalin wanted a return to the age of heroic sacrifice for the collective. Both knew the Christian ethos was in their way. Both tried to erase it. Hitler openly called Christian pity for the weak a "Jewish disease." Stalin demolished churches.

And when they began their mass killing, they had to hide it. Hitler hid Auschwitz in Poland — so that neither German nor European space would see what was being done there. Stalin executed in NKVD basements, not in stadiums. Why? Because they knew: a society that even half-consciously remembers what the scapegoat mechanism is will recoil from open scapegoating violence.

Archaic cultures did not hide their victims — they celebrated them. The Incas held public human sacrifices as festivals. The Maya did. Roman gladiators died publicly. Hiding the victim begins only when one knows the victim is innocent. The twentieth century hid. That is evidence that the Gospels were working — even against their enemies.

The Russian terror you see around you now also hides. Because even the most furious would-be destroyer of the civilization that read the Gospels knows in the bottom of his belly that his victim is innocent. That is why the lie. That is why the "special operation." That is why the denial of mass graves. This is not strength. It is the weakness of one who knows he has been seen through.

Let me be practical.

If you live in a time of civilizational crisis, the first thing you need to know is not that the West has "shared values." That phrase is empty. What you need to know is the specific spine of those values. That spine is the Girardian discovery: we refuse to justify violence against the innocent, even when it is convenient, even when it "unites the nation," even when it "solves the problem."

Your enemies despise this refusal. To them it is weakness. To them "real politics" means returning to pagan logic: find the enemy, plant the bomb under him, tell everyone he was guilty, get temporary peace. This is the archaic reflex. It is simple, it is intuitive, it is twelve thousand years old. It is your seducer.

The hardest — and most important — thing is not to give in. Not because your enemies are not enemies. They are. Not because you do not have the right to defend yourself. You do. But the way you defend yourself must preserve the one thing for which any defense is worth mounting: the memory that the victim is innocent. That alone is what makes your civilization different from the ones it is fighting. This is your one advantage. Not weapons. Not economy. This.

In the garden of Gethsemane, on the night before his death, the rabbi from Galilee said one of the strangest things in the whole Gospel. One of his disciples drew a sword and cut off the ear of the man who had come to arrest him. A logical reaction. We all live in that logic. He stopped him and said: "Put your sword back in its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword." And he healed the ear of the man who had come to arrest him.

This is not pacifism. He is not saying "let them kill you." He did not say "do not defend yourselves." It is more complex. He is saying: the sword cannot be sanctified. The sword may be necessary. It may be a moment of final tragic reality. But it cannot be made holy. A mob that takes up the sword and divinizes itself in it is doomed. A mob that takes up the sword and carries in memory that with this sword it is striking the image of God — has a chance not to lose itself.

This is what Christianity learned from the Hebrew prophets and what it added of its own. The sword is not sacred. The victim is innocent. God is not with the mob. Hold this. No other civilization in human history has said it.

When you wake up in the morning at the front, in the rear, in a hospital, in a basement — remember that you are not fighting for walls. You are fighting for the only civilization in human history that has taken as its sacred rule the refusal to sanctify its own violence. Everything else is secondary.

I started this lecture by saying: let me say something hard. Now I tell you what the hard thing is.

It is fashionable in our age to despise religion. I understand perfectly. Much of what institutions calling themselves Christian have done deserves contempt. The Inquisition. The Crusades in their worst forms. Colonialism at its worst. I am not asking you to forget any of it.

But I am asking you to distinguish. An institution can betray its own core. That is the hardest truth a mature mind has to hold. The fact that the Church has at times betrayed the Gospels does not make the Gospels empty. The reverse: you would not be able to recognize the Church's betrayal if you did not have a standard by which to judge it. That standard is the very thing the Church proclaimed. The Gospels condemned their own Church from inside. That is part of the game.

The Western person of today usually thinks her values are universal and self-evident. The prohibition of slavery, equality of women, protection of children, right to life, right to justice — all of this she takes to be natural reason. This is the biggest forgetfulness in our culture. It is not natural reason. It is the consequence of a very specific historical revolution, one that Plato did not make, Aristotle did not make, the Buddha did not make, Confucius did not make, the Maya sages did not make. The revolution was made by one marginal Jewish sect in the first century which believed that God Himself had become an innocent victim.

You stand on that inheritance. You stand on it — even if you are an atheist. The atheist of the Western kind is a post-Christian atheist. He has a value structure that comes from the Gospels and has simply dropped the top metaphysical shelf. The atheist of the non-Western kind looks different: he does not believe in God either, but he also does not believe in the rights of the weak. He has another value structure.

This difference — between the post-Christian atheist and the non-Christian — you will feel all your life, if you pay attention. This is not an argument for faith. It is an argument for memory.

I am not addressing you here as a preacher. I am speaking as a reader, as a teacher, as a citizen of a country that is fighting now. Remember. Do not forget what knot all of this was tied around. If you forget — the mob will come quickly. It always comes quickly. It already stands at your country's gates. It is already inside, in some heads. What resists it is not the army. The army only buys you time. What resists it is you, reading the Gospels slowly and honestly, and remembering whom they crucified.

"They crucified the Lord of glory." (1 Cor 2:8). Paul writes this twenty years after. Heavy words. They carry weight.

That is enough. In the next lecture we will meet a man who built out of all of this the highest cathedral of intellect Europe has ever seen. His name is Thomas Aquinas.