Excerpts from Gil Bailie’s Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads
	“Few were as careless of orthodox formulas as Jesus, and there is something more than a little precious in affecting a greater concern for orthodoxy than his.” – C. K. Barrett “If the Judeo-Christian ferment is not dead, it must be engaged in an obscure struggle against deeper and deeper layers of the essential complicity between violence and human culture.” – Rene Girard One of the many paradoxes with which Christians must wrestle is the fact that, by its very nature, a “pro-Christian” position is antithetical to the spirit of the gospel. What is happening in our world, Girard argues, is nothing less than the disintegration of conventional culture, a process that is irreversible and one that constitutes humanity’s moment of truth. We grow dizzy from an avalanche of change and risk losing our way in history, because we remain unclear about the underlying dynamic of history and oblivious of its determining forces. Unless we better understand what is happening to us, we will continue to be buffeted by wave after wave of this disintegration, reluctant to recognize its scope, unable to appreciate its spiritual meaning, and unprepared to meet its historical challenges. Coming to grips with the depth of the crisis is a daunting task, but it is also one that is full of promise, and the price to be paid for shrinking from it is too horrendous to seriously contemplate. “The idea of ‘limitless’ violence, long scorned by sophisticated Westerners, suddenly looms up before us,” writes Girard. “For the first time,” he says, humanity faces “a perfectly straightforward and even scientifically calculable choice between total destruction and the total renunciation of violence.” 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. Conversely, when a culture’s sacrificial routines fail to generate this combination of camaraderie and moral rectitude, the existing rivalries fester and the social fabric begins to fray. The Suffering Servant Songs combine two insights: first, that the victim was innocent and his persecutors wrong, and, second, that his victimization was socially beneficial and that his punishment brought the community peace. The fact that it combines these two perspectives is what makes it such a trustworthy text. It has suppressed neither the moral offensiveness of the violence nor the social fact that the violence had beneficial cultural effects. In order for these two antithetical facts to be reconciled, of course, it was necessary to subordinate one to the other. If the social harmony it produced was to be enjoyed and extended, the violence would have to be found morally acceptable. All cultures have had to choose between confronting the truth about their mob violence, on the one hand, and enjoying the camaraderie it generated, on the other. What is distinctive about the Bible is that it is the first literature in the history of the world to grapple with the moral dilemma this choice represents. “Sacred violence provides the state with its legitimacy and fuels the optimism and idolatry of the patriot. It sanctions the judiciary, justifies class distinctions, bestows privilege on the “best people,” and dignifies the executioner.” – Robert Hamerton-Kelly The logic of sacred violence is nowhere expressed more succinctly nor repudiated more completely than in the New Testament, where the high priest solemnly announces its benefits and the crucifixion straightaway reveals its arbitrariness and horror. The New Testament account of the crucifixion reproduces the myths and mechanisms of primitive religion only to explode them, reveal their perversities, and declare allegiance to the Victim of them. As the theologian Robert Hamerton-Kelly, one of Girard’s most astute interpreters, puts it; “Christian theology provides a trenchant critique of religion.” “Christianity’s impact on the West is a tribute to the power of its basic conception, which is the absolute centrality of the position of the victim…The moral significance of this position is enormous.” – Eric Gans At first blush, it would see that the awakening of an empathy for victims would have the effect of reducing both victimization and violence. On the contrary, by arousing empathy for victims, the biblical tradition has destroyed the kind of peace and social consensus that conventional cultures were once able to achieve at the victim’s expense. In clogging the gears of the scapegoating machinery, the gospel revelation brings not peace but a sword. This is purely and simply because it interrupts the only kind of peace that “the world” – the world of conventional culture – understands. The only kind of violence that can end violence effectively is sacred violence, and, over time, the gospel revelation gradually destroys the ability to sacralize violence. Sacred violence is at the heart of primitive religions, and vestiges of it are at the heart of all “ the kingdoms of this world.” It is the sacred violence at the core of archaic religion, therefore, that screens us from the apocalypse. Veiled violence is violence whose religious or historical justifications still provide it with an aura of respectability and give it a moral and religious monopoly over any “unofficial” violence whose claim to “official” status it preempts. Unveiled violence is ‘apocalyptic’ violence precisely because, once shorn of its religious and historical justifications, it cannot sufficiently distinguish itself from the counter-violence it opposes. Without benefit of religious and cultural privilege, violence simply does what unveiled violence always does: it incites more violence. In such situations, the scope of violence grows while the ability of its perpetrators to reclaim that religious and moral privilege diminishes. The reciprocities of violence and counter-violence threaten to spin completely out of control. In other words, societies are slipping deeper into violence, not because violence is now more powerful, but because, however physically powerful it is, violence has been shorn of much of its once shimmering moral and religious prestige. Violence is physically devastating and increasingly difficult to terminate because it has lost its capacity for generating the metaphysical aura that gave it its sovereign power and its moral privilege. “Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself,” wrote the literary critic Northrop Frye. This is a stunning insight. It cries out to be paired with the observation that the Nazi experience tests the limits of what “history” can explain. It implies that “history” pays a price in return for its explanatory power. It suggests that “history” conceals something in order to illuminate everything else. …If “the Nazi experience tests the limits of what history can explain,” it is because the explanatory power of “history” begins and ends with its ability to explain away the victims and the violence vented against them. To use Frye’s evocative imagery, the screen that we have used to conceal from ourselves the workings of the apocalypse is the screen that has kept us from recognizing the humanity of our victims and the truth about the violence inflicted on them. Equally remarkable in Frye’s lapidary statement is its implication that the end of “history” was inextricably bound up with the Bible, and that the biblical texts could not be fully comprehended if their apocalyptic features were neglected. Frye even went so far as to suggest that the “vision of the apocalypse is the vision of the total meaning of the Scriptures,” …people all over the world are employing intellectual, moral, and rhetorical ingenuity in an effort to endow the violence they favor with culture-founding authority, and all over the world they are failing. While we have so far been too preoccupied with its many symptoms to realize it, what we are witnessing is the passing of a historical epoch during which the sacrificial mechanism for resolving violence violently still functioned. We may no longer be able and willing to turn violence into religion, but neither are we able to turn the other cheek, and the conventional way of resisting evil causes the contagion of evil to spread, perpetrated by those who are most determined to eradicate it. Ultimately, there are only two alternatives to apocalyptic violence: the sacred violence and scapegoating of conventional culture and religions, on the one hand, and forgiveness and the renunciation of violence and vengeance, on the other. That the former is now impossible, and that the latter seems hardly less so, doesn’t change the facts. “When Jeremiah had finished saying everything that Yahweh had ordered him to say to the people…The priests and the prophets then addressed the officials and all the people, “This man deserves to die, since he has prophesised against this city, as you have heard with your own ears…’ ” Jer 26:8. Here is the prophet as critic of religion becoming the prophet as the victim of religious righteousness. Here is Jeremiah as the spiritual descendant of Micaiah and the spiritual ancestor of Jesus of Nazareth…there is a biblical affinity between the vocation of the prophet and the fate of victim. This relationship, in fact, is the heart and soul of biblical literature. The victim, finally, is the Bible’s truth-telling agent par excellence. Both Christianity’s scriptural sources and its creedal formulae pivot around a public execution, an act of official violence regarded as legally righteous by the political authorities and as a sacred duty by the religionists. This simple and obvious fact is the most overlooked aspect of the colossal historical phenomenon we call Christianity. It has taken this long to realize the gospel’s anthropological implications in part because the moral, intellectual, and epistemological effects of the Gospel revelation have of necessity developed gradually. What had been thrown off by the crucifixion was the mechanism for maintaining cultural order and psychological stability, “the infrastructure of all religions and all cultures,” as Girard put it. Those living closer to the gospel’s epicenter – beginning with Christianity itself – are more likely to experience its cultural destablilizing effects than those at a greater distance from it. Christianity no more owns the Gospels than do multinational corporations own the earth, a point that the Gospels and the earth will make clear enough in due course. As the cultural and historical convolutions continue, Christians will have abundant reasons for entering into serious dialogue with the religions of the world…in a spirit of humility. In the dialogue itself there is much that Christianity stands to learn from others, but there is one thing that it will have both to learn better itself and to convey more coherently to the world, and that is the staggering historical and anthropological significance of the Cross. In the final analysis, the only alternative to the simulated transcendence of social contagion and violence is another experience of religious transcendence, one at the center of which is a God who chooses to suffer violence rather than to sponsor it. “Jesus is not there in order to stress once again in his own person the unified violence of the sacred; he is not there to ordain and govern like Moses; he is not there to unite a people around him, to forge its unity in the crucible of rites and prohibitions, but on the contrary, to turn this long page of human history once and for all.” - Rene Girard As Andrew McKenna puts it, “The breakdown of institutional Christianity is the legacy of the crucifixion narrative, which is one with the Hebrew Bible’s denunciation of overtly sacrificial institutions, indeed, of all forms of victimization.” ascend
	November 15, 2009
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