Four Meditations on Scandal and Ressentiment
Meditation #1: Rene Girard’s confrontation with “the Nietzschean tradition” in “Dionysus versus the Crucified” and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning seems to be a reworking of Nietzsche’s ressentiment, especially its essential connection to Christianity. What is the outcome of that reworking?
In the Dionysus article, Girard wrote that ressentiment is Christianity’s child, but not its father. Where Nietzsche thought Christianity is born from ressentiment, Girard thinks ressentiment is an indirect effect of Christianity and is one possible condition of the mimetic cycle. In other words, Girard saw ressentiment as an effect of the disruption of the cycle, not the driver of the cycle. It is a dangerous disruption nonetheless because vengeance is still hanging around waiting to be activated.
Looking at the Gospels will help understand how this works. Jesus’ innovation in the Gospels is to improvise ways of responding to violence so as to dissipate its power. He does not respond to violence with a desire for vengeance. Rather, he devises, in the moment, new ways of turning mimetic contagion back on itself to dis-integrate its symmetrical power. By “symmetrical power” Girard means the need for a shared identity among all the members of the crowd so that they bond together as a unified crowd intent on exacting their violent revenge on someone or something else. Myth works in its pagan formulation by driving this cycle toward the need for a scapegoat. The mimetic cycle is the driver of human violence, and the Gospels not only recognize this but they show specific practices for short-circuiting the cycle. For this reason, the Gospels are myth turned around to take the side of the victim.
As an example, in John 8:3-11, the priests and scribes bring an “adulterous woman” to Jesus to test him on his adherence to the law. Girard emphasizes Jesus’ response: he kneels and breaks eye contact with the crowd. Girard sees this deliberate physical movement as Jesus cutting off the mimetic energy of the crowd because he doesn’t immediately respond to the test in the expected manner. By kneeling and breaking eye contact, he doesn’t return the energy desired by the choreographers of the scandalous scene. When he finally speaks, he redirects the energy back to the crowd: “Let he who is without sin among you cast the first stone.” It is a brilliant lesson in redirecting energy without the hard rejection that would only further fuel the mimetic contagion. But we must go further to understand the power of the improvisation. Rather than directing the energy of the mimetic contagion back at the crowd as the crowd, his response individualizes each of them by calling for introspection – “Let he who is without sin among you…” The prescribed response, if followed, atomizes the collective energy into a personal introspection about one’s own unworthiness when answering to an absolute Law.
John 8:3-11 emphasizes sin as the content of the mimetic cycle — the woman has sinned, but so have the others in the crowd. Jesus dissipates the contagion by making the crowd into self-reflective individuals looking at their own sins. In the processes, they must see the woman as one of them. Everyone has sinned and each individual certainly does not want to be stoned for their momentary transgressions. Sin becomes something that someone looks for in themselves before they look for it in others.
We have to be careful here, however. It is very tempting to read sin as Original Sin and therefore as a human condition. This would be to profoundly misunderstand how mimesis (as meaning-making) works in this story, and it would be to attribute a view of sin to the historical Jesus that was very likely not that of a Jewish Apocalypticist. Nietzsche himself sets us up for this mistake in his characterization of sin and the ascetic priest: “Sin, I say again, this human form of self-defilement par excellence, was invented to make science, culture, every enhancement and nobility of humanity impossible: the priest rules through the invention of sin” (AC 49). In classic Nietzschean ressentiment, sin creates the mimetic symmetry as a generalized human inheritance but also as the basis of a personal struggle against instinct, the body, and its pleasures. None of that is present in this story — or in any part of this Gospel. There is no human condition in John 8, though arguably it is there in Luke-Acts.
We should look closely at how “sin” is operating in the story because it is key to understanding Jesus’ intervention into the mimetic cycle. “Let he among you who is without sin cast the first stone.” The context of the story and the Gospels in general make it clear that sin has not yet become generalized Original Sin. Strictly understood, to be “without sin” in this story would mean to have lived according to the Law of Moses. To have sinned is to have broken the Law: any one in the crowd is therefore automatically unworthy of casting a stone at another who is part of the same community. There is nothing abstractly human about this version of sin; this is sin against a people and its traditions. The mimetic cycle, and the specific mimesis that is operating here through the words “without sin,” is a gravitational force that pulls the community together and gives it an identity. Nietzsche saw this as one of Judaism’s truly heroic and admirable achievements:
Speaking psychologically, the Jewish people is a people of the toughest life force which, put in impossible conditions, freely chose the side of all décadence-instincts out of the deepest shrewdness for self-preservation — not as if controlled by them but because they divined in them a power with which one could prevail against “the world.” (AC 24)
Ressentiment here is a positive reactive force that uses décadence as a means, not an end (as it would become for Pauline Christianity). It is an outward devaluation of a hostile world, but it is a heroic act that invests the energy into traditions and law (torah) as the gravitational power of a People.
Paul will eventually take this gravitational force and carry it outward into the broader world. He will be a Jew spreading the good news to the Gentiles, but he will not require Gentiles to follow the Law. In his letter to the Romans, sin is clearly what Nietzsche represented it as in AC 49 quoted above — a human condition that changes the gravitational force of the Law into the Original Sin of a shared humanity that precedes the Law: “sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there’re is no law” (Romans 5:13). But in the story of the adulterous woman, we are not fully there. To mix terminology from physics and neurology, there are absolutely no signs of this shift from the afferent (inward pulling gravitational energy) to the efferent (outward pushing dark energy). Jesus brings about, through his use of the word sin, an alternative symmetry that individualizes each member of the gathering crowd and equalizes them in terms of their unworthiness to punish anyone else in the name of the Law. There is no requirement that the self-reflective concept of sin represent a shared humanity among the members of the crowd.
This is important to understand because it illuminates the difference between mimesis as our meaning-making capacity from the pure mechanics of the mimetic cycle. To collapse one into the other leads us down the path of an essential psychology of desire, which I resist. Yet, they cannot operate without each other. If we are to understand the mimetic cycle as having an ahistorical uniformity to it, we miss the different ways in which mimesis changes the functioning of the cycle. By mimesis, I mean the content (ideas, images, representations, signs) we use to orient ourselves to reality when we are within the mechanics of the mimetic cycle. This orientation requires us to put concepts to use as we make sense of the reality of the situation.
To clarify this with John 8:3-11: when Jesus uses the word sin to return an individualizing energy back into the gathering crowd, he is reinforcing their status as the descendants of Abraham and therefore subject to the Law, but he is also re-orienting their relationship to that Law. Sin is the word he uses to re-orient the crowds’ relationship to the reality of the situation. Is anyone truly in a state of purity with respect to the Law? If one is impure, how can one turn violent against another’s impurity? This is the mimesis working within the cycle but is not reducible to, or completely determined by, the cycle.
To take this one step further, if we are looking at the cycle purely for its mechanics, we would see how the word sin breaks up the mimetic symmetry that leads to violent scapegoating, but we could miss how it replaces the violent symmetry with a non-violent one. Instead of looking for lawbreakers outside of oneself in order to find sacrificial scapegoats, Jesus’ intent is to find the lawbreaker within, not to create oneself as a scapegoat, but to equalize oneself with the victim. This version of symmetry can’t be understood solely through the operation of the mimetic cycle as a uniform mechanics. It has to be understood through the use of the word sin and its mimesis as the specific content we use to orient ourselves to reality and to others. Sin, in other words, becomes the channel through which mimetic contagion forms and seeks a scapegoat, but it is also the channel through which Jesus reverses the energy to break up the contagion through an individualizing symmetry that brings the victim back into the fold as an equal. These symmetries are different in kind, not degree, and we lose sight of this if we are only interested in the universal mechanics of the mimetic cycle.
Thus the mimetic cycle is not hermetically sealed and is not uniform. It has fissures and gaps that allow for new modes of expression, new lines of force, and different kinds of symmetry. Scandal is not, as demonstrated in this story, the mechanism of an inevitably violent symmetry of the crowd. Is it the indicator of the gaps and fissures in the cycle itself. This is precisely what is demonstrated in John 8:3-11. One and only one scandal is interrupted, but we don’t know where that interruption will lead. Jesus doesn’t even know that the crowd has dispersed: “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” To the woman he says, “Neither do I condemn you. Go on your way and don’t sin again.” It is pure dispersal with only the weak admonition to think about your own relationship to sin as your relationship to the Law and thus to the community. The story itself disperses as John never returns to it.
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Meditation #2: Isn’t Jesus acting as Nietzsche’s ascetic priest in this story of the adulterous woman, transforming outwardly energized ressentiment into guilt and bad conscience?
No. He doesn’t go that far. We need to spend a bit more time on this moment to understand the relationship between mimetic contagion, scandal, and ressentiment. The role of the Christian ascetic priest for Nietzsche is to permanently turn inward the initial outward projection of ressentiment so that it becomes internalized as guilt and bad conscience — it becomes a “psychology” that Nietzsche calls “the man of ressentiment.” (The Jewish priest encourages the cycle in a different way.) There is a crucial temporal dimension to the Christian process as well as a will to power on the part of the acetic priest who redirects the weakened vengeance of the crowd into a sense of guilt. The priest is out for his own gain: “The human shall not look outside, he shall look into himself; he shall not look prudently and carefully into things, as a learner, he shall not look at all: he shall suffer. And he shall suffer in such a way that he needs the priest at all times” (AC 49). On the face of it, that is what Jesus is doing — making each member of the gathering crowd look inside only at themselves to internalize their sin.
Yet that isn’t a very good understanding of the dynamics in this story. We see in John 8:3-11 only the momentary breaking up of the symmetrical power before it forms into mimetic contagion. There is no call for perpetual suffering that “needs the priests at all times.” All we have, in Girard’s terms, is the intervention into a scandal. Scandals precede mimetic contagion and can take many forms. In John 8:3-11, the scandal is twofold: 1) the woman has broken a major commandment and the Law says she should be stoned, 2) Jesus is being scandalized/tested by the priest and scribes to see what he will do. The scandal/test is a trap. If Jesus affirms the Law, then he affirms the original scandal and the resulting violence. There would be absolutely nothing special about his message, and the Gospel would have no lasting value. On the contrary, if he doesn’t condone the stoning, then he creates a new scandal by publicly thwarting the Law.
Jesus prevents the contagion, but he doesn’t necessarily end the scandal and its inherent desire for vengeance. He only momentarily short-circuits the scandal’s acceptable expression as physical violence. We have no idea what the dispersing crowd does with its mimetic desire for vengeance that has been dispersed. Will it hang around and seek an outlet somewhere else? Will they turn to the teachings of Paul and internalize their share of Adam’s Original Sin and thus embrace a human condition that precedes the Law? This weakened vengeance is classic ressentiment according to Nietzsche, and Girard agreed. But for Girard, this is how ressentiment is Christianity’s child, not its father. It is an effect in this instance, not a cause, because Jesus’ reaction doesn’t start from vengeance. It starts from a response to a scandal; he seeks to end vengeance by intervening in the cycle of mimetic contagion. He knows that he will create a new scandal while he defuses the energy of the original scandal. So, he can’t end scandal itself; he merely redirects its energy back into the crowd as an individualizing energy. It is unclear what will be done with that redirected energy, while we know that the thwarted choreography of the priests will yield a new scandal with Jesus as the scapegoat.
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Meditation #3: It seems that the Nietzsche of AC and the Girard of I See Satan and “Dionysus versus the Crucified” share this understanding of ressentiment as child and not father of Christianity. But they seem to go in different directions.
The Nietzsche of AC and Girard of I See Satan agree that this is what Jesus should represent to us, but here is where they part ways. We see this clearly in the story of the adulterous woman. But they obviously part ways on the subsequent history of Christianity. For Nietzsche, subsequent history has misunderstood his example and reconstituted the mimetic cycle as permanent ressentiment: “Obviously the little community had not understood the most important thing, the exemplary way of his dying, the freedom, the superiority over every feeling of ressentiment — an indication of how little they understood him at all! (AC 40). From this misunderstanding, the mimetic cycle of vengeance re-emerges but this time on behalf of Jesus: “But his disciples where very far from forgiving his death — which would have been evangelical in the highest sense… Precisely the most unevangelical feeling, revenge, came out on top again. The matter could not possibly be at an end with his death: they needed ‘retribution,’ ‘judgment’’ (AC 40). The mimetic cycle reconstituted itself — revenge “came out on top again” — but now this is a desire for revenge on behalf of the scapegoat. For Girard, something very different happened after Jesus’ death on the cross. The Gospels became a new way of mythologizing. Rather than taking the side of the crowd, the Gospel took the side of the victim. Myth remains, but it is doing the opposite work of pagan myth (his term, not mine).
While I’m sympathetic to Girard’s reading of the Gospels – I think he is in many ways right – I feel like he re-energizes Christianity as a revealed truth that created an apocalyptic divide in history:
Far from surrendering to some “morality of the slaves,” as Nietzsche claimed, the biblical tradition punctures a universal delusion and reveals a truth never revealed before, the innocence not only of Jesus but of all similar victims (I See Satan, 1)
This creates some disturbing effects in his elaboration of the mimetic cycle, and its starts to justify Nietzsche’s reading of Christianity. It seems at times that Girard is standing above the mimetic cycle from an imaginary exteriority as he describes it. Violence and the Sacred has a lot of this, but Girard seems to go into overdrive when he consciously invokes Christianity as the puncturing of a universal delusion in his books that come after Violence. It’s all a bit too Messianic for me, and there is a bit too much ressentiment-driven negation here (if not full throated retribution) that Nietzsche found in the disciples. This birds-eye view tends to make the cycle always appear the same each time, and we lose the specificity of our analysis if what we are doing is always looking for the same dynamic over and over again. This is why I think it is important to separate out the meaning-making aspects of the cycle from its mechanics. That separation allows us to look at the specifics of any given instance of the cycle without reductionism. This is where I think that Nietzsche was much more subtle in his understanding of the cycle through ressentiment, décadence, affirmation, Yes-saying, et cetera. These are all ways of describing different conditions and dynamics of the cycle.
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Meditation #4: So in the gap that opens up between Jesus and Paul, both Girard and Nietzsche find something positive although they vehemently disagree on institutional Christianity’s role in that subsequent history. Girard injects a Christian apologetics into that moment while Nietzsche finds some inspiration from Buddhism. How does Nietzsche’s invocation of Buddhism offer an alternative way of understanding this gap between Jesus and Paul?
Nagarjuna’s Mahayana Buddhism is far more sophisticated than the Gospels in dealing with ressentiment and violence, and I think that Nietzsche saw this (even though his sources were flawed): “it [Buddhism] embodies the objective and cool posing of problems, it arrives after a philosophical movement lasting hundreds of years, the concept of god is already done away with when it arrives” (AC 20). Christianity, in contrast, emerges from problems within Judaism (AC 24) and doesn’t have the long history of killing off its own God so that it can get on with the business of the “objective and cool posing of problems.”
In those middle aphorisms of AC, Nietzsche is a bit more objective and cool than he is in the surrounding anti-Christian screed. We can see this in the subtlety with which he handles décadence. The long-term tendency in the reception of Nietzsche has been to see décadence as unequivocally bad. But that is not the case in these aphorisms. We do Nietzsche a disservice if we treat décadence as a universal anti-value just as we do a disservice by seeing only a uniform mechanics of the mimetic cycle as its own universality. For the Nietzsche of AC, décadence-religions are not all bad. In Nagarjuna’s sense, there is no essence to décadence, or to ressentiment for that matter. This can be seen in how Nietzsche differentiates Buddhism, Christianity and Judaism as décadence-religions: they are very different in their valuation of décadence as means versus ends. As Nietzsche tells the tale, the growth and extension of ressentiment within Christianity turns décadence from a means to an end:
The human of faith, the “believer” of any kind, is of necessity a dependent human — someone who cannot posit himself as an end, who for his part cannot posit ends in general. The “believer” does not belong to himself, he can only be a means, he must be used up, he needs someone to use him up. (AC 54)
This is Christian ressentiment’s fundamental expression as a will to power: ressentiment turns mimetic contagion into a perpetual weakening of the masses in the service of a priestly class who benefits from décadence as an end in itself. Décadence becomes 1) permanent, 2) personal, and 3) a perpetual embrace of suffering in need of justification. Human beings are thus turned into means rather than ends. As Nietzsche brings AC 54 to a close, “fanaticism” becomes his term for mimetic contagion that is drained of any willingness to question our convictions while we fiercely hold onto them as true. This process is thoroughly and completely an embrace of mimetic contagion that enforces décadence as a self-weakening end. A new priestly class emerges as the mimetic objects and impresarios of this décadence-driven psychology. The result is a giving over of one’s “convictions” to this new priestly class:
The “believer” is not free to even have a conscience for any question of “true” or “untrue”: to have integrity at this point would immediately be his destruction. The pathological conditioning of this perspective makes a fanatic out of the man of conviction [emphasis added] — Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon — the counterpoint to the strong spirit who has become free. (AC 54)
This is “the psychology of conviction” that comes about through the power of the ascetic priest, even in secular form. This is ressentiment’s extensive power — it makes itself a psychology as a type of personality, and it does so on a grand scale. Its fanaticism “affects the great multitude” (AC 55). We miss these differences if we simply totalize Nietzschean anti-values like décadence.
Décadence is not the essence of ressentiment, nor vice versa. Rather, they are particular conditions of the mimetic cycle, which itself cannot have an essence. Here another term from Mahayana Buddhism is useful — pratitya-samutpada (dependent conditioning). If nothing has an essence but things still somehow exist, then we need to understand the network of conditions that bring them into existence. Décadence, ressentiment, and the mimetic cycle are all dependently conditioning each other, and we cannot universalize/essentialize either their interactions or their individual functions. We do better to treat décadence as conditioned by the mimetic cycle while it also, in turn, is able to condition the cycle as mimesis (meaning-making). The same with ressentiment. We do better to treat mimesis and mimetics as parallel series that must be analyzed together while not collapsing the one into the other, or by making either one the master over the other. The best that we can or should say is that ressentiment and décadence (as well as affirmation and Yes-saying) are particular expressions of how the mimetic cycle is dependently conditioned by all of the factors that feed into the cycle, which means that the cycle is not a hermetically sealed entity with an essence. It is itself dependently conditioned while it conditions other things.
Contrasting Buddhism with Christianity makes the former, for Nietzsche, a powerful combination of décadence and affirmation (as opposed to décadence versus affirmation). The opening paragraph of AC 20 seems to spell this out, but it took a very close reading for me to understand how “excessive sensitivity” and “depression” resulted from “hygienic measures” (practices) that made suffering impersonal. Other “countermeasures” needed to be created to keep the de-personalization of suffering from becoming décadence as an end in itself: “All these would be ways of strengthening that excessive sensitivity,” not an ascetic denial of it. We must deal with human violence and suffering but not give into the decadent trajectory of the resulting ressentiment. This makes ressentiment a necessary condition of a Buddhist/Jesus morality, but not the end to be sought. But then he continued his screed and buried the positive thread of those few aphorisms.
That said, it is powerful to be able to use the mimetic cycle to understand certain dynamics. One can easily see it everywhere, but I also want to be careful and hold onto a Mahayana emptiness (sunyãtã) within the cycle. This is where I take some inspiration from William James and Henri Bergson – I want to separate out the mechanics of the cycle (quantitative, measurable, spatial) from the way in which we invest the cycle with affective meaning (qualitative duration). There is an emptiness (Bergson’s difference in kind) between those parallel but interacting series that we should respect in any given explanation. As the Mulamadhyamakakarika reminds us, we always need to come back to what we are trying to explain. We are never standing above and outside of it exercising judgment fueled by ressentiment.