STRANGERS AND SCAPEGOATS

All the devils have animals’ faces and brutish expressions, reflecting their evil natures and their eternal separation from Paradise, the place of all loveliness. Their hairy pelts, beards and goatish horns represent the principal attributes of that animal – the goat – which because of its complaining was perceived as being far from divine grace, unlike the lamb who patiently accepted the terrible sacrifice; the devil-goat therefore represents the Jewish people, who rejected the Messiah.
The fact that the most horrific demon in the tableau is painted yellow – the colour of Jews – compounds the association.
In the Christian tradition, he-Satan, the adversary, is no longer a common noun but becomes the personal name of that being who seeks by every means to damage mankind, impede salvation, and transfer to the spirit world the corruption already present in the body. The assaults of the Devil in the early centuries of the Church led to . . . persecutions, to the rise of Gnosticism (which posited a devil who had created matter and was coeternal with the Good and in constant conflict with it), and to the great Trinitarian and Christological heresies.
The monsters that adorn the tableaux of late medieval and Renaissance art may thus be seen as carrying this double status of the demonic as insider and outsider, a hybrid creature at once animal and anthropological, a fiend fallen into the deepest abyss of hell yet capable of holding forth in the Heavenly Tribunals of the Most High. Indeed the idea of the demon as adversarial mirror-image of God is succinctly captured in Dante’s portrait of the Devil’s head with three faces (Divine Comedy, Canto 34): a startling image intended as an antithetical parody of the triune God (Inferno III). It is also present in the juxtaposing of the evil monster, Rahab, and the divine Lion of Judah, on the sacristy lavabo of the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence, the font where the priest washed his hands of impurities before he approached the sacrificial altar.
The interrogation of sacrificial monsters reveals the paradox that the monster is not only a portent of impurity (the root of monstrum in monere, to warn) but also an apparition of something utterly other and numinous (from the root monstrare, to show). In this double sense the monstrous can fill us with both awe and awfulness.
A monstrum is a message that breaks into this world from the realm of the sacred, even in the ancient and extremely cruel notion of ‘monstrous births’ as revelations of divine judgement, the otherness of the monster is considered not only horrifically unnatural but also horrifically supernatural, charged with religious import. Likewise, the experience of horror in relation to the monstrous is often described in terms reminiscent of religious experience.
For Otto, as for Freud before him, the coincidence of representation and horror marks a specific experience of the ‘uncanny’ (das Unheimliche). But the differences between the two approaches here are, I think, most revealing. Otto construes the uncanny as a sign of the utterly transcendent numen, ‘a completely unhomely experience of the mysterium that has broken into the home from a wholly other realm’. By contrast, Freud sees no suggestion of radical transcendence here, only traces of repressed unconscious trauma.
Girard begins by subjecting ideologies of scapegoating to a critical hermeneutics of suspicion, exposing concealed meanings behind apparent ones. His core hypothesis goes something like this. Most societies are based on the ritual sacrifice of a maligned other. The foundational consensus needed for social coexistence is provided by a collective projection wherein some victimized outsider becomes the alleged carrier of all the aggression, guilt and violence that sets one neighbour against another within the tribe. This victimization of the scapegoat–stranger serves to engender a sense of solidarity amongst ‘the people’ (gens, natio), now reunited in a shared act of persecution. In this manner, harmony is restored to the community which conveniently forgets its initial hatred for the alien and may even come to revere it (retrospectively); it was, after all, the alien’s ritual oblation which saved the community from itself in the first place. The scapegoat thus becomes the one who – mirabile dictu – enabled the internally divided society to turn away from its own internecine rivalry and focus its hatred on someone outside the tribe.
Sacrificial myths of alienation are not confined to ancient times. They continue, as both Girard and Mircea Eliade argue, to operate today even though the mechanisms for demonizing the other have become more sophisticated and surreptitious.21 Indeed, Girard goes so far as to claim that no modern society is entirely free from scapegoating tendencies – informed as every society is with mimetic rivalry for scarce resources, periodically resolved by making common cause against an agreed ‘enemy’. Thus may be explained the recurring phenomena of witch-hunting, xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism, often in the name of ‘national security’. Such persecutionary strategies operate on the fantasy that it is the evil adversary outside/inside the Volk who is poisoning the wells, contaminating the body politic, corrupting the unsuspecting youth, eroding the economy, sabotaging peace and destroying the general moral fabric of society. Moreover, the popular media in modern societies often play a pivotal role in ostracizing some commonly identified ‘alien’ (individual or minority group).
In short, peace requires nothing less than the decoupling of the stranger and the scapegoat. And this means acknowledging that the genuine ‘other’ is always guaranteed by a radically divine Other – an asymmetrical, vertical alterity irreducible to the envious ploys of mimetic desire. Girard, like Levinas, calls this ethical alterity – even if it addresses us through the face of the other – God.
Or to return to the story of Beowulf, Girard would surely concur with Seamus Heaney’s view that the Christian ethos of redemption ultimately loosens the pagan grip of sacrificial purgation which informs much of the saga. In the end, it is his inner monster that Beowulf must confront, the terrifying shadow of his own death. The dragon which the hero finally faces is not, like Grendel, a monster from without but a monster from his home ground – a beast ‘abiding in his underearth as in his understanding’ and against which Beowulf must ultimately measure himself. ‘Dragon equals shadow-line’, concludes Heaney, ‘the Psalmist’s valley of the shadow of death’. The hero signs off not with bellicose virtuosity but with a sense of transcendent wisdom. The last note is less one of sacrificial rivalry than of resignation to a higher will.
Such stories vividly convey the biblical wisdom that only by confronting the serpent can we ultimately overcome it; as Moses demonstrated when he conjured a bronze serpent as antidote to the deadly serpent (Numbers 21, 4), or as Jesus suggested when he declared that his disciples would speak ‘entirely new languages and be able to handle serpents’ (Mark 16, 17). For as John wrote, ‘Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up’ (John 3, 11).
The monstrous other who threatens ‘us’ and ‘our world’ is represented as an enemy of God and then is exorcised from the right order of things and sent to some sort of hell. ‘Our’ order is identified with the sacred over against a diabolically monstrous chaos. Such is the fate of . . . the sea monster Leviathan in Psalm 74 and Isaiah 27.27
But another way of responding to the monster as personification of otherness-in-sameness is to deify it in some way, and this tendency to construe the demonic as a necessary dialectical counterpart of the divine is, I believe, equally problematic. One witnesses examples of this in several Gnostic accounts of the biblical God as well as in numerous myths of non-biblical deities (e.g. Hindu and other Near Eastern religions). Occasionally, the Godhead itself is actually identified with the monstrous. Opposite extremes merge, becoming indistinguishable in their respective strangeness and uncanniness. In such instances, we find the demon being divinized as a manifestation of sacral alterity.
In short, if demonizing monsters (as impure) keeps God on our side (as pure), deifying them brings us into a zone of ‘religious horror’. We here enter that ambivalent world of the magico-mystical Holy (das Heilige) which Rudolf Otto linked with the long tradition of sacred ‘terror and awe’ running from Old Testament hierophanies and certain mystical notions of the mysterium tremendum right down to postmodern theories of the ‘hysterical sublime’. I shall return to this critical point in below chapters.
Suffice it to say for now that what is needed, when confronted with extreme tendencies to demonize or deify monsters, is to look into our own psyches and examine our consciences in the mirror of our gods and monsters. We need, I suggest, to explore further the spaces between polarities, to dwell on the thresholds which mediate between the vertical and the abject. We need to look to the middle way.
The imaginary character of myth, in sum, makes the so-called ‘guilty one’ consubstantial with the crime. The monstrous character of the ‘criminal’ and the direct causal connection between his monstrosity and the collective crisis itself, appears so immediate at the level of narrative fantasy that one scarcely notices the accusatory process behind it. ‘We assume that we are secure in mythic illusion because we only see it as so much fancy . . . The most effective and definitive alibi remains that abstract disbelief which denies the reality of violence reflected by the myth’.39 This is why Girard was so adamant in his repudiation of those who persist in construing mythological monsters as fabulous poetic creations. And it was in order to disclose the victimizing motivation behind myth that Girard proposed his own hermeneutic of suspicion – the theory of the scapegoat.