Eventually all cultures converged around the same solution - the scapegoat mechanism. They sacrificed something (sometimes humans) which everyone could focus their anger on and who was incapable of retribution. Fast forwarding a great deal, we come to Christ, who was the quintessential scapegoat, completely innocent and incapable of retribution. The function of the scapegoat is to restore social order in the context of individuals spiraling out of control through mimetic desire. The huge difference between Christian tradition (Logos) and older Mythos is that the former is self-aware. It points out to its readers and listeners that this scapegoat mechanism is occurring and that we should really identify with the scapegoat, i.e. the One who unifies all of our competing mimetic desires which lead to perpetual violence, vengeance, and retribution. He provides the impulse towards each individual choosing to value what is Good, Beautiful, and True, by comming to know their innermost desires, feelings, and thoughts. Much more detailed analysis is in the article linked below, for anyone interested.
https://theoriapress.wordpress.com/2021 ... mechanism/
Max Leyf wrote:Barfield points to an “inwardization,” or a simultaneous intensification and consolidation of subjectivity, that has transpired over the evolution of humanity and whose results characterize the structure of our souls today. In fact, just because of this represents what is normal to us, we hardly notice it, having no foil to set it off. I attempted to show in the last piece both the immense significance that any number of traditional mythologies bear within them as well as the fact that they can reveal the singularity of the Christian one in sharp relief directly they are arrayed before us for consideration. On that occasion, I attempted to present this difference diachronically: as an evolution through history such that the warlord ethos of the Greek gods in the theogony was overcome by Jesus on the Cross, and simultaneously, the entire multitude of conflicting gods and goddesses are brought under and single rule, but in a way that was antithetical to the manner by which Zeus achieved his provisional regency by vanquishing his father. This is the theme I wish to develop in the exploration to follow, but from a different angle.
I am not the first to suggest that the Christian mythos is unique and even antithetical to all others. Barfield, together with his fellow Inklings J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, suggested that the Gospels presented a mythos that distinguished itself from all others in that it was also historically true. Rudolf Steiner dedicated a substantial part of his work towards investigating and explicating this interpenetration of the archetypal and the historical worlds in Christ: “Christianity as mystical fact” is how Steiner expressed it in the title of his collection of seminal lectures on the subject in 1908.
Another thinker who revealed a particularly striking manner in which this is true, and whose work has largely kindled the inspiration for the present chapter, was René Girard. I will attempt a brief outline of Girard’s theories of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism and try to show how they illuminate further dimensions of the paradox that I indicated in the prior chapter.
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Perhaps an example will serve to make this clearer. René Girard describes the manner in which the to our eyes grotesque connection can be drawn between the arrival of a figure like Oedipus in Thebes and the sudden outbreak of violence, plagues, and famines in the city. The relation must indeed appear improbable because it appears to relate the moral failure of Oedipus with collective strife of both social and natural kind. The most intelligent thinkers of today would waste no time in identifying it as an example of the “naturalistic fallacy” and summarily dismiss it as anything that warrants further consideration outside of serving as a mere literary artifice. But Girard shows that the connection between the moral and the natural will at once reveal its eminent rationality if we are able to supplement what is explicit in such stories with what is merely assumed in a tacit way and therefore usually overlooked. To achieve insight into this connection, it will be necessary briefly to review Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, its immediate corollary of mimetic violence, and the theory of the scapegoat mechanism as the panacea for societies on the verge of self-destruction.