What We Bring to the Gospel of Mark (2)
Note: This page is a very draft text with missing footnotes etc... (Feb 2025)
Theology via anthropology
The third understanding I bring is that the text of Mark does theology via anthropology.
Anthropology is the study of how we are human. Mark's Gospel is inspired; that is, "God-breathed," but it does its theology, and so speaks to us of God, by helping us understand ourselves. It is not a document imposed from on high, nor is it a "sacred" document for which there is but one true interpretation. Such approaches drift into fundamentalism. Indeed, their impositional nature subverts the gospel into something truly sacred; that is, their impositional nature is a form of violent control. Mark is an invitational document about a human being whose life can lead us into a new culture, or new way of being; a way which is holy, rather than sacred. It is showing us how to be human, which must be our first concern if we hope to become godly.
Mark's portrayal of Jesus is starkly human. In Mark 14:36, Jesus asks that the cup be taken from him if possible, and this is too much for the author of John’s Gospel who says instead, "And what should I say—'Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour." (John 12:7) In Mark, it is in the anthropology of Jesus, in the way that he is human, that we will ourselves find inspiration.
What follows is an anthropology which I find compatible with Mark's sensibilities, but which is derived from many sources, most notably René Girard, who has provided us with a systematic overview of ourselves.
Death
We die. We are completely afraid of death. We are biologically programmed to survive at any cost. We can observe the dead bodies of others, but we cannot really conceive of ourselves “not-being.” This makes us susceptible to violence. Those who have the means to do violence to us not only hold our life in their hands, our fear of death means they can force us to do almost anything in order to preserve our lives. Richard Beck called this a slavery and quotes John Chrysostom:
The one who fears death is a slave and subjects themself to everything in order to avoid dying... [But] the one who does not fear death is outside the tyranny of the devil. For indeed “man would give skin for skin and all things for [the sake of] his life” [Job 2:4], and if a person should decide to disregard this, whose slave are they then? They fear no one, are in terror of no one, are higher than everyone, and are freer than everyone. For one who disregards their own life disregards more so all other things. And when the devil finds such a soul, he can accomplish in it none of his works. Tell me, though, what can he threaten? The loss of money or honour? Or exile from one’s country? For these are small things to one “who counteth not even their life dear,” says blessed Paul [Acts 20:24]. Do you see that in casting out the tyranny of death, He has dissolved the strength of the devil?1
We deny our mortality. A culture is a "mythical hero-system... which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakeable meaning." We hope to create something of "lasting worth and meaning that [will]... outlive or outshine death and decay."2 All this makes us more determined to survive and more determined to win over others. Adding weight to all this is the way we learn to live, and to make choices, which inevitably increases our exposure to violence, and our tendency to be violent ourselves.
Imitation (Mimesis)
We do not know who we are. We learn how to be from other people. Specifically, we learn to desire what they desire. James Alison sums this up with a conciseness which our pretension to be free agents finds brutal and terrifying: "We always learn to see through the eyes of another. The desire of another directs our seeing and makes available to us what is to be seen."3 Other people are our models for how to be a human being. We are a "hyper-imitative" species.4 We are nothing like the "rational actors" we imagine ourselves to be. Kierkegaard also saw this.
For it seems indeed as if, in order to be themselves, a person must first be expertly informed about what the others are, and thereby learn to know what they themselves are—in order then to be that. However, if they walk into the snare of this optical illusion, they never reach the point of being themselves... For from "the others," naturally, one properly only learns to know what the others are—it is in this way the world would beguile a person from being themselves. "The others" in turn do not know at all what they themselves are, but only what the others are. (Christian Discourses pp42, quoted by Bellinger. I have modified the original to be gender inclusive.5
Charles Bellinger, who quotes the previous lines, also says
When human beings are looking to each other as models of being, the pathway of life is a treadmill or squirrel cage rather than an actual road,6
whereas Mark will talk about following Jesus on the road or on the way. (cf Mark 10:52)
Desire
Girard's insight was that our intuition that we autonomously desire is incorrect. We desire according to the desire of anther. There are two kinds of desire. One is acquisitive desire, where we desire the same object as the person who is our model; that is, the person we are imitating. Metaphysical desire is to desire intangible things like status and fame, and we learn which of these to desire from the person who is our model.
Mediation and Rivalry
Mediation is the process by which someone influences the desires of another. There are two forms of this. External mediation is where the model or mediator is so far removed from a person that there is no real possibility of rivalry. There is a sense in which they belong to different worlds. My church youth group was led by the senior master at the local high school. We all wanted to be like him; indeed, a number of the boys suddenly took up playing guitar, just like him. But there was no rivalry with him; he was, after all, the senior master as well as the group leader.
However, among the boys, rivalry was a real possibility. We were much closer together, feeling not only that we could be equals, but that we could surpass each other. Modelling ourselves on each other, as well as upon our teacher, we become similar to each other in this Internal Mediation, desiring the same things. And because we were on the same plane, so to speak, we could become real and actual rivals. Mediation can be drawn as a triangle, for desire is "triangular."
In External Mediation, the perpendicular of the triangle is much "higher," and as the Subject, I can have no real rivalry with my Model. But with Internal Mediation, the perpendicular is much shorter, and rivalry can occur.
The Object is not something I desire on my own, or even for itself. My model directs me towards it. This is why advertisers associate their products with beautiful people. They know I have no need and no desire for a new computer. But if a new computer implies I will be like that beautiful person, well... At the time of writing, this is a joke in my family, because my wife, whom I so often model myself upon, recently endured the catastrophic failure of her laptop. She has been looking at new laptops, and although I neither need, want, nor can afford a new laptop, there has been a constant desire to look for something new!
A delightful and concise introduction to the mimetic triangle, which a child can understand, is Carly Osborn's The Theory of René Girard, A Very Simple Introduction (Australian Girard Seminar, 2017).
Violence
A shared desire can reinforce and heighten our perception of the value of the object and lead to violence. In such an escalation we may even forget the object, and instead become fascinated by the other person, and yet also angered by the other, much like two kids who've forgotten the toy they were fighting over but still fight bitterly with neither of them able to stop, or like folk who have a deep hatred of someone, but cannot do the obvious thing, and walk away or let go.
Without some external restraint or intervention, this rivalry can lead to serious injury or death. As a species, we seem to have lost the biological mechanisms where submission halts the violence of a rivalrous episode. Dogs roll over and expose their bellies, and the fight quickly subsides. Humans kill their prisoners and commit genocides.
The Scapegoat
Our propensity for all-out violence raises the question of how, so far, we have failed to wipe ourselves out! Girard imagined a group of early hominids consumed by all-against-all rivalrous violence over some object. He hypothesised that, by chance, that violence suddenly became focussed on just one individual. This is often referred to as "the founding murder" or "the originary violence" against the first scapegoat. Such a murder has a startling effect upon the crowd or mob because, in the act of this murder, all the rivals are suddenly united in cooperation. It leads to what feels like a miraculous peace. (Politicians, and others, still weaponise this effect today: they foster a unity helpful to themselves by identifying for us an individual, or identifiable group, to blame for our problems, e.g., refugees or "dole bludgers." They choose a scapegoat for us.)
For the very early humans, it is theorised that this murder had two particular results.
Firstly, it would have seemed obvious that because the trouble had stopped, the murdered victim must have been evil. So, this was not a murder at all; this was the cleansing of something evil!
But, secondly, there must at the same time have been something special about the dead person, because the victim was also the one who brought the peace.
In such an understanding, the victim is good and evil at the same time; that is, sacred, because they both cause and yet restore us from the situation. This phenomenon is called double transference because the mob projects or transfers the disorder, and whatever has caused it, onto the victim, but it also ascribes or transfers its new-found peace to the victim, understanding that the victim has the power that brought that peace into being. We can see this reflected in texts which are ambivalent towards the gods because they are both angry and beneficent.
The sacred
The sacred is the systematisation of such events in early Homo sapiens' experience. It is a culture built upon murder and exclusion. Rather than us inventing sacrifice to placate the gods, James Alison says, sacrifice created us!7 We have been able to survive by using systematised and limited violence to channel and partly control the violence which would otherwise destroy us. We have been able to build empires, but they are always built upon victims: the murdered, the enslaved, the poor. Today's neoliberal economy, for example, depends upon there being unemployed people.
How the Sacred Controls Violence
Alison says
Eventually, the group is able to move from repeating the violence of the all-against-all where the one is randomly designated in the midst of violence, to a more deliberate choosing of a substitute for that one before the violence becomes too dangerous. It is this second substitution, according to Girard, which marks the beginning of sacrifice: when we have become sufficiently adept at imitating our own imitative resolution of our own imitative violence, we are also able to ritualize it by substituting what we might now call a victim, whether human, or later, animal....
Over time, the three pillars of archaic culture formed us: ritual gave us peaceful space for repetition, learning, and thus technology and development. Prohibitions marked out as dangerous the hyper-imitative behaviours which put the group at risk of another all-against-all. And eventually, as language developed from the ritualized sounds and gestures flowing from the emerging symbol, myths began to tell the story of the group's wonderful beginnings and survival in the midst of the bizarre deaths of trickster gods.8
The three pillars which Alison mentions are clear within our own culture and traditions today.
Prohibition is the group seeking to avoid behaviours which lead to rivalry and violence. "You shall not covet..." is an obvious example.
Ritual is a carefully scripted re-enactment of the original murder, "a well-controlled mime."9 Ritual's deep foundation is sacrifice. Rituals are cooperative acts which reinforce the solidarity of the group. They remind us of the power of the scapegoating event even, in a sense, "taking us back there."
Rituals are different to celebration. Rituals, at base, are always about reinforcing the status quo: affirming it. So, while a birthday party can be a celebration of what is new—another year of life, a lynching is a reinforcement of white supremacy. But in the entanglement of our whole being with the culture of empire, even a birthday party can be ritualistic, inviting only the white kids on the street.
I am making a distinction here, rather like the one I made between the sacred and the holy. If we celebrate communion, we remember Jesus' death, but we are looking and living to the new freedom promised in Christ. A ritual communion would still be compromised with some kind of violence.
Myth is telling the story of our origins, of how our culture and empire began. There are important qualifications to be made about the word Myth. A myth is first of all a story. In much theological discussion, myth is understood to be the pre-scientific way we describe the world through story.10 What Girard adds to this understanding is that myth lies. It is important to understand that he is not saying that myth is superseded by a scientific description of the world. A scientific description is a superior description for the building of a bridge, for example, but can say little about love and beauty. Nor does he mean to say that myth is untrue. Stories always betray a truth about us, for myth is how we carry the meaning of ourselves.
By saying myth lies, Girard is claiming that we create myths to justify "the originary sacrifice" of our tribe or community,
to cover over the victim, to blame the victim so thoroughly that no one is in doubt about the victim’s guilt and deserved punishment. In myth, even the victim goes along with the lie and asserts his guilt (as does, e.g., Oedipus, but not Job!)11
In Mark's gospel we see this in the story of the demonised man in Chapter 5:1-20, where he goes along with his exclusion by his community by stoning himself! Girard would say that "this double fiction that the victim is to blame, and the victims even blame themselves, is what makes myth myth."12
An example of myth in the Girardian sense for us Australians is terra nullius13 and the accompanying opinion that the First Nations people were savages. This neatly absolves us of all the massacres and carries on into our present racial discrimination. As Girard has said somewhere, "to have a scapegoat is not to know you have one."
To be clear, Mark does not lay out this anthropology in his Gospel. He is not a disciple of René Girard. Rather, bringing Girard and his interpreters to Mark enlivens the Gospel. This anthropology alerts us to, and opens us to, the sensibility within Mark, and sharpens the impact of everything Jesus does. Perhaps though, in the resurrection, Mark and Girard will meet each other, and Mark will say, "Yes, I think you understood the depth of what I saw in Jesus."
For me, Mark S. Heim's book, Saved from Sacrifice, suddenly brought to life the ideas I have sketched out above. But some years later, I still regard myself as a beginner in my understanding, for I have needed to be converted all over again. Everything about life is like Mark's gospel: turned upside down! I see the world with different eyes. I quoted Alison above, saying: "The desire of another directs our seeing and makes available to us what is to be seen." With respect to the culture of empire, in which all humans must live, we are like fruit fly larvae in an orange. We, and our whole word, are coloured orange. Therefore, we can barely perceive orange, let alone know how not to be orange. Orange is the "just is" of our cultural existence which most of us never question. Revelation is our slowly growing consciousness from Genesis' rewriting of the Babylonian myths of chaotic and dangerous gods through to the realisation that God loves us with unlimited love, and it continues as we learn to live out the implications of that. It is to learn that there is an "orangeness" which enslaves us and to learn that we can find another way of being and become freed.
But if we are such hyper-imitative beings, who will we copy? Who will show us how to be human and not "orange"? Jesus is fully human in Mark, despairing as we do and suffering as we do. Mark implores us to imitate Jesus; that is, to follow him. Jesus is never in rivalry with us; his mediation is external for he models himself on the God who has no rivalry with anyone.
Christianity unveils the scapegoat mechanism.
The gospels have the same structure as myths, but an entirely different perspective… From the Markan and other gospel narratives, we slowly realise that God is the victim, and that the victim’s blood only appeased humans, not God. The gospels tell a story about God, but perhaps even more, they tell a story about us.
The writer I have rephrased in the paragraph above goes on to say the power of the gospel story and the truth of our conversion lie
in the permanent alteration in the way we read not only the gospel story, but everything else. Instead of reading through a sacrificial lens, we read through a forgiving lens, realizing that we, both on an individual and on a social level, have been involved in a multi-generational process of victimizing and expelling others. And that God has nothing to do with this violence.14
Andrea Prior (February 2025)
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1. The excerpt is from Homily IV of Chrysostom’s Homilies on Hebrews and is quoted in Beck, The Slavery of Death, p14. I have changed the language to be gender inclusive.
2. Earnest Becker The Denial of Death, pp5
3. Alison, On Being Liked, pp1
4. James Alison See also “Concilium” 2013(4)
5. Christian Discourses pp42, quoted by Bellinger. I have modified the original to be gender inclusive. http://www.religion-online.org/article/the-crowd-is-untruth-a-comparison-of-kierkegaard-and-girard/
6. Ibid
7. See: https://jamesalison.com/we-didnt-invent-sacrifice/ See also “Concilium” 2013(4)
8. Ibid
9. See: https://violenceandreligion.com/mimetic-theory/
10. Indeed, it can be argued that a scientific paper is also, in the end, a myth, for it is also the telling of a story. But the distinction is still useful. Scientific method strives for reproducible results without ambiguity. Myth uses ambiguity to invite us into deeper knowledge where ambiguity cannot be avoided.
11. Caleb Miller. See: https://web.archive.org/web/20210119112116/https://preachingpeace.org/the-pillars-of-culture-prohibition-ritual-and-myth/ This page was retrieved 23/7/24. Note that the original domain has expired.
12. Ibid
13. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_nullius#Australia
14. See: https://violenceandreligion.com/mimetic-theory/
Good people.
