Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

The reversal of the relation of innocence and guilt between victims and executioners is the keystone of biblical inspiration.

This new knowledge begins with faith in Christ the innocent victim, and it becomes the leaven that will work itself out and expand to the point that the concern for victims becomes the absolute value in all societies molded or affected by the spread of Christianity.

This is how the gospels worked. For the first time in history, the story was told from the standpoint of the victim. Girard sees this as a definitive turning point—the moment when the scapegoat mechanism began to lose its absolute power. The story forces people to come to grips with their own violence.

The commandment that prohibits desiring the goods of one's neighbor attempts to resolve the number one problem of every human community: internal violence.

If becoming human involves, among other things, acquiring mimetic desire, it is obvious that humans could not exist in the beginning without sacrificial institutions that repress and moderate the kind of conflict that is inevitable with the working of mimetic desire.