The Shape of Non-Violent Belonging: Exploring Gods,Circles,and Sacrifice in the Political Domain of Ancient Greece Through a Mimetic Lens

Abstract

This article explores contemporary research on the origins of the political domain in ancient Greece. Marcel Detienne has noted that the political domain in ancient Greece was associated with a circular or semi-circular space of assembly and was invariably associated with Hesta, the goddess of sacrificial fire. Detienne has framed the origins of the political domain in terms of a rupture with the metaphysical. This article applies the lens of mimetic theory to these motifs of the political domain: the circle and sacrifice. Linking Detienne’s observations to René Girard’s work on social order and generative violence, this article critiques the myth of political innocence and argues that the political domain is itself a product of what Girard terms the sacred. The Fourth Gospel offers alternative, non-violent forms of belonging; the eucharistic circle as opposed to the sacred circle of generative violence.

Introduction

The political domain – conceived as modern, liberal, and democratic – is frequently juxtaposed to the religious domain. ¹ The origins of the political domain in ancient Greece, i.e., the origin of assemblies in ancient societies, the demarcation of deliberative spaces, and the exercise of power within these spaces, etc., offer a window into the historical development of social order in the West. A certain myth of political innocence emerges from the characterisation of these spaces as a paradigm shift from the irrational and religious/metaphysical to the rational and the representative. Does the birth of the political domain represent a departure from the religious and the metaphysical, or is the political domain a by-product of the religious, of the sacred, as that word is understood by René Girard? In this article I will explore contemporary ideas about the origins of the political domain through the lens of mimetic theory, paying particular attention to the motifs of sacrifice and the circular shape of assembly in the origins of the political domain. I will argue that, on the available evidence, the political domain emerges from the space of generative violence and is, therefore, incapable of creating completely non-violent forms of belonging. I argue, further, that the forms of belonging present in the Fourth Gospel challenge the myth of political innocence by offering a true non-violent model of belonging, based on the recognition – not the expulsion – of the innocent victim.

The Shape of the Assembly

In a lecture entitled ‘The Gods of Politics in Early Greek Cities’ Marcel Detienne suggests a fertile area of research for historians and ethnologists interested in experimental forms of cultural comparativism. ² Detienne explores what is called the ‘political domain’ in reference to the actual spaces where politics occurred in early Greek cities. He is interested in the concrete practices that constitute the political domain in ancient Greece; ‘the practices of assembly, or, rather, the ways in which people assembled’. ³ Detienne’s field in this lecture is political, defined as ‘the wish to assemble around the Common Good’. ⁴ In tracing the origins of the ‘political domain’ to its earliest and simplest forms, concrete questions naturally arise:

Who initiates the process of assembling a group? Can it be anyone in the group, or should it be an elder, a man with authority, an individual endowed with supernatural powers, or an elected leader? Where is the assembly held? Each time in a different place? In a space that is marked off? In a fixed, specially arranged, even built-up venue? In a place that has been ritually designated? Ritually designated secretly? Or solemnly? Who opens such an assembly? How is it brought to a close? Who presides over it, and how? Is it preceded by a more select committee? If so, of what kind? Is there a formal agenda? How does one gain permission to speak? Using what gestures? If there is an argument or debate, what form does it take? Do speakers contradict one another? Do they adhere to a model created by the assembly? What is its tempo? Does it reach a formal decision? If so, does it do so by consensus? By a vote? What kind of vote? A show of hands? A written vote? A secret vote? A majority vote? What constitutes a quorum? And how does a quorum relate to the total membership of the assembly? ⁵

Detienne’s list of questions indicate the considerable effort involved in any attempt to rediscover what the workings of the earliest ‘political domains’ were like. From the outset Detienne eschews the goal of establishing a ‘typology’ or ‘morphology’ valid ‘urbi et orbi’. Detienne works with microconfigurations, twenty or so diverse societies which provide historians and ethnologists with areas of comparison upon which to construct free, wide-ranging experiments. Indeed, he adds a warning to historians who may be keen to cultivate homologies which, Detienne insists, must be shunned ‘like the plague’. ⁶ Disclaimers made, Detienne offers some positive characteristics of the early Greek political domain. Firstly, it was inseparable from the plurality of the gods which were honoured and invoked in ancient Hellenism. Detienne notes that in ancient Greece there are gods everywhere but he is principally interested in the gods of the political domain.

Detienne draws on the example of the precarious city of the Achaeans who came to besiege the town of Priam – the imaginary city of the Phaeacians – and on the actual archaeological evidence found at Megara Hyblaea in Sicily, which dates from about 730 BCE. Referring to the Iliad, Detienne describes the Achaean forces who, on reaching land, immediately set about the demarcation of an assembly space. This space was known as the agora. Agora refers both to the physical space and the assembly of men who deliberate in the space. From the beginning the altars of the gods were set up in the agora. ⁷ According to Detienne, out of the myriad of Greek gods, two divine powers were always directly involved in the planning of a new city. Apollo was considered the founder, an Archēgetēs. Also essential was the presence of the goddess Hestia. Apollo was associated with the art of planning and the demarcation of space. Hestia was associated with the sacrificial fire which burned upon the altars of the city. Detienne notes that political authority in early Greek society was derived from Hestia, not Apollo; the public space, the agora was the domain of the goddess of sacrificial fire.

Secondly, Detienne notes the shape of the deliberative space in the ancient agora. The space of the political domain was circular or semi-circular. ⁸ According to Detienne, whoever wished to speak for the ‘common good’ would ‘advance to the middle, es mesōn, where he would be handed the scepter that conferred authority upon his words so long as his agora (in the sense of speech) concerned what the Odyssey calls ‘a public matter’ (ti demiōn)’. ⁹ Detienne’s research characterises the political domain – in early Greek cities – as assemblies which ‘take place in a space in the shape of a circle, or a semi-circle, and that they are peculiar to a space called an agora, a fixed space that is common to the greatest number of citizens’. ¹⁰ There is no discussion of the appropriateness of the circle or semicircle, as such. The early practitioners of this form of political discourse were ‘warriors’; however, they were ‘men who set as much store by the art of speech as by the martial arts’. ¹¹ In Detienne’s description of this assembly of military men there is no hint or vestige of threat or potential violence. Even the decision to ‘advance to the middle’, and thereby to single oneself out from the assembly, seems perfectly innocuous, parliamentary even.

Detienne makes the interesting point that in ancient Greece the gods are not the instigators of the political domain. The political domain is a human invention to which the gods come late: ‘Cities were an invention of men, of mortals, and one fine day the gods woke up to this fact. In no time, they were jostling at the gate, clamouring for the privileges of a so-called poliad deity’. ¹² The gods of ancient Greece may have interfered in a variety of human affairs but politics was ‘specifically constructed by human beings’. Politics was a sphere of activity where humans came into their own. Mere mortals determined, by debate and by vote, how the ritual calendar would be arranged and which of the various gods would be honoured in it, taking upon themselves the ordering of ‘the affairs of the gods’. ¹³

In Detienne’s assessment of ancient Greek society we see a people not so much in the thrall of capricious gods but, contrariwise, a society setting the gods to work. The temples of Apollo, Artemis, Hera, Poseidon, and other gods were public domains where public documents (the rules of sacrifice and decisions of the assembly) were published. These temples had no Holy of Holies and their ‘priests’ were ‘annually elected magistrates who were expected to give an account of the spending of public money’. ¹⁴ At the beginning of his lecture Detienne, perhaps pre-emptively, gently scorns the view that the political domain ‘fell from the skies one fine day in Pericles’ Athens, in the miraculous form of democracy’, and from here democracies’ history is ‘superbly linear’. Detienne smiles at the notion that the ‘miracle’ of Greek democracy leads us ‘ineluctably from a predestined American Revolution, by way of the so-called French Revolution, straight to our own dear Western societies, which are so happily convinced that their divine mission is to convert other peoples to the true religion of democracy’. ¹⁵ Detienne disavows such a neat story from the beginning. But his conjuring of the nascent ‘political domain’, a circle of civil discourse about the ‘common good’ which is happily untangled from the irrational, jostling company of the gods, tends to reinforce the very picture he disavows. How on earth did the ancient Greeks decide to assemble in their circles and semi-circles and proceed to debate and discuss the ‘common good’?

From Detienne’s fascinating ‘experiment’ we note two fundamental characteristics of the agora; that the political domain was a place which always included the presence of the goddess Hesta and the sacrificial fire, and that it was always a circular or semi-circular shaped arena. The ancient Greeks may, indeed, have had a more workman-like relationship with their gods; they may have had a real sense of political agency, largely free from the irrational interference of the gods. This may have produced something like our idea of politics today. However, in holding together the ideas of the agora as a circular space and, at the same time, the association with Hesta and sacrificial fire, Detienne’s account of the political in ancient Greece may point us in another, unintended direction. Detienne would not consider the course I am about to take, for it is a course inspired by a homology. However, the twin ideas which Detienne brings to our attention in his lecture – the physical shape of the assembly and the unique role of Hesta – invite a dialogue with René Girard.

René Girard and the Sacred

Homologies must be avoided like the plague! Girard’s mimetic theory is frequently both admired and rejected as an example of a homology or meta-narrative. Responsible historians and ethnologists carefully sift through the evidence and attempt microconfigurations, and no more. ¹⁶ Girard’s project, which grounds the origins of culture in mimetic violence and our attempts to control this violence remains, for some ethnologists and historians, ‘radioactive’. ¹⁷ Girard’s theory of culture first finds expression in his 1972 work Violence and the Sacred, where he memorably refers to violence as ‘the heart and secret soul of the sacred’. ¹⁸ Humans, Girard argues, did not invent ‘religion’, nor for that matter did they invent ‘politics’. Nor did ‘religion’ give birth to sacrifice and ritual. The circular assembly which Detienne, Ruzé, and others have found beneath the sands of ancient Hellenism are, in Girard, the late offspring of the first properly human assemblies. These assemblies were the violent encircling of an arbitrary victim by a mimetically charged community undergoing a mimetic or ‘sacrificial’ crisis. Human history has been the determined veiling of our violence, and our violent origins, until all traces are contained and concealed within innumerable institutions, the political being one such institution.

Girard’s ‘homology’ is founded on what he observes as the curiously successful psycho-social dynamic which can create social order through violent acts of exclusion, or scapegoating. For Girard, the ancient Greeks did not invent politics – when the gods weren’t looking – and, thereby, claim one of human reason’s first great victories over the metaphysical and the irrational. Through Girard’s lens the ancient Greeks inherited and occupied the circular space of sacrifice (the space of scapegoating violence) and gradually transformed it into a space where discourse achieved a certain status and power. How long this transformation took, from the site of sacred violence, pure and simple, to the politically respectable agora – a space merely ‘overseen’ by the goddess of sacrificial fire – who can tell? Why does the political domain occur within a circle or semi-circle? Why must it occur in the place of the sacrificial fire? These are the questions mimetic theory asks of Detienne and Ruzé.

Surviving our Origins: Girard’s Theory of Culture

According to Girard, when theories of culture are stripped of cultural anthropology’s assumptions about humans ‘inventing religion’ and needing to ‘communicate with the gods’, etc., we are faced with a species remarkable for its capacity for imitation (mimesis) and, simultaneously, lacking instinctual breaks on violence; these are our hominid ancestors. ¹⁹ Our advanced capacity for mimesis sets in motion rivalrous desires and corresponding acquisitive gestures which are rapidly mimicked and repeated into a frenzy. This violent mimetic frenzy, if it is not to destroy the whole group, will – at its highest pitch – be directed to one member of the group, channelling the imitated violence towards a single victim. None of this is self-conscious strategy; it is the seemingly ‘miraculous’ irruption of what Girard calls the ‘sacred’. Girard’s account of the birth of the political domain is like Thomas Hobbes’s; for to become political we must first escape our mimetic state of nature: the ‘violence of all against all’.

Our communal escape from unbridled mimetic violence is not, however, by means of a social contract, as Hobbes posited. That, at the highest pitch of violence, humans would calmly reason their way into a social contract makes even less sense than imagining politics ‘falling from the sky in Pericles’ Athens’! Raymund Schwager observes that those who, following Hobbes, ‘put their complete trust in reason as the ideal organizer of human society’ were ‘already victims of an abysmal irrationality’. ²⁰ Hobbes posits a rational, contractual escape from internecine violence. Detienne suggests that the political domain is achieved by limiting the access of the gods to agora. Girard insists that the gods who jostle to enter the political space in ancient Greece were already firmly established within those city walls. The gods are the fictive representations of innumerable innocent victims whose violent exclusion from the community created social order from mimetic chaos and simultaneously transported the victim – in the minds of the community – into the realm of the sacred.

It is not difficult to see why, for many, Girard’s mimetic theory remains contentious, if not radioactive. For our purposes mimetic theory allows a perspective on what Detienne and others have offered on early political assemblies. It brings into view the shape of these ancient assemblies and their role in creating social order. The question is, whether this social order was originally produced through the habitual, violent exclusion of the ‘other’ from the encircling group, or if the circle emerged historically as something like Detienne imagines it, a space free of violence devoted to the pursuit of the ‘common good’ through reason and debate.

Detienne’s experiment brings into view the circle and the goddess of sacrificial fire. These two fundamental characteristics of the agora invite reflection. I will look briefly at sacrifice and its relation to the motif of encirclement and I will argue that their association is not merely coincidental: the circle is the shape of generative violence. Beyond these, I will explore the reimagined circle of Saint John’s Gospel and explore what it may have to say to our contemporary political spaces.

Sacrifice Revisited

Sacrifice is, indeed, a broad field. ²¹ Girard’s theory of sacrifice has frequently been criticised as reductive. ²² Girard’s anti-sacrificial bias – especially in his early writings – is grounded in his assertion that sacrifice is the product of a psycho-social dynamic historically characterised by generative violence. His own anti-sacrificial position has been considerably altered over time. ²³ However, Girard insists on distinguishing archaic sacrifice, the sacred, from what may be termed Christian sacrifice. Girard’s anti-sacrificial bias appears idiosyncratic at first, considering the extent to which Christian literature and liturgy employ the symbols and language of sacrifice. Nevertheless, having defined sacrifice as a function of the sacred, Girard insists that the Gospel witness to the death and resurrection of Jesus is essentially anti-sacrificial; Christ’s death appears to be another sacrifice, however, it reveals the role of violence in the formation of social groupings and the tendency to legitimise, and even divinise our own violence. The crucifixion ‘fails’ as a sacrifice, but it succeeds in revealing the generative violence behind our social order.

The anticipated benefit of Christ’s violent death, in terms of temporary social stability, was immediately overrun and voided by the appearance of an entirely new social reality formed on the conviction that Christ (and, by extension, all our victims) are innocent of our collective antagonisms. For the first time in our history the power of sacred violence is revealed to be a lie; henceforth the sacrificial mechanism is in its violent death throes. If the nascent political space, both circular and dedicated to the goddess of sacrificial fire, is originally a space of scapegoating violence then the origins of political discourse are not above and free from violence; they are a product of it. The idea that politics occupies, in its origins, a space free from violence perpetuates the myth that the mere practice of politics creates a peaceful, rational, and non-violent social order. What is the significance of the presence of Hesta – the goddess of sacrificial fire – within the original space of the political? Apart from acknowledging her presence, Detienne does not explore the significance of the appropriateness of sacrificial fire and political discourse. In Violence and the Sacred Girard has drawn attention to the motif of circular violence in myth, offering an alternative reading to the circular assembly of archaic societies. Girard links encirclement and sacrifice within myth in a manner which may shed light on the earliest political spaces which so fascinate Ruéz and Detienne. For Girard the circle in myth is not the shape of tempered debates about the common good, but the place wherein the collected social tensions of archaic societies were resolved through an act of sacrificial violence.

The Circle of Archaic Sacrifice

In Violence and the Sacred, Girard notes:

The mechanism of reciprocal violence can be described as a vicious circle. Once a community enters the circle, it is unable to extricate itself. We can define this circle in terms of vengeance and reprisals, and we can offer diverse psychological descriptions of these reactions. As long as a working capital of accumulated hatred and suspicion exists at the center of the community, it will continue to increase no matter what men do. Each person prepares himself for the probable aggression of his neighbors and interprets his neighbor’s preparations as confirmation of the latter’s aggressiveness. In more general terms, the mimetic character of violence is so intense that once violence is installed in a community it cannot burn itself out. To escape from the circle it is first necessary to remove from the scene all those forms of violence that tend to become self-propagating and spawn new, imitative forms. ²⁴

The violence which the community needs to remove in order to free itself from the vicious circle of mimetic rivalry becomes identified with an individual, a scapegoat from within the same community. The term ‘scapegoat’ has its origins in ‘riddance rituals’ such as the atonement ritual practised in ancient Israel (Cf. Leviticus 16: 1–34). However, Girard insists that such riddance rituals were themselves late, ritualised forms of sacrifice which emerged over many centuries from earlier, non-ritual forms of frenzied expulsion of a weak, expendable, and arbitrary member of the archaic society. This human scapegoat of an archaic society is what Girard refers to as the ‘surrogate victim’: ‘In destroying the surrogate victim men believe that they are ridding themselves of some present ill. And indeed they are, for they are effectively doing away with those forms of violence that beguile the imagination and provoke emulation.’ ²⁵ The scapegoat mechanism of collective violence not only removes what the community believes is the source of their ills and the violence which besets them: ‘At a single blow collective violence also wipes out all memory of the past.’ ²⁶ Hence, generative violence is habitually mis-remembered and appears historically in only in disguised forms, myths and rituals. For Girard, myth is how a community understands its escape from internecine, reciprocal violence by means of sacrificial violence. The transformation of reciprocal violence to restraining violence is what Girard calls the sacred.

At the socio-psychological level the mechanism of reciprocal violence is structurally a circle. Girard’s exploration of myth suggests that mimetic conflict in archaic societies may also have been literally an encirclement of the surrogate victim. The pattern of encirclement is replicated innumerable times as mimetic desire provokes new rivalries and produces new conflicts, embedding the circular pattern of social ordering into human consciousness; the original vicious circle. In Violence and the Sacred Girard points to myths as diverse as the Aztec myth of Teotihuacan, involving the ‘voluntary’ sacrifice of Tecuciztecatl and Nanāhuātzin, and the Greek myth of the infant Zeus, encircled by the fierce Curetes, and the myth of Dionysus, assassinated by the Titans. Girard notes that in each case the closing of the circle signals the moment of frenzied sacrifice. ²⁷

Girard describes the myth of Oedipus in terms of a circle of violence: Oedipus, who first pronounced curses on the murderer of Laius, was inscribing a circle of accusation and counter-accusation, against his ‘enemy brothers’ Tiresias and Creon. At the critical moment, Girard notes, Oedipus draws back from violence: ‘Oedipus replies to the chorus, which had pleaded with him to spare Creon: “What you are asking, if the truth be told, is neither more nor less than my death or exile. Well, then, let him depart – though his departure means my certain death, or else my ignominious expulsion from Thebes”.’ Here, Mark R. Anspach notes, is the prophetic moment in the tragedy: ‘Here Oedipus breaks out of the circle of violence that circumscribes the myth.’ ²⁸ The language of encircling violence echoes in the Hebrew psalms: ‘My foes encircle me with deadly intent | their hearts tight shut, their mouths speak proudly | they advance against me, and now they surround me’ (Psalm 16: 10–11). Other psalms similarly evoke the language of frenzied encirclement; being compassed about by swarming bees (Psalm 117: 11), or being enclosed by fierce bulls (Psalm 21: 13). The closed circle of generative violence which, for Girard, haunts so much of ancient literature is also inscribed in the circular nature of sacrificial time; the idea of the eternal recurrence. It is this endless sacrificial violence which, Girard insists, is finally and definitively interrupted by the Gospel revelation. The encirclement motif in myth suggests a link between the psychological structure of mimetic conflict and its innumerable historical enactments, the community’s encirclement of the surrogate victim.

Moving from myth to ethnography Girard notes that ‘in certain South American villages’ – in those of Bororo, for example:

[t]he village is laid out in the form of an almost perfect circle, divided up according to social categories. In the center is the men’s house; entrance is forbidden to women. Cultural and religious activities consist for the most part of a complex system of comings and goings confined entirely to the men, with the central house serving as a sort of general meeting place. The women inhabit the houses on the periphery of the circle and unlike the men, they never move to another house. ²⁹

Girard concludes that the ‘physical structure of the Bororo village seems to reflect the centrifugal inclinations of its weakest inhabitants, the women, by making the center an exclusively masculine preserve.’ ³⁰ According to Girard’s theory, the women of the tribe, who are deemed likely to provoke mimetic rivalry among the men, are deliberately kept at a distance from the centre of the circular plan, in order to minimise the occurrence of social violence. At the socio-psychological level (mythic accounts) and at historical-cultural level (ethnography) Girard’s theory suggests that circular patterns of assembly and habitation represent social order emerging from mimetic conflict. The circular/semi-circular space within the agora is, in this view, an off-spring of sacred violence, not the triumph of human reason and calm deliberation over the metaphysical.

Three Circles in John’s Gospel

The Gospel of John is suggestive of both the closed circle of archaic sacrifice and the possibility of a non-violent, non-sacrificial circle; the sacred circle collapsed and entirely reconstituted. The closed circle of archaic sacrifice is present in John’s account of the woman taken in adultery; the victim is encircled by a vengeful mob intent on her death (John 7:53–8:11). ³¹ In the context of a frenzied mob, each man poised to throw the first stone, Jesus assumes a position of studied detachment, avoiding any possible provocation. Girard notes that even eye contact between Jesus and the mob could trigger the sacrificial process, and thus, Jesus bends low to avoid the mob’s enraged gaze. ³² Jesus decollectivizes the ‘enthusiasm for killing’ by inviting the mob participants to consider their own sins. His careful strategy ‘deconstructs’ the sacrificial circle, delegitimising violence by restaging it as individual choice on the part of anyone who has never lusted unlawfully. According to McKenna, the sacrificial formula of ‘unanimity minus one’ is undone and as the crowd disperses, ‘the sacred circle collapses, implodes, the nomadic circulation of its centre.’ ³³ It should be noted that, in collapsing the sacred circle, Jesus did not merely put himself at risk of the mimetic frenzy. The deconstruction of the sacred circle involved a mortal risk for all the participants: ‘To be the first to leave a crowd, to be the first not to throw stones, is to run the risk of becoming a target for the stone-throwers.’ ³⁴ Elsewhere Girard has noted: ‘Unanimity is a formal requirement; the abstention of a single participant renders the sacrifice even worse than useless – it makes it dangerous.’ ³⁵ What Jesus reveals is not merely a more kindly and tolerant ordering of social interactions; attempting to save the innocent victim of any mimetic crisis, i.e., choosing to withdraw from the sacrificial order, is a radical vulnerability to menace and violence.

We encounter the closed circle of archaic sacrifice again in John’s Gospel in the courtyard of the High Priest during the passion of Christ. In the Gospel account of Peter’s denial, three of the four Gospels record the fire in the courtyard of the High Priest. Encircling the fire at night, vague forms of being with (Mitsein) others are attempted. In the Gospel, Peter’s being with the group around the fire requires him to deny his being with Christ. The being with which is offered in the circle around the fire is predicated on an exclusion, on Peter not being with Jesus. ³⁶ In each instance the closed circle represents the sacrificial logic which differentiates on the basis of all against one. Girard observed the significance of the fire in the Gospel accounts of Peter’s denial, in each account the closed circle emphasising the mimetic constriction which singles out and expels in order to achieve differentiation. The account from John’s Gospel uses the word ανθρακιαν (anthrakian: charcoal fire) (John 18:18). The Evangelist, according to Raymond E. Brown, ‘evinces a partiality for charcoal fires’ which appear only one other time in the New Testament; in John’s account of the post resurrection encounter with Peter (John 21:9). ³⁷ Perhaps this partiality is deliberate: the charcoal fire, around which the closed sacrificial circle formed in the passion narrative, is now calling the reader’s attention to a completely different form of being together, one based on reconciliation with the resurrected, Innocent Victim. The shape is the same; however, the intimidating closed circle, the scene of Peter’s betrayal, has been transformed in John’s Gospel into an open, reconciling, and Eucharistic space. The closed circle of archaic sacrifice – and the generative violence it produces – is collapsed and undone in the Gospels, which open up new, non-rivalrous forms of identity and communion.

The concluding chapters of the Fourth Gospel offer an imaginative representation of the transformation of social order. The sacred circle which is first drawn offers the sacrificial form of being with others, a scapegoating dynamic. The second circle is transformed into a eucharistic space, which is a non-violent, being with the Innocent Victim. What kind of community forms around this non-violent circle? Gerhard Lohfink’s Jesus and Community is suggestive: Lohfink distinguishes between those who accepted the reign of the Kingdom of God and remained in their towns and villages, imbued with a new sense of hope and justice, and the disciples (mathētēs) who were the literal and metaphorical followers of Jesus on his preaching and healing tours. ³⁸ It is the community of the disciples which eventually crystalises into something genuinely transformative. In contrast to other contemporary forms of belonging, Lohfink insists that it was:

obviously not Jesus’ intention that the circle of disciples close itself off from Israel, still less that it solidify against Israel: he wanted it to remain open for Israel as a whole. Thus the circle of disciples did not form a new community outside the old people of God, one assembled by Jesus as a surrogate or replacement for Israel. A concept of this sort would be thoroughly unbiblical. ³⁹

Lohfink insists that the disciples were not intended to become a ‘holy remnant’ marked by exclusivity. Rather, they were intended to function as a type of symbol of what Israel was to become. The disciples were not gatekeepers, deciding who would enter the Kingdom of God; rather, they modelled the kinds of social order that characterise the eschatological people of God. Lohfink notes that in Mark 10: 29–30 those who forsake mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, blood relatives, as the primary form of belonging are inducted into a new set of relationships; indeed, a new family in which, paradoxically, there are again brothers, sisters, mothers and children. Lohfink notes that in the Gospel text, what is renounced for the sake of the Kingdom of God – ‘homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields’ – are to be restored. ‘But not fathers. Fathers are not included in the second half of the carefully constructed parallelism of Mark 10: 29–30’. ⁴⁰ Lohfink argues that ‘fathers’ are deliberately omitted since they are ‘too symbolic of patriarchal domination.’ ⁴¹ Lohfink argues that the renunciation of paternity in the circle of disciples is umbilically linked to the renunciation of violence. Lohfink further argues that this radical ethic of renunciation is addressed neither to the individual nor to the world at large, but to the circle of disciples. This suggests that the Johannine circle is fundamentally the circle of disciples who have renounced certain forms of belonging in order to receive back these relationships purged of violence. ⁴² The political space, however refined it has become, was conceived in the space of sacrifice and generative violence. To conceive of the political as a space free from the gods and from the dynamics of generative violence is to continue to conceal (and thereby render more problematic) the sacrificial roots of politics.

Conclusion

Detienne gives an account of the origins of the deliberative space in ancient Greece which suggests that a kind of domestication of the gods created the conditions for something that would become the political domain. Committed to a comparativist approach, he is careful to avoid the trap of cultural exceptionalism. He brings to our attention two defining characteristics of the agora: the shape of the deliberative space and its connection to ritual sacrifice. From within these archaic circles a new kind of political assembly emerged, a discourse we are still apt to think of as the ‘miracle’ of Greek democracy. The ‘miracle’ may be described as the creation of a space wherein human reason achieved mastery over the metaphysical in the form of the ‘gods’. It is this inheritance and this claim which our contemporary political domain insists upon. ⁴³ This can be seen by the virtual unanimity of politicians from across the political spectrum insisting that the violent conflict in the Middle East, post 7 October 2023, must be resolved quickly by political action. Politicians, especially those from outside the countries immediately involved, view political action as the obvious and only solution to the violence. It is rarely, if ever, considered that politics – functioning at many levels – is also a source of this violence. In Girard’s final book, Battling to the End, he engages with the military author Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831). ⁴⁴ Von Clausewitz coined the remarkable phrase: ‘War is merely the continuation of policy by other means.’ ⁴⁵ This phrase tends to shatter any innocence we may have about the political being our escape from violence and irrationality. Girard finds in von Clausewitz a ‘stunning intuition’ about history’s accelerating course towards mimetic conflict. However, Clausewitz constantly disguises his intuitions, in order to give his book, On War, a more ‘scholarly’ and technical tone. ⁴⁶ The tone of Girard’s last great work is, itself, apocalyptic:

Today violence has been unleashed across the world, creating that which the apocalyptic texts predicted: confusion between disasters caused by nature and those caused by humans, between the natural and the man-made: global warming and rising waters are no longer metaphors today. Violence which produced the sacred no longer produces anything but itself. ⁴⁷

Girard considers the present state of the world to be ‘both the worst it has ever been, and the best. It is said that more victims are killed, but we also have to admit that more are saved than ever before.’ ⁴⁸ What is characteristic of this age is escalation, acceleration. In this context Girard does not deny the legitimacy of heathy political action but he considers politics, in itself, powerless to control the rise of negative undifferentiation. Has the political domain, confident in its own myth of origins, the capacity to discern between the two kinds of being with identified in the Fourth Gospel?

Whether the circular assembly was the invention of warrior-statesmen in ancient Greece, or whether it is the site of generative violence, evolving over time into something recognisably political, is the question raised by mimetic theory. The juxtaposition of the archaic circle and the Eucharistic circle in the Gospel of John suggests that the kind of belonging we typically associate with rationality and the pursuit of the ‘common good’, i.e., the political, is always vulnerable to our most enduring social dynamic, the creation of order through generative violence. The Gospel of John is suggestive; the kinds of belonging which signal the Kingdom of God are precisely those which collapse the sacred circle and create new circles of belonging based on the innocence of the victim and, consequently, a rejection of the scapegoating principle. The Gospel form of belonging is not predicated on human rationality or on the imagined triumph of rationality over the metaphysical, another kind of scapegoating. Girard notes:

Reality is not rational, but religious. This is what the Gospels tell us. This is at the heart of history’s contradictions, in the interactions that people weave with one another, in their relations, which are always threatened by reciprocity. This awareness is needed more than ever now that institutions no longer help us and we have to make the transformation by ourselves. In this we have returned to Paul’s conversion, to the voice asking, ‘why do you persecute me?’ Paul’s radicalism is very appropriate for our time. He was less the ‘hero’ who rose to holiness than the persecutor who turns himself back and falls to the ground. ⁴⁹

The new belonging, which Girard gestures towards, emerges with the graced awareness of our complicity in generative violence of all kinds. Before we can take our places at the transfigured circle we must own our historical attachments to the sacred circle. Imagining the political as a space somehow above the influence of mimetic contagion, and its sacrificial logic, binds us more securely into the sacred circle. The Easter morning encounter between Peter and the risen Jesus brought about this consciousness in Peter. It was the decisive moment in Paul’s conversion also. Christian discipleship is characterised by the collapse of the first kind of circle, the circle which may well have been our original space of belonging, and entering into an entirely new form of belonging, with no illusions of prior innocence.