Sean L > Sean's Quotes

“Oh, wearisome conditions of humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound,
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity:
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws—
Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?

-- from Mustapha”
― Fulke Greville, Poems by Fulke Greville

“Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take their anger out on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them.”
― René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes

“Those who protest against “Western ethnocentrism” imagine themselves to owe nothing to the West, since after all they rage furiously against it. But in fact theirs is the most Western perspective of all, more Western than that of their adversaries.

Not only is the revolt against ethnocentrism an invention of the West, it cannot be found outside the West.”
― René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes

“To recognize Christ as God is to recognize him as the only being capable of rising above the violence that had, up to that point, absolutely transcended mankind. Violence is the controlling agent in every form of mythic or cultural structure, and Christ is the only agent who is capable of escaping from these structures and freeing us from their dominance. This is the only hypothesis that enables us to account for the revelation in the Gospel of what violence does to us and the accompanying power of that revelation to deconstruct the whole range of cultural texts, without exception. We do not have to adopt the hypothesis of Christ’s divinity because it has always been accepted by orthodox Christians. Instead, this hypothesis is orthodox because in the first years of Christianity there existed a rigorous (though not yet explicit) intuition of the logic determining the gospel text.
A non-violent deity can only signal his existence to mankind by having himself driven out by violence – by demonstrating that he is not able to establish himself in the Kingdom of Violence.
But this very demonstration is bound to remain ambiguous for a long time, and it is not capable of achieving a decisive result, since it looks like total impotence to those who live under the regime of violence. That is why at first it can only have some effect under a guise, deceptive through the admixture of some sacrificial elements, through the surreptitious re-insertion of some violence into the conception of the divine.”
― René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

“Christ is the only man to overcome the barrier erected by Satan. He dies in order to avoid participating in the system of scapegoats, which is to say the satanic principle. After his resurrection, a bridge that did not exist before is established between God and the world; Christ gets a foothold in the world through his own death, and destroys Satan's ramparts. His death therefore converts satanic disorder into order and opens up a new path on which human beings may now travel. In other words, God resumes his place in the world, not because he has violated the autonomy of man and of Satan, but because Christ has resisted, triumphed over Satan's obstacle.”
― René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes

“The preference that cultures grant to themselves, in other words, must be perpetuated at any cost. This preference is inseparably bound up with the identity, the autonomy, the very existence of these cultures.”
― René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes

“More and more, it seems to me, modern individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he”
― René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes

“The mutual conquest of difficulties is the cement of friendship, as it is the only lasting cement of matrimony.”
― Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic 1910-1913

“the luxuries of civilization satisfy only those wants which they themselves create.”
― Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic 1910-1913

“The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and "radicalizes" the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be “revolutionary” now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions.

This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves. In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims.

...

The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually, what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion, euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc.

Neo-paganism would like to turn the Ten Commandments and all of Judeo-Christian morality into some alleged intolerable violence, and indeed its primary objective is their complete abolition. Faithful observance of the moral law is perceived as complicity with the forces of persecution that are essentially religious...

Neo-paganism locates happiness in the unlimited satisfaction of desires, which means the suppression of all prohibitions. This idea acquires a semblance of credibility in the limited domain of consumer goods, whose prodigious multiplication, thanks to technological progress, weakens certain mimetic rivalries. The weakening of mimetic rivalries confers an appearance of plausibility, but only that, on the stance that turns the moral law into an instrument of repression and persecution.”
― René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

“To some people, there is no noise on earth as exciting as the sound of three or four big fan-jet engines rising in pitch, as the plane they are sitting in swivels at the end of the runway and, straining against its brakes, prepares for takeoff. The very danger in the situation is inseparable from the exhilaration it yields. You are strapped into your seat now, there is no way back, you have delivered yourself into the power of modern technology. You might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
― David Lodge, Small World

“The most recent phase of the alternation between Occidentalism and primitivism has therefore concealed the essential thing, the universality of violence. A selective blindness in one of two forms has obscured the fact that all cultures, and all individuals without exception, participate in violence; that violence is what structures our collective sense of belonging and our personal identities.”
― René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes

“The commandment that prohibits desiring the goods of one's neighbor attempts to resolve the number one problem of every human community: internal violence.”
― René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

“The powers and principalities want to be “revolutionary” now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions. This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner”
― René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

“In a society that has fallen prey to anarchy the voracious appetite for persecution feeds on victims indiscriminately, as long as they are weak and vulnerable. The least pretext is enough. No one really cares about the guilt or innocence of the victim.”
― René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning