This is also why no one wants to recognize that these texts rise up before us because we have disregarded the Book of Revelation. This is why no one wants to read the apocalyptic texts that abound in the synoptic gospels and Pauline epistles. The longer we persist in our error, the stronger God’s voice will emerge from the devastation. Indeed, it is in the apocalyptic texts that the word of God is most forceful, repudiating mistakes that are entirely the fault of humans, who are less and less inclined to acknowledge the mechanisms of their violence. This prescience is known as the apocalypse. The paradox can be put in a different way: Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure. Christianity, in other words, demystifies religion.Īnd yet, demystification, which is good in the absolute, has proven bad in the relative, for we were not prepared to shoulder its consequences. Rituals had slowly educated humans after Christianity, they had to do without. The decisive point in this evolution is Christian revelation. This is the implacable logic of the sacred, which myths dissimulate less and less as humans become increasingly self-aware. Since the dawn of humanity, millions of innocent victims have been killed in this way to enable their fellow humans to live together or at least not to destroy one another. What I call (after Freud) the “founding murder”-the immolation of a sacrificial victim who is both guilty of disorder and able to restore order-is constantly reenacted in the rituals at the origin of our institutions. What this means is that humanity results from sacrifice we are the children of religion. The mechanism by which they have done that is sacrifice, which reintroduces difference into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else.
In all of this, my hypothesis has concerned mimesis: Because humans imitate one another, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society. Its goal is to shed light on the process of hominization: the fascinating passage from animality to humanity that occurred thousands of years ago. My work has often been presented as a discussion of archaic religion through comparative anthropology.
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