"Nietzsche insisted that even though the reality of God’s death or irrelevance has been realized, even he himself is “still pious”. By this he means that the mental habits of assuming an absolute do not go away just because conscious belief in that absolute has vanished: these mental habits are ingrained in us and in our language. The ‘Death of God’ has led to a transfer of faith in reason and science as if they can offer a replacement foundation of truth. Nietzsche argues they cannot. Rather, true freedom requires one to abandon substitute vestigial foundations and to sacrifice certainty. The illusion of foundations can only be maintained by sacrifice of the truth, which is that there is no foundational truth. The sacrifice that he demands is not the killing of innocents, but a willingness to cut the foundation out from under oneself. This is the sacrifice required for the survival of the species.
Girard’s theory aims at something quite different: he seeks to unmask the “erroneous” façade only to re-impose an ultimate Christian metaphysics. He argues, the
"Cross...utterly discredits the notion that Christianity is...mythological. The world’s myths do not reveal a way to interpret the Gospels ...the Gospels reveal to us the way to interpret myth."
The crucifixion is non-sacrificial in that it does not embrace the legitimacy of sacrifice but exposes the irrational scapegoating of other religions. Girard characterises the ‘Sacred’ in the world’s religions as based on a victimising mechanism: conflict arising from mimetic rivalry (imitative competition) results in a sacrificial crisis which is resolved by focussing violence on a victim thereby preventing the contagion of violence throughout a society. When peace ensues there is a misunderstanding that the victim has been the supernatural harbinger of peace, leading to the victim’s deification thereby providing an external reference point for societal cohesion and differentiation. The Bible and the Gospels in particular show that this mechanism is an illusion which can be surpassed, ending the need for the sacrifice of innocents. The mode of Jesus’ death and his obvious innocence is meant to draw attention to this deeply repressed mechanism.
Girard finds the refounding mechanism in the words of the Madman:
"(h)ow shall we the murderers...comfort ourselves?... What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? In this sacrifice of the old god a new religion must be created, redirecting sacred energies into new religious forms. Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it?"
Girard tells us that the selfish religion of the ‘superman’ is what Nietzsche will offer as a surrogate."
"A man sets out to discover a treasure he believes is hidden under a stone; he turns over stone after stone but finds nothing. He grows tired of such futile undertaking but the treasure is too precious for him to give up. So he begins to look for a stone which is too heavy to lift—he places all his hopes in that stone and he will waste all his remaining strength on it." [Deceit, Desire and the Novel]
"This book probes the narratives of poets who are exiled, tried or executed for their satire. Aesop, fabulist and riddle warrior, is assimilated to the pharmakos--the wretched human scapegoat who is expelled from the city or killed in response to a crisis--after satirizing the Delphians.
In much the same way, Dumezil's Indo-European heroes, Starkathr and Suibhne, are both warrior-poets persecuted by patron deities. This book views the scapegoat as a group's dominant warrior, sent out to confront predators or besieging forces. Both poets and warriors specialize in madness and aggression, are necessary to society, yet dangerous to society."
