Breaking the Chains

Scholars have often repeated the same thing about violence.
Violence often begets violence or that violence is spiral – it continues eternally.
Take the example of a son whose father is killed by someone. The son, when he identifies the culprit, waits for an opportune time to take away his life. The same fate will await for him.

The enmity between two persons or groups or nations continue although the initiators of violence are no more. The chain can be only broken when one of the descendants one day forgives the other.

The idea of forgiveness and the breaking of the continued violence can be explained with an example. Charles Taylor writes how this was possible in the political realm of South Africa. According to him the harmonious living is possible today only because of the victim who rises vertically to forgive the other. It is possible. What one has to do is to break the chain of hatred with love; break the chain of resentment with forgiveness. It is not that you do it because you are powerless but because you are powerful, inspired by the love of God.

Nietzsche had spoken in his genealogy of morals that resentment of the weak created the morality of evil. In his dictionary, forgiveness is the tool of the week to subdue the powerful. For the one who wanted to retrieve the sense of self-transcendence against instrumental rationality and establish the transformation of the values it may have seemed correct. He wanted to recover the human creativity and transcend nihilism through aesthetics.

When it comes to the political realm, Nietzsche's genealogy does not help. I am not undervaluing the moral motive behind the claim of Nietzsche, but the political outcome of it. Taylor himself suggests that Nietzsche's followers turn to be anti-humanists. Leaving aside the philosophical debate, when one turns to the political conflicts between nations or groups, the only way to break the chain of hatred and war is to forgive.

The Death of Christ on the Cross is the real witness to the end of bloody sacrifice. Unbelievers may not subscribe to the faith of the Christians, but the fact is that humanism one values in the world has come out of and shaped of the agapeic gospel of Christ.

FIRST STONE and RESPONSIBILITY

René Girard’s book - Violence and the Sacred - displays some of his important themes such as the mimetic desire, rivalry and scapegoat mechanism. I need to read the book again. His research is very interesting. More interestingly his article entitled “The First Stone”[1]beautifully explains his important themes on the reflection of the passage where Jesus asks the crowd (Jn 8: 3 – 11).

It is a very interesting article in which Girard analyses the importance of the significance of the ‘first stone’. Since the Gospel passage does not talk about the stoning – because stoning’ never occurred – Girard goes on then to compare another passage in which Apollonius of Tyana motivates the people of Ephesus to stone at a stranger. When someone is surrounded by a furious crowd, the first stone is the very important one. All have stones yet all hesitate to be the first to stone at the culprit or the stranger. When the first stone is thrown then stones follow – one after another non-stop. This is what is ‘mimetic’. The first stone has no model whereas all other stones have a model to follow.[2]

Girard explains how Apollonius does not mention about the first stone at all. He only motivates them to stone at the beggar, Whereas Jesus talks specifically about the ‘first stone’. He exposes the importance of the first stone since it is associated with responsibility. Jesus calls for introspection. Those words of Jesus and his action put an end to violence. It calls for seeing the stranger as I am because he has the same flesh and heart like mine and I am in sin like the stranger. The call reminds that the act is associated with responsibility. At the end the life of woman is saved whereas in Ephesus the significance of the first stone was not spoken and the beggar was killed leaving him under the heap of stones. The gospel then calls for justice which drops the stoning altogether.[3]

He then also pays attention to action of Jesus who bends down to write comparing him to the beggar – the victim in the narrative of Apollonius. It is a very interesting interpretation. The interpretation can be best understood only when one reads Girard’s “The First Stone.”   

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[1] René Girard, “The First Stone,” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Fall 1999): pp. 5 – 17.

[2] Cf. Ibid., pp. 8 – 9.

[3] Cf.  Ibid., p. 14.