As John relates:
Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of all lies.
- John 8:43-44
That name is Satan, and these myths are thus expressions of the false accusations, collective murders and victim deification that founded pre-Christian culture, and that the Gospels recognise, reproach and reject. The Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, is therefore the advocate of all martyrs as witnesses to the truth of the Gospels. The dreadful sword1 of Christ, l’ordre de la charité, spells the doom of all those Satantic societies by revealing their social order lies on the convergence of collective violence upon a scapegoat. And it was this inevitable destruction of Satan, by the Christian interpretation of collective violence and its universal declaration of guilt that must invariably, argued Nietzsche, prevent any continued order or fraternity between men.
Ressentiment is the element of violence that survives the impact of Christianity. For ressentiment flourishes wherever violence is diminished and Christianity has only partly succeeded in its aims to eliminate violence in all its forms.
The ressentiment, only made possible by Christianity and its diminution of Satanic violence, expressed by Jungian efforts to Biblicise mythology, by Heideggerian efforts to mythologise the Gospels, and by the idealisations of primitive cultures have only contributed to the vague and eclectic religiosity of our time. Faced with the dreadful turbulence of Christianity, both Jung and Heidegger grasped at the vestigial elements of the old sacred. Except for their vocabulary, they are wholly within the realms of nineteenth-century historicism.
Unexposed to the priestly whetting of pagan teeth with blood, few recognise the urgency of the Gospels. Bewilderment and condescension follows each mention of the collective murder of God.
Per Nietzsche:
“…God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife – who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed to great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event – and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hiterto!” – Here the madman was silent and looked again at his hearers; they also were silent and looked at him surprise. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, so that it broke in pieces and was extinguished. “I come too early,” he then said, “I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still on its way, and is travelling – it has not yet reached men’s ears. Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars – and yet they have done it themselves.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §12
The expression here is contaminated across several layers, yet still distinguished logically. At its most obvious, Nietzsche is writing on the modern disappearance of the deification consequent to the collective murder of a real victim. The second level follows, the realisation that the victims of collective murder are the pagan gods. The highest level is the realisation that the Passion of Christ is not the death of the Christian God but the death of all other gods.
Like his fellow idealists, Nietzsche felt that the death of an exhausted religion – the Biblical religion – would allow the birth of some new god, a birth unrooted in the death of the resented Biblical God. Idealists are unable to apprehend the reality, rendered unintelligible by Christianity, of collective violence, and see it only as a cure for the fermenting pandemonium – the ressentiment – of their, and our, time. The caustic trickle fills the cup of every “intellectual” nihilist, i.e., the psychologists.
As an interpretative tool, the mimetic principle is far more serviceable than the Freudian complex. By eliminating the conscious patricide-incest desire, it does away with the cumbersome necessity of the subsequent repression of the desire. In fact, the mimetic principle casts the unconscious aside. The mimetic principle explains the Oedipus myth and does so with an economy and precision lacking in the Freudian approach.
