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| Source: js.emory.edu |
(Rene Girard)--“Religion in its broadest
sense, then, must be another term for that obscurity that surrounds man’s
efforts to defend himself by curative or preventive means against his own
violence.... This obscurity coincides with the transcendental effectiveness of
a violence that is holy, legal, and legitimate successfully opposed to a
violence that is unjust, illegal, and illegitimate….
Religion, then, is far from
‘useless.’ It humanizes violence; it protects man from his own violence by
taking it out of his hands, transforming it into a transcendent and
ever-present danger to be kept in check by the appropriate rites appropriately
observed and by a modest and prudent demeanor….
[Religious] prohibitions
serve a basic function. They maintain a sort of sanctuary at the heart of the
community, an area where that minimum of nonviolence essential to the survival
of the children and the community’s cultural heritage—essential, in short, to
everything that sustains man’s humanity—is jealously preserved. If prohibitions
capable of performing this function actually exist, one can hardly attribute
them to the beneficence of Nature (that good angel of complacent humanism, the
last relic of those optimistic theologies engendered by the deterioration of historical
Christianity).
