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Rene Girard. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001. xxiv + 199 pp. $20.00 (cloth), ISBN 1-570-75319-9; Leominster, Herefordshire, UK: Gracewing, 2001. ISBN: 0-852-44290-4; Montreal: Novalis, 2001. ISBN: 2-895-07157-8.
Rene Girard is one of the most original thinkers of the late twentieth century, and this book might justly be called a capstone of his career. Written in retirement and treating nearly all of his major ideas in less than two hundred pages, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning serves as a compact and pithy introduction to his work for those yet unfamiliar with it, and as a focused and attentive exposition of these ideas for those who have been following and critiquing him all along. Also helpful for the beginner is translator James G. Williams' foreword, which clearly explains Girard's system in question-and-answer format. Girard's contribution to Western thought is what he elsewhere calls "the anthropology of the Cross,"1 or the examination of the Bible from the standpoint of anthropology with an eye to unveiling cycles of human violence.
According to Girard, human behavior is mimetic, and this behavior inevitably leads to crisis, since people imitating each other often vie for the same objects of desire. This conflict is potentially explosive and damaging to all parties involved. The age-old way of resolving such conflict, Girard theorizes, is through what he calls the "single victim mechanism," in which the community chooses a marginal and innocent victim on whom to channel its violence. In the normal process, this victim would first be demonized, as the hatreds and destructive rivalries would be transferred to him or her, and then deified, as his or her death will have brought about reconciliation of warring parties. This pattern is broken, Girard claims, by Jewish attitudes toward sacrifice (the use of animals rather than people, for instance), by the...