Did Christianity usher in a more just and equitable world? After the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, Europe trudged through the middle ages until the Renaissance in the 15th century.
Your comment was about the impact of Christianity on the Roman Empire and in Europe, so that’s irrelevant, but Girard’s argument is also not about individual adherence to the ideology. Instead, it’s about the destruction of archaic virtue, premised on scapegoating and mythologized violence, as a result of Christianity. Modernity was premised on this, as identified by Nietzsche and others.
Oh sure, the experience of millions of non-Christians is irrelevant, of course.
Is Girard saying that Christianity destroyed scapegoating and mythologized violence? Or simply archaic virtue? Because I can think of loads of scapegoating all over the Eurasian landmass, from 300 years of the Spanish Inquisition, to pogroms ordered by the Tsars, the Bolsheviks, the Cossacks, and the White Army.
Since you’re arguing from a very dishonest place and intentionally misrepresenting what I said, I really shouldn’t bother engaging with you, but:
Despite his later religious appeals, Girard’s original argument is more anthropological with regard to the emergence of various monotheistic traditions. Archaic virtues and religions were about hiding the nature of sacrilized violence, specifically the fact that the victim/scapegoat had no real power to dispel whatever crisis predicated their victimization. This becomes fully exposed for the first time in the Christian mythos, but had orthodox and heterodox precedents in almost every world religion,and especially Judaism, as Girard’s work itself engages with. Overtime, the effect of this mythos is to undermine the efficacy of sacrificial logics, such that we now, in modern society, more often than not, identify with the victims vs. the victimizers. This is a complete inversion of the archaic social order, as Nietzsche railed against in his notion of Dionysus vs. the Crucified. The impact of the Christian mythos obviously also extends into other world religions (e.g. Islam and its two billion adherents, where the Christ figure also holds special status) as well as into various secular moral philosophies that derive their origins from Abrahamic traditions.
I'm not arguing from a dishonest place. I'm asking how this philosophy of history relates to actual historical events. We live in a world where modern governments routinely use concentration camps and genocide to consolidate power, and erase ethnic and racial minorities. I'm trying to square what you're saying with all of that. It doesn't seem to me like we're identifying with victims vs. victimizers any better than Marcus Aurelius would have.
The fact that you see things through the lens of the persecuted and not the persecutor, recoil at the injustice of violence done to those without power, is precisely the change I’m describing. This was not Aurelius’ view, nor one that would have much purchase in the ancient world.
>Christianity gave us a world without heroism and virtue?
Without archaic notions of heroism and virtue, as Nietzsche railed against in the concept of “slave morality” overtaking this cultural order.
>Christianity stopped us from destroying the weak and the other?
It's weird then how the western Christian world has retained all of those negative traits for almost two millennia.
Relatively speaking, yes. Historically, all of Europe was murderously at each others throats, or more recently, the idea of colonialism being morally repugnant would’ve been laughable (as was true in its archaic, imperial analogues). Of course, we have not entirely shed ourselves of these notions, but their power is much diminished to centuries past.
