Scapegoats and the Veneration of the Saints -- Mimetic Theory and Literary Study

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Date Posted: 06:02:01 01/28/08 Mon
Author: Betsy Peters
Subject: Scapegoats and the Veneration of the Saints

Reading Girard's chapters from the Scapegoat made me ponder, does this pagan model of attacking some victim and then claiming that they were the very means of bringing reconciliation to the community work in the historical examples of the veneration of the martyrs to sainthood? I wonder, however, how we must take into consideration the fact that it is not necessarily the people who kill the martyr that venerate him as a saint. Joan of Arc dies as a "witch" with the English--a woman in armor definately sticks out--but the French canonized her. The missionary saints who died in foreign lands were not necessarily canonize by those who killed them. My knowledge of the saints and their stories is greatly lacking, but it appears that the same mechanism involved in "worshipping past vicitims" is invovled here too.

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Re: Scapegoats and the Veneration of the Saints -- Kiernan, 07:20:08 01/28/08 Mon