Sage — Agape: love that needs no victim
Love across the line
The other people in the water are not obstacles to your wave. They are other views of the same ocean. Relationship is how the ride is shared: you give way, you call a set, you do not treat a neighbor as a tool for your score. Love is association across the line that still distinguishes you from them. A great ride is not a private trophy. It is a line other people can still feel after you kick out.
The highest commandment is to love God with all the heart and soul and mind, and the neighbor as oneself. I believe the neighbor is a child of God — a participant in the field, a soul, not a map of one.
Love is association across a boundary that stays a boundary.
Agape and sin
Agape is association recognized as the hunger to no longer be separate. It is not a moral extra glued onto thermodynamics.
God's agape is pure association — the non-rivalrous, non-sacrificial joining of the field that does not consume the other in order to remain itself.
I believe sin is believing or acting as if we are not associated with God, which is separation (dissociation) from God. Coherence with God (the experiential field) is association.
Here “dissociation” means coming apart from God and from one another; it is not a psychiatric diagnosis.
This keeps my monism strict. There is no rival kingdom of evil with its own substrate. There is one field.
Rivalry and the scapegoat
Human desire, on Girard's account, is mimetic. We do not spontaneously generate our wants. We borrow them from models. Desire is triangular: subject, model, and object. When the model is close enough that the subject can compete for the same object, rivalry follows. Escalating rivalry produces a crisis of undifferentiation — a war of all against all. Communities resolve this crisis through the scapegoat mechanism: spontaneous, unanimous violence directed against an arbitrary or marked victim. The victim's death or expulsion restores temporary peace. The community then sacralizes the event, generating myths that conceal the victim's innocence and the crowd's guilt. Myth is the narrative form of this concealment.
… In internal mediation the model is a peer or neighbor; the rivalry intensifies and can become violent. The prisoners in the cave are bound less by chains of ignorance than by the reciprocal imitation of one another's desires and the resulting competition for prestige, objects, and recognition.
Sin, on this account, is precisely this mimetic dissociation — the turning from the infinite field of association into rivalrous patterns that require victims. God's agape is the opposite movement: pure association that does not need a scapegoat to remain coherent. It is the non-rivalrous imitation of the Father that Jesus both teaches and enacts.
The Passion: the victim declared righteous
Girard locates the decisive unmasking in the biblical tradition, culminating in the Gospels. … the biblical texts progressively side with the victim. The Joseph story, the Book of Job, the prophetic denunciations of sacrifice, and above all the Passion narratives reveal the innocence of the scapegoat and the guilt of the persecutors. The crucifixion of Jesus is the ultimate exposure of the mechanism: an innocent victim is killed by a mimetic mob under the cover of religious and political legitimacy, yet the resurrection and the subsequent proclamation declare the victim righteous and the violence unjust.
The "ascent" is therefore the movement from mythic participation to the recognition of the scapegoat mechanism. It is not an intellectual climb to a higher metaphysical realm but a conversion of perspective: seeing the same events from the side of the victim rather than the side of the crowd. …
I believe Christ's revelation is the field revealing itself from within, outside of time. It came to Abraham and other historical figures, most deeply in the Passion, and continues through the Holy Spirit as intuitive knowledge of God. This fits Girard's early non-sacrificial reading. The Passion is more than payment for sin: it reveals the pathway to relationship (coherence) with God, which is why the resurrection was needed.
Jesus and the leper
When Jesus touches the leper (Mark 1:40–45 and parallels), He does far more than heal a disease of the skin. He enters the space of maximal dissociation without Himself becoming dissociated. He refuses the sacrificial logic that says "touching the unclean makes one unclean."
Agape is the counter-movement. It is the association that does not require the expulsion of the other in order to remain itself. Jesus' repeated association with lepers is the mimetic model of how human beings are to associate with God: by entering the places of dissociation without becoming rivalrous or sacrificial, and by allowing the Logos to restore coherence from within.
→ Read the whole reading: Jesus and the leper · the metabolic essay: Leprosy