Myths are narratives that emerged in the early days of human civilization, and they help us to explain and respond to key issues that men have asked at all times, such as the origin of the world, human beings, God, meaning of life etc.
Myths are not historic because they do not refer to events that really happened. However, because they did not happen it does not mean that they are false. In fact, they are true in as much as they try to explain realities at a time when science did not exist. Take for example the myth of the god of time named Kronos, who after giving birth to children eats them up. Of course, this has never happened, it is not historical, but it is true; in fact, time is something that first we have it and then we consume it; each day when we get up in the morning we “give birth” to a new day, so to say; each night when the day is over it’s because we have consumed it.
In this and other articles to follow, I use the word “Myth” in its anthropological denotation and not in the sense it has now in modern English meaning a delusion, a lie, or something untrue.
The domination system or structure of power
This is how the theologian Walter Wink calls a set of unjust economic relations that are politically oppressive, racially biased and patriarchal in as far as gender is concerned. All this within a society that divides people into social classes in order that relations between people become hierarchical and not egalitarian; and finally, it is also the use of violence to maintain and guard this status quo, which has been in force since the birth of Babylon in 3000 BC.
According to Wink, things do not happen by chance, attached to a domination system there must be a domination myth, a legend or narrative that tries to explain and justify the reason for the situation being as it is, and how we got here.
“Might is right” – The myth is called “Redemptive Violence” and it entrenches the belief that violence saves and justifies itself, and that war brings peace or as the Romans used to say, vis pacem para bellum, that is, if you want peace, prepare for war. This myth, or stories people tell to explain nature, history and customs, justifies that power is imperative to establish peace and harmony. Like we turn to God when all else fails, so we turn to violence to solve individual and social problems as the last resort, thus attributing to violence the function of a god. As a matter of fact, for Wink, this, and not Judaism, Christianity or Islam, is the prevailing, and the most ancient and dominant “religion” in the world since Babylon.
The myth of redemptive violence endows the domination system with a narrative that can be reproduced in an infinite number of ways, convincing all those involved, both the oppressors and the oppressed, that without this system of domination, or structure of power, the world as we know it would cease to exist. Therefore, only “legal violence”, more specifically that which is exercised by the domination system, can save us from self-destruction.
The game of cops and robbers or heroes and villains
Let’s look paradigmatically how this myth works: a powerful individual, system or group, has caused injury or distress to another particular individual or group. From inside the oppressed group, a hero or powerful group arises, who confronts by violent means, defeats and kills the oppressor, thus ending the reign of terror.
Subsequently, the victorious protagonist and hero creates a system in which the newly liberated people can live freely and in harmony for a period of time. However, because power corrupts, eventually the previously fair liberator, seduced by power, is himself turned into a dominant oppressor, a villain. And so, the cycle starts once again with the eventual emergence of another hero.
It is on the basis of this myth that some historians claim that history repeats itself. Let’s look for instance how this paradigm evolved in the last century in Russia. The czarist Russia was so oppressive that for a while, sadly a too short while, people felt a relief with the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, which soon evolved into an even more oppressive regime under the domination of Stalin and those who followed him in the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat.
From an early age, children are indoctrinated into the domination system through the worship and admiration of heroes in cartoons and later in films. Against an invincible hero is an apparent equally invincible villain.
Children, youth, and even us adults, consciously identify ourselves with the hero, in order to have a good concept of ourselves; but unconsciously we also identify with the villain, to whom we project our repressed anger, our rebelliousness and lust, and we enjoy this wickedness of ours for three-quarters of the film, allowing ample time for indulging the violent side of the self, during which evil seems to be prevailing.
When the end eventually comes, and the good declares victory after much effort and suffering, it is as if our innermost selves were able to re-establish order over our own wickedness and base instincts. The villain’s punishment provides catharsis to reassert control over our own inner tendencies, repress them, and re-establish a sense of goodness without coming to any insight about their own inner evil.
This is why we like watching movies or perhaps we need them to keep our aggressiveness under control or at a manageable level. This sort of sublimation also happens in sports; it is always preferable that the rival groups or countries face each other in stadiums at the Olympic Games than in battlefields.
Films serve therefore as a catharsis or release because the punishment of the villain in the film corresponds to a self-punishment of our own evil tendencies. Salvation is found in the identification with the hero, maintaining in this way the use of violence and self-violence, justified and reinforced, and the continuation of the domination system.
By making violence pleasurable, fascinating, and entertaining, the Powers are able to delude people into compliance with a system that is cheating them of their very lives. We have been educated for thousands of years to make violence enjoyable; all you need is to think there are bad guys and these bad guys need to suffer for what they have done, so it is enjoyable creating pain for these people; revenge is very enjoyable indeed. In a violent society nothing is more enjoyable than the revenge.
Similar to what used to take place in Roman arenas where gladiators fought each other to death or Christians were devoured by beasts, and to this day in bullfighting arenas, throughout history, violence has been not just a means to advocate justice and peace, but our culture has been making it an enjoyable and rewarding spectacle.
In short, the Myth of Redemptive Violence is the story of the victory of order over chaos by means of violence. Based on the fact that man is naturally violent, violence, or better said “legal violence”, justifies itself because it makes us believe there is no alternative way to obtain order and peace.
The violence in education
“La letra con la sangre entra”
This is the Castilian proverb extolling violence against children as the best method of teaching. At the mercy of sadistic and unscrupulous teachers, children were beaten up in schools and colleges as well as in the bosom of the family. I will always remember a schoolmate of mine, who had lost his father, and because the elderly mother did not have the strength to beat him up and the beatings he received in the school were not sufficient, he would go systematically to the police station to be beaten up there every day.
The Babylonian myth of creation
The most ancient myth or sacred narrative of creation of the universe and human beings tells us that in the beginning there was Apsu, the father god, and Tiamat, the mother god, who gave birth to many children gods; but because the younger gods were extremely noisy when at play and disturbed Apsu in his sleep, he decided to kill them off; the younger gods, however, discovered the plan and in anticipation killed Apsu.
Tiamat pledged revenge for the death of her husband, filled with fear the rebel gods solicited the help of their cousin, Marduk. Coming to their rescue, Marduk captured and killed Tiamat; later he dismembered her body and scattered her blood; so from her dead body, according to the Babylonian myth, the World was created. In other words, creation was an act of violence and not of goodness as in the biblical myth of creation.
In such a world, for cosmic order to exist the violent suppression of the feminine is needed; this is mirrored in the social order by the subjection of women to men, and men to their rulers. In the beginning there was chaos, and violence was used to establish order. It is therefore justified to use violence because without it there would be no order. We can then conclude that the myth of the redemptive violence is about the victory of order over chaos by means of violence.
After the creation of the world, Marduk threw into prison the gods who sided with Tiamat; since these complained of the bad prison food, Marduk and his father, Ea (son of Apsu), killed one of the imprisoned gods and from his blood human beings were created to be servants of the gods.
Therefore, according to the Babylonian myth of creation, violence is natural, it is encoded in our genes. So, it was not mankind who created violence by an act of disobedience to God as the biblical myth has it; violence has always been a reality, and part of the cosmic and human nature. Humans are naturally incapable of peaceful coexistence; peace has to be imposed on from a higher order.
Therefore, the smartest and the most powerful present themselves before others as kings, Czars, emperors, princes, priests and masters, that is, as representatives of the goodness and justice of God with the mission to combat evil and punish evildoers. The “legal” violence of the leaders in the society opposes the “natural” violence in order to defeat evildoers and dissuade others from their evil tendencies thus facilitating social coexistence.
In this way women are advised not to have needs since they must sacrifice themselves for the good of the family; men are instigated to renounce their personal interests to serve the king to the point of giving up their lives in battles to protect and increase the king’s dominion. Similarly, children are instructed from very young that there is right and wrong, good and bad, and that to be good they must give up the use of their natural power outwardly, and use it inwardly against themselves to suppress and repress their evil tendencies and obey authority unconditionally.
The biblical myth of creation
Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. (…) And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. (…) God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. (Genesis 1, 4, 12, 18, 21, 25).
The biblical myth of creation described in the book of Genesis is quite different from the Babylonian one. However, because it was developed during the time the Jewish people were living in exile and captivity in Babylon, there are similarities between them, but fundamentally it opposes the Babylonian myth. In the Bible, God is good and creation is an act of God’s goodness. The way God creates each of the various realities, he makes sure that what is created is good. In other words, God is good and creates a good creation.
Evil and violence are not part of the creation as God conceived it. Creation is an idyllic garden where the first human beings lived in harmony with each other, with nature and with God. Evil entered later as the result of misuse or abuse of freedom. The world and the realities that God created were good initially, but were later corrupted by the sin of Man.
In the Bible, after Adam and Eve stole from God the prerogative of good and evil, and placed themselves as the standard of all things, arbitrariness entered into the world and with it violence, which is exercised soon after in the second generation by Cain over his brother Abel. Violence never appears in the Bible as a naturally good reality, but always as an artificially evil one; it does not present itself as a natural fact that has to be assumed and accepted, but always as a problem to be solved.
It is clear that the biblical story of creation is not the myth that prevailed all over the world, from Babylon or Mesopotamia to Egypt, Greece, India, or China. Instead, the Babylonian myth is the most ancient and most current, and has no rival; there are very few that confront and challenge it. It is a type of civil religion that is transversal to all cultures, civilizations and religions, and the matrix that is used in most of the films and cartoons that are made, in order to educate the new generations of the necessity of violence to re-establish and maintain order.
Religion as legitimation of power
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgement. Romans 13:1-2
The belief that authority comes from God and that whoever exercises it on earth does so in His name belongs to the ideology of the domination system. From this belief of idolizing authority is a short step that many kings and emperors took. Already in our time after the Spanish civil war, the dictator Francisco Franco, in order to justify the usurpation of power, declared himself ruler and even minted coins with his effigy and the words “Francisco Franco, Leader of Spain by the grace of God”.
Religion, instead of asserting its myth that man is not violent per se because he was created by God from an act of love, let itself be influenced by the Babylonian myth, thus becoming violent as in the case of the Jewish religion.
The whole sacrificial system is based on the belief that only with blood is one redeemed or rescued. The only difference between the Jews and the surrounding peoples, or the distant Mayans and Aztecs, is that they replaced human sacrifice with animal sacrifice. Christianity has somehow returned to human sacrifice by giving it a new meaning, this time to the sacrifice of one man once for all, valid for all times and places.
Christianity, the successor of Judaism, as the verse cited by Saint Paul suggests, followed in the footsteps of Judaism, blessing and adopting the myth of redemptive violence. It is certain that Jesus of Nazareth stands apart, and precisely because of this, he was not understood by his disciples and furthermore, his teachings were washed or watered down already in the apostolic generation by his own followers.
For Walter Wink, Christianity was perverted and made chaplain, or religious educator and moral guarantor of all that the State did. Caesaropapism is the ideology that ruled the Western world after the Roman Emperor Constantine made Christianity the state religion, despite Jesus being against the union of powers as we conclude from his warning to give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. (Matthew 22:21)
The Crusades and the Inquisition are the most exponential cases where the interests of politics united and coincided with the interests of religion, merging into a single goal and strategy, one being justified by the other. In the Crusades, the Church, which declared them, mobilized armies to defend the holy places occupied by Muslims, hence the concept of the holy war, killing in the name of God which is the “non plus ultra” in the self-justification of violence.
The Inquisition, an instrument of the Church to purify and compel faithful to true faith and doctrine, was used more by the state than by the Church herself; the most blatant case was the conviction of Joan of Arc. Both in the Catholic and the Protestant world, witch-hunting was promoted by the state, with the approval of the Church, thus freeing themselves of individuals who threatened the system.
The Karpman or the Bermuda triangle
In short, the myth of redemptive violence is a fallacy that order can only be victorious over chaos by means of violence. As in this myth, violence presents itself as the only possible solution to chaos, barbarism and anarchy; since violence is not a problem but a fact, our world is neither perfect nor perfectible. The world is a theatrical stage of an eternal conflict on which there is a more or less lenient version of the law of the jungle, that is, the survival of the fittest.
Ultimately redemptive violence redeems nothing, neither the victim nor the villain, nor does it solve the problem or conflict that created it. The only thing that it does is to perpetuate itself in a kind of eternal vicious circle. Thus, we have a version of the Karpman triangle (persecutor – rescuer – victim equivalent to villain – victim – hero) and from this sort of Bermuda triangle no one escapes alive.
The Greek thinking is shaped by the myth of eternal return, and so is the Hegelian dialectics that consists of a thesis that is opposed or confronted by an antithesis resulting in a synthesis; with time the synthesis itself becomes a new thesis to which follows a new antithesis and so on ad infinitum. The Greek circular understanding of time also follows the same paradigm, the god of time called Kronos continuously gives birth to children and eats them.
If we do not change the paradigm, if we do not dismiss the Babylonian myth and adopt instead the biblical sacred story of creation, then there is no hope, the world is at a dead end, and so the self-destruction of humanity is the most likely outcome.
Opposed and very different to the Greek paradigm of eternal return is the Jewish thinking because it is rooted in the Hebrew epic of emerging from the slavery in Egypt, passing through the desert of purification and entering into the Promised Land of freedom. Time is not cyclical, but linear; in this view of time we never return to the starting point, unlike a mouse running on a wheel, we walk into a future that enables us to progress ad eternum.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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