Then we understand what the Kingdom of God is and why it is not an unalloyed good for people. It is in no way like placing a herd of cows in ever-green meadows. It confronts people with the most difficult task in their history. Compared to us, there is something honest and sympathetic about the people of Gadara. They do not yet behave like demanding buyers of the consumer society. They admit that it will not be easy for them to live without scapegoats and demons.

In all the texts we have read, the demonological perspective persists, but it undermines itself. To complete its defeat, it is enough to slightly expand the jurisdiction of the theory of "scandal" that Jesus himself expounds and whose amazing explanatory power we have already noted many times. The texts I have commented on are representative, I believe, of the Synoptic Gospels as a whole.

In short, in order to complete the destruction of the demon, it is necessary to orient the text in the direction that Jesus himself points – in the direction of "scandal" and everything that this term implies, i.e. in the direction of the problem of mimeticism and its exorcism.

It is not without reason, as we see, that Mark and Matthew warn us not to stop at the letter of the greatest of all the demonological texts put into the mouth of Jesus himself. It is enough to turn to the dictionary to understand that the parable distortion of the text is a kind of concession to the mythological and violent representation that comes from the collective murder of the scapegoat.

Open your Greek dictionary on the verb paraballo, from which the noun parabole, "parable," is derived. The very first meaning of this verb clearly demonstrates that we are talking about such a concession, since it leads us directly to collective murder. Paraballo means to throw something into the food of the crowd to quench its thirst for violence, preferably a victim, someone condemned to death; With the help of such an action, apparently, the subject of the verb himself can get out of a dangerous situation. The orator resorts to a parable, i.e., to a metaphor, in order to prevent the crowd from turning against him. In the extreme, there is no such discourse at all that would not be a parable; Indeed, the whole of human language as a whole is most likely derived from collective murder, along with other cultural institutions. After particularly startling parables, the crowd is sometimes ready to turn to violence, but Jesus shies away from it because his hour has not yet come.

To warn readers that Jesus speaks in parables is to warn readers of the persecutory distortion so that they can take it into account. In the case of our passage, this necessarily means warning them against the language of exile. An alternative is unthinkable here. Not to see the parable character of the exile here is to continue to succumb to the deception of violence, and therefore to practice the type of reading that Jesus himself warns us about, and that it should be avoided, and that it is almost inevitable: "And the disciples came and said to him, 'Why do you speak to them in parables? He answered and said to them, "Because it is given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but it is not given to them <... > therefore I say to them in parables, that when they see, they do not see, and when they hear, they do not hear, and they do not understand" (Mt 13:10-13).

On this point, Mark connects the parable even more closely than Matthew with the system of representation against which the Gospels fight. For those who live in this system, he writes, everything "comes" in parables. Consequently, the parable, taken literally, does not take us out of this system, but strengthens the walls of the prison (but it would be inaccurate to conclude from this that the parable does not have the task of converting the listener). This is what the following lines mean – here again Jesus addresses His disciples: "It has been given to you to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, but to those who are outside all things come in parables; so that they look with their own eyes, and do not see; they hear with their own ears, and do not understand, lest they be converted" (Mk 4:10-12*; italics are quoted from Isaiah 6:9-10).

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Even in the Gospel texts, which are usually considered "archaic," in which belief in demons seems to blossom in full bloom, it is actually abolished. Such is the case with the dialogue on the exile that we have just read, such is the case with the miracle in Gadara. We do not notice this abolition, because it is expressed in the contradictory language of the expelled exorcism and the persecuted demon. The demon erupts into the nothingness that is in some sense "co-substantial" to him, into the nothingness of his own existence.

This is the meaning of Jesus' expression: "I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning" (Lk 10:18). In the Gospels there is only one transcendence, the transcendence of divine love, which triumphs over all manifestations of violence and the sacred, exposing their insignificance. An analysis of the Gospels shows that Jesus prefers the language of "skandalon" to the language of demons, but the opposite is true for his disciples and Gospel editors.

All this is understandable if the disciples were really what they are described in the Gospels themselves—very attentive, well-intentioned, but not always able to fully understand what their teacher says and does. The story of Peter's denial has already led me to such a supposition. It can be assumed that the disciples influenced the development of narrative passages more than the transmission of Jesus' words.

Jesus is the only one who knows the language of "skandalon": the most significant passages clearly show that these two languages ("skandalona" and demons) are applied to the same objects, and that Jesus translates the logos of demons into the category of mimetic scandal. This is what happens in Jesus' famous address to Peter, which I have already quoted: "Get thee behind me, Satan! you are a stumbling block to Me!" (literally: "You're a scandal to me") (Mt 16:23). Could it be that at this point Jesus sees Peter as possessed by Satan in the sense in which the witch-hunters used the expression? Of course not. Of course, nothing of the kind is meant, as is clear from the following phrase, which describes Peter's behaviour as something typically human: "For you do not think of the things of God, but of the things of men" (Mt 16:23).

The language of "skandalon" replaces the fear of hellish forces – for a long time, undoubtedly saving, but blind – with an analysis of the causes that push people into the trap of mimeticism. In trying to subject Jesus to the contagious temptation of his own worldly desire, Peter turns the divine mission into a worldly enterprise, doomed to destruction because of the competing ambitions that it will inevitably arouse or has already aroused, at least in Peter. In this way, he plays the usual role of Satan, the role of a model of mimetic desire.

There is, as we see, a strict correspondence between what the Gospels tell us about demons and the truth of mimetic relationships as formulated by Jesus, as it is discovered by certain literary masterpieces, or, in our day, by a theoretical analysis of these relationships. This is not the case with most texts that reflect belief in demons, but modern commentators do not study them very carefully, and therefore all texts that testify to such a belief seem to them to be the bearers of this faith, deserving of nothing but indiscriminate rejection. And their content is not really studied.