I will attempt to portray Raymund Schwager's biblical access to sin by sketching his approach to original sin, which is a theological question that has been very controversial in modern theology, but at the same time is very important for Christian systematic theology and also for a thinking inspired by R. Girard.

Schwager has outlined his analysis of the problem in several articles, which he later published together in a book, so far only available in German. It bears the title: Original Sin and the Drama of Salvation, in the context of evolution, genetic engineering and apocalypticism ⁽¹⁾. I will aspire to outline the most important aspects of his biblical hermeneutics, as given there. Those of you familiar with J. Alison's "The Joy of Being Wrong" ⁽²⁾ will certainly recognize many similarities and some differences between the two theologians' approaches. I will not refer to Alison's work, however, because my task here is to present Schwager's view.

1. Three Principles

Three methodological principles guide Schwager's approach: 1) That biblical texts should be interpreted not by standards imposed on them from the outside but by standards that can be developed from the biblical texts themselves, and that such a standard is mimetic theory, because Scripture is full of the description and/or uncovering of mimetic processes. 2) That the Bible as a whole is the document of revelation, not just parts of it, which means that more texts than those usually associated with a theological topic may be relevant and that those texts have to be considered in a dramatic fashion ⁽³⁾ and not just by adding one passage to the other. 3) That for the Christian theologian the Christ event, more exactly the resurrection of Christ, opens up a whole new understanding of Sacred Scripture, of both New and Old Testament, and that therefore the NT is the hermeneutical key for the OT, and may transform its meaning in the process. - Since this is a very important point for Schwager, I will also stick with the traditional Christian names Old, and New Testament.

You will instantly see these principles at work in Schwager's analysis of the biblical foundation for the doctrine of original sin.

2. Genesis and the Gospels on Original Sin

The locus classicus for original sin is, of course, the story of the forbidden fruit in Gen 3, the story of the so-called Fall of the first humans, named Adam and Eve. Schwager also grants high priority to that passage in his treatment of original sin, but it plays no exclusive role and it has to be seen in connection with other OT-passages and be re-read through the NT. The story of the Fall is a story of temptation and gradually succumbing to it. To that there is a counterpoint story in the synoptic gospels: the temptation of Jesus after his baptism. The fundamental difference is that Jesus resists temptation. Let us take a closer look on what these two stories tell us about original sin.

For Schwager - and he is not alone in that assessment - Gen 3 depicts one installment of a larger development starting in Gen 1 and 2 with creation and ending in the catastrophe of the Tower of Babel in Gen 11. The most important of the other episodes on the way there are the story of Cain and Able and of the Great Deluge. Thus Schwager analyzes Gen 2-11 as different stages of a complex development.

In Gen 3 the serpent begins his seduction not by a word of his own but by pretending to repeat God's previous word, while in fact distorting it in a deceptive way. Earlier (Gen 2:16f.) God had commanded: "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die." ⁽⁴⁾ Now (Gen 3:1) the serpent makes that: "Did God say, 'You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?'"

Schwager argues: "From the beginning temptation is an imitation of God which, however, centers exclusively on one aspect of God's words (on proscription) and that way God is made to appear as a perverse idol." ⁽⁵⁾ The woman in the story succumbs to this temptation immediately, even in her defense of God. She rebuts by quoting God's real commandment that all trees but one are for human consumption, but then she adds something to God's commandment: " … nor shall you touch it… ." (Gen 3:2). So in fact even in her defense of God the woman emulates the model of the serpent by misquoting God's commandment.

When we look at Jesus' temptation in Mat, the tempter again starts out by quoting God, this time not even misquoting him, but correctly repeating the heavenly words that had just before initiated the scene. Jesus' temptation is preceded by his baptism through John. During that event, Matthew reports, "a voice from heaven said, 'This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.'" (Mat 3,17 parr) The tempter twice starts out with: "If you are the son of God" (Mt 4:3.6), and then demands some action by this divine son. He does not misquote God, but he wants Jesus to misuse God's words for "secondary and selfish purposes" ⁽⁶⁾. Contrary to the woman in Gen, Jesus does not succumb to temptation. He too rebuts by quoting God's word, however he quotes from Scripture without any addition. ⁽⁷⁾ So by resisting to emulate the misguided use of God's word, which the tempter makes, he succeeds in resisting temptation.

A further analysis of both passages reveals to Schwager more clearly the nature of the temptation at work. In Gen the forbidden fruit is not so tempting by itself, it is the serpent's depiction of that fruit being an object of God's envious desire ⁽⁸⁾ that draws the woman's desire towards it. A mimetic triangle of subject-model-object is established, with the slight but important variation that not God Himself is the model, neither the serpent himself, but the image of God the serpent has projected, which is a distorted and perverse image of God. Thus Schwager understands the serpent "as a symbol of that mimesis that falls prey to immediate desire because of selective imitation" ⁽⁹⁾.

"Selective imitation" also is an apt description for the way in which the tempter in Mat quotes God's word. But in the third temptation of Christ the devil reveals the true nature of his desire, when he tries to seduce Jesus into worshipping him. While the serpent in Gen builds up a desire to be like God in humans, the tempter in Mat gives away that this is really his own desire. He "does not merely imitate words of God anymore, but clearly God Himself. … [Thus] it becomes ever more clear that the tempting voice is nothing but a covetous and perverse imitation of God." ⁽¹⁰⁾

This, however, is a tight rope to walk for theologians: Gen explicitly states that humans were created in the image of God, they are and should be like God in a certain sense, and yet striving to be like God is a temptation and the ultimate sin. In Mat Jesus is called the Son of God by a voice from heaven, and yet he can be tempted to worship a wrong God.

Yet for all their similarities, there is also a fundamental difference for Schwager in the way Gen and Mat look at temptation: The words Jesus had just heard at his baptism must be seen as the description of a deep, inner experience for Jesus that also constituted a new experience for him of who he himself was. Schwager suggests: "An opening of Jesus' soul must have corresponded to the opening of the heavens, … and Jesus heard words that touched him in his innermost identity" ⁽¹¹⁾. It is exactly at this personal experience and at the words expressing it that temptation attacks. Thus in "the gospels primordial temptation does not aim at an outside object, but rather at this inner experience. This experience which comes from God and at the same time seeks to endow the recipient with his own deepest identity should be preserved as a holy mystery and gift in openness for the future, but temptation aims at misusing it for secondary and selfish purposes"⁽¹²⁾.

So in a first important NT transformation, primordial sin is not the transgression of an outside law, rather it is a false response to an inner, gift-like experience of one's own identity given by the divine; and this false response then has repercussions for the experience of oneself and the divine, thus distorting and falsifying it. Schwager mentions this as an important difference between OT-Judaism and NT-Christianity: "While Israel saw its salvation in the obedience of the people to God's commandments and the loss of salvation in breaking the commandments (Lev 26:1-13; Deu 28:1-14)"⁽¹³⁾, Christianity viewed salvation as an inner gift of grace. The unifying power of Christianity has been its idea of God (Trinity) and a special experience of God (resurrection), and not the law. Sinning in that sense is not the breaking of a heteronomous commandment, but missing one's own God-given identity, one's God-given calling or mission.

In Gen, when God discovers the transgression, each of the sinners tries to shift the guilt on someone else: Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the serpent. This shifting of the burden of guilt, a burden that has been accumulated in a social process, on only one participant of that process is already a first indication of scapegoating. I want to add that Adam blames Eve in a very telling phrase: "The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate." (Gen 3:12) So after all, it's really God who is to blame, because he gave that horrible woman to Adam. ⁽¹⁴⁾ If tradition had taken more notice of that detail, the scapegoating of women for original sin wouldn't have been so easy.

As you certainly know, God does not accept these attempts to shift the blame, he rather acknowledges the common responsibility of all participants, for each of them gets a punishment of his or her own and all are expelled from the garden of Eden. What is notably absent from the consequences of the transgression, however, is death. From what we have heard before, we might expect Adam and Eve to die on the spot. But they don't. According to Gen 5:3 Adam went on to live for 930 years - not exactly the kind of punishment we would expect.

Schwager finds a solution to the ensuing puzzlement in the next chapter of Genesis. It reveals that the kind of death that is the consequence of sin is violent death. The effects of sin unfold "as rivalry between brothers and reach their pinnacle in murder" ⁽¹⁵⁾. As manifold ways of rivalry are the consequences of acquisitive mimesis in mimetic theory, so in Schwager's exegesis the punishments mentioned in Gen 3 are forms of rivalry (between man and woman, woman and serpent, man and soil). The story of Cain and Abel, however, makes that completely clear, in that envy is Cain's motive for murdering Abel.

Thus the consequence God threatened for the transgression does indeed occur -God did not make empty words. But: it is not God Who brings it about; it is humans themselves who bring it on each other. So judgment "is an inner consequence of evil human action, a consequence which can fall upon someone who is not guilty of the evil himself, but stands in close kinship with the perpetrator of evil"⁽¹⁶⁾. Already Gen indicates that God's judgment really is a human self-judgment that comes about in a diabolic cycle of deception, rivalry and violence.

Therefore Schwager argues that looking at Jesus' trial and being put to death provides us with important insights for the understanding original sin, for these events reveal in utmost clarity what was only alluded to in Gen:

The texts so far have shown the desire to be like God at the root of primordial temptation. In the trial against Jesus this is the main accusation leveled against him: he is accused and found guilty of challenging the sovereignty of God by declaring himself to be the Son of God. Schwager sees in that accusation a revelation of the inner motives of Jesus' persecutors: they project their own motives into their victim, and he becomes their "skandalon". So they are driven by the same desire as the serpent in Gen and the devil in Mat. It is Jesus' prosecutors who want to be like God in a covetous imitation, not Jesus; but they cannot acknowledge their own desire and project it onto Jesus. They blame Jesus for their own craving, as Adam already had blamed God for his transgression.

From this we learn that human beings driven by the sinful desire to be like God will not recognize their own desire: acquisitive or antagonistic mimesis aimed at God is unconscious. That's not new to mimetic theorists, but it is a clarification for Christian theology, because Gen insinuates that the first couple was conscious of their rivalry with God. Jesus' trial makes it clear that it is much more complicated. On a deeper, unconscious level, Jesus' persecutors - standing in for all sinful humans - actually resent God and therefore they persecute the one person who claims unique communion with God. Schwager argues that on that level Jesus in fact is not a random victim, he is the perfect or "necessary" victim, for he really embodies the divine in this world - which in the first place enabled primitive cultures to divinize their victims. ⁽¹⁷⁾ As with Cain and Abel, also in the trial of Jesus the relationship to God, the kinship with God, is the focal point of envy.

Even more important, however, is the change in God's reaction to this. In Gen the consequence of sin is the banishment and expulsion of sinful humans by God, in the NT "it is not God who banishes humans from the garden of salvation, but humans cast out the Word of Salvation that came to them: 'He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.' (John 1:11) The immediate consequence of sin is not the punishment of the sinners, as in the story of paradise, but the killing of the one sent by God to His own." ⁽¹⁸⁾ As in Gen 4, a man is killed by other men, but here it is the one man being in complete union with God that is killed by a crowd of men, a mob that is completely unified against the one.

The "collective ganging-up against an arbitrarily selected victim" ⁽¹⁹⁾ who is finally saved by God is, however, not completely alien to Gen. It is in an incomplete and preliminary way prefigured in Gen 6-9: the story of the great Flood and Noah's rescue from it. Schwager sees many OT-texts as "mixed texts"⁽²⁰⁾, meaning that they contain primitive elements, which still depend on the scapegoat mechanism, but also impulses of revelation that break up this mechanism. Both these elements are closely intertwined, so that they cannot be taken apart and shown in their respective purity. The story of the great Deluge is such a mixed text, for it portrays God on the one hand as bringing about the Flood, on the other hand as the savior of Noah and the creatures in the ark from the very floods He sent. A perspective looking back from the resurrection of Christ recognizes that God is never the perpetrator of violence but exclusively the Savior from violence. So it provides us with a different reading of the story of the Flood. In demythologized form it would indicate "that the ganging-up of the many against the one does not fully succeed anymore, and the sacralization of the one fails completely, because God saves the one. As a consequence the many are doomed, because they destroy each other." ⁽²¹⁾

The strange fact that Gen cites collective human violence both as the reason for the Flood, and as the reason for "God's decision never to curse and destroy the earth" ⁽²²⁾ again makes Schwager conclude that on the one hand sin and violence have reached "a universal dimension" ⁽²³⁾ and "all of human society after the fall is given its formative structure by sinful violence" ⁽²⁴⁾. On the other hand it reveals a universal promise by God, a hope of salvation that is no more dependent on human or animal behavior. ⁽²⁵⁾ The question arises for Schwager, how sin could have gained such universal might. The genealogical model which the Christian doctrine of original sin suggests offers at least one viable answer to that, according to Schwager (it may be noted here that the literal translation of the German expression for original sin is "hereditary" or "inherited" sin).

The portrayal of primordial history in Gen is interspersed with genealogies, ⁽²⁶⁾ which few commentators make any sense of. Schwager draws on mimetic theory and on research by the French physician Alfred Tomatis⁽²⁷⁾ to conclude that the constitution of a human person essentially is a process of (ontogenetic and phylogenetic) communication. He therefore understands the biblical expression "beget" and the genealogies to indicate much more than a mere biological fact: Begetting is to be understood as "a communicative process that encompasses the whole human person, … an especially intense bringing forth of one's image and likeness (…) and of mimesis that involves the material body and at the same time transcends the merely physical and permeates the whole human person" ⁽²⁸⁾.

Schwager emphasizes that Gen sees human procreation as the bringing forth of one's image and thus directly links it with God's act of creation (Gen 1:26). ⁽²⁹⁾ That way the power to procreate has a two-fold function: It "is direct participation in the creative power of God and as such it belongs to the original goodness of creation (Gen 1,27f; 2,21-24; 5,1-3)" ⁽³⁰⁾. This power, however, receives a new function in the situation after the Fall: It provides "replacements for those who have become victims of violence and murder, which happens all the time (Gen 4:25f.)." ⁽³¹⁾ "So Gen sees the begetting and bearing of children as the great counter-force against the destructive power of sin and violence, … . Despite this eminently positive significance of procreation, sin intrudes this realm as well by disturbing the harmony between the sexes (Gen 3:7.16) and causing birth to be marred by pain (Gen 3:16)." ⁽³²⁾ Thus after the Fall "human persons 'born of woman' (cf. Job 25:4) are intensely interlinked with each other by begetting and birth, so that impurity is passed on by the very communication that constitutes the persons themselves, because it is an impaired communication" ⁽³³⁾. This means that the all-important role parents play for their children's relationship to God does not begin with birth, as is commonly held, but much earlier with begetting the child. Since each parent again is dependent on his or her parents, this line of communication with its flaws and inadequacies reaches across multiple generations. It is this fact that Gen wants to emphasize with its genealogies, according to Schwager.

The NT again shows us the deeper meaning of that human interdependence. It reveals that Jesus' mission was - and again is after the resurrection and the sending of the Sprit - the gathering of the people of God. This people of God is called to embody a new form of unity and communion with each other and with God. Humanity as a whole and God are believed to enter into a new kind of communion that respects each (human and divine) person, but is also defined by a closeness and unity that the NT can only express it by invoking the image of a body. The community of believers is the body of Christ. So human communion among each other and with God has remained the common thread of NT revelation, from the beginning of Jesus' ministry through his death and resurrection till the end of times.

From that Schwager concludes that this also was the aim of hominization in the very beginning. Human beings were created for that purpose: to be in communion with each other and their creator, while at the same time upholding full respect for the uniqueness and dignity of each and every person.

This brings us up to my final point: Schwager's imaginations for hominization and the fall.

3. Imaginations of Hominization and "the Fall"

One of the problems arising for theology when accepting evolution theory, is that theologians have to find a way of plausibly holding fast to Church teaching about the human condition before the fall in that new context. At least since St. Augustine, Christian tradition imagined humans before the fall as physically immortal, protected from illness and any kind of suffering, in full mental control of their lives with a mature intellect and a psychological freedom surpassing ours by far. Evolution theory postulates early humans as quite savage people, just having crossed the threshold from animal life to some kind of rationality that allowed them to be more ingenious than their animal cousins and to pass on their knowledge more effectively, but still being unfinished in their development, merely at the start of the long history that was to make them the rational creatures we are supposed to be today. They were subject to early death by predators, illness and their fellow humans, and one wonders, what "psychological freedom" might mean for those first humans.

Schwager takes on the hard task of reconciling evolutionary thinking and theological doctrine with one another by modifying the concurrent imagery that goes with either of them. I deem this to be a very important contribution to today's theology, because Schwager attempts nothing less than to re-formulate the doctrines of Christian faith in its Roman-Catholic tradition in such a way that they resonate with the modern "Weltbild" shaped by evolution thinking.

Schwager accepts the modern view that the first humans were not free from natural physical death, and - as we have seen - he shows that the Bible only claims they were free from violent death. He also agrees that the process of the constitution of humans was not fully completed with hominization, creation being an ongoing process, and thus the rationality the early humans had was quite undeveloped compared to ours. The first humans were much more guided by their affectivity, their emotions. However, this did not preclude them from having a relationship to God, according to Schwager. From interaction with today's mentally handicapped we know that human persons with little intellectual capability but with an intensive emotional life, can have a very strong relation to the divine. And, of course, Schwager agrees with mimetic theory that modern man's or woman's rationality is not as eminent as enlightenment thinking might have it.

But Schwager's modifications also concern the theory of evolution: To be acceptable to Christian theology it may not construe evolution as a blind process of mere mutation and selection, rather evolution must be seen as guided by a teleology, which shows itself in the vigor inherent in life: the drive of every living being to protect and spread life. And finally Schwager insists that the definition of what a human is cannot not come from empirical anthropology alone. Membership in the human family is not determined by the intellectual power of a creature, but rather by his or her having some kind of openness to the transcendent. If that transcendence has been established, we may and must consider these creatures human persons, however undeveloped their other capabilities might be.

Now for any theology of the Fall these early humans must have been able to sin, which implies that they must have had some kind of freedom. Indispensable for that is, according to Schwager: being able to be a principle of one's own further development (which fits very well into an evolutionary world view) and being able to make choices. For the first humans, however, the latter ability would not have primarily consisted in the power of rational deliberation and of choosing between clear and distinct alternatives, but in the capability of being faithful or unfaithful to an experience of being gifted. According to Schwager the first humans, who were endowed with great emotional intensity and yet little critical self-reflection and rationality, were called to respond to the gift-like experience of the closeness of God in the way proper to their stage of development, and at the same time urging on that development. ⁽³⁴⁾ Primordial sin then consisted in the failure to do so. The primordial scene of hominization that could reconcile Christian doctrine with an evolutionary "Weltbild" would look somewhat like the following:

Divine influence prompted a group of higher animals to transcend the limitations of their mental horizons and to become humans by opening them up to the experience of the closeness of a mysterious infinity. They felt this closeness very intensely, and yet only implicitly. With it came the call to deepen that experience step by step, so as to constitute human self-consciousness also explicitly. This call also summoned the first humans to embark on a path that would eventually lead them - through an unknown, shared future - to explicit cognition of God and communion with Him and among themselves. In absorbing that experience, however, the group shied away from its mysteriousness and the intensity of communication. Instead they clung to the impulses of their familiar animal past and turned the gift they had received into a means of self-assertion. Thus the new experience of the infinite led to a problematic self-constitution of human consciousness, because it included experiences of fear of the numinous and an increased tendency to violent conflicts. The call to communication and a common future was followed in a negative way: in the negative unity of ganging-up against a common victim. ⁽³⁵⁾

As you can see, Schwager construes the act of hominization with reference to evolution thinking and the mimetic theory, yet theologically he relies on the model of the scene at Jesus' baptism: a deep personal experience of the divine endows the recipient with a new grasp of his or her identity and with a new calling or mission. With that, however, comes the danger of misunderstanding and misusing this new kind of self-consciousness, a danger Jesus avoided but the first humans succumbed to.

Schwager even goes a step further in making the scene of hominization and the fall more vivid and proposes three alternative scenarios. He positions himself at the moment of hominization and looks from there backwards into evolution and forwards into salvation history, each time finding points of resonance for the scenario he considers. He emphasizes, however, that these considerations should not be misunderstood as historical reports. The goal again is to express the Catholic doctrine of the fall within the framework of today's science and scholarship, thereby transforming both realms of human operation.

I want to conclude my presentation with these three "variations on primordial sin" by R. Schwager:

Variant 1: The intense experience already mentioned occurred during the sexual intercourse of two animals. The offspring of that union was included in the movement of self-transcendence just initiated and thus a new group was constituted. A misapprehension of this experience could have happened in a way that the numinous fascination of sexuality led to its divinization. "This variation - retrospectively - fits very well with the fact that sexuality was already an important catalyst in the evolution of animal life and - prospectively - that in this scenario the unity of the flesh that God had intended from the beginning according to Jesus (cf. Mk. 10:6-9) and that was to become the symbol of the unity between Christ and the Church (cf. Eph 5:31f.) had already existed at the outset of humankind." ⁽³⁶⁾

Variant 2: The mentioned experience was made during intensive forms of common feeding. Gradually "animal feeding should have been transformed into an experience of being gifted and food should have been experienced as a living symbol of the power granting these gifts. That version is supported - retrospectively - by the fact that feeding was an important factor of evolution and - prospectively - that in this case the high cultural importance of the human meal and the sacrament of the Eucharist would have been prefigured." ⁽³⁷⁾

"Variant 3: While jointly hunting or engaging in a kind of 'War of the Chimpanzees' ⁽³⁸⁾ the unified group was struck by an awe-inspiring premonition in the face of the stricken prey or victim. This premonition could have gradually led to a change of behavior and to a sensitivity for the inviolability of the human person as the bearer of a mysterious presence. Actually a negative development commenced, and killing itself was more and more experienced as an awe-inspiring, fascinating (= sacred) act. This variation seems plausible - retrospectively - because of the role fighting has in animal behavior, and - prospectively - because of the all-importance of Christ's Cross for salvation."⁽³⁹⁾

Schwager admits that we are in no position to decide on one of the variants. Instead he deems it likely that a long-term process occurred in which all three elements played a role, in addition to the experience of overwhelming natural powers.

Works Cited or Conferred to

Alison, James: The joy of being wrong. Original sin through Easter eyes. Crossroad, New York, N. Y., 1997.

Girard, René: A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare. Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford, 1991.

Goodall, Jane: The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Patterns of Behavior. Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1986.

Schwager, Raymund: Biblische Texte als „Mischtexte". Das hermeneutisch-spirituelle Programm der „Entmischung". In: Katechetische Blätter 119 (1994), 698-703.

-:Erbsünde und Heilsdrama. Im Kontext von Evolution, Gentechnologie und Apokalyptik. (BMT 4). LIT, Münster - Thaur 1997.

-:Jesus in the Drama of Salvation. Toward a Biblical Doctrine of Redemption. (German: Jesus im Heilsdrama. Entwurf einer biblischen Erlösungslehre). Trans. J. G. Williams & P. Haddon. Crossroad, New York, N.Y., 1999.

-:Must There Be Scapegoats? Violence and Redemption in the Bible. (German: Brauchen wir einen Sündenbock?) Transl. by M. L. Assad. Crossroad, New York, N. Y., 2000.

Tomatis, Alfred: L'oreille et la vie. Itinéraire d'une recherche sur l'audition, la langue et la communication. Paris ²1990.

-:L'oreille et la voix. Dessins de P. Guillaume et V. Simon. Paris 1987.

-:Neuf mois au Paradis. Histoires de la vie prénatale. Avec la collaboration de L. Sellin. Paris 1989.

Anmerkungen:  

 1. Schwager, R.: Erbsünde und Heilsdrama. Im Kontext von Evolution, Gentechnologie und Apokalyptik (BMT 4). LIT, Münster - Thaur 1997. Henceforth abbreviated EHD. All translations, if not stated otherwise, are my own.

2. Cf. Alison, J.: The joy of being wrong. Original sin through Easter eyes. Crossroad, New York, N. Y. 1997.

3. Cf. Schwager, Raymund: Jesus in the Drama of Salvation. Toward a Biblical Doctrine of Redemption. Trans. J. G. Williams & P. Haddon. (German: Jesus im Heilsdrama. Entwurf einer biblischen Erlösungslehre). New York: Crossroad 1999.

4. Quoted according to the New Revised American Standard Version (1989).

5. EHD 27.

6. EHD 106.

7. Cf. Mat 4:4 - Deut 8:3; Mat 4:7 - Deut 6:16; Mat 4:10 - Deut 5:9; 6:13.

8. "God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God" (Gen 3:5).

9. EHD 27.

10. EHD 41.

11. EHD 106.

12. EHD 106.

13. EHD 105.

14. I am indebted to W. Palaver for pointing out to me that this observation has already been made by R. Girard in A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare. New York 1991, 324f.

15. EHD 25.

16. EHD 29.

17. Cf. Schwager, R.: Must There Be Scapegoats? Violence and Redemption in the Bible. (German: Brauchen wir einen Sündenbock?) Transl. by M. L. Assad. Crossroad, New York, N. Y., 2000, 190-200, esp. 199f.

18. EHD 107.

19. EHD 25.

20. Schwager, R.: Biblische Texte als „Mischtexte". Das hermeneutisch-spirituelle Programm der „Entmischung". In: Katechetische Blätter 119 (1994), 698-703.

21. EHD 36.

22. EHD 34. Cf. Gen 6, 11 / 8,21.

23. EHD 35.

24. EHD 36f.

25. Cf. EHD 34.

26. Cf. Gen 4:17-22; 5:1-32; 10:1-32; 11:10-32; EHD 47.

27. Cf. Tomatis, A.: L'oreille et la vie. Itinéraire d'une recherche sur l'audition, la langue et la communication. Paris ²1990. See also L'oreille et la voix. Dessins de P. Guillaume et V. Simon. Paris 1987. Neuf mois au Paradis. Histoires de la vie prénatale. Avec la collaboration de L. Sellin. Paris 1989.

28. EHD 50f.

29. Cf. EHD 47f.

30. EHD 49.

31. EHD 49.

32. EHD 49.

33. EHD 47.

34. Cf. EHD 65.

35. Cf. EHD 111.

36. EHD 114.

37. EHD 114.

38. Cf. Goodall, J.: The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Patterns of Behavior. Cambridge, Mass. 1986.

39. EHD 114f.