My work has often been presented as a discussion of archaic religion through comparative anthropology. Its goal is to shed light on the process of hominization: the fascinating passage from animality to humanity that occurred thousands of years ago.
In all of this, my hypothesis has concerned mimesis: Because humans imitate one another, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society. The mechanism by which they have done that is sacrifice, which reintroduces difference into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else.
What this means is that humanity results from sacrifice; we are the children of religion. What I call (after Freud) the “founding murder”—the immolation of a sacrificial victim who is both guilty of disorder and able to restore order—is constantly reenacted in the rituals at the origin of our institutions. Since the dawn of humanity, millions of innocent victims have been killed in this way to enable their fellow humans to live together or at least not to destroy one another.
This is the implacable logic of the sacred, which myths dissimulate less and less as humans become increasingly self-aware. The decisive point in this evolution is Christian revelation. Rituals had slowly educated humans; after Christianity, they had to do without. Christianity, in other words, demystifies religion.
And yet, demystification, which is good in the absolute, has proven bad in the relative, for we were not prepared to shoulder its consequences. We are not Christian enough.
The paradox can be put in a different way: Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure. This prescience is known as the apocalypse. Indeed, it is in the apocalyptic texts that the word of God is most forceful, repudiating mistakes that are entirely the fault of humans, who are less and less inclined to acknowledge the mechanisms of their violence. The longer we persist in our error, the stronger God’s voice will emerge from the devastation. This is why no one wants to read the apocalyptic texts that abound in the synoptic gospels and Pauline epistles. This is also why no one wants to recognize that these texts rise up before us because we have disregarded the Book of Revelation. Once in our history the truth about the identity of all humans was spoken, and no one wanted to hear it; instead we hang ever more frantically onto our false differences.
Two world wars, the invention of the atomic bomb, and all the rest of the modern horrors have not sufficed to convince humanity, and Christians above all, that the apocalyptic texts might concern the disaster that is underway. Violence has been unleashed across the whole world, and our paradox is this: By getting closer to Alpha, we are going toward Omega; by better understanding the origin, we can see every day a little better that the origin is coming closer. Our fetters were put in place by the founding murder and unshackled by the Passion—with the result of liberating planet-wide violence.
We cannot refasten the bindings because we now know that the scapegoats of sacrifice are innocent. Christ’s Passion unveiled the sacrificial origin of humanity once and for all. It dismantled the sacred and revealed its violence. And yet, the Passion freed violence at the same time that it freed holiness. The modern form of the sacred is thus not a return to some archaic form. It is a sacred that has been satanized by the awareness we have of it, and it indicates, through its excesses, the imminence of the Second Coming.
War, Heraclitus wrote, “is father of all and king of all.” That law of human relations was reformulated, a few years after Napoleon’s fall, in an office of the Berlin Military Academy. And the reformulation took the shape of a trend to extremes, the inability of politics to contain the reciprocal increase of violence. Its author, Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), left his book unfinished when he died, but it is perhaps the greatest text ever written on war: a treatise that the English, Germans, French, Italians, Russians, and Chinese have read and reread from the end of the nineteenth century until the present day.
Clausewitz’s On War claims to be a work on strategy. It discusses what was at the time the most recent example of the trend to extremes, which had occurred, as always, unbeknownst to those involved. Clausewitz spoke to us about his specialty as if it were not related to everything else that was going on around it, and the result has implications far beyond his discourse. He formulated and helped identify what might be called Prussianism in its most disturbing form, without considering the consequences of what he had identified.
Ours is the first society that knows it can completely destroy itself. Yet we lack the belief that could bear up under this knowledge. It is not theologians who set us on the track of the new rationality; that was done by a man who died in 1831 at the age of fifty-one. He was a military theorist whom France, England, and the Soviet Union detested, a feisty writer who left no one indifferent. His actual theses have no future. Yet there is a subcurrent running beneath them that needs to be read aloud, for it can reveal a hidden reality.
It would be hypocritical to see On War as only a technical book. What happens when we reach the extremes that Clausewitz glimpses before hiding them behind his strategic considerations? He does not tell us. This is the question we have to ask today. Clausewitz had a stunning intuition about history’s suddenly accelerated course, but he immediately disguised it and tried to give his book the tone of a technical, scholarly treatise. We therefore have to complete Clausewitz by taking up the route he interrupted and following it to the end. Completing the interpretation of On War is to say that its meaning is religious and that only a religious interpretation has a chance of reaching what is essential in it. Through Clausewitz’s text, the relevance of the apocalyptic texts becomes apparent with greater force.
We must not turn the author of On War into a scapegoat, as did, in their time, Stalin and one of Clausewitz’s most famous commentators, Liddell Hart. We shall also not be content with the timidity with which Raymond Aron tried to rehabilitate him. The reason the text is not yet fully understood is perhaps because it has been attacked and defended too often. It is as if we have not yet wanted to understand the central intuition that it seeks to hide.
This constant denial is interesting. Clausewitz was possessed, like all the great writers, by resentment. It was because he wanted to be more rational than the strategists who preceded him that he suddenly put his finger on an aspect of reality that is absolutely irrational. Then he retreated and tried to shut his eyes.
Clausewitz conceived relations among men as mimetic, in spite of his philosophical approach being that of Enlightenment rationalism. He provided all the means for showing that the world is tending more and more to extremes, and yet his imagination always thwarted and limited his intuitions. Clausewitz and his commentators are hampered by their rationalism. This is as good a proof as any that a different kind of rationality is needed to understand the reality of what he glimpsed.
Durch diese Wechselwirkung wieder das Streben nach dem Äußersten, he wrote in his first chapter: “War is an act of violence, which in its application knows no bounds; as one dictates the law to the other, there arises a sort of reciprocal action, which, in the conception, must lead to an extreme.” Without realizing it, Clausewitz discovered not only the apocalyptic formula but also that it is bound up with mimetic rivalry. Where can this truth be understood in a world that continues to close its eyes to the incalculable consequences of mimetic rivalry? Not only was Clausewitz right, in opposition to Hegel and all modern wisdom, but what he was right about has terrible implications for humanity. This warmonger alone saw certain things.
Christ allows us to face this reality without sinking into madness. The apocalypse does not announce the end of the world; it creates hope. If we suddenly see reality, we do not experience the absolute despair of an unthinking modernity but rediscover a world where things have meaning. Hope is possible only if we dare to think about the danger at hand, but this requires opposing both nihilists, for whom everything is only language, and pragmatic realists, who reject the idea that intelligence can attain truth: heads of state, bankers, and soldiers who claim to be saving us when in fact they are plunging us deeper into devastation each day.
By accepting to be crucified, Christ brought to light what had been “hidden since the foundation of the world”—the foundation itself, the unanimous murder that appeared in broad daylight for the first time on the Cross. In order to function, archaic religions need to hide their founding murder, which was being repeated continually in ritual sacrifices, thereby protecting human societies from their own violence. By revealing the founding murder, Christianity destroyed the ignorance and superstition that are indispensable to such religions. It thus made possible an advance in knowledge that was until then unimaginable.
Freed of sacrificial constraints, the human mind invented science, technology, and all the best and worst of culture. Our civilization is the most creative and powerful ever known, but also the most fragile and threatened because it no longer has the safety rails of archaic religion. Without sacrifice in the broad sense, it could destroy itself if it does not take care, which clearly it is not doing.
Was Paul a megalomaniac when he said in the First Letter to the Corinthians that “none of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory”? I do not think so. The rulers of the age, and all that Paul calls powers and principalities, were state structures based on the founding murder, which was effective because hidden. In the context, the leading power was the Roman Empire, which was essentially evil in the absolute but indispensable in the relative—and better than the total destruction about which the Christian revelation warns us. Once again, this does not mean that Christian revelation is bad. It is wholly good, but we are unable to come to terms with it.
A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt. Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one. Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution. This is the implacable law of the trend to extremes. The protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they reveal Jesus’ innocence and, little by little, that of all analogous victims. The process of education away from violent sacrifice thus got underway, but it moved very slowly, making advances that were almost always unconscious. It is only today that it has had increasingly remarkable results in terms of our comfort—and at the same time proved ever more dangerous for the future of life on Earth.
To make the revelation wholly good and not threatening at all, humans have only to adopt the behavior recommended by Christ: Abstain completely from retaliation and renounce the trend to extremes. Indeed, if the trend to extremes continues, it will lead straight to the extinction of all life on the planet. This is the possibility that Raymond Aron glimpsed when reading Clausewitz. He then wrote an impressive work to expel apocalyptic logic from his mind and persuade himself at all costs that the worst could be avoided, that deterrence would always triumph. This budding religious clairvoyance is superior to what most people are capable of, but insufficient. We have to take the interpretation of the text further. The interpretation has to be finished.
Since the beginning of the “novelistic conversion” in my 1961 study Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, all of my books have been more or less explicit apologies of Christianity. Christianity is a founding murder in reverse, which illuminates what has to remain hidden to produce ritual, sacrificial religions. Paul compared it to food for adults, in contrast with food for children, which is what archaic religions were. Nietzsche himself sometimes had intuitions of this kind regarding the Greeks’ “infantile” character.
To make the situation even more perverse, however, Christian revelation is the paradoxical victim of the knowledge that it provides. Absurdly, it is conflated with myth, which it clearly is not, and doubly misunderstood by both its enemies and partisans, who tend to confuse it with one of the archaic religions that it demystifies. Yet all demystification comes from Christianity. Even better: The only true religion is the one that demystifies archaic religions.
Christ came to take the victim’s place. He placed himself at the heart of the system to reveal its hidden workings. The second Adam, to use St. Paul’s expression, revealed to us how the first came to be. The Passion teaches us that humanity results from sacrifice, is born with religion. Only religion has been able to contain the conflicts that would have otherwise destroyed the first groups of humans. Mimetic theory does not seek to demonstrate that myth is null but to shed light on the fundamental discontinuity and continuity between the Passion and archaic religion. Christ’s divinity, which precedes the Crucifixion, introduces a radical rupture from the archaic, but Christ’s resurrection is in complete continuity with all forms of religion that preceded it. The way out of archaic religion comes at this price. A good theory about humanity must be based on a good theory about God.
People in the process of being educated, who are not yet fully human, can become so only by measuring themselves against the divine, and there comes a time when God can reveal himself fully to them. It is understandable that Christ frightened the apostles. He is also, however, the only model, the one that places man at just the right distance from the divine. Christ came to reveal that his kingdom was not of this world but that humans, once they have understood the mechanisms of their own violence, can have an accurate intuition of what is beyond it. We can all participate in the divinity of Christ so long as we renounce our own violence.
And yet, we now know, in part thanks to Clausewitz, that humans will not renounce it. The paradox is thus that we are starting to grasp the gospel message at the moment when the trend to extremes is becoming the unique law of history.
Christian revelation has confirmed all religions in its relation to the divine that is rejected by the modern world. It confirms what religions have glimpsed. In a way, it is because Christ accepted the mold of false resurrections that he is truly risen. The beneficiaries of archaic resurrections that reestablished peace and order were in a real relation to the divine. There was something Christian in all myths. By revealing the victims’ innocence, however, the Passion makes positive what was still negative in myths: We now know that victims are never guilty. Satan thus becomes the name of a sacred that is revealed and devalued through Christ’s intervention.
At present, the wise and the discerning (which I suppose now refers to academics) are furiously redoubling their attacks on Christianity and once again congratulating themselves on its forthcoming demise. These unfortunates do not see that their skepticism itself is a byproduct of Christian religion. While it is good to get rid of the sacrificial idiocies of the past in order to accelerate progress, eliminating obstacles to humanity’s forward march and facilitating the invention and production of what will make our lives more prosperous and comfortable (at least in the West), it is nonetheless true that sacrificial stupidity was also what prevented us from perfecting ways of killing one another.
Paradoxically, stupid sacrifice is what we are most in need of at present. Few Christians still talk about the apocalypse, and they usually have a completely mythological conception of it. They think that the violence of the end of time will come from God himself. They cannot do without a cruel God. Strangely, they do not see that the violence we ourselves are in the process of amassing and that is looming over our own heads is entirely sufficient to trigger the worst. They have no sense of humor.
Violence is a terrible adversary, since it always wins. Desiring war can thus become a spiritual attitude. We have to fight a violence that can no longer be controlled or mastered. More than ever, I am convinced that history has meaning, and that its meaning is terrifying.
In fact, the apocalyptic moment serves as a link between Clausewitz’s treatise and considerations on the destiny of Europe. If we take to its logical conclusion our analysis of a new global escalation of extremes, we have to consider the complete novelty of the situation since September 11, 2001. Terrorism has again raised the level of violence up a notch. It is one of the last metastases of the cancer that has torn the Western world apart. Terrorism is the vanguard of a general revenge against the West’s wealth. It is a very violent and unpredictable revival of conquest, which is all the more terrifying because it has encountered America along the way.
In this sense, everyone knows that the future of the idea of Europe, and thus also the Christian truth running through it, will be played out in South America, India, and China as well as in Europe. Europe has been playing a role analogous to Italy’s during the wars of the sixteenth century, except worse. It has been the battlefield of the entire world. Europe is a tired continent that no longer puts up much resistance to terrorism. This explains the stunning nature of the attacks, which are often carried out by people on the inside. Resistance is all the more complex because the terrorists are close to us, beside us. The actions are completely unpredictable. The very idea of sleeper cells corroborates everything we have said about the violent mechanisms by which cultures mediate themselves: the identity between people that can suddenly take a turn for the worst.
Atta, the leader of the September 11 group who piloted one of the four airplanes, was the son of a middle-class Egyptian family. It is staggering to think that, during the three last days before the attack, he spent his nights in bars with his accomplices. There is something mysterious and intriguing in this. Who asks about the souls of those men? Who were they and what were their motivations? What did Islam mean to them? What does it mean to kill oneself for that cause?
We are witnessing a new stage in the escalation to extremes. Terrorists have conveyed the message that they are ready to wait, that their notion of time is not ours. This is a clear sign of the return to the archaic, a return to the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, which is significant in itself. But who is paying attention to this significance? Who is taking its measure? Is that the job of the ministry of foreign affairs? We have to expect a lot of unexpected things in the future. We are going to witness things that will certainly be worse. Yet people will remain deaf.
On September 11, people were shaken, but they quickly calmed down. There was a flash of awareness, which lasted a few fractions of a second. People could feel that something was happening. Then a blanket of silence covered up the crack in our certainty of safety. Western rationalism operates like a myth: We always work harder to avoid seeing the catastrophe. We neither can nor want to see violence as it is. The only way we will be able to meet the terrorist challenge is by radically changing the way we think. Yet, the clearer it is what is happening, the stronger our refusal to acknowledge it. This historical configuration is so new that we do not know how to deal with it. It is precisely a modality of what Pascal saw: the war between violence and truth. Think about the inadequacy of our recent avant-gardes who preached the nonexistence of the real.
We have to think about time in such a way that the Battle of Poitiers and the Crusades are much closer to us than the French Revolution and the industrialization of the Second Empire in France. The points of view of Western countries are at most unimportant background features for Islamists. They think of the Western world as having to be Islamicized as quickly as possible. Analysts tend to say that this is the attitude of isolated minorities cut off from the reality in their countries. They may be so with respect to action, of course, but with respect to thought? Despite everything, does such thinking not contain something essentially Islamic? This is a question that we have to have the courage to ask, even though it is a given that terrorism is a brutal action that hijacks religious codes for its own purposes. It would not have taken such a hold on people’s minds if it did not bring up to date something that has always been present in Islam. To the great surprise of our secular republicans, religious thought is still very much alive in Islam. It cannot be denied that some of Muhammad’s theses are active in today’s world.
What we are witnessing with Islam, however, is nonetheless much more than a return of conquest; it is what has been rising ever since the French Revolution, after the communist period that acted as an intermediary. Indeed, Leninism had some of these features, but what it lacked was religion. Our new escalation to extremes is thus able to use all components: culture, fashion, political theory, theology, ideology, and religion. What drives history is not what seems essential in the eyes of Western rationalists.
If we had said in the 1980s that Islamism would play the role it plays today, people would have thought we were crazy. Yet the ideology promoted by Stalin already contained parareligious components that foreshadowed the increasingly radical contamination that has occurred over time. We therefore have to radically change the way we think and try to understand the situation without any presuppositions and using all the resources available from the study of Islam.
The work to be done is immense. Personally, I have the impression that this religion has used the Bible as a support to rebuild an archaic religion that is more powerful than all the others. It threatens to become an apocalyptic tool, the new face of the escalation to extremes. Even though there are no longer any archaic religions, it is as if a new one had arisen built on the back of the Bible, a slightly transformed Bible. It would be an archaic religion strengthened by aspects of the Bible and Christianity. Archaic religion collapsed in the face of Judeo-Christian revelation, but Islam resists. While Christianity eliminates sacrifice wherever it gains a foothold, Islam seems in many respects to situate itself prior to that rejection.
Of course, there is resentment in its attitude to Judeo-Christianity and the West, but it is also a new religion. Historians of religion, and even anthropologists, have to show how and why it emerged. Indeed, some aspects of this religion contain a relation to violence that we do not understand and that is all the more worrying for that reason. For us, it makes no sense to be ready to pay with one’s life for the pleasure of seeing the other die. We do not know whether such phenomena belong to a special psychology or not.
We are thus facing complete failure; we cannot talk about it, and we cannot document the situation because terrorism is something new that exploits Islamic codes but does not at all belong to classical Islamic theory. Today’s terrorism is new, even from an Islamic point of view. It is a modern effort to counter the most powerful and refined tool of the Western world: technology. It counters technology in a way that we do not understand and that classical Islam may not understand either.
Clausewitz is easier to integrate into a historical development. He gives us the intellectual tools to understand the violent escalation. But where do we find such ideas in Islam? Modern resentment never leads all the way to suicide. Thus, we do not have the analogical structures that could help us understand. I am not saying that they are not possible, that they will not appear, but I admit my inability to grasp them. This is why our explanations often belong to the province of fraudulent propaganda against Muslims.
We do not experience this reality; we have no intimate, spiritual, phenomenological contact with it. Terrorism is a superior form of violence, and it asserts that it will win. There is no indication, however, that the work that remains to be done to free the Qur’an from its caricatures will have any influence on terrorism itself, which is both linked to Islam and different from it. We can thus put forward the tentative hypothesis that the escalation to extremes now uses Islam as it once used Napoleonism and Pangermanism. Terrorism is fearsome in that it knows how to use the most deadly technology outside of any military institution. Clausewitzian war is an analogy that can make only imperfect sense of terrorism, but it certainly does foreshadow it.
In my 1972 book Violence and the Sacred, I borrowed the idea from the Qur’an that the ram that saved Isaac from being sacrificed was the same one that was sent to Abel so that he would not have to kill his brother: proof that in the Qur’an sacrifice is also interpreted as a means of combating violence. From this, we can draw the conclusion that the Qur’an contains understanding of things that secular mentality cannot fathom: that sacrifice prevents vengeance, for example. Yet, this topic has disappeared from Islam, just as it has disappeared in Western thought. The paradox that we thus have to deal with is that Islam is closer to us today than to the world of Homer. Clausewitz allowed us to glimpse this, through what we have called his warlike religion, in which we have seen the emergence of something both very new and very primitive. Islamism, likewise, is a kind of event internal to the development of technology. We have to be able to think about both Islamism and the escalation to extremes at the same time; we need to understand the complex relations between these two realities.
The unity of Christianity in the Middle Ages resulted in the Crusades, which were permitted by the papacy. And yet, the Crusades are not as important as Islam thinks. The Crusades were an archaic regression without consequences for the essence of Christianity. Christ died everywhere and for everyone. Seeing Jews and Christians as falsifiers is more irremediable. It allows Muslims to eliminate all serious discussion, all comparison among the three religions. It amounts to not wanting to see what is at stake in the prophetic tradition. Why has Christian revelation been subject to the most hostile and ferocious possible criticism for centuries, but not Islam? There is an abdication of reason here. In some respects, it resembles the aporia of pacifism, which can be a strong encouragement for aggression. The Qur’an would thus benefit from being studied in the same way that Jewish and Christian texts have been studied. I think that a comparative approach would reveal that it contains no real awareness of collective murder.
By contrast, there is a Christian awareness of such murder. The two greatest conversions, those of Peter and Paul, are analogous: They are one with the awareness of having participated in a collective murder. Paul was there when Stephen was stoned to death. His departure for Damascus immediately followed that murder, which must have affected him terribly. Christians understand that the Passion has rendered collective murder inoperative. This is why, far from reducing violence, the Passion aggravates it.
Islamism seems to have understood this very quickly, but in the sense of jihad. There are forms of acceleration in history that are self-perpetuating. We have the impression that today’s terrorism is somehow the heir of totalitarianism, that terrorism and totalitarianism contain similar forms of thought and ingrained habits. One of the possible threads of this continuity is the construction of a Napoleonic model by a Prussian general.
The model was later taken up by Lenin and Mao Zedong (referenced by al-Qaeda). Clausewitz’s brilliance lies in his having unknowingly anticipated a law that has become worldwide. The Cold War is over, and now we are in a hot war, given the hundreds, and tomorrow perhaps the thousands, of victims every day in the Middle East.
The trend toward the apocalypse is humanity’s greatest feat. The more probable this achievement becomes, the less we talk about it. I have come to a crucial point: that of a profession of faith, more than a strategic treatise, unless both are mysteriously equivalent, in the essential war that truth wages against violence. I have always been utterly convinced that violence belongs to a form of corrupted sacred, intensified by Christ’s action when he placed himself at the heart of the sacrificial system. Satan is the other name of the escalation to extremes. The Passion has radically altered the archaic world. Satanic violence has long reacted against this holiness, which is an essential transformation of ancient religion.
It is thus that God revealed himself in his Son, that religion was confirmed once and for all, thereby changing the course of human history. Inversely, the escalation to extremes reveals the power of this divine intervention. Divinity has appeared and it is more reliable than all the earlier theophanies, but no one wants to see it.
Humanity is more than ever the author of its own fall because it has become able to destroy its world. With respect to Christianity, this is not just an ordinary moral condemnation but an unavoidable anthropological observation. Therefore we have to awaken our sleeping consciences. To seek to comfort is always to contribute to the worst.
René Girard is a French-born literary critic, anthropologist, and theologian. Elected to the Académie française in 2005, he is the author of such books as Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Violence and the Sacred, and To Double Business Bound. This essay is adapted from Achever Clausewitz, forthcoming in Mary Baker’s English translation as Battling to the End: Politics, War, and Apocalypse from Michigan State University Press.
Comments:
Is it fair to say that in Girard's view the job of Christians is to resist the Apocalypse? The essay argues that the Apocalypse is something wrought by man onto himself and not an event fashioned by God.
But we can't go back to sacrifice because we can't be pagans anymore after the cross. What's needed is the "stupid sacrifice" of Jesus, imitated by Christians. So while the world mimics violence, the Church imitates peace.
Violence as used by extremist Muslims needs careful analysis especially in the era of postmodern polarization that we live in. Girard's points there with regard to history of wars, rationalism, apocalyptic literature and violence must be further reviewed and analysed before it can be judge. This is definitely a very complex piece of thought.
I appreciate Susan Carr's comments, above, since she reports how an intelligent person responds upon first encountering Girard. His work doesn't fit into the usual paradigms.
I think a good way to get a handle on his work is to read and re-read the kind of example that contrasts pagan and Judeo-Christian stories. An especially good one is Girard's contrast of Oedipus and Joseph. This is in "I See Satan Fall Like Lightning," and maybe in some other works also. (Girard likes to keep making the same points, and obviously he needs to keep making the same points until his arguments and insights sink into our thick skulls a little more.)
Jody's comment is a good one, and there's not much way to avoid being pessimistic while we are on this side of the eschaton. But on a hopeful note, I think Girard presents the possibility of the Christian solution, if human beings can experience conversion towards or at least understanding of what God in Christ has done in history. But it's hard to be optimistic if indeed the scapegoat mechanism functions as an anthropological inevitability.
Many thanks to First Things for continuing to keep Girard before a somewhat general public. Maybe this kind of spark can get a fire of interest going.
As I understand Girard, the Christian solution is radical: members of a culture must submit to intellectual and spiritual conversion, and thereby cognitively grasp the degree to which life is squandered on a both a collective and personal level by escalating violence, envy, resentment, etc.; and one gains the insight that whatever sense of control thought he had over his enemies by one-upping him in life, love, work, war, etc. was an illusion. It is slavery, not freedom.
True freedom is achieved by leaving the field. By rejecting the game itself.
(I love that the word resentment, a favorite of Girard, stemming from the French ressentiment, has a dual meaning, one: "a sense of being personally aggrieved or victimized", the other: "coming to understand the other person's point of view").
So I see Girard as wanting to impress on us the self-made nature of the apocalypse that is indeed underway. He seems to be saying humanity is stuck in a violent game it does not understand (original sin, in my reading), and lacks the ability to either win the game or withdraw from it. True freedom is to sever the cords that bind us to our enemies, cords that enslave us via mimetic escalation, and to bind ourselves solely to the Cross. This abandoning the field has the paradoxical effect of freeing us once and for all to choose the objects of our desire in genuine truth and charity, not hiding behind the lowly force of envy.
That's my take after one reading, but I absolutely loved this piece. I hope to see more from Professor Girard in the future here on First Things.
Girard's logic in explaining this coming apocalypse presents some statements that gave me a comprehension problem. His concept of "humanity" was not clearly enough. It seems to mean human society. The society is disorderly because it is composed of individuals with mutual differences. Humans attempt to bring about order by imitating one another's violent activity. The conflict between these differences leads to violence and warfare. In the present world, that violence eventually will become the apocalypse predicted in the Bible. Violence begets violence, and war begets war. Clausewitz apparently said these things. (However, I add that the Old Testament Jewish scriptures say that national unity was to be achieved by warfare waged under the direction of Yahweh. So where does the current conflict over Israel fit into this apocalyptic discussion?).
Human sacrifice by suicide bombers are examples of the sacrifices that "archaic religions" perform or performed. They illustrate the argument that such religions need human sacrifice of innocent idealistic believers to unite the religious community and give it victory over its enemies. (The ancient Jews sacrificed innocent animals rather than humans; a lesson from Abraham-Isaac story). Jesus was the ultimate example of human sacrifice. That sacrifice gives hope to the world of his followers and to the whole world if/when converted to Christianity. If the world does not accept the sacrifice of Christ to end war and violence, it is doomed to suffer the apocalypse. For the secular world, war victims or heroes provide a similar sacrificial function for the world. For the Islamic world, conversion to Islam would likewise save the world, and opposition to Islam will also lead to an apocalypse; although the Koran is not so dramatic in its prophesies. (And before applying all of this to current world problems, remember that the Revelation was written in response to the problem of the Roman Empire and not Islam.)
The Cold War is not over. It has just taken on a new form with different participants. Islam's vision of utopia is like what communism was. I suggest that communism is creeping into the world community in the trend (progress?) toward more socialism using government power to try to satisfy popular demand and be the savior of the world. Islam will eventually become sufficiently compatible with Western culture for its terrorist extremism to be accepted (Incidentally, terrorism is just psychological warfare in another form.)
In the modern world where Christianity resides, technology has replaced religion to provide the means for dealing with these differences and overcoming them. Terrorism is the means by which Islam deals with this problem. The continued use of terrorism and technological weapons will lead to disaster.
Will this situation lead to apocalypse? I doubt it, but only God knows. The war will probably go away after much sacrifice by the parties involved; .eventually to be replaced by another. Hopefully Christians and Muslims and Jews will "imitate one another" and set their differences aside sufficiently to live together in peace. Islam is not an archaic religion, but it does have something to say about conflict and its resolution. Christians can trust in Christ's resurrection for the solution to the problem of sin and its consequences.
--a bafflement that required real study of his many works and reliable interpreters (e.g. Gil Bailie;
--moments of deep devotion triggered amidst the Francaise circle-speak;
--a real appreciation of his key model of
(a)human imitation, leading to
(b) envy and fruitless competition, leading to
(c) social destabilization, leading to
(d) desperate demand for the catharsis of the blood of a scapegoat, leading to
(e) sentimental deification of the saving transaction of the scapegoat, leading to
(f) rinse and repeat.
For this to work, it must be unconscious, autonomic. Christ showed the mechanics of the game, by being a scapegoat whose victimization could not be justified. So the game is up on the mechanical revivication of societies, pursuant to this recent article, unless we become *real* Christians, eschewing retaliation on every level (judgment, lingering anger, social machinations), and "extremes" [excess?]. Even then it may be too late, the metastasis of Islamic terrorism is particularly difficult for the human race.
I have noticed that contemporary education tends to dismiss that which is not immediately comprehensible. Don't fall into this trap with Girard. Read what you can find. And he's not for everyone. But it's a wonderful sign that First Things is now fostering discourse at this level.
In his theory of mimetic rivalry, Girard discovered the authenticity of the Judaic-Christian tradition which dominated the West for many centuries to the early modern age. Yet Christians still act violently (e.g. invading Iraq). By invading the "other" we are still not fully Christians - the act of true self-giving is missing not only at the cultural level but also at the individual level. And Islam is in fact the power that Satan is using today to abolish the Church. It is probably his last attempt - He is called the divider and destroyer and he lives victorious in our civilizations, bringing us closer every day to destroy each other. This is the epitome of self-annihilation - Hell. Contrary to the martyrs who died for their faith, Muslim fundamentalists die to bring death to "the other" (Christians and Jews).
Islam is spreading everywhere in Europe, a dying continent. Apocalypse was meant for hope and support to Christians when John wrote it, but it is also meant for the last days. However, as Christians we cannot fail to hope, for the saviour is with us till the end of the world. John Henry Newman in the 19th century brought hope and faith - His words of the development of doctrine and faith are happening. There is a development in our undestanding of everything Christian, not only because the Second Vatican Council affirmed it in the 20th century, but precisely because it is guided by the God of Love.
Girard says we must renounce violence. It seems to me that we cannot do this without first denouncing, or more perhaps more precisely ridding ourselves of the desires that drive mimetic rivalry. If we could recognize that true freedom is "freedom from" desire, temptation, covetousness, and not "freedom to" do whatever we wish (license), then perhaps we could make some small steps in freeing ourselves from rivalry.
An individual conversion of this sort is one thing. Asking a culture to do this, though in the "real" world we live in does indeed seem apocolyptic. If Christians were to renounce rivalry and violence, would Christians then simply be led to the slaughter? Is that the Truth we are seeking? Do I need a more developed sense of humor? Ugh!
Thanks again to First Things and Prof. Girard!
René Girard’s latest work on “War and Apocalypse” (First Things, August/September) stirred much-needed debate in the intellectual realm. The Stanford professor (whose theory of mimetic rivalry was a pioneer in contemporary anthropological and psychological research) has come back.
But before we discuss his latest article, we need to explore his thought. In his theory of mimetic rivalry, Girard shows how we are born with a tendency for selfishness. Mimetic rivalry, that is imitative rivalry, exists in human natural relationships.
According to him, I desire what "the other" has, not only because it is good, but more importantly because he also desires it. Thus, in effect, by desiring what he has, I want to fulfill myself by “raping” and destroying him. I am my god, and will expand my family, my tribe, my nation, my religion, and my culture only because they are mine! When people fight because of violence, it becomes contagious, and society descends into chaos and disorder. The only Satanic remedy to restore order found in the early cultures was the scapegoat. In pagan cultures, men would collaborate and kill a person they accuse of not following them. The act of killing unites them again and order is restored. This is the ritual of sacrifice in archaic religions. Following the killing act of the “innocent” person, the band starts feeling guilty as they see the victim not moving anymore. They then attempt to reintroduce him in their memory by making him divine, and celebrating his feast with dance and festivities. This remembrance accomplishes again what Satan wants: a lie. Order is re-established based on a lie (killing an innocent person), and a person is now divine based on another lie.
This powerful chain was only broken by the death of Christ. This is the Satanic power that Christ reversed by his death, not because he was innocent but because being innocent he did not retaliate. On the cross he forgave his accusers. In his research, Girard found that the story of killing an innocent person violently goes back to the earliest human people. Archaic religious texts and mythology are based on the same theme. The exception is the Bible. Contrary to the mythic stories of other religions, in the Genesis story of Cain killing his brother Abel, the author does not condemn the victim but the killer. The victim is also justified in many other Biblical events such as the story of Joseph who resisted Egypt’s queen’s invitation to intercourse and ended up being imprisoned for his innocence. Joseph was released and eventually became the prime minister of Egypt. As the people of God become more responsive to the Spirit of God, God reveals himself more fully in terms of relationships to His people (e.g. the victim husband Hosea to his people). The full self-revelation of God becomes actualized in Jesus Christ, His Only Son. Only in Christ, the truth is fully revealed and Satan’s lie is revealed. Girard became Catholic when he discovered the truth. The only way out of the vicious circle of violence is to not retaliate which means becoming like Christ. It is because Christ died voluntarily that he lived again in glory (the Resurrection). It is true that since Christianity came into the world, a great development of morality has taken place moving entire cultures from the more violent to the less violent and accomplishing great deeds for the dignity of humanity. However, in Girard’s thought, the Spirit of Christ is working in cultures and time. The development of moral values has taken time. For example, although it was always pronounced by the Church, only in the 18th century has slavery started to be recognized and eliminated in Christian societies and the rest of the world. Girard says that Christians are not fully Christian until they have renounced violence in all its forms, not only in their culture but also in their individual hearts.
Now we can talk about Apocalypse. Since 9/11, Girard says, an abhorrent phenomenon has appeared. Fundamentalist Muslims use new technology to force America and the free world into embracing Islam. Islam is spreading everywhere in Europe, a dying continent. The religion that initially grew by the sword in the 7th century is growing again through violence. Since primitive culture and religion grew by violence, there is a renewed concern that humanity will succumb to violence again. What makes it worse is the experience of the 20th & 21st centuries – two World Wars, followed by a Cold War, followed by more struggles and wars that took place recently in Islamic countries. In my view 9/11 is not the beginning of Islamic fundamentalism. Since the mid 1970s, there has been a violent revival of Islamic fundamentalism. This includes Iran, Palestine/Israel, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. But we cannot blame Muslims alone for the disasters of the world. In spite of a development in moral values because of the Christian influence all over the Western world, we are still self-destructive because, as humans, we have the power to think violently and act violently. In spite of the Spirit of Christ, Christians were killing each other in Northern Ireland until a few years ago. Who invaded Iraq in 2003 but Christians? Who was following his own self-interest but a Christian President of America? That is why we are not yet Christians in the full sense. By invading the "other" we are still not fully Christians - the act of true self-giving is missing not only at the cultural level but also at the individual level. There are probably more people of good will in other religions than those self-proclaimed evangelizers in North America. Satan is still going around like a lion seeking who he can swallow as St. Paul said. Satan is called the divider and destroyer and he lives victorious in our civilizations, bringing us closer every day to destroy each other. This is the epitome of self-annihilation - Hell. Another phenomenon is intriguing today. Contrary to the martyrs who died for their faith, Muslim fundamentalists die to bring death to "the other" (Christians and Jews).
Apocalypse was meant for hope and support to Christians when John wrote it at the end of the first century, but it is also meant for the last days. However, as Christians we cannot fail to hope, for the saviour is with us till the end of the world. John Henry Newman in the 19th century brought hope and faith - His words of the development of doctrine and faith. There is a development in our understanding of everything Christian, not only because the Second Vatican Council affirmed it in the 20th century, but precisely because it is guided by the God of Love.
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I especially appreciate Mr. Farahat's 7/29 comment.
I didn't understand this article one bit when I read it this week.
Thanks to these comments though, I'm looking forward to reading it again with at least a little understanding.
If I understand Girard correctly, since the demystification of other religions by the true religion, Christianity, we are faced with a double edged sword. As we are more aware of the innocence of Jesus revealed in his Crucifixion, we move further from violent ritual sacrifice. The farther from this we move, the more dangerous it is for the future of life on earth because without sacrificial constraints we “invented science, technology, and all the best and worst of culture.” Because we were not prepared to shoulder the consequences of demystification, the burden of Christianity, we continue to tend to extremes and thus all life on the planet is in peril. “We are not Christian enough.”
What types of mimeses are possible? Is it only a mimesis of our nemesis the devil who lies and murders, or is it possible to have a mimesis of our Genesis? I contend that if our Christianity tends to extremes we lose our awareness of the truth of Christ. If we tend toward a gnostic extreme, all matter is evil. We don't look for a resurrection of the body, we seek to destroy the body and free the spirit. If we were spirits trapped in material bodies, then our fall from grace would have been the same as Satan falling like lightning from the sky. However, we were created “very good” and we were fashioned from “mater” earth according to Genesis.
If we tend toward a pelagian extreme, we are capable of saving ourselves through imitating virtuous behavior and we have no need of a savior or divine grace. Both gnosticism and pelagianism implicitly deny the Incarnation. The former denies that the Incarnation ever took place, the latter calls into question its very purpose.
If we tend toward extreme Calvinism or Jansenism and insist on man's complete wretchedness and depravity, then the inherent goodness of human nature though wounded and deprived of the fullness of God's goodness is denied. It is much easier to kill completely depraved people: whether they be the criminal, the infirm, the old, or the unborn. We have become ignorant again and have reinvented a post modern version of archaic religion that has through technology the capability of destroying all life on earth.
“Christ's divinity, which precedes the Crucifixion, introduces a radical rupture from the archaic...”
Jesus is the firstborn of all creation through whom all things are created. Before Adam He is. Adam's humanity, which precedes the fall and the “founding murder” of Abel, introduces a radical rupture from the chaotic formless void that was hovered over by the Spirit whose breath carried the Word of the Father, “Let there be Light.” Adam and Eve, created in the image and likeness of God, originally offered God a sacrifice of their obedience which is foundational to a sacrifice of thanksgiving and praise. Adam's ecstatic cry of joy that at last there was “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” (I contend) has praise and thanksgiving to God contained within it. Although Eve tried to debate a creature more cunning and powerful than herself, she did reiterate (albeit imperfectly)God's command to avoid the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The original innocence, original justice, and original unity were all realities in human beings before the original sin. “Christ came to take the victim's place. The second Adam...revealed to us how the first came to be. The Passion teaches us that humanity results from sacrifice, is born with religion.”
In a collection of homilies given by the then Joseph Cardinal Ratizinger on Genesis, he explores the cosmology of the Babylonians wherein creation results from a battle between the god Marduk and the dragon Tiamat. Creation and human beings sprang from the blood of the ancient dragon. From this myth we are given to understand that human nature is primarily draconian. This is in sharp contrast to the first creation account of Genesis where God is completely other than his creation, he creates ex nihilo, human beings are seen as the very good pinnacle of creation, and are created in the image and likeness of God.
The author of Hebrews reminds us that in the past God had spoken in varied and fragmented ways. The Holy Spirit, who blows where he wills, planted seeds of truth among people who had no direct revelation like the Hebrews had. In the book of Romans, Paul reminds us that through creation God is revealed plainly. All human beings have an innate, remnant knowledge of the good along side the evil. Those who ultimately choose mimesis of our nemesis are without excuse, even without the specific Revelation of the God of Abraham or of Jesus Christ. All are save in grace through the Sacrifice of Christ on Calvary and his Resurrection. In a mysterious and wonderful way God will offer salvation in the heart of every person.
Girard says that in the Passion the myths of archaic religions are revealed as being satanic. God's goodness and man's inherent goodness are also revealed. The goodness and truths in other cultures is brought out even more by the Revelation of Christ and fulfilled in him. It is through the Sacrifice of Christ on Calvary and his Resurrection that all are saved in grace.
Though Jesus said that wars “must happen” before the end of all things, human beings are not forced to choose to imitate evil and bring wars about. The Spirit of God, who in His own time and ways makes plainly known to every person the invitation to holiness and gives the accompanying grace to do it, still hovers “with bright wings” over creation. Rebirth began with the Resurrection and all creation will continue to suffer birth pangs until the end.
Mother Theresa is credited with saying that the fruit of abortion is nuclear holocaust. If we with sincere heart, seek to be anamnetic of our true Genesis, instead of mimetic of our true nemesis, the number of abortions and wars can be limited. We do not have to freely cooperate with evil. We can and must resist with hope in the promise that in the end there will be no more war and death and that God will wipe away every tear.
"The work to be done is immense. Personally, I have the impression that this religion has used the Bible as a support to rebuild an archaic religion that is more powerful than all the others. It threatens to become an apocalyptic tool, the new face of the escalation to extremes".
The greatest issue with Islam is that in Islam faith does not purify reason and reason does not purify faith (if I may be so bold as to use the Holy Father's language from his latest encylical) By contrast. it appears that in Islam, Faith and Reason are in fact polarised. Thus, a muslim will say that whereas the messenger, unlike Jesus, did not perform miracles, his miracle was the recitation of the sacred Koran, which, for muslims, is the most perfect book ever. Now, much work has been done in this area by european scholars showing that the Koran has grammatical errors, 20% of it makes no sense and it has been the victim of bad editing with interweaving of unrelated texts. In short,like any anicent texts it requires huge amount of intepretation, which undermines the claim of the Koran to be "clear". But, of course,muslims generally will have none of this as their text is perfect. I think Girard is spot on about Islam's apocalyptic potential but in my view its coherence it seems to depend on the believer keeping faith and reason apart. Thus, a muslim can live with all the so called abrogations in the Koran i.e. permission to drink alcohol which was then revoked, the call to live at peace with people of the book, then changed in a later sura to a requirement to make war on the infidel, the change in marriage laws to allow the messenger to marry his son's wife. To keep the whole thing together, it seems one has to suspend the use of reason.
While I find reading Girard intellectually invigorating, as always, I do have to ask about crude facts. Was primitive man not in fact far more violent than we are today? Did not 9/11 take a toll that barely exceeded the number of innocent victims Uncle Joe Stalin used to sacrifice every day before lunch? What "mimetic hostility" is supposed to doom us, right now? Iran may be led by madmen, and they may want to nuke Tel Aviv, but a few decades ago, every city on the planet lay under a similar doom.
It's also unclear to me what Dr. Girard thinks we ought to do about Muslim terrorists.
It seems to me the more plausible danger right now is that we go out with the whimper of a universal nanny state, not with a bang. In ten years, when China exceeds the US in GDP, we'll probably forget about the "threat of radical Islam;" whatever happens then, it will almost certainly not fit the present template of "the West vs. Islamic Radicalism."
But maybe I need to read the article again, listen to the concepts and forget about specifics . . .
This comment is intended only for readers who are following the various threads of Girard's argument and the commentaries herein. I have a brief response to Mr. Bottum, a man named Sean, and then my own small attempt to help FT readers "read Girard" (this last is in the section entitled "On Reading Girard" below.
My Comment
I have been working with Girard's ideas for 15 years and continually find its relevance and capacity to "unveil" hidden aspects of contemporary sociological phenomena striking and rewarding. At times the "girardian" experience is monolithic in its hermeneutic simplicity, but usually (if used correctly) it is profoundly relevant.
Mr. Bottum's comment
Mr. Bottum's first response to the article hits the nail on the head in suggesting that the space between Girard's reading of revelation and the eschaton offers no significant "plan" for the time between: now, in the "end times." However, when he argues (accurately, I think) that "One of the difficulties of Girard's wide-ranging vision of mimetic violence is that it has no strong political theory for the era in which we have had to live for nearly two thousand years—no certain application in the mid-time between the biblical revelation and the coming of the kingdom," I wonder if this is not the same for Christ's kingdom of God. Did Jesus not explain that His Kingdom is not of this world? To be less tongue-in-cheek here: Is not this "one of the difficulties" of Christianity itself -- that is offers no "strong political theory for the era in which we have had to live"?
Fortunately, First Things is not SOLELY a periodical dedicated to the political. Girard's primary concern is, strictly speaking, religious, and, thus, Mr. Bottum is fair, I think, to include the Girardian essays even if they are not completely helpful in the political realm.
Sean's Comment
Another zinger of a comment comes from Sean of 8/7 who claims, quite fairly, that "this wasn't Girard's best writing." Indeed, the selection is a preempted translation of "Achever Clausevitz" (soon to be in translation). We would probably be best to wait for the whole argument in full to see where we stand on his overall presentation. Nevertheless, Girard has often had the tendency to sway among multiple ides in his writings. Though this may have hindered the advancement of his ideas, it should not be held against the ideas themselves. If the idea works, let us follow it where it goes and make the explanation clearer ourselves.
On Reading Girard: Anthropology according to the Fathers
Here, then, is a very brief attempt to shed some light on how Girard reads anthropology. I argue that his central approach is usually a synthetic reading of various texts in modern thought with the aim of showing how they ultimately point to Christ. He takes, for example, the basic institutions of archaic religion and compartmentalizes them into myth, ritual and prohibition (following the great religious thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) so that they can function in his work as "types" of the "one who was to come," Christ. As the Fathers read the Old Testament in light of the New, Girard reads archaic religion in light of the Gospel depiction of Christ. This anthro-typology allows Girard to see any sacrificial system as pointing to its fulfillment in the Cross, as the Gospels repeat and unveil the very sacrifice that they signaled. Of course, the difference here is that anthropology outside of the biblical text is not guaranteed to have the "written hand of God" behind it. Thus, the Girardian method is not completely the same as patristic exegesis. Nevertheless, once the leap of faith into mimesis as the foundational movement of desire, rivalry and scapegoating is made, the whole field of the humans sciences opens up to a kind of "figurative prooftext" of the centrality of Christ in human thought and culture. This leap of faith is actually possible, I think, starting from the biblical texts and church tradition themselves (but to show that requires a much lengthier discussion).
In the Clausewitz text, Girard is simply trying to show that contemporary war-phenomena reflect mimetic violence that point to the revelation of Christ. Analyzing modern mimesis is a way to see the centrality of Christ, for it allows us to see the anthropological dimension of Christian apocalypse in its most clear form. That is his point. If nothing else, this becomes an "apology" for the apocalyptic biblical texts that (and Girard is very right here) are usually brushed aside by many Christian as flat-out embarassing. To be sure, this method of weaving in and out of modern texts and culture to set them up at reflections or antitypes of Christ via the lens of mimetic desire, rivalry and scapeagoting is "reductionist." But this is how Christians MUST think at a certain point if they are to really hold that Christ alone is the way, the truth, and the life. Because Christians hold that Christ is the alpha and omega, they must, in a sense, be fundamentally reductionist.
Girard’s theory, coming from his anthropologer’s perspective, focuses on the Christian revelation that the sacrificial scapegoat is in fact innocent, and the sacrificers therefore guilty. RG postulates the impact of such revelation on our individual progress (or lack of progress) towards the abandonment of various forms of human sacrifice. In other words, his reading of Christianity is as a moral standard demanding that we all forego such sacrificing of victims.
(As far as I can see, the New Testament itself offers “no strong political theory” based on this revelation either.)
If a political theory is to be constructed consistent with this revelation, it must base itself on our individual and collective obligation to take the side of the victim, to stand with the scapegoat in resistance to the sacrificers. Our obligation is not merely to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God, but also…to do justly.
It does appear that Girard has not directly addressed this yet. But this article (his first discussion of political jihad that I have seen) is a start. And it is none too soon.
The worst scapegoating episode of all human history took place in the lifetime of many living today. Only sixty-four years ago, hate and ideology combined with technology to “sacrifice” six million Jews. The Nazi “sacrificers” did indeed believe that the elimination of the Jews would solve the problems of their society. And they came so close to total success that Europe is now one of the most “Jew-free” of continents.
But today, sixty-four years later, Europe and the rest of the world (now, sadly, including our own country) are watching with only slight interest the preparations being made for the next round of the Holocaust. Iran, the world’s oldest “Islamic Republic” and arguably the only truly Islamist-jihadist power, is developing the modern weaponry that will permit them to take care of the "problem" of Jews in the Middle East. And thanks to the success of the “Zionist entity”, six million Jews are gathered together in an area the size of New Jersey, within mid-range flying distance of Iranian missiles.
It is clear that the Muslim world, at least throughout its Arab and Iranian spheres, regards Israel as the source of all their problems. Israeli democracy shames their primitive despotisms. Israeli economic prosperity contrasts painfully with their poverty and underdevelopment (even where petro-dollars spring from the very soil, their economies are embarrassingly weak and unproductive.) Israeli respect for human rights and human dignity offers endless humiliating contrasts. Arab citizens of Israel are better off, in every material and political way, than the “citizens” of any of Israel’s neighbors. And since 1947, the Muslim cry throughout the Middle East has been consistent: “Our problems (poverty, ignorance, despotism…) will not be solved until the Jews are pushed into the sea!” This fits Girard’s (or anyone else’s) definition of a scapegoat scenario.
Geo-political “realists” of course argue that a nuclear-armed Iran could be deterred from attacking Israel by the threat of retaliation. This was true of the Soviets, they argue. And it may be true of Iran, too, if the realists are correct in discounting the theology of radical jihad. If Islamist terrorists really don’t believe their own rhetoric, and are simply trying to bluff their way to some position of regional hegemony, then maybe Shoah Two will be indefinitely postponed. (See my dialogue with Frankie Sturm of the Truman Project at http://mistermoleman.com/2009/03/01/a-perfect-sturm-of-appeasement/.)
But this “realism” all depends on refusing to take the Islamist Jihad movement at its word. European and American “realists” can safely do so. Israelis cannot. In facing this imminent danger of another mass “sacrifice” of the Jews, Israel at least has its eyes wide open. Unlike Isaac, they do not wonder “Where is the sacrifice for the altar?” They know.
The question for Christians, and for all who recognize the scapegoat mechanism and its underlying injustice, is: Where do we stand? Not with the scapegoaters, of course. But are we content to stand on the sidelines, as spectators? Or do we recognize our obligation to stand against the forces of human sacrifice? Do we take our stand with the victim?
Surely this question is one of the first for consideration of any "strong political theory" based on the Christian revelation.
If Satan is reduced to a “mechanism” within, not in any way external to, the fabric of the human condition, will it not inevitably lead us to question all of what Girard perceives to be our “archaic religious understanding” of evil forces? And will it not dissolve the mystery of evil itself? For example, Girard writes “…all that Paul calls powers and principalities, were state structures based on the founding murder…” Let’s examine what Paul actually wrote:
“For it is not against human enemies that we have to struggle, but against the principalities and the ruling forces who are masters of the darkness in this world, the spirits of evil in the heavens.” (Ephesians 6:12) The mind of the Church down through the ages has viewed these mysterious forces as entities in disobedience to God that seek to enslave the human race, and that they inspired us to crucify Jesus with no awareness that the Cross would liberate us not only from our own mechanisms of violence, but from the principalities and powers that are beyond our understanding.
Finally, Girard seems to not have a sense of how Jesus moved among us. Adrienne von Speyr names it in her book, Confession: “…from the very beginning his entire earthly life stands in the light of confession…One can say that the Lord lives on earth before the Father in the same condition in which the perfect penitent should live before his own confessor…:in complete openness, concealing nothing…” (p 23) It is from this place that we must approach others in interreligious dialogue. We have not confessed nearly enough—it is not in the fabric of our gait, our speech and our eyes. Nor have we been nearly penitent enough. Moving with us and for us, Jesus knelt before the adulterer and her accusers and wrote something in the dirt. What he wrote is irrelevant.
The originating act of violence was the eating of an apple, an act that tore asunder our relationship with God and with each other, the most violent act in history, which made possible the “founding murder.” The liberating moment is not the singular act of rejecting the mechanisms of violence, but in doing the will of He who sends us.
In the modern world, victims have learned, he writes, to game the mechanism, i.e., to use Christian concern for victims against Christians, and thereby position themselves for excercise of power and violence. RG writes repeatedly of political correctness and its enabling of those who game Christian forgiveness and Christians' preferential option to avoid violence.
What's the answer? There is none, on this side of the eschaton, except in striving for good government that, mindful of obligation to the poor, aligns with Christian teaching, such as Catholic teaching on society.
The mechanism of mimetic rivalry and its consequences is kaleidoscopic. RG is not offering reductionist interpretations of human anthropology nor of Christianity. What he is giving us is some way of understanding the complexity (and foundational evil) of the City of Man and the depth and urgency of God's plan for our salvation.
It may seem trivial, but Girard's acceptance (in one of his books, not this article) that "political correctness" is a real phenomenon disturbs me. PC'ness was largely manufactured out of whole cloth by right wing ideologues in the US. The fact that Girard takes it seriously and tries to "explain" it in scapegoating terms is just another aspect of Girard not paying enough attention to evidence.
Similary, there are plenty of tribal cultures with no clear sacrificial elements (pygmies, for example, or the Senoi/Semai cultures in Malaysia). Buddhism is mentioned, rarely, in his books as a religion that sees desire as a foundational problem, and that's true, but it was also founded as an antisacrificial religion (against the rituals of the Vedas) many hundreds of years before Christianity. This puts the uniqueness of the Christian unmasking of sacrifice in question.
Girard's ideas are big, true, but his scholarship is diminished by his disinterest in the facts of history and anthropology. On the other hand his big ideas are VERY big and I have changed my thinking in a lot of ways after encountering them.
First, I think Costello (8-21) raises a critical point when he asks what does it mean to reduce Satan to a "mechanism within, not in any way external to, the fabric of the human condition." Is it enough to define original sin anthropologically, or instead, is original sin even more than a very deep scapegoating thing? Rather than scapegoating alone, is the original sin a hatred of the innocent, and a fear and hatred of the Source of lost innocence?
Second, further research should address Girard's speculation that Islam looks "as if a new (archaic religion) had (has) arisen built on the back of the bible, a slightly transformed Bible" (Old and New Testaments). On this cautious remark, it seems clear that the Qur'an is drawn more from the Penteteuch than the New Testament, in an effort to restore and return to the original faith of Abraham. It dilutes a few of the gospel stories to more of a veneer, particularly reducing Christ to that of a John-the-Baptist-type prophet in anticipation of Muhammed, the final Prophet in a world that needs no Redemption. Interestingly, Alexander the Great is one of the Qur'anic prophets.
Third, it is not clear that Islam (broader than than terrorism it harbors as the thin edge of the wedge) is a "new religion." Muhammed made no such claims. Girard challenges: "...historians of religion, and even anthropologists, have to show how and why it emerged." A very engaging question. T.E. Lawrence x-rays the Arab mind in four or five pages in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, noting that Islam is the only religion of some 40,000 proclaimed by as many prophets, to come out of the Arabian desert; and the historian McNeil claims (The Rise of the West, in a footnote) that it was in ninth century Baghdad than the crowd elevated the entire Qur'an to the level of uncontestable and unifying divinity. Perhaps the escalated price for intertribal accord. Mohammed's personal circumstances and experiences are barely a ripple at the front end of what has become an extraordinary anomaly in history, as we enter the new millennium, with Islam now claiming 1.3 billion adherents. Girard is brilliantly concise when he writes: "Archaic religion collapsed in the face of Judeo-Christian revelation, but Islam resists."
Fourth, we cannot help but wonder about thow the serendipity fit between western, rationalistic multiculturalism, as either an ideology or a collage of self-interests, dovetails with the religion of Islam which sees all belief systems as imperfect and assimilable versions of itself. Might the apocalypse this time end up as more of a decoy for a somnambulist western world that will one day (as in the days of Arianism) simply wake up to find itself Muslim, by infiltration (demographically, rhetorically, culturally, politically, etc.).
Fifth, while Girard is quizzed for not providing a political theory for these final days of whatever duration, some of us would remark that the social teachings of the Church, likewise, fall short. Instead, we are reminded by the Church of the irreducible dignity of the human person and of the common good, and that Christianity provides us with principles based on moral theology, not political theory or any ideology. The "negation of ideology", said John Paul II. In his Cariitas in Veritate, Benedict calls for "integral human development" (the whole person) that excludes no one (quite different than dar al-Islam versus dar al-harb).
How to avoid the fate anticipated by Rene Girard? How to affirm the dignity of human person? Vatican II reminds us that Christ not only reveals the Father (a term unknown to Muslim unitarianism) to man, but also reveals man to himself. Kudos to a faithful Rene Girard for his wisdom and his courage in teasing segments of academia away from their sleepy and sleep-inducing peer acceptance mentality.
He says "Because humans imitate one another, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society."
That's pure baloney. Hogwash. Because humans imitate one another, "contagious" similarity (please note that "contagious" is a value-laden word here, not a pure descriptive), merely refers to the fact that some behavioral traits will spread. There is NOTHING AT ALL about the spread of such behavior that presents a social problem. Quite the reverse, it ought to if anything suppress social problems.
Perhaps that contagion leads to some problem or other, but it is not by the mechanism of similarity, as Girard suggests. Maybe by competition, for example: If I adopt a new fashion because I want to be admired, there is a limited amount of admiration to go around, for which I am competing. So I may struggle against others on account of the fact that they are copying the same fashion I am, competing for the same attention I am hoping to receive. Yes, I can see imitation leading to struggle, but ONLY by reason of other conditions. Similarity itself does NOT breed violence.
Why do I say that? Consider a mother and child: the child naturally imitates the mother by learning language, by learning the mother's habits, even the mother's way of sitting and walking. And the mother struggles against this? Nonsense. And the same holds true in larger social circles: imitation by itself presents conformity and agreement. It is only through additional factors that imitation breeds violence. Which means that the meme of imitation is not the root source of the violence.
I also dispute this: "What I call (after Freud) the “founding murder”. Cain's murder of Abel did not found human society. Just think through this: at some point after they were at least adolescents, but probably adults, both Cain and Abel sacrificed to God the product of their labor. But this was before murder, and was done by both the holy and the unholy young man. Did they each, independently and out of total vacuum invent the idea of sacrifice to God? Of course not. They each grew up with Adam and Eve who, though temporarily defeated by sin, retained enough godliness to know and observe the foundational duty to worship God, and passed that practice on to their children. Cain and Abel already lived in a culture that observed sacrifice.
Now, was Cain's murder of Abel "the immolation of a sacrificial victim who is both guilty of disorder and able to restore order "? Not a bit of it. It was rooted in envy, pure and simple. Cain observed that Abel's sacrifice was acceptable to God, and (instead of accepting that the reason for God's rejection was in Cain himself) chose to reject his own defect and instead react violently against the outward testimony (Abel's accepted sacrifice) to his (Cain's) inward sin. But Cain's envy was not in the least bit connected to any imitation of Abel's action. No, the envy sprang out of a choice (distorted, of course) to view God's acceptance of one and rejection of the other as the bestowal of a limited resource, God's love. And if limited, then a matter for competition, and thus a basis for violent struggle. Again, the violence is not a result of imitation, but competition. But that envy causes the distorted view of God's love as a limited resource, is not the result of it. Therefore, the need to compete for that love does not find its source in any fundamental human social instinct (like imitation), but in sin, defect.
The meaning of sacrifice in human society was already established before the murder. Murder was a tool for the suppression of truth, springing out of envy, and had nothing to do with an intention of sacrifice or of imitation.
So where dilys (quite accurately, I think) sums up Girard by saying:
"(a)human imitation, leading to
(b) envy and fruitless competition, leading to "
it appears to be simply unfounded. Imitation itself does not lead to envy and competition.
Maybe, just possibly, Girard's thought simply cannot be compressed into a short essay. Or, maybe, it is just plain bad anthropology.
I had always understood Girard to hold that the problem of the foundation of culture is like a quadratic equation with two solutions: the negative pagan solution, based on sacrifice, and the positive biblical solution, based on love. Insofar as I understand this latest turn in his thought, he seems to be saying that there is, in fact, no Christian solution to the problem of culture: Christianity's great revelation makes the old pagan solution fail—and gives us no real cultural replacement for it. And the Bible's promise of the apocalypse is proof that knowledge of this fact was built into Christian revelation from the beginning.