René Girard and the Nonviolent God 0268104530, 9780268104535

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RENÉ GIRARD AND THE NONVIOLENT GOD

René Girard and the

Nonviolent God

Scott Cowdell

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu Copyright © 2018 by the University of Notre Dame All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-­­­in-­­­Publication Data Names: Cowdell, Scott, author. Title: René Girard and the nonviolent God / Scott Cowdell. Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018043814 (print) | LCCN 2018044785 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268104559 (pdf ) | ISBN 9780268104566 (epub) | ISBN 9780268104535 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268104530 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Nonviolence—Religious aspects—Christianity. | God (Christianity) | Girard, René, 1923–2015. | Anglican Communion—Doctrines. Classification: LCC BT736.6 (ebook) | LCC BT736.6 .C69 2018 (print) | DDC 230/.046—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043814 ∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and ­durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected]

for Peter Thiel, and Imitatio “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me” (Matt. 25:35)

When Jews and Christians came to use the word “god” it was already lying around and meaning something else. —Herbert McCabe, God Still Matters The God of Christianity isn’t the violent God of archaic religion, but the non-­violent God who willingly becomes a victim in order to free us from our violence. —René Girard, Evolution and Conversion Je vous nomme désormais le nouveau Darwin des sciences humaines. —Michel Serres, “Réception à l’Académie française de René Girard” Here comes René Girard, the Poirot of theology. —Sebastian Moore, The Contagion of Jesus

CO N T EN T S

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1 1.  Overture to Mimetic Theory

6

2.  From Violence to Divinity

25

3.  From Hominization to Apocalypse

51

4.  Girard among the Theologians

84

5.  A Divine-­Human Drama

115

6.  The Shadow Side of Finitude

145

7.  Divine Overaccepting

173

8.  Christ, the Nonviolence of God

202

Conclusion 240

Notes 245 Bibliography 285 Index 307

AC K N OW LED G M EN T S

I greatly appreciate the congenial working environment afforded me by the Charles Sturt University Centre for Public and Contextual Theology (PACT), along with PACT funding to attend conferences of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion and the American Academy of Religion. For all this and more I thank our director, Stephen Pickard. To those who kindly read and commented on all or part of this work in draft, I owe my sincere thanks for their time, encouragement, and (in one or two cases) their prudent advice: Jeremiah Alberg, Sandor Goodhart, Curtis Gruenler, Wayne Hudson, Stephen Pickard, Brian Robinette, and Bruce Wilson. Further thanks go to Jeremiah Alberg and Brian Robinette, who proved generous (if readily identifiable) “anonymous reviewers” for the publisher, and especially to Wayne Hudson and Bruce Wilson for their long-­standing interest and support. Once again, the University of Notre Dame Press has taken good care of me. To Stephen Little, Matthew Dowd, Maria denBoer, Wendy McMillen, and Susan Berger I offer my particular thanks. I thank Christopher Brennan for the index and Stephen Pickard for a PACT grant to fund its preparation. The striking cover image we are using features a piece of art glass by the Swedish sculptor Bertil Vallien. It was photographed by my wife, Lisa Carley, against a backdrop of plantation shutters slightly ajar. I thank Kosta Boda (in their 275th anniversary year) for kind permission to use this image (www.kostaboda.com), and I thank Lisa—not only for this photograph but for her support during another writing project and, more generally, for thirty-­two years of love, loyalty, and laughter.

 ix

x  Acknowledgments

It would not have been possible for me to conduct research for and write this book without a generous three-­and-­a-­half year fellowship from Imitatio, the Girardian arm of the San Francisco–­based Thiel Foundation. My thanks to Jimmy Kaltreider, Lindy Fishburne, Trevor Cribben Merrill, the Research Committee and Board of Imitatio, and especially Peter Thiel—arguably René Girard’s most influential former pupil—to whom this work is gratefully dedicated. Canberra, Australia Octave of Easter April 2018

Introduction

This is a book about René Girard (1923–2015) and what he brings to Christian theology. It comes at a time of dawning recognition about the significance of mimetic theory for theology, though the nature of that significance remains less clear. This book aims to provide that clarity. It seeks to mediate between Girard’s oeuvre and what we might call mainstream, orthodox theology—it is a particular concern of this study to show that Christian belief need not be bent out of shape to accommodate mimetic theory. In so doing, questions need to be addressed about the compati­ bility of Girard’s self-­ declared scientific program with theology’s authoritative sources: scripture, creeds, and persistent tropes regarding creation, revelation, providence, Christology, eschatology, and atonement. Among the theological critics of mimetic theory to receive attention here are Hans Urs von Balthasar, John Milbank, and Sarah Coakley. Girard’s theological interlocutors and interpreters are also present, most notably Raymund Schwager and James Alison. In this undertaking, the reader may detect a new accent in theology’s engagement with mimetic theory. Girard has received theological attention, both positive and negative, within his own Catholic Church and throughout the Protestant world. There has also been a smattering of Eastern Orthodox writings on Girardian themes.  1

2   R ENÉ GIR AR D A ND THE NONV IOLENT GOD

But there has not been extensive engagement with mimetic theory in Anglican theology, though Girard has been welcomed (with serious reservations) at the Catholic end of Anglicanism by Milbank and Coakley. Recurrent themes in this study reveal certain Anglican preoccupations on my part, as a theologian who has been influenced intellectually, but also spiritually and personally, by mimetic theory. If the integration of faith with reason, theology’s engagement with culture, and the ecclesial mediation of personal transformation all add up to a single gift and task for me, as a characteristically Anglican way of being Christian, so the discovery and exploration of mimetic theory has illumined and deepened my Anglican sensibilities. First, consider the “threefold cord not quickly broken” of scripture, tradition, and reason. Anglicans who align their theological sympathies with those of Richard Hooker—the great apologist of the Elizabethan Settlement—believe that, while scripture is primary, nevertheless any adequate hermeneutics must involve respectful conversation with the church’s creedal traditions and with the canons of reason (reason being conceived more broadly than today’s instrumental rationality typically allows). Girard is manifestly sympathetic to maintaining this conversation. Second, with this structural commitment in Anglican theological method comes its predilection for situating doctrine in close proximity to prayer, worship, and the cultivation of Christian character. This association of rational theological discourse with personal and communal transformation through word, sacrament, and common prayer is highly compatible with Girard’s insistence on linking theoretical insight with personal conversion. Third, the aforementioned Elizabethan Settlement manifested classical Anglicanism’s commitment to maintaining peace in both church and nation. This emphasis perseveres in a characteristic spirit of irenicism and public-­mindedness in Anglican theology, which finds obvious resonances in Girard. His mimetic theory represents wisdom for the common good, beyond any sectarian agenda. He also declares that rivalrous self-­definition and scapegoating should be off-­limits to Christians. Both these commitments echo Anglican sensibility at its best.

Introduction  3

From motives that may be discerned in the conception of this study, we now turn to an overview of its contents. The first three chapters offer a close reading of Girard’s oeuvre, exploring what I call his early, middle, and late phases. These chapters reveal theological synergies that developed throughout Girard’s literary and social-­scientific researches, along with a kernel of the whole mimetic theory that was already present at the beginning. Next, we turn to a theological assessment of Girard’s social-­scientific program, considering how he might fit best into today’s theological conversation. In the two following chapters, on divine revelation and divine action in an evolutionary world, mimetic theory is aligned with divine providence conceived in kenotic and incarnational terms. The preferred vehicle for this alignment is theological dramatic theory, as illuminated by the double agency tradition. In two final chapters we look at key theological concerns that have been laid at Girard’s door. These include the tragic cast of mimetic theory and its apparent ontologizing of violence. Girard offers theology a way beyond the standard options that too readily either embrace or deny such tragic, violent elements. Here I invoke a practice called overaccepting, which comes from improvisation theory in drama. Overaccepting provides a key to how certain contested theological themes can emerge less problematically in light of mimetic theory. The concentration is on divine providence in general and Jesus Christ in particular—who he is, what he does, what can and should be said of him, and what ought not to be said—from the perspective of divine nonviolence. Such divine nonviolence, it must be admitted, is honored more in the breach than in the observance—and mimetic theory does not gild the lily when it comes to Christian involvement in violence. It distinguishes between a central arc of biblical revelation and particular passages that reflect an earlier, more violent religious imagination. It regards many such “texts of terror” as having been recontextualized by later biblical writers, though they were not excised, and the sentiments they express have certainly resurfaced throughout Christian history. Indeed, as the Mennonite theologian J. Denny Weaver reminds us,

4   R ENÉ GIR AR D A ND THE NONV IOLENT GOD

There can be no doubt whatsoever that much of the Christian tradition has assumed a role for divine violence and that an integral dimension of the traditional understanding of the omnipotence of God is the presumed prerogative of God to exercise violence. That divine exercise of violence appears in the Old Testament and the New Testament and is prevalent in theology at all levels today.1

In terms of practice, the church abandoned an early pacifist incli­ nation for a developing tradition of just war theory, in the midst of which the crusades erupted as an excess of religiously sanctioned vi­ olence.2 The Jesuit theologian Robert J. Daly lists thirty-­six historical moments when Christianity had the chance to revive its peaceful origins. But for every instance of peace carrying the day (from early Christian refusal of military service, to medieval and Reformation-­ era peace movements, to the Quakers, antislavery, and the pacifist churches, on to today’s Christian movements for liberation, justice, and peace), there are many examples of Christianity endorsing and perpetuating violence. These include caesaropapism, just war theory, the crusades, the Inquisition, the witch trials, the so-­called religious wars of early modernity, slavery, modern militarism, anti-­Semitism with the Holocaust, and Christian involvement in more recent ethnic violence.3 Yet there is a counterwitness that challenges every such trend, which New Testament scholar David J. Neville ventures to hold up. “If the voice of Jesus breaks through the strata of later interpretative traditions with sufficient clarity,” he writes, “it should be heeded. One such instance .  .  . is the moral stance of Jesus with respect to violence.”4 With this history in mind, it is desirable to avoid perpetuating an intellectual version of violence by subjecting the gospel to an unjustifiable conceptual rigidity.5 Accordingly, the ex-­Catholic Girardian theologian Anthony W. Bartlett is concerned about the “attempt at full conceptual coherence by the tradition around the dogmatic legacy.”6 I am more confident than Bartlett that this risk can be avoided while honoring the language and concepts of creedal orthodoxy and that this is important for Girard’s theological reception. However, with Bartlett, I resist any ideological annexing of the gospel. That way lies

Introduction  5

the sacrifice of inconvenient facts, persons, and movements, signifying a return to structuring violence. Something that marks this study is a critical willingness to bear with the language and imagery of violence while repurposing it, so that mimetic theory in theological hands “does violence to structuring violence.” This is the violence that Slavoj Žižek refers to as “a radical upheaval of basic social relations,” which rather than perpetuating the cycle of violence rejects and overturns it. As Žižek says, with characteristic irony and provocation, the monsters of history were not violent enough, in that they left the underlying system of violence undisturbed.7 This is precisely what Girard refuses to do as he points the way via redeemed mimesis to transformed human relations. So Girard brings more to theology than an analytic tool or even a grand theory. Mimetic theory is both of these, but more besides. It is an impetus to personal transformation and also to wider reform—though further discussion of how Girard might support a positive account of modernity’s secular spaces, and what mimetic theory can bring to the sociopolitical arena, will have to await another opportunity.8 It remains an open question whether Christians, Jews, and others will avail themselves of the resources that mimetic theory provides for faith, spirituality, and practice. Those who do will discover what can come only from a nonviolent God: the power to challenge the cultural nexus of violence, scapegoating, and a purely human sacred that Girard has identified. “Since sacred power depends on the conspiracy of all to maintain it,” as Girardian biblical scholar Robert Hamerton-­ Kelly concludes, “those who withhold consent from the conspiracy are dangerous and their gracious irony threatens the foundations. They are the ‘nothings’ that God uses to bring the ‘somethings’ to nothing (1 Cor. 1:28).”9

CH A P TER 1

Overture to Mimetic Theory

Christ wanted to make humans into superhumans, but by means opposed to those of Promethean thought. —René Girard, Resurrection from the Underground

The usual way to present René Girard’s mimetic theory—and I have done this myself 1—is according to the three chronological stages of its articulation in print. First, there is his account of “borrowed desire,” commencing with Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961) (literally “romantic lie and novelistic truth,” translated as Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 1965). Second, Girard’s scapegoat theory of human origins, culture, and religion is articulated in La violence et le sacré (1972) (Violence and the Sacred, 1977). Third, a new stage of religion appears, with the Judeo-­Christian breakthrough beyond “deviated transcendence,” as set out in Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (1978) (Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 1987). Here, Girard seeks to demonstrate that the role of founding violence against a victim is definitively and world-­transformingly outed and undermined by the Hebrew prophets and the Christian Gospels. One might then add an apocalyptic addendum, based on Girard’s late, troubled work Achever Clausewitz (2007) (literally “completing Clausewitz,” translated as Battling to the End, 2010), in which modern military 6 

Overture to Mimetic Theory  7

history discloses a potentially unstoppable apocalyptic “escalation to extremes.” Such a three-­stage approach is fine as far as it goes, and it proves pedagogically useful, but it misses subtleties of interpretation that I do not want to pass over in this book. I also need to update my usage of “mimetic theory.” In René Girard and Secular Modernity (2013) I used it, perhaps pedantically, to refer to the abovementioned first stage only, whereas the community of Girardian scholarship has settled on a more comprehensive usage. “Mimetic theory” now normally refers to all three dimensions of Girard’s vision: the interdividuality of desiring, the scapegoating, and the Judeo-­Christian breakthrough. However, I have come to realize that all three elements are to some extent present from the beginning for Girard, so that these discoveries should not be strictly linked to the order of their appearance in a series of major publications. Hence, under the heading “early Girard,” we will find the false sacred already discernible within the logic of borrowed desire, with prophetic insight recognizable from the start in the foundations and atmospherics of Girard’s “novelistic conversion” and in his diagnosis of modern mimetic ills. These ills can be seen to harbor a sacrificial imperative, too, along with a dose of “apocalypse now.” Though the full exposition of these themes has to await Girard’s later works from the 1970s to the 1990s and beyond, as we will see, the full picture can already be sketched in an “overture” to mimetic theory, which is the task of this chapter. “Middle Girard” will refer in the following chapter to his theorizing of religion and of the Judeo-­Christian breakthrough that opened a door to secular modernity. This is not a new departure, or even a further stage, so much as the exploration and explanation of a single dense insight that had dawned on “early Girard.” In chapter 3, we will see how “late Girard” comes to acknowledge a positive aspect to sacrifice. He also fills in some gaps regarding humanity’s beginning and likely end: in developed reflections about hominization and apocalyptic intimations regarding humanity’s future. Throughout Girard’s whole oeuvre, then, mimetic theory emerges in dialogue with Judeo-­ Christian faith, revealing a human future beyond the sacred that contains violence (i.e., in the dual sense of both expressing and limiting

8   R ENÉ GIR AR D A ND THE NONV IOLENT GOD

violence). These discoveries of Girard invite a more detailed theological engagement with mimetic theory, which will follow in subsequent chapters.

“Early Girard”: Great European Novels Proust and Dostoyevsky do not define our universe by an absence of the sacred, as do the philosophers, but by the perversion and corruption of the sacred, which gradually poisons the sources of life. —René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel Girard’s research into motifs of transcendence in five key European novelists, including Proust and Dostoyevsky, was the occasion and catalyst of a religious conversion. —Michael Kirwan, “ ‘Strategies of Grace’ ” I also discerned that your first work, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, was a direct preparation for La violence et le sacré. —Raymund Schwager, letter to René Girard, August–September 1976

By the 1950s, Girard was teaching French literature in America and developing his distinctive way of reading novels. Beyond the then-­ fashionable methodologies of New Criticism, with its purely textual focus attuned to aesthetic and formalistic concerns, and literary history, attending to contextual factors and authorial intention, Girard was gravitating to an approach at once scientific and aesthetic, rational and intuitive. As Robert Doran explains, “Girard sees the literary text as an embodiment of an intuitive understanding of the human condition,”2 surpassing the typical structural, existential, and historical concerns of literary criticism. This combination of emphases was also important in the French intellectual ferment from which Girard emerged, as psychology and structuralism combined in Jacques

Overture to Mimetic Theory  9

Lacan, and as grand theory from the era of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx yielded to the concerns of existentialism and psycho­analysis. This ferment was signaled by the appearance of a pre-­ Freudian version of the unconscious in Pierre Janet that is more amenable to a mimetic account, along with fin de siècle interest in crowd behavior and hypnosis—the emerging modernist literary self is riper for a mimetic reading because it comes “without qualities.”3 Eugene Webb points to the scope for Girard’s new synthesis to arise at a confluence of “the characteristically French awareness of the sociality of personhood and its tradition of belief in the Cartesian autonomous self.”4 Against this background, the atmosphere of postwar French soul-­searching and American debate in the humanities provided the immediate context in which Girard began to think of personal desire as social and mediated. So, there is no ready separation of the individual and the collective according to mimetic theory. The modern Western individual is wrong about being self-­made and self-­contained. Our desires are not in fact original but borrowed, though this conclusion is rarely either obvious or welcome. Good modern literature reveals it, however. Already in a 1954 article, Girard identified in nineteenth-­century French literature an awareness of “this perpetual shifting from one Ego to another by which we have defined ‘individualism.’ ”5 In his first book, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961) (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 1965), and in some articles from the period, Girard explores this discovery by writers who have undergone what he calls a novelistic conversion, away from the “romantic lie” of detached selves and autonomous desires. Girard offers a highly developed and nuanced account of this borrowed desire, which in later decades he further refines while adding to the list of those who have recognized it—from William Shakespeare to Jerry Seinfeld.6 Beginning with the desires of Don Quixote, which were awakened by reading about Amadis of Gaul and his medieval knightly exploits, through to the snobisme of French salons so knowingly portrayed by the later Marcel Proust, Girard identifies various reifications of desire and traces their elaboration. As he recalls, “I realized that Cervantes talks about the old chivalry just as Proust talked about the snobs of the Fauberg

10   R ENÉ GIR AR D A ND THE NONV IOLENT GOD

St.-­Germain in the early twentieth century. When I realized that, I had my first book.”7 The key idea, contrary to the object focus of desire according to Sigmund Freud, is that this or that “object” is only desirable because the “model” or “mediator” of our desire has awakened our desire for it by their own desiring. Girard realizes that “the closer the mediator comes, the greater his role becomes and the smaller that of the object,” and, accordingly, that “Dostoyevsky by a stroke of genius places the mediator in the foreground and relegates the object to the background.” Hence, for Girard, “at last novelistic composition reflects the real hierarchy of desire.”8 When “external mediation” of that desire is in play, envy is averted—as between Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, whose separation in terms of social status ensures that any borrowing of desire between them is unlikely to lead them to the same object.9 In other words, they do not enter into “internal mediation”: a situation in which the subject’s desire for an object comes to coincide with their model’s desire for the same object.10 Think of two friends who fall out once both have come to share the same love interest. The desire of one has possibly awakened the desire of the other, whereupon the desire of both is likely to escalate further, with each serving as mediator of the other’s desire. The model thus becomes a “model obstacle” for their subject and, as things progress, vice versa. Such rivalry can quickly escalate to the point that “mimetic doubles” or “monstrous doubles” emerge to become indistinguishable rivals and enemies, eclipsing the original object of desire.11 As social hierarchies break down, a newfound modern equality leads more readily to “internal mediation” and the envy it breeds, as Alexis de Tocqueville keenly observed in a book that proved illuminating for Girard, Democracy in America.12 So, what Girard came to call acquisitive mimesis is revealed to be at best partial. Desire is fixed most truly on its model, and the real focus of acquisition is the being of that model—this is why acquiring an object typically fails to satisfy because this or that object is only ever a proxy for the being of the model, which remains elusive. Girard recognizes that “the moment the hero takes hold of the desired object its ‘virtue’ disappears like gas from a burst balloon. The object has been desecrated by possession and

Overture to Mimetic Theory  11

reduced to its objective qualities, thus provoking the famous Sten­ dhalian exclamation: ‘Is that all it is?!’ ”13 This illustrates Girard’s version of existentialism, but a version in which existentialism’s ontologically insecure, fundamentally unattached individual actually remains highly attached and hence ever-­more-­completely insecure. This attachment of our desire to its model, hence the attachment of our “individuality” to the being—ideally, the prestigious being—of that model, is referred to by Girard as metaphysical desire.14 For Girard, as Pierpaolo Antonello observes, “the successful novel is either a magnifier of the pitfalls of metaphysical desire or [it] is ultimately uninteresting.”15 And indeed, from the second chapter of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Girard is already contrasting the essentially false-­sacred dimension of such desire for the being of its model with the authentic transcendence revealed according to Christian faith: “Deviated transcendency is a caricature of vertical transcendency. There is not one element of this distorted mysticism which does not have its luminous counterpart in Christian truth.”16 He sees that such desire makes us gods for one another, writing elsewhere at the time that “for Proust, as for Dostoyevsky, transcendence, which, in the past, separated the worshipper from the worshipped, now separates individuals from each other and forces them to live their relationships at the level of a corrupted religiosity.”17 In the mid-­1960s, at what may well mark the mid­point between his early work on the novel and his ground-­breaking Violence and the Sacred, Girard concluded that “to desire is to believe in the transcendence of the world suggested by the Other.”18 Here is Girard’s false sacred—the “deviated transcendence” that constitutes the deepest truth that he has discovered about human existence—appearing well before he uncovered its origins in a scapegoat mechanism at the birth of human culture, as fully disclosed later in Violence and the Sacred. Yet this mechanism is foreshadowed even in these earliest Girardian explorations of desire, in which individual and collective can become indistinguishable, and when role-­modeling and creativity vie with rivalry and violence as desire plays out. In a 1978 interview, he recalls that “at the time of Mensonge Romantique .  .  . this mimetic nature of victimage did not escape me, [though] its enormous potential in regard to primitive religion certainly did.”19

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Girard draws attention to some particular instances in Proust and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. First, to Proust. Benoît Chantre points to Girard’s discussion of the steeple at Combray from In Search of Lost Time. The church steeple represented for Proust a vector of transcendence in the midst of what Girard called “human and earthly gods of internal mediation.”20 The church steeple serves as axis mundi for the world of Combray, though the verticality of genuine transcendence has been replaced by a faux transcendence played out horizontally and purely anthropologically in the town. Girard explains how the steeple allows Proust to address the false sacred, with its systole and diastole of disorder and renewed order: The nearer the mediator comes to the desiring subject the more remote transcendency becomes from that vertical. It is deviated transcendency at work. It drags the narrator and his novelistic universe further and further from the steeple. . . . The greater the distance from the mystic centre, the more painful, frenzied, and futile the agitation.21

The movement referred to is illustrated by the explosion of crows from that tower at dusk and their eventual return, pacified. This suggests to Proust a reality that was “deadly no more but benign.”22 Chantre sees Girard’s interest in the steeple and its crows as foreshadowing both the circulating dynamic of sacrificial religion that he would later explicate and its messianic overcoming by genuine transcendence that will complete his mimetic theory. That phrase, “deadly no more but benign,” for Chantre, “resembles in a most striking fashion the development of Girard’s central intuition, as if everything to come was implicitly there from the beginning.”23 With hindsight, Girard draws attention to another passage in Proust for its insights into the scapegoat mechanism. The Verdurins, like a “group of cannibals,” mock Saniette, yet the praise that Saniette later attracts in the same circles is deemed by the narrator to be equally explicable: by comparison with how kings are as likely to be condemned as acclaimed. And, indeed, “sacred kingship” provides

Overture to Mimetic Theory  13

Girard with important anthropological evidence for his later account of the slain victim becoming the sacral foundation of culture. For Girard, this text of Proust “contains everything and tells everything, even the ultimate divinization of the victim, and the victimary and ritualistic nature of monarchy, but at the time I did not realize it.”24 Second, to Dostoyevsky. The virtual pimping out of a man’s wife to his friend in order to boost his own flagging desire in “The Eternal Husband” offers Girard another example. These attempts of the eternal husband to lead the woman of his choice to the feet of the idol resemble the sacrifices of primitive religions closely enough to be mistaken for them. They resemble the barbaric rites that the cults of blood, sex, and the night demand of their devotees. The possessed, too, lead their women to Stavrogin’s bed.25

Stephen Gardner recognizes these early forays as prefiguring Girard’s developed sacrificial mechanism: “the second (and chrono­ logi­cally the first) being that of romantic self-­immolation, the self-­ defeating and ultimately self-­destructive character of modern ‘romantic desire.’ ”26 Proust, Dostoyevsky, and, later, Friedrich Nietzsche helped Girard to trace these darker implications of desire. The key is desire’s connection to its model, whose projected mirage of fuller being is bound to disappoint. Herein Girard identifies the root of what he regards as a chronic modern Western restlessness, as desire passes from object to object and frustrated acquisitiveness escalates—shifting also from model to model as the being of one after another proves elusive or unsatisfying. Hence each conquest necessitates further conquest, as yet one more apparent sexual, financial, or career-­advancing annexation of a model’s being (i.e., by conquest) leaves the “puppet of desire”27 unfulfilled, casting about for a worthier model. Here is an explanation for masochism and sadism, too, which Girard wrests from Freud’s grasp. He reveals them to be a pair of mainstream (i.e., rather than deviant) mimetic conditions that are only tangentially sexual if at all (accordingly, Girard refers to them as pseudo­masochism and pseudo­sadism). The being of a model is the thing, and the more abusive that model the better. Such an abuser must surely occupy a level

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of being that is superior to our own, as evident from their contempt for us. Many cringe willingly before such a model, luxuriating in their ill-­treatment, while others aspire to the obviously superior status of their abusive model by becoming abusers themselves—masochism and sadism tout simple.28 All sorts of dysfunctional dynamics can be generated out of this basic mimetic pattern. Self-­destructive ambition, the addiction that stumbles headlong into the false promise of enhanced being, the narcissism of dandyism or coquetry that feeds on and in turn feeds the desire of others29 (hence the renown of celebrities that seemingly comes from nowhere and in fact amounts to nothing); the “oppo­ sitional defiant disorder” of uncontrollable children, perpetually affronted adolescents, angry young men, and anti­heroes; the reckless risk-­taking among life’s adventurous winners twinned with the programmatic self-­destructiveness of life’s habituated losers—these can be accounted for in terms of desire that has broken free of objects and become entirely obsessed with the being of models. And this path is always ultimately downward. The end point of metaphysical desire— in art and literature, as in life—is ugliness, death, and the inanimate, where modern fascination eventually comes to rest. This is because every­thing more life-­affirming that one has (or might have) sought and welcomed must eventually yield what all metaphysical desire yields, which is nothing but disappointment—surely, then, only that which is so superior that it yields us nothing could ever truly satisfy.30 Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, along with his Devils and Crime and Punishment, prompt Girard’s most searching reflections on what he calls underground psychology, or ontological sickness. This condition manifests itself in the worst instances of metaphysical desire bringing people undone through prideful, obsessive, misdirected, misunderstood, or just plain muddled cravings, which are actually rooted in the desire to create oneself out of the being of a supposedly worthy other (by either emulation or opposition). The Girard who later explicates the culture-­preserving function of mythology here identifies the greatest modern myth of all: that of our own detachment and autonomy, despite our entire reliance on the desire and being of others.31 Only later did Girard come to articulate a more positive account

Overture to Mimetic Theory  15

of mimesis to offset his early insights into its capacity for fostering wretchedness—and, as we will see, there is certainly scope for conversion away from this stifling reality. We have noted the early appearance and at least partial recognition of sacrificial motifs. The apocalyptic dimension that has come to characterize Girard’s latest work is also present early on. It is identified in the condition of lost moderns who destroy themselves and others in pursuit of an illusory being, which Girard sets out in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. It is present in his discussion of Proust, who regarded World War I—the first of the twentieth century’s great conflicts over abstractions—in terms of internal mediation writ large. The mutually slavish copying of the French and Germans, which Proust observes, is remarked upon by Girard—an apocalyptic insight that only emerged fully in Achever Clausewitz (2007, translated in 2010 as Battling to the End). He first explores it in a chapter of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel called “The Dostoyevskian Apocalypse,” and then at length in his second book, Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky (1963; ET 1997).32 Here Girard locates the sacrificial lynchpin of our whole human adventure as modern history and literature have begun to reveal it, though it takes him a further forty-­five years to fully lay out the rationale and to plumb the implications of what Dostoyevsky had taught him: On the level of Dostoyevskian observation there is no longer any distinction between novel and metaphysics. All the threads we have connected, all the tracks we have followed converge towards the Dostoyevskian apocalypse. The whole of novelistic literature is carried along by the same wave, all its heroes obey the same call to nothingness and death. Deviated transcendency is a giddy descent, a blind plunge into the shadows. It ends in the monstrosity of Stavrogin, and in the infernal pride of all the possessed.33

Here, Girard categorizes the kind of alienating dynamic that has led Christians to talk of Satan, demonic possession, original sin, and the need for deliverance. We will explore possibilities for a Girardian take on sin and redemption more fully in later chapters. But at this

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early stage Girard has become aware of a path beyond the whole infernal mimetic charade via a “conversion” similar to his own that he recognized in Proust and Dostoyevsky. As he wrote at the time, “The apocalypse would not be complete without a positive side.”34 Girard’s own conversion to Christianity proved inseparable from this whole intellectual breakthrough. In the autumn of 1958, he was struggling with the concluding chapter of Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque when he found himself reflecting on the change of heart that some of his featured writers and their “heroes” had undergone. They came to realize the inadequacy of black-­and-­white rivalries, moving beyond habituated self-­justification and un-­self-­ awareness. This signified abandonment of the mechanical opposition between self and other is characteristic of romanticism, according to Girard.35 The transition from rivalry and loathing to acceptance of the flawed other marks a renunciation of dysfunctional desiring, and it is to be found both in the “hero” and the author of a great novel.36 Such a transformation represents the very antithesis of violence. The reader, too, must share in the transition, which entails sympathy on the reader’s part for novelistic characters in the grip of mimetic compulsion as a necessary step toward the reader’s own conversion from that same compulsion.37 And with this discovery of complicity in borrowed desire, moral self-­righteousness yields to humility and self-­awareness. A great writer is then able to emerge, alert “from the inside” to the deepest truth of human motivation. As Girard explains, This experience is shattering to the vanity and pride of the writer. It is an existential downfall. Very often this downfall is written symbolically, as illness or death. In the case of Proust and Dostoyevsky it is explicitly presented as a change in outlook. Or to take Don Quixote, on his deathbed he sees finally his mimetic madness, which is also illness and death. And this existential downfall is what makes a great work of art possible.38

Girard was struck by parallels here with religious conversion. In particular, he was drawn to the excruciatingly mimetic figure of Stepan Verkhovensky, from Dostoyevsky’s Devils, who woke up to

Overture to Mimetic Theory  17

himself before his death and turned to the Gospels. Girard woke up, too, thus beginning a period of intellectual and then—in light of a serious health scare at the time—of more emotionally intense Christian conversion. Girard returned to the Catholic Church and there he remained unwaveringly, as a self-­declared Christian witness.39 In connection with the literary problem that precipitated his conversion, Girard writes, “I was thinking about the analogies between religious experience and the experience of a novelist who discovers that he’s been consistently lying . . . for the benefit of his Ego, which is in fact made up of nothing but a thousand lies that have accumulated . . . sometimes built up over an entire lifetime.” And so it was for Girard: “I ended up understanding that I was going through an experience of the kind that I was describing. The religious symbolism was present in the novelists in embryonic form, but in my case it started to work all by itself and caught fire spontaneously.”40 This connection between “novelistic” and Christian conversion is described by the “early Girard” in terms of a common share in the “form” of Christ. Yet this structure is also an entirely rational and intra­worldly reality for Girard, providing the fundamental pattern of Western art and experience from Augustine’s Confessions to Dante’s Divine Comedy to Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “It is present every time artists succeed in giving their work the form of the spiritual metamorphosis that brings the work to birth. It is not the same as the narration of this metamorphosis, even though it may coincide with it.”41 It is important to understand what Girard is saying here, and what he is not saying. In the conclusion to Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, which could only take shape following Girard’s own conversion to Christianity, he dismisses the relegation of Christian symbolism in these “great novels” to either apologetics or window dressing. Rather, Christian symbolism is integral to the transformation of perspective that great novels embody, and as such this symbolism can and should be addressed from the perspective of “scientific criticism.”42 So resurrection, for instance, and immortality are actually indispensable elements because “repudiation of a human mediator and renunci­ ation of deviated transcendency inevitably call for symbols of vertical

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transcendency whether the author is Christian or not.”43 This point is illustrated for Girard by the conscious use of such symbolism in Stendhal and Proust, despite their not being Christians—“the Dantean and Augustinian archetype remains inscribed in the form of their work.”44 This form of Christ appears at the end of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but, more than that, Girard sees it as integral to the book’s overall dynamic and in what it represents for the author, along with what is mediated to the reader: “This form . . . has a history and this history coincides with the stages of spiritual healing.”45 Girard is clear, however, that Dostoyevsky is no religious propagandist.46 He is certainly a prophet, though, in the biblical sense of one who recalls God’s people from idolatry.47 Girard regards Dostoyevsky’s ending to The Brothers Karamazov as representing the highest pitch of his genius, in which the novelistic and the Christian experience are one.48 Sandor Goodhart goes so far as to say that, according to Girard, “escape from metaphysical desire is not different from the death and resurrection the Christian Gospel writers describe.”49 From the perspective of Christian theology, Christ is the Logos that Girard identifies in the structure of great European novels. This Logos is at once rational and revelatory, judging and converting— though it typically makes its way incognito due to its widespread rejection. Here is the message of the Gospel of John’s prologue ( John 1:1–18): that this constitutive Word was deeply engaged in the world’s coming-­to-­be, though it was rejected in favor of other means for securing human order and meaning (which Girard comes to identify with the single-­victim mechanism and its false-­sacred religio-­cultural legacy). We will return to this theme in chapter 5 in response to objections directed at Girard by Hans Urs von Balthasar, who offers a more sustained account of this form of Christ according to the metaphysical tradition of German idealism. For Girard, the form of Christ is more to do with literary figurae recalling death and resurrection, and such “Christian symbolism is universal for it alone is able to give form to the experience of the novel.”50 It is a shame that Balthasar does not recognize in Girard an alternative, though not entirely unrelated, commitment to discerning the form of Christ in the literary history of Western culture. It was rendered explicit by “early Girard” just when

Overture to Mimetic Theory  19

Balthasar was beginning his own great theological work on the form of Christ in literature, aesthetics, and revelation, The Glory of the Lord. Girard makes a further, tantalizing disclosure about the events surrounding his own conversion. In response to a question about how he thought all of this out, Girard replies that “everything came to me at once in 1959. I felt that there was a sort of mass that I’ve penetrated into little by little. Everything was there at the beginning, all together. That’s why I didn’t have any doubts. There’s no ‘Girardian system.’ I’m teasing out a single, extremely dense insight.”51 We have noted the appearance at this early stage of Girard’s “deviated transcendence,” normally associated with his subsequent work on the false sacred as it emerges from the sacrificial mechanism. According to “early Girard,” deviated transcendence accrues to the quasi-­sacred being of a model as it holds sway over the restless heart of the one who desires. And this is what must be let go of, as Girard himself discovers. With his own conversion, he was drawn by Christ into a reformed pattern of desire, similar to the “novelistic conversion” of Proust and Dostoyevsky. It made them into great writers, able to recognize the truth about being human beyond our accustomed self-­deceptions. Proust ceased frequenting the salons in favor of a circumspect literary retirement, achieving with In Search of Lost Time the mimetic self-­awareness missing from his earlier Jean Santeuil.52 Likewise, Dostoyevsky awoke to the mimetic nature of his early political radicalism and revealed this problematic in his book Devils, having come to understand that borrowed desire “links revolutionary behavior to the prestige mediated by an irresistible seducer rather than to an authentic passion for freedom.”53 His experience of conversion, which (beyond that of Proust) was both “novelistic” and Christian, explains how it was that “Dostoyevsky’s failure as a terrorist made him a novelist.”54 Dostoyevsky’s early entrapment is replayed in our own day as disaffected first-­world Muslim youth are being seduced into joining the Islamic State by agents provocateurs active on the fringes of mainstream Islam and on social media. Yet for Girard the two types (or, better, dimensions) of conversion are profoundly related. In a later discussion of Dostoyevsky’s personal and creative transformation, Girard explains that “it is the novelistic

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experience, the experience of rupture, that relates to Christianity and allows itself more and more to be interpreted by it.”55 In fact, quite early on, Girard is already looking to the Gospels in connection with transformed desire. For instance, Jean Racine’s formerly promethean literary character Phaedra discovers for herself what John the Baptist knew concerning Christ: that he himself was not the light, intended as he was for witness to someone greater ( John 1:8).56 It is in Dostoyevsky, however, that Girard finds a complete prophetic diagnosis of desire’s modern problematic, along with its solution—an analysis that connects across over five decades to his own apocalyptic conclusions in Battling to the End. According to Girard, the apocalyptic impulse inherent in modern Western life is a prideful insistence on division, opposition, and the mimetic doubling whereby conflict annexes meaning and dominates existence. In later chapters we will meet John Milbank’s theological critique of Girard’s developed position, but here we can recognize in “early Girard” an assessment of modern conditions in close step with Milbank’s own—though, contrary to Milbank’s assessment of him, Girard reads this as a path of free choice rather than one of ontological or historical necessity. As early as Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, then, Girard prefigures two aspects of mimetic desire that he later makes more explicit: its inescapability and its positive capacities. And our ability to choose, beyond any sense of imprisonment in a malign condition, is set out by Girard in forthrightly theological terms: “choice always involves choosing a model,” he writes, “and true freedom lies in the basic choice between a human or a divine model.”57 To highlight this point, in a way that shows Girard to have been thinking Christian thoughts about his literary and social-­scientific researches from the start, he places on the frontispiece of Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque a line to this effect from a French translation of Max Scheler: “L’homme possède ou un Dieu ou une idole” (Man has either a God or an idol). The cumulative effect of wrong choices in this regard leads ultimately to cultural apocalypse, according to Girard—a realization that he links to Jesus’s saying, “Whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Luke 11:23).58 What is more, Girard views this cultural apocalypse as an indirect fruit of Christ’s work in history: “It is the freedom of

Overture to Mimetic Theory  21

Christ, perverted but still vital, that produces [Dostoyevsky’s] underground.”59 This is why Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, in The Brothers Karamazov, proves theologically illuminating for Girard. To prevail over the Inquisitor’s loveless, lifeless cynicism, the God of Jesus Christ allows the modern world to experience increasing meaninglessness, lostness, social upheaval, and violence as the burden entailed by our poor mimetic choices. God allows modernity’s conscious rejection of Christ as the price of our freedom, working redemptively despite moderns having to live with the consequences of their rebellious free will—the logic of which Jesus foresaw.60 In this process Girard discerns the meaning of Jesus’s teaching about those seven devils worse than the first coming to re­occupy the house swept clean of its former occupant (Matt. 12:43–45).61 It is as if God allows violence to do its work as an overture to divine nonviolence. Hence it is a strange work of love in which Christ allows the underground to manifest itself, as the failure and reversal of Chris­ tianity,62 until the atheism, suffering, and existential meaninglessness of modernity have progressively robbed humanity of its many illusions, to reveal at last that it is a matter of choosing for or against Christ. “It is not the plan that Christ would have chosen for human beings if he had not respected their freedom,” Girard acknowledges, “but the one they have chosen for themselves in rejecting him.”63 What we are left with is the choice to be redeemed, leading us to the imitation of Christ over the thralldom of borrowed desire that is characteristic of Dostoyevsky’s “possessed.”64 Here we recognize that Girard’s work is compatible with a spiritual theology (more on this in chapter 4).

“Early Girard”: Greek Tragedy Christianity breaks free of the ancient city whose closure it rejects. —René Girard, Oedipus Unbound

Interviewed in his early seventies, Girard reconstructs the crucial next stage in his elaboration of mimetic theory. He recalls that

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the reading of Greek tragedy played an essential role in my discovery of the victimary mechanism, parallel to the modern novel in relation to my discovery of mimetic conflict. Sophocles understood the Oedipus myth, and Euripides the myth of Dionysus, much better than our contemporaries. I found my way in myth and ritual through Greek tragedy, seen both as a form of ritual and a form of revelation, although a partial one, less radical than Christianity. The main source of my intuition is the Gospels, which unmask the role of collective foundational murder.65

Already in 1965, halfway between the French originals of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and Violence and the Sacred, Girard links the self-­ deceiving moral dualism to which his great modern novelists had awoken with that of Oedipus, birthing a new realization: that “myth is the glimpse of a structure linked to the genesis of truth.”66 Hence the tragic begins to undo the mythical—the category that Girard later explores as the chief archaic vehicle for dissembling collective guilt over the innocence of victims. Sandor Goodhart was undertaking doctoral work with Girard in Buffalo, New York, at the time of these developments. He recalls that Girard “had begun reading Greek tragedy (Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, for example) and while noticing the same tortuous problematic of metaphysical desire, he also noticed that such psychological complexes were mired there in sacred ritual and myth.”67 In a series of questions, Goodhart then sets out a range of new possibilities that emerged for Girard at the time. What if primitive culture existed to protect us against runaway mimetic desire, to manage it for us, and what if what sustained that ritual was the phenomenon of scapegoating? What if it was not desire that is the problem (which is, after all, universal and continuous in the fabric of social life) but the violence it produced when the sacred turned transgressive, when mediators and subjects clashed (and “double mediation” ensued), when differences broke down, and the assertion of difference or separation .  .  . issued in the conflict we noticed earlier? And what if, finally, literature, like

Overture to Mimetic Theory  23

Greek tragedy, is the place where all this structural composition and decomposition comes to the fore, is made explicit, precisely because it is no longer working?68

In a 1965 lecture, the necessity of sacrificial victims as a palliative for the rivalrous escalation of desires is identified by Girard. Enter the scapegoat. Human and animal sacrifice serves a cathartic “religious” function for the sake of restoring order to the collective, in a process that Girard already links to the Lamb of God as “the first and ultimate figure of the scapegoat.”69 Here is a revelatory arc that, while it leads to Jesus, begins for Girard in Greek tragedy and gains momentum in the prophet Isaiah: “The Songs of the Servant of Yahveh render fully explicit an identification with the scapegoat that we believe to be implicit in Sophocles.”70 The transcendent quality of the scapegoat is acknowledged, yet its role as an object of re-­ligio on behalf of the collective is acknowledged to be breaking down.71 This is thanks to the new religion of a new God who makes possible a new human solidarity beyond the vi­olence of victim-­making.72 Here is the false sacred outed by a revelation that is “literally grafted onto the Greco-­Western body, but, in the first and last instance, always determinant,”73 driving a social collapse that spells apocalypse for Girard. And all of this in 1965. A 1968 paper significantly fills out mimetic theory. It identifies the necessary misrecognition or mis-­knowing that makes arbitrary sacrifice seem justified and compelling, along with the corresponding necessity of inflating a victim’s alleged transgressions, and of restoring difference from out of undifferentiated social chaos, arresting the tendency toward what is already being called the “false-­sacred” social order to collapse. Here Girard appropriates biblical talk of scandal and of Satan being overcome by the cross, hence introducing something genuinely new to social science.74

* * *

So, this is the picture that is emerging. The truth about our rivalry making us all indistinguishable is occluded by the singling out for scapegoating of someone who must be perceived as different. Enter

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the false sacred, to begin constructing a social order—a stable human religio-­cultural artifact that serves well for a time, but which begins eventually to unravel under pressure from the real sacred. For Girard, this undoing begins with prophecy and continues via “the quite literally apocalyptic structure of a revelation that only the breakup of the city could bring to completion.”75 This revelation makes possible an end to our rivalrous violence, with its characteristic scapegoating resolution, because it shows the victim to be innocent and hence requires us to find unity by other means.76 Here Girard locates the unsurpassed radicalism of Judeo-­Christian scripture, and does so significantly earlier than is usually credited in his work. What Girard has begun to unearth is everywhere misunderstood, however, as attested by historical Christianity’s regular refusal of its own innate radicalism. In antiquity, Christianity settled instead for a “quite precarious religion of difference,” as Girard laments, while today it is often content with a legacy of “pale ideals and trifling ‘humanism.’ ”77 Girard’s tying together of these insights with an account of human origins is yet to come, though he has already grasped desire’s dissimulating logic leading to sacrificial resolution as the price of a misunderstood collective stability. Here is the sacred social fact of a violent transcendence that the revealing of genuine transcendence undoes from within, disclosing both the true God and the truth about human existence. What is more, as the incisive reader of novels has become the great interpreter of myth because of what he discovered in the Bible, we find emerging in Girard’s early papers on Greek mythology a distinctive way of reading the Bible that would become his trademark.

CH A P TER 2

From Violence to Divinity

I am in search of the innocent victim in any historical, mythical and fictional account. —René Girard, Evolution and Conversion

Having discovered the borrowed nature of desire and its characteristic pathologies in a range of great—that is, profoundly self-­aware— modern literature, René Girard set out to pursue this rabbit down its burrow. He turned to anthropological and ethnographic analyses of human collectivity via the study of myth, in order to understand how mimetic desire is related to social order and disorder. From the outset, as was evident in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Girard demonstrated a refined understanding of the various stages and quirky manifestations of human desiring. But now it was necessary to move beyond his earlier literary “co-­researchers.”1 He went on to forge his own account of stabilizing communal structures, addressing the differences and distinctions that are central to the approach of French ethnological research with unique insight into the originary role of scapegoating. Scientific investigation thus reveals a functional sacred. In the prosaic logic of social prohibitions, the practical utility of ritual, and the only superficially diverse taxonomy of world mythologies, Girard finds not  25

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only a key to unlock the mystery of our origins, but also a privileged window onto our likely global future. Girard’s social-­scientific analysis is doubly remarkable for associating its key breakthrough with the Judeo-­Christian scriptures. These lay bare the dynamics of collective human meaning-­making, according to Girard, while also revealing the process of its undoing. Psychology and historiography thus enter into a profoundly fruitful relationship with anthropology and sociology via biblical hermeneutics. In Girard’s hands the scriptural augments the scientific, while the scientific reinforces the scriptural. Science thus joins scripture in pointing to a reality beyond the human “system” that is well-­meaningly if relentlessly subversive of that system. Understanding this fundamental connectedness of Girard’s scientific and biblical insights is essential for grasping the true distinctiveness of his method, and for understanding what a Girardian theology might be.

“Middle Girard”: The Functional Sacred Since it is not possible to observe the historical genesis of ritual sacrifice except by inference, the evidence for Girard’s conclusions is necessarily indirect. —David Humbert, Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock Because mimetic theory posits that myths attempt to conceal founding violence, mimetic theory has reason to believe that the evidence has already been tampered with. —Grant Kaplan, René Girard, Unlikely Apologist

This chapter introduces what we might call “middle Girard,” touching mostly on three significant books: La violence et le sacré (1972) (Violence and the Sacred, 1978), Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (1978) (Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 1987), and Le bouc émissaire (1982) (The Scapegoat, 1986). I will also pick up

From Violence to Divinity  27

a point or two from elsewhere and address Girard’s distinctive treatment of Friedrich Nietzsche. We recall from the previous chapter that the insights about sacrifice, Christ, and apocalypse usually associated with the major works of this middle period were found to be genuinely if incompletely present in “early Girard.” In Violence and the Sacred, Girard begins by setting out the necessary role of sacrifice for safely deflecting the otherwise-­unrestrained vengeance in human groups that predated the rise of legal and institutional protections.2 Violence is uniquely mimetic, says Girard, using his newly adopted and now characteristic word for borrowed desire. And he has come to see that “violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred,” referring to that array of supposedly supernatural forces perceived as threatening humanity prior to any understanding of purely human and natural causality.3 Impurity and taboo are explained for the first time in terms of the prudent avoidance of mimetic escalation toward violence, while Girard theorizes ritual as a strategy for heading off the recurrence of such violent crises.4 Contrary to the myths from which it emerges, Greek tragedy reveals for Girard the social crises that are allegorized as plagues and natural disasters in mythology, along with their typical resolution: “Where only shortly before a thousand individual conflicts had raged unchecked between a thousand enemy brothers, there now reappears a true community, united in its hatred for one alone of its number. All the rancors scattered at random among the divergent individuals . . . now converge on an isolated and unique figure, the surrogate victim.”5 Girard believes that this phenomenon of violent unanimity, with its echoes in modern lynchings and pogroms,6 “will . . . reveal itself as the fundamental phenomenon of primitive religion, although wherever it plays a crucial role it is completely, or almost completely, absorbed by the mythologized forms it engenders.”7 Archaic festivals (such as Mardi Gras) safely represent—that is, in licensed form—the sacrificial crisis along with its resolution. Their characteristic blurring of normal cultural boundaries and hierarchies recalls the collapse of differentiation8 that marks the emergence of mirror doubles and the destructive violence that threatens to overwhelm a pre­modern society, with familiar carnival figures such as the Guy and the piñata representing the

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sacrificial victim. Indeed, full-­blown Dionysian ritual culminates in somebody’s actual dismemberment.9 Girard thus identifies the sacred aspect of sacrifice in the resolution of group violence, so that violence is both disease and cure.10 This surrogate victim mechanism and its echoes constitute humanity’s way of doing culturally what animals do instinctively, in avoiding lethal intra­species conflict. Consequently, for Girard, “there is no society without religion because without religion society cannot exist.”11 His three religious pillars of taboo, ritual, and myth encode and preserve the violence-­based unanimity whereby mimetic crisis is resolved through sacrifice. In chapter 10 of Violence and the Sacred, Girard spells out how the primitive sacred is violence in its dual aspects of destruction and healing. He explains how a scapegoat absorbs the group’s escalating violence, thereafter coming to represent the cathartic resolution of that violence. So despite the variety of sacred manifestations—kings, mythic heroes, gods, deified ancestors—an arbitrarily chosen surrogate victim stands behind them all.12 Such cathartic, sacrificial “vi­ olence is venerated insofar as it offers men what little peace they can ever expect.”13 This “identity of violence and the sacred”14 is developed in later ritual substitutions for the founding act of generative violence: the original victim bears away the destructive violence of a community, while subsequent ritual substitutes for that original victim reproduce the pacific effect of their slaying.15 In a final chapter, titled “The Unity of All Rites,” Girard makes fully explicit his Durkheimian conviction that society begins with religion and, in what amounts to an exercise of achever Durkheim, he equates the birth of religion with the surrogate victim mechanism. This victim, according to Girard, “reconciles mimetic oppositions and assigns a sacrificial goal to the mimetic impulse. At the moment when differentiated unity is urgently needed and apparently impossible to obtain—that is, during a crescendo of reciprocal violence—the surrogate victim comes to the rescue.”16 In concluding, and having engaged with a number of alternative views along the way ( James George Frazer, Sigmund Freud, Claude Lévi-­Strauss), Girard is in no doubt about what he has achieved. “My theory is the first to offer an explanation of the primordial role that religion plays in primitive societies,”

From Violence to Divinity  29

he announces, “as well as of man’s ignorance of this role.”17 All the weight of sacred awe, communally reinforced, is in fact a technology for maintaining social stability in pre­modern contexts. Yet were that simple truth to be acknowledged, its efficacy would be compromised. I have been concentrating on the key features of Girard’s position as they emerge through a succession of case studies and reflections that make up Violence and the Sacred, though it is difficult to convey a sense of the cumulative quantity and quality of evidence to be found there. Yet that evidentiary weight is crucial to Girard, as he sets out the criteria to justify his proposal: Our theory should be approached, then, as one approaches any scientific hypothesis. The reader must ask himself whether it actually takes into account all the items it claims to cover; whether it enables him to assign to primitive institutions an origin, function, and structure that cohere to one another as well as to their overall context; whether it allows him to organize and assess the vast accumulation of ethnological data, and to do so in a truly economical manner, without recourse to “exceptions” and “aberrations.” Above all, he must ask himself whether this theory applies not in single, isolated instances but in every conceivable situation. Can he see the surrogate victim as that stone initially rejected by the builders, only to become the cornerstone of a whole mythic and ritualistic edifice? Or as the key that opens any religious text, revealing its innermost workings and rendering it forever accessible to the human intellect?18

In Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, in conversation with two sympathetic psychiatrists, Girard delivers his magnum opus. Two sections hence I will come to some new ideas on the nature of desire that Girard sets out there, which arise in tandem with his developing picture of religion and its Judeo-­Christian transformation. In light of those developments, Girard’s insights into Nietzsche and secular modernity can best be understood (which will be my goal in the final section of this chapter). However, the major new contribution in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World concerns the

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Judeo-­Christian breakthrough. Girard’s following book, The Scapegoat, further develops his new understanding of how re-­ligio works, and of its untying according to the Judeo-­Christian scriptures. Regarding religion, I first mention Girard’s identification of the slain victim as the transcendental signifier that initiates human cultural development (in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, book 1). The crowd becomes more and more undifferentiated as it is swept further and further into mimetic crisis, to the point that it spontaneously “lynches” an arbitrary victim. Whereupon, the mob is awestruck as the corpse of that slain victim is distinguished from the undifferentiated collective, thus attracting the world’s first non-­ instinctual attention. This “victim will be imbued with the emotions provoked by the crisis and its resolution” because of “the spectacular and liberating reversal that has occurred at that instant.”19 Thus the victim, who is set upon by the mob and declared guilty in the act of being lynched, is then resurrected in the mind of the mob to become its savior. Hence both blame and deliverance are ascribed to the victim. Girard certainly recognizes the need for a prolonged gestation in prehistory before the signifying impact of this founding event can develop into cultural institutions. Nevertheless, “the double transference will determine the only possible meaning to take shape under the circumstances, and this will constitute the sacred and confer total responsibility for the event on to the victim.”20 Thus Girard’s Durk­ heimian conviction that the religious is the social—which he views as the greatest anthropological insight of our time21—is now grounded in a new account of hominization and cultural formation based on the scapegoat as humanity’s Ur-­symbol (more on this shortly, and in the following chapter). A second significant development concerning the social functioning of religion is “middle Girard” designating certain anti-­Semitic persecution texts from medieval France as myths that have failed. These accounts of Jewish responsibility for natural disasters, though with hardly any hint of the sacred remaining in how Jews are portrayed, show that the aforementioned “double transference” onto the victim is no longer working. The mystification and méconnaissance (mis-­knowing) characteristic of primal religion, concealing actual

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victims behind mythological figures who are excoriated then deified, is succumbing to desacralization, and from this emerges our modern world.22 In chapter 2 of The Scapegoat, Girard develops this insight to identify three stereotypes of persecution in medieval persecution texts: the crisis, the crime, and the criteria—all drawn from the Greek word krino, to judge. These stereotypes link a medieval Jew to an early-­ modern witch to a figure like Oedipus in mythology by presenting (1)  a sacrificial crisis portrayed in allegorical terms as a natural blight or cataclysm threatening to destroy the community; (2) a crime involving the fundamental destabilizing of proper social order and the differentiations that maintain it, such as parricide or incest; and (3) a criterion whereby attention is drawn to the victim: a distinguishing mark, as in the typical limps and disfigurements of mythic heroes, or something different about the victim’s origin or self-­presentation. For Girard, all this linguistic, mythological, textual, and historical evidence reveals actual victims buried in mythology. In so doing it “implies an as yet concealed relationship between collective persecutions and the culture as a whole.” He adds that “if such a relationship exists, it has never been explained by any linguist, philosopher, or politician.”23 With these two developments, Girard’s account of religion and culture is complete. The Scapegoat continues with a detailed parsing of world mythology, revealing his three stereotypes of persecution at work, though under erasure.24 The cumulative power of such explorations, here and elsewhere, gives credence to Girard’s claim that he “solves the fundamental enigma of all mythology.”25 He succeeds where Casaubon—George Eliot’s fictional scholar—collapses in defeat. It comes as no surprise that Girard’s ironclad confidence in his account of religion and culture is widely derided. So, for instance, the Wittgensteinian philosopher Peter Winch, in his review of The Scapegoat, holds tight to the linguistic turn and dismisses any possibility of such comprehensiveness. He blames Girard for sinning against the canons of relativism and the perspectival nature of truth. Winch declares Girard to be worse than Casaubon, and madder.26 Girard, however, dismisses all such “small intellectual ambitions” with contempt, demonstrating a palpable confidence in the mastery he

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has achieved. “Myths that contain exactly what is needed to reflect a pattern of unconscious persecution I take at face value and regard as suggestive of the true nature of mythology,” he announces, while “myths that contain something else and do not clearly support my case I regard as having been tampered with.”27

“Middle Girard”: From the Sacred to the Secular via the Prophets and the Gospels Faithful to the logic of sacrifice, those who have refused the invitation to the Kingdom are obliged to turn against Jesus. They can hardly fail to see in him the sworn enemy and corruptor of the very cultural order that they are vainly attempting to restore. —René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World Children recognize the difference between the two religions because violence makes them afraid and Jesus does not make them afraid, but the wise and clever cannot see the difference. —René Girard, The Scapegoat

This whole violent mechanism of the false sacred is revealed in the context of its overcoming. The unquestioned guilt of the victim in mythology is clearly breaking down by the dawn of modernity. The Jews and witches vilified in persecution texts can no longer be so obviously regarded as guilty. Girard believes that older mythology, too, will soon yield up the bones of culture’s formative victims. The unifying capacity of myth and ritual is thus draining away, as the power to sacralize a victim subsides into our modern incapacity for anything but hatred toward enemies.28 Today, as Girard concludes, “we cannot conceive of distortions or persecution powerful enough to consecrate the victim.”29 And this desacralizing, secularizing impulse we owe to the Bible.

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In book 2 of Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, Girard turns first to the Hebrew scriptures with an eye to their mytho­logi­ cal elements, employing the reading strategy that typified his wider study of mythology. Girard also offers many fascinating new takes on familiar biblical texts, here as elsewhere, such as the mark of Cain being a prophylactic against the crisis of indistinguishable doubles and Noah’s flood as an allegory of just such violent mimetic crises of undifferentiation.30 The psalms have a particular importance for Girard, as the first texts in the history of religion to represent the victim, whose innocence is protested in the face of persecutors—an interpretative lesson that Girard first learned from Raymund Schwager.31 With the prophets, however, all three pillars of sacrificial religion and the false sacred are called into question: mythology, the sacrificial cult, and taboo (conceived as a primitive version of law). By the last of these, Girard has in mind the way in which law functions as a protection against anything that might collapse the many distinctions and differentiations that are presupposed by any stable social order. The obsessive-­seeming attention of the book of Leviticus to such considerations provides a good example. All these expedients upon which archaic societies rely are entirely dependent on a sufficiently terrible conception of the sacred, fit to constrain the sort of errant behavior that can escalate to the point of undoing such societies. From Girard’s perspective, however, the time for such projections has come to an end. He points beyond the archaic sacred and its mythology, identifying its inherent sense of divine vengeance as nothing more than a projection of human vengeance. Girard affirms the superiority of the Old Testament law and prophets over all the forms of mythology—as representing a genuine signpost to the gospel and a praefiguratio Christi. As such, a point of no return has been reached, with the spell of sacrificial victimage broken. Yet the job remains to be finished, beyond this “first gradual withering of sacrificial resources.”32 So, for Girard, “at the very moment when this adventure approaches its resolution Jesus arrives on the scene—Jesus as he appears in the Gospels.”33 This is a necessary step, not least because divine violence is never entirely disavowed in the Hebrew scriptures, so that “only the texts

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of the Gospels manage to achieve what the Old Testament leaves incomplete.”34 For Girard it is Jesus’s mission to reveal the sacrificial truth of religion and culture that has been “hidden since the foundation of the world” (Matt. 13:35).35 This whole underlying order of mimetic violence and its mimetically murderous resolution is what “Satan” means, according to Girard, and the foundations of this culture are in fact the tombs hidden underfoot, as referred to in Luke 11:44.36 “That is what the religion that comes from man amounts to,” Girard concludes, “as opposed to the religion that comes from God.”37 Central to this revelation for Girard are the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s passion, which gains its transformative power precisely because it is so fully “connected with every ritual on the entire planet.”38 Consequently, “by submitting to violence, Christ reveals and uproots the structural matrix of all religion.”39 Hence Girard insists that the gospel mandates an entirely non­sacrificial and nonviolent reading of reconciliation, despite historical Christianity preferring sacrificial versions of atonement that have done much to discredit it in the modern world.40 (I will say more about sacrifice and atonement in chapter 8.) So, unlike reconciliation achieved sacrificially according to the false sacred, the gospel strikes Girard as most resembling a form of practical atheism.41 But it is a reconciling “atheism” that remains divinely revelatory—for Girard, “this reconciliation allows God to reveal himself as he is, for the first time in human history.”42 A role for resurrection emerges at this stage in Girard’s oeuvre. In Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, Girard gives resurrection an important confirmatory role in the exposure of sacred victimage. He points to the moment in Matthew’s passion narrative when the graves start to open (Matt. 27:52–53). For Girard, “these are the victims who have been assassinated since the foundation of the world, who begin to return upon this earth and make themselves known.”43 Two decades on, Girard adds that “only [ Jesus’s] Resurrection, because it enlightens the disciples, reveals completely the things hidden since the foundation of the world.”44 Here, the confirmatory role of the resurrection for Girard becomes an essential mediation of Jesus’s impact on those who followed. Without it, the false sacred would not have been overcome. Indeed, for Girard, “the resurrection

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shows that scapegoating is a prison from which the apostles would never have broken free without divine help.”45 The new anti­sacrificial religion to which Girard testifies is also apocalyptic, and here an important theme from “early Girard” receives further development. “The discovery of sacrificial foundations has made apocalyptic a central part of his thought,” observes Anthony Bartlett, “as a real anthropological category arising directly from the revelation of the victim and its destabilizing impact on the world.”46 Girard views modernity’s “lengthy decomposition of the city of man”47 as the gospel’s desacralizing triumph over sacrificial order. What is also overcome is the traditional understanding of apocalyptic in terms of divine violence. Now the Bible’s apocalyptic texts, “which are either fetishized or held up to ridicule, never deciphered,”48 can reveal a meaning that is not structured by sacrifice as it functions according to the false sacred. This is because the cross has triumphed over the New Testament’s “powers and principalities,” which control the world through a bond of sacrificial violence (Col. 2:13–15). For Girard, referring to this Colossians passage, the bond that stood against us with its demands is human culture, which is the terrifying reflection of our own violence. It bears against us a witness that we do not even notice. And the very ignorance in which we are plunged seats the principalities and powers upon their thrones. By dissipating all this ignorance, the Cross triumphs over the powers and brings them into ridicule, and exposes the pitiful secret of the mechanism of sacralization. The Cross derives its dissolving capacity from the fact that it makes plain the workings of what can only be seen—after the Crucifixion—as evil.49

The apocalyptic dimension of all this, according to Girard, is God’s doing through the disruptive effect on culture of Jesus’s crucifixion. Yet it only becomes something terrible through subsequent human agency—or lack of it. The intervening god, whose false-­sacred power is rooted in sacrificial pacification, is displaced by the cross and resurrection of Jesus. Hence “we know that we are by ourselves,” as Girard explains, “with no father in the sky to punish us and interfere

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with our paltry business”—that is, no more false-­sacred deity. As for divine violence, it survives only in the mythic worldview “to which modern imagination remains strangely attached.”50 Instead, for Girard, the “sacred violence” is all ours. Hence the kingdom of God is both opportunity and obligation: an opportunity to be freed from stability-­ maintaining violence and the obligation to seize that opportunity.51 Otherwise, while God remains nonviolent, it will be escalating human violence that eventually reveals the truth about God’s kingdom and what it demands of us. Accordingly, for Girard, we now have in our hands all the threads of the logic that transforms the announcement of the Kingdom into an announcement of the Apocalypse: if men turn down the peace Jesus offers them— a peace which is not derived from violence and that, by virtue of this fact, passes human understanding, the effect of the gospel revelation will be made manifest through violence, through a sacrificial and cultural crisis whose radical effect must be unprecedented since there is no longer any sacralized victim to stand in the way of its consequences.52

Girard says that he is not competent to go beyond such anthropological considerations in order to address questions of faith and grace,53 though who would deny that these conclusions represent a significant contribution to theology on Girard’s part? So, let me offer some further theological considerations. While Girard does not characterize the méconnaissance that precedes revelation of the false sacred as itself evil, any return to it after what the crucifixion has revealed is certainly reckoned as such.54 This assessment raises questions about God’s role in earlier history when the false-­sacred dispensation still held sway (more on this in the following chapter). Likewise, Girard maintains the necessary role of Jesus’s death for the world’s deliverance from violence, despite his commitment to what J. Denny Weaver calls nonviolent atonement. Girard argues thus because “a nonviolent deity can only signal his existence to mankind by having himself driven out by violence—by

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demonstrating that he is not able to establish himself in the kingdom of violence.”55 This is how Girard approaches the traditional affirmation of Jesus’s virginal conception, which he likens to Paul’s description of Jesus as the second Adam. It attests to Jesus’s independence from the violence that Girard has identified at the root of human culture. Girard contrasts the sexual violence and monstrous births found in mythological stories about gods impregnating women—in which the orgasm that appeases the god is seen as a metaphor for collective violence—with the deconstructed mythology of a non­forced, non­ sexual virginal conception and the gentle accompanying imagery of Jesus’s Christmas crib.56 So, for Girard, “saying that Christ is God, born of God, and saying that he has been conceived without sin is stating over again that he is completely alien to the world of violence within which humankind has been imprisoned ever since the foundation of the world: that is to say, ever since Adam.”57 Everywhere we look, we are finding in Girard’s elaboration of mimetic theory significant resources for the reappraisal and reaffirmation of traditional theological orthodoxy in nonviolent terms—an orthodoxy that emerges for Girard “in, with, and under” a non­positivist, non­reductive, social-­scientific account. On this basis, Girard laments the various regressions of historical Christianity to a sacrificial version of its best self.58 However, Girard also criticizes the way in which secular modernity began to shore itself up by sacrificing religiously based laws, and indeed by sacrificing Christianity itself. In a 1975 letter to Schwager, he ruefully concludes that the last protection offered to society by the religious law is the way that society is now unified in opposition against it.59 Likewise, “we can only agree among ourselves in attacking the Gospel,” Girard observes, “which by a wonderfully revealing symbolism is in the process of becoming our scapegoat.”60 The similarity of law and gospel is emphasized here, which no doubt points to their joint function (albeit quite differently achieved) of averting sacrificial crisis. Indeed, Girard goes so far as to state that “Christ is the truth of the laws of all societies contrary to Freud,

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Nietzsche, and all the moderns who see only oppression in prohibitions.”61 And we know that rejecting the protection of either the law or the gospel, given Girard’s apocalyptic reading of history, will not end well. In the second half of The Scapegoat, Girard adds rich detail to the picture that is emerging, based on close readings of a number of passion and passion-­related texts. There is too much detail to address in brief compass.62 However, the intentionality of the Gospel texts as engines of revelation and conversion is clearly emphasized. And some important developments are on offer. Girard points out how victims in antiquity often found support from one group, in opposition to another group, whereas Jesus was betrayed by everyone, including his supporters.63 And yet “they know not what they do” in their sacrificial unanimity, as Jesus acknowledges from the cross (Luke 23:34), in what Girard regards as history’s first ever definition of the unconscious.64 Yet he opposes any fetishizing of the passion, insisting that Jesus’s sacrifice identifies him with every other innocent victim65—a point the Gospels themselves make by providing a parallel sacrificial account involving John the Baptist. In addition, Girard draws on the passion narratives to further develop his understanding of mimetic desire. These reveal to him that “the unanimous mimeticism of the scapegoat is the true ruler of human society.”66 Here an “early Girard” insight is strengthened: that sacrifice is inscribed in the logic of internal mediation. He illustrates this from the macabre account of John the Baptist’s sacrifice. The Herod/Herodias dyad represents a competitive state of fascination over the same object—the scandal-­invoking figure of John the Baptist—yet beyond a certain pitch of mimeticism this object is lost sight of and rivalry concerning the Baptist’s fate takes over. Girard thus sees the Gospels as highlighting the unfailing drive of mimeticism toward the sort of unanimity revealed in the Baptist’s fate and that of Jesus. For Girard, then, “this is the terrible paradox of human desires. They can never be reconciled in the preservation of their object but only through its destruction; they can only find agreement at the expense of a victim.”67

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In subsequent chapters an important theological challenge raised by such passages will be taken up. Does this almost mechanical inevitability of violent mimetic unanimity, to which Girard appears to be committed, mean that human reality is agonistic to its core and that humans have none of the free will and innate openness to God that Christian orthodoxy affirms? It is enough for now to say that if we remain caught up in mimetic rivalry, then there are certain inevitabilities. However, Girard invites us to choose Christ’s non­rivalrous sharing of his Father’s life-­giving desire as our model, and to do that is to enable a very different outcome. There is a further development to be noted in The Scapegoat concerning the resurrection. Girard realizes that Jesus’s resurrection is being distinguished in the Gospels from what a typically pagan, false-­sacred understanding of resurrection would entail. Herod and the crowd begin looking for John the Baptist revived, which is what a false-­sacred mindset would expect to see in light of the Baptist having been sacrificed, through double transference onto such a victim. Jesus underwent an entirely new type of resurrection, however, taking place outside the violent system of cultural meaning-­making.68 Girard sharpened this insight subsequently, explaining that Jesus’s resurrection was precisely not the contrivance of any human group because it came as an unexpected surprise. Hence Peter’s testimony that “God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36)—that is, God has made him Lord and Christ, not the familiar human agency that is the false sacred, which has finally been brought to light as a result of Jesus’s death. Thus the concrete reality of Jesus’s resurrection is entailed by the logic of Girard’s account. He does not follow a typical liberal trend in modern theology by regarding Jesus’s resurrection as nothing more than a metaphor for the birth of Christian faith. It became important for Girard in later years to emphasize this distinction, insisting that the resurrection was an objective reality involving more than Rudolf Bultmann allowed, whose Jesus had “risen into the kerygma.”69 Apart from which, Easter would be reduced to a pagan resurrection: to the birth of group solidarity out of prior sacrifice, which is then back-­projected onto the victim.70

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It is in these terms that Girard affirms “the supernatural”—he has nothing if not goodwill toward Christian orthodoxy. But he insists on demarcating the supernatural in rational terms that place it within the ambit of scientific inquiry. Girard thinks that the most miraculous and supernatural aspect of the Gospels is their revelation of true divinity through outing and overcoming the false sacred. He illustrates the point with an example, singling out the Gerasene demoniac story (Mark 5:1–17) as the most miraculous (i.e., the most supernaturally freighted) of Gospel texts. In Girard’s hands, however, it reveals how a stable communal system, built on the sacrificial exclusion of a “tame” demoniac, is undone by Jesus, so that the sacrificial order is turned upside down (a herd of pigs goes over a cliff and drowns, reversing the typical scenario of a victim at the hands of an ancient sacrificial mob). As the satanic show seeks to co-­opt Jesus, which is also the point of his temptations (Matt. 4:8–10), instead we see the whole false-­sacred reality exposed and disempowered.71 Here is an affirmation of the supernatural, albeit entirely in terms of mimetic theory. This perspective on the supernatural as a way of perceiving God at work within the weave of natural causality recalls the kenotic (self-­emptying) theme in scripture and theology (see, e.g., Phil. 2:5–11), and with it the Thomistic double agency tradition in Catholic thought. I will be associating mimetic theory with this particular theological arc from chapter 5 on. Girard does not limit revelation of the scapegoat mechanism to Christ and his passion, affirming that “innocent victims were rehabilitated before Christianity. Socrates, Antigone, and others are rightly mentioned in this context. There are aspects similar to the Christian understanding of the martyr, but they are isolated in nature and do not affect any society in its totality.”72 So the criterion for “Christian uniqueness” in Girard is not originality but reach and impact (more on this in chapter 8). This effect does not even depend on the explicit naming of Jesus, according to Girard, but “only our actual attitude when confronted with victims determines our relationship with the exigencies brought about by the revelation which can become effective without any mention of Christ himself.”73 For example, we see such an impact in the rise of science, which can only inquire into

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law­like causality once the search for victims to blame for unwelcome natural phenomena has been seen through and abandoned.74 Girard understands the Holy Spirit—the Spirit of Truth overcoming falsehood—to be the vector of this reach and the carrier of this impact, “working in history to reveal what Jesus has already revealed, the mechanism of the scapegoat, the genesis of all mythology, the non-­existence of all gods of violence.”75 Witch hunters, persecuting totalitarian bureaucrats, and all religious, political, ideological, and managerial purveyors of false gods are thus put on notice. Yet such people can also be transformed by the Holy Spirit to set their religious distortions aside. As an example, Girard identifies Paul (formerly Saul), the reformed persecutor of Christians.76

“Middle Girard”: Unfolding Insights on Humanity and Mimesis The mimetic is . . . the real unconscious. —René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World

Girard in this “middle” period also develops his mimetic account of human origins and motivations. This involves a new and bold gambit, issuing no doubt from his growing confidence about what mimetic theory had become capable of. I refer to Girard’s first foray into paleontology and hominization. On the journey from animal to human, he proposes, the mimetic nature of animals passes a threshold after which properly human desire can emerge. Then, with mimetic rivalry and the emergence of doubling, Girard seems to be saying that an alter ego comes to be reflected within the self, which is none other than the reflexive consciousness.77 As for the birth of collective human reality, we have Girard’s account of the sacrificial victim as the transcendental signifier, apart from which no further symbolic differentiation and hence no language and culture could have arisen. In the following chapter, we will begin to see how “late Girard” attempts to consolidate these first steps in theorizing hominization within the

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framework of theological orthodoxy. But, for now, we note Girard’s further insights into mimetic theory, as he explores the pathological extremes of metaphysical desire and ontological sickness. These considerations will lead to one more key aspect of “middle Girard,” with his critique of Nietzsche. Girard’s developing presentation of the modern Western psychological experience continues in book 3 of Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Once again, it involves integrating the major aspects of mimetic theory. Modern travails take on an apocalyptic cast for Girard, as we have seen from the beginning of his oeuvre, with these apocalyptic implications now revealed as deriving from the Gospels. He links today’s increased prevalence of psychopathological symptoms to advancing desacralization, which of course takes place under the impetus of Judeo-­Christian revelation.78 The big contribution here is to read psychopathology interdividually, beyond Freud, so that what depth psychology put forth in interior and unconscious terms is reinterpreted by Girard as interpersonal and mimetic.79 The dynamics of metaphysical desire, familiar from “early Girard,” are now explored from a new angle. Essentially, it is the internalizing of rivalrous doubles and obstacles that edge interdividual dynamics toward the various neuroses and psychoses that proliferate in modern societies. Madness thus emerges as a socially sanctioned means for refusing to integrate the rivalrous doubles, and more generally as an unwillingness to face the truth of our rivalrous mimetic condition, which would entail the alarmingly unstructured prospect of living without rivalry.80 The alternative, for Girard, is provided by the “reason that must expel its own caricature as madness in order not to understand itself too well.”81 Further exploring such mimetic artifices, he links narcissism—a strategy for maintaining the illusion of metaphysical sufficiency—with the mood of modern nihilism and the avant-­garde, along with revolutionary movements that end up oppressing rather than liberating.82 Hence Girard retrieves madness from its accustomed status as a sui generis abnormality to relocate it on the normal spectrum of mainstream mimetic dynamics. This placing of madness and sanity on a sliding mimetic scale is evident in Girard’s remarks on the significant extent of modern creativity.

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Where the un­integrated mimetic dynamics of rivalry do not lead to psychological collapse, despite modernity’s increasing lack of sacrificial protection, then the unprecedented harvest of modern creativity is released.83 In this extended discussion, we see Girard’s dual emphasis on modern humanity’s full and unprotected immersion in mimetic currents, along with the possibility of coming to our senses and returning to our right mind. His account of Jesus and the Gerasene demoniac, mentioned earlier, is thus a fit story for our times. Jesus’s desire replaces the desire of the crowd that has condemned the designated outsider to his madness—a madness that internalized the crowd’s scapegoating of the one-­usefully-­deemed-­to-­be-­other as a necessary requirement for maintaining the status quo. Girard’s concluding chapter in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World is on how to pass beyond mimetic entrapment. Conversion of our perspective is the key. It lets us escape the rivalry that grows into a chronically self-­defining condition and also the burden of an illusory self-­sufficiency.84 Once again, the Bible provides a diagnostic schema for Girard as he assesses this contemporary cultural condition: “All members of the post-­modern family file in behind the hearse that leads the way to the places described by the prophet Jere­ miah,” he declares, referring to “the desert generated by idolatrous hatred.”85 For Girard, benefits that accrued thanks to the false sacred are now largely exhausted. The God of the Bible is the rock of ages to which Girard redirects us,86 though in his apocalyptic reading of modernity he recognizes that this rock is not only there as a reassuring symbol of stability. It becomes a stumbling block for idolaters and a wrecking ball swung at the altars where innocents were sacrificed to ensure communal survival. Yet for all this urgent, almost quasi-­violent social transformation that the Gospels must inevitably unleash, the God set forth in them “has not the slightest violence in him.”87 Jesus’s yoke is easy and his burden is light, as Girard reaffirms, understanding this to mean that there is no rivalry in Jesus.88 Jesus can be the model of desire who does not lead us into mimetic rivalry, let alone into violence. So, it is that moderns who lack their pre­modern forebears’

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false-­sacred protection from outer and inner destabilization can still be delivered from rivalrous mimetic entrapment. The dry bones can respond to the Spirit’s breath, according to the image from Ezekiel 37 with which Girard ends his magnum opus.89 What is not possible for humans in the face of modernity’s characteristic threats remains possible for God.

“Middle Girard”: Nietzsche, Modernity, and Madness The “God is dead” which circulates in this world does not sum up [Nietzsche’s] Madman’s words, it grossly falsifies them. —René Girard, “The Founding Murder in the Philosophy of Nietzsche” Nietzsche was a gambler who sought all the means available to escape from the Christian revelation hidden in the fragment 125 of The Gay Science. —Martino Pesenti Gritti, “Nietzsche’s Double Binds”

To conclude this exploration of “middle Girard,” before moving on to “late Girard” in the following chapter, I introduce an example linking mimesis, modernity, and madness that rivals the importance of Fyodor Dostoyevsky for “early Girard.” This time there is an extra dimension: the “novelistic conversion” that brought Dostoyevsky to his senses did not take place in the case referred to here, let alone any Christian conversion. On the contrary, according to Girard, Nietzsche combined a historical breakthrough in the understanding of Christianity with an ambivalence toward it that eventually caused him to become psychologically undone. Like Dostoyevsky and Freud, Nietzsche is a pivotal figure for Girard as he develops mimetic theory. Nietzsche is fully aware of the false sacred as only Christian revelation could have made him, yet stoutly resistant to the offer of new life in Christ that would have ended his preference for the archaic sacred. Beginning

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with a brief reference in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, and refined in subsequent articles and books, “middle Girard” regards Nietzsche as a stillborn prophet of the gospel’s implications for modernity. Girard points out signs of Nietzsche’s impending psychosis via the presence of divinities and scapegoats in Ecce Homo, concluding that “you cannot espouse Dionysus, in the way that Nietzsche does, outside any form of ritual, without exposing yourself to the unrestrained release of the mania.”90 Dostoyevsky awoke to his own personal state of mimetic entrapment, and exposed it in Notes from the Underground, whereas Nietzsche did not—though he knew and admired that particular work.91 In a volume of essays from 1978, To Double Business Bound, Girard describes Nietzsche’s cultivation of intellectual and artistic superiority in terms of will to power, which he understands as “the ideology of mimetic desire.” Here we see Nietzsche submitting to the ressentiment that he deplores (which for Girard is “really a thwarted and traumatized desire”) and directing it against the composer Richard Wagner, who was the model of his own desire. Girard thinks that Nietzsche is seeking to rival Wagner’s own personal cult, based at Bayreuth.92 In a 1984 essay “Dionysus versus the Crucified,” re­titled “Nietzsche versus the Crucified” for its inclusion in The Girard Reader, we find Girard’s key insight on the matter. It concerns Nietzsche’s prophetic grasp of Christianity’s true nature. Contrary to an influential reading of Christianity as just one more entrant in the parade of mythology through history (a misreading that extends from Celsus in the second century to Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell in the twentieth), Nietzsche recognized that Christ was different from the mythological deities because of his concern for the victim. Yet Nietzsche regarded this as a weakness, adding that such solicitude for the weak points to something that Christians have secretly resented.93 Hence Christian ressentiment, according to Nietzsche, is to be understood as “the manner in which the spirit of vengeance survives the impact of Christ and turns the Gospel to its own use.”94 Here Girard identifies a major aspect of the developing mimetic toxicity that he has been tracing in secular modernity—anticipating, too, a fuller apocalyptic reading of

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modern history by highlighting the pagan deities after which nuclear weapons are named (Pluto, Poseidon, Ariadne, etc.).95 This escalation of mutually resentful antagonism without the protection of scapegoating is something that Nietzsche warned about in his famous account of “God’s” collective murder in Aphorism #125 from The Gay Science—about God being dead, and we having killed him.96 Yet this is not the “death of God” tout simple, as welcomed by Nietzsche’s followers in mid-­twentieth-­century radical Protestant theology. Rather, for Girard, “the ‘death of God’ is nothing . . . but a misrepresentation of the tremendous desacralizing process brought about by the Christian revelation. The gods who are dying are the sacrificial gods, really, not the Christian God, who has nothing to do with them.”97 This reading explains the “new festivals of atonement” that Nietzsche’s madman believes to be necessary, precisely because the old false-sacred deity that could protect us is in fact the “god” who has been killed off. What is more, it is thanks to Christ and the advent of Christianity that the “eternal return” (i.e., of the old sacrificial religion) has been brought to an end.98 This breakthrough in understanding represents a major historical moment, along with a triumph of biblical interpretation on Nietzsche’s part. For Girard, paradoxically, Nietzsche is the one thinker in the modern world whose work did achieve something that the Christian thinkers have always failed to achieve. They have never dared. He put his finger on that “sword” that Jesus said he brought, the sword destructive of human culture, the sword no human being can fail to dread and resent even though—or is it because?—it belongs to what Pascal calls l’ordre de la charité.99

In a paper from the same period, titled “The Founding Murder in the Philosophy of Nietzsche” (1985), Girard mocks his own idée fixe in Nietzsche’s own terms (“the collective murder—my own personal eternal recurrence”),100 but that does not stop him from presenting his central idea with renewed force. Having realized that “the eternal recurrence is the past which Christ has abolished,”101 Girard nevertheless declares that the rationalists and the atheists

From Violence to Divinity  47

are wrong about religion being finished.102 Rather, the false sacred will seek to return in a new form, as Nietzsche hoped and as history has revealed to be the case. But its success will be limited. This is because the old religious world has been spun out of its orbit since the founding murder was revealed by Christ—who, “breaking thereby the mainspring of the eternal recurrence, leads us this time to the idea of an end without a [new] beginning.”103 So Girard’s apocalyptic theme gains greater traction. We are now in the foothills of Battling to the End, with its frankly terrifying vision of where human history is likely to be heading, and why. In a lecture titled “Nietzsche and Contradiction” (1986), Girard inquires after Nietzsche on the cusp of his insanity, at the stage when he claims to be both Dionysus and the Crucified. Girard has obviously been reflecting, in light of his own understanding of madness, on how Nietzsche must have been unable to reconcile mimetic doubles within his own self. And here they are, Dionysus and Christ. Given Nietzsche’s stated position this juxtaposition seems counterintuitive. But Girard finds the crucial piece of evidence for his explanation of Nietzsche’s madness—his “smoking gun”—in the latter’s notebooks. There he discovers Nietzsche’s uncharacteristically ambiva­lent response to Wagner’s sympathetic take on Christianity in Parsifal. Nietzsche appears to welcome the Christian compassion evoked by Wagner’s prelude to Parsifal, referring to its “dreadful certainty,” its “indescribable expression of greatness,” its “somber and melancholy vision,” beyond anything he had found in Protestantism—though this lapse from resentful demystification of Christianity did not make it past Nietzsche’s sister, who ensured its exclusion from the posthumously published Will to Power.104 Yet for Girard this sympathetic fragment provides the key to Nietzsche’s madness: The will to power acquires its significance through the difference between Dionysus and the Crucified, which is the difference between Nietzsche and Wagner, and the plunge into madness is the final confusion of that difference, the shift from Dionysus versus the Crucified to Dionysius and the Crucified. When this difference collapses, Nietzsche goes mad. . . . The presence of even one

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single pro-­Parsifal and pro-­compassion fragment confirms that Nietzsche’s intellectual life is like a pendulum that oscillates madly not only between Wagner and Nietzsche but between Dionysus and the Crucified. Between the two antipodes the oscillation is frantic throughout his whole career, even though Nietzsche tries fiercely to suppress it, and his writings, being the instrument of that suppression, almost always recall a needle firmly planted at the same extremity of the dial. The function of the writer in Nietzsche is to convince himself and us that the opposite opinions from the pro-­Parsifal ones are the only ones that enter his mind. . . . The madness is an integral part of the Nietzschean adventure; the thinker overturns the pendulum of his own thought in order to prevent further oscillations and the intolerable suffering that accompanies them. In order not to surrender to Wagner, or to Christianity, Nietzsche upsets the applecart of his thought. The text we have read throws light on the genesis of the final breakdown which is not as unrelated to the intellectual and spiritual life of the writer as most Nietzscheans would have us believe.105

In my previous book I speculated as to whether the incident that provoked Nietzsche’s descent into madness can be read along these lines.106 In a Turin street, Nietzsche witnessed a horse being beaten and rushed forward to protect it. I was pleased to find my instinct confirmed by the Italian Girardian scholar Giuseppe Fornari. His book, A God Torn to Pieces, is about Nietzsche sacrificing himself to madness. Fornari develops Girard’s interpretation, which is based on conflicting mimetic doubles—with Christ as the white whale that Nietzsche’s Captain Ahab had to be rid of, drawing so much of Europe to its death after him.107 Fornari is persuaded that Nietzsche must have sensed the truth of suffering in the beaten horse, such as he had long suffered himself and exorcised in the worst way: in the suffering of the substitute victim that he had long sought to have die in place of himself. Now that all is lost, he can

From Violence to Divinity  49

recognize such suffering. It seems reasonable to conclude that this was the only way for him to have access to a feeling of compassion, so long denied.108

Here was an instinctively compassionate act, likely to have involved the same sort of reaction that James Alison recognizes in Luke’s Good Samaritan parable (Luke 10:25–37). There, despite barriers of taboo and exclusion, the Samaritan found himself compelled to act. The Greek word used is splanchnizesthai, normally translated as “was moved to pity.” Alison offers “was gut-­wrenched” as a better rendering; he understands this experience as the mark of having come to dwell inside God’s compassion.109 Was it this irruption of Christlike compassion that brought Nietzsche undone, faced by that scene in a Turin street? And this despite all his prior efforts to resist the claims of Christ—something so different from the increasingly grandiose self-­perception revealed in Nietzsche’s writing during his Turin sojourn. It is the struggle between Christ, by whom Girard sees Nietzsche to have been secretly (and ashamedly) moved, and the eternal return of the Dionysian, which Nietzsche sees as having been derailed though not halted by the gospel. Nietzsche’s madness, as a strategy to avoid having to resolve this conflict of internalized mimetic doubles, proves prophetic for Girard of a wider struggle in secular modernity. Years later, Girard describes this strategy as “a properly Luciferian error.” Nietzsche refuses the opportunity to be “light bearer” for the truth of the victim that he perceives—a truth that remains opaque to atheist ethnologists, as indeed to many Christians. Girard describes the consequences for Nietzsche as prophetic: To understand that the twentieth century and its genocides, far from killing Christianity, make its truth all the more dazzling, you have just to read Nietzsche from the proper angle and situate all the disasters caused by our Dionysian and sacrificial choices along the axis of his writings, the first of those disasters being the madness that was getting ready to swoop down on the thinker

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himself—a madness every bit as significant as the political and historical insanity that followed.110

* * *

We should be clear about how distinctive all this is methodologically, and especially with an eye to theology. In Girard’s hands, “the Christian text returns in a completely new light—not at all buttressed by some existing science that would be exterior to it, but as identical with the knowledge of man that is surfacing in the world today. The Christian text is this knowledge.”111 Mimetic theory is interwoven with scriptural wisdom. It is not only compatible with Christian orthodoxy but also freshly illuminating of it. This recalls the defining Catholic synergy between faith and reason. More on this in subsequent chapters.

CH A P TER 3

From Hominization to Apocalypse

In these first overview chapters we have progressed from “early Girard” to “middle Girard”: from breakthrough insights into human desire unearthed in the modern European novel, via Greek tragedy and its dissent from mythological solidarity, to the elaboration of a scapegoat-­based mechanism that has minted the two-­sided coin of culture and religion, thence finally to the potentially apocalyptic running-­down of that mechanism along a secularizing arc. This was worked out in dialogue with the social sciences, though the key to understanding history was provided by the Judeo-­Christian scriptures. Hints of these developments and their implications for modernity were identified from the start in René Girard’s oeuvre. However, Girard continued to refine, extend, and apply mimetic theory in no­ table ways, following on from Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World and The Scapegoat. In this chapter “late Girard” will be set out according to four broad themes. First, his brief, earlier Darwinian reflections on human origins in light of mimetic theory are extended. Second, God’s presence in prehistory and antiquity is considered, when scapegoating and its religio-­cultural legacy held sway, but also whenever false-­sacred violence has recurred against the grain of Judeo-­Christian revelation. Third, we note Girard’s stunning reappraisal of sacrifice, which before  51

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the 1990s he had viewed entirely negatively. Fourth, the apocalyptic threat that Girard first recognized in the modern novel has become his overriding concern, as the religio-­cultural corrective of scapegoating slips further into its modern eclipse. In, with, and under these four enlargements of mimetic theory is another crucial “late Girard” development that touches on all of them: his realization that mimesis is not solely the problematic vehicle of envy and violence that had previously loomed so large in his account of desire. Without proposing a new mimetic category (despite Girard starting to use the convenient term “good mimesis”), he comes to recognize that borrowed desire represents an opening out of the human person to the other, including to God, which makes it an intrinsically good faculty. Mimesis can be distorted, however, and it certainly needs to be redeemed—though that redemption is itself mediated mimetically, as Girard has long recognized.1 This more rounded account of the one single mimetic principle, which emerged in Girard’s important 1993 interview with Rebecca Adams,2 provided the necessary anthropological template for his fuller treatment of theological anthro­pology and soteriology. And indeed, there is such a fuller theological agenda to be found in “late Girard.” It registers a more intentionally theological style of self-­presentation on his part, too, though not any substantive rearrangement among the nuts and bolts of mimetic theory (it does, however, reference those newly appreciated positive aspects of mimesis). Several doctrinal themes are explored, in addition to Girard’s more familiar biblical treatment of the Judeo-­Christian breakthrough. Rather than address this theological turn as a separate “late Girard” theme, however, I will mention it as necessary—along with his aforementioned revision of mimesis in more affirmative terms—while unpacking the four stated themes, saving more detailed attention to the relation between Girard and Christian theology for the following chapter. The major works of Girard’s late period span a decade from the mid-­1990s, though in some cases their initial publication, or their translation into English, took all of that decade, and occasionally longer. Evolution and Conversion was based on interviews at the time

From Hominization to Apocalypse  53

of Girard’s retirement from Stanford University in 1995 but was not published until 2007. The nearly contemporaneously-­sourced volume Quand ces choses commenceront (1996) (When These Things Begin, 2014) was also based on interviews, as was Celui par qui le scandale arrive, recalling conversations held in late 2000 (The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 2014). The latter two books feature some original essays by Girard as well. Girard’s last monograph, Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair, appeared in 1999 (I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 2001). Then came his Paris lectures on mimetic theory and world religions, gathered in a short work, Le Sacrifice (2003) (Sacrifice, 2011), followed by two more interview-­based works. There was his definitive apocalyptic reading of modernity in Achever Clausewitz (2007) (“completing Clausewitz,” translated as Battling to the End, 2010), along with a 2015 publication, Reading the Bible with René Girard, transcribing videotaped interviews held in 2005. This last volume is the only one of these that was not worked over by Girard himself prior to publication, due to his great age, and some seasoned Girard readers have remarked to me on its apparent tendency to over­theologize. It was published posthumously with the endorsement of Martha Girard and edited by the Girards’ long-­term friend Michael Hardin, the Anabaptist theologian and peace activist. I judge it to be a significant contribution to the conversation, while recognizing that the status of some opinions expressed in its pages will raise questions. It is fair to say that some “late Girard” material does not yet have a settled place in the “canon,” and it is only now finding its way into the secondary literature. There is a speculative quality to some pronouncements from this period, and occasionally the tone is tentative. Nevertheless, this is a distinctive phase in Girard’s oeuvre, with important new contributions emerging from his eighth and ninth decades.

“Late Girard”: Mimetic Theory and Hominization Girard’s interdisciplinary project further developed its engagement with paleontology and evolutionary biology, theorizing human evolution according to mimetic theory. If Girard is right about human

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origins in terms of scapegoating and the false sacred, then he must be able to encompass, simplify, and indeed improve upon today’s best thinking in the area. In this undertaking, Girard is filling out some insights that he first sketched decades earlier. For instance, his preliminary thoughts on the innate mechanisms by which animals put a brake on the escalation of intra­species conflict are to be found in Violence and the Sacred.3 The first full-­blown discussion is in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World.4 Girard admits to Rebecca Adams that he pursued his “single insight” down this new path in a flush of enthusiasm—adding that, at the time, he did not think about any theological repercussions. He went on to say that his mimetic theory was the first to correctly balance ethology’s joining and structural anthropology’s disjoining of animal and human cultures. Despite admitting to Adams that his earlier thoughts on hominization were tentative, nevertheless Girard regards them as an important exercise in “mimetic theory flexing its muscles.”5 Girard describes human sociality as sacrificially mimetic, and mediated by the surrogate victim rather than innately present in the manner of animal sociality.6 Mimesis over­activates, aggravates, and disorganizes instinctual patterns, such as the aforementioned braking mechanism manifest in so-­called animal rites (i.e., where intra-­ species aggression is re­directed onto something else—think of your picnic being invaded by a pair of angry geese).7 The path from animal rites via the long process of hominization to human society, then, hinges on the scapegoat mechanism.8 Girard came to recognize that “the only thing an animal needs to become human is the sacred victim.”9 By this he means that there is a shift into the symbolic universe of human sociality only via the primary symbol of a slain victim. This is a conception that Girard has to defend against theological criticism, as we will see—it is not a position on human origins that is straightforwardly in line with belief in the goodness of creation. A related aspect of Girard’s earlier writing on hominization, mentioned briefly in the previous chapter, is its apparent ascription of nascent human consciousness to mimetic rivalry. Once the mimetic doubles have emerged at the height of internal mediation, does one’s double awaken a conscious echo within?10 If this is what Girard was

From Hominization to Apocalypse  55

saying back then, it is not taken up by “late Girard,” so I will make no more of it here. However, along with some remarks in Violence and the Sacred that appear to give rivalry a formative role in the very constitution of human desire, as lit upon by the veteran Girardian thinker Paul Dumouchel, such a perspective might suggest that human origins are about nothing other than violence and conflict. And, if so, this does indeed raise questions about the compatibility of Girard’s account with the original goodness of creation as typically endorsed by Christian orthodoxy, in reliance on the first verses of Genesis. I will begin to address this matter in the following chapter. New perspectives on hominization that emerge in “late Girard” are found in two works, with clarifications in various others. In Evolution and Conversion, there is a chapter titled “The Symbolic Species.” This title is drawn from the discussion of emergent human brainpower by Terrence Deacon, and indeed the evolution of human brains in tandem with that of human culture is a new “late Girard” theme. “What I am suggesting,” he explains, “is an integration of culture and biology through the scapegoat mechanism.”11 Here Girard is concerned with the evolution of group fitness among proto-­humans,12 conjecturing the implosion of such groups through lethal infighting. This instability would have lasted dozens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, according to Girard, until the scapegoat mechanism emerged out of the aforementioned animal rites (i.e., the ones identified by Konrad Lorenz, whereby animals redirect their aggression).13 With new insights he has gained into chimpanzee tool use, hunting, and proto-­rituals, Girard presents the advance toward hominization as a gradual process of complexification awaiting an initial center of signification,14 which was provided by the primal murder. The resultant scapegoat mechanism then applied evolutionary pressure leading to the development of larger brains, for coping with the new symbolic power and social complexity that it made possible. According to Girard, the advance of proto-­humanity—from as far back as Homo habilis, two million years ago—must have involved religion, which channeled quite reasonable fears of a return to mimetic crisis into the religious protections of prohibition and ritual.15 “It seems evident to me,” he sums up, “that

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the human mind has been shaped and trained through prehistory and history by religion and rituals.”16 In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, “late Girard” encapsulates his newly extended understanding of hominization as an evolutionary process in terms of mimetic theory: From the moment when the pre-­human creature, the human-­to-­be [la créature préhumaine], passed over a certain threshold of mimetic contagion and the animal instinct of protection against violence collapsed (the dominance patterns), mimetic conflicts must have raged among humankind [des hommes], but the raging of mimetic conflict quickly produced its own antidote by giving birth to the single victim mechanism, gods, and sacrificial rituals. .  .  . Surviving in our culture in only very attenuated forms, this mechanism must have reconciled the earliest communities and given them first a ritual order and then an institutional order, which assured the community’s temporal duration and relative stability.17

In The One by Whom Scandal Comes, there is a chapter titled “Hominization and Natural Selection”—though in the French original its title is more suggestive: “L’hominisation. Un retour sur la théorie de Darwin” (Hominization: A Return on the Theory of Darwin), which might suggest a dividend, a bonus, or even a surprise outcome. Girard’s stated aim here is “filling in a number of gaps in the standard account of hominization” with the aid of mimetic theory, on a timeline that he now regards as encompassing the whole span of genus Homo,18 assaying “the seemingly interminable transition between animal and man.”19 Here Girard is seeking to further ground his conviction that archaic religion must be thought of as a mechanism of natural selection.20 He laments his inability in Violence and the Sacred to express the newly discovered scapegoat mechanism in such “survival of the fittest” terms. “If I could rewrite it today,” Girard reflects, “I would try to show that . . . since death abolishes all ‘bad’ possible outcomes, the scapegoat mechanism can be thought of as a source of ‘good’ bio­ logical and cultural mutations.”21 He links this in another chapter to the typical singling-­out of weaker prey by predators.22

From Hominization to Apocalypse  57

The drivers of this evolutionary process, according to Girard, are heightened mimeticism coupled with increasing brain size, which brought proto-­humans to a crisis point when violence threatened the group. Girard’s intentional presentation of mimetic theory in keeping with Darwinian evolution leads to original sin making its debut in Girard’s oeuvre. It gives him a way of describing the mimetic escalation to violence and to the now-­familiar mechanisms of archaic religion that have kept such escalation in check: “If original sin created the problem of violence, it found a solution in archaic religion.”23 Here we see a mimetic account of hominization raising questions of Christian orthodoxy for Girard. This new line of thought exemplifies the mutual influence that emerged from Girard’s close, longstanding communication with his Innsbruck-­based Swiss friend, the Jesuit Raymund Schwager, who was Girard’s first major theological interlocutor. The question of original sin and “the fall” does not escape Girard’s conversation partner in part 2 of The One by Whom Scandal Comes, Maria Stella Barberi. She presses Girard to clarify this connection, asking if the fall marks humanity’s beginning, and if fallen humanity is the same as humanity tout court. He replies that “there is no other man than the man of the Fall. In the beginning was the Fall” (Il n’y a pas d’autre homme que l’homme de la chute. Au début, c’est la chute).24 In this exchange, it certainly sounds like Girard might again be saying that humanity arose out of violence, giving credence to the major theological critiques of Hans Urs von Balthasar and John Milbank that we will encounter in subsequent chapters. There we will see more fully that it comes down to questions of choice and the sequence of events: did the human story with God begin in peace and freedom, with sin and violence only growing out of faulty human choices, or were we cursed from the start with violent disorder and the targeted violence of its containment? So, is violence ontological— integral to our being, if you like—or is it merely contingent? And, therefore, is Girard’s account of hominization compatible with an orthodox Christian sensibility? “Late Girard” seems more obviously in tune with this orthodox Christian view—of humanity falling into

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sin through faulty choice—when he declares that “the original sin is the bad use of mimesis.”25 For instance, he helpfully identifies original sin with the deviated transcendence characteristic of “metaphysical desire.”26 But Girard’s eye is on what Matthew Fox calls original blessing, before there is any deformation due to original sin. The seedbed of original sin, which is understood as mimetic desire deviated toward false-­transcendent models, is the created grace whereby humanity is directed instead to a divine model. A Girardian theologian from Schwager’s school at Innsbruck, Petra Steinmair-­Pösel, makes this connection, recalling also how God’s self-­giving in Christ is essential for Girard if the distorted mimesis of original sin is to be put right.27 She points to Girard’s own positive assessment of mimetic desiring as providing means of access to God: “If desire were not mimetic, we would not be open to what is human or what is divine.”28 Regarding his acknowledgment of humanity’s mimetic descent into original sin, Girard in The One by Whom Scandal Comes describes his position as an “Augustinian reaction against an excess of humanism,”29 praising Augustine’s “profoundly intuitive sense of mankind, perhaps because he was in contact with paganism.”30 Girard makes a similar point in what turned out to be his last public lecture, from 2008. He was discussing the archaeological findings at Turkey’s cele­brated Neolithic site Çatalhöyük, where the remains of a large community are revealing many features that have proved exciting for mimetic theorists. Domestic wall paintings at Çatalhöyük seem to situ­ate rituals of animal sacrifice in the context of a sacrificial crisis, with human sacrifice suggested by smaller images of dismembered human bodies that surround larger images depicting animal killing. Girard addresses the sanitizing of such pictures in the hands of their leading interpreters, ruefully observing that “there is in the modern mind a romanticizing attitude in respect to the prehistoric world: archaic man is deemed to be a Rousseauistic creature who is fundamentally good. Talking about brutality and violence in the Neolithic is perceived to be incorrect or out of fashion,”31 whereas a wider pattern of archaic obsession with the deployment of death in the preservation of life seems to be self-­ evident in all aspects of domestic life at Çatalhöyük.

From Hominization to Apocalypse  59

This does not necessarily lead to a wholly negative assessment of humanity, however—simply a realistic one. Augustine, for his part, began with an orthodox Christian sense of creation as good throughout, though corrupted by human choice through the fall. In my reading of Girard, proto-­humans were bearers of a morally innocent mimetic nature, evolved from that of less-­advanced animal species, when the scapegoat mechanism carried them over the hominizing brink. Thus, something more recognizably human emerged, first culturally and religiously, then biologically (i.e., as brain and society co-­evolved). Somewhere on the cusp of this transition lay “the fall” when our forebears, spinning out of control toward the violently mimetic annihilation of their group, were saved by the discharge of their pent-­up violence onto a convenient scapegoat.

“Late Girard”: The Nonviolent God, Satan, and the Powers Where was the real God, who for Girard is most fully revealed in the Judeo-­Christian scriptures, prior to that revelation? And what about after—is there any authentically divine role for the disclosed, displaced, and defeated false sacred reappearing in a world now marked by that revelation? These are important questions for “late Girard,” who addresses them via the related New Testament figures of Satan, the “powers and principalities,” and the katéchon (that which holds back or restrains, the restrainer). Girard makes these terms his own, interpreting them according to mimetic theory. He eventually arrives at a more integral understanding of the sacrificial, which he comes to realize is an unavoidable reality—and one with positive as well as negative aspects. These developments, in which we might discern a conscious move on Girard’s part to shore up his orthodox Christian bona fides, are accompanied by a number of dogmatic statements about Christ, the Trinity, and the church cast in terms of mimetic theory (which I am saving for the following chapter). We begin here with the question of all that violence in prehistory and antiquity, and of God’s relation to it—of the false sacred

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and its legacy in light of its disclosure and disruption through the Judeo-­Christian scriptures. Girard’s response is to view this archaic dispensation as a stage on the way to a fuller revelation, refusing to damn the false sacred as entirely inimical to an orthodox Christian understanding of God’s presence and God’s plan. So, for instance, he is not prepared to condemn archaic cultures for their violence according to modern standards.32 Yet this does not amount to any sort of endorsement. What the Judeo-­Christian scriptures reveal to shape subsequent sensibilities certainly does cast the light of judgment on what went before, rendering unacceptable what was acceptable prior to the Judeo-­Christian revelation. Girard touched lightly on this possibility in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, as noted in the previous chapter—that what went before looks different in light of Jesus’s crucifixion.33 Now he is more comprehensive: The term “satanic” applies .  .  . only to a world that comes after Christian revelation. . . . I do not conclude . . . that archaic religions were satanic. Archaic religions were legitimate in their place and time; they became illegitimate only from the moment that their lie was exposed. Before that they were legitimate. This is an important point, which I have yet to fully work out.34

A further proposal of this sort can be found in When These Things Begin. It emerged when Michel Tregeur, Girard’s atheist interlocutor, pressed on him the question of whether God’s existence changes anything—whether God needs to be real for mimetic theory to retain its validity, or indeed for Jesus’s moral teaching to hold up. Girard’s answer is unexpected, breaking new ground. “What does it change?” he responds rhetorically. “It means that the entire sacrificial, moral, and religious history of humanity before Christianity is a holy history. It means that the pagan religions were a first path toward God, and that the practice of sacrifices was a way of keeping violence to a level that God didn’t desire, but that he tolerated.”35 Girard is saying that Jesus’s teaching does not emerge in the vacuum of lone religious genius—here one might recall the conceit of nineteenth-­ century rationalistic and romantic lives of Jesus, which separated Jesus from

From Hominization to Apocalypse  61

his Jewish context, from his exalted place in Christian doctrine, and from his institutional followers in the church, bringing great satisfaction to the “cultured despisers of religion” then and since. Instead, Girard insists that Jesus is not a novum but, rather, the crucial link in a longer chain of divine revelation (more on this in chapter 8). It is also implicit in Girard’s answer that the God revealed in Jesus Christ had not—and, one supposes, would not—leave the world to its own devices in the period before that world was able to receive God’s transforming revelation in scripture. Girard’s introduction in Battling to the End takes this theological insight deeper and further: 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 re-­established peace and order were in real relation to the divine. There was something Christian in all myths. However, by revealing the victims’ innocence, 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 utterly devalued through Christ’s intervention.36

In Reading the Bible with René Girard, the obvious logical conclusion is drawn: that God approves the mixed picture of human community built on the foundation of scapegoating violence; that even though these arrangements were not good, nevertheless they represented the only possible way forward.37 Indeed, Girard acknowledges that “we see the whole history of humanity as one where they must learn to repent of their sacrifices but at the same time, if they hadn’t had these sacrifices, there would have been no humanity, no salvation, no Christ.”38 So things could not have been otherwise in an evolutionary world—one in which Girard acknowledges that “human consciousness is born in violence, through violence.”39 Demonstrating his Catholic sympathies, contrary to what various Protestant perspectives would allow, Girard affirms God’s accommodation to whatever

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imperfect natural means are available, concluding that “mysteriously God is using human violence to bring the human animal to the level where we will try to teach it love.”40 Here Girard’s orthodox Christian instincts are to honor creation without understating the need for salvation and honor salvation without understating the dignity of creation. Hence Girard’s acknowledgment that “in some ways archaic religion has . . . real features of divinity, since it reconciles . . . in a certain context. Oh, this sounds dreadful,” he frankly admits, though he goes on to explain that “we don’t want to worship violence. Christ teaches us that we have to worship only love; but we have to understand that worship of violence is a series of steps towards love.”41 In working through this uncomfortable juxtaposition—of God willing and acting for the good under the forms of sacrificial vi­olence— Girard co-­opts the Pauline terminology of “powers and principalities.” In Evolution and Conversion, he interprets these powers sociologically, in accord with mimetic theory: The mimetic mechanism produces a complex form of transcendence, which plays a very important role in the dynamic stability of archaic society and therefore one cannot condemn it from an anthropological and sociological standpoint, because it is necessary for the survival and development of humanity. It can be defined as the “social transcendence” in Durkheim’s terms, or the idolatrous transcendence from the point of view of the Judeo-­Christian perspective. It is an illusory and idolatrous form of sacred that, nonetheless, can protect the archaic human community from greater and more disruptive forms of violence. It is what Paul says also regarding powers and principalities, meaning the secular powers of this world: they are doomed, and they are going to disappear very quickly, but he doesn’t condemn them in a self-­righteous way, he does not demand that they are destroyed with violence, and one has simply to submit to their authority.42

In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard offers a short chapter on these “Powers and Principalities.” He interprets a diverse New Testament usage, seeking greater precision about the relation of these

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powers to the “satanic” mechanism of founding murder. Girard notes the range of terms employed, and how they fall into two groups: Expressions like “powers of this world,” “kings of the earth,” “principalities,” etc. assert the earthly character of the powers, their concrete reality here below in our world. On the other hand, expressions like “princes of the kingdom of the air,” “celestial powers,” etc. emphasize the extraterrestrial, “spiritual” nature of these entities.43

Such dual usage shows the New Testament writers deploying both natural and supernatural terminology to provide a sufficiently “thick description.” And Girard explains how earthly phenomena can seem to exhibit a sacred aura: To say of the powers that they are “celestial” is to insist on their religious dimension, namely, on the prestige that thrones and sovereigns enjoy among humankind and that is always perceived as a little supernatural. We see this even now in the toadyism that bows and scurries at the feet of our governments, no matter how unimpressive the latter are.44

Regarding the ascription of these powers to Satan, and what, if any, place they should be accorded in Christian theology, the “late Girard” position seems tolerably clear enough if we examine four pronouncements. (1) We have already noted his conviction, expressed most fully in The One by Whom Scandal Comes, that archaic religion is not itself satanic. However, the false-sacred legacy does become satanic when prosecuted in the face of Judeo-­Christian revelation. (2) Some five years earlier, in interviews for Evolution and Conversion, Girard said something a little different: that “the archaic sacred is ‘Satanic’ when there is nothing to channel it and to keep it at bay, and social institutions are there to do precisely this job, until the Kingdom of God will finally triumph.”45 Here, I suggest that Girard is actually clarifying a distinction between the originally satanic sacred emerging from the founding murder and the religious structures that arise later to harness and channel that satanic sacred, but which in themselves

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are not satanic—while these subsequent religious structures are not of the good, if you like, they are nonetheless for the good. (3) In the aforementioned chapter on New Testament powers and principalities, from I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard explains that the powers, though always associated with Satan and based on the transcendence of Satan, are not “satanic” in the same sense as he is, even though they are his tributaries. Satanic rituals do not seek to become one with false transcendence; they do not aspire to mystical union with Satan. To the contrary, they try to keep this formidable figure at a distance and hold him at bay outside the community.46

(4) Finally, Girard makes the Augustinian claim that Satan is parasitic on existing order, rather than constituting an ordering principle in “his” own right.47 “He” can no longer perform his onetime ordering function, having lost cultural transcendence—having been seen to “fall from heaven like lightning”—although, in the affairs of this world, the satanic capacity to stir up disorder remains. I think that Girard’s point across these four contributions is sufficiently consistent, and it is this: that the basis for any viable human life together is the false sacred, manifest in the satanic injustice of a founding murder. However, the humanly religious elements that emerged from the false sacred to preserve the fragile new cultural entity are not themselves satanic, despite representing the legacy of founding violence (I refer to the “religious” prohibitions, rituals, and eventually the myths that proved necessary for more developed and stable social institutions to arise and to survive). This compound legacy is not sacred in the same way that the term “sacred” refers in mimetic theory to the awe-­inducing originative event—to the “miraculous” unity of a suddenly pacified community, gathered in stunned silence around a slain innocent. This might be why the term “sacred” was itali­ cized in that passage quoted from Evolution and Conversion (point 2, above): to emphasize a distinction between the highly charged sacred origins of culture and a kind of Weberian “routinization of charisma” evident in the subsequent development of prohibitions, rituals, myths,

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and then institutions to maintain that culture. I will say more about this shortly when commenting on Girard’s wider re­evaluation of sacrifice, in light of which this distinction between the false sacred and its legacy in archaic religion becomes clearer still. Closely related to the terminology of “powers and principalities” is the other category that Girard co-­opts from Paul: the katéchon. In 2 Thessalonians 2:6 the term refers to “that which restrains,” while the more personalized katéchōn, in the following verse, means “the restrainer.” It is the Antichrist who is being restrained until the final (eschatological) revelation of Christ. This interim measure has been understood variously throughout Christian history as a way of talking about God’s providence, preserving the stability of a less than fully converted world. It is commonly associated with the ordering and pacifying authority of the state, the rule of law, and the military. In The One by Whom Scandal Comes, Girard clearly distinguishes the katéchon from the false-­sacred scapegoat mechanism that first established human order, and which earns from him the appellation “satanic,” just as we have seen him do with the “powers and principalities” more generally (this is what Girard has always taken the Gospel image of “Satan casting out Satan” to mean: the deployment of limited scapegoating violence to prevent much more extensive violence from destroying society). However, the katéchon is limited explicitly by Girard to the Christian dispensation—to the period after revelation has exposed and begun to destabilize the satanic mechanism and its religio-­cultural legacy. In this period the false sacred, which has been torpedoed by the gospel, has not yet sunk with all hands. Girard admits that not even two millennia have been enough for the influence of the Passion to really seep in, to penetrate men’s minds to the point that this mechanism is disabled once and for all; for the non-­guilt of victims to be fully recognized, together with the illegitimacy of persecution and, more generally, of regimes based on the exploitation of one group by another; in short, for all the systems of violence that have been breaking down for two thousand years to be exposed.48

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Hence a divinely mandated katéchon accounts for the continuing but limited role that “official violence” exercises in tolerably maintaining the stability of civilizations: Whereas the Satan who casts out Satan well and truly represents order, katéchon is situated in a Christian world, in a world freed from Satan’s rule, a world that wants no part of it. At the same time, katéchon still retains a little of the old order, without which nothing would stand in the way of absolute violence. Katéchon holds back violence, which is to say what is left once Satan has been cheated, duped. It must be admitted that, in order to prevent violence, we cannot do without a certain amount of violence. We are therefore obliged to think in terms of least possible violence. But, as a practical matter, it’s difficult to say how little the least violence would have to be.49

Here is the basis for Girard’s Realpolitik in refusing to embrace pacifism. “I should make it clear that I myself am not an unconditional pacifist,” he declares unambiguously, “since I do not consider all forms of defense against violence to be illegitimate.”50 Girard is too Augustinian. Elsewhere he points to the danger of pacifism becoming the antagonistic mimetic double of oppression, and hence of helping to perpetuate an oppressive cycle.51 Pacifist Girardians who balk at such unsparing pragmatism need to realize that it represents an integral dimension of Girard’s thinking about the powers in general and the katéchon in particular, rather than an isolated opinion that Girard might foreseeably have changed.

“Late Girard”: A New Positive Dimension of Sacrifice A closely related development in “late Girard” is his re­appropriation of sacrifice. This comes as a surprise and has yet to be assimilated by critics such as Sarah Coakley who are more familiar with “middle Girard” and his strong disavowal of sacrifice. In Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (book 2, chapter 2), Girard offered an

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extended critique of sacrificial usage in reference to Jesus, denying it any utility whatever in commending the gospel. However, that chapter does contain everything Girard wants to say about Jesus’s death as humanity’s great (if not lone) witness against false-­sacred violence, about the necessity of his freely offered life in the service of God’s liberating love for humanity, and about Jesus’s self-­offering as setting the necessary pattern of all subsequent discipleship. At that stage, Girard in his “middle” period was unable and unwilling to regard a death that he clearly saw as beneficial and unavoidable as representing any kind of positive sacrifice.52 And this is what changes. His new insight brings a distinction: between sacrifice as immolation-­by-­others and sacrifice as consecration-­on-­behalf-­of-­ others: “the Christian sacrifice which is the renunciation of all egoistic claiming, even to life if needed, in order not to kill.”53 Girard reads this more positive version of sacrifice in association with the katéchon, using another image from Paul: of moving on from baby food to the “mature food in which you sacrifice yourself in order not to sacrifice your neighbor.”54 Girard is particularly struck by this different, life-­giving type of sacrifice as it appears in the “inexhaustible text” about Solomon judging between two prostitutes in a matter of disputed custody over an infant (1 Kings 3:16–28). There, the real mother chooses to give her child over to a rival claimant rather than see it hacked in two, with a half given to each, as proposed by the wise king in a ruse for flushing out the truth. Girard makes much of this new realization, resiling from his entirely hard line against sacrifice in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, especially his dismissal of the book of Hebrews with its sacrificial interpretation of the cross. The recantation came in a 1993 interview with Rebecca Adams—although Schwager had been pressing the deconstructive reclaiming of sacrificial language in Hebrews on a dubious Girard since as long before that as 1977.55 Schwager even uses Girard’s own core insight against him to reinforce the point: “Frankly, here I see a trace of sacrificial thinking. To unify the NT, you throw out a text. The Epistle to the Hebrews .  .  . your own scapegoat?!?”56 Girard eventually admits to having scapegoated sacrifice itself, along with the book of Hebrews.57

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As to the reasons for his earlier antipathy toward Christian sacrificial rhetoric (including perhaps his not-­uncommon reaction against old-­fashioned Catholic dolorism,58 with its spirituality of excessive self-­denial), Girard describes this as the last gasp of his youthful anti-­ church avant-­gardism.59 In the 2007 French-­language omnibus edition of four major works, entitled De la violence à la divinité (From Violence to Divinity), Girard goes further. He deletes passages from Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World as it appears in that new edition, “notamment une opinion absurdement négative sur l’Epître aux Hébreux. Je répudie aujourd’hui cette lecture” (notably an absurdly negative opinion of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Today I repudiate that reading). Girard admits that his former dismissal of all sacrifice on the basis of its association with an impure archaic form “reflète une ultime illusion humaniste et progressiste dans mon interprétation du christianisme” (reflects one final humanistic and progressivist illusion in my interpretation of Christianity).60 In dialogue with the philosopher Gianni Vattimo, whose return to the Catholic faith he facilitated, Girard offers some characteristic drollery on this subject: My rejection of the word “sacrifice” was, for the most part, an honest mistake. And yet it was also prompted in part, no doubt, by the desire to twist the aged lion’s tail and loudly disagree with the Church, just for the sake of disagreeing. I was trying to redeem myself somewhat in the eyes of fellow intellectuals. For three hundred years, all of us intellectuals have chained ourselves to la révolte, and the addiction is hard to break. Now that la révolte has reached even the Catholic clergy the end of this particular tunnel must be in sight!61

Note that Girard’s new awareness of a distinction in sacrificial types is accompanied by an appreciation of their continuity. He does not want to disjoin the two sacrificial categories, or to join those scholars of religion who deny Judeo-­Christian distinctiveness. “I put too much emphasis on that difference, and not enough on the symbolic unity of sacrifice,” admits Girard in When These Things Begin, “which,

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if one examines all the term’s meanings, sums up humanity’s entire religious history.”62 Around the same time, in interviews for Evolution and Conversion, Girard makes the point more fully, describing this development in what sacrifice entails as the key to humanity’s moral history that Christ has provided on our behalf, adding that he would now like to write a history of religion as a history of sacrifice63 (more on this in chapter 8). Indeed, Girard goes part of the way toward that goal in his 2003 Paris lectures titled Le Sacrifice (Sacrifice, 2011), identifying various sacrificial themes present in Hindu and Buddhist scriptures—though these instances were hardly ever recognized as such, let alone subjected to critique in those texts. Regarding their sacrificial component, Girard is saying that archaic religions are revelatory in this sense: they provide the category of sacrifice that is later both exposed and reconfigured in the decisive Judeo-­Christian revelation. Archaic religions, by programmatically striving to keep things under control so that further sacrificial crises are avoided, thus point to the eventual overcoming of sacrifice—sort of: Archaic religions are the real educators of mankind, which they lead out of archaic violence. Then God becomes victim in order to free man of the illusion of a violent God, which must be abolished in favor of Christ’s knowledge of his Father. One can regard archaic religions as a prior moment in a progressive revelation that culminates in Christ. . . . This is the only way that a free mankind can develop.64

Girard thus sees the sacrifice of Christ recapitulating the sacrifices of archaic religion, just as the Eucharist recapitulates primitive cannibalism. Hence, we honestly confront our violent beginnings65 as part of being rescued from the inevitability of a similarly violent future. For Girard, the fact that humanity has found a way out of this prison through Christ’s sacrifice now calls for choice and participation. “Everything that Christ conquered by escaping the world and its violence without taking part in it,” Girard explains, “he offers to all human beings who are willing to let themselves be raised up by

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grace.”66 And this choice has a particular form. With Christ, it entails what we might call the self-­sacrificial refusal of sacrificial violence. In The One by Whom Scandal Comes, Girard explores this insight with reference to Psalm 40:7–8 (“the most extraordinary of all the Psalms”) as it appears on Christ’s lips in Hebrews 10:5–6—about God not wanting sacrifice and burnt offering, while the psalmist’s ears have been marked for obedience. Girard reads this strange passage in these terms: “if you wish neither burnt offerings nor sacrifice, there is no longer any obstacle to violence: from now on, nothing can stop it. The old system is finished. Accordingly, in order not to inflict violence, one must be prepared to submit to it. Everything is summed up in this idea.”67 Here we see the new inescapability of sacrifice for Girard, which can only be renounced as immolation by its embrace as consecration. There will be sacrifice, so let those of us whose ears have been marked for obedience to the gospel choose this sacrifice freely for the giving of life rather than be party to inflicting sacrifice on someone else. In this way it is as if Jesus’s sacrifice does what the old form of sacrifice is supposed to have done, albeit making peace in a new and better way. But this continuity-­in-­distinction regarding the meaning of sacrifice has further implications for Girard. He was finally to emphasize that there is no escape whatever from the category of sacrifice, which forms a kind of meme woven deeply into the roots of our language itself. Thus, we cannot articulate any wholly critical perspective on sacrifice.68 Its risk and ambiguity will remain, and its violence must be dealt with. Girard admits that to put it bluntly, we cannot have a perfectly non-­sacrificial space. In writing Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden I was trying to find that non-­sacrificial space from which to understand and explain everything without personal involvement. Now I think that this attempt cannot be successful.69

Girard makes a related point: that this newly acknowledged inescapability of sacrifice as a dimension of culture and language means that

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no purely social-­scientific position can provide a clear view of the sacrificial. Hence no neutrally rational and objective access remains possible. We are all caught up in sacrifice, and blinded by it, so that only Jesus’s willingness to undergo it has opened our eyes.70 There is yet one more aspect of this issue for Girard, concerning the failure of false-­sacred mechanisms. We noted the delineation of “ontological sickness” in “early Girard,” with descent into the hell of metaphysical desire regarded as potentially necessary for people before they can grasp the nature of their condition and come to their senses, on their way to a final revelation. As we saw, this was the case for fictional protagonists in Miguel de Cervantes, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Marcel Proust. “Middle Girard” adds Dante’s Divine Comedy to the list, referring to the entire structure of that three-­part work, then pointing further back to Augustine’s Confessions, which he identifies as “the first work whose genesis is wholly inscribed in its form.”71 Here Girard reveals the sword that Christ brings: it is the scriptural revelation that undoes an ersatz, false-­sacred peace. This is a severe mercy that he interprets according to Blaise Pascal’s order of charity since, ultimately, it is for humanity’s good.72 This is revelation under erasure, made manifest through what happens when that reve­ lation is rejected.73 It may be that “late Girard” offers a new way of understanding this. In a 2005 interview, reproduced in Reading the Bible with René Girard, he revisits his longstanding assessment of archaic sacrifice as of limited efficacy, requiring the regular transfusion of ritual, with the support of myth and prohibition, to retain its potency. Here Girard says something that sounds new, which may represent a development in his thought: without such rejuvenation, the sacrificial system will eventually run out of steam and collapse of its own accord. For Girard, setting out this new suggestion, we can assume that the sacrificial world, even if there had not been any Christian revelation to interrupt it would have lost finally its efficacy and turned to naught. In other words, the type of destruction that we can expect if we don’t follow Jesus would have happened

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without Jesus, when sacrifices would have exhausted their possibilities. So Jesus cannot be accused of being directly responsible for the end of sacrifices. They lose their power. You have to have new expulsions in order to restore that power, have a new sacrificial system, but all sacrificial systems become routine and finally collapse. Therefore, Satan expels himself, but he cannot do it for all eternity.74

Here Girard may be following through to its end the logic of that Weberian “routinization of charisma” to which I have already referred, whereby the awe-­inducing founding murder drains away through the routine religio-­cultural apparatus meant to preserve its effect. In time all such arrangements will wear out and fail, with apocalyptic implications for any society left exposed in that way. While Jesus refuses to perpetuate this old form of sacrifice that God has repudiated (recall the use that the book of Hebrews makes of Psalm 40), nevertheless, by redefining sacrifice through his submission as a victim of the old system, Jesus actually supplies the escape route that this creaking old apparatus can no longer deliver. If this is a new point that Girard is making, it differs from “middle Girard” suggesting that Old Testament revelation has already begun to denature the false sacred and undermine social stability in its world, whereupon Jesus arrives to complete the picture.75 Here, “late Girard” would appear to be saying something new, or at least making a supplementary point. It may be sufficient to understand it thus: though Jesus was not the necessary end of the old sacrificial system—for good or ill (since it would have eventually fallen over without him)—nevertheless, he was its contingent end, for good or ill (since through Jesus an alternative outcome for the world did actually take flesh). Hence Jesus can be seen as accelerating the collapse of civilization, which was already “on the way down,” while also providing the only way to avoid that apocalyptic outcome. He allowed civilization to be salvaged, then, averting what would otherwise have been its collapse into violent self-­destruction. I should mention one more passage, from I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, which may appear to complicate this synthesis—though I suggest that it need not be read that way. Here Girard seems to be far more uncomplicatedly following Augustine, declaring that

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if God allowed Satan to reign for a certain period over humankind, it is because God knew beforehand that at the right time Christ would overcome his adversary by dying on the cross. God in his wisdom had foreseen since the beginning that the victim mechanism would be reversed like a glove, exposed, placed in the open, stripped naked, and dismantled in the Gospel passion texts, and he knew that neither Satan nor the powers could prevent that revelation.76

While this passage is far more declaratively theological, it remains compatible with the false sacred running down naturally toward its end. While it is likely that without Christ the false sacred would have eventually collapsed anyway, nevertheless it did not happen that way—with Christ there emerged an alternative to the eventual collapse of the false sacred. For Girard to say that God foreknew this outcome may be saying no more than that God wills humanity’s salvation, and not its abandonment to the ultimately unavoidable apocalyptic consequences of unredeemed mimesis. Here is further evidence that Girard does not view violence as ultimate, or as ontological.

“Late Girard”: Modernity and Apocalypse The idea of an angry God, indeed, is the last possible sacrificial reserve, which protects us in an untruthful way from beholding the “objective apocalyptic situation.” —Józef Niewiadomski, “ ‘Denial of the Apocalypse’ ” We are classicists first, romantics second, and primitives when necessary, modernists with a fury, neo-­primitives when we are disgusted with modernism, gnostics always, but biblical never. —René Girard, The Scapegoat

A future deprived of sacrificial guarantees, should Jesus’s alternative version of sacrificial living not be taken up, will be an apocalyptic

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future—though that outcome will be humanity’s doing, not God’s. In this section of the chapter we note the fourth major “late Girard” development, with his assessment of secular modernity as both the fruit of revelation and the birth pangs of apocalypse. As Girard explains, “when I say that modernity is apocalyptic, I mean that it is revelatory.”77 This is not an entirely new theme, however. While Battling to the End presents a new and significant insight, it needs to be seen as part of a larger picture. A quick review of what we have already gleaned about modernity and apocalypse from earlier stages in Girard’s oeuvre will help to set the scene. In chapter 1 we saw how “early Girard” viewed modernity as a new stage in humanity’s mimetic journey, marked by a greater propensity for internal mediation. With the decline of hierarchical societies and the democratic rise of competing equals, the pressure was on for modern Western individuals to avoid internal mediation by pursuing a more marked distinctiveness. Yet this had to be achieved by accessing the “being” of successful models of desire by desiring whichever objects they desired. Girard then charted the downward spiral of prideful mimetic obsession when these models become rivals and mimetic doubles. This leads to romantic immolation, as subjects dash themselves against their model obstacles in a perverse affirmation of the latter’s superior being. The masochistic and sadistic world of Dostoyevsky’s “underground” and of “ontological sickness,” which Girard also called the Dostoyevskian apocalypse, demonstrated his early understanding of modernity as apocalyptic. In chapter 2 we explored “middle Girard,” discovering why the impact of Jesus Christ leads both to modernity and to its apocalyptic shadow. Judeo-­Christian revelation had exposed and undermined the foundations of culture, which were derived from scapegoating and maintained by the false-­sacred technical apparatus of human religion. These discoveries, which were intuited though not yet fully theorized by “early Girard,” meant that the closed, violent worlds of antiquity were broken open to new experiences of equality and homogeneity, hence also of potentially unrestrained conflict and instability. Girard saw Friedrich Nietzsche as both the prophet and the nemesis of this

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development, seeking to restore the Dionysian false sacred in a post-­ Christian era. Yet Nietzsche’s will to power was dismissed by Girard as nothing more than the ideology of internally mediated mimetic desire. He saw Nietzsche as eventually painting himself into the corner of madness, unable to sustain his anti-­Christian kicking against the goads—here I am reminded of Saul in his losing struggle against Jesus Christ, in Acts 26:14. But there was no saving conversion for Nietzsche as there was for Saul (who became Paul). Nietzsche deepens the Dostoyevskian apocalypse, according to “middle Girard,” making it metaphysical— just as “late Girard” sees the great insight of military theorist Carl von Clausewitz turned into metaphysics by Nietzsche.78 Before I conclude this chapter with a brief discussion of Clausewitz and Girard’s late, troubled work Battling to the End, some further “late Girard” insights will set the scene. For “late Girard” the modern world is a mixed reality. It represents the cultural afterglow of Judeo-­Christian revelation, in which the sacrificial impulse is running down. Indeed, in our unprecedented modern Western concern for victims, which Girard now goes so far as to call God’s kingdom growing in secret, all the archaic sacred social defenses are removed, hence raising the specter of apocalypse.79 Notwithstanding these developments, the false sacred is sneaking back under cover of Christianity and its modern humanistic legacy, according to “late Girard.” Today there is quite an appetite for manufacturing new victims, for instance, though they need to be selected from among the victimizers so that modern people can feel justified in persecuting them.80 This widespread victim obsession, with self-­ righteous political correctness making new victims by deftly turning real or imagined persecutors into victims, is described by Girardian thinker Stephen Gardner as the “circular firing squad of modern victimology” and interpreted as the sacrificial spirit of archaic religiosity taking its last stand.81 This near-­universal mantle of victimhood represents a signifi­ cant instance of undifferentiation. Hence in an emerging global monoculture it will be important to restore differentiation wherever

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possible, and here some new thinking on Girard’s part emerges. Secu­ lar modernity has so far preserved a sufficient sense of differenti­ ation through consumer capitalism, as a wide choice of market niches and mass-­produced goods serves to defuse mimetic rivalry—indeed, Girard describes the market-­driven modern West as the first civilization to use mimetic rivalry positively.82 Yet he declares this modern culture of individualism and differentiation, as pacific as it might seem, to be based on illusion. Contrary to the nostrums of popular left-­wing discourse, it is not difference and otherness that we fear but, rather, the deeper undifferentiation that lies concealed beneath both our apparent fear of the other and our countervailing modern insistence on celebrating diversity. For Girard this is why local distinctiveness (cuisines, craft traditions, etc.) is everywhere celebrated nowadays—though such distinctiveness is often less than genuinely traditional, having been confected as an act of resistance against global homogenization.83 At the time of writing, Brexit provides a good example of this flight from undifferentiation. Another good example, combining both fear of undifferentiation and today’s relish in making victims out of victimizers, is provided by zombie fiction. What is the purpose of all those gunshots and stabbings to the head in every episode of AMC’s television series The Walking Dead if not the programmatic ritual slaughter of the undifferentiated and the victimizers—in this case the plague of zombies—so that civilization might be preserved? Zombie fiction provides a body count of positively Aztec proportions, although the sacrificial reality is kept under a measure of erasure. These particular victims are already dead, after all. At a personal level, today’s much remarked upon hatred of conformity in the West, with its accompanying drive to maximize individual differentiation, papers over the uncomfortable realization that we are all in fact highly imitative.84 Girard finds new evidence for this in the decline of robust desire evident in today’s West, which he attributes to exhaustion of the mimetic impulse. For instance, he astutely describes today’s cultural addiction to pornography as the consequence of this last and unmentionable taboo: our lack of desire.85 So it is insufficient

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for Girard, in discussing secular modernity, to concentrate solely on its heightening of mimetic conflict: I think that a contemporary description of the phenomenology of mimetic desire should dialectize the duality between mimetic conflict and an abatement of mimetic desire. This is also Jean-­Michel Oughourlian’s interpretation; namely, contemporary individuals aren’t strong enough to have mimetic desire. They aren’t passionate about anything. This is something I used to believe could never happen, but now I am more open to it. Consumption society, which was invented partially to cope with mimetic aggressive behavior, has eventually created these socially indifferent human beings unable to communicate with each other and mainly concerned with what is strictly accountable in their life, in the sense of self-­interest. This is a radical form of nihilism.86

This undifferentiation is also manifest geopolitically, apart from its felt presence in a widespread sense of individual lostness and apathy. Today’s defining global oppositions, which have been characterized as a “clash of civilizations,” might be better understood as civil wars within the one, increasingly undifferentiated global monoculture.87 For instance, today’s hatred of the West by militant Islamists (it used to be communism that provided such a rallying point for the disaffected)88 is not understood by Girard as a matter of rivalry with the West based on difference and otherness. On the contrary, far from turning away from the West, they cannot prevent themselves from imitating it, from adopting its values without admitting it to themselves. They are no less consumed than we are by the ideology of individual and collective success. The rivalrous ideal that our example imposes on the whole planet cannot make us conquerors without there being unaccountably many vanquished, unaccountably many victims. It is hardly surprising, then, that this ideology should produce reactions among the vanquished that are very different from the ones it produces

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among the conquerors themselves. Above all it creates a fervent determination to utterly shatter the enormous competitive machine that the United States, closely followed by all the other nations of the West, has become, a source of immense personal and national humiliation.89

It might also appear that there is a modern Western fascination with difference in a resurgent love of primitivism and the more recent enthusiasm for multiculturalism. But Girard sees false consciousness at work whenever the West disingenuously talks itself down rather than acknowledge the overweening pride evident in its self-­interested scapegoating of weaker societies.90 Beginning with the Renaissance, he traces an oscillating history of modern Western self-­flagellation followed by self-­aggrandizement vis-­à-­vis the primitive. We observe this characteristic Western back and forth in colonialist arrogance giving way to the opposite excesses of noble savage–style romanticism, which is evident, for instance, in today’s elevation of multiculturalism over more traditional Western identities. For “late Girard” this phenomenon is readily accounted for: Western alternation between arro­ gance and self-­abnegation is a stratagem for maintaining sufficient differentiation between the West and the rest—in this case by being able to blame all the violence on one side or the other. Either we see ourselves civilizing the violent primitive from a position of cultural superiority, or we deplore how the West inflicts shameful violence on the innocent primitive. In neither case, however, do we recognize our kinship with the primitive in shared violence. The influential colonial-­ era mindset of cultural preeminence evident in James Frazer’s vast nineteenth-­century anthropological classic The Golden Bough provides Girard’s main touchstone here, compared with its typical disavowal in today’s mood of cultural relativism. Behind these apparently diametrically opposed positions lies the simple if unpalatable fact of our similarity with primitive cultures—an undifferentiation that the modern West has always sought to deny: Multiculturalists today have managed to see what Frazer missed . . . and on this point at least one must give them their due. They are

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not mistaken about the world in which we live: it is indeed full of more or less hidden victims. Alas, our young iconoclasts have purchased this clear-­sightedness at the cost of a blindness that is the opposite of Frazer’s. They fail to see that in the archaic world there was the same type of victim, the same scapegoat. . . . The most recent phase of the alternation between Occidentalism and primitivism has therefore concealed the essential thing, the universality of violence. A selective blindness in one of two forms has obscured the fact that all cultures, and all individuals without exception, participate in violence; that violence is what structures our collective sense of belonging and our personal identities.91

The fact of resurgent primitive violence in our modern world supports Girard’s conviction. He regards Nietzsche’s zeal for the violent Dionysian, against the Judeo-­Christian preferential option for victims, as prophetic of what was to come with Nazism: an organized attempt to obliterate our modern concern for victims under millions of corpses.92 Likewise, Girard identifies on the political left a resurgent Dionysian spirit in the attempts we are witnessing to outflank Christianity and seize its mantle of social concern—for instance, today’s militantly secularist embrace of victims’ rights, which eagerly claims its superiority over a complicit and untrustworthy church. “Late Girard” is unsparing in his assessment of this maneuver: In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims. Satan imitates Christ better and better and pretends to surpass him. This imitation by the usurper has long been present in the Christianized world, but it has increased enormously in our time. The New Testament evokes this process in the language of the Antichrist. To understand this title, we should de-­dramatize it, for it expresses something banal and prosaic. The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually, what the radicalization of contemporary victimology

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produces is a return of all sorts of pagan practices: abortion, euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc. Neo-­paganism would like to turn the Ten Commandments and all of Judeo-­Christian morality into some alleged intolerable violence, and indeed its primary objective is their complete abolition. .  .  . Since the Christian denominations have become only tardily aware of their failings in charity, their connivance with established political orders in the past and present world that are always “sacrificial,” they are particularly vulnerable to the blackmail of contemporary neo-­paganism.93

A further example is given in Battling to the End, as suggested by its French title, Achever Clausewitz. This exercise in “completing Clausewitz,” on Girard’s part, as he had earlier sought to “complete” both Émile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud, is about picking up the germ of a mimetic idea at the source and following it to its logical conclusion. In this case Girard has brought to light the dynamics of archaic violence that are making their return unrestrained in our modern world since Napoleon and the advent of total war. No more do we see rule-­governed gentlemanly warfare, but mass mobilization and civilian deaths in large numbers, with nothing to stop what Girard calls the “escalation to extremes” now that war has lost its sacrificial efficacy for restoring peace (especially since the late 1960s, he adds elsewhere).94 Massacres of civilians, which have increased since the Balkans war of the 1990s, represent the sacrificial failures of our global era, according to Girard, since mass sacrifices no longer have any power to reconcile. War as a purported tool of sober statecraft is giving way before our eyes to the widespread ascendancy of totalizing bloodlust. Clausewitz drew attention to this shift in the first chapter of his classic 1832 treatise on military strategy, Vom Krieg (On War). But he resiled from it thereafter, famously insisting that war could still be the continuation of policy by other means.95 Girard traces an alternative story, from the mutually defining mimetic doubling between

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Napoleonic France and Germany, to that between Germany and Russian Bolshevism, then between Nazism and Stalinism, followed by the Cold War.96 He goes on to predict global conflict between American and Chinese versions of the one capitalist monoculture.97 This mimetic escalation has become the main driver of modern history for Girard, also characterizing late twentieth-­century conflicts in the Balkans, Rwanda, the Middle East, and the subcontinent. As Girard concludes, “from Napoleon to Bin Laden, attacking and defending have been promoted to the rank of the unique engine of history.”98 Girard also finds the echo of this mimetic conflict in the violent rivalry of modern Western societies with the environment. “There is an indissoluble link between global warming and the rise in violence,” he argues, adding that “I have repeatedly emphasized the confusion of the natural and the artificial, which is perhaps the strongest thing in apocalyptic texts.”99 What is he getting at here? I think it is this: that we have incorporated the natural world into the human world; that we have annexed its ends to our ends; that we have absorbed nature as a resource for our project of self-­creation, just as we have arbitrarily designated other people as competitors in the same process. We have treated the natural world just as we treat the rest of our property—just as we treated slaves and colonial populations in an earlier age, and as asylum seekers are widely treated now. Yet below this lies a fear that all the structures of difference and superiority that we cling to are really bogus and unreliable and that deep down we are really one. And this fear extends to the planet itself: that our mastery over the Earth is an illusion; that we are frail creatures in a sensitive natural ecosystem, so that our fortunes rise and fall with those of the environment. Hence the same conversion that leads us to mutual respect—rather than insisting on differentness so that we can feel justified in fearing and persecuting those who it suits us to classify as other—must now extend to our relationship with the environment. Our human distinctiveness in the order of creation must not be overinflated at the expense of recognizing our solidarity with all the creatures and natural systems of planet Earth.

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Without such breakthroughs, however, Girard foresees only apocalypse, albeit of our own making—a prospect that early Christianity anticipated in the book of Revelation, which encoded a sense that Jesus’s message would not be allowed to change the world sufficiently to save it from its own violence.100 In a brief epilogue, Girard turns his insights from Battling to the End toward understanding contemporary Islamist violence. Since 9/11, and mostly in interviews, Girard has addressed this issue in a piecemeal fashion. His conclusions in the epilogue are twofold. First, radical Islam is an alternative version of modernity rather than an alternative to modernity. What we are witnessing is a civil war within one global civilization rather than a “clash of civilizations.” His second conclusion is more tentative: Girard suggests that Islam has never entirely freed itself from the legacy of archaic violence, which provides license for those who wish to depart from the Qur’an’s many teachings about mercy and the restraint of violence.101 For all these heightened apocalyptic fears, Girard has not abandoned his earlier confidence that God’s purposes are being worked out in history—he is too Augustinian to be either a determinist or a defeatist. Instead, Girard retains an open-­ended view of history,102 with a sense that the cultural impact of Judeo-­Christian revelation is not exhausted: I think that we must examine our history and try to see whether, beneath what has already occurred, there are not additional layers of phenomena waiting to be revealed; whether some aspects of life that used to be constrained by the old sacrificial system are not going to flourish, other domains of knowledge, other ways of living. Everything that the Passion undid in the cultural sphere might well be an opening, an extraordinary sense of enrichment. I am certain it is.103

His point, however, is that God in Christ is not invested in preserving the world as it is, but in the world as it can be through repentance and faith. This represents an investment in the peace of God that passes all understanding,104 as distinct from the false-­sacred peace that Girard

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has helped us understand all too well. Here, as James Alison points out, a basic distinction is being made between apocalyptic, which is human-­centered, and eschatology, which is God-­centered.105

* * *

With that we conclude our close reading of Girard, tracing the development, explication, and refinement of mimetic theory until it has become a vehicle for global prophecy. Along the way we have found a deepening insight into the Judeo-­Christian scriptures and their revelatory role, which enlists humanity in an alternative mimetic way of being—apart from which Girard has come to predict a dark future for planet Earth. In addressing Girard’s intent with Evolution and Conversion, Jacob Sherman provides a useful assessment of the whole “late Girard” period: Evolution and Conversion is . . . in many ways a lengthy response to the sort of criticism . . . met in Milbank, Balthasar and Adams. Girard not only tempers his judgments about sacrifice but also builds a bridge between archaic violence and Christian non­violence, explores various salutary functions of mimesis, and roots his entire structure more thoroughly in a creational or evolutionary framework. Indeed, Girard’s most recent thought seems to conform to the Thomistic maxim that grace does not destroy but fulfills nature.106

Subsequent chapters will attempt to show how all this might look in closer conversation with Christian theology. We will begin with a chapter on how Girard might be—and ought not to be—identified with the theological enterprise.

CH A P TER 4

Girard among the Theologians

What you say is surely worthy of the ideas of “traditional theology” and of popular piety. But I understand that you have not had the time to study these authors; so the task of bringing these refinements is mine as well as that of the theologians who will follow you. —Raymund Schwager, letter to René Girard, 22 April 1978 To understand our own times, we have not only a new Darwin of culture but also a Doctor of the Church. —Michel Serres, “Receiving René Girard into the Académie Française” I . . . believe that it is finally time to give Christian theology the anthropology it deserves to have. —René Girard, in Gianni Vattimo and René Girard, Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue

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René Girard was not a theologian, by either training or vocation, though as a scholar in the humanities and social sciences he dialogued with theologians and intentionally contributed to the the­o­ logical enterprise. Indeed, as Girard admits, “since the beginning of the ‘novelistic conversion’ in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, all of my books have been more or less explicit apologies of Christianity.”1 His choice of book titles, most of which came to be sourced from biblical quotations, reinforces the point. Yet Girard’s association with the­ ology is not uncomplicated. Michael Kirwan suggests that “Girard’s career as a ‘theological’ thinker, if anything, shows him oscillating between timidity and enthusiasm, as he works through an ambiguous and complex relationship with institutional Christianity.”2 Other figures whom Girard brings to mind, also some theological currents and movements with which he might profitably be associated, will be addressed in this chapter, prior to my opting for theological dramatic theory in chapter 5 as providing the most promising fit. But first I want to examine Girard’s method, in which the scientific and the theological are combined via the incarnational to yield the apologetic. Girard tells Raymund Schwager that he feels obliged to stay with the critical enterprise so that his work can connect with a whole modern audience that is cut off from the Judeo-­Christian tradition.3 He is not avoiding the theological so much as serving its apologetic mission of clarifying and teaching the gospel in an unofficial capacity, on another front. Girard’s theological instincts are entirely orthodox, too—he disavows liberal Christian sacrifice of doctrinal substance for the sake of reductionist clarity or ideological fashion. When his mimetic theory is questioned because it seems to compromise human freedom before God, for instance, Girard takes pains to offer reassurance. Perhaps, as an orthodox believer and a loyal son of the church, he does not wish to be caught offside—though I am sure there is more to it than that. The logic of Girard’s mimetic theory reassures him that his Christian inclinations are deeply in tune with the truth. Mimetic theory is not the whole of Girard’s faith, but it does confirm the heart of his faith.

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Mimetic Theory and Theology: Girard’s Incarnational Paradox As I see it my argument is quite logical. If you understand the old sacred as a closed system, and if you understand the Gospels as a revelation of how that system works, then the Gospel cannot come from within the closure of violence. It can’t come from humanity, and therefore it must come from without. —René Girard (with Thomas Bertonneau), “The Logic of the Undecidable” Most theologians don’t get around to asking about what is happening phenomenologically, i.e., psychologically, sociologically, anthropologically, culturally, economically, and politically, when people are experiencing salvation. —Robert J. Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled

Girard regards his thesis as being “in line with all the great dogmas, [while] it endows them with an anthropological underpinning that had gone unnoticed.”4 He is offering what Robert J. Daly calls a “phenomenology of redemption” or a “phenomenology of grace.”5 In a late interview, during which Girard calls himself an anthropologist and a rationalist, he adds only a few sentences later that “the religion of the Incarnation should be an anthropology as well as a theology. Incarnation means man and God together.”6 Hence, in an unusual juxtaposition—and one that eludes many of Girard’s critics—social science and scriptural revelation are linked in mimetic theory. Schwager, who was Girard’s first major theological interlocutor, offered this sharp rejoinder to anyone accusing Girard of reducing Christian faith to mere knowledge of a social process: “Since [Girard] expressly believes in the true divinity and humanity of Christ, the working of the Holy Spirit in history, and even the virgin birth, and since he attributes central importance to Christ’s cross and salvific activity, such broad-­ sweeping criticism rules itself out of court.”7 Clearly, however, there

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remains a tension at the heart of Girard’s vision, introducing doubt into his reception by theologians. So, for instance, Schwager encourages Girard to rethink sacrifice in the service of a more balanced appraisal, as we have seen. This would allow him to reclaim the theologically significant theme of Jesus’s sacrifice for the life of the world, and hence to avoid theological criticism. For Girard, who was persuaded, this development “brings my perspective into closer alignment with traditional theologies, as I have always wished”—yet, in saying so, he is also clear that “this rectification, though it is by no means a trivial matter on the theological level, changes absolutely nothing with regard to mimetic anthropology.”8 Here is an expression of Girard’s methodological paradox, in which theological claims appear to be both primary and secondary in his project. Let us explore this more closely. Staying with the theme of sacrifice and scapegoating, “late Girard” shows how Christian doctrine and mimetic theory interpenetrate in his thinking. He explains that there are two radically opposed yet formally similar modes of divinity: the archaic, which arises directly from the efficacy of scapegoats; and the Christian, which arises indirectly, and para­doxi­ cally, from their inefficacy by virtue of the destruction of false gods. As against the partial, earthly, temporal and unjustly condemned scapegoats of all other religions, as Schwager observes, there is the perfect scapegoat, both fully human and fully divine. As against imperfect sacrifices, whose efficacy is temporary and limited, there is the perfect sacrifice that puts an end to all the others.9

Yet, for Girard, there is no neutral, social-­scientific path to this insight apart from what the passion narratives reveal. As we noted in the previous chapter, Girard came to see sacrifice as so deeply rooted in human sensibility that the path out of a sacrificial mindset was only through a new form of submission to the harsh law of sacrifice—to a willing self-­consecration by which others will be set free as the sacrificial mechanism is exposed. This was Girard’s point about Psalm 40 and its

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use in the book of Hebrews. Apart from this revealed breakthrough, social science cannot lead us beyond our unrecognized complicity in scapegoating.10 It is always on the basis of this revealing, saving power that Girard makes his high assessments of Jesus Christ—his Christology is high, but functional. Without Christ there is no comprehensive revealing of the scapegoat mechanism,11 and apart from Christ any natural sense of God falls short of the true knowledge that comes with conversion away from a scapegoating mindset.12 So, for instance, while liberal (and many feminist) Christians will not do so, Girard endorses the virginal conception of Jesus. As we have noted, he sees it as a powerful declaration that Jesus was conceived in peace, contrary to the mythological divine births that issue from sexual violence.13 To recognize Christ as God, then, is to recognize that he is the only being capable of transcending the false transcendence of violence.14 Likewise, for Girard, “the resurrection is not only a miracle, a prodigious transgression of natural laws” (though he obviously thinks that it is), but it is also (and, for Girard, most importantly) “the spectacular sign of the entrance into the world of a power superior to violent contagion.”15 Girard is clear that this is not a reality that can be fully explicated in terms of his social-­scientific approach, emphasizing with regard to eschatology that there can be no mimetic theory of the resurrection.16 Yet he still insists on the rational justifiability of resurrection belief, affirming that “the anthropological and theological significance of the Resurrection is so coherent that it is very difficult to imagine that it could be an invention.”17 The continued dissemination of Jesus’s impact is equally important for Girard,18 and so in addition to Christ’s passion and resurrection he affirms the Paraclete as the socio-­historical vector of their impact.19 As to how the resurrection of Jesus differed from typical pagan unanimity and became the decisive revelation of an alternative sacred, Girard insists that “the Holy Spirit gave the disciples the power to separate themselves from the crowd and to contradict it.”20 The Trinity thus emerges quite simply and directly for Girard. It is the logical implication of what has been revealed scripturally in light of mimetic theory: “Christ, his Father, and the Paraclete are therefore themselves, the three of them, the one God who corresponds to John’s

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[Gospel] definition—God is love.”21 Characteristically for Girard, this Trinitarian vision emerges from the work and hence the person of Christ. When pressed by an atheist interviewer, Michel Tregeur, as to why the false sacred cannot have been revealed “by a man” without the need to postulate God’s existence and involvement, Girard makes a virtue of a necessity in a riposte that is as sure-­footed as it is orthodox: But it was invented by a man. Jesus’s humanity must be taken just as seriously as his divinity. That’s what the Incarnation is. To be Christian is to believe that the proclamation you’re talking about has only one source and that he is at once God and man. Add to that the Paraclete, who also has to be there since he’s the defender of victims, and you have the Trinity that everyone today gets so worked up about, as if it were the most ridiculous thing in the world.22

Girard’s last published word on this subject goes further still. He describes the intra-­Trinitarian life mimetically, suggesting the patristic doctrine of perichoresis: “the Son imitates the Father so perfectly that he ‘is’ the Father. But the Father imitates the Son and shares everything with him. This process of good imitation . . . in the Trinity is itself not an abstract principle but a person, another imitator who is called the Holy Spirit.”23 Here, Girard describes the Holy Spirit as the mimetic agent of intra­divine unity, recalling the traditional designation of the Spirit as vinculum amoris—bond of love—between the Father and the Son. Hence, Schwager can regard the Trinity as Christianity’s answer to humanity’s mimetic disorder, such that “the fateful triangular structure of human desire is overcome in the revelation of the threefold divine love.”24 Girard goes on to affirm the necessity of sharing in the Trini­ tarian life, which brings him into the heart of what ascetical theology has traditionally affirmed. And here Girard endorses something that Simone Weil says: that this mutual indwelling is necessary for God to experience the suffering of human beings and not miss sharing in the spiritual bond that emerges in suffering.25 Here we see how far Girard takes human relationality. It finds its model in the Triune life.

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He insists that “Christian monotheism is not monolithic because it has relationship inside itself.”26 Girard immediately adds a rare mention of how much remains for Christian faith beyond what can be articulated: “Now, we cannot understand this, humanly speaking. We cannot work it out. Our intelligence cannot solve this problem, cannot really conceive it.”27 Girard never sacrifices the rational for the super­rational, however. As he goes on to explain, “A personal knowledge, fully rational yet not always accessible to reason is needed.”28 Here I am reminded of a reviewer’s criticism, in response to my previous book on Girard, that there is not enough mystery in Girard’s account of Christi­anity.29 Well, here is the mystery, clearly acknowledged by Girard—and a Trinitarian mystery at that. In the previous chapter we also noted his affirmation of the supernatural, and in the following chapter I will be addressing what I call the untheorized eschaton in Girard’s thought. Yet mystery is not mystification. As my own favorite theological teacher insisted,30 we need theology to point to mystery. So, Girard is clear that there is more to God than mimetic theory can encompass, though what he does understand of Christian truth, and what he seeks to explain regarding God’s work in the world, is expressed in terms of mimetic theory. For Girard, this synergy between revelation and reason in Jesus Christ outperforms all ultimately violent and partial systems of human meaning-­making.31 He insists that “the Gospels are borne aloft by an intelligence that does not come from the disciples and that is clearly beyond everything that you, me, and all of us can conceive without them, a reason that is so superior to our own that after two thousand years we are discovering new aspects of it.”32 Although, for Girard, while “we can never manage to gain access to the religious aspect through the meager power of reason alone .  .  . we can see that it’s rational.”33 Reflecting on the importance of joining reason and faith to yield apologetics, Girard declares that “I can’t do without God for reasons that, it’s true, aren’t always intellectual, but that often are, and in our era that’s very important, because it’s in the intellectual realm that, since the eighteenth century, Christianity has been pronounced utterly defeated and completely discredited.”34

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Girard’s intellectual discoveries confirmed for him the claims of Christian dogma, then, which is why he returned to the Roman Catholic Church: “I’m Catholic because I think that Catholicism is in possession of the truth about dogma. It’s the furthest from the extremist oscillations that began with the Reformation and that led to modern atheism.”35 We know that Girard had personal experiences that helped awaken and confirm his faith,36 though he insists that “my intellectual and spiritual adventure isn’t only subjective.”37 His conviction lies in the power of illumination found in the Judeo-­Christian scriptures and Christian doctrine: “What I am saying is that Chris­ tianity reveals its power by interpreting the world in all its ambiguity. It gives us an understanding of human cultures that is incomparably better than that offered by the social sciences.”38 I take this to mean that, as interpreted according to mimetic theory, Christianity attains a unique power to illuminate the human condition. Indeed, Girard despairs of Christianity when it becomes infatuated with more fashionable though ultimately less illuminating alternatives: What’s most pathetic is the incipiently modernized brand of Christianity that bows down before everything that’s most ephemeral in contemporary thought. Christians don’t see that they have at their disposal an instrument that is incomparably superior to the whole mishmash of psychoanalysis and sociology that they conscientiously feed themselves. It’s the old story of Esau sacrificing his inheritance for a plate of lentils.39

Yet Girard never surrenders his methodological paradox. In his preference for anthropological analysis without explanatory recourse to God or the supernatural, Girard aims to widen the reception of his thought40—since “if you postulate the a priori truth of religion from the start, your reasoning would have a far weaker apologetic value.”41 Yet, at the same time, his is a Gospel-­centered apologetic. Girard’s science is real science, yet it is also scriptural; likewise, his scriptural hermeneutic is scientifically based. He unashamedly declares the Gospels to be part of a new science or knowledge of humanity, representing “what amounts to a Gospel-­inspired breakthrough in the

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field of social science.”42 Here Girard is presumably also distancing himself from other so-­called scientific approaches in Gospel scholarship.43 For Girard, “the word ‘scientific’ does not apply to the interpretation of the Gospels, but to the interpretation that the Gospels give of mythologies. The Gospels read myth.”44 Girard sums up his overarching aim in the important 1993 interview with Rebecca Adams, justifying his paradoxical but ultimately unified approach as a man of both faith and science: In my view, the idea of a special Christian revelation is essential to Christianity. But this is not my main reason for accepting it. I accept it because I believe it is true. Everything in my research leads to this special revelation which defines the uniqueness of Chris­ tianity. My ultimate purpose is to show that this special Christian revelation can and must be approached on rational terms, in terms of the Gospels’ own critique of all human religion.45

It is fitting for Girard, an orthodox Christian believer, that the incarnate God is revealed “in, with, and under” the discoveries of social science, while the best literary and social-­scientific insights into the human condition point him to the incarnation. Here again is a Catholic vision of grace perfecting nature, not destroying it. The anthropological revelation is not prejudicial to the theological revelation or in competition with it. It is inseparable from it. This union of the two is demanded by the dogma of the incarnation. . . . The “mimetic” reading permits a better realization of this union. The anthropological widening of the incarnation in no way eclipses theology; it shows its relevance by putting the abstract idea of original sin into more concrete form, as James Alison has powerfully observed.46

If God is at work, it is by kenotic means, not imposing Godself on the world. This kenoticism recalls a Thomistic principle known as double agency. More on revelation and double agency in the following

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chapter, which will set Girard in a theological context that I believe most suits him: theological dramatic theory.

A Test Case in Theological Orthodoxy: Girard, Mimesis, and Freedom This art that reveals in broad daylight the divisions and doublings of idolatrous pride is no longer itself divided. To say that it reveals good and evil as pure choice is to say that no Manicheanism remains in it. . . . There are no longer righteous and wicked characters in themselves. —René Girard, Resurrection from the Underground I believe in freedom of the will. Jesus says that scandals must happen . . . but at the same time he says: happy are those to whom I will not be a scandal. So there are nevertheless a few who are not scandalized. That scandals must happen might sound like determinism, but it is not. —René Girard (with Rebecca Adams), “Violence, Difference, Sacrifice”

If mimesis forms an unbreakable web in which human desire has no freedom, then Girard’s interdividual account of human being must prove incompatible with traditional Christian belief in humanity’s fundamental freedom of will. The Genesis picture of a good creation prior to the spoiling choice of our legendary first parents is at risk if no such choice turns out to have been possible. Hence any nonviolent theology derivable from mimetic theory will be stillborn. This is one important theological challenge to Girard from his critics, and it will be addressed in this section, though it is not the only such challenge to Girard’s orthodoxy. In the following chapter I will be raising the related issue of humanity’s natural knowledge of God, which has been of particular importance to the Catholic Church in its theological

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resistance to Reformed teaching on total depravity. The problem arises for Girard because the true God is not fully revealed before the Judeo-­Christian dispensation, so that all prior human religiosity must be seen as a decidedly mixed business marked by significant méconnaissance. Hence it has been suggested that Girard is closer to Karl Barth than to Catholic theology when it comes to natural human knowledge of God. Then, in chapter 6, I will begin to address the challenge to Girard that comes from John Milbank, Sarah Coakley, and others: that Girard’s scapegoat theory of human origins assumes an ontological violence at the heart of reality, making any orthodox claim about the basic goodness of creation untenable. I do not doubt that insisting on a place for human freedom in mimetic theory will strike some readers of Girard as controversial. Cesáreo Bandera points to Girard’s assertion, met in the previous chapter, that there is no man but the man of the fall—which to the best of Bandera’s knowledge remained Girard’s position.47 For Bandera, an orthodox Christian perspective demands the primacy of loving mimesis, the rejection of which would constitute humanity’s “fall.”48 Yet while Bandera concludes that Girard perfectly depicts the fallen human condition, he points out that Girard has nothing to say about an original paradise.49 Kevin Lenehan also asserts the incommensurability of Girard’s account of human origins with the intention of the Genesis creation narratives and their doctrinal elucidation. “While Girard’s theory describes the process of hominization and cultural generation based on mimesis and the management of reciprocal violence,” Lenehan acknowledges, “it does not offer from within its own logic any explicit understanding of the purpose and intention of God for humanity in this process, or the nature of the relationship between creator and creation.”50 Yet I wonder if we can find more commensurability between mimetic theory and the doctrine of creation than this. My suggestion is that Girard sees divine grace and human freedom intertwining to carry the maturing person of faith beyond mimetic entrapment. Two discussions are important here. One is the aforementioned 1993 interview with Rebecca Adams in which Girard, who up to Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World had acknowledged only

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its dysfunctional aspects,51 foreswore his formerly negative assessment of mimesis. As noted in the previous chapter, he came to recognize the inescapability of mimesis, its basic goodness, its role in mediating desire for God, and its necessity for accessing worthwhile models of right desiring.52 Asked about mimetic desire producing evil, Girard replied that “it can become bad if it stirs up rivalries but it isn’t bad in itself, in fact it is very good, and, fortunately, people can no more give it up than they can give up food or sleep.”53 The other discussion is more complex. It involves Schwager’s proposal for resolving his own longstanding concern that Girard’s account of mimetic entrapment proves incompatible with the human freedom that Christian orthodoxy enshrines54—“that the self-­concealing ‘mechanism’ eliminates all freedom on man’s part,” as Schwager’s correspondent Hans Urs von Balthasar put it in his own largely appreciative, influential, yet ultimately misconceived critique.55 Girard counters by making a virtue out of a necessity, presenting mimesis as the sine qua non of human freedom. “If our desires were not mimetic,” he argues, “they would be forever fixed on predetermined objects; they would be a particular form of instinct. Human beings could no more change their desire than cows their appetite for grass. Without mimetic desire there could be neither freedom nor humanity.”56 This plasticity of human desire, entirely on account of its mimetic nature, ensures that determinism will never hold sway over human freedom. So, according to Girard, far from being naively reductive and deterministic, as people sometimes say, [mimetic theory] shows that in human affairs the unpredictable is always possible. The sequences that it uncovers are very probable because they are the automatic reflexes of sin, but they are never certain. There is never any determinism in the strict sense of the word.57

Schwager also addressed a similar concern in the work of veteran Girardian thinker Paul Dumouchel. In Schwager’s important mid-­ 1980s lecture “Mimesis and Freedom,” Dumouchel’s charge that Girard is “complex and ambiguous” on the subject of mimesis and

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vi­olence is disputed, along with Dumouchel’s assessment of human freedom as mimetically constrained in a quasi-­mechanical way.58 Dumouchel seems to be saying that desire as a category is no longer needed by Girard once he has identified and named mimesis. I would respond that the reality of desire remains, though Girard now has a new theoretical instrument for better describing its interdividual nature—adding that to locate rivalry at the origin of mimetic desire is to put the cart before the horse. Schwager concedes that there are ambiguous phrases in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, but still concludes that the weight of evidence is against Dumouchel’s reading. For Schwager, Dumouchel has confused the tightly biologically determined world of animal mimesis with the enslavement of human freedom that only comes when mimesis is allowed to descend into the evil of rivalry and violence.59 Subsequent developments along this line allow us to confirm Schwager’s assessment, beginning with Dumouchel’s sketch of his own systems theory of mimesis as the product of interpersonal rivalrous dynamics.60 Mimesis emerges under the pressure of evolutionary selection as an algorithmic, almost cybernetic process for Dumouchel. So you might say that mimesis is a rivalrous dynamic that coincides with the appearance of desire at the level of individual motivation.61 In a recent discussion Dumouchel renews his case for this primacy of rivalry.62 He sees mimesis emerging from the contagious rivalry interior to a relational system, in turn creating by projection the desires of participants within that system. Dumouchel reminds us that Girard only begins referring to “mimesis” with his early 1970s book Violence and the Sacred, regarding the appearance of this new term as representing a new understanding of desire on Girard’s part—as a behavioral convergence of impersonal forces, rather than the back-­and-­forth interdependence of individuals familiar from Girard’s account of borrowed desire since the late 1950s, with Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Dumouchel attends to the first few pages of a chapter in Violence and the Sacred titled “From Mimetic Desire to the Monstrous Double,” in which rivalry does indeed seem to precede desire (p. 145).63 Contrary to standard readings, he suggests that, throughout Violence and the

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Sacred, Girard presents mimesis as a way of talking about symmetries in a network of rivalry that “does not suppose any specific force that leads [individuals] to imitate each other.”64 No wonder Dumouchel dismisses claims made for mirror neurons (discovered in the 1990s) to provide a neurological basis for the mimetic nature of desire, since desire for Dumouchel is an epiphenomenon of group dynamics— with mimesis providing at best a name for those dynamics.65 Revisiting the early pages of that chapter in Violence and the Sacred, however, I judge that while Dumouchel is justified in raising the question, Girard’s whole thrust does not warrant the conclusions drawn. This is because I read Girard’s remarks in those pages as referring explicitly to the sacrificial crisis. In that distinct set of circumstances, there is no question but that rivalry shapes desire and that violence has hold of both the subject and the object of that desire (pp. 144–45). If I am right, Girard is referring to the singularity and not the norm. This interpretation is supported by the fact that, within a few pages, mimesis and desire are once again in their right minds (p. 146), needing freely to deviate if conflict is to ensue. So, yes, the double bind is certainly structured by rivalry, as the monstrous doubles loom. But Girard identifies the seeds of this outcome in the standard focus of mimetic desire on the being of its model—a state of affairs that is certainly prone to rivalry, though not derivable from it (p. 147). Hence, there is no inevitability involved, let alone a quasi-­cybernetic necessity. This primacy of desire and its mimetic conditioning represents the normal state of affairs for Girard, while Dumouchel seems to be drawing generalized conclusions from Girard’s quite specific remarks about the sacrificial crisis, when all normal distinctions have indeed melted into undifferentiation. At this point it is appropriate to revisit what may well be one of those ambiguous passages in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World to which Schwager refers. I flagged it in the previous two chapters, but have saved it for this theological discussion of mimetic desire and freedom. Here Girard appears on the face of it to endorse Dumouchel on the primacy of rivalry at the expense of human freedom. Regarding the process of hominization, Girard explains that

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for there to be desire according to our definition, the effects of mimesis must interfere, not directly with animal instincts and appetites, but in a terrain that has already been fundamentally modified by the process of hominization: in other words, the mimetic effects and a wholesale re-­processing of symbols must develop in unison. All the elements of what we call normal psychology . . . must result from the infinitely slow, but ultimately monumental work achieved by the disorganization and increasingly complex reorganization of mimetic functions. Our hypothesis makes it logical to imagine that the rigorous symmetry between the mimetic partners (which results in the paroxysm of rivalry that is in itself sterile and destructive but becomes fruitful to the extent that ritual retraces it in a spirit of fear and solidarity) must bring about two things among man’s ancestors [among hominiens: literally pre­human hominid species], little by little: the ability to look at the other person, the mimetic double, as an alter ego and the matching capacity to establish a double inside oneself, through processes like reflection and consciousness [“et la faculté corrélative de dédoublement interne, réflexion, conscience etc.”—also translatable as “and the related capacity for internal splitting, reflection, awareness etc.”].66

Girard seems to be saying that recognizably human desire, beyond the fixities of animal instinct, only emerges out of the whole mimetic and symbolic reorganization that constitutes the hominizing process—so far, so good—but, in particular, that rivalry provides the necessary precondition for conscious self-­awareness. Is he saying that our mimetic double calls us into being as a self—that our first ancestors needed rivalrous provocation in order to become conscious? If so, it would indeed suggest that rivalry is the mother of humanity, confirming the worst fears of Balthasar (and Milbank). This is especially so because no mention of the founding murder is made in the passage, perhaps suggesting that rivalrous escalation strikes the very first spark of human consciousness before anyone is sacrificed. “Adam and Eve” would thus have awoken to one another in rivalry, rather than with Adam’s non­rivalrous delight in Eve that is recounted in Genesis 2:23. Is it possible to interpret this passage from Girard in such a way that

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orthodox Christian belief in human innocence before “the fall” can be preserved? Here it is helpful to compare the English translation with those key phrases in the original French text, as revisited in the passage quoted above from Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. My alternative rendering appears to soften and mitigate stronger-­ sounding claims in the official English version (i.e., claims to the effect that human consciousness and thought as a whole are the direct fruits of rivalry). The French original seems to be saying no more than that awareness of self and awareness of other grow up together, with rivalry contributing to our growth in reflexive self-­awareness. And such rivalry is already being harnessed to productive ends. It is also interesting that while the founding murder is not mentioned in this passage, hominization is already under way and the protective sacrificial fruit of ritual is already in place. This confirms that Girard is addressing a point in the journey of humanity that is already beyond the founding murder. Use of the word hominiens locates the transition that has obviously taken place prior to the emergence of Homo sapiens, which fits our established understanding of Girard on the timing of this hominizing transition, as does his sense that the genus Homo has continued to evolve in its capacities for communication and world-­ making (thanks to ritual and other religious resources deriving from the founding murder). I conclude that this difficult passage in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World refers to the ritual aftermath of a founding murder, at a time when “human” societies are developing. It need not refer to rivalrous dynamics birthing the human. Indeed, there is evidence in Girard for positing a mimetic state prior to the emergence of rivalrous desire, on the cusp of hominization, before the onset of rivalrous escalation that builds toward the founding murder. This proposal can be filled out and buttressed if we attend to an exchange between Girard and Schwager on “the fall” in an explicit discussion of theological orthodoxy. In 1983 Schwager wrote to Balthasar that their shared concern about the compromising of freedom in Girard’s account of human desire had been resolved to Schwager’s satisfaction,67 as was also evident in Schwager’s essay “Mimesis and Freedom.” Having dismissed

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Dumouchel’s take on the entrapment of desire, Schwager continued in that lecture to propose a reconciliation of Girard on mimesis and sacrifice with the free and unhindered desire for God recognized by Christian theology in the story of Adam and Eve—that is, before they freely chose the path that pointed forward to Cain, Abel, and the primal murder.68 Girard went some way toward endorsing this position in a letter to Schwager early in 1991, though he emphasized the immediate deviation of such natural desire for God toward human models. This he described in terms of idolatry and original sin. Here Girard seems to be pursuing two concerns of personal importance. One has to do with his apparent wish to find acceptance in Catholic theological circles—he asks Schwager, “Is it possible to affirm such a thing without getting into trouble with your colleagues?” The other is to preserve his own deep-­seated social-­scientific commitments and not to compromise them in his desire to satisfy theological orthodoxy, informing Schwager that “I don’t operate as well with abstract concepts as I do intuitively.”69 Schwager proposed a solution that seemed to satisfy Girard, whereby mimetic theory and theological orthodoxy could both be accommodated. This placed “the fall” in a zone of human freedom between the era of animal mimesis, from which humans emerged, and the hell of mimetic entrapment into which free but idolatrous choice led subsequent humanity to “fall.” Indeed, humanity was so quickly enslaved mimetically that this primal zone of genuine freedom became lost in phenomenological obscurity.70 This proposal obviously pleased Girard, who, ever charming, replied to his friend, “How can I not agree with you?” So the choice of mimetic models in freedom is indeed possible for Girard, even though he recognizes that prehistory reveals no trace of this choice ever having been made. Girard continues in that letter, clarifying what he is prepared to agree on—perhaps to make sure that he has it clear in his own mind: Should we not think that the option to choose the divine model in the gospel sense is there from the beginning, but it isn’t chosen; therefore, it is nowhere present in what we know of mankind [Ne

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faut-­il pas penser que la possibilité de choisir le modèle divin au sens évangélique est là dès début mais n’est pas choisie est donc n’est présente nulle part dans ce que nous voyons de l’homme]? And the fact that this choice was not made, makes the other choice something that seems natural and that becomes the wounded nature of man [car le fait que ce choix n’ait pas été fait a fait de l’autre choix quelque chose qui semble naturel, qui devient la nature blessée de l’homme]? But only the light of revelation can show that man is wounded, and that he renounces his freedom because he lives with the continuing influence of [elle reste dans le prolongement de] animal mimesis, which aggravates the violence? Am I correctly interpreting what you said? So there is a possibility of another choice, of which there’s no objective trace to be found in a natural and evolutionary analysis, because the continuity with animal nature is all that is visible [la continuité avec l’animal est seule visible]. This explains so many things.71

Hence Girard affirms a primal place for the freedom that he had insisted upon more generally, notwithstanding the strong sense of mimetic compulsion that he and Schwager jointly acknowledge. Here his good will to theological orthodoxy could not be plainer. He acknowledges no other humanity than a fallen one as seen to emerge from a familiar reading of the Genesis account72 while insisting on human freedom alongside mimetic desire. Yet Girard retains his conviction that Cain murdering Abel is the crucial event, chiefly because “both the synoptic Gospels and John talk about the foundation of the world (katabole tou kosmou), or the origin, the beginning (archē) in terms of murder.”73 Elsewhere he puts it thus: “Original sin begins on an individual level in Genesis, with Adam and Eve but it immediately continues on the group level with Cain and Abel: the murder of the brother, you see, is the creation of human culture.”74 So Girard’s understanding of Christian orthodoxy’s good creation does not distract his primary attention away from the violent emergence of culture. Girard sees “the fall” as referring primarily to what happened with Cain and Abel, though Girard can now also acknowledge

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the prior choices in human freedom that faith affirms, and which led to that fateful meeting of Cain and Abel in the field—choices, however, which remain invisible to the scientific eye. Thus Girard affirms a theologically orthodox picture of human origins as compatible with the scientific intent of his mimetic theory, without having to bend that theory out of shape. Having said that, it is plainly a happy outcome for Girard that his orthodoxy on this matter could be established to Schwager’s satisfaction, on behalf of the Catholic theological world.

Mimetic Theory and Theology: Prophetic and Mystical Michael Kirwan, in his book on Girard and theology, mentions political theology and liberation theology as two areas where mimetic theory offers particular insights. We have noted the central place given to the victim and the exposure of violently complicit religion in Girard’s account, which is in keeping with the core concerns of liberation theology. So, by “giving up the rationalistic illusion that confines religion to religious belief stricto sensu” because “knowingly or not we all exist inside some kind of religion,”75 Girard is effectively endorsing liberation theology’s turn away from problems of modern Western unbelief toward those of (often religiously sanctioned) social injustice. Kirwan also points out that in this deconstructive age, when radically “postmodern” theologians declare that nothing lies outside the text, Girard shares with the liberation theologians a stubborn realism about concrete social conditions.76 Regarding political theology, we have considered Girard’s interpretation of the New Testament powers and principalities, Satan, and the katéchon in light of mimetic theory, along with a range of his insights into the dynamics of secular modernity. These themes are widely theorized in political theology, and Girardian thought has made a contribution. My interest in this section and the following, however, is to look elsewhere, noting synergies with Girard’s program in more fundamental theology, in terms of both influences on him and links that might be fruitfully developed.

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Wolfgang Palaver, in his magisterial study René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, identifies Girard’s affinity with Augustine on the borrowed nature of desire.77 To this we should add Augustine’s awareness of the deviated transcendence whereby a natural desire for divine plenitude is satanically deviated.78 Other themes in Augustine have presented themselves already in our discussion of Girard: a sense of the creation as originally good though diverted by sin, an unsentimental realism about human motivations, and a sense of God’s purposes being worked out regardless of sin and evil. These all remain for “late Girard,” despite his darker thoughts, allowing him to retain a sense of history’s openness. Rowan Williams helpfully identifies Girard with the project of negative theology, given the latter’s conviction that Jesus’s death reveals a God wholly outside the processes of sacred violence. This extra-­ systemic God is associated by Williams with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Simone Weil.79 For Kevin Lenehan, who has written a major study comparing Girard and Bonhoeffer, both are “thinkers of the end of religion” who prioritize God’s revelation over violent-­tending human constructions of meaning and who view the secular positively, making contributions to theology that are foundationally relational and violence-­renouncing.80 We do not know the extent to which Girard was aware of Bonhoeffer, though he was certainly aware of the latter’s French contemporary. In Weil we discover major theological, spiritual, and intellectual influences on Girard. Palaver notes that Weil and Girard both distinguish between first-­and second-­rate authors, and Girard’s consequent use of Weil in formulating his account of Marcel Proust’s “novelistic conversion.” He also points to their shared (Augustinian) sense of the danger of deviated religiosity—though, in distancing himself from Weil’s harsh assessment of Judaism, Girard has tended to disavow the extent of his dependence on her.81 Still, Girard does acknowledge Weil’s influence,82 perhaps admiring her because he owes far more to the avant-­garde and revolutionary tradition than to French Catholic literature.83 And, like Weil, Girard was a kind of outsider to the Catholic Church’s institutional agenda “for Christ’s sake,” likewise to official

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theology—though, unlike Weil, the logic of Girard’s discoveries led him to embrace the Church and a life of active worship. Before his first book, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, then, and the late 1950s Christian conversion that cleared the way for him to complete it, Girard’s early reading of Weil had helped to sow the seeds of major insights: I remember reading Weil in 1955, while I was teaching the modern novel, and she had a considerable impact on me. . . . Weil’s intuitions on mimetic dynamics and collective victimary processes are of great importance. .  .  . Weil particularly understood the oscillations between enemies in tragic conflicts, where the winner of today will be the loser of tomorrow, and where deities change camp accordingly. The definition of tragedy that I use in my books lies in this alternate symmetry, which goes on ad infinitum.84

Weil recognizes the similarity between religious feelings and the emotions associated with social belonging—“vox populi, vox Dei”85— on the basis of which she resists the Roman Catholic Church’s claims on her allegiance, fearing that an ersatz divinity would draw her into a compelling but ultimately satanic “mystical body.”86 She identifies a feedback loop of antagonism in human relations that tends toward a scapegoating resolution.87 Her own experience of being caught up in a genuinely alternative “mystical body” is described in terms of captivity to Christ through embodied vocational solidarity with the affliction (malheur) of all creation, serving a God who does not reflect human power and violence.88 Weil offers a mysticism of redemption centered on self-­ dispossession, in tandem with God’s “decreation”: such a kenotic making-­room-­for-­the-­other is understood to be God’s way with creation, calling for both divine and human self-­limitation.89 Weil identifies precursors of Christian salvation in the tragic literature that proved so significant for Girard—he is especially struck by her identification of Antigone as “the most perfect figura Christi in the ancient world.”90 She refers also to “a kind of magic” entailed in the Hebrew scapegoat ritual, though it was only thanks to Christ—to his purity

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and his willingness to suffer as the world’s evil transfixed itself upon him—that history’s current of sustaining violence was finally short-­ circuited.91 Attention to Christ’s example rather than to our own religious and ethical striving yields the kind of victorious passivity92 that constitutes Weil’s contemplative account of world-­transforming Christian obedience. We can see that Weil’s critique of false transcendence in the name of something beyond human contriving is suggestive of Girard’s mimetic theory in all its elements. While Girard has his mimetic desire and Weil her “force,” both thinkers refer to conformist impulses that fuel the delusion of personal autonomy while reinforcing group norms.93 For both of them these norms tend to idolatry and collectivism, to violence and scapegoating. Likewise, each sees a counter-­ mimetic story emerging in history: hers more developmental, his more episodic and discontinuous,94 though for both it is only in Christ that humanity finally breaks through to a new stage of existence. Even Weil’s emphasis on the necessary spiritual posture of passivity has emerged in Girard’s thought. He commends Proust for abandoning the snobisme of Parisian salons for twelve years of withdrawal in his appartement on the Boulevard Haussmann, where he crafted his masterwork In Search of Lost Time; likewise Friedrich Hölderlin, who forsook the world of mimetic to-­and-­fro for the literary solitude of his tower.95 Here is a further dimension of the kenosis that plays so central a role for Girard. So, despite their disparities and divergences, Girard endorses what he calls Weil’s “Gospel anthropology”—her suggestion that the Gospels are “a theory of humankind even before they are a theory of God”96—and laments that the Christian tradition has tended to prefer a philosophical anthropology.97 Cyril O’Regan concludes that Weil is far more intentionally theological in the direct divine agency that she posits while, strictly, this has no place in Girard’s more scientific account.98 This is a regu­ lar refrain in the assessment of Girard by Christian thinkers, and it is not without warrant. Even in a late interview Girard can still declare that “I am fundamentally an anthropologist and a rationalist.”99 Hence, some have accused Girard of sacrificing theology to social science—Jim Fodor,100 for instance, though one must chiefly

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reckon with John Milbank—while his friend, the Jesuit Schwager, first thought of Girard as a pre-­Christian Plato-­figure awaiting theological baptism.101 Yet there is more to what he offers than that. For Girard, who insists on addressing the wider world and not simply Christian believers, it is nevertheless the case that his anthropology is illuminated by the Gospels—likewise that the Gospels’ undoing of the false sacred liberates human reason.102 The clearest advocate to date for coming straight out and numbering Girard among the theologians is Kevin Mongrain. He thinks that electors of the Académie française, who placed Girard in seat number 37 among the 40 immortels, knew what they were doing. It was a seat previously occupied by Catholic theologians.103 Mongrain is convinced that if we read attentively, we see that [Girard’s] anthropology is not anthropocentric but fundamentally theocentric and Christocentric, which puts it squarely in the family of Christian theology. The anthropological doctrine of mimesis, which Girard calls his “mimetic theory,” is therefore not at the center of Girard’s thought. Instead . . . his anthropology is merely the handmaiden to his fundamentally theocentric-­Christocentric perspective on salvation history. He may have developed his anthropology deductively from looking at parts of the providential whole, but eventually the providential whole crystallized in his thinking, and since then his anthropological doctrine has been tailored to better serve the biblical narrative’s panoramic vision of salvation history.104

The presence of what Girard in Battling to the End calls “innermost mediation” (médiation intime),105 recalling Augustine’s interior intimo meo and the imitation of Christ, is a further sign for Mongrain that Girard has arrived in the neighborhood of mystical theology, hence his striking description of Girard as “a theologian of the cloistered heart.”106 This fulsome assessment risks collapsing the paradox inherent in Girard’s social-­scientific approach to theology, in which theology is served as it were by one who stands outside it. Such was the case

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with Weil, too, who influenced Girard. Yet there can be no doubt that Girard strengthened his links to the theological enterprise over time, just as there can be no doubt that the project of allowing desire to be transformed by borrowing the desire of Christ constitutes a spiritual matter for Girard while it is equally a sociopolitical matter. So, if Girard is perhaps not quite the “theologian of the cloistered heart” that Mongrain regards him to be, he is certainly the prophet of an urgent and crucial social transformation that proceeds from Christ, via the transformation of our desire. It is the mediated nature of interdividual reality that makes this process of sharing Christ’s desire indivisibly both social and personal. Moreover, as we will see in the following chapter, this integration of personal transformation into the process of revelation and redemption is one more sign of Girard’s alignment with the priorities of theological dramatic theory. Now, how might this insight play out in practical terms? Girard is often hesitant to provide a detailed program for applying mimetic theory. Nevertheless, one set of possibilities is receiving increased attention from his Christian interpreters. The Conferences of John Cassian, in particular the desert father’s acute analysis of obsessive mental habits—also the greater efficacy of allowing these preoccupations to be displaced in contemplative prayer, rather than self-­ consciously trying to fight them—illuminates, for Mongrain, Girard’s own remedy for the obsessions of internal mediation, mimetic rivalry, and scandal.107 This is necessarily so, given that Satan, according to mimetic theory, is a projection of the system that works by provoking rivalry. Accordingly, as Schwager explains, “Since projections easily awaken counter-­projections, they are never overcome through direct attacks but are even reinforced that way. Evil cannot be fought frontally, but can only be overcome by the slow development of a true vision of reality.”108 James Alison would concur, emphasizing this other-­dependent nature of Christian faith and ethics beyond the imaginative scope of conventional moralizing. “What matters is not so much what you do,” Alison writes, “as what someone else is doing, altering your subjectivity and producing a new you.”109 A Girard-­literate Cassian would insist that mimetic obsessions need to be exposed to Christ’s desire, to which one is opened through

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the habituated practice of contemplative prayer. Such contemplation is best understood in Girardian terms as disciplined attention to an alternative model of desire, rather than to models that sustain our obsessions even as we struggle against them.110 Regarding rivalry, for instance, Girard says that “if we imitate the detached generosity of God, then the trap of mimetic rivalries will never close over us.”111 More work needs to be done linking Girardian imitatio with meditatio in the tradition of John Main and the World Community for Christian Meditation, among whom the influence of Cassian looms large.112 Such contemplation can be understood in terms of what I call mimetic dialysis. If anyone is inclined to think that such considerations represent a significant departure from Girard’s characteristic voice and preoccupations—perhaps deforming his prophetic cultural critique into an ill-­fitting pietism—I would encourage them to think again. No one knows Girard better, against the backdrop of both social science and the history of ideas, than Wolfgang Palaver, and in a recent essay, touching on several themes that I have addressed in this section, Palaver leaves no doubt about the connection between the social and the mystical in Girard: I think that Girard’s mimetic theory is deeply rooted in a mystic experience that opened his eyes to precisely this God who brings together renunciation and creative love. Working on his very first book, Girard discovered the God of the Gospels. He took over Simone Weil’s expression “creative renunciation”—albeit without citing the French mystic at all—to summarize the pivotal last chapter of his first book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. . . . It is this insight that enabled Girard to understand the deep difference between . . . parochial altruism as it emerges from the archaic past and Christian universalism.113

Another leading Girardian scholar, Ann Astell, reinforces this sense of the mystical and the social as inseparable for Girard.114 Once again we recognize Blaise Pascal’s order of charity as an important

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concept for Girard, in which God is encountered uncomfortably as the genuinely spiritual contends against the false-sacred ordering of human affairs. This underscores Girard’s conviction that a different form of human togetherness is made possible by the gospel. He describes this different form of human togetherness as “a state of positive undifferentiation, in other words, identified with others.”115 So, beyond what we might call negative undifferentiation, which marks the emergence of doubles in the mimetic crisis, and the differenti­ ation that reasserts itself through sacrificial resolution, Girard gives us “positive differentiation.” As he says, it is the capacity to accept the other—the obverse of insisting on differentiation from the other in order to allocate blame and to establish superiority. Instead, by sharing in Christ’s incarnate solidarity with all his “sheep,” we come to share in the shepherd’s desire, his love, and his willingness to smell like the sheep (an image for ministry commended by Pope Francis). “This is Christian love,” Girard says, “and it exists in our world. It is even very active. It saves many people, works in hospitals, and even operates in some forms of research. Without this love, the world would have exploded long ago.”116 Here is the capacity to pass beyond judging others—beyond identifying the speck in another’s eye while remaining oblivious to the major blockage in our own (Matt. 7:1–3). Here is Jesus’s juxtaposition of the two great commandments (Matt. 22:36–40), which link the deeply mystical embrace of God through the total yielding of our identities and capacities (heart, soul, mind, and strength) with the “positive undifferentiation” that allows us to love our neighbor as ourselves. So, to be mystical in a Girardian way is to avoid being scandalized, to refuse self-­justification on the basis of our works (i.e., against the other, who is deemed not to measure up by comparison with ourselves), and not to disdain our structural entanglements with flawed others. Such Christian mysticism represents a reversal of the false sacred, which seeks “negative differentiation.” Instead, if that is no longer our concern, we can live non­rivalrously and non­judgmentally.117 So we see that addressing Girard in terms of mysticism takes us into, rather than away from, the social heart of mimetic theory.

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Mimetic Theory and Theology: If Bernard Lonergan, Why Not Sarah Coakley? Theology today is a pluralistic discipline with many contested methods. I mention two creative proposals, each pointing in the direction of what Girard is doing. The first, Catholic proposal is already discussed in secondary Girardian literature. The other proposal is Anglican, yet I find it even more promising as a theological vehicle for engaging with mimetic theory—and this despite criticism directed at Girard from its originator. This final section in the chapter is highly compressed, and its aim is at best to be suggestive. I have saved the most comprehensive and suggestive model for the following chapter. An important mid-­twentieth-­century attempt at unifying modern theology’s complex methodological space came from the Canadian Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan, and overtures have been made within the guild of Lonerganians toward making common cause with Girard. For example, Charles Hefling emphasizes the dynamic nature of experience, the comprehensiveness of mimetic theory in illuminating so much from the perspective of a single insight, and, chiefly, Girard’s sense of humanity’s self-­deception, rationalization, and complicity in the grip of a corporate lie. All these are deemed to be correlative with Lonergan.118 Robert M. Doran suggests compatibilities in terms of mimetic desire in Girard and consciousness in Lonergan, focusing on the latter’s natural desire to know and his “sensitive-­psychic desire.”119 Apart from these specifics, the overall thrust of Lonergan’s undertaking resonates with a number of Girardian emphases. In his most influential work, Method in Theology, Lonergan joins the flight of mid-­ twentieth-­ century nouvelle théologie away from the statically conceived logical categories of Aristotelian/scholastic thinking. This was the theological mindset that dominated Catholic seminary education from the Council of Trent to Vatican II. Instead, Lonergan proposed a dynamic method, as befits human immersion in history, and necessarily involving the Christian’s own intellectual, moral, and religious transformation. Lonergan reconceived the theological task to encompass a list of essential categories: research,

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interpretation, history, dialectics, foundations, and doctrines, to be taken up by systematic theology and then communicated in the most appropriate way120—all of which “makes thematic what already is a part of Christian living.”121 The center of gravity for Lonergan was the reality of being caught up by God into self-­transcending love and hence delivered from false religion and the demonic—from “an exultant destructiveness of oneself and others,”122 of which Girard, too, had been deeply aware since his early work on the modern European novel. Lonergan’s self-­transcending Eros recalls Girard’s account of desire for the being of a model, which both thinkers might trace to Augustine. There are certainly affinities here, in the self-­involving dynamic of revelation and the liberation of humanity from lies that characterize both approaches (though Girard’s single focus, unlike that of Lonergan, is not explored via so careful a demarcation of investigative categories). I now mention a newer theological method that, while arising in response to a very different agenda and containing much that Girard does not address, nevertheless provides a category for what Girard is doing: the théologie totale of English priest and theologian Sarah Coakley. It points beyond the three main options in current British theology, which she deems variously to be inadequate: fundamentalism, the Radical Orthodoxy project of Milbank et al. (more on that in subsequent chapters), and a re­energized theological liberalism—in particular, a liberal theology of feminist form, which tends to deny the creative potential of traditional Christian orthodoxy. Reading Coakley’s critique of these three options, I can picture Girard sidestepping each criticism while endorsing what she declares to be valuable: The first alternative rightly seeks to extract itself from dependence on secular “foundations,” whether philosophical or sociological, and to resist moral relativism; but in the process it repressively ignores the complex actualities of the lives of its religious adherents. The second alternative rightly exposes the pretensions of a modern secular sociology that sought to explain religion away; but in the process it also averts its intellectual gaze from the entanglements of high doctrinal “orthodoxy” with messy heterodox realities. The

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third option, quite differently, declares itself unashamedly “modern” and has no fear of the hermeneutics of suspicion, as such: sociology can well be utilized to trace “patriarchal” aberrations within the faith, to the point of asserting that these aberrations represent its natural and intrinsic identity. The remaining problem in this third option is a different one, then, from that of the other two. For here modern philosophy and social science, as such, seem to provide no reason for theological hope in the face of these exposés of failure, except to invite one to remake “God” by almost arbitrary preference.123

Girard cannot be tarred with any of these brushes. He is too indebted to the social sciences for the fundamentalists and for Radical Orthodoxy. Though, as I will suggest in subsequent chapters, his use of social science is sufficiently biblically and theologically com­ patible to resist the critique of Milbank. He is also more insistent than both fundamentalism and Radical Orthodoxy about the mixed quality of religion, church, and society. Yet he is more confident than the theological liberals, insisting that Christian orthodoxy offers better weapons against distorted religion than those provided by this or that fashionable ideology. Instead, Girard’s program shares affinities with Coakley’s own proposal. Théologie totale is open to social science, while refusing to be reductionist. It favors the enlargement of theology as a wide-­ ranging but non­totalizing process of disclosure. It entails the incorporation of personal transformation into revelation. It acknowledges that sexual and other natural human desires are related to our desire for God—indeed, locating the origin of our desire in the Trini­tarian mutuality of God’s own Being, which is a position that we have seen Girard endorse. Thus théologie totale draws gender and politics (the dynamics of human relationality) into our understanding of God, while insisting on the necessity of contemplation and mysticism for spiritual creativity.124 There are tensions preserved in théologie totale that are also found in Girard’s program: between forthright scientific realism about the human condition and the necessary reve­lation of God for truly understanding and re­orienting humanity; also between

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the aforementioned involvement of human desires in how God is conceived and the contemplative capacity to counter any emerging distortions. Théologie totale overcomes false divides, including those between belief and practice, thought and affect, theology and religious studies, the critical and the hermeneutical, the academic and the pastoral. Théologie totale seems compatible with the highly critical yet profoundly humane Christian vision that Girard conveys, in which faith and reason are woven fine, and self-­involving transformation is essential for knowing the truth. The healing of desire by properly repositioning it in the light of Trinitarian desire lies at the heart of Coakley’s proposal,125 and her goal is surely suggestive of Girard’s: being caught up in “the Spirit’s simultaneous erasure of human idolatry and subtle reconstitution of human selfhood in God.”126 Given that Coakley has criticized Girard for the inadequacy of his early dismissal of sacrifice, and has sustained her critique despite his position on sacrifice having moved far closer to her own, it would be good if their projects could become more strongly aligned.127

* * *

I introduced this chapter by pointing out what Girard says about his own commitments to the theological task and to theological orthodoxy. I argued that he intends to engage with theology, though in a way that relies on social science and the close observation of human desire at work. A crucial test case to do with human freedom and the violence of human origins was then examined. I argued that Girard had intentionally sought to maintain an orthodox position, though the issue will need to be revisited in subsequent chapters. I then sought to situate Girard according to some currents and figures in modern theology, including the link that Girard acknowledges to the prophetic witness of Weil and to the implications of mimetic theory for personal transformation via contemplation. Like Weil, Girard is not an ecclesial theologian but, rather, a prophet who helps Christians and others to see things differently. Thus his sense of calling to be an apologist was realized. The type of theology that Girard evokes is the self-­involving, self-­transcending sort, with obvious affinities to

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spiritual theology and to the work of Lonergan. In keeping with the picture that has emerged of his priorities, I suggest that Girard’s compatibility with the emerging théologie totale project of his critic Coakley is worth exploring and developing (more on the related concerns of Coakley and Milbank in chapters 6 and 7). I have saved one more current theological movement with strong Girard connections for chapter 5. Schwager used it as a vehicle for exploring Girardian insights in his book Jesus and the Drama of Salvation, no doubt aiming to address doubts about Girard expressed in Balthasar’s great Theo-­Drama. We now turn to this category of theological dramatic theory, along with the congruent (kenotic and incarnational) Thomistic theme of double agency, to claim mimetic theory and its vision of the human journey for theological orthodoxy. However, in this undertaking I will be painting on a world-­historical canvas, beyond the account of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection to which Schwager limits himself in conceiving his version of a Girardian Theo-­drama.

CH A P TER 5

A Divine-­Human Drama

As we have seen, René Girard demonstrates goodwill to theological orthodoxy in the nonviolent, kenotic, incarnational position that he endorses. Yet challenges persist. In the remainder of the book, I will aim to set out a Theo-­dramatic perspective on Girard’s reading of natural and human history as a salvation history. The double agency tradition, developed by Thomas Aquinas, is an obvious and helpful adjunct in this undertaking and can strengthen Girard against his theological critics. In short, my proposal is that, from a Girardian perspective, human and natural history is best understood as a drama of divine action through the within of things, honoring both the freedom and finitude of creaturely existence. In keeping with this emphasis on divine drama playing out kenotically in the realm of creaturely finitude, I will use a category from improvisation theory in the theater to suggest how the Theo-­drama advances—the category of overaccepting, beyond the alternatives of accepting and blocking that stifle creative improvisation. In this way we can begin to see how Girard might escape the charge that his account of natural and human history enshrines ontological violence. A preliminary discussion of some challenges and possibilities for a Girardian account of revelation will set the scene.  115

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Girard and Revelation The process of revelation is . . . technically identical with the overcoming of violence among men and women. —Raymund Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats? The supernatural, in the Christian sense, respects freedom. Quite literally, it cannot make itself felt as a commanding force. To a certain world, therefore, it remains absolutely out of reach. —René Girard (with Thomas Bertonneau), “The Logic of the Undecidable”

Girard is accused of “gnostic” tendencies in the Theo-­Drama of Hans Urs von Balthasar.1 Divine revelation according to Girard is declared to be too narrow and limited to conveying information only. Further, this informational content is regarded as lacking a properly Catholic acknowledgment of humanity’s longstanding if incomplete God-­ awareness prior to the revelation in Jesus Christ. Balthasar’s mystical sense of God’s glory anticipated in the world through the impact of beauty, enlisting the rightly disposed believer in a divine-­human drama of personal transformation after a form most fully revealed in Christ,2 is said to be absent from Girard. So, according to Balthasar, Girard is too restrictive in theorizing a process that is at once more universal and more participatory. Revelation for Girard does of course contain “gnosis”—saving knowledge that was not previously known—though that gnosis is rather like the two-­dimensional shadow cast by a three-­dimensional object. The “news” component of Girard’s “good news” concerns the innocent victim being revealed at last, along an arc beginning with the Hebrew psalmists and prophets and leading to the passion of Jesus Christ. This disclosive arc continues, via Jesus’s resurrection and its non­mythological ignition of a non­sacrificial human togetherness, with the Holy Spirit unleashed as God’s “advocate for the defense” of victims. Thus begins a phase of history in which the newly exposed

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false-­sacred mechanism is progressively undone, despite resistance both from inside and outside the Christian orbit. One of Girard’s strengths here is that his account of revelation as unveiling is at one with the root meaning of “apocalypse,” so that revelation and apocalypse, typically disjoined in modern theology, can once again mutually illuminate. The apocalypse for Girard begins with the unraveling of social bonds as the false sacred is increasingly exposed and denatured, and compassion for victims begins to leach into the foundations of culture to weaken the sacrificial edifice of human social order. From his early work on the hypermimetic condition of modernity and its tendency toward madness—as exposed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche—to the apocalypse of “escalation to extremes” that haunted Carl von Clausewitz in his reflections on Napoleonic-­era military history, Girard discerns a terrifying undercurrent to history that he traces to the historical impact of Jesus Christ. Balthasar’s Catholic concern about the gnostic quality of that revelation invites some useful clarifications. Regarding Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, to which Balthasar refers, it is certainly fair to say that Girard sees revelation as significantly informational—a liberating truth about the human condition is revealed through the scriptures. Yet revelation of this victim mechanism is at the same time God’s saving act, according to a reasonable reading of Girard, as the shackles of history’s great and indispensable lie begin to be thrown off. And here the parallels with Gnosticism end. Unlike gnostic revelations, all this happens through concrete history: first, in the actual human history of Jesus, which is integral for Girard in focusing and capping off a longer process of historical revelation; second, because the transformation of our continuing personal and collective history is likewise involved (i.e., it is about transforming history, not escaping history). Revelation of the real God, according to Girard, takes place when the false sacred is exposed and coincides with the emergence of a new humanity beyond the structuring power of sacred violence.3 As the American Catholic theologian Grant Kaplan helpfully explains,

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“Girardian revelation yields both a formal and material element. Formally, it initiates a process of re-­reading; materially, it reveals or discloses a fundamental truth about humans and God that reverses the cultural momentum aimed at concealing these fundamental truths.”4 Girard does not simply equate divine revelation with the arrival of human self-­understanding, in line with the existentialist theology of Rudolf Bultmann that was also accused of gnostic tendencies. Rather, in Jesus Christ there is a new life for humanity, with new patterns of relationship, a new future, and, as James Alison also points out, even a new past5—a new narrative of our origins, of our priorities, of where we think we have been led in life, and hence of our identity. So, we are saved and reconstituted beyond simply being informed, as the single jewel of divine revelation reveals in its facets the various theological loci. As Alison explains, “revelation and salvation are not separable realities, but . . . the discovery of who God is and who we are is itself an important part of salvation, not accessible in any depth except from within the process of salvation.”6 Of course, these insights on the integral relation between revelation and salvation are not confined to the Girardian movement in recent theology, or indeed to Catholicism. The Reformed theologian Colin Gunton is completely in accord, insisting that “revelation is first of all a function of that divine action by which the redemption of the creation is achieved in such a way that human blindness and ignorance are also removed. To that extent the doctrine of revelation should be understood to be a function of the doctrine of salvation.”7 The inseparability of what is revealed and the uptake of that reve­ lation emerge for Girard in John’s account of the woman taken in adultery ( John 7:53–8:11). After Jesus reveals the scapegoating nature of what is about to be unleashed on the woman, her accusers depart one by one as each comes to feel the force of that revelation.8 For Girard, then, according to Grant Kaplan, revelation occurs not so much in the suddenness of an event, but in the slow and painful coming-­to-­understand that unifies being forgiven with becoming conscious of one’s sinfulness. The revelation transforms what it means to understand: not so much to conceive,

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but to undergo change. . . . The nature of the knowledge or meaning revealed determines the manner of its appropriation. And the extent to which Christians have understood the meaning of Christ’s words and deeds manifests itself in the way they live their lives.9

This basic Girardian insight is seen to emerge from the Hebrew scriptures. “When Yahweh reveals himself as Lord,” as Raymund Schwager insists, “he does not grant humans additional knowledge. He unmasks their latent violence and shows that they can live peacefully and truthfully in his name only.”10 This decidedly non­ gnostic account of revelation-­ as-­ salvation-­ as-­sanctification-­as-­apocalypse is the basis for rightly understanding Girard’s “Gospel anthropology.” It is inadequate on the part of leading Anglican theologian John Milbank, therefore, to claim that Girard’s account of human life and origins is solely indebted to the social sciences.11 Here I daresay that Milbank betrays a suspicion toward science in general and social science in particular. It is hard not to conclude that he regards science as a debased form of knowing that sunders reality in order to reunite it, sacrificially despoiling a more integral vision of reality.12 Yet for Girard the gospel emerges at the heart of what God is making of human history and society, with the social sciences granted the vocation of ancilla theologiae in explicating that divine mission. The social sciences have helped Girard to theorize scripture’s exposure of a religio-­cultural complex founded on the sacred victim. So, there need be no conflict here between science and faith; we can conclude, with James Alison, that revelation and mimetic theory are concentric for Girard.13 Nevertheless, these concerns of Milbank, for whom an ambitious and high-­minded agenda in political theology accompanies his emerging philosophical and systematic theology, are important. And it is this theology to which Milbank looks for his account of humanity and society, rather than the degraded pseudo-­theology that he identifies in the modern social sciences.14 Milbank insists on gift and reciprocity as the pacific Trinitarian pattern whereby human beings are created as relational, God-­oriented beings.15 While gift g­ iving in a range of human societies is analyzed

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anthropologically by Girard as a ritual of social bonding that involves the displacement of sacrifice from people to objects,16 for Milbank all this represents the degenerate form of an ideal. He opts for an originally peaceful, hierarchical order of gift exchange, binding a group together in healthy mutuality, rather than the prophylactic role that Girard, following Marcel Mauss, assigns to gift giving.17 Like Max Scheler, Milbank adopts what amounts to an aristocratic view of proper social arrangements.18 He cannot abide the antagonism of equals that Girard imagines in the primal horde, from which peace accidentally but miraculously emerges once the mob has set upon a scapegoat victim. Because of his preferred hierarchical sensibilities, and his Augustinian sense of desire as originally pure and God-­ward, Milbank rejects Girard’s account of desire, blaming him for projecting the agonistic cultural arbitrariness of modern liberal democracies back onto human origins, and hence for debasing all desire as derivative. Girard’s account of desire recalls for Milbank the worst excesses of positivist social engineering, in which selves and their desires are sacrificed for a collective peace.19 The disjunction here surely lies with Milbank not appreciating how “acquisitive mimesis” is only a derivative form of desire according to Girard, as James Alison has long pointed out.20 Milbank appears to miss what we might call the metaphysical psychology of mimetic desire, in its attraction to the “being” of a model— whereupon mimetic desire is directed only secondarily to this or that object of desire favored by the model. Girard’s own intentions in this matter are clear enough if we consult his correspondence with Schwager. In the previous chapter we saw how Schwager helped his friend to articulate a theologically orthodox position on human freedom that did not tear the seamless garment of Girard’s social scientific method. Schwager is less successful when trying to conceive in Girardian terms of a pre-­mimetic, natural desire for God—the sort of thing that Milbank also seeks. Schwager’s argument with Girard is that if mimesis shapes all our desiring, then it will inevitably distort and deflect our desire for God. So, there must be a pre-­mimetic state of purer desire according to the demands of Catholic orthodoxy (Schwager is following Henri de Lubac on the

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supernatural here, and Milbank would sympathize). Schwager points to a discussion of “The Winter’s Tale” in Girard’s then-­new book on Shakespeare, A Theater of Envy, in which Leontes only gets Her­mione back, “resurrected,” when his false mimetic image of her has been surrendered. Schwager suggests to Girard that, following this logic, mimetic desire can never connect us to the real God.21 Hence, asks Schwager, does it not follow that mimesis yielded idolatry prior to the further misconceiving of God’s nature that accompanied the singlevictim mechanism? Girard’s response to Schwager is subtle, though he sticks to his guns. Much as how Girard allows an original freedom before the onset of mimetic escalation toward envy, rivalry, and violence—a freedom, however, which is nowhere evident in what social science is equipped to reveal—he is happy to admit a natural desire for God at the beginning of human existence, but one that is immediately diverted toward human models. This is how Girard reads Jesus’s observation in John 5:44: that the glory of God was exchanged for human glory. Girard then asks his friend, “Isn’t original sin based on the fact that the desiderium naturale has been around all along and is still misdirected toward men?”22 So, while Schwager wants a genuine natural desire for God that only later gives way under the sway of mimesis to yield the scapegoat mechanism and the false sacred, Girard seems content to admit a natural mimetic desire for being as his version of what Augustine, de Lubac, and the wider Catholic tradition call for. Answering Schwager, Girard summarizes this alternative formulation: “The idea that the sacred, idolatry, precedes the scapegoat mechanism, would suit me perfectly, if all the structures of the sacred did not depend on this mechanism. But, would it not be sufficient to say that . . . the impetus toward idolatry precedes the mechanism? Mimesis turned toward man is always already oriented toward idolatry.”23 In his 1993 interview with Rebecca Adams, not long after this exchange with Schwager, Girard dismisses the Anglo-­Catholic Milbank as too much of a Catholic philosopher and as insufficiently biblical—as making only scant reference to the Gospels. Girard, however, cannot get past the Johannine conviction that there is murder

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from the beginning.24 Yet from the time of that Rebecca Adams interview, and perhaps in response to Milbank, Girard does begin to emphasize the essentially positive nature of mimesis as the key to human sociality, communication, learning, and hence survival— though mimesis is also involved in envy, rivalry, and violence, along with the sacrificial restraint of violence. For Girard, “metaphysical desire” in the hands of “good mimesis” is the basis of healthy relationships both interpersonal and God-­ward, in a way that is suggestive of the Trinitarian relations. Milbank has noted this acknowledgment of “good mimesis” in Girard’s thinking from the early 1990s, though he says that Girard fails to explain it.25 The explanation that Milbank seeks is actually present in the fuller account of “metaphysical desire” that Girard has been offering since Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.

Revelation and Theo-­Drama Theodramatics is as much concerned with “reconstructed relationships” and how they conduct people into God’s truth in Christ as it is with seeing things in a certain way. —Ben Quash, Theology and the Drama of History Propositionalist theology at its worst is guilty of dedramatizing Scripture. —Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine

Milbank, like Balthasar, worries that Girard has sacrificed something vital for the Christian imagination. I want to dispute this using Balthasar’s own favored category of theological dramatic theory, presenting Girard’s unified theological vision of revelation-­salvation-­ sanctification-­apocalypse in Theo-­dramatic terms. In the previous chapter we noted Bernard Lonergan’s conviction, com­patible with Girard’s, that a dynamic method in theology best suits human immersion in history. Likewise, in Sarah Coakley’s program of thé­ ologie totale the transcending of defining oppositions is paramount.

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Theological dramatic theory offers just this dynamic way forward. Such an approach will also help to address Milbank’s Catholic-­ minded concern that mimetic theory entails an assessment of human relations as foundationally rivalrous and agonistic. So, why drama? Compared with reading a narrative or even the text of a play, both of which can be picked up and put down, “the rationale of the dramatic text as such is performance in real time, and it is hard to see how we could intelligibly think of drama in any other way.”26 Rowan Williams extends this observation to highlight the uniquely confronting presentation of suffering and loss in dramatic performance, when normal habits of evasion and denial are more readily overcome.27 So, drama allows a greater level of engagement with the audience. Likewise, it is also more of a conversation into which the audience is drawn than a one-­way declamation, though it certainly involves declamation. Hence, drama invites a re­examination and broadening of our revelational categories to better reflect a dynamic, two-­way reality. Here it is helpful to invoke the symbolic as a key to the dramatic. Indeed, after surveying accounts of revelation in the history of theology, Avery Dulles adopts “symbol” as the most fitting category28 because it takes time to unpack and cannot be boiled down to a list of propositional dot points. The notion of a “saturated phenomenon” in contemporary philosophical theology is likewise ripe for application to revelation, as Jean-­Luc Marion points out.29 It is a comprehensive reality that cannot be reduced to its parts, that has multiple resonances and crosses neat boundaries, proving endlessly fertile as it is explored and appropriated. All of this is particularly apposite to Girard’s account of revelation and, in particular, to the engagement that drama entails.30 So we are in the realm of reception—indeed of discovery, as James Alison observes.31 The word of God bears fruit as it is discovered through a liberating and transforming encounter: it is declamation leading to reclamation via conversation. Likewise, Girard’s resolutely hermeneutical approach to the use of scripture is appropriately mutual and conversational. The revelation of God reaches us through the merging of horizons between Jesus’s history as mediated by the Judeo-­Christian scriptures and our own history as illuminated by

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those scriptures in conversation with the social sciences. A Girardian account of revelation attends to Jesus’s impact, recalling the insight of renewed historical Jesus studies from the 1950s (though without explicit indebtedness to them).32 For Alison, our knowledge of Jesus Christ begins with the experienced impact of conversion by Jesus Christ—much as the great concavity in the Earth’s crust on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula provides information about the prehistoric asteroid impact that caused it.33 Such an approach represents an improvement on influential twentieth-­century alternatives. It avoids the extrinsic account of revelation in Karl Barth by insisting that the miracle of grace actually swallows up the abyss of sin that separates humanity from God, claiming the human heart as its purpose-­built habitation and there fulfilling its mission. Girard is therefore in step with Balthasar’s own proposed advance on Barth, that “through the grace of incarnation, Christ gives to his brothers and sisters the capacity for being of service to God’s Kingdom in their very natures.”34 It also avoids the way that Karl Rahner’s theological anthro­ pology tends to forward-­load his account of revelation. According to Rahner, human beings are constituted as “hearers of the word,” interiorly hardwired to recognize Christ when they eventually come to encounter him.35 Rahner’s approach proved formative for the whole acculturating, world-­affirming, post–Vatican II Church in the West, but it risks an indiscriminate baptizing of culture. However, we might allow that God, as Rahner’s un­thematized horizon of all human desiring, is technically though of course “anonymously” present wherever desire seeks after the being of its model. Innsbruck theologian Nikolaus Wandinger helpfully explores this possibility. He shows that all such desiring, for Rahner and for Girard, constitutes an incomplete manifestation of what Rahner is tracing along the journey of Augustine’s restless heart toward the being of God. Wandinger also thoughtfully considers the different types of Rahner’s “anonymous Christian” that would necessarily have been present in an ancient pagan world under the sway of Girard’s false sacred—likewise in the post­biblical world, whenever an inchoate sense of revelation led someone toward Christ though away

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from a sacrificially distorted version of historical Christianity. But, while acknowledging the possibility of Christ’s presence incognito throughout history, Wandinger admits that these instances did not attain world-­transforming prominence.36 Hence, Rahner’s “transcendental anthropology” cannot yield sufficient critical distance between gospel and culture. Girard is undoubtedly darker than Rahner in his take on human society and religious sensibility apart from the explicit revelation of God, in a way that reminds Balthasar of Barth.37 Girard sees God and human selves coming into full clarity only through the gospel of Jesus Christ. Riding into view on the Hebrew scriptures, Jesus advances our prior religious reckoning of what an encounter with God might be and who we might be apart from that encounter. This is James Alison’s point about concavities: we are made genuine “hearers of the word” (Rahner) by a revelatory-­salvific-­ transforming-­apocalyptic encounter with Jesus Christ, before which we were not equipped to know the true God properly or our true selves as hearers.38 Before that, we were typically run by the desires of others, and hence were not strictly in our right minds. Wandinger allows as much regarding Rahner on the theme of concupiscence: while no earthly object of desire can fully bind us to itself given the ultimate horizon of being—a horizon that transcends (and hence relativizes) all such worldly attachments—in practice it is idolatrous choice under the pressure of what Girard calls metaphysical desire that remains the norm.39 Alison concludes that if there is a universal “Christoformity” of grace, it is to be found in people actually turning to the victim rather than in any more general “anonymous Christianity.”40 This shows how a dramatic approach can improve our understanding of revelation. It takes us beyond the standard modern options of theology “from above” and theology “from below.” In reve­la­tion, according to Barth, in which God’s word “comes down” to the world, we have a classic expression of theology “from above.” In reve­la­tion, according to Rahner, with humans constituted naturally in openness to God and made ready for God through the structures of their subjectivity, we approach a theology “from below.” These catch-­all terms are imperfect, and their pure forms are not uncomplicatedly on offer.41 Yet each term is suggestive of a tendency. These

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were important categories in late twentieth-­century Christology, for instance, distinguishing high Christology based on revelation (in the tradition of Barth) from lower Christologies more attentive to historical Jesus studies and to theological anthropology as informed by existentialist philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences (Rahner up to a point, but certainly Hans Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx, along with feminist and liberation theologians).42 For present purposes the twinned categories of “above” and “below” in theology are chiefly inadequate because both count the receiver of revelation to be essentially passive—as either receiving an alien word “from above” or sensing a natural yet unarticulated word “from below.” How does that unfamiliar word from above, or that indistinct word from below, come vibrantly alive in cognition and transforming action?43 This is where drama comes into its own, offering a more dynamic category. Theo-­drama certainly insists on a word “from above”—from outside the system of human cultural creation, that is—but not at the expense of its instantiation and fruitfulness once discovered and taken up by human beings. Theo-­drama is not compatible with standard theology “from below,” however, because human openness to God emerges as part of the to and fro, the advance and retreat of dramatic action, rather than being constituted prior to it. For Balthasar, Theo-­ drama conveys a sense of God’s initiative working through human openness and obedience. Humans are attuned to revelation not as Rahner’s “hearers of the word,” then, but only insofar as they are drawn into the Theo-­drama. So, theology for Balthasar is “from within,” as Mark McIntosh terms it,44 rather than “from above” or “from below.” Following Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, it helps Balthasar to think of “epic” and “lyrical” dimensions held together in the Theo-­ drama: the epic mode is objective, official, and doctrinal, while the lyri­cal mode refers to vivid and devout engagement in the drama on the part of believers. This combination yields a juxtaposition of grandeur and intimacy, of address and response.45 Here, aspects “from above” and “from below” are drawn together “from within.” So we are dealing with a more comprehensive category, as Ben Quash observes, for whom “drama offers neither the perspective of immediate feeling and individual association; nor an unruffled perspective on

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the objectively given.”46 So drama provides a model for an integral Christian vision of God’s revelation and salvation, understood to be working themselves out under the actual lived conditions of life and history. Schwager points out that drama integrates genuine, episodic experience—with all its contradictions, conflicts, setbacks, and hard-­ won advances—while retaining an overarching theme.47 In this sense, drama as a theological category represents a potential improvement on narrative theology, which came to prominence in the 1980s. For Schwager, the limitation of narrative as a theological vehicle is its potential unresolvedness. It is true to the complexities of experience, certainly, though without the closure that a traditionally conceived drama provides, with its final act that brings resolution. He argues that as narratives are in themselves capable of being continued indefinitely, a purely narrative theology runs into the dilemma of either abandoning itself to a narrative thread which leads on endlessly, dissolving the Christian memory of events into a sea of other narrations . . . or limiting itself, without any particular justification, to the biblical narratives. . . . In some ways similar to a narrative doctrine of redemption is a theology which takes drama as its model. But this is clearly differentiated from a narrative-­based doctrine in that it is able to integrate a genuine line of reasoning. . . . The theological line of reasoning can be developed out of drama, since drama does not advance without end . . . but expresses itself in conflict and its corresponding resolution.48

In other words, drama involves closure like theory, while including the realism of lived experience. The closure provided by drama comes only through the resolution of difficulties, beyond a more straightforward theoretical version of closure. So, for Quash, “it may be concluded that drama as an art form is uniquely positioned to manifest complex, pluriform, multiply interpreted truth in changing circumstances. It is involving, particular, social, and anticipatory.”49 Such a Theo-­dramatic account of revelation can also do justice to great and intense spiritual lives, as these are caught up in God’s

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purposes.50 Schwager first argued for this particular suitability of drama in his doctoral dissertation on the life and Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. The characteristic Jesuit method of meditation that involves imaginative placement of oneself into a scene from the Gospels, in order to discern the will of God for one’s own situation, integrates intellect, affectivity, and volition, beyond the capacities of abstraction and disembodied reason. Such a Theo-­dramatic approach encourages discernment in the midst of disorienting uncertainties and conflicts, secure that one is part of a larger drama that is going to come out right.51

A Girardian Theo-­Drama There are various theological schemata for structuring the divine-­ human drama of salvation history. Balthasar does not think that Girard is capable of such a feat, accusing him of “rendering impossible a drama that involves the two sides.”52 But this assessment misses the synergy between faith and reason in Girard’s program and his compatibility with Balthasar’s own understanding of revelation as entailing its own reception. Indeed, for Schwager, “Girard’s thought  .  .  . contributes greatly to clarifying this issue, because it agrees perfectly with a dramatic interpretation of revelation in Jesus Christ, as inspired by the ‘Theodramatik’ of H. U. von Balthasar.”53 So what sort of Theo-­drama might best explicate Girard’s under­ standing of natural and human history as a salvation history? Schwager, in Jesus and the Drama of Salvation, follows Girard’s own attention to the central events surrounding Jesus’s death in conceiving a multi-­ act drama. This particular approach addresses a key concern of Schwager, which is to resolve the tension between theologies of the kingdom of God, which are typically indebted to Jesus’s praxis, and theologies of redemption based on Jesus’s sacrificial death. Balthasar had been the first to advance this rapprochement by Theo-­dramatic means, while Schwager set out to address the consequent problem of apparently incompatible Gospel texts via “the mediation of a dramatic exegesis . . . on the model of conflictual action.”54

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In Schwager’s understanding, the drama of Jesus Christ holds together three otherwise isolated narratives: the violent human action against Jesus, the faithful nonviolence of Jesus himself, and God the Father’s purposes in history as violence yields to resurrection.55 Moreover, what was possible with scripture was also possible for Schwager regarding the subsequent history of Christian thought: the holding together of apparently discrepant emphases on both the righteous judgment and forgiving mercy of God. For instance, beyond the separation of these aspects of God’s nature in Marcion and Martin Luther, Schwager highlights their reconciliation in Irenaeus, Origen, Anselm, and Barth.56 My intention is to build on this conviction of Schwager: that Theo-­drama is an untier of hermeneutical knots—a way to hear what speaks beyond the apparently irreconcilable voices that are present within scripture and in scripture’s engagement with wider reality. A particular concern is with the Darwinian aspects of the Girardian. How can God’s nonviolent goodness be reconciled with the harsh realities of evolution, including but not limited to the violent hominizing transition that Girard has theorized? His scientific sympathies require that any proposed Girardian Theo-­drama must accord with features of the evolutionary process, which is not typical of other Theo-­dramatic renderings. I note that Celia Deane-­Drummond has recently moved into this relatively virgin theological territory and shares my concerns. “In theodrama,” she writes, “the tragic is recognized fully rather than absorbed and neutralized in the manner that more often than not happens in an epic account. The tragic has been the pattern for the drama of evolutionary history for millennia, as witnessed in the paleontological record.”57 To accommodate this bigger picture, I propose a broader Girardian treatment than the one adopted by Schwager. This will call for five acts spanning the whole of cosmic history from the perspective of salvation. These acts are not strictly compatible with a simple plan extending from creation to fall to salvation to the age of the church, thence on to the eschatological consummation, though there are parallels—Girard is not setting out to write a systematic theology after all (notwithstanding the systematic theological resonances of mimetic

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theory). So here are the five acts that I believe are called for in a Girardian Theo-­dramatic account of life on planet Earth and its journey under God. 1. The Pre-­Human Paradise of Savage Innocence. Natural processes in the universe give rise to a habitable planet and to the emergence of life, which advances in complexity to the brink of consciousness through an evolutionary process that includes natural selection, entailing a great sacrificial cost in terms of animal suffering and death. This is a savage reality of maladaptation, predation, and widespread extinction, though it is not strictly violent. Violence is a human thing for Girard, in its destructive and reconciling forms, emerging at the point of hominization. He is clear that “violence is not originary; it is a by-­product of mimetic rivalry.”58 Before that, while there is natural savagery, and the vast loss of life is tragic from a sensitive human perspective—with so many animal lives ended brutally and left in a state that we might regard as unfulfilled—nevertheless this same process also gives and sustains life and secures the advance of life. As the psalmist sees it, “The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God” (Ps. 104:21). Hence it is not necessary to describe this stage in terms of natural evil. In the context of morally innocent animal mimesis, proto-­humans emerge in a state that Girard acknowledged to Schwager can be regarded as one of freedom and peace with God, though he adds that there is no empirically verifiable trace of this state because it did not continue. 2. Hominization, the Primal Murder, and Providence. The Genesis story illustrates “the fall” into mimetic entrapment of our legendary first parents, Adam and Eve, who allowed themselves to be drawn mimetically from freedom into a posture of rivalry with God, pointing forward to the primal murder of Abel by Cain at the foundation of settled human existence. This Ur-­text illustrates the elements of mimetic theory, suggesting also its compatibility with a traditional doctrine of “the fall”—initiated by the choice of a mimetic model other than God, then descending from there into a crisis that is only

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resolved by a primal murder. So, the choice of “Adam and Eve” and the action of “Cain” draw the arc of a single hominizing movement. On the cusp of hominization, the turn to rivalry and violence threatens the survival of nascent human groups. These lack institutional protection, while having also lost the instinctive behavioral patterns and innate group hierarchies that protect animal species. Hence the founding murder emerges through the evolutionary struggle in various proto-­human groups as an advantageous development. It allowed our hominid forebears to leap forward on the back of new symbolic powers that it released, driving further co-­ evolution of the brain with language, social interaction, and technology. The religious nexus of prohibition/myth/ritual that enabled the creation of stable larger-­scale hominid communities eventually allowed Homo sapiens to emerge in the Paleolithic, thereafter filling and subduing the Earth from the agricultural breakthrough of the Neolithic on. Divine provi­dence holds humanity in being through a law­like, religio-­cultural nexus erected on the hidden foundation of a single-­victim mechanism, with violence specifically deployed in homeopathic quantities for the restraint of worse violence. Savage innocence has become human violence—though prior to the revelation that ends this stage in the Theo-­drama, Girard does not regard even this violence to be evil. 3. The Breakthrough. There are glimpses of awareness concerning this sacrificial mechanism in the tragic literature of Western antiquity and in Eastern religions. However, from the beginning of its unmasking in the Hebrew scriptures to its complete exposure in the passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Holy God is revealed in human history and a new way of being human emerges beyond false-­sacred solidarity at the expense of victims. Indeed, for Girard, “it is the resurrection of Jesus that brings the dissenting minority into being at a time when, humanly speaking, the truth had been buried with him once and for all.”59 Thereafter, prolongation of false-sacred practices becomes evil (see the discussion in chapter 3, above) since there is an alternative that undoes humanity’s former méconnaissance.

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4. The Best of Times. The Worst of Times. This assessment of the revo­ lutionary age, with which Charles Dickens begins A Tale of Two Cities, captures the modern paradox according to Girard: a world of both greater good and greater evil than ever before.60 The Word makes its way in this world through the wider cultural impact of Judeo-­Christian revelation, including but not limited to the church’s mission; the Holy Spirit—the “advocate for the defense” of victims—begins to undo the previously unquestioned antipathies and pathologies of violent exclusion lying at the root of human culture. This yields an inexorable drive toward secular modernity as the false sacred contracts. Human rights and justice for those formerly disdained and marginalized grow in the modern West as a result of the Judeo-­Christian breakthrough, with previously unimagined blessings for individuals, categories of persons, and societies at large. It is a time in which generosity and forgiveness proliferate, beyond the pagan norms of blood feud and scapegoating, so that victims and victimizers can be reconciled. Because it is about undoing the legacy of primal murders, James Alison calls it “the time of Abel.”61 Yet this undermining of the false-­sacred mechanism also has a dark side. It threatens social cohesion as scapegoat victimizing loses its former efficacy, releasing a potentially dangerous instability into world history. The peace and unity that came with scapegoating and the prolongation of its effect through religious myth and ritual can only now be held in check by newer versions of the katéchon/katéchōn (2 Thess. 2:6–7) such as the modern nation-­state and consumer market. The escalation to extremes of military conflict from the time of Napoleon, as discerned by Clausewitz, threatens the end of human history under the sign of New Testament apocalyptic. Humanity’s violent mimetic tendencies are most likely to win out against the Christian revelation—an outcome that early Christianity itself foreshadowed with its apocalyptic literature. Girard insists that history remains open-­ended (freedom again), dismissing the historical determinism that he finds in modern thinkers from Hegel to Francis Fukuyama,62 though he admits to being terrified by the possible prognosis at which he has arrived.63

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5. The Un-­Theorized Eschaton. Girard disavows any purely this-­ worldly outcome. His apocalyptic vision affirms that the kingdom of God is not of this world, with the Gospels promising only division on Earth:64 “The outlook for the world in the wake of Christ’s revelation is therefore exceedingly bleak. But the affairs of this world no longer matter. Union with God takes precedence.”65 Girard is thus entirely traditional in imagining a post­historical or a­temporal “beyond” that will be God’s doing and God’s business. This he distinguishes from the kingdom of God beginning to reveal itself within history through active human participation in God’s mission on behalf of the victim—while certainly genuine, any projection of God’s eschatological kingdom onto the plane of history must remain partial, compromised, and incomplete.66 Nevertheless, Christian eschatological imagination does important work in the present. It promises a final resolution of history’s conflicts and the peace that the gospel prefigures, as a fitting end that will illuminate and transform our complex and conflicted experience within the Theo-­drama. More immediately, it challenges the pagan eschatology of eternal return, disrupting a cyclical view of time that runs on sacrificial blood, along with any Christian account of the apocalypse understood in terms of divine violence.67 But because this final consummation of God’s kingdom is quite outside the purview of mimetic theory, the eschaton remains un-­theorized by Girard. The veteran Girardian scholar James G. Williams describes this as “the triumph of Christ in ‘a beyond of which we can describe neither the time nor place.’ ”68 This sketch of a Girardian Theo-­drama, representing salvation history from the perspective of mimetic theory along the broad arc of creaturely evolution, does indeed involve a juxtaposition of divine initiative and human response. Yet the human response is itself a manifestation of divine initiative within history—through the human life of Jesus and through the Holy Spirit, the “advocate for the defense,” who is continually at work among those who have received and obeyed the divine revelation and who take the side of the victim. There are

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a number of challenges for theology entailed by such a vision, however. God’s will must make its way through so much natural savagery, human violence, and tragedy, while God’s providence must embrace even Christianly indefensible expressions of human violence for the restraint of even worse violence. I will try to address these challenges in the following two chapters, with an eye to the demands of theological orthodoxy. But first, the nature of God’s action and oversight in this process must be considered.

Double Agency: Backstage in the Theo-­Drama The double agency tradition, which receives its classic formulation from Aquinas, is already recognizable in the Hebrew scriptures. It has an honored—though by no means an exclusive—place in the Judeo-­ Christian imagination, according to which the Lord of all creation is present kenotically: honoring the integrity of creation and giving all creatures a divine vocation through living and acting in keeping with their own particular natures. According to double agency, the forces of nature, creatures of the Earth, and human beings are all at work, with the world’s life taking shape through this ceaseless activity. Yet God is at work, too, in all these actions. God does not represent one cause among others, however, as process theology suggests, with its God contributing to every event. Nor is God the sole cause of all events, as in the dualistic Cartesian extremes of seventeenth-­century theology that effectively alienated God from the working of God’s own world (hence giving modern atheism its imaginative impetus).69 Here we seek to avoid the modern conundrum of a closed natural and historical order into which God can only intervene from outside. As William C. Placher puts it, “divine action is not an interruption in or a violation of the normal course of things, but precisely is the normal course of things.”70 How might this reading of God’s action, as discerned in the Hebrew scriptures, align with aspects of the false sacred that have survived within those scriptures, revealing a religious past in the process of being transformed? This is the major concern of Schwager in his

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Theo-­dramatic attempt to deal with a mix of violent and nonviolent scriptural texts. He identifies a trajectory in the Hebrew scriptures leading from God as the direct cause of bad outcomes for human beings, by intermediate stages, to an eventual understanding of God’s judgment as manifest in the natural consequences of human actions playing themselves out.71 And this is also how Girard sees it, addressing survivals of divine violence in the text. “The punishment appears transcendent because it spares nobody,” he says in an interview, “but it comes from reciprocity, from mimetic desire, which makes it so that the evil we inflict on others will sooner or later be returned to us with interest.”72 What this suggests is that a development can be discerned, from one sort of text in the Hebrew scriptures to another. That is, the shift from imagining God as a wholly sovereign actor toward a more integral conception of divine action—a God at work through the within of nature and history, rather than acting upon nature and history. Hence the strong affinity I am proposing between Theo-­drama and double agency. I suggest that a double agency perspective emerges more clearly once an emphasis on divine transcendence over against the human, which is more typical of the false sacred, begins to give way before a newer version of sacred transcendence—one that does no violence to natural constraints and historical processes. This more integral vision of a gracious God is kenotic and incarnational. The end point of this revelatory arc, from Girard’s perspective, is secular modernity, which turns out to be the realm of the hidden God and a fruit of the gospel. In the New Testament the double agency paradox may appear to be less in evidence, with the sovereignty of God over nature and human beings asserted again and again. Yet while the Christ event is a God event, it is also a natural and a human event. Jesus’s divine message and acts are rooted in the everyday life of this world, with saliva used in healing, water in foot washing, and bread and wine for Jesus’s sacramental presence. Indeed, the fact that this “Son of Man,” “the human one,” Jesus of Nazareth, is presented as the very presence of God in the New Testament represents the classic instance of double agency, which centuries later at the Council of Chalcedon (451) received its definitive expression: Christ is one person with two

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natures, one divine and the other human, united “without confusion, change, division or separation.” Here is God at work and a human being at work in perfect accord; here is God fully at home in a human life. Other approaches in the early church underrated the significance of Jesus’s humanity (Apollinarianism) or God’s role in accounting for Jesus (Arianism).73 But in the doctrine of Christ’s incarnation the double agency insight is demonstrated in all its paradoxicality, fulfilling the biblical vision of God at work in the work of God’s world and of God’s chosen people. And such a kenotic perspective is ripe for Theo-­dramatic application. This witness of scripture and tradition resonates with the experience of Christians ancient and modern, who are encouraged to regard their lives in the present from the elevated perspective of God’s eternal purposes. “By the grace of God I am what I am,” Paul declares; “I worked harder than any of them—though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Cor. 15:10). This conviction, repeated in various forms by the saints, is called “the paradox of grace” by D. M. Baillie in a classic Christological essay. “This is a highly paradoxical conviction,” he writes, “for in ascribing all to God it does not abrogate human personality nor disclaim personal responsibility. Never is human action more truly and fully personal, never does the agent feel more perfectly free, than in those moments of which he can say as a Christian that whatever good was in them was not his but God’s.”74 Herbert McCabe, who taught James Alison at Blackfriars, Oxford, brings out the paradoxicality of this Thomistic position even more sharply, arguing that “I am free because God is in a sense more directly the cause of my actions than he is of the behavior of unfree beings.”75 How has this double agency tradition taken shape? Irenaeus insists that God deals gently rather than intrusively with the world and is at home in the world as a creator who “does not need to break and enter, being immanent.”76 For Origen, God respects the world’s integrity as it develops toward its completion—a completion that involves the enfleshed divine Logos. Gregory of Nyssa, in the subsequent age of the creeds, conceives of God permeating creation and holding it in being, relating to each creature according to its nature, which Frans Jozef van Beeck rightly points out is a far cry from intervening deities of the

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ancient pantheon.77 This non­interventionist, double agency reading is also compatible with Augustine, for whom “on the one hand the divine sovereignty, decree and providence reign absolutely over all history, and God controls all creaturely action,” while “on the other hand, God does not act as a finite cause but in and through finite causes, natural and human”—and, if acting from outside the visible world, then only “through the mediation of other finite things, especially the angels.”78 Albert the Great, master of Aquinas, was a keen student of nature.79 And in his genius pupil we have a theologian eager to honor the created natures of all things. His approach was to combine Aristotle, whose God provided the external cause of things, with Neo­platonism, where God is the ultimate form in which all finite things participate.80 “Using Aristotle’s distinction of four causes, material, final, efficient, and formal, Aquinas explains how God is the source of all material causes, the goal of all action, the first cause of all agents, and the source of all forms.”81 Particular events are the work of primary (God) and secondary (natural) agency together, by analogy with the artisan and the tool, both of which contribute to the wood being split or the nail being driven. These are actions performed wholly by God and wholly by the secondary agent.82 It is true for Aquinas that God can act apart from the world’s normal order.83 But this is not to deny the overall force of his more general dictum: “detrahere actiones proprias robus est divinae bonitati derogare” (to deprive things of actions of their own is to belittle God’s goodness). Etienne Gilson, who cites the dictum, is eager to present this view of divine action as a profoundly Christian insight based on God’s great love for creation, rather than the rationalistic product it became in the hands of later Neo-­Thomist scholasticism. “If no philosophy was so constantly busy safeguarding the rights of creatures,” Gilson concludes, “it is because [Aquinas] saw in this the one means of safeguarding the rights of God.”84 So how does God act in the Theo-­drama, according to this kenotic, double agency model? It involves what is called “uniform” divine action, in which God underpins all the working of creation as the ground of being, coming to be perceived as “special” divine action when a particular set of natural circumstances or human actions permits a heightened transparency to divine communication. Rowan Williams puts this

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phenomenon into a recognizably Celtic spiritual key, reflecting that “it is as if the created order is a texture of uneven thickness.”85 We are clearly in the realm of suggestiveness and metaphor here, with a view to subverting any mythological notion of God as one actor among other finite actors. Austin Farrer addresses this notion of God at work through the work of creation on the analogy of fiction authors and their characters. Farrer insists that the seemingly free action of nature is not a put-­up job. The Creator of the world is not to be compared with those bad novelists who make up the plot of their story first, and force the characters to carry it out, all against the grain of their natures. He is like the good novelist who has the wit to get a satisfying story out of the natural behavior of the characters he conceives. And how does he do it? By identifying himself with them and living them from within.86

Rowan Williams also sets this double agency insight in Theo-­dramatic terms. He refers once again to Simone Weil, whom he has compared with Girard under the heading of negative theology, and “for whom divine action is only perceptible when the ego renounces or displaces itself.”87 Accordingly he argues that, for Weil, if God is not in an environment, God’s action can never have the form of an episode intruding into the history of created causality or finite agency. It must not be in competition for a shared local space (and this is . . . why a theologian like Augustine can so firmly reject a view of miracle that regards it as a direct divine interruption of finite agency, as opposed to an extraordinary realization of possibilities inherent in finite agency itself ).88

For Girard, then, “we know that we are by ourselves, with no father in the sky to punish us and interfere with our paltry business”89— that is, no more intervening, false-­sacred deity. This self-­renunciation on God’s part, this respect for creaturely finitude, points to a deeper link between the God disclosed in accord with mimetic theory and the God whose action “in, with, and under” the world’s action is best described through theological dramatic theory.

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God Is Not Our Rival The category of Theo-­drama captures this kenotic sense of double agency with good effect, and, as I now want to suggest, Girard’s mimetic theory has a distinctive contribution to make in resourcing such a Theo-­dramatic account. The key idea is that God and human beings need not be understood as rivals. Balthasar looks to Irenaeus (whom he finds far more sympathetic than the great Augustine) as a particular champion of this insight: “the ancient Greek idea, also sanctioned by the Bible, of God’s ‘lack of envy,’ the idea that God is not jealous of created nature.”90 So God and human beings can be at work in the same world, in the same lives, in the same space, without envy, rivalry, or violence. Likewise, Rowan Williams speculates on how Girard’s insights might be compared with Gregory Nazianzen’s deployment of the traditional axiom that the divine knows no envy, or—even more significant—Augustine’s denial that God loves us for anything we can “contribute” to him. For both these theologians, a God who is ontologically unclassifiable is ipso facto not involved in mimesis: if he cannot be imaged (imitated), he does not imitate us. Our welfare is therefore not something to be wrested from God in Promethean fashion. It is his free gift.91

This can be so, I suggest, because the mimetic connection between persons, and their mimetic connection with God through the mimetic mediation of Jesus, is incompatible with the notion of dual agencies working independently. Rather, my desire derives from your desire, with both our desires at work in my actions toward the shared object of our joint desiring. And so too as we come to share God’s desire. In yet one more potentially Girard-­friendly turn to the world of drama, Balthasar compares this process in Christ and his followers with the disponibilité (availability) relied upon in the Stanislavsky or “method acting” school, whereby actors access the emotion required for performance via that of a model whom they call to mind.92 Likewise, in freedom we respond to our divine model and find that we are increasingly blessed with an authentic personhood drawn not

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from the mimetic pressure of the horde, or of any wrongheaded indi­ vidual model, but from God in Christ. This is God at work in Paul’s work, for example, as a reflection of the incarnational limiting case of God alive in Jesus’s human life—a life without sin, which we can regard as a life lived free of mimetic entrapment. So, mimesis does indeed serve freedom and the process of becoming a unique self, yet strangely enough it is by openness to God’s action mediated mimetically that our desire takes shape in genuine freedom and authenticity. We become our own person because our fundamental desires are not drawn primarily from any other person but ultimately from God, who thus creates and honors every person. This relationship between God and humans is nothing like that of the envious, who compete with each other over whichever object of desire. There is no situation of scarcity, or any necessary “internal mediation.” Rather, God relates to humans humanly through Jesus Christ, via “external mediation,” so that borrowed desire cannot give rise to envy or rivalry. This accords with the double agency tradition, with God delighting in the freedom of God’s creatures to fulfill their own natures while fulfilling God’s purposes. Referring to Paul in Jesus’s hands, for instance, Balthasar writes that the risen Jesus has “expropriated him in order to personalize him.”93 As for Christians in general, Balthasar describes them as “free-­in-­themselves, precisely because with [ Jesus], they are expropriated for the sake of the whole.”94 Milbank beautifully describes this synchrony of human autonomy and divine gift in terms of grace, which “implies a raising of oneself as oneself to the beyond oneself.”95 Regrettably, neither Balthasar nor Milbank appreciates his entire compatibility with Girard on this point. God honors our nature as mimetic creatures by shaping our desires according to the desire of Jesus—and God does so in peace, far from violent fantasies of borrowed desire according to the false sacred. It is as if the real God domesticates us, making us happy and fulfilled creatures at home with God in the world rather than feral competitors for scraps in a wasteland of mimetic enslavement. God is not an ingredient of human action, either, and certainly not a univocalizing claimant upon the multivocal realm of free human choices. Rather, God comes to us in Jesus Christ as a life-­transforming mimetic presence

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at the heart of human freedom. James Alison describes this as being called into being within the pattern of God’s own desire: “our Father’s only access to us, the only way he can get to our slot-­machine handle, is by asking him into our pattern of desire”96—and, because we have become symptoms of God’s desire (i.e., no longer caught up in desire by the social other), our desiring is no longer over against anyone. The problem with mimetic desire is that the freedom for which our mimetic nature is destined, in the sharing of God’s desire, turns so readily into rivalry and mutual self-­definition. “Metaphysical desire” is freed from this escalation to extremes when it comes to share in God’s non­competitive desire, which can breathe in our space without stealing our oxygen—welcome on our turf without driving us elsewhere in search of Lebensraum. So, as Alison affirms, “the only real concept of freedom is theological, made possible by the irruption of a different sort of Other into the other-­which-­forms-­us and the setting free of our freedom.”97 Here is Milbank’s goal, though achieved by other means. This is notable in comparison with the false sacred, which sustains a world of mimetic fascination and demands the tribute of victims. Today’s rivalry between theism and atheism is really about defending or attacking God’s right to intrude upon our space, with both sides typically unable to perceive or appreciate the kenotic reserve and respect of the Holy God, imagining instead an intrusive insensitivity that is more typical of the false sacred. As Girard emphasizes, however, the Holy God does not reach for the world’s levers by any means other than the powerlessness of Christ. This is so much so that the Holy God does not even insist on effacing all traces of the false sacred, preferring instead to work patiently inside its carapace—likewise to persevere within the mimetic constraints of human understanding. Culture-­preserving sacrifice is thus undone by the sacrifice of Christ, as the book of Hebrews testifies, while the structures of religion and myth are allowed to persist in the Gospels’ subversive repurposing of sacrifice (more on this in the final chapter). As Balthasar himself insists—though these words could equally have come from Girard—“all vestiges of mythical thinking and speaking in the New Testament shrink to purely formal ways of expressing something that is completely new and unique.”98

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It is even the case that the non­rivalrous God can get through to us by way of our rivalrous condition. Blaise Pascal’s order of charity, whereby divine providence makes use even of the negative and the ill-­ suited, might suggest that liberation can find its way through a state of mimetic entrapment. In chapter 1, we saw how some great novelists had come to an awareness of their mimetic condition, as Girard himself had done. He explains that reflection on his own immersion in mimetic dynamics led to his discovery of the mimetic principle, which at the same time constituted a Christian conversion.99 The divine grace that is inseparable from this breakthrough100 can be linked to the “form” of Christ, which Girard declares to be at work in all such novelistic conversions. Two further examples come to mind— one from church history and another from the Old Testament. The Girardian scholar Jeremiah Alberg reminded me how Ignatius Loyola formed a desire to rival the exploits of medieval saints at the time of his conversion, having devoured their stories during a long convalescence. Where once the deeds of knightly models had inspired him, Ignatius’s zeal now turned to saintly models. Here is an early-­modern Spanish account of mimetic rivalry that recalls the tale of Don Quixote, though with a very different outcome—in one story of rivalry the hero becomes a missionary saint; in the other, a deluded buffoon. So, with the right model, rivalry can be positive, even revelatory. One can imagine a godly version of rivalry where the goal is to outdo a saintly model, or indeed Christ himself, in showing respectful, non­rivalrous regard for others. A fascinating Old Testament incident offering a similar insight occurs when Esau’s rivalrous twin, Jacob, is fleeing a further rivalrous contest with his crafty uncle Laban on his way to an apparent rivalrous showdown with Esau. It is at this point that Jacob finds himself wrestling in darkness with the angel of God—and successfully (Gen. 32:22–32). It is as if God reaches Jacob through yet one more instance of rivalry and in that context subverts and converts him. With the new name of Israel and a new vocation, he is able to pass beyond his former rivalry, as is immediately apparent when the looming conflict with Esau is averted. Jacob then prudently establishes a safe distance between himself and Esau, effectively avoiding any risk of “internal

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mediation.” This reveals the blessing of wisdom that he has received from God, in a new self-­awareness that has literally been wrestled out of his former rivalry. Israel’s subsequent limp is perhaps a reminder of his potential to become a scapegoat, tending as he had toward the extremity of rivalrous violence—an outcome, however, that was averted by the mercy of God, who became Jacob’s rival in order to free him from rivalry (Gen. 32:31–33). Grant Kaplan fills out this insight—about God even making use of such limitations to work our conversion—in two ways. First, following the communication theory of Walter Ong, he emphasizes how the word of God can only come to us through an evolving human system of communication. It is solely with reference to such an imperfect vehicle freighted with memories, established habits of mind, and expectations that any word to us is interpreted. “Communication is not only profoundly interpersonal,” Kaplan concludes, “but undeniably hermeneutical.”101 And in this the mimetic participation and hermeneutical character of revelation according to Girard emerges as an instance of God working through the natural and the historical, as double agency would have it. Second, Kaplan affirms the Thomistic compatibility of what Girard is doing with what I have called the incarnational paradox of his anthropological method: Mimetic theory, then, posits that this anthropological insight comes from a supernatural source. Yet the revelation itself takes on a human form. Here it follows the old scholastic dictum: quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur: “that which is received is done so according to the mode of the one receiving it.” Coming from a divine source, it is not only supernatural but also anthropological.102

So, God is at work within the whole sweep of natural and human history as the five dramatic acts set out earlier presume. And this is a God who is not tempted to overmaster human efforts, even when we are getting things wrong. The God whose drama is being enacted through the within of our collective human drama even works in the ruins of our history—a conviction that Balthasar sets at the heart of his theological aesthetics, likening God to an artist who takes the

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formless into a higher form.103 I hope that here, and throughout this chapter, it has become clear that Balthasar had nothing to fear from Girard. Indeed, their projects are highly compatible.

* * *

Let me briefly introduce the next stage in these explorations, looking ahead to chapters 6 and 7. Can the freedom of creation, along with the respect for nature’s laws that Girard will not surrender, justify the inescapably tragic Darwinian account of violent human origins? How can this humble, patient, and nonviolent God, who bears with our limitations in the savage cut and thrust of history, be understood as the savior, revealing a different future from that vouchsafed by the false sacred? How can the God who shares humanity’s historical drama through non­rivalrous, non­interventionist, kenotic, patient double agency still be a living, saving, Holy God in light of all the horrors that are part of that drama? Such questions point to the so-­ called problem of evil in yet one more iteration, and I want to come at it in a new way. Adding a dose of Irenaeus to Girard’s stated commitment to Augustine104 will aid in that. So too will deploying a recently theologically appropriated category from improvisation in the theater, called overaccepting. Thus, I hope to defend Girard from the charge of promulgating a violent ontology at the expense of an orthodox Christian take on the goodness of creation. Also, since violent divinity is exposed and rendered otiose according to mimetic theory, I will be exploring some implications of that in chapter 7, suggesting how a nonviolent God can remain the God of judgment. Without sounding like something out of Fifty Shades of Grey, it will help to mark out a role for “the force of love” in a nonviolent theology.

CH A P TER 6

The Shadow Side of Finitude

A theology compatible with mimetic theory must face the challenge of enormous suffering that its evolutionary approach entails, along with the fall into rivalry and sacrifice that separates what I have called the savage innocence of animal mimesis from the mimetic violence of emergent humanity. René Girard vests this acknowledgment of the tragic in a sense of divine providence and eschatological hope, rather than either yielding to a naive Edenic escapism or seeking to balance out tragedy with an aesthetically satisfying flourish—let alone cele­ brating it in a Dionysian, Nietzschean manner. His “Gospel anthropology” is unsentimental. In Girard’s unsparing vision, the horrors accompanying natural and human history are not gloried in, denied, or balanced out. Rather, they are acknowledged and redeemed. Yet the frankness of Girard’s vision is too unsparing for some. Once again, we will be meeting objections from Hans Urs von Balthasar and John Milbank, along with Sarah Coakley. Balthasar and Girard differ over how to read the Logos of Heraclitus, lying at the root of Western culture, with Girard far more attuned to its mythological dissimulation of human culture’s founding violence. Milbank cannot abide such agonistics, as we have seen, accusing Girard of immersing being itself in violence.  145

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The reality of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw” has to be acknowledged, along with the sobering fact that around 97 percent of the animal species that have ever lived are now extinct. Girard has long viewed Charles Darwin’s intellectual achievement as a model,1 however, extending its scope to hominization via the scapegoat mechanism. This he understands as an evolutionary breakthrough that unlocks further evolutionary developments in socialization, brain, and language, as we have seen.2 How is this tragic panorama—this so-­called shadow side of creation—to be interpreted theologically?3

Setting the Scene: Evolution, Mimetic Theory, and Finitude Girard’s work draws most closely to the tendency of an ontologization of violence where he attempts to combine his theory of culture with Darwin’s theory of evolution. —Wolfgang Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory

Most mainstream theologians today are satisfied that evolution provides the means of God’s ongoing creation through the within of natural processes, viewing science and faith as compatible. Various streams of Christian thought struggle with evolution, however. Two of these are products of modernity: Protestant biblical literalism in the extreme form of “creation science” and Anglicanism whenever it bases its apologetics on the argument from design.4 A contrary stream does not deny that evolution takes place though it does question God’s involvement in a dark and violent process so apparently alien to what we see in Jesus Christ, who is the light of the world and the prince of peace. Some theologians, including activists for animal welfare, refuse to identify God with the undoubtedly harsh and wasteful process that Darwin revealed, against eco-­theologians whose delight in the holistic complexity of evolving natural systems is not typically matched by a concern for natural selection’s countless victims.5

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One classic option for protecting the creator from the challenge of nature’s harshness is to blame “the fall,” but to look beyond Adam and Eve’s misguided choice to the fallen angels—especially since we now know that 3.5 billion years of evolution, suffering, and extinction preceded humanity’s appearance. These fallen angels are claimed to have rejected their created role as supernatural mediators in running God’s world, hence corrupting a hitherto nonviolent creation. In this way, everything from earthquakes and tsunamis to disease, predation, and death can be seen as arriving contrary to God’s will.6 Such a solution is seriously wrong­headed—it is not good theology, and it is not compatible with what science reveals. As Richard Kingston argues, addressing some theological implications, if God entrusted to fallible . . . angelic beings such absolute control over creation that it was within their power to “brutalize” the animal kingdom for all time, then he cannot be exonerated from all culpability for what actually happened. Must we not go further and say that such action would indicate either incompetence or the fact that the sufferings of the lower creatures are unimportant in the eyes of the Creator! The fall of the angels, in brief, provides neither a sound theodicy nor a stimulus to animal welfare.7

A further theological concern with this approach can be better appreciated thanks to mimetic theory. What does laying blame for natural disasters and other harmful outcomes in the physical world remind us of ? Girard would regard it as mythological thinking, belonging to the imaginative world of the false sacred.8 Why do we live in a harsh world full of compromises and frustrated potential? Because there is blame to be laid—whether on angels, on humans, or on both. Accordingly, a scientific account that is alert to natural causality can only emerge once the false sacred and the scapegoating on which it is based has begun to decline thanks to the historical impact of Judeo-­Christian revelation. Natural outcomes can then be understood in terms of natural causation within the constraints of finitude, but not before. Prior to that, “someone” is to blame.

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Those who identify “the fall” as ruining a kinder, gentler version of life as we know it do not appreciate how inconceivable that life is apart from long aeons of natural selection in what are often (though not always) unyielding environments—as if all the familiar species could have emerged in a world with the same physics, chemistry, geology, and biology as this world but without the consequence of animal suffering. Apart from the fundamental physics that produces order at the expense of entropy, disorder, and decay, or stellar evolution forming (and dying stars releasing) the heavy elements that eventually coalesce in planets and living bodies, or the geological churning that yields habitable landmasses and fertile soil along with earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis—and without the global catastrophes and mass extinctions that cleared the Earth of dinosaurs so that mammalian life could claim its place in the sun—we would not have “all things bright and beautiful.” No Edenic state of finely wrought, pain-­free herbivores without predation or natural selection either did exist or could ever exist. The agility, acute senses, and big beautiful eyes of deer, for instance, emerged over millions of years under the pressure of predation, just as the lean tensile elegance and breathtaking speed of cheetahs arose through competition for elusive prey. Adaptation to the biosphere’s many habitable niches means that today’s remarkable rock-­climbing goats, soaring eagles, and darting fish evolved at the cost of countless others who were not up to the harsh conditions and competition. Though, of course, no species is ever perfected by evolution. Adaptation and refinement under evolutionary pressure typically proceed only far enough to ensure reproductive success in a particular niche. When environmental circumstances change, however, whole populations can prove ill-­adapted and perish. Even many well-­established species survive at the expense of a large proportion of effectively surplus individuals (the numerous hatchlings of sea turtles, for instance) who perish as cannon fodder in yet another of evolution’s grand (if unplanned) campaigns. Our own humanity, too, has been bought at a great price in terms of animal suffering. One aspect of this is that it has taken a long time for life-forms as complex as ourselves to emerge, with our chapter in

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life’s story necessarily building on many earlier stages along the way. This indebtedness is evident in what we might call the palimpsest quality of our bodies, whereby traces of ancestral lower-­order lifeforms are evident within human anatomical structures.9 Another aspect is that fully evolved human brains could not have achieved their level of complexity without our hominid ancestors assimilating sufficient proteins that were only available from eating meat.10 And, of course, Girard believes that proto-­humans could only afford to make dangerous weapons and become organized hunters of such meat once they had resolved the mimetic crisis and its community-­ destroying violence by scapegoating a victim.11 But that is not the full picture. A more nuanced portrayal of evolutionary theory has emerged in recent decades, according to which randomness and natural selection are not the whole story. Rather, these mainstays of radical Darwinism, with its highly antagonistic account of competition for scarce resources, are balanced with a newer awareness of cooperation and natural synergies, making for a less conflictual process. As Michael Rota puts it, “Nature is indeed ‘red in tooth and claw,’ but it is not just red in tooth and claw.”12 Yet these two aspects—the cooperative one and Darwinism’s more familiar competitive one—are best understood in dialectical terms. Holmes Rolston points to their inseparability in the constitution of natural cycles, and of so-­called ecological pyramids (which quantify the successively larger amounts of biomass required, at each lower level of the food chain, to support higher-­level predators), whereby simpler forms of life are taken up in the survival of other life and the evolution of more complex life.13 Today’s controversial “re-­wilding” movement, which seeks to reintroduce long-­ago exterminated apex predators into the wilderness areas of first-­world countries, hopes to revitalize ecosystems that have become overstocked and ecologically sub­optimal. The return of wolves to the United States, and even lynx to England, would help to optimize environmental conditions, sparking up the herbivores and generally reintroducing a lost richness to life at the same time as it brings a long-­absent form of death. Hence competition can be seen as part of a larger process that enables life to achieve and sustain greater vigor and complexity. The evolution of

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sexual reproduction, whereby selfishness necessarily yields to cooperation, provides a further example—though everybody knows that sexual reproduction also gives rise to further competition.14 Likewise, while chimpanzees are highly cooperative, they are also highly competitive and aggressive. Reflecting on the latter example, Girardian thinker Paul Dumouchel affirms that “cooperation and conflict are not polar opposites; they are interdependent, reciprocal functions. Conflict limits and often puts an end to cooperation; yet cooperation inevitably occasions conflicts.”15 Coakley—whose critique of an agonistic and reductive Darwinism extends to Girard as well—declares her personal reliance on being able to regard creaturely existence in far more pacific and synergistic terms. Accordingly, she views the evolutionary process more positively in terms of overall self-­giving sacrifice.16 Yet Coakley, too, admits the limited extent of those natural synergies, which do not cancel out the enormous suffering and wastage of life that remains an undeniable aspect of evolution.17 So it is a richer and more nuanced yet still tragic view of evolution that we need to consider. At the human level, there is no escape from this mixed reality— not even by recourse to supposed counter­evidence based on studies of altruism. Wolfgang Palaver addresses recent research into the so-­ called parochial altruism that binds human groups together. He cites the economist and leader in behavioral science Samuel Bowles in an article from Nature titled “Conflict: Altruism’s Midwife.” Bowles concludes (in a Girard-­compatible vein) that “generosity and solidarity towards one’s own may have emerged only in combination with hostility towards outsiders.”18 Yet if altruism and cooperation are not unalloyed goods, competition and conflict are not necessarily bad. War and crime involve cooperation, after all, while competition in business provides a necessary (if not a sufficient) condition for innovation and prosperity. Likewise, working through (or at least learning from) conflict is often the only way for groups to achieve reconciling outcomes—and for individuals within them to gain maturity. And all of this, for good or ill, is underpinned by mimesis. Our mimetic nature fosters competition, but it also reinforces the effect of reciprocity, dispersing the effect of cooperative acts more widely.

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Hans Weigand, in a systems analysis of mimetic dynamics, argues that both cooperation and competition are integral to being mimetic and do not issue from an atmosphere of scarcity as is widely thought.19 He concludes that “all the feedback loops that we find in complex systems of social life ultimately draw on mimetic reinforcement.”20 Hence, what might seem aberrant and conflictual reveals a more complex reality. Girard explains this role of mimetic bootstrapping in the rise of violence: The model is likely to be mimetically affected by the desire of his imitator. He becomes the imitator of his own imitator, just as the latter becomes the model of his own model. As this feedback process keeps reinforcing itself, each constitutes in the other’s path a more and more irritating obstacle and each tries to remove this obstacle more and more forcefully. Violence is thus generated. Vi­ olence is not originary; it is a by-­product of mimetic rivalry. Violence is mimetic rivalry itself becoming violent as the antagonists who desire the same object keep thwarting each other and desiring the object all the more. Violence is supremely mimetic.21

We note the insistence here that this violence goes deep but is not foundational. Raymund Schwager affirms this assessment with reference to the single-­victim mechanism, which stands at the heart of Girard’s mimetic theory—this “unanimous unloading of aggression on a random victim is the single structuring socio-­sacred basic process. But by no means does [Girard] reduce all human activity to a hidden form of violence.”22 Holmes Rolston reads the whole teeming, struggling phenome­ non of evolving life in terms of emergent complexity, in which the accidental and predatory deaths of animals represent a gift of life and not simply the destruction of life. Yet Rolston insists that “the view here is not Panglossian”; rather, “it is a sometimes tragic view of life, but one in which tragedy is the shadow of prolific creativity.”23 Like Coakley, he turns to the category of sacrifice as essential—as indeed Girard does, as we will see—and he uses the image of a passion play, pointing to a divine mystery of sacrifice in nature that is recapitulated

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on the cross: “Via naturae est via crucis.”24 Girard himself comments on Darwin “resorting” to Thomas Malthus, and his late eighteenth-­ century case for limiting human population growth, for the idea that death as much as survival is necessary for the continuation of life. Hence Girard’s admission that “the theory of natural selection seems to me quite powerfully sacrificial . . . in some sense . . . representing nature as a super-­sacrificial machine.”25 Scientifically informed considerations like these help us under­ stand what divine providence might and might not be expected to deliver—recall the double agency understanding of God’s action, which takes place “in, with, and under” the creaturely processes of nature and history. “Fragility and conflict cannot be exorcised from creation but must coexist with the wonder and beauty of nature as the price finitude pays for existence,” as American theologian Wendy Farley explains.26 Or, transcribing this insight into a Thomistic key, we could affirm with Herbert McCabe that God creates material realities that are all striving for perfection according to their respective natures, though in so doing some material things cannot avoid damaging other material things.27 So, natural as well as human history can be understood in terms of tragedy: that despite freedom, and apart from any guilt or punishment being involved, conditions are such that success in life is not guaranteed due to the limitations inherent in creaturely finitude. At the level of human freedom in the flow of mimetic currents, when we must consider mimetic proneness to rivalry and violence, the way forward lies in a learned re­direction of desire on the part of free creatures, so at least to some extent they can avoid the effects of wrongly ordered mimeticism. In this undertaking there are worthwhile insights to be had in recent science fiction, which provides a key literary and dramatic vehicle for exploring the complexities of human distinctiveness (this would not be a proper discussion of Girard unless literature featured somewhere). Paul Dumouchel points out that in science fiction, artificial life-forms are not always imagined to have emerged pre­programmed as peaceful, human-­friendly, and nonvi­ olent (i.e., not as we see in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot). Instead, they need to develop this profile through relationships, over time, by trial and

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error. He points to the child robot in Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film AI: Artificial Intelligence, banished because the parents see it becoming a rival to their real son. The message is that we do not advance in our development to become loving people independent of any propensity for rivalry and violence. Spielberg’s robot is just like us, then, and this raises the question, “what does it take for an artificial agent to appear real?” Dumouchel concludes that “He (it) must be mimetic, vulnerable, non-­autonomous in its desire, and capable of violence—and we must further be ready to recognize it as the origin of its own actions.”28 Dumouchel’s insights are reflected in the innovative 2015 South African film Chappie, which portrays an intelligent robot that can only grow from the mental equivalent of infancy through to adulthood by immersion in human language and relationships. Along the way “he” picks up up the patois, swagger, and mannerisms of the crimi­nal gang into whose hands he falls. “Chappie” eventually becomes compassionate and humane, but only through learning to negotiate a mimetic force field of rivalrous and violent desire, thanks to the model provided by a female gang member’s maternal love for him. But not every such story has a happy ending. In another fine 2015 film, Ex Machina, Alicia Vikander’s “Ava,” an artificially intelligent robot, passes the Turing Test and proves her “humanity” by being able to lie, manipulate, seduce, and kill in pursuit of her own desires. I suggest, however, that her well-­concealed psychopathic persona was derived mimetically from the manipulative corporate culture of Nathan, her creator, and from a whole world of Internet and social media gleanings that her advanced processors had assimilated en bloc, providing her with endless further mimetic models. To me the message of Ex Machina is stark: that entrenched corporate malfeasance in a social-­media world breeds psychopaths—mimetically.29 Mimetic creatures can only begin to tell a different story by getting past the evolutionary stage of founding violence. I turn to Wendy Farley again, who states the problem well and suggests a way forward for faith: Intellectual, moral, spiritual, and physical fragility confine human freedom. This tragic environment to existence is the shadow side

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of finitude. What is expressed symbolically in Greek tragedies as the inevitability of conflict, and by malevolent deities, is an environment shattered by conflict and preexisting evil. But from the perspective of a Christian tragic vision, the harsh environment to freedom need not be traced to a wicked cosmos. Instead, it appears as the tragic structure of divine love. The power of love brings al­terity into existence, but the fragility of alterity is intrinsic to finitude and cannot be overcome.30

My point is that all this is not necessarily a bad thing. Finitude is forthrightly the way the world is. As Edward Schillebeeckx emphasizes, finitude is not a flaw, an apostasy, an ailment, but simply a state of affairs entailed by the logic of creation.31 God does not save us from finitude, but in it and through it. And, of course, no one should be blamed for it. Hence the secular and the presence of God are not necessarily at odds (more on this shortly, in a discussion of Milbank). Part of the solution lies in recognizing that the tragic aspect entailed by finitude is at least to some extent perspectival. For humans, our fini­ tude and consequent fragility present an existential threat if we fear for any sense of meaning and purpose that we might have managed to build up, when counted against the entropic forces that will eventually pull that meaning down, and us with it. As Gregory Anderson Love observes, “Even death, created by God as a gracious boundary for the living of our lives in narrative form, has become an enemy of humankind due to the worship of the finite.”32 But threat and scarcity are not the only way to view life. The Theo-­drama entails a different story, with a different sense of meaning for the whole, and not least in its ending. Still, this existential threat continues to haunt the modern imagination, and it looms menacingly in today’s widespread fear of indiscriminate violence. Such violence represents an ontological assault and is, in that particular sense, describable technically in terms of horror—as Adriana Cavarero explains.33 Marilyn McCord Adams sets this experience of horror at the heart of her account of redemption as “horror defeat.” She refers to circumstances in which “individuals’ meaning-­making

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activities were brought to a sudden end, without regard to who they were as persons.”34 Such finitude, and the horror that the prospect of a frustrated, unfulfilled, snuffed-­out life evokes, is thoroughly repositioned by the Christian hope of redemption. The Theo-­drama is not a one-­act play, in which accumulation and success represent our only hedge against non­being. There is no need for a “bucket list” if we are part of a larger Theo-­drama in which there is meaning to the whole and ultimate redemption for the parts—if our life is better imagined as a river flowing toward the sea, rather than into the dead end represented by a bucket. So, of itself, finitude is not evil. To think so would conform to Gnosticism, not to Christian orthodoxy. Likewise, if natural selection is part of a process that builds and extends life, then its savagery, while acknowledged, need not be described in terms of natural evil. Girard can accommodate all of this. We have noted his reference to the order of charity in Blaise Pascal, applied to the way in which God allows bad consequences of our actions to reveal the truth to us if we prove to be resistant to it in other forms. But this need not suggest that an altogether severe mercy is what Girard has in mind. He has also testified to a sense of divine husbandry throughout the whole process. Two examples, thirty years apart, illustrate the point. In a letter to Schwager of 1976, Girard makes an admission that would surprise some of his critics: One could see, therefore, the whole schema of the scapegoat at the heart of the cosmic march toward a greater awareness, as Teilhard [de Chardin] does, but without getting rid of the problem of evil, as he tends to do, since violence is never rehabilitated [récupérée] in the Hegelian sense. The moment must come when humanity must confront it directly. I think this could be linked to a comprehensive vision of the Johannine Logos, as positioned behind [dérrière] the violent Heraclitean Logos, at once hidden and banished by it.35

Here Girard points to a consistent divine investment in the good of creation that is expelled, as the Johannine Logos is expelled, by human beings who prefer a Logos of violence (more on this shortly).

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In a French debate nearly thirty years later, Girard talks in plainly spiritual terms about the evolutionary process, affirming his appreciation of the French thinker Claude Tresmontant. Girard laments that “Alors, évidemment, les savants athées vous diront qu’il n’y a pas de signification spirituelle dans l’évolution biologique. Moi, je pense qu’il y en a une” (Whereas the learned atheists will of course tell you that there’s no spiritual significance in biological evolution, I think that there is).36 He is impressed by the development of bi­ologi­cal complexity, such as that of the human brain, and feels that evolutionary theory based on chance alone cannot do justice to such emergence: “La grande faiblesse de l’évolution, telle qu’on la conçoit aujourd’hui, c’est d’imaginer que tout cela s’est produit par hasard” (The great weakness of evolution, as it is conceived today, is to imagine that all this is produced by chance).37 So Girard places himself in the mainstream of Christian thinking about evolution today, regarding it as the means of creation (more on this in the following chapter). Most important for Girard, in acknowledging that the path of life’s evolution is strewn with victims, is that one victim is raised up to set a whole new direction, displacing survival of the fittest as the iron rule of life. This is the thrust of the Girard-­inspired Theo-­drama that I have proposed. To begin exploring the sort of solution that Farley indicates, and which a theology indebted to Girard would demonstrate, we consider some responses that fall short. This will involve examining the structure and “psychology” of rival responses to this state of affairs more closely and comparatively, under a Girardian eye. Accepting and blocking are introduced as distinct strategies for dealing with a tragic sense of absence and loss, in tandem with the reflections on “historical” and “structural trauma” of Holocaust scholar Dominick La Capra.38 In seeking a path beyond accepting and blocking, attempts to re-­narrate absence and loss will prove unable to advance us beyond these rival options. A third way for theology emerges here, to be explored further in the following two chapters under a rubric of overaccepting. This category will prove fruitful in confirming the link between mimetic theory and dramatic theology, while also helping to answer Girard’s critics.

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Rival Responses: Accepting and Blocking One response to the bruta facta of life’s horrors is accepting them without demur. Here we are in the company of positivists and materialists, neither of whom are typically burdened by nostalgia for a lost Eden where nothing bad ever happened. Things for them are likely to be just as they are, with the physical, biological, and social sciences content to describe without lament. This is the posture that Milbank (mis)identifies and criticizes in Girard. One might go further, rejoicing to make victims of the weak while a pitiless sun shines. This is the solution of Friedrich Nietzsche, and of the false-­sacred victim-­ factory that was Nazism, along with the substitute religion of Marxist totalitarianism described by Girardian theorist Cesáreo Bandera as “the terrors of Acheron in secular and bureaucratic form but no less oppressive.”39 All this represents the pagan resurgence of merciless Dionysian exultation that Girard believes to be supervening on secular modernity—the old false sacred reborn among Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “cultured despisers of religion.” By such accepting one might delight in the tragic and celebrate Nietzsche’s Übermensch in his triumph of strength over weakness. There is an alternative version of accepting that is resigned and despondent rather than exultant. Might it reveal a contrary though veiled psychological reality underlying the previously mentioned, more assertive version? It sounds like the nowadays-­familiar legacy of actual traumatic events that we have come to associate with post-­ traumatic stress disorder. There is a posture of arrested psychological development, according to Holocaust theorist Dominick La Capra, in which a particular loss balloons into a generalized sense of absence. An actual historical trauma morphs into a pervasive absence coloring all of life, rather than remaining in the realm of concrete loss where it might be treated and eventually resolved in a psychologically healing manner. “When loss is converted into (or encrypted in an indiscriminately generalized rhetoric of ) absence,” La Capra explains, “one faces the impasse of . . . impossible mourning, and interminable aporia in which any process of working through the past and its historical losses is foreclosed or prematurely aborted.”40 Such “mourning

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becomes impossible, endless, quasi-­transcendental grieving.”41 When the experience of absence takes this exaggerated form that I recognize as accepting, it issues in a potentially willful defeatism that may also manifest itself as lashing out. This recalls Girard’s treatment of pseudo-­masochism and pseudo-­ sadism. Both are victim mentalities rooted in a profound sense of absence, though regarding the victim role they respond differently. The masochist courts abuse from the model of their desire, viewing it as their lot in life. This model’s very abusiveness establishes their superior “fullness of being.” The sadist, however, is dealt the same hand but plays it differently, accessing the abusive model’s (presumed) fullness of being by emulating their abusiveness.42 In both cases, the same sense of absence is manifest as the same “metaphysical desire” in a posture of accepting, though by opposing means. Neither version is compatible with the eschatological, redemptive focus of a theology in tune with mimetic theory, though they certainly fit what we would expect from the false sacred. The trauma of actual events is met by imaginations rooted in the false sacred with accepting, in the sense that every new sacrificial crisis automatically perpetuates yet more sacrifice. Past traumatic events manifest their continuing presence in an unquestioned posture of constant sacrificial vigilance that is reinforced ritually and mythically. This is the horror of Nietzsche’s eternal return, from which there is no escape. It is indeed an agonistic present built up from the habituated religio-­ cultural means of dealing with an agonistic past. The false sacred yields a haunted and uneasy stability, bereft of any genuine newness that might bring redemption in the present and admit a glimmer of eschatological hope. Hence it is opposed to the advent of Jesus Christ, the light of the world—“the world knew him not” ( John 1:10), recoiling from the prospect of his alternative Logos becoming flesh. More of this shortly, when we will meet a subtler version of this accepting that I discern in Balthasar. Now, however, we consider some rival responses to a tragic sense of life that can be identified as blocking. La Capra, in addition to analyzing genuine “historical trauma,” identifies the more diffuse alternative of “structural trauma.” This refers to an abiding sense of absence at the heart of things that feels

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threatening but is not the product of any actual loss. It is typically, if unhelpfully, resolved by a version of blocking—in this case, by conjuring up a lost past and a failed meta­narrative to fixate on, rather than dealing with a tragic sense of absence in the present. We see this alternative of blocking, for instance, in the activist rhetoric of so many embittered conservatives and conspiracy theorists of all stripes, religious and secular, who like to think that the world, the country, or the church has gone to the dogs and who look for someone to blame. “When structural trauma is reduced to, or figured as, an event,” La Capra elucidates, “one has the genesis of myth wherein trauma is enacted in a story or narrative from which later traumas seem to derive.”43 This sounds to me like repressed memory syndrome, in which unbearable psychic burdens of the present become somehow more manageable once linked to imagined past harms—and imagined assailants. Hence, by blocking our present sense of dread and fragility, we create and then sink under the weight of a repressed past.44 The result, referencing Sigmund Freud, is “acting out” via melancholia in place of “working through” by mourning45 and the favoring of escapist violence and scapegoating over calm and mature realism about what actually confronts us. For La Capra, “absence, along with the anxiety it brings, could be worked through only in the sense that one may learn better to live with it and not convert it into a loss or lack that one believes could be made good, notably through the elimination or victimization of those to whom blame is imputed.”46 We cannot miss significant Girardian resonances here—regarding myth, méconnaissance, and victimization.47 For La Capra, we convert an unbearable sense of tragic absence into a focused loss, refusing to deal with our present reality because we prefer to blame somebody for a foundational if fictional wrong. Some further examples. We noted a refusal to accept that things could be meant to be as they are when theology resorts to belief in fallen angels—these supernatural agents become the cause of natural ills, to match the human responsibility for sin and evil that is otherwise traced to Adam and Eve. God is therefore freed from any responsibility for natural and human evil, having created a paradisiac pleasure garden that creatures, both angelic and human, failed to appreciate. Creation science is the most

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obvious and militant manifestation of such blocking, refusing the consistent testimony of science in favor of a pseudo-­science grounded in the comforts of ideology rather than the weight of evidence. Its role in America’s “culture wars” is to help create and sustain the secularist bogeyman against whom culturally sidelined religious conservatives can maintain an identity and a cause through mimetic rivalry. Alternatively, rather than getting God off the hook for natural and human evil, the same Genesis story can be used to blame God for violence, sacrifice, and expulsion. So, instead of human beings as the chief agents of expulsion, as identified by Girard, God is cast in that role as Adam and Eve are exiled from Eden. Rather than face the truth about our complicity in the primal murder, our own age-­old persecuting practice is projected onto God and hence declared sacred. Girard reads the prologue to the Gospel of John as a corrective to such blocking. There it is revealed that humanity expels God, and not vice versa.48 For Girard, of course, there must be no such blocking. According to my Girardian assessment, any sense of “structural trauma” points not to this or that guilty party but to the crisis itself. I suggest that it is a serendipitous pointer to concrete events of natural history and prehistory that have woven actual savagery and suffering into the way of things through the evolutionary advance to hominization, exacerbating the tragic quality of finitude. These originary events are not conjured up—they are real, though they are no one’s particular responsibility. So, any present sense of absence on humanity’s part can be grounded in real foundational events rather than in their confabulation, but with nobody singled out to take the blame. These “things hidden” are then perpetuated by myth and ritual as the necessary (though never fully reliable) continuing basis for human life together. I suggest that this fragile state of affairs represents the limiting case of absence that La Capra identifies in “structural trauma.” Again, rather than confecting a loss to account for a sense of absence, mimetic theory points to a bona fide loss at the point of human origins. Unlike La Capra, however, Girard does not just advocate healthy mourning, working things through to the point of acceptance. Rather, as a Christian he believes that God is redeeming and will redeem

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history—that there is a deeper order working itself out, that bad can yield up good, and that actual losses are going to be put right. In the meantime, we have resources in mimetic theory for facing this sense of absence and fragility, neither comforting ourselves with a mythical version of our origins and the rituals that sustain it nor separating our present psychological burdens from actual history so that we give up on trying to change the world. Rather, we can recognize the violent reality behind those myths (a reality glimpsed though never fully appreciated by Freud), eschewing any religio-­cultural recourse to victimage for assuaging that sense of absence. The “working through” advocated by La Capra would certainly help change the world, though in a passive way, as we refrain from “acting out.”49 Girard’s focus on redemption, however, should make us more active agents of a transformed world. Not for him any retreat into passivity and quietism as the only alternative to denial, fabulation, and blame-­shifting. Martha Reineke, whose book Intimate Domain brought La Capra’s exploration of trauma to my attention, might well dispute my assessment of Girard in such positive and pro­active terms, troubled as she is by his advocacy of withdrawal following the model of Friedrich Hölderlin. Reineke argues that Girard needs to face squarely the gnawing sense of absence at the heart of modern Western life, which La Capra addresses, with a theology of divine action in the key of kenosis. Reineke finds this preferable to the dynamic of loss that she ascribes to Girard,50 viewing him in my terms as blocking. Her book includes a plea for recovering an early but long-­abandoned role for affective memory in Girard that would provide further resources for dealing with absence, forestalling withdrawal under the specter of loss.51 Yet the withdrawal demonstrated by Hölderlin and advocated by Girard in Battling to the End can simply be viewed in terms of Girard’s own prescription for psychological health: to focus on objects and not be caught up with models of desire—in other words, to just get on with things and try to avoid mimetic entrapment.52 This is the sort of advice that I can envisage John Cassian endorsing: to withdraw from mimetic fascination and endless restless nostalgia to abide in a mimetically de­toxified present. Which of course spells anything but withdrawal tout court: it is a more intentional and

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self-­aware acceptance of one’s actual life in the real world; it resists flight from a sense of absence, and hence blocking. So, to be “in the world but not of it” is as far as withdrawal goes for Girard, which provides the best means of negotiating the perpetual risks that come with our evolved mimetic nature. As for a theology of kenosis, I would suggest that a Theo-­dramatic approach to God at work within the weave of natural and historical causality—the very double agency that I am proposing as com­ patible with both mimetic theory and theological dramatic theory—is entirely in tune with a kenotic vision of God at work in the history of Israel, including the humanity and powerlessness of Jesus Christ.

Is Re-­Narrating an Improvement? The demand of orthodox Christianity is not simply a Gnostic escape from evil by a re-­imagining of ontology, but rather the appropriation and conversion of evil as belonging to the Divine Providence. —Neil G. Robertson, “Milbank and Modern Secularity”

Rather than accepting or blocking the tragic facts of natural and human history, can we re-­narrate or even “out-­narrate” a tragic depiction (Milbank), thereby moderating its offense to faith? The great Augustine offers such a re-­narrating in light of Neo-­ platonic philosophy. The world emerged from a plenitude of being, with progressively lower levels of created entities displaying less and less of that plenitude. “Natural evils” such as predation and life’s decay are re-­narrated as inevitable absences that help constitute an ultimately satisfying whole. Evils were introduced into the world by the choice of angels and humans—someone is to blame. And yet, with the benefit of predestining foreknowledge, God is on top of the problem, setting things up to redress and to punish those evils. Likewise, the civitas Dei in its historical manifestation balances out the worst excesses of the civitas terrena. Augustine is re-­narrating, making the evil fit a satisfying aesthetic pattern, rooting it in original freedom,

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and refusing to see it as the malign counterforce that Manichaeism envisaged. Thus in all respects Augustine keeps evil on a leash, which is very much in keeping with Girard. Yet what we are left with is a lost perfection that needs to be put right in creation and history by God’s subsequent providential guidance. Don Cupitt regularly blames this Platonic, Augustinian legacy for the maudlin and backward-­looking tendencies of much theology. In light of this I am inclined to read such Augustinian re-­narrating in terms of the absence and “quasi-­ transcendental grieving” that La Capra describes, and hence in my own terms as a subtle and powerful version of blocking. God thus ensures that tragedy never fully appears as such because its horrors are balanced out. Augustine’s “aesthetic theodicy” (Balthasar) re-­narrates these tragic elements of immanent disorder according to a grander whole.53 He prioritizes a systemic view of measure in creation, so that form and order matter more than the well-­being of individuals. Indeed, as John Hick points out,54 the tragic fates of individuals are made to look less jarring when viewed against a more favorable cosmic backdrop. The suffering of victims, which is so central to Girard’s concern, is no more central in some other re-­narrating options. An example of re-­narrating as accepting was offered by Darwin. It is helpful to recall that the young Darwin had a theological mentor at Cambridge, Adam Sedgwick, a parson naturalist and geologist whose conventional Anglican faith in the argument from design accompanied a sense of nature’s perfect order and balance that he commended to Darwin. Yet Darwin’s own naturalistic investigations increasingly brought home to him the gross inefficiencies, wastage, ill-­adapted life-forms, and sheer brutality of nature that earlier naturalism had failed to fully appreciate. Darwin’s solution was deistic, denying divine involvement in the outworking of an original creation so that many ill-­fitting and distressing details could be blamed on blind natural laws rather than on Archdeacon William Paley’s once-­indubitable divine watchmaker. Cornelius Hunter reveals from Darwin’s notebooks and publications that the theory of evolution by natural selection was actually conceived as a theodicy, with so-­called natural evil not needing to be blamed on God.55 For Darwin, as Hunter shows,

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“God was constrained to benevolence and was distanced from the evils of creation through the interposition of natural laws. Positing natural selection operating in an unguided fashion on natural biological diversity was Darwin’s unique solution.”56 Nobody was to blame— not God, and certainly not Adam and Eve or the fallen angels; this is just “how things are.” In this refusal to connect God with the extent of creaturely mal­adaption and suffering, we have an attempt at re-­ narrating that on closer examination can be regarded as another version of accepting tragic reality. As Jürgen Moltmann insists in his work on the crucified God, however, it is the God of Jesus Christ, whose cross stands at the heart of the Trinity, who provides the only theodicy fit for Christians.57 Girard’s proposals are entirely compatible with this Christological approach to God’s nature, presence, and work, whereby the horrors are faced and redeemed by God rather than theorized away. This is Girard’s solution in his powerful and non­traditional reading of Job, whom he presents as an unjustly scapegoated figure invited by his misguided friends to take the blame for his own misfortunes, hence justifying God’s supposedly harsh way with him. The God of Job’s final chapters is usually viewed as the real God speaking out at last to silence Job’s importunity and reconcile him to the tragic-­seeming inscrutability of God’s purposes. Girard’s decisive counter­proposal is to identify this god as the false sacred appearing in person—as the status quo giving voice to its false-­sacred back-­story. The real God, the God of Israel, the God who takes the side of the victim, appears instead in Job’s stubborn protest: “As for me, I know that my defender lives” ( Job 19:25).58 God has a different solution, according to Girard, more in step with Darwin’s science than with his theology. Another version of re-­narrating, which in this case can be understood as blocking, emerges in the influential critique of Milbank—an attempt at “out-­narrating” any version of reality that is set on making peace with violence and tragedy. Milbank unenthusiastically acknowledges Girard’s credentials in this undertaking,59 expecting a lot more from him. As we have seen, Milbank seeks nothing less than a healthily differentiated world order rooted in transcendent being. In light of such transcendence, life can be received as a gift, while envy and rivalry are

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forestalled. Likewise, persuasion within an existing structure of hierarchical relations replaces the inevitability of competition on a level ontological playing field. Girard falls short, for Milbank, due to the undifferentiated world of contending equals that he proposes, infusing violence into the way of things. The villain is the uni­vocity—the ontological undifferentiation, with one single order of being shared by God and all existents. This univocity emerged, according to Milbank and the Radical Orthodoxy movement (following Balthasar and others), in William of Ockham and Duns Scotus to shape early modernity with its nominalist metaphysics. Instead of Martin Heidegger’s “fall into being,” and all this essential contestedness, Milbank (like Augustine) holds fast to a primally ordered unity from which all creation falls through the faulty choices of conscious agents. The key text for these purposes is the chapter on “Ontological Violence or the Postmodern Problematic” in Theology and Social Theory, in which Milbank attributes any nihilistic, tragic, and violence-­ridden interpretation of reality to a metaphysical misreading. If we insist on a univocal ontology, with one echelon of being shared by God and creatures, then there can be no real otherness, with no basis in the order of being for a hierarchy of peaceful coexistence. Instead, we cannot escape “the simultaneous occurrence of univocity and equivocity”60 whereby supposed “equals” start competing for supremacy. If such are the lenses through which we view reality, Milbank concludes, then we will assuredly form a distorted image. An example. It came as an initial surprise to me that Milbank— unlike every small boy in the Western world—does not like dinosaurs. But then it began to add up. He refuses to make theological peace with Darwinian science by questioning the “dateable aboriginal calamity” of “the fall,” and hence making room for what he regards as an unacceptable mythology of nature’s evolutionary journey under God. Instead, Milbank invokes the realism of theological narrative against the claims of evolutionary science, insisting that “only the unwise would search for paradise among the primeval swamps, whose weirdly monstrous inhabitants betray to faith their non-­belonging to the primarily intended created order.”61 I asked Milbank about Girard in general and, in particular, his own dismissal of what seem to be

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such plain scientific facts. In reply he again insisted on “a strict realism about the fall,” thanks to which “we have totally lost access at every level to the original uncontaminated creation, even if the Incarnation obscurely opens the gate back.” Regarding dinosaurs, which seem to lurch into view for Milbank only when we put on the faulty univocal lenses, “it’s unsurprising that if we try to research historically backwards we find little trace of paradise .  .  . and instead discover the monstrous reality of dragons.”62 So, for Milbank, the wrong ontology reveals a distorted reality. But this can be fixed. “By exposing the critical non-­necessity of the reading of reality as conflictual,” he maintains, “an alternative pos­ si­bility of reading reality as of itself peaceful is gradually opened to view, and the notions of transcendence, participation, analogy, hierarchy, teleology and the Platonic Good will be shown to belong inextricably to this reading.”63 Here Milbank is steering close to postmodern textualism, contending for one version of reality over another in a discussion that floats free of any scientific moorings—especially, but not exclusively, natural history according to evolutionary theory. By seeking to out-­narrate all such claims to realism with a more realistic, pacific narrative grounded in faith and gospel, Milbank is actually blocking anything of God to be found in an account of reality acceptable to modern secular sensibilities—likewise blocking any insights of the biological and social sciences into the role of suffering in evolution and hominization, such as those arrived at by Girard. The same hint of special pleading emerges when Milbank extols the church for a better narrating of the human condition and its prospects than anything secular modernity can offer.64 Here I suggest that Girard’s alternative should not be underestimated. It is worth remembering his exchange of letters with Schwager about “the fall,” discussed in chapter 4. Girard expressly repudiates the ontological violence with which he is charged and endorses the actuality of a fall from mimetic innocence into a perceived rivalry with God, hence into actual interpersonal rivalry. Girard agrees with Milbank that social science can reveal no trace of that originary innocence, while insisting that theology is right to envision it. Where they differ here is that Girard holds this conviction together with a robust

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affirmation of scientific and social-­ scientific inquiry. This inquiry has its place, as we have seen, interwoven with theology in Girard’s account. Yet social science does not close the book on truth. Where Milbank and others declare Girard’s account to be prescriptive, it is simply meant to be descriptive65—and in light of that distinction, Milbank’s critique seems to have over­reached. It is ironic that Milbank accuses Girard of harboring a violent ontology because a violent subtext has been identified in Milbank’s own program. Is violence present in the way that Milbank commends his narrative of peace? Gavin Hyman asks whether Milbank gives us Augustine’s re-­narrating writ large, though without Augustine’s habit of self-­criticism to balance his judgment of others. Hyman acknowledges with approval that “for Milbank, the great virtue of the Augustinian narrative is the way in which difference is subsumed within the Christian ontology without being obliterated.” He goes on to observe, however, that “the difficulty with Milbank’s metanarrative is that it is precisely this difference that seems not to be respected. It cannot but do undue violence to the narratives that it positions.”66 It is as if Milbank out-­narrates by shouting. Scott MacDougall is unsparing in his development of this critique. He insists that Milbank’s radical disjoining of Augustine’s two cities demonstrates the very violence that Milbank claims to deplore, replacing Augustine’s ambivalence about the earthly city and his knowing assessment of the church’s flaws with an uncritical dualism.67 MacDougall contends sharply in Girardian terms that “the secular is Milbank’s scapegoat, the sacrifice that makes his theological system run.”68 He goes on to emphasize Milbank’s Edenic backward-­lookingness at the expense of any adequately Christian eschatological perspective.69 MacDougall concludes that Milbank’s theology must be flawed because of its violence—since “violence, as Milbank quite rightly points out, contravenes Christian revelation and leads to error.”70 If the Girardian eye is on the victim, Milbank seems content to clean up the crime scene. This is not to deny that Milbank exhibits a keen sense of the concrete difference that a rightly understood resurrection faith brings to Christian life. The agonistic world he deplores is uniformly marked

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by “Reaction, Sacrifice, Complicity with Death, Scarcity and Gener­ ality,” whereas the Christian notes of “Gift, End of Sacrifice, Resurrection, Plenitude and Confidence”71 show how potent a re-­narrating is possible. The problem is his blocking. Girard is every bit as aware of the gospel, its distinctiveness, and its impact, though he includes in that impact things that Milbank shuns. One questions whether being theologically inhospitable to secular modernity in general and science in particular is compatible with a truly Catholic vision because it is not truly Catholic unless everyone is at the table. Girard and Milbank agree that secular modernity is accompanied by the return of the Dionysian,72 but they account differently for the secular itself. Despite his keen early sense of secular modernity as lying somewhere between the playgrounds and the killing fields of mimetic deregulation,73 Girard comes to understand it more positively in terms of the world shaking off the false sacred through the cultural diffusion of gospel influence. The capacity of scapegoating to unify a society against a victim is much diminished now that the truth of this mechanism has been revealed. Yet that advance is matched by a greater risk of crisis because the protection afforded by this sacrificial mechanism has been undermined—indeed, for both “early Girard” and “late Girard” the focus is squarely on these prospects of crisis. So, the Girardian secular, despite its acknowledged dangers, is regarded ultimately as God’s doing, while the Milbankian secular is the distasteful way our world appears to the metaphysically misinformed. From a Girardian perspective, modern secularity can be lived on its own terms and still be godly. Neil G. Robertson, in his root and branch critique of Milbank’s take on secular modernity, draws close to Girard’s developed position. The integral medieval vision of ontological belonging within a Christendom framework, which for Girard still contains strong echoes of the false sacred,74 does not give way to the nihilistic emptiness of modernity, as the Radical Orthodoxy movement insists—regarding modernity as evacuated of God’s sustaining presence, beginning with the philosophy of nominalism. Instead, Robertson argues that the Cartesian world of modernity is emptied of false sacrality in favor of a rational natural order that reveals the glory of God. “The modern confidence is that only through a radical

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alienation from nature can we be at home in nature,” as Robertson insists, “with a stability unknowable by ancient or medi­eval lights.”75 Robertson adds that, in view of what he regards as this critical misreading, Milbank misses “the deep spirituality of the modern.”76 Despite acknowledging what Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Carl von Clausewitz variously revealed about violent contagion and a resurgent false sacred under secular modern conditions, Girard is committed to modern disenchantment as a cultural and spiritual blessing. Here is another sign of Girard drawing near to the theology of kenosis that Martha Reineke is looking for.77 So what Milbank calls peaceful is infected by violence, while what he calls violent has come to us thanks to the prince of peace. It is not possible to out-­narrate a violent world with a narrative of Jesus that is itself violent—which maybe even represents a mimetic double of the world’s own violent Logos. Jesus’s cross effects a transfiguration in which the Holy Spirit carries a broken world into the embrace of resurrection, rather than a mere re-­narrating of natural and human tragedy. There is no enmity toward this world and no one-­ upmanship from the one who gave his life to free this world from the death-­dealing power of rivalry and violence. More on this in the final chapter, which will (among other things) address the uniqueness of Jesus—what it means, and what it must never mean. One last example of re-­narrating, which turns out to be another case of accepting, concerns the Greek notion of Logos. In the hands of Heraclitus, this concept provided a satisfying way of reconciling the contrarieties of experience into a unified whole. Balthasar, who shares the same spiritual passion to unite the apparently irreconcilable in a single divine purpose, is partial to the Logos of Heraclitus as a pointer toward what comes to fullness in Christ, synthesizing religion, philosophy, and myth. Long before he came to criticize Girard for being narrow in this regard, Balthasar insisted that “those who want to ‘purify’ the Bible of religion, philosophy and myth want to be more biblical than the Bible, and more Christian than Christ.”78 To be sure, both Girard and Balthasar see the transition from pagan antiquity to Christ in terms of continuity and completion via correction, but their emphases differ. For Girard, Christianity inhabits

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the carapace of false-­sacred religiousness, leaving place for law, self-­ sacrifice, and even the appropriately evacuated structures of mythology, though without endorsing the false sacred. Girard calls for more discontinuity between the false sacred and the converted Judeo-­Christian alternative, with eschatology providing the reconciliation that Balthasar looks for in Heraclitus’s universal bringing-­together of contrarieties. What Balthasar seems to overlook is the violence. Girard, like Heidegger, recognizes violence in the Greek Logos. He names Heraclitus as the philosopher closest to the pagan sacred for proclaiming the violent logic of all cultures, which is expulsion.79 As Girard insists, “Heraclitean violence is an idealized version of mimetic rivalry.”80 In the Logos according to the Gospel of John’s prologue, however, tables are turned on the mythical expulsion of humanity in Genesis 3 and the truth is revealed: it is humans who expel God. Thus, the Logos of John—to whom violence is done, who sides with the victims—is declared to be the Word of truth.81 It is interesting that in commending Heraclitus as he does, Balthasar cites without hint of disapproval the Greek’s disdain for those multitudes of somnolent common people who miss this vision splendid by virtue of their ignorance: they are hoi polloi, like swine.82 Is this not a piece of prima facie evidence for Girard’s reading: that the Logos of Heraclitus is implicated in violence and expulsion? In this case, those expelled are the sort of common people in whom Paul rejoiced—those whom God chose in Christ to shame the wise (1 Cor. 1:26–29). With his drive to reconcile darkness and light, in order to draw the sting of tragic reality, it is as if Balthasar takes leave of his usually unerring Christian instincts. By seeking to banish the pagan darkness with this Heraclitean fire of aesthetic completion, Balthasar does not distinguish the altogether different quality of light that emerges in John’s prologue—an alternative Logos, in which knowledge of the scapegoat mechanism has been engraved. His accepting of tragic reality in securing a suitably inclusive Catholic vision has unwittingly come to share some Heraclitean exclusivity, at the expense of a much more radical inclusivity that Jesus himself extends to the whole of natural and human history in his solidarity with its victims. Balthasar

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gives a better account of this solidarity with the celebrated discussion of Easter Saturday and Christ’s descent to the dead in his Mysterium Paschale. There, God’s love and solidarity absorbs its opposite, overcoming the expulsion of victims to hell.83 Accepting is not what Jesus does with evil and death. Nothing is properly Christian if hope for the lost is not prominent in its reckoning.

* * *

Girard does not deal with the tragic reality of finite existence by re-­ narrating as Augustine does, seeking an aesthetic balance, with evil understood as absence and as subject to continuous redress. Such an approach counters tragedy by blocking. Neither does Girard content himself with other versions of re-­narration. While true to Darwin he is not a deist who seeks to distance God from the bitter facts of life in the mode of accepting. And while he shares Milbank’s Augus­ tinian commitment to a pacific ontology, Girard does not respond by blocking. Rather, he is an apologist for Christ and the Spirit who are healing and advancing creation on an eschatological trajectory. Girard does not view the Heraclitean Logos in Balthasar’s mode of accepting, either—as unifying the dark and light of creation (rather like “the Force” in Star Wars). He prefers instead the wholly radiant Logos of John and its bathing of tragedy in the light of hope. Inade­ quately featured in these various forms of accepting and blocking is a sufficiently comprehensive resurrection hope. The Triune God has not abandoned the world and its burden of tragedy—not nature, not history, not secular modernity—but is busy with its transformation, now and for eternity. Here Girard exemplifies the most demanding but also, I believe, the most honest and spiritually credible theological response to the so-­called problem of evil. Every theology that is not seduced by the easier paths of accepting or blocking must contend with the lack of closure, divine implication in suffering, and reliance on eschatological hope that we have canvassed in this chapter. The solution to the problem of evil is not theoretical, though Christology and escha­tology can reconfigure it (not re-­narrate it) spiritually and make it more

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bearable—not least, I will suggest, by means of overaccepting. As mentioned, the following chapter imports the category of overaccepting from improvisation theory in the theater, which is the alternative to accepting and blocking. It is a concept that has been deployed with good effect in theological ethics and political theology but not to my knowledge as a vehicle for reimagining fundamental and systematic theology. In a Girard-­inspired Theo-­drama it is particularly apposite. Via overaccepting, I will seek to show how mimetic theory, in Theo-­ dramatic form, can address violence and its rivalrous roots in a hopeful, generous, and theologically orthodox way.

CH A P TER 7

Divine Overaccepting

God’s sovereignty never renders the story a simple unfolding of a set play. Human beings were and are actors, not marionettes. —Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld, Killing Enmity

In the previous chapter we considered the tragic and violent facts of life in a Darwinian and Girardian universe, along with various responses deemed to involve either accepting or blocking. Neither of these twinned options, in whichever form, was reckoned to have solved the traumatic problems that they were confronting. It was suggested, however, that René Girard has succeeded in meeting that challenge where others have failed. I will now seek to develop that insight, extending the Theo-­dramatic approach that I have been commending. For Girardian theologian Michael Kirwan, “the Dramatic The­ ology project, deriving to some extent from Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theodrama, has many resonances with the theoretical notion of ‘overacceptance.’ ”1 It is this practice of “overaccepting,” taken from the theory of improvisation and understood as an improvement on the alternative options of accepting or blocking, that I will be exploring  173

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in this chapter. My aim is to show how the divine-­human drama can best be seen to play out theologically from a Girardian perspective. According to Balthasar, Girard falls short of a genuine Theo-­ drama, settling for a one-­sided theological anthropology. Through the lens of overaccepting, however, Girard’s program reveals an edgier divine-­human drama than Balthasar can credit. And whereas Milbank dismisses Girard’s account of “the gift” as socially utilitarian, sacrificial, and hence sub-­Christian, Girard’s overaccepting of realities such as tragic suffering and secularization secures a better appreciation of existence in terms of gift than what I regard as Milbank’s blocking of these realities. So, what does overaccepting mean, and how can it contribute to a Theo-­drama conceived along Girardian lines? What about the reality of sinfulness, of secularity? What about the shadow side of finitude, the violent Realpolitik of human history, the profound disorientation that accompanies trauma, the widely perceived scandal of innocent suffering, and our apparent entrapment in violence? What about the widespread moral affront occasioned by traditional beliefs concerning divine wrath and punishment? In all of these areas, a Girardian Theo-­drama that advances by overaccepting represents a significant theological improvement.

Overaccepting: Beyond Accepting and Blocking The branch of theatrical performance practice called improvisation is also known as impro, improv, or theater sports. It involves unscripted or only semi­scripted performances in which unexpected developments must be taken up into the evolving drama in real time. The riskiness of this undertaking makes for good entertainment, with  a skilled ensemble able to sustain the sense of a coherent developing drama while incorporating whatever comes up. Improvisation is a craft that is learned and taught. Its key attribute has been called overaccepting, which represents an advance on the two standard alternatives of accepting and blocking. The option of simply accepting whatever development presents itself may knock the drama too far off course and tear the fabric of its inner logic, preventing it from

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achieving the coherent and satisfying outcome that a well-­trained ensemble can bring off. Blocking, on the other hand, wastes such challenging opportunities to advance the drama in creative ways, displaying a resistance that can easily bog down the performance. An incident from the concert hall provides an illustration of overaccepting, involving Richard Egarr as keyboard soloist with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Although this example is not drawn from the theater, its live performance context is comparable. A radio presenter on Australia’s national classical music station reports that spontaneity is important as far as Egarr is concerned, for his musicians as well as his audience, and he purposely leaves room for things to “cook on tour.” His own cadenzas too are never the same twice. In fact in the ACO’s Melbourne concert this week, mid-­way through a cadenza in Haydn’s Keyboard Concerto in D a mobile phone erupted, prompting him to incorporate its ring tone into his improvisation.2

Imagine if Egarr had ignored the ringtone and proceeded doggedly with a cadenza that he had previously written out. Such blocking of the incident, trying to pretend that nothing had happened, would have heightened tension in the hall, while representing a lost opportunity in Egarr’s mission of commending music from the baroque and classical periods as accessible and hip. Likewise, blocking the interruption by an offended scowling, or even briefly stopping the performance—as orchestral conductors have been known to do in response to excessive audience coughing—could have offended the audience and sacrificed the élan of virtuoso performance for an affronted rectitude. An alternative response might have involved some half-­hearted accepting, perhaps with a theatrical scowl at the audience. This would have been understandable and polite, but lame and a wasted opportunity compared with what Egarr actually did. Instead, he demonstrated overaccepting, and we can be confident that an Australian audience would have brought the house down in response. Overaccepting is the habituated practice of performers trained in improvisation, crafting a good outcome out of whatever presents itself.

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As Samuel Wells explains, exploring how this idea might transform Christian ethics, it need not be about originality or even individual virtuosity (as in my classical music example). Rather, in the theater it is more about a skilled ensemble knowing what they are doing and helping each other to keep the play going3—which also suggests that overaccepting could be an exemplary, even a defining ecclesial practice.4 A friend remonstrated with me about the use of this term, regarding it as an ugly and intrusive neologism. I did consider simply using the word “improvisation” instead, though that conveys nothing of the direction-­setting, programmatic, high-­functioning intent of overaccepting. Improvisation is a skilled activity, but overaccepting points to a special version of it—it is improvisation developed into a habitus, and made into an adventure, with a definite end in view. So, for good or ill, I am persevering with the term. In Wells’s understanding, the Theo-­drama is the given, and everything else is gift.5 In light of a multi-­act, divine-­human drama in which choice and free will, tragedy and hope, mark the unfolding of events, knowing the logic of the whole and where it is going unleashes the freedom and creativity to make something worthwhile out of any development, even if it is unwelcome. This is true of human actors, but I also suggest that God’s creativity underpinning the sacrificial forward movement of the Theo-­drama might be imagined better in terms of overaccepting. Jesus was a great exponent of overaccepting, according to Wells. In response to his temptations in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, for instance, we see Jesus neither accepting nor blocking but over­ accepting the popularity, persuasiveness, and power that Satan offered, by adopting these on his own terms in the service of God’s coming reign.6 For Michael Kirwan, such an approach “is to imitate God’s loving creativity, in neither accepting nor rejecting the sinfulness of the world. Rather, this sinfulness is ‘overaccepted’ in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.”7 A comparable process of overaccepting can be discerned in the development of doctrine, which is necessary if the tradition of Christian orthodoxy is to advance beyond the inadequate alternatives that arise in every epoch. As Kevin Vanhoozer explains, “tradition is the

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Church’s attempt to negotiate this tension between ‘sameness’ and ‘difference,’ an attempt that aims at a kind of nonidentical repetition.”8 To my mind, this suggests overaccepting, as an advance on the accepting or blocking of either “sameness” or “difference.” The key we are looking for lies with redemption and escha­ tology—with the healing of creation’s wounds. Tragedy and evil must not be trivialized or ignored, and neither should we welcome them unopposed to inflict their terrible burden. Rather, tragedy can be turned into gift by means of overaccepting. This is a theological and spiritual habit that we can recognize in Girard, which goes to the heart of Judeo-­Christian imagination. It is what we would expect from a nonviolent God who neither does violence to the innate logic of nature and history by summarily expunging all harm, nor allows tragedy and evil to have the last word, but who improvises on tragedy and evil in the key of transformative hope.9 In light of its final act, prefigured in the midst of the Theo-­drama, the eschatological given represents the overaccepting of tragic fate.10 It is especially important for Wells that the divine-­human drama ensures the reintroduction of everything that has been discarded along the way, so that overaccepting is always gathering up “lost” elements ripe for reincorporation.11 This is entirely in accord with the justice, compassion, and hope in Christ and the Holy Spirit that Girard identifies as the Bible’s promise to all victims. As William Cavanaugh observes, applying Wells’s insights about overaccepting to political theology and ecclesiology, a true understanding of eschatology requires neither tragic resignation to sin nor a triumphal declaration that the church is the realized eschaton. It requires a fully penitential “overaccepting” of human finitude and sinfulness by receiving the healing kingdom that God, through Christ and the Spirit, has planted right in the midst of our bloodstained history.12

Here we might also recall James Alison’s Girardian approach to sin and failure “through Easter eyes,” in which the truth of our condition can only be accessed from the redeemed perspective of God’s loving

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forgiveness.13 Indeed, for Alison, “we are not first created and then forgiven, but rather it is through forgiveness that we enter the possibility of being created.”14 It is as if our creation can be regarded as an overaccepting of our redemption. Hence, we neither capitulate to the negative potential of our mimetic nature by accepting the inevitabilities of being run by the system nor respond with the blocking characteristic of a self-­hating dualism— a self-­hatred revealing Dominick La Capra’s “structural trauma” that we readily project onto others, whom we punish accordingly. Rather, by overaccepting our mimetic nature we are caught up in the desires of Christ and his saints. This emphasis on creation as transformation and participation within the divine-­human drama constitutes a sort of re­potting, to use a gardening metaphor, releasing what had been throttled and root-­bound into a larger context where it can recover, spread out, and thrive. A consequence of this confidence in the Theo-­drama can be discerned in Girard’s assessment of secular modernity. He is given neither to accepting it along with the naive champions of progress, nor to blocking it in keeping with the nostalgic critics of modernity. Rather, Girard’s overaccepting of secular modernity as a consequence of the gospel regards it as a welcome collapse of the closed, false-­sacred cosmos, while also exposing the loss of significant protections that this collapse entails. Through such overaccepting, secularity emerges beyond talk of the death of God as a further act in the divine-­human drama, lying between the Judeo-­Christian revelation and its eschatological consummation.

From Augustine to Irenaeus: Overaccepting the Shadow Side of Finitude A challenge for theology today emerges at this point: of adapting ancient doctrines first conceptualized in accord with a more static cosmology to modernity’s historicist and evolutionary mindset. Accordingly, as LeRon Shults points out, it is not enough simply to tinker with Augustine or add some Irenaeus when rejuvenated theological

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categories are called for.15 Here Girard’s scientific sensibility in the service of a Theo-­dramatic account can provide a way forward. In the previous chapter, when discussing the attitude and spirituality of blocking, I assigned Augustine to that category along with his great champion John Milbank. Yet we have also heard Girard declare his indebtedness to Augustine.16 Can we garner Augustine to Girard’s project of overaccepting, with Shults’s warning in mind? The issue is how to deal with human and so-­called natural evil. Augustine posits a plenitude of creaturely potencies laid up by God at the beginning, with each realized at the right moment in history, as creation runs the gauntlet of evils that have intruded through free angelic and human choice. In the previous chapter I charged this model with blocking because the divine response to these challenges is essentially negative, either fixing or punishing as creation is guided forward with a backward eye on its original purpose. This entails a constant returning to the script in dogged resistance to a series of disruptions, which in improvisational terms is suggestive of blocking. A more open process is certainly foreshadowed by Irenaeus, however. The fall is not so much a calamity and a betrayal as an advance in the ongoing creation of humankind. The journey of life for Irenaeus is not away from the fullness of being, and hence is not preoccupied about losing ground, but moves toward that fullness. As James Alison insists that the truth of our mimetically compromised condition—our original sin—only dawns on us in the redemptive experience of leaving it behind,17 so Irenaeus shifts attention from Adam and the fall to Christ and the redemption. As Alison explains, “this entire problem is obviated the moment a Christological rereading becomes the interpretative key.”18 Peter C. Bouteneff shows how Western theology’s typical emphasis on sin and original sin is largely absent from this major alternative Christian tradition, which extends from Irenaeus to the late Middle Ages. Irenaeus concluded—amazingly—that Adam came into being as a result of Christ and his passion, that Adam was made in the image of the incarnate Christ, who himself is the beginning and the end. This trajectory of thinking, which cannily stands temporal chronology on

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its head, was definitive for the patristic era and right on through the fourteenth century in Nicholas Cabasilas.19

Such a perspective is more eschatologically oriented, and more compatible with an evolutionary process. This connection cannot be taken too far, of course—evolution is not a smooth teleological progression. Yet the Irenaean approach is more suggestive of a dynamism explored than of a stasis preserved. It is less about maintaining, and more about transforming. Hence the category of overaccepting could be identified in Irenaeus, concerning the facts of human sin and the travail of nature. Indeed, although Irenaeus preceded Augustine, one could view a more modern Irenaean type of theodicy in terms of overaccepting the Augustinian type. And Girard certainly provides an example. His use of Paul’s concept of the katéchon to account for humanity’s continued reliance on aspects of deviated transcendence is an aspect of this.20 From an eschatological perspective, with a robust view of human sin and frailty caught up nevertheless in the biblical impetus of revelation and grace, we can regard Girard as overaccepting the fact of natural suffering and human evil in light of its role in a larger drama of creation and redemption. This is expressed in his conviction that evolution should be read spiritually, not atheistically, as a divinely underwritten process.21 Girard sees a theme in it, a divine purpose being revealed, a sacrificial self-­giving that finds its acme in Jesus’s passion, as we noted in the previous chapter. All that eating up and overtaking of life on behalf of other life, present and future, can be re­appraised from a broader perspective, as environmental ethicist Holmes Rolston does when he re­frames value loss on the part of individual creatures in terms of a wider value capture.22 What he means is that the value of an animal’s life is not lost to so much as captured by a predator, and hence by the whole ongoing natural system. But will that do? This solution constitutes accepting, in the terms we have been setting out, whereas overaccepting will take the tragedy of lost individuals more seriously on their own terms, beyond being satisfied with big-­picture reassurances about life’s overall advance. Once again, the divine-­human drama’s

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ending, revealed in its midst through Israel and Jesus Christ, invites the overaccepting of so much natural suffering and apparent futility as God’s beloved creation is being revealed. The travail of creatures is fully illuminated thanks to Christ’s sacrificial solidarity and offered redress by his resurrection, which is regarded as the vector of all creation’s eschatological future. This is none other than the creation groaning in travail as it awaits God’s revealing of the new creation, as imagined in Romans 8:18–23. An exciting further step is proposed by leading Australian theologian Anthony Kelly. In light of Christ’s sacrificial solidarity with all creaturely suffering—“the Lamb slaughtered from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8)—and “the special energies of Christian love and hope,”23 Kelly sketches a protology to match the transformative promise of eschatology. If creation is God’s gift, and Christ is given in solidarity with a suffering world from its inception, then Kelly regards this world as also forgiven. That is, the natural agencies that inflict suffering are forgiven, as a consequence of their loving, redemptive embrace by God in the sacrificial solidarity of Christ. For Kelly, if violence and death are a necessary part of evolutionary and historical process, a cosmic application of forgiveness is implied. Forgiveness of those inflicting these lethal negativities (the enemy) is necessary if the promise of the future is to be fulfilled in conformity with the unconditional “for-­giving” and self-­giving that is constitutive of creation.24

Such a solution to the theological problem of suffering entailed by evolutionary processes secures the position of Adam in light of Christ, restoring the protology prioritized by Augustine in light of sote­ri­ ology as conceived by Irenaeus. It is another way to regard creation as the overaccepting of salvation—a Girardian theme that is emerging here in various ways. From such a Girard-friendly theological perspective, the sacrificial facts of hominization, along the extended tragic arc of evolutionary time, are subject neither to accepting nor blocking. Rather, they are redeemed via their overaccepting in terms of divine providence,

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reframed in light of the overall Theo-­drama. Yet this is not a smooth ride. In the previous chapter we noted that human life is unrecognizable without its burdens of tragedy and suffering, and of course without the opportunities provided by working through them. John Hick, attempting to adjudicate between the classical perspectives of Augustine and Irenaeus, concludes that “there is a logical impossi­ bility in the idea of free persons being ready made in the state (which is to constitute the end-­product of the creative process) of having learned and grown spiritually through conflict, suffering, and redemption.”25 This recalls an earlier discussion of various artificial life-forms from science fiction, with Paul Dumouchel’s insistence on mimeticism as the indispensable ingredient. Still, God’s final purposes are recognized by Girard to have been at work via hominizing processes rooted in the false sacred, before those divine purposes had been fully revealed. The suffering of all creation and of all victims yields to overaccepting by being joined to that of Christ, and subject to healing agency from the Holy Spirit. Likewise, the whole category of sacrifice is subject to overaccepting by “late Girard” in terms of consecration rather than immolation (more on this in the following chapter). Ilia Delio has devoted herself to exploring and developing this tradition of interpretation that goes back to Irenaeus. It is an approach that focuses on the fulfillment of creation rather than redemption from sin. She mentions the medieval cosmic Christology of her own Franciscan tradition, in particular that of Alexander of Hales, Duns Scotus, and Bonaventure, for whom “the incarnation is not an isolated event but is integral to the possibility of creation itself; one is inconceivable without the other.”26 She notes, too, the self-­transcending impetus that Karl Rahner discerns in evolutionary change. Rather than the logos of a stable Greek cosmos, Delio follows Teilhard de Chardin in regarding Christ as the organizing principle of an evolving cosmos.27 With the challenge of creation’s shadow side in view, nevertheless Delio insists that “the risen Christ is the inner power of this evolutionary universe that impels us to go forward into a greater unity of love despite the forces of separation.”28 Girard’s sense of Christ recapitulating all sacrifices, of the false sacred progressively recolonized and overtaken by a new, secularizing, Gospel version

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of the sacred, and of creation’s purpose only emerging out of méconnaissance thanks to this Judeo-­Christian revelation, suggests further synergies between mimetic theory and a suitably updated Irenaean tradition.

The City of God and Creation in Genesis: Overaccepting Realpolitik William Cavanaugh pays particular attention to how such overaccepting might play out politically. He approaches this by revisiting Augustine’s twin cities of God and “man.” For Augustine the city of God contributes to the good of the earthly city, just as the earthly city serves the city of God by exercising its disciplinary rights over human disorder. Thus, we find human sin and violence in the two cities—ameliorated by the city of God, though by no means absent from the church due to influence from the earthly city—with violence conscripted to a necessary, though constrained, degree. Girard’s non­ pacifist admission that limited, lawful violence is needed to restrain worse violence represents one of his most Augustinian insights.29 A more purist and rigorist approach to these challenges can betray rather than serve the cause of justice and Christian fidelity. Indeed, as Samuel Wells points out, “for the church to think it can simply block evil is contrary to the example of Christ, has no guarantee of success, bypasses the imagination, and tends to ally the church with the powerful forces it may have no place beside.”30 Cavanaugh views the two cities non­dualistically, in terms of two performances taking place in the same space and involving the same actors. The Richard Strauss opera Ariadne auf Naxos provides an illustration, with its “play within a play.” The setting is a grand social event, for which the wealthy host has arranged two opera performances for his guests after dinner—one tragic, the other comic—until unforeseen circumstances require the evening’s entertainment to be curtailed. Hence, he instructs the performers to conflate these two operas into a single performance to save time. In one scene the tragic operatic heroine laments her cruel fate and contemplates suicide, but then she

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is interrupted by Zerbinetta from the comic opera, who cheers her up and leads her off into a brighter future.31 Thus the comic trumps the tragic in its own backyard. This is something that Woody Allen has made his stock in trade, mocking the gloomy fatalism of Russian literature and cinema, classical tragedy, and the bleakness of Ingmar Bergman in a memorable series of comic films. Such satire is the liberating practice of overaccepting at work. However, as Ben Quash rightly observes, the comic is not merely the rolling back of the tragic, since the comic shares a depth of realism with the tragic.32 Rowan Williams adds that while the comic and the tragic both reveal the fragile and compromised state of humanity, the comic also reveals that what is painful need not prove lethal.33 Hence the comic is more hopeful, and in that sense more eschatologically attuned than the tragic.34 The comic certainly should not be seen as blocking the tragic, then, but neither does it settle for accepting the tragic, which would spell the end of comedy. Rather, it is precisely because of this shared affinity that the comic is able to transcend the tragic by overaccepting it. Accordingly, the category of overaccepting characterizes Christian practice in the face of violence and tragedy. “The church is not a separate institution enacting a wholly separate drama,” as Cavanaugh insists, “but works with other actors to try to divert tragedy into the drama of redemption.”35 He offers an early foray into overaccepting drawn from ecclesial practice under General Augusto Pinochet’s Chilean dictatorship when the church confronted the official practice of torture, which is understood by Cavanaugh as a “liturgy” of social atomization. The oppressive political reality was not susceptible to blocking by a church bereft of political and military power. Yet neither was accepting appropriate, leaving Christians huddled powerlessly behind closed doors with their mouths shut. Instead, a counter-­ liturgy was mobilized in which the disappeared were prayed for by name in churches, while Christian flash mobs sprang from the anonymity of crowds to mock the official narrative in acts of subversive street theater, before dissolving quickly away. The Eucharist was held up as a re­knitting of the social body, which the torture state’s liturgy of violence was seeking to unravel.36 Such overaccepting of violence,

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recognizing it as a strategy to impose meaning, involved its disempowering by the enactment of a fuller meaning. We see essentially the same approach in Jesus’s response to his temptations, as set out in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. I identify the same overaccepting of Realpolitik at work in early chapters of the book of Genesis, where problems have gathered for Girard around the issue of ontological violence. He recognizes that the primal chaos of Genesis 1:1 is best understood as a metaphor for mimetic crisis, along with a number of other instances from the books of Genesis and Exodus (e.g., the confusion of tongues at Babel, the flood, the stories of warring brothers, the plagues of Egypt).37 Building on this insight, I suggest that accounts of creation in Genesis 1–3 are best understood as a political theology of overaccepting in allegorical form. In the first account (Gen. 1:1–2:3) we have a response to the Babylonian cosmology with which God’s people in exile had been confronted, in particular the creation epic Enuma Elish where the divine Marduk slays the sea monster of chaos Tiamat to create the world from her sundered corpse. Following Walter Wink, Brian Robinette suggests that the export of this Babylonian creation myth of redemptive violence to Syria, Phoenicia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Germany, Ireland, and India shows how successful it was at making evil appear unproblematic while supporting political arrangements based on power.38 Genesis registers its protest against all this via a more pacific account. James Alison develops Girard’s insight, pointing out that the traditional doctrine of creatio ex nihilo finds its truest reference in this sense of having been redeemed from the chaotic violence of history (which is rendered in the mythical imagination as watery chaos). He argues that to the degree in which the arbitrary nature of victimization or persecution becomes apparent in the Old Testament, so it becomes possible to tell the story of a foundation or creation which does not involve a god in the suppression of chaos. It became possible to see that God is anterior to chaos. Thus it becomes possible to understand creation as ex nihilo.39

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But beyond accepting that violence occupies the heart of reality, and hence perpetuating mimetic rivalry against the gods of Babylon by delivering the counter­punch of Yahweh’s greater might, or blocking by trying to avoid rather than dismantle the toxic legacy of Babylonian dualism, we see Genesis overaccepting the Babylonian account by discrediting and then repurposing its religio-­political agenda, to a quite different end. Notice that the chaotic waters of myth­ology, personified in the figure of Tiamat, are retained at the start of Genesis—just as, for Girard, the real sacred inhabits the carapace of its predecessor. Yet these waters are no longer perceived as a terrorizing element, and they are subdued merely by the breath of Yahweh. This insight is echoed in the psalms, with Leviathan “formed to sport in the deep”40 as God’s non­threatening plaything— biblical imagination has morphed Tiamat, the Babylonian monster of chaos, from “Godzilla” into “Flipper.” Likewise, the differenti­ation of creation’s elements does not emerge violently from the collapse of an undifferentiated chaos in this first creation account of Genesis. Rather, it proceeds in an orderly, unhurried progression over six leisurely days—with a day off at the end. It is more like a test match in cricket than a conflagration. Moreover, in the second creation account (Gen. 2:4b–25), while Eve is acknowledged by Adam to be wonderfully different, she is also recognized as his very bone and flesh (Gen. 2:22–23). Hence our “first parents” escape the crisis of undifferentiation and the foundational rivalry that mythology enshrines. Their exposure to rivalry comes later, and as a result of their choices, leading to murder in the next generation. Cavanaugh concludes that “unlike the Babylonian creation myth, the world is not created out of the need to restrain an original vi­ olence. The world is created in peace; goodness, not violence, is the way things really are.” Here we see the overaccepting of violence as it appears in the Babylonian myth—rather than accepting its tit-­for-­tat dualism in acquiescence to more violence, or blocking it by refusing to take its measure and proceeding to dismantle it. Overaccepting does not perpetuate violence, unlike the status quo–­preserving Realpolitik of both accepting and blocking.

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Compassion: Overaccepting Trauma Overaccepting is not a guarantee of comfort or safety, however, and Girard’s version of the divine-­human drama calls for a bracing treatment of divine providence. For instance, regarding “the cost of discipleship,” Cavanaugh acknowledges that “overaccepting is not always so immediately beautiful. Martyrdom exhibits all the desperate ugliness of violence and death, and yet martyrdom transfigures death by placing it into the larger story of what Christ has done with death.”41 Overaccepting can thus be understood as a mode of revelation, which discloses and opens up a new creation in which we are invited to participate. A role in the divine-­human drama and hence a new being is on offer, derived ultimately from a new mimetic model of desiring found in Jesus Christ. But there is something tough and uncompromising about this calling. A lot of responsibility is put into human hands, according to Girard, because it is genuinely up to us to decide what to make of the revelation that has been given. Theo-­drama, double agency, and this challenge associated with overaccepting all point to the centrality of human collaboration within the outworking of God’s purposes. While this involves a lot more than a shift in perspective, a mental transposition, it cannot be less than that: “be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:2). It is this transformation of minds that I will be reflecting on in this section, applying overaccepting to the experience of trauma as a way of picturing God at work in the divine-­human drama. The theological niceties of understanding providence in terms of overaccepting tragedy and violence are likely lost on the traumatized. The basic fact of pastoral ministry as the church’s traditional response to trauma is an acknowledgment of this reality. For the afflicted, pastoral ministry represents an advance on two standard responses. One option is accepting their abject condition by denying its tragic reality, being unhelpfully upbeat. The other option involves blocking it, by being neglectful and avoidant perhaps, or full of “rage against the

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dying of the light,” or by searching for someone to blame. Praying through the psalms of lament together on my regular visits with a dying parishioner, when I was a young first-­time rector, represented a third option that we lit upon together. That young mother and I chose the psalms of lament to give proper voice to the sadness and frustration of her situation, while holding these entirely proper feelings within the framework of faith and hope, as she faced the tragedy of her terminal cancer. Such pastoral ministry, as the church’s vehicle for overaccepting the horrors and burdens of life, does not offer a solution. Rather, it provides a way of transfiguring the experience of trauma and sustaining faith when confronted by its bitter reality. Compassion thus becomes a genuine efficacy for redemption, taking us beyond benevolence and any hint of sentimentality to the heart of Theo-­drama. As Wendy Farley explains, “Compassion is the intensity of divine being as it enters into suffering, guilt and evil to mediate the power to overcome them.”42 This mediation can be understood as working mimetically. Christ’s being is mediated to us as we come to share his compassionate desire, so that the one who is suffering might enter into that fuller being—as Paul puts it, “that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thess. 4:13). This mediation is unmistakably sacramental, revealing the divine mystery at the heart of a pastoral church. Serene Jones engages this reality of trauma. Beyond the accepting that I associate with Zen-­like detachment, nihilistic atheism, or a familiar stoic “stiff upper lip,” on the one hand, and the blocking that refuses to be at peace and regularly needs to lay blame, on the other hand, she patiently traces the outline of wounds that will probably never fully heal. Her spiritual and pastoral instincts carry Jones past the two sub-­Christian options of blocking and accepting to what I recognize as the posture of overaccepting. She points to Jesus’s suffering taken up into God’s Trinitarian life. She reflects on the shorter ending of Mark’s Gospel, which withholds easy closure. And she highlights scriptural stories of trauma undergone and transformed.43 Her message is that God “gets it.” Jones explains that the traumatized typically need three things: a chance to speak, to be heard, and to have their story reintegrated into

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normal functioning. And the Holy Spirit, Girard’s “advocate for the defense of victims,” is surely close at hand. Jones points to the wisdom of John Calvin on praying the psalms, which give language to the traumatized—a reality that I confirmed in my own pastoral ministry with that young mother in extremis. The psalmists’ words of lament, including their violence and anger, “simply are what they are—the groans of the violated.”44 Girard recognizes this unvarnished quality of the psalms, describing them as the first historical instance of sacrificial victims protesting their innocence, and hence as a sign of the false sacred beginning to lose its power.45 There is a further element that Jones finds in Calvin that suggests Girardian overtones: “As Calvin often reminds his readers, it is only when they hear the psalmist lament the harm done to him that they, by mimicking his words as they pray, find a language for and an awareness of the trauma they have endured.”46 Here the psalmist becomes the mimetic model of a healing desire, commending his own desire and hence aiding his subject in overaccepting of suffering. As pointed out in the previous chapter, there is a good Girardian reason why we might feel a sense of trauma in the present and recognize that it does indeed issue from the past, though without being able to be more specific (recalling La Capra’s “structural trauma”). Such “things hidden since the foundation of the world” (Matt. 13:35) can be subject to overaccepting thanks to Girard’s account of revelation through the Judeo-­Christian scriptures, as we realize that the false sacred is losing its monopoly. Friedrich Nietzsche wondered about the festivals of atonement that we would need to invent in order to restore what has been lost, but such a restoration is precisely what Girard would have us forgo. Rather, in Jesus Christ the false sacred and the sacrificial are not subject to accepting in Nietzschean fashion, but overaccepting as a spiritually fecund secularity. So, as I have argued, the secular can be understood as a fruit of the gospel—indeed, as the gospel overaccepted. I regard such secularity as representing the “death of God” and the traditional void of the contemplatives, in the particular sense that a “cloud of forgetting” arises between us and what it felt like to inhabit a false-sacred world. As James Alison points out, we are given Easter eyes and a new past47

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as the false-sacred center of fascination and its control over our imagination is put behind us.

The Force of Love: Overaccepting the Scandal— Wrath, Apocalypse, Judgment Lord, shake us with the force of love, to rouse us from our dreadful sleep. —Alan Gaunt, from his hymn “Great God, Your Spirit Like the Wind” (sung to the tune Jerusalem)48 So urgent is the problem and so massive the stake that it justifies the remarkable vehemence, even brutality, that Jesus manifests in his dealings with “those who have ears and hear not, eyes and see not.” —René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World Judgment at the discretion of the Son of humanity, who chose to accept suffering over inflicting it, might well be different from vengeance. —David J. Neville, A Peaceable Hope

I am concerned in this final section of the chapter with a cluster of related themes that are amenable to overaccepting from a Girardian Theo-­dramatic perspective, so that they can be redeployed in testi­ mony to a nonviolent God. They relate to things that have prob­ lematized traditional belief under modern Western conditions: God’s apparent sanctioning of suffering and violence, along with scriptural themes of divine wrath, apocalypse, and judgment. It is the affront that these notions pose to widespread sensibilities that contributes to modern atheism’s mimetic rivalry with faith. This is a problematic addressed by the New Testament word skandalon. It points to the paradoxical nature of divine grace and

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divine justice, whereby “the deserving” sometimes suffer, while “the undeserving” receive blessings—the last are first, and the first are last, in a way that upends any conventional, prudential moral reckoning of just desserts. For Girard, the scandal is the obstacle, the rival whose enhanced “being” secretly fascinates us, over whom we obsess, manifest inversely in an eagerness to blame the rival and bring them down. Jesus becomes such a scandal for his disciples by his willingness to accept the cross, denying the mantle of overmastering divine power that they sought in him as their model. Instead, Jesus chose to refuse this expected role, which comes from the false sacred, in favor of something that his disciples could scarcely begin to imagine, and hence their disappointment with Jesus.49 And this very scandal that Jesus brings is still embroiling modern Westerners over the unwelcome limitations that the fact of suffering entails. Girardian thinker Jeremiah Alberg has devoted sustained attention to this theme. He links scandal to revelation in an illuminating way that suggests to me what overaccepting the scandal of violence, and  the notion of divine violence, might mean for the­ology in a Girardian key. In particular, Alberg addresses the jealousy and rivalry awakened by God’s mercy toward those we regard to be undeserving— who have perhaps received the acceptance in life that we crave but feel deprived of. And this scandalous revelation then forces us to see ourselves and God in a new way. Here again is that special case whereby immersion in rivalry proves to be revelatory  (as discussed in chapter 5, above). In being welcomed by a merciful God we are declared ipso facto to be sinners, which does violence to the dignity that we have rivalrously assembled for ourselves at the expense of those others whom we deem to be unworthy. In Gregory Anderson Love’s version of this insight, “the presence of a world of grace threatens us with the sting of shame: we must admit to God, to others, and above all to ourselves that we were wrong.”50 Hence, for Love, “good news shatters the self as fully as does catastrophe.”51 Ultimately, it is scapegoating logic that is exposed and threatened when we are scandalized in this way. Instead, Hosea’s God who desires mercy and not sacrifice is revealed,52 but therewith also some uncomfortable home truths about

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ourselves. Here again is the insight of James Alison: that humanity only comes to awareness of its former sinful condition through the process of being liberated from it. Alberg studies Jean-­Jacques Rousseau as an exemplar of this scandalized mindset, setting out how only “the religion of the heart that he describes, without the dogma, without the structures of authority . . . would be a Christianity that does not cause scandal.”53 Rousseau must, therefore, expel the gospel from his system if he is to avoid such scandal—to preserve a sense of his own natural goodness with no room for the acknowledgment of sin. Girard, in his foreword to Alberg’s book, points out that Rousseau—the first romantic—was always scandalized and always mired in rivalry. Having to admit that Christ had forgiven him as a sinner would have robbed Rousseau of his self-­defining moral superiority.54 Once more we see sacrificial violence inscribed in the logic of mimetic rivalry, as discussed in my first chapter. Rousseau cannot have his morally pure natural state without doing violence to Christianity—without scapegoating the theological account of human sin and redemption against which he has become locked in scandalized rivalry.55 Alberg is further indebted in his thinking about scandal and reve­ la­tion to that great seer of the American South Flannery O’Connor and her dark Catholic vision.56 In her novel The Violent Bear It Away, and in a written reflection on the subject of a terminally ill “child saint,” O’Connor confronts the popular modern expedient of being so scandalized over the suffering of children that belief in God is rejected as a result. Such high-­mindedness creates an “in group” of scandalized non­exploiters who are terribly concerned about suffering and outraged in their dismissal of an obviously morally culpable God. Yet O’Connor believes that orthodox Christianity’s eschatological hope serves such children better than dubious ministrations from the self-­appointed self-­righteous. Their “tenderness” toward the children’s suffering might willingly see Christ sacrificed by Herod, though not the rest of the Holy Innocents. For O’Connor, however, God allows the innocents to perish while Jesus survives, so that through him the redemption of all the lost can enter history.57

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Here we have an example of overaccepting all such suffering, beyond the scandalized consciousness to which O’Connor refers— that is, beyond both accepting and blocking the fact of suffering, which in both cases ensures that suffering can still be relied upon to justify scandalized indignation against God. For Alberg, this heralds the arrival of a new, non­rivalrous desire and, with it, a new clarity of perception: The contrast between the kind of desire that either gets caught up in the fascinating spectacle or refuses to see it and the kind of desire that enables one to look and get beneath the surface suggests both a difference and a similarity between the two. Both are desires. At the bottom of the former is some rivalry. The look or the refusal to look is based on an attempt at mastery of the situation or of oneself, with the view of outdoing or surpassing the other. The latter desire is, at root, one of submission—not necessarily to the person of Christ, but to truth or to the demands of one’s art, or simply to reality. Such submission, as Flannery O’Connor saw and expressed, makes it possible for even violence to return us to reality, that is, to the non-­violent truth of love.58

This brings us to the heart of how violence, and the mythological theme of divine violence, can be wrestled with and forced to yield up a blessing in the hands of mimetic theory.59 It recalls Girard’s aforementioned invocation of Blaise Pascal’s “order of charity,” whereby the uncomfortable stripping away of illusions can be perceived as a blessing. It provokes a crisis of meaning, recalling for us how Girard linked his conversion to what reflection on the reality of his mimetic condition had revealed—akin to the novelistic conversions explored in his first book, which registered the “form” of Christ (if not any more explicit Christian revelation). Alberg points out that, for both O’Connor and Girard, “the Gospel revelation contains the power to deconstruct culture.”60 The title of O’Connor’s novel, The Violent Bear It Away, refers to Matthew 11:12, about the kingdom of God being taken by force. This is regularly

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understood to mean that God’s kingdom undergoes violence at sinful human hands, but O’Connor reads the passage differently—most likely following her own study Bible, the 1899 Challoner edition of the Douay-­Rheims Bible. It interprets the passage in terms of Catholic asceticism seizing the kingdom by overcoming sin and self-­will.61 This reading is present in more recent Catholic commentary, too. For New Testament scholar John P. Meier, it means that “the Kingdom of God is entering the world with explosive power, and those who earnestly desire to enter it pay any price to be disciples.”62 O’Connor’s fiction features wild figures of faith whose zeal for God’s kingdom and for souls represents a real kind of violence, though not the deeply compromised human form of violence based on rivalry and sacrificial pragmatism. It is a force of love, and it is a scourge to any surviving strains of the false sacred in Christianity. Girard’s account of biblical apocalyptic should be read accordingly. Beyond its accepting by literally minded Christians, who antici­ pate apocalypse as a welcome divine punishment, and its blocking by rationalistically minded liberal Christians in their mirror doubling with fundamentalists, Girard views the apocalypse as having been delivered into modern human hands by revelation. Further, from God’s side of the equation, these apocalyptic texts become a testimony to “the Lamb’s mode of overcoming evil and opposition to God.” The Lion of Judah and the rider on the white horse of the book of Revelation have their martial symbolism redirected in testimony to God’s nonviolent force of love.63 According to my colleague, the New Testament scholar David J. Neville, regarding the seer’s testimony in this last book of the Bible, John did not simply take over the motif of the divine warrior but in doing so, subtly—perhaps all too subtly!—reworked the motif so as to convey that in view of the historic mission of Jesus Messiah, God’s victory over antagonistic forces was no longer effected by inflicting violence but by suffering it.64

In the same vein, God’s judgment can be turned from bad news into good news by overaccepting. Girard regards revelation as a salvific,

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liberating process but, in that sense, also a judging one. The light reveals the darkness, as in the Fourth Gospel, and in showing up the works of darkness it judges them. As David Neville observes, “Light illuminates, but by virtue of what it illuminates, it also divides.”65 The test is what James Alison calls the intelligence of the victim, which revelation brings. He regards such judgment as manifesting itself in the victim’s claim upon us, which lends a decidedly Levinasian cast, so that, for Alison, “the judge is judge as victim.”66 This very Girardian insight also has a Barthian flavor—Barth scholar Hans Vium Mikkelsen points out that “by judging, the human being has taken the place of God. God takes this place back, which belonged to him from eternity, by judging human judgment in Jesus Christ.”67 This does not constitute the blocking of judgment or, alternatively, the accepting of sin that we saw with Rousseau. As Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki insists, “Forgiveness construed as acceptance can continue to wreak ill-­being on victim and violator.”68 She gets the balance right, however, understanding the grace of forgiveness to correspond with a tough, clear-­eyed, yet transforming love. By way of definition, then, Suchocki offers the following: “forgiveness is willing the well-­being of victim(s) and violator(s) in the context of the fullest possible knowledge of the nature of the violation. As such,” she concludes, “forgiveness holds the possibility of breaking the chain of violence.”69 This is not “cheap grace,” then, but “costly grace” that transforms us as we come to face the truth about ourselves and as we must deal with the consequences of our actions.70 But neither are we talking about the accepting of judgment, if God’s judgment means our damnation. Rather, in Józef Niewiadomski’s lovely phrase, “God judges us by raising us from the dead.”71 This is the resurrection that, for Alison, reveals our sinful condition only from the perspective of its forgiveness.72 God, in judging sin through the process of liberating humanity from it, is overaccepting the standard harsh and violent account of judgment. If judgment retains a dark side, then, it will not be something inflicted by God. Rather, it will be the way human beings experience their own freely chosen alienation from God’s coming reign.73 This is Raymund Schwager’s solution in his imaginative life of Jesus,

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where he interprets divine wrath as entirely a matter of perspective. A wrathful God is how God appears according to an imagination distorted by sin, guilt, and shame.74 Here Schwager (referring to Matt. 25:14–­30) follows Girard (who also refers to Luke 19:11–27) regarding the parable of the talents. The third servant perceives the master differently from the first two servants, whose investment success is cele­ brated. This “unworthy” servant believes his master to be harsh and so he reacts fearfully to the expectations of his master—his mimetic obstacle. The dreadful mimetic fascination evident in this perspective is then predictably confirmed as his self-­chosen destiny plays out.75 Divine forgiveness, then, is not so much our being pardoned by an affronted God, as the fruit of a whole revelatory pattern whereby our image of God is transformed. As Herbert McCabe puts it, in terms that have clearly resonated with James Alison, “What we call the forgiveness of sin is nothing other than our being given the gift of shifting from the punitive image of God to a true vision of God who is totally in love with us.”76 Schwager identifies this transformation playing itself out in the choice given to sinners: to accept the truth of God’s boundless grace and love, along with the judgment that this entails, so that every delusion is unmasked, or to continue along the path of self-­delusion—that is, to “either allow their own wicked inclinations to be conquered, or succumb to a merciless (mutual) self-­punishment.”77 So, our sense of being scandalized by exposure to the truth of our condition contributes to our experience of God’s wrath—a wrath that is in fact nothing other than the outworking of God’s love and grace. In this way, a version of ourselves is in the process of being destroyed so that we can live again, finding our way into God’s light. For Schwager, God is always in himself the kind father who meets sinners with anticipatory love; only if the sinners, despite the experience of grace, cling to their own criteria of judgment do they imprison themselves in them. The judgment sayings are not a sign that God has a double face, but they bring out with great seriousness that people possess no power to save themselves and God carries out against them no “violence to compel love.”78

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Consequently, Schwager argues that the threat of hell can be re-­ framed in more positive terms if we attend more closely to the way God’s non­rivalrous love manifests itself in honoring human freedom: The doctrine of hell is on the contrary the logical development of the preaching on non-­violence. God’s renunciation of physical violence in the fate of Jesus is a concrete expression of God’s recognition of human beings as partners who in their freedom may not be forced by anything and therefore may not be coerced or overpowered.79

Rather than blocking or accepting hell, then, here is a Girard-­ friendly example of overaccepting. The reality of deluded méconnaissance that accompanies the distortions of sin is taken seriously, along with human freedom to reject God. Hell thus becomes a way of talking about the human journey into God’s forgiveness, viewed from the perspective of what is being left behind. Hell represents a personal identity and a social context to which we might still cling stubbornly, doing violence to God’s offer of salvation—the tragic possibility of self-­exile that God allows us as a final gift of non­ coercive love. Herbert McCabe is convinced, however, that this whole hellish reality of alienation from grace is something that God is steadfastly refusing on our behalf. “The crucifixion . . . ,” he writes, “is the whole human race showing its rejection of itself. The resurrection is the Father’s refusal to accept this self-­rejection of man.”80 But this version of the resurrection is not a matter of blocking. Rather, the resurrection can be understood as God’s overaccepting of judgment and hell. Likewise, heaven represents God’s eschatological overaccepting of humanity’s regularly hellish history, in which the false sacred’s distorting illusions about God and humanity are shed at last. In this way, humanity is judged and purified, but only by being loved and liberated. This perspective displays more realism about the world than is attainable by blocking the doctrines of hell and judgment, while also being more realistic about God’s revealed nature than is possible by accepting hell and judgment as they are widely conceived.

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How to understand stubborn scriptural and doctrinal references to divine violence in apparent contravention of God’s mercy ought now to be clearer. The mythological theme of divine violence can be transfigured through overaccepting. So violence, yes, but only tangentially resembling the human violence that is rooted in mimetic envy and rivalry. Yes, it refines and clarifies, but it only destroys things that are ultimately rooted in destructiveness.81 God’s violence can thus be understood as the force of love—as a nonviolent violence. Milbank makes a similar point, though he refers to “counter-­ violent violence.”82 Milbank’s phrase brings out the assertive, in-­your-­ face aspect of this divine nonviolence. It is entailed by the resurrection of Jesus Christ and present in the Christian community, where Milbank looks for pacific patterns of gift exchange that reflect divine nonviolence. For New Testament scholar Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld, this divine nonviolence takes us to the heart of early Gospel praxis, where martial imagery was deployed to describe how members of the pacific community were “caught up in the costly confrontative, anti-­ imperial stealth invasion of the empire through their exercise of deliberate, defiant, and hopeful vulnerability.”83 Thus, with supreme irony, the church mediates “the ‘terror’ of God against evil through love and faithfulness.”84 Many would disagree, of course. I mention in particular Miroslav Volf and his influential apologia for Christian pacifism, which I consider to be an only slightly subtle version of accepting violence, judgment, and hell. Volf regards the peaceful and forgiving church practices in which he grew up as necessarily underwritten by a wrathful God who can be relied upon to pay back human violence. This is the “vengeance is mine” divinity of Deuteronomy 32:35, claiming a monopoly on payback, and the God whose wrath we must leave room for, according to Romans 12:19. Hence, Volf believes that “the ‘theologization’ of violence is a pre-­condition for the politics of non-­ violence.”85 In light of this I once referred to Volf in a book review as “the Mel Gibson of Christian pacifism.”86 He expresses doubts about the likely success of his solution, however, acknowledging that non­retaliation and nonviolence may prove inadequate in the face of

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history’s tyrants and madmen87 (Girard would agree with him on this one point, with his acknowledgment of the katéchon). The problem with Volf ’s proposal, as I see it, is that his violent divinity is the false sacred baptized. Girard’s version of overaccepting leads in a different direction, however, in accord with an unfolding Theo-­dramatic logic. He acknowledges real participation in God’s nonviolence as a possibility for humanity, despite recognizing the same painful historical contingencies that Volf acknowledges. God, for Girard, is revealed progressively to be nonviolent—a God who invites humanity through Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection to an actual share in that nonviolence. Expecting eschatological payback for our enemies while we keep our own hands clean is an inadequate solution to the problem of human evil. Instead, we hope for the remaking of humanity in the likeness of its nonviolent God. Conservative Christians who criticize Girard for abandoning scripture’s apparent insistence on divine vengeance express a legiti­ mate concern. As Neufeld says about the challenge of squaring a nonviolent God with scripture, “such a reading requires of readers a nimble facility to read against the grain of inherited interpretation and against the surface meaning of the text.”88 For example, as scholars like David Neville point out, violent end-­times texts in the New Testament are typically “enclosed within—and hence relativized by— non-­retributive, indeed surprisingly benign expressions of eschatological judgment.”89 The aforementioned conservative Christians can retain the mythologically grounded theme of divine wrath, however, by embracing its overaccepting as a non­rivalrous, non­scandalized metaphor for God’s urgent grace that liberates and heals. Likewise, their favored biblical references to divine judgment, in violent New Testament texts that promise sinners their comeuppance, can also be retained by overaccepting such texts as a revelation of what God takes to be most serious in human history, though all such violent outcomes are entirely in human hands. Girard says something similar, and in a way that supports a Theo-­ dramatic understanding of his work. In response to the question of an audience member following a public dialogue with the Italian

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philosopher Gianni Vattimo, Girard acknowledges the power of heaven and hell imagery, which “supplies motivation for our lives, transform[ing] them into dramatic representation.”90 This imagery is a force multiplier in religion, as in the greatest literature (e.g., Dante). Yet Girard is explicit that Jesus is the opposite of a judge who punishes.91 If what I am proposing sounds insufficiently triumphalist, Girard would remind us that the false sacred is what best caters to our needs for complete closure and protection against uncertainty. So, instead of such a theologia gloriae, he offers a theologia crucis, insisting that “the cross is a skandalon because men will not understand an impotent God who suffers his persecutors humbly. Therefore, they stumble against this idea.”92 Those who seek to take the Bible seriously, then, would do well to recall Paul’s counterintuitive testimony to strength made perfect in weakness (2 Cor. 12:8–10).

* * *

Through all these learned habits of overaccepting, the Theo-­drama allows us to reclaim our present, and our past, beyond the two­fold paralysis of accepting or blocking the tragedy and suffering of life. Likewise, by overaccepting harsh traditional language about divine wrath and disapproval, which has attached itself to the Christian message over time, we can retain all that powerful imagery for the divine project of human liberation while detoxifying the conception of God that it implies. Thus, we preserve every bit of divine seriousness about humanity’s need for transformation by keeping the old language of wrath, apocalypse, judgment, and hell while re­ appropriating and repurposing those concepts in light of revelation. Having acknowledged the mixture of violent and nonviolent texts in the New Testament while putting his faith and hope in the nonviolent ones, David Neville mentions another kind of violence. Akin to the way in which ideological distortions of plain facts do violence to reality is “the coercion of nonretributive meaning from texts that anticipate divinely ordered retributive violence.”93 Such coercion and falsification of texts would constitute what I call blocking, whereas taking them seriously yet reframing them in the larger context of

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God’s revealed redemptive purposes—as Neville himself chooses to do—bypasses the blocking that he fears in favor of overaccepting. Such texts are echoes of the false sacred, yes, but they are now renovated and redeployed in scripture’s testimony to the real sacred, providing powerful language and imagery for expressing the force of love. So, by refusing the respectively liberal and conservative theological options of blocking and accepting, we take both the tragedy of the world and its Theo-­dramatic promise with appropriate seriousness. By overaccepting, we show that we have outgrown the mythology of a violent and wrathful God, which was once beneficial but has now become a burden, while drawing power from this old imagery of the sacred for a new and better end. In the following and final chapter, I will apply these insights to a cluster of questions concerning Jesus’s person and work.

CH A P TER 8

Christ, the Nonviolence of God

We have seen how René Girard came to a more positive assessment of sacrifice, whereby the collective immolation of victims was overtaken by Jesus’s self-­consecration. We also noted Girard’s theological account of human emergence and history as a process of unfolding possibilities in which violence, functioning both as poison and antidote, is permitted though not divinely intended. Sacred violence, for Girard, represents a stage on the way to a world that can no longer be structured by such violence—a secular, modern world that will either come to grief thanks to unrestrained violence or find a way beyond violence after the pattern of Jesus’s non­rivalrous desire. Either way, ours can no longer be a world in which the homeopathic violence of scapegoating retains its primordial efficacy. Girard leaves us with a Theo-­drama marked by continuities as well as discontinuities. In this chapter I will be applying the category of overaccepting, as set out in the previous chapter, to aid our Girardian theological exploration of this tension. The focus will be on Jesus’s sacrifice and the high-­but-­functional Christology that Girard infers from the nature and impact of that sacrifice. I regard Girard’s account of Jesus and his sacrifice as overaccepting the history of religions, overaccepting Judaism, and overaccepting the violent imagery of Christian atonement traditions. We will also note, inter alia, that Girard’s Christological 202 

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conclusions can be described as overaccepting mimetic theory itself. My goal here is a deeper Girardian understanding of how the non­ violent God mediates reconciliation to violent humanity.

Jesus’s Sacrifice: Overaccepting the History of Religions The Passion unveiled the sacrificial origin of humanity once and for all. It dismantled the sacred and revealed its violence. However, Christ also confirmed the divine that is within all religions. —René Girard, Battling to the End

First, we recall continuities that Girard discerns in the history of sacrifice. In Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World he declares Jesus’s passion to be tied in with every sacrificial ritual of the old sacred 1 and Jesus’s solidarity with every innocent victim—Girard refuses to fetishize Jesus’s passion in isolation from a whole history of innocent suffering.2 Likewise, the various pagan resurrections serve as a template for Jesus’s resurrection, so that all the myths of the false sacred are seen to contain “something Christian.”3 Having initially rejected sacrifice as incompatible with the new dispensation of Judeo-­ Christian revelation, as we have seen, Girard came to regard sacrifice as a category that maintains a symbolic role at the heart of human religious history while undergoing a profound transformation. As Michael Kirwan explains, “Girard now argues .  .  . that the Christian revelation has transformed and incorporated the pagan sacred, not simply replaced or superseded it.”4 Indeed, Girard suggests that “changes in the meaning of the word ‘sacrifice’ contain a whole history, religious history, of mankind.”5 In light of this, as we have noted, Girard says that he would like to have written a comprehensive history of religions as a history of sacrifice.6 There is a strong affinity here with Irenaeus’s vision of Jesus recapitulating the entire experience of humanity in his own person: Jesus “must live through all the ages of man in order to heal all.”7

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Thus the history of sacrifice is ultimately a salvation history for Girard. He describes the archaic sacred as a prior moment in the progressive revelation leading to Christ.8 He even calls paganism a first path toward God and the history of religions a “holy history.”9 So, for Girard, “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.”10 Yet, nevertheless, for Girard “the God of the Bible is at first the God of the sacred and then more and more the God of the holy, foreign to all violence, the God of the Gospels.”11 I mention one further notable concession from Girard to the continued utility of archaic religious survivals. We know that he regards prohibitions as one plank of primitive religion, taken up into the stabilizing institutions of more complex societies. Yet, while prohibition and constraint are now widely disdained in the wake of Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, Girard continues to affirm the necessity of such restraints for the avoidance of rivalrous mimetic escalation. It is notable, therefore, that in a letter to Raymund Schwager, Girard goes so far as to declare that “Christ is the truth of the laws of all societies.”12 This is not to say that God endorses the violent workings of the archaic sacred, though these are allowed—as an imperfect means, and with a better end in view. Girard has come to see God as advancing humanity toward love via the “violent phase” of archaic religion.13 Elsewhere he expresses this insight in terms of God allowing Satan to reign for a season, knowing that at the right time Christ will overcome Satan on the cross.14 All this Girard regards as a pedagogical strategy on God’s part, providing the only possible way forward if human freedom is to be respected.15 We could say, therefore, that God’s plan according to Girard involves violence contingently though not necessarily. Yet, for all that, Girard refuses to dismiss the contribution of the false sacred, even as he declares its obsolescence: “there is both a break and a continuity between the archaic, sacrificial religions and the biblical revelation, which dispels but does not authorize us to condemn sacrifice, as if we were by nature strangers to violence.”16 This tension is echoed in a number of contemporary writings on the atonement that also take a nuanced view of sacrifice. For J. Denny

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Weaver, Jesus’s death proved inevitable, but it was not a death that was either sought or willed by God.17 Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld expresses this insight neatly: the death of Jesus is what it took, not what it takes.18 Or, as Gregory Anderson Love concludes, “The journey to Golgotha reflects God’s circumstantial will for Jesus in a world that resists God’s saving presence, and not God’s intentional will in the sending of the Son.”19 So while Girard emphasizes sacrificial con­ ti­nuity between the archaic sacred and Judeo-­Christian revelation, he also insists on their discontinuity. He identifies a religion of God that is irreducible to a religion of “man,”20 with an incarnation that is meant to displace all religion reliant on the old sacrificial mecha­ nism.21 And he insists that the true God is only revealed as he is for the first time in human history through this breakthrough that Jesus achieves,22 without which the scapegoat mechanism would not have come fully to light.23 Hence Girard’s reference to “two radically opposed yet formally similar modes of divinity.”24 Girard is at his most theological in this insistence that only a special grace from God could have bridged this chasm.25 He declares in his interview with Rebecca Adams that “the Gospels are borne aloft by an intelligence that does not come from the disciples and that is clearly beyond everything that you, me, and all of us can conceive without them, a reason that is so superior to our own that after two thousand years we are discovering new aspects of it.”26 The nature of this special grace, according to Girard, is the nonviolent God’s willingness to become a victim in order to put an end to humanity’s reliance on redemptive violence.27 God’s provisional alignment with the violent human justice machine was not carried out at divine arm’s length. Indeed, and crucially for Girard, the divinity of Jesus lies in his unique capacity to rise above violence since “a non-­ violent deity can only signal his existence to mankind by having himself driven out by violence—by demonstrating that he is not able to establish himself in the Kingdom of Violence.”28 For Girard, Jesus’s final stand represents a renunciation of violence so complete that in raging against Jesus, violence totally exposes itself.29 As James Alison explains, such exposure could not have even been conceived let alone achieved prior to this breakthrough: “Before Jesus stepped into

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the place of shame . . . showing that the space which it designated as cursed is livable, there was no ‘outside’ the system.”30 This insight lies at the heart of Alison’s insistence that we can only recognize our unredeemed mimetic condition through “Easter eyes”—that in our redemption is also our realization of what has enslaved us. It is now possible to understand Girard’s dialectic of conti­nuity and discontinuity regarding sacrifice in the history of religions. For S. Mark Heim, it means that Jesus is sacrificed in accord with a mythical perspective—in solidarity with all the victims of scapegoating— while in fact Jesus’s death puts an end to the social stability that is founded on scapegoating and sustained by myth.31 Heim goes on to explicate, from a Girardian perspective, how God used the “bad thing,” which was the scapegoating violence wrongly thought to be a good thing, in order to achieve a genuinely good thing. “It is the same event,” Heim writes, “but what’s happening in that event for the people who kill or accept the killing is not what’s happening in that event for Jesus and God.”32 What Heim sees here is the turning of myth into history,33 the divine annexation of an entirely human space of sacrificial atonement.34 Thus the archaic rituals of sacrifice, deployed against Jesus, lead to a decidedly non­archaic outcome. It is as if the old sacrificial mechanism has worked, yielding the peace that issues from Jesus’s death, though not by working on its own terms. So this act of crucifixion is at once a humanly evil and a divinely redeeming act.35 And here is where overaccepting comes in. Girard’s insistence that the primitive sacred not be dismissed, nor its sacrificial violence declared to be entirely antipathetic to God’s progressive revelation, admits no blocking of the false sacred. God will make something of it, though not on its own terms, even while it is being expunged from the Earth. Nevertheless, despite his use of the New Testament katéchon, which represents a limited tolerance of violence on God’s part, there is no accepting of the false sacred by Girard. Here once again is the tension to which I have been referring. Girard admits God’s highly conditional investment in a predominantly human mode of religion, even though he regards this human dimension as being eventually taken up, hollowed out, and annexed by a genuinely godly version. Here we see what Robert Hamerton-­Kelly

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describes as “a dialectical overcoming of sacrifice, which supersedes it while leaving it intact.”36 And this suggests to me the dynamic of overaccepting. From the scapegoating roots of evolved human sociality, a pattern of sacrifice emerges to fulfill yet overreach these origins—to admit their utility while deconstructing and reimagining their inherent logic. Such overaccepting illuminates Girard’s acknowledgment that the new religion occupies the carapace of the old, with its prohibitions, myths, and rituals.37 Sacrifice is offered by humanity, but can be recognized at the same time as God’s own self-­sacrificial yet anti­sacrificial act on Jesus’s part, annexing the human mechanism and repurposing it toward an uncompromisingly divine end. Here, too, we discern the double agency principle, with God and humanity at work in the same set of actions. Yet what humanity meant by sacrificing Jesus is not what God meant as Jesus underwent this process: a revelation and a salvation that could not have been imagined by its perpetrators.

A High-­but-­Functional Christology: Overaccepting Mimetic Theory Jesus removes these obstacles and, as a result, he is one with the Father, he is God himself, which is a cause of scandal for many people. —René Girard (with Richard J. Golsan), “Interview”

If God is overaccepting the history of religions through Jesus’s willingness to step into humanity’s sacrificial machine, then Girard’s high dogmatic claims for Christ can be understood as overaccepting mimetic theory itself. Mimetic theory reveals founding violence, in a process involving the Judeo-­Christian scriptures. Girard insists that this is a matter not of anything supernatural impinging on the course of human discovery but, rather, of a process within the unfolding of human history that can nevertheless be interpreted in terms of divine revelation and grace. It is important for Girard that what the Gospels disclose about sacrificial religion is in the public domain, as

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it were, and not a matter of privileged revelation.38 So, for Girard, “in order to understand, from a mimetic viewpoint, the central element in the Bible, and in the Gospel, one doesn’t need to think in terms of transcendence. What is happening here is related to strictly empirical observation. That is why I can claim that the superiority of the Bible and the Gospels can be demonstrated scientifically.”39 Having established that the Gospels play a unique role in mimetic theory for exposing, deconstructing, evacuating, and recolonizing the false sacred, Girard once again practices overaccepting. Rather than blocking the contribution of social science to theology in the manner of Milbank, say, or simply accepting that religion is a naturalistic dimension of human sociality in the tradition of Durkheim, Girard derives his high-­but-­functional Christology from avowedly scientific conclusions, in the manner of overaccepting. Every element of Girard’s eventual dogmatic theological position is expressed in terms of mimetic theory—most notably Jesus’s resurrection, which represents the spectacular entrance into history of a power greater than violence and the mob mind.40 Retracing the arc of Christological proclamation from the resurrection back to Jesus’s origins, Girard affirms the virgin birth as exonerating Jesus of complicity in the mythical world of divine births and the sacred violence from which they issue. He refers to the Johannine prologue ( John 1:1–18), which names the world’s structuring by violence and then points beyond it.41 Following this logic earlier still, Girard even declares that Jesus is the Son of God from all eternity, as proclaimed by the New Testament and the Fathers, since Jesus could not have emerged from a world of violence knowing the true nature of that world as he did.42 As Frederiek Depoortere summarizes Girard’s logic on the question of Jesus’s divinity, “such a person cannot be generated by a world completely dominated by violence. Consequently, the only logical conclusion is that Jesus was not an ordinary human being, but God incarnate.”43 From the midst of that world structured by violence—a violence that God in Christ set about undergoing and redeeming rather than accepting or blocking—emerges incarnational belief as a defining act of overaccepting. For Girard, then, the divinity of Christ “is the only hypothesis that enables us to account for the revelation in the Gospel of what

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violence does to us and the accompanying power of that revelation to deconstruct the whole range of cultural texts, without exception.”44 Note that this high-­but-­functional Christology is described here as a hypothesis, based on the illuminative force and interpretative fruitfulness that Jesus brings. And such interpenetration of theological and social-­scientific language is quite fitting, according to Girard. He believes that “this is . . . the only time that this notion of a fullness of humanity that is also a fullness of divinity makes sense in a context that is as ‘humanist’ as it is ‘religious.’ ”45 Here is the human-­divine logic of double agency, of incarnation, of kenosis, and of Theo-­drama, with God submitting to the constraints of a historical process that provides the only humanly appropriate setting for revelation. Thus the divine and the human are revealed together, the false sacred yields to the holy God, and humanity finds salvation while God finds vindication. As a result, we might even say that Christology is the over­ accepting of anthropology.

“For the Father Is Greater than I”: Overaccepting Christian Uniqueness All demystification comes from Christianity. Even better: the only true religion is the one that demystifies archaic religion. —René Girard, Battling to the End

Girard declares the uniqueness of Christianity because he does not find a comparable level of insight into the foundational role of vi­ olence outside the Judeo-­Christian scriptures and their legacy, and since the limited presence of that insight in Greek tragedy and the world religions has been insufficient to transform any culture in its entirety.46 Judaism represents a special case for Girard, however, as we will see in the following section. Regarding Eastern religions, on which he gave a series of Paris lectures at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2003, Girard acknowledges that “the [Hindu] Vedas go a long way in their understanding of sacrifice, but without escaping . . . the source of primordial

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error that characterizes archaic religion: the sacralization of reconciling violence.”47 Nor does he think that Buddhism has overcome the sacrificial imagination, despite some texts suggestive of a breakthrough.48 Girard tells Rebecca Adams that Buddhism lacks Christianity’s drive to expose sacrificial origins, along with Christianity’s resistance to other­worldliness.49 Regarding Islam, Girard’s assessment is that it does not share Christianity’s awareness of the founding murder.50 He notes Islam’s dismissal of the passion narratives as blasphemous, blocking access to the final exposure of sacred violence that they bring.51 He concludes that “like Christianity, Islam re-­enables the innocent victim, but does it in a militant way.”52 Girard adds that while all religions today teach a proper aversion to anger, resentment, envy, and violence, they do so without being fully aware of the scapegoat mechanism, and only to the extent that “the Easter traditions” have come to exert influence within the traditional cultural orbits of these non-­Christian religions.53 For Michael Kirwan, then, the challenge of Girard and of mimetic theory to non-­Christian faiths is simply stated: do these traditions contain texts (especially texts which are embedded in practices of liturgy and worship) which perform the same task, of clarifying the link between religious assertion and exclusionary violence, and which do it to the same degree as the Christian gospel? Girard does not claim that such a process is absent altogether, but that as a matter of empirical fact no religious culture or institution has done a demonstrably better job of deconstructing sacred violence than Christianity, and those cultures which have been substantially exposed to the Christian revelation.54

Yet it remains the case for Girard that while Jesus is the center, he is not the circumference of this revelatory circle. Rebecca Adams seeks to be entirely clear about this, checking with Girard that “divine grace is present, you would say, whether or not it is recognized as such?” In response to which he affirms, “Whether or not it is recognized as such.”55 Here Girard probably has in mind those limited

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inklings of the sacrificial mechanism that he acknowledges in Greek tragedy and world religions. With the passion of Christ, however, Girard sees these glimmers becoming a shareable breakthrough, giving rise to “the possibility of mankind becoming like God through the Son’s mediation.”56 He is adamant that Christians must hold fast to this confession of Jesus’s uniqueness, rather than fall into a spiritually dissolute assimilation of Christianity to the undifferentiated world of mythology in the name of a misplaced tolerance. While Girard is provisionally tolerant of false-­sacred survivals, nowhere is he tolerant of unconvinced, lukewarm Christianity. So Girard maintains a typical modern Catholic tension: affirming Jesus at the heart of revelation and salvation, while acknowledging that God is at work beyond the orbit of explicit Christian confession. Two Catholic Girardian theologians help to explicate his position. For Michael Kirwan, there is no warrant in Girard for Christianity or the church to feel superior, despite mimetic theory’s exclusive claim for Jesus’s centrality, because no organized religion has proved itself adequate to the challenge of nonviolence.57 Girard’s focus is good news for a new way of being human in the world, and it must not be understood as self-­promotion on the church’s part. So while there is a form of supersessionism in Girard, acknowledged by Kirwan, it is “not of one group or faith tradition by another, but the ‘abrogation’ of the false and violent sacred—no matter in which faith tradition it raises its head—to be replaced by a transcendence which is fully merciful.”58 James Alison locates the roots of this more inclusive Christian uniqueness in Jesus’s own proclamation: The phrase “for the Father is greater than I” ( John 14:28), which was to cause so much trouble in the subordinationist controversies, is much better understood as indicative of how undistorted mimetic desire both affirms the uniqueness of Jesus’ Sonship and at the same time ensures that that uniqueness is not exclusive, but constantly . . . brings about an ever wider process of creative filiation.59

Here we are taken beyond the church’s traditional accepting  of Christian uniqueness, which led to claims of salvific exclusivity of the

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extra ecclesiam nulla salus est sort. We also avoid the blocking of claims for Christian uniqueness that characterized liberal Protestant the­ology from the mid-­nineteenth century onward—from D. F. Strauss to John Hick. Rather, for Girard, the traditional claim of Jesus’s uniqueness and Christian distinctiveness is upheld, but it is turned outward rather than inward. Its content is not to be conceived as a matter of particular revelation apart from that revelation fully inhabiting public history as illuminated by mimetic theory. It is a uniqueness deemed to be anthropologically accessible, with its theological elaboration built on publicly verifiable human experience. In Girard’s hands, Christology moves to the center of public theology, which might encourage a rethinking of public theology’s characteristically non­dogmatic agenda.60 Hence we have one more Girardian instance of overaccepting. The Christian proclamation of Jesus’s uniqueness is good news for the world and for the religions because it guarantees the inclusive, forgiving, world-­transforming love of God. This proclamation of Jesus’s divinity as genuinely divine, and not as one more excess of human mythology—as Girard sees Judaism and Islam alleging61—represents a necessary breakthrough for all humanity. Without such convictions, for Girard, we would be left with the false sacred and no definitive remedy, which would be a bad outcome for everyone. Yet these dogmatic convictions are not linked to any form of religious one-­upmanship, which would not serve the larger public cause for which Jesus died. A tension remains, therefore—one that is especially evident in the case of Judaism and the Hebrew scriptures.

“The God of Golgotha and Auschwitz”: Overaccepting Judaism In this way the messianic hope, the Torah, and the commandments have become a widespread heritage of faith—among the inhabitants of the far islands and among many nations, uncircumcised in heart and mind. —Moses Maimonides (1135–­1204), Mishneh Torah

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I now want to address the special relationship between Chris­tianity and Judaism. Girard is clear that with Jesus “there takes place a shift that is both tiny and gigantic—a shift that follows on directly from the Old Testament but constitutes a decisive break as well.”62 He regards the Old Testament as needing the Gospels to complete its revelation of founding religious violence.63 The momentum of this change has become unstoppable, according to Girard, because of the real yet incomplete exposure and undermining of false-­sacred mythology that has already been achieved by the Old Testament law and prophets.64 For Schwager, following Girard, the Old Testament represents “a long and laborious exodus out of the world of violence and sacred projections,”65 yet it awaits the advent of Jesus Christ for its completion. Girard further clarifies this emphasis on transition, and the tension he discerns between continuity and discontinuity, by regarding the Gospels as making universal what was already there in the Old Testament and completing revelation by a concrete demonstration. In line with this further insight, James Alison makes much of Peter accepting the Gentiles for baptism in Acts 10:9–18. Peter sets aside the purity code in a new and deepened appreciation of the Holy, so that “insider status ceases to be over and against anything at all, and Judaism goes universal.”66 Here we are in territory first marked by Paul with his image of wild olive shoots grafted into the native olive tree, which symbolizes Gentile Christians coming to share in the spiritual belonging and the nutrition that accrue to Israel by right (Rom. 11:13–24). Regarding Christianity as the globalizing of Judaism represents a more promising line of Girardian interpretation, and once again it involves overaccepting. Rather than blocking the Old Testament and Judaism in a Marcionite, supersessionist spirit, Girard recognizes ample signs of the false sacred being exposed in the prophets, the stories of Joseph and Job, and the psalms of lament.67 He ends Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World with imagery from Ezekiel 37 and its valley of dry bones, upon which the Spirit of God breathes to bring new life. Clearly, for Girard, the innocent slain are receiving recognition and justice at last, according to the Old Testament.

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Yet he insists that the New Testament is more explicit about this. For example, the dissident minority that comes to see things in a new way is not always named in the Old Testament even when it must be present—Girard is thinking, for instance, of whoever it was whose converted religious imagination gave us the book of Job.68 So, while he is not inclined to any blocking of Judaism for the sake of honoring Jesus Christ, neither is Girard simply accepting Judaism as if Christianity brings no new and significant development. Beyond blocking and accepting, then, I suggest that Girard is overaccepting Judaism, seeing it honored and universalized in what God reveals through Jesus the Jew. In this Girard joins a venerable tradition, from Moses Maimonides to Jürgen Moltmann. In the latter’s theology of hope, a long-standing Christian concession that Judaism represents the praeparatio evangelica is turned on its head, with Christianity viewed instead as a praeparatio messianica.69 This perspective respects the primacy of Israel’s covenant, while declaring a new stage in God’s faithfulness to that covenant, carrying the Jewish expectation of a messiah to the wider world. Christianity thus joins Israel in looking for the final messianic consummation of all things—an expectation learned from the Hebrew scriptures—though, unlike Judaism, it welcomes that blessed day proleptically in the advent of Jesus Christ. This final coming will fulfill the hopes of both Jews and Christians, who “are together peoples of the God of Israel,” as Paul van Buren beautifully puts it.70 This conviction has been expressed within recent Judaism as well as Christianity. For instance, the Jewish theologian and Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide believes in the resurrection of Jesus in continuity with the Pharisees’ belief in eternal life. He is persuaded as to the historical kernel of the resurrection narratives (in line with standard Christian apologetics) by the otherwise unaccountable impact of resurrection faith on Jesus’s earliest disciples. For Lapide, this resurrection represents a gift of hope from the God of Israel, passing from the heart of Israel’s covenant and the Hebrew scriptures to the Gentile world—though it did not convince Lapide that Jesus was the

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Messiah, let alone the consubstantial Son of God, as Christians came to believe in light of his resurrection.71 Girard’s first doctoral student, Sandor Goodhart, initiates a significant dialogue on this question of Jesus’s distinctiveness from his own perspective as a passionately Jewish Girardian. Challenged by Goodhart, Girard contends that the central anti-­idolatry theme of Hebrew scripture benefits from the fuller exposure of the persecuting mechanism that narratives of Jesus’s passion provide.72 Elsewhere, Girard accounts for the superior revelatory force of the passion, in comparison with the Old Testament, by virtue of its practical didacticism in exposing the false sacred. “Not only does it show us the truth that was proper to all the previous myths,” he argues, but “it makes us see both positions at the same time, one alongside the other.”73 Goodhart concedes a distinctive role for the Christian texts in exposing the sacrificial mechanism,74 and even accords to Jesus’s resurrection the distinctive confirmatory role that Girard gives it in the revealing of scapegoat victimage75—though, like Lapide, Goodhart denies the risen Jesus any messianic let alone divine status. Yet even this much distinctiveness does not persuade Goodhart that anything other than the standard midrashic elaboration of Judaism is involved.76 Every stage in Jewish midrash brings a new unfolding, a fresh insight, but it is still Judaism, and Christianity for Goodhart is no exception. So, for instance, Goodhart inquires after the source of Christian reve­lation and finds it in Jesus’s continuity with the Torah: What are we to make of the fact that what [ Jesus] gets from God turns out to be exactly what Judaism is saying? In other words . . . even [if ] we accept that he gets it from God, by divine intervention or divine origin, then what God says to him in effect is that Jews are right. If everything that comes out of his mouth .  .  . is absolutely compatible with . . . the Judaic position, the law of anti-­ idolatry, the midrashic deconstruction of all positions that would posit themselves within the mythic and sacrificial system . . . and if René Girard then comes along . . . and finds within that Christian perspective the foundation for his own theories, are we not led,

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after all is said and done, to an unexpected conclusion: namely, that Girard and Girardianism are Jewish?77

As for Judaism as a whole, vis-­à-­vis Christianity, Goodhart takes the latter to be a reading of the former directed to a Hellenized Jewish audience in the first instance, and then to the wider non-­Jewish world. He insists on the Torah as the sole word of God for Jews, in accord with the one foundational revelation of God to Moses at Sinai, so that only in fidelity to that conviction can Jews engage with another religious body such as Christianity. Hence Goodhart puts to Girard the following question: Just as we have claimed that . . . Torah (though complete and sufficient in itself ) can never completely disclose its meanings without interpretation, can we not say that Christianity undertakes—in its own particular way and for its own particular community—that monumental Toradic task? Is not, in short, the text of the Christian Gospel, a “part 2” to Torah’s “part 1”?78

Girard is not convinced. In response to Goodhart he wants to maximize the solidarity between God and all the victimized scapegoats brought to light by Hebrew scripture. Yet he still insists that Christian theology takes this solidarity further, in this case by fully recapitulating in order to fully overtake the archaic sacred. Girard’s Christian God is thus in ultimate solidarity with victims, “which means all the way to complete identification. God and the scapegoat become one once again in the death of a Jesus who is as fully divine as he is fully human.”79 While Girard affirms the presence of this insight in the “mysterious proximity between the Servant and God in the Servant Songs [of Isaiah 52–53],” he wants to say more than that: “we must try to understand the text [the Servant Songs of Isaiah] as part of an effort which, half a millennium later, will produce such Christian ideas as the incarnation and redemption through the cross.”80 Here it is interesting to observe Girard at full stretch in the direction of dogmatic theology. While intent on conceding as much as possible to Judaism, he is spurred by Goodhart’s challenge to mount

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a stronger defense of Christian distinctiveness. Christianity is nothing without Judaism, as he admits, and Judaism nearly achieves what Jesus the Jew finally achieves. But now Girard insists more strongly on a development from one to the other in terms of Christianity’s depth and not just in terms of its global reach. Goodhart remains adamant, however, arguing that even if the resurrection and the gospel in general represent a unique revelation, Christianity can still be viewed as participating in the ongoing midrashic explication of Torah—beyond this, Christian confession falls prey to the unnecessary excesses of supersessionism and triumphalism.81 We leave this fascinating, friendly, yet unresolved debate between Girard and his former pupil with the following conclusion: that Girard sees the Jewish achievement carried to its highest expression by Jesus of Nazareth, who was honored for this by his Jewish and then Gentile followers in ways that took leave of Judaism, while not rejecting it. Here again we see overaccepting at work, challenging yet preserving by transcending. As the bodily resurrection of Jesus took his embodied history to a new and previously unanticipated place, so the resurrection and the Christian dogmatic edifice erected upon it took the religion of Torah to a new and unanticipated place. It would indeed be inappropriately supersessionist and trium­ phal­ist to extol “part 2” at the expense of “part 1,” though could one not identify the same tendency whenever Judaism reduces “part 2” to the status of an optional or even unwelcome addendum to “part 1”? Girard even suggests that for Israel to insist on too distinctive an identity—at the expense of its unique and essential vocation among the nations, which lies in Israel’s universal solidarity with all the scapegoats of history—is to risk “a mimetic reversal of anti-­Semitism.”82 Mark Anspach reflects on Jewish-­Christian (likewise, Christian-­ Jewish) rivalry using Girard’s category of internal mediation, with each serving as model and obstacle to the other in terms of unique revelation.83 Girard does his best to avoid such rivalry. He admits in response to Goodhart that “some of my earlier statements on the subject were rash and inadequate, I now believe. I am still groping toward a more satisfactory understanding.”84 The two peoples of the God of Israel lose their joint anti-­idolatrous witness if either seeks to idolize

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its own position. That would dishonor the one true God of both Jews and Christians, whom Paul van Buren movingly describes as “The God of Golgotha and Auschwitz.”85

God’s Breakthrough to Humanity: Overaccepting Atonement At the center of the whole picture we do not find a wrathful God bent on killing someone, demanding blood. Instead, we find the image—I use the word advisedly—of the covenant-keeping God who takes the full force of sin onto himself. —Tom Wright, The Day the Revolution Began It is quite natural to say that people died on D-­Day for us, but quite unnatural to say that they gave their lives to the Germans. —Peter Schmiechen, Saving Power The theological appropriation of Girard’s insights, that is, the development of a contemporary and authentically Christian (i.e., essentially non-­violent) concept of God and Atonement remains a work in progress. —Robert J. Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled

Atonement is much discussed and contested today, with certain theological positions on the atonement spectrum finding strong cultural echoes. One in four Americans identifies as an Evangelical Christian, many of whom believe no doubt in a violently disapproving God whose wrath toward sinners was (at least temporarily) redirected at Jesus. I regard such views as inseparable from other instances of false-­ sacred violence that have regularly resurfaced within Chris­tianity, supporting colonial-­era excesses, savage retributive justice, patriarchal social inequalities, and America’s heavily armed civil religion of redemptive violence.86 Interestingly, a similar cultural dynamic is

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at work in Russia. As Antoine Arjakovsky points out, “the current dominant anthropology within the Orthodox Church, of man as an ontological sinner and of a God of vengeance, is unfortunately the source of the political pessimism of the Russian Orthodox Church— a pessimism that is, itself, the origin of a neo-­byzantine conception of the links between Church and State.”87 There could be no better illustration of this than the harrowing 2014 film of Andrey Zvyagintsev, Leviathan. The Girardian scholar and peace activist Duncan Morrow, writing of similar theological complicity in a long history of Northern Irish troubles, explains how in the presence of actual threat and latent chaos, the experience of the community was narrated in churches against a social backdrop that consistently reproduced the division of the world into friend and foe. As it faced an apparently mortal threat, the attraction of a promise of salvation to God’s chosen and persecuted, and damnation to the persecutors, had an obvious resonance.88

If mimetic theory can help to reveal such theological roots of today’s structural violence, it can also suggest a remedy. Girard believes in the need for humanity to be delivered from the false sacred by God, but not in terms of Jesus’s necessary torture and death: Medieval and modern theories of redemption all look in the direction of God for the causes of Crucifixion: God’s honor, God’s justice, even God’s anger, must be satisfied. These theories don’t succeed because they don’t seriously look in the direction where the answer must lie: sinful humanity, human relations, mimetic contagion, which is the same thing as Satan. They speak much of original sin, but they fail to make the idea concrete. That is why they give an impression of being arbitrary and unjust to human beings, even if they are theologically sound.89

Perhaps Girard acknowledges that these various atonement theories are “theologically sound” because none of them have been singled out

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for the Catholic Church’s official endorsement90 so that, therefore, all of them are deemed to be acceptable (or at least because, taken together, they are thought to be mutually correcting). There can be no doubt, however, that Girard has his preferences among the atonement theories, even if the Church does not. In this section I want to look at these “theologically sound” but nevertheless problematic approaches to which Girard refers, in light of the wider contemporary discussion. I will introduce the three main atonement models of the pre-­Reformation era, considering if and how they might be re­appropriated in accord with mimetic theory. This is a contested area among Girardian theologians, with Schwager in Jesus and the Drama of Salvation and Anthony Bartlett in Cross Purposes representing opposed positions on the compatibility of atonement traditions with mimetic theory. My aim, however, is to show that Girard’s account of human reconciliation, issuing from God’s self-­sacrificial act in Jesus Christ, can be understood as a Christianly orthodox overaccepting of the atonement idea. Girard’s critic Hans Boersma provides a neat summary of Girard’s position, which I will further develop. “He has combined in an intriguing fashion,” Boersma concedes, “his own particular versions of the moral-­influence and Christus Victor theories. While his understanding of the actual functioning of the cross is that of revelation and imitation (moral influence), the revelatory power of the cross serves, and turns out to be, Christ’s victory over Satan.”91 Here are two of three options from the influential typology with which Gustaf Aulén inaugurated a mid-­twentieth-­century return of atonement theology, and which do indeed have Girardian resonances. So does the third, and best known, the Anselmian one, though to a more limited extent. Aulén began with Irenaeus, the Fathers of East and West, and then revisited the New Testament, setting out the so-­called classic theory that was later revived by Martin Luther. God in Christ overcomes Satan, who is outwitted and bought off in order to set an enslaved humanity free. This is also known as the Christus Victor model and is the one that most comprehensively suits Girard’s purposes. In the medieval church two alternatives emerged. With Anselm of Canterbury, what Aulén calls the Latin theory shifted attention to Christ

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providing human satisfaction to God and the resulting divine largesse to humanity. Anselm thus abandoned the older, “classic” emphasis on despoiling and disempowering Satan (it is his Latin theory that developed later into the less nuanced and more unsettling Calvinist version of substitutionary atonement, as I will indicate, to which the aforementioned concerns about scandalous divine violence largely attach). A third tradition arose with Peter Abelard and medieval passion mysticism, which Aulén called the subjective view, known also as the moral influence theory. It emphasized the impact of Christ’s love as demonstrated by the extent of his suffering on the cross, moving the hearts of believers to repentance and conversion. It was a psychologically explicable, non­speculative approach that suited the Enlightenment and Pietism.92 Bartlett’s concern is that all these approaches risk making peace with sacrificial violence, compromising the Christian message: If we accept that there is an issue of unmasking violence; if we accept that there is a mystique of violence lurking in sacrifice, then we can leave sacrifice behind and see a transformative encounter with violence as the final nature of the cross. If, on the other hand, we retain sacrifice as an impenetrable surd of human behavior, then the cross will always be refashioned in its terms.93

I argue that Girard dares to take the risk that leaves Bartlett so uneasy, overaccepting the false sacred and sacrifice for the sake of Jesus’s world-­transforming mission. My preference, in keeping with Schwager and others, is to persevere with the atonement tradition and Girard’s (quite selective) use of it as a vehicle for conveying the breakthrough that Jesus’s cross accomplishes. I am heartened that a feminist theologian alert to Christianity’s regular descent into something more violent, less Christian, can also see value in retaining these atonement traditions. In her sharp but balanced assessment, Darby Kathleen Ray allows that atonement should not be maintained as part of the theological repertoire if it does more harm than good. Interpretations of the

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salvific efficacy of the suffering and death of Jesus that yield a praxis of domination instead of freedom are illegitimate—the rotten fruit they produce discredits their theory. At the same time, however, we must recognize that the effects of any given idea are multiple, they vary over time, and they are often impossible to predict or control; thus, the issue of what constitutes an effective praxis, and therefore an acceptable theory, is rarely self-­evident and is necessarily open to discussion, debate, and revision. Feminists and others who criticize atonement orthodoxy because of its violent history of effects should not back down from our claims, but we ought to take care that in the heat of the argument we do not invalidate our position by embracing the very tactics of stereotype, reductionism, and scapegoating for which we denounce that orthodoxy, lest we, too, produce rotten fruit.94

One particular “rotten fruit” that Girard has increasingly sought to avoid is the kind of mimetic rivalry against Christian tradition to which Ray refers. Hence my interest in overaccepting as a preferred expedient for advancing beyond the theological mimetic doubles represented by conservative accepting and liberal blocking. I turn now to Girard and those three pre-­Reformation atonement traditions, which I will address in reverse order: first, the Abelardian subjective, or moral influence, model; then the earlier, Anselmian Latin, or satisfaction, tradition, against which Abelard reacted; and, finally, the more primitive classic, or Christus Victor, tradition, to which Anselm objected. It is this earliest tradition that proves most promising for re­appropriation in Girardian terms, though the other two also exhibit Girardian resonances. First, and briefly, the moral influence theory can be seen to complement Girard in three ways. Its efficacy lies in the transformation of lives rather than in a cosmic transaction remote from the practice of discipleship. It eschews the necessity of Jesus’s death for satisfying divine honor and for restoring the lost order of creation. Such notions are present in the so-­called Latin, or satisfaction, theory, but they too readily evoke the false sacred. The moral influence theory centers on the revelatory aspect of Jesus’s cross, recalling Girard’s emphasis

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on revelation, though it falls short of exposing the false sacred. The vi­olent torture of Jesus remains central to his supposed moral influence. Still, Abelard’s model has been identified with Girard and certainly highlights part of the picture. Second, we consider the Latin, or satisfaction, theory that emerges in Anselm’s late eleventh-­century Cur Deus Homo, “why the God-­ Man,” which Jaroslav Pelikan describes as the most important treatise of the period from Augustine to the Reformation.95 The argument is well known. The fall distorted the created order and God must restore it, with the human race required but unable to play its part, whereupon Jesus’s sacrifice redresses the offense on behalf of all humanity, with the infinite largesse accrued by his sacrifice as the God-­man made available subsequently for the expiation of individual sins. It is widely held that Anselm’s account of atonement simply reflects a crudely feudal mindset, calling for violent retribution if God’s affronted honor is to be satisfied. However, as Lisa Sowle Cahill explains, “God’s ‘honor’ refers not to individual personal dignity, but, as in feudal society [rightly understood], to an integrated system of relationships, revolving around an authoritative benefactor.”96 So what Anselm actually relies on is a “thoroughgoing immanent tele­ology of created natures, in which all creatures have proper functions to perform.”97 His connection to feudal social arrangements is less about retribution and more about honoring the mutual obligations that hold society together. For Colin Gunton, then, “the point is that God does not demand satisfaction for sin because he is in any way personally affronted or offended by transgression. What is at stake is ‘the order and beauty of the universe,’ for which God is responsible.”98 Contrary to another common misunderstanding, Jesus’s death according to Anselm should be understood as fulfilling God’s expectations of humanity as a whole, rather than paying for the sins of individuals—that “personal debt” is only addressed subsequently, when Christ makes the infinite merits of his self-­offering more widely available to believers.99 Hence a later and more savage version of satisfaction should not be read back into Anselm’s account; this is not a theory of divine punishment for individuals being narrowly avoided thanks to Jesus’s sacrifice. Rather, Jesus’s satisfaction maintains divine

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love and mercy in tandem with divine justice—a feat meant to show that Anselm’s God is indeed the “God than which none greater can be conceived.” Schwager concurs, reading Anselm’s justice emphasis in terms of divine mercy.100 So too Michael Kirwan, linking Anselm and Girard in terms of their joint search for a rational, communicable connection to the prevailing culture, and to non-­Christians (in Anselm’s case, Muslims)—though Kirwan notes with James Alison that Girard does not start with sin and the negative, but with what is revealed in light of the resurrection.101 One might even identify mimesis in Anselm. Grant Poettcker regards Cur Deus Homo as “a rhetorical performance” leading readers who are not disposed to believe in the incarnation, through the mimetic modeling of Anselm’s character Boso, to recognize the necessity of incarnation in the “fitting” restoration of creation’s proper balance.102 Here the Girardian theme of God’s non­rivalrous respect for creation and human agency comes into view, which we have asso­ ciated with the double agency approach to divine action in the world. As Pelikan points out concerning Anselm’s theory: despite humanity transgressing God’s rightful claims, God does not intrude on the “rectitude” (rightness) of each creature’s proper place and dignity. Hence the non­rivalrous solidarity of the incarnation, whereby God honors the need for humanity’s offense to find human redress.103 Cahill memorably concludes that “Anselm of Canterbury is no Mel Gibson.”104 Nevertheless, the false sacred still haunts Anselm’s account. Violence has not only fed into but has also issued from the satisfaction theory. In the Carolingian era, when conquered Saxons were being theologically educated using themes amenable to their own pagan-­influenced culture, an earlier Gallican Eucharistic prayer with its incarnational and resurrection focus was replaced by a new one emphasizing the real presence as primarily that of the crucified. With tortured Saxon crucifixes, appearing from the late tenth century, a new emphasis on guilt and expiation entered Western theology. Anselm was also writing at the time when Pope Urban II began to bless military action in defense of declining Carolingian social order, through the so-­called Truce of God. Immediately thereafter, this

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newly sanctioned violence was channeled outside Christian society onto the Muslim world with the first crusade.105 From the perspective of mimetic theory, the stable cosmic and social order lying at the heart of Anselm’s vision was annexed by a false-­sacred agenda, perpetuating the mythological obfuscation of false-­sacred violence. But as the theory developed to its next stage, this veiled sacrificial possibility became painfully real and explicit. Anselm’s satisfaction theory points forward to penal substitutionary atonement, which emerged as a Reformation-­era submodel.106 This is the default position in conservative Evangelicalism worldwide, as popularized through influential writings from John Milton to John Stott. Its widely commented-­upon weakness is its conflicted picture of God, in whom Anselm’s measure of respect for humanity is replaced by wrath and violence against human sin, despite this being described in terms of God’s solicitude for the sinner. Penal substitutionary atonement loses Anselm’s tension between divine wrath and mercy, in favor of their pathological fusion. Gregory Anderson Love discerns a false-­sacred-­sounding sacrificial logic in this picture of God’s wrath meeting human sin via the iconic role of an innocent surrogate, which in turn provides a metaphysical foundation for subsequent violence.107 Yet is this the Christian God at work? Is not Caesar the “divinity” we meet here, who was punishing Jesus on the cross?108 Timothy Gorringe traces the influence of penal substitutionary atonement on modern Evangelical campaigns to retain the death pen­alty.109 He cites William Blake accordingly: “Every Religion that Preaches Vengeance for Sin is The Religion of the Enemy and Avenger; and not the Forgiver of Sin and their God is Satan.”110 Its consequences can be identified in instances of contemporary cultural dysfunction, as indicated at the start of this section. With his Ulster experience in mind, Duncan Morrow observes that “within a world of substitutionary atonement, doctrines of election and forgiveness are transfigured into promises for the few, who are distinguished from their peers by their allegiance and unique access to truth, not by their conversion to non-­violence.”111 In his biblical, historical, theological, and liturgical study of the linked sacrificial and atonement themes in Christianity, Robert Daly

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accords the key illuminating role to mimetic theory. He is especially concerned to disown the punishing God and the tortured Christ that we find in substitutionary accounts.112 Daly’s Boston College colleague Lisa Sowle Cahill shares his affront and highlights its resonances in theology today: Daly joins a chorus of other voices objecting that the atonement paradigm sanctifies violence (Denny Weaver, Stephen Finlan); worships a divine sadist (Dorothee Soelle); turns God into an omnipotent child abuser (Rita Nakashima Brock); speaks no word of salvation to African American women and others resisting oppression (Delores Williams); and provides murderous fanatics, fascists, and torturers with validating symbols ( Jürgen Moltmann, Mark Taylor).113

It is John Calvin who introduces this final transformation. With the Catholic penitential system in eclipse, Jesus’s single sacrificial act had to bear the whole weight of human redemption. David Dawson, in his Girard-­inspired history of the sacrificial theme, regards this development as the complete return of the false sacred within the Christian dispensation. In this assessment, he is recalling the dual role of the sacred victim in mimetic theory as both cursed and divinized. For Dawson, the poles of exalted divinity and satanic torment fuse in Calvin’s vision of a God who is damned. Can this display of bottomless suffering be the revelation of divine love? Is it not rather the last gasp of the old primitive sacred, the collapse of its metaphysical vectors and symbolic field? In the “marvelous way he loved us even while he hated us,” a last ruined mask of pagan deity flares out of the darkness, transfixed and scandalized.114

This distortion is not confined to Calvinism. Daly highlights a range of French Catholic Jansenist theologians and spiritual writers who positively exulted in images of Christ’s suffering—such as Bossuet, the late seventeenth-­century bishop and tutor to the Dauphin,

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who declared that “when an avenging God waged war on His Son, the mystery of our peace was accomplished.”115 For Daly, who is highly critical of the false-­sacred survivals that he identifies in various Catholic liturgical, atonement, and spiritual theologies—even in the magisterial writings of Pope John Paul II—there is no need to search to see where Mel Gibson in his film The Passion of the Christ got his idea of Christ suffering far, far more, as doctors have pointed out, than any human being could suffer and still be alive. And it explains why that film’s grotesque exaggerations could have been the cause of a moving religious experience in so many of the film’s viewers. It simply fed on their own ideas of a severe, relentlessly judging God being appeased, for our sakes, by the suffering of his Son.116

Here we are far from Girard’s conviction that Jesus’s refusal to compromise with violence was what got him killed.117 Where some Girardian potential can be admitted in Anselm’s original Latin version, and in Abelard’s rejoinder, there is precious little scope with this over­developed version of satisfaction theory. It is outright accepting of the false sacred. Penal substitution has other problems. For a start, as Peter Schmiechen points out, “the idea of satisfaction or appeasement of God is simply not biblical. .  .  . While there are references to Jesus dying for us and in my place, nowhere is there a fully developed [biblical] idea of Jesus’ death being the payment of a penalty offered to God as a requirement of divine justice.”118 For Stephen H. Travis, while “it is both true and important to say that [ Jesus] . . . endured the God-­ ordained consequences of human sinfulness . . . this is not the same as to say that he bore our punishment.”119 Furthermore, Jesus’s praxis is nowhere in sight. And, significantly, this approach to atonement offers little help in fostering transformed lives. Instead, we are left with shame, guilt, taint, and self-­justifying recourse to a scapegoat for fixing things, as Stephen Finlan argues, in what could count as a neat Girardian assessment.120 Finlan sets out the scant spiritual resources that a punitive, substitutionary account of atonement provides:

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Punishment is only avoided by an undeserved rescue. Therefore, gratitude is colored with guilt; confession grants only temporary relief; repentance brings only short-­lived reform; liturgy stimulates but a passing feeling of release. The mentality of shame that underlies atonement theory will always reassert itself. . . . The doctrine replaces the actual sacrificial ritual but not its underlying fears.121

We are on far surer ground if we turn the tables on penal substitutionary atonement along Girardian lines, as we have already seen Girard do with sacrifice more generally. Yes, there is a reconciliation that has been achieved by Jesus’s sacrifice, but it is not God who needs to be reconciled with humanity. Rather, humanity feels itself estranged from God, and this is what needs fixing. Accordingly, as we concluded earlier in the chapter, the sacrifice of Jesus can be understood as a sign of divine mercy enacted “in, with, and under” a stereotypical act of human sacrificial violence to free us once and for all from that whole shameful, alienated, self-­hating, scapegoating calculus. It is not as if divine mercy is at one with divine violence, as in penal substitutionary atonement but, rather, that divine mercy can only get through to us by undergoing the religious violence that it is intent on overcoming. Concerning the related notion that Jesus represents a sin offering, as in the Old Testament, Peter Schmiechen reminds us that thank offerings were offered to God but not sin offerings. Sin offerings were gifts to us from God for making humanity righteous.122 The blood shed was about the gift of life, not about any necessity of death.123 More generally, Daly concludes from his study of Old Testament soteriology “that atonement, the assumed primary function and purpose of sacrifice, is primarily and most emphatically not a human activity or achievement. It is . . . a human-­directed activity of God, really a gift from God.”124 So it is not God who demands satisfaction from humanity. Rather, for James Alison, God is propitiating us. In other words, who is the angry divinity in the story? We are. That is the purpose of the atonement. We are

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the angry divinity. We are the ones inclined to dwell in wrath and think we need vengeance in order to survive. God was occupying the space of our victim so as to show us that we need never do this again. This turns on its head the Aztec understanding of atonement. In fact it turns on its head what has passed as our penal substitutionary theory of atonement, which always presupposes that it is us satisfying God, that God needs satisfying, that there is vengeance in God.125

Atonement, for Alison, is active and creative, not reactive.126 It is about a state already achieved, notwithstanding humanity’s continued méconnaissance and concupiscence, into which the God who “traverses our hostility” is pleased to draw us, so that we eventually come to inhabit that state liturgically.127 He argues that atonement is a given, not something to be attained, in a way that holds together two Girardian convictions about the atonement: that a change of heart on the part of humanity unlocks its meaning and that Christ’s suffering in the defeat of Satan is the unavoidable means of enabling that change of heart. Regarding God in this process, Alison writes that “our enmity does not prevent his love for us. It does not even limit it in any way. Our enmity does blind us to that love, as it blinds us to who we really are, and yet it also provides the murderous circumstances in which it is possible for that love to be shown to us.”128 It is only thus that humanity’s sense of divine disfavor can be set aside, so that we can be reconciled to God—because God is in no need of reconciliation with us. Daly points to Julian of Norwich as a standout figure in medieval soteriology for making just this point, emphasizing not divine disfavor but divine maternal love. For Daly, then, this is “a God who sees like a mother who does not ‘see’ the sins of her children, but sees with loving compassion only the suffering that their sins cause.”129 The resentment that brews in response to such a sense of divine disfavor has been associated with the traditional Korean notion of han: a kind of Weltschmerz, which necessitates deliverance from the psychic woundedness of which human sinfulness constitutes a symptom.130

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For Andrew Sung Park, Jesus’s blood represents the authority of God to remake the wounded sinner, which God in Christ does by carrying their han.131 Here are obvious connections with a Girardian assessment of the escalating mimetic disorder from which humanity requires deliverance, with its internal mediation, envy, rivalry, and violence. God carrying our han means that our anger is turned on God, via Jesus, who becomes the target for all our resentment, guilt, hurt, sin, and pitiable méconnaissance. Schwager regards all victim-­making rage as coming down to anger against God, which is borne by Jesus, and in that sense Jesus carries the sins of all (1 Peter 2:24).132 There is a wider theodicy entailed in this approach, too. As Marilyn McCord Adams insists, “Because God is the One who is ultimately responsible for human vulnerability and horror-­participation .  .  . God in Christ crucified stretches out loving arms on hard wood to absorb our anger—the very worst that human beings can suffer, be, or do—into God’s own flesh.”133 Beyond both divine apathy and divine abjection, as Moltmann points out, God offers this remarkable solidarity out of love.134 In terms of practical outworking, this absorption of human vi­olence without payback breaks the cycle of violence.135 This refusal of payback is the nub of it—refusing to “take the bait,” if you like. In interpersonal relationships, from parenting to pastoring to political leadership, this is a necessary capability if potentially difficult situations are to be transformed. It requires self-­mastery and mimetic maturity. This way in which, as Brian Robinette puts it, God “ ‘absorbs’ within God’s self the ravenous power of sin, violence, and death in order to dismantle its pervasive influence”136 is suggestive of the Christus Victor approach, where Girard most readily “fits” with the theology of atonement. Such refusal to “take the bait” is the opposite of what Satan did, according to the Latin, or classic, theory, when Satan was hooked on the divinity of Christ by taking the bait of Jesus’s humanity—in effect, by responding rivalrously to Jesus. Such short-­circuiting of violence is what salvation must look like according to mimetic theory. Stephen H. Travis explains that

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those who forgive others take into themselves the hurt and the pain which has been caused, rather than throw it back at the offenders in retaliation. The meaning of the cross is not that God punished his Son in order to avoid punishing humanity, but that in Christ God himself took responsibility for the world’s evil and absorbed its consequences into himself.137

This theme, of God defeating Satan by subterfuge, was subsequently abandoned by Anselm with his satisfaction theory, which conceived of atonement in terms of humanity’s status before God rather than humanity under Satan’s power. With Girard, of course, we recall that Satan represents the whole mimetic, sacrificial complex in which humanity is entrapped, and it is this parlous anthropological condition that is revealed and overcome. It is not a cosmic victory, though the supernatural language used for the New Testament “powers and principalities” does testify for Girard to their formidable, transcendent aspect.138 This theme of tricking Satan has been revived in recent atonement theology,139 and its importance for Girard has been noted.140 He sets out this aspect of the classic theory in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning: Once we identify the bad contagion, the idea of Satan duped by the Cross acquires a precise meaning that the Greeks obviously sensed without succeeding in articulating it in a completely satisfactory fashion. . . . The Greek Fathers had it right in saying that with the Cross, Satan is the mystifier caught in the trap of his own mystification. The single victim mechanism was his personal property, his very own thing, the instrument of self-­expulsion that put the world at his feet. But in the Cross this mechanism escapes once and for all from the control Satan exercised over it. . . . The divine wisdom knew that thanks to this death the victim mechanism would be neutralized. Satan would be completely unable to elude this trap; he would participate in God’s plan unawares. The Greek Fathers, in treating Satan as the victim of a kind of divine ruse, suggest aspects of revelation now obscured because the anthropology of the Cross remains obscure.141

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Here we recall our earlier discussion of God annexing and repurposing the sacrificial mechanism through the cross, so that an act of blind murderous folly by the mob reveals an act of divine salvation. This defeat of Satan cashes out in terms of breaking the spell of our mimetic entrapment in the sacrificial mechanism, which is perpetuated in every legacy of structural violence. Girard believes that central to this salvation is Jesus’s exposure of the scapegoat mechanism,142 which he describes in terms of Jesus’s mastery over the powers (following Col. 2:13–15).143 These powers and principalities are not supernatural and remote but historical and immediate, and they were identified by Paul with the Roman Empire.144 Here is the victory over Satan that Aulén associated with the classic, or Christus Victor, account. As described by Darby Kathleen Ray, it has a decidedly Girardian ring: For Augustine, as with Irenaeus and Gregory of Nyssa, the death of Jesus on the cross signaled the defeat of evil by exposing the injustice and immorality at its root. In the murder of Jesus, the absolute unfairness of the devil’s motives and tactics became devastatingly clear; the true face of evil is unmasked for all to see, its claim to authority discredited, and its seductive potential squelched.145

J. Denny Weaver makes a significant contribution at this point, insisting that Jesus’s liberating praxis and resurrection have to be taken into account, and not only his crucifixion. He enunciates a more comprehensive and actively engaged updating of the classic theory that he calls “narrative Christus Victor” because it is through the narrative of Jesus’s life as a whole that Satan is undone. Weaver is concerned that Girard’s Jesus is too much the passive victim and not enough the agitator for transformation.146 My concern is that too much agitation can represent rivalry and self-­defining mimetic oppositions, whereas truly radical passivity can overcome mimetic rivalry while disempowering a powerful opponent. Two images are helpful in this regard. One is drawn from martial arts, illustrating how power can be defeated by subversion rather than by matching force for force. Aikido is a practice in which opponents

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are defeated by using their own strength against them, rather than by direct overpowering.147 Whereas Girard’s Jesus demonstrates too much passivity, according to Weaver, the metaphor of Aikido suggests instead that Jesus demonstrated Paul’s “strength made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). Ray points to such subversive power against dominant realities by means of parody, satire, and mischief.148 “Without the resources of the powerful or affluent,” she writes, “the underprivileged learn to take advantage of the preconceptions, expectations, and pride of the powerful, using their narrow assumptions against them in unexpected ways.”149 Another image is drawn from family systems theory, according to which the whole system can be changed by one participant beginning to behave differently. That way, entrenched patterns and inevitabilities can eventually yield to a different model. There can of course be resistance, but abiding change is effected in no other way. S. Mark Heim, in his searching Girardian reflection on atonement, employs the example of family systems theory, following Leander S. Harding.150 Christus Victor is undergoing something of a theological renaissance. Hans Boersma subordinates the Latin and subjective theories to it, as means to an end.151 Ray regards Christus Victor as superior to both subsequent medieval models: Like the Anselmian school, it safeguards divine power and salvific efficacy, suggesting that spiritual healing is a requirement for the flourishing of human life and reminding us that the possibility for such healing is not something we ourselves can create or control but it is a mystery to be embraced and celebrated with awe and thanksgiving. At the same time, however, it insists on the necessity of a continued human praxis of liberating transformation, for without the daily incarnation and actualization of saving power, salvation is merely an idea, a lifeless point of dogma with no liberative power.152

In Girard’s hands, according to Frederiek Depoortere, the Christus Victor theme has been successfully developed and applied in ways that complement the insights of its leading contemporary exponents,

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such as Darby Kathleen Ray and J. Denny Weaver. As Depoortere explains, Girard succeeds in offering an interpretation of the cross . . . without implicating God in violence. Moreover, he also avoids the three problems inherent in the patristic version of Christus Victor. First, his interpretation of the cross disallows any rigid distinction between the “good guys” and the “bad guys” because such a distinction would amount to repeating the scapegoat mechanism exposed by the cross. Second, Girard does not relegate the battle against evil to a realm far removed from the earth and disconnected from human history. The evil power against which Christ struggles is the power of violence that holds humankind in bondage and that is the founding principle of human culture. Third, Girard does not consider the struggle against violence as “a done deal.” Indeed, Satan may have been exposed and the process of his destruction may have been set in motion, but this does not mean that violence is over and done with. This implies that human beings are still called to oppose evil by taking Jesus as their model and opting for nonviolence. In this regard, a Girardian interpretation of the cross can profit from a dialogue with authors, such as Weaver and Ray, who defend activist forms of nonviolence because a risk inherent in Girard’s view of the cross is indeed that it presents us with a Jesus who is nonviolent in a rather passive way, as Weaver has pointed out. Thus, in conclusion, Girard offers an interpretation of the cross that shows something has objectively changed with the cross, but he does this in such a way that the problems connected with the traditional interpretation of the cross in terms of satisfaction and substitution are not repeated.153

There is also a Theo-­dramatic quality to what Girard proposes regarding atonement, involving divine action and human response. This point has been made about Christus Victor more generally. For Aulén, God is both “the author and object” of reconciliation according to this model,154 creating a situation in which humanity can enter into the forgiveness of God once the “powers” and their alienating effect

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have been subdued. The medieval options of objective (Anselm) and subjective (Abelard) atonement, however, prove inadequate to capture the dual valence of this divine-­human drama.155 Peter Schmiechen emphasizes the dramatic quality of the Christus Victor approach, which does not involve reduction to a rational formula as is the case with Anselm’s model.156 This dramatic quality emerges as something of a modern necessity in George Rupp’s exhaustive typology of atonement theories, linked to social and ecclesial conditions in the periods from which they issued. He concludes that an adequate account of the atonement for today must accommodate both the temporal mediation of change and the social context in which individuality is shaped— it must be conceived as both a one-­off event and a socially mediated process.157 John Milbank would concur, insisting that as a sign atonement is once and for all, but as a real transformation it goes on happening.158 But how are we to account for atonement actually transforming the human condition? In Anselm’s day, it was far easier to imagine such a global change, though this possibility evaporated with the rise of nominalism and the increasingly autonomous Western individual. For Girard, however, the social constitution of individual selfhood through the mimetic handing on of desire recovers a more porous individual than has typically been conceived in Western modernity,159 making more explicable the possibility of a global change that also entails its reception and outworking by individuals. In addition to Jesus’s definitive death and resurrection, Girard insists on the Holy Spirit carrying the impact of Easter into wider action160—if victims are not treated differently, as the one he calls God’s “advocate for the defense” comes to ensure, then confessing Jesus represents no advance.161 Thus atonement for Girard brings the concrete power to overcome mimetic control by the crowd,162 which is available to all who choose to share in Jesus’s praxis by grace.163 For Schwager, referring to Good Friday, Easter, and Pentecost, “in the Easter response to this misdeed there was finally revealed an eternal goodness, which cancelled out even this evil and yet did not overwhelm people with divine power, but continued to court their freedom by means of the Spirit.”164 Here, once again, is a divine act

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that is also entirely humanly collaborative, involving no violence at all against human freedom.165 This is a perennial theme for Schwager, and more than conceded by Girard (as we noted in chapter 4). Here we are in the imaginative field of overaccepting. The traditional notion of God redeeming the world through the death of Jesus is overaccepted in a way that takes us beyond both structuring sacrificial violence and refusing to see any value in sacrifice tout court. Jesus’s sacrifice becomes part of a bigger picture in which atonement concepts can be reimagined and redeployed. They become a way of talking about how God rescues humanity from the power of structuring violence to discover a transformed life in Jesus Christ. As Lisa Sowle Cahill puts it, “The atonement paradigm of salvation, when tied to resurrection and complemented by soteriologies of incarnation and ethics of the reign of God and option for the poor, can [still] inspire communities of vicarious sacrifice for others that can make a difference in the world around us.”166 Thus we see Girard advancing beyond the accepting of sacrifice and suffering that Darby Kathleen Ray associates with liberation theology in its identification with the powerless and the blocking of sacrifice and suffering that she associates with feminist theology in its strong reaction against victim-­making patriarchal ideology.167 Girard’s solution proves more truly liberating, with God enabling humanity to find a way beyond the depredations of false-­sacred violence and its lingering legacy. His version of Christus Victor is prone neither to the accepting of sacrificial violence characterizing the cancerous penal substitutionary outgrowth of Anselm’s account based on satisfaction nor to the pietistic blocking characteristic of Abelard’s moral influence tradition. Girard asserts a robust alternative, overaccepting the death of Jesus as the price of humanity being freed from méconnaissance and redemptive violence to discover and thereafter be shaped by the nonviolent God. Girard’s overaccepting also spares him Boersma’s accepting of divine violence as a necessary scaffolding for the gift of divine hospitality, which is the Calvinistic revision that Boersma undertakes in Violence, Hospitality and the Cross. Equally, his vision does not entail blocking the struggle involved in any Christus Victor approach by

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discerning only passive victimhood in Jesus and a redemption limited to “rational awakening,” “intelligence,” and “demystification”168— which is what Bartlett fears. Jesus’s death means overaccepting the passivity of the victim. This is the divine, anything-­but-­passive ruse that brings Satan undone.169

* * *

I have argued that Girard’s high-­but-­functional Christology involves overaccepting the history of religions, the uniqueness of Jesus, the profundity of Judaism, and the social sciences themselves. Regarding atonement, while two medieval models suggest aspects of Girard’s program, the older classic, or Christus Victor, model is presented as most compatible with Girard, in keeping with a growing theological appreciation of that theme. Contrary to the accepting and blocking of Jesus’s sacrifice according to various conservative and progressive approaches within Christian theology—among them the false sacred returning in the form of penal substitutionary atonement—Girard’s overaccepting escapes charges that he downplays both Jesus’s sacrifice and the radicalism of Jesus’s praxis. Girard does neither. Jesus’s death was the contingent cost of humanity’s escape from the false sacred and the price of God’s loving outreach “while we were yet sinners” (Rom. 5:8). It reveals that we have entirely mistaken God—that it is we who need to be reconciled with God, not God with us. Yet there was no other way for God to overcome our crippling méconnaissance than by letting Jesus undergo at our hands what we humans wrongly took to be divine judgment. In this way, we can regard Jesus’s sacrifice on our behalf as the overaccepting of atonement. There is more that could be said. I mention three theological themes crying out for further exploration in “Girardian theology.” First, there is the work of God’s Holy Spirit in helping us to make our own the fruit of Jesus’s cross and resurrection. It is increasingly recognized that Western theology has neglected this crucial dimension, looking to originating events rather than an ongoing dynamic in the Spirit to account for human transformation. Accordingly, John Zizioulas reminds Western Christians that while “Christ in-­ stitutes . . . the Spirit con-­stitutes.”170

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Second, salvation is best appreciated in relational rather than legalistic and transactional terms—as coming to abide in God’s Trinitarian embrace, in fact, which entails a redeemed sociality. This clarification offers greater theological grounding to those who wish to draw out the spiritual implications of mimetic theory. Robert Daly lays at least part of the blame for missing this connection on the fact that atonement theology emerged in advance of mature Trinitarian reflection in the early church—at least in the Western church, since the East preserved this more spiritual theology of atonement as theosis.171 It is in these terms that Daly understands the atoning sacrifice of Christ. His account, which is heavily indebted to mimetic theory, echoes the spiritual and theological commitments that came to greater prominence for “late Girard,” including his newly positive appraisal of sacrifice. In these developments we recognized Girard’s jointly mystical and prophetic sensibility. Daly’s presentation of Christian sacrifice, and its atoning function, is also in tune with the humanly inclusive sense of divine revelation and Theo-­drama that characterized our theological assessment of mimetic theory. So, for Daly, Christian sacrifice is not some object that we manipulate, nor is it something that we do or give up. It is first and foremost, a mutually self-­giving event that takes place between persons. It is, in fact, the most profoundly personal and interpersonal event that we can conceive or imagine. It begins . . . not with us but with the self-­ offering of God the Father in the gift of the Son. It continues, in a second “moment”, in the self-­offering “response” of the Son, in his humanity and in the power of the Holy Spirit, to the Father and for us. And it continues . . . —and only then does it become Christian sacrifice—when we, in human actions that are empowered by the same Spirit that was in Jesus, begin to enter into that perfect, en-­ Spirited, mutually self-­giving, mutually self-­communicating personal relationship that is the life of the Blessed Trinity.172

Third, the church is something of an absent friend in Girard’s account. While there are certainly mentions of the church,173 we have noted Girard’s preference to address the wider world and not be seen

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as a narrow apologist for a churchy agenda. Yet the ecclesial manifestation of redeemed sociality is a necessary theological theme—not only to ensure that all creedal bases are covered, but so that redeemed mimetic dynamics find a compelling sacramental, institutional witness in the wider world. I am not alone among Girardian theologians in my conviction that mimetic theory demands an ecclesiology.174

Conclusion

This has been a study of René Girard’s mimetic theory of religion and violence and how it might best be fleshed out theologically— a task made particularly interesting by the theory’s significant reliance on biblical hermeneutics as part of its wider interdisciplinarity. Girard’s account of how humanity and society emerges through the homeopathic use of violence belongs to the social sciences. But it is not a reductive account, in that a crucial role is played by the discovery of an extra-­systemic element that exposes and disempowers the structuring of society on violent foundations. I refer to the God of Judeo-­Christian revelation, as mediated by the developing scriptural imagination. The stakes are high for Girard. This revelation coincides with a turning point in the human story. The stability won through sacrifice and preserved for culture by religion is compromised once this mechanism is brought to light. Enter the apocalypse, which Girard understands to be the default condition of human history. It is kept in check by structuring violence and, hopefully, by following the God of Jesus Christ once the role of structuring violence has been outed and undermined. The gospel thus constitutes a stumbling block to the usual working of human religiousness, but also a hopeful pointer beyond it for those who develop what James Alison calls the intelligence of the 240 

Conclusion  241

victim and who begin to live differently. This is the continuing work of Christ and the Holy Spirit, according to Girard—a theme that could be further explored by Girardian theologians, along with that of its necessary ecclesial mediation. In this study the elaboration of mimetic theory is set out in three phases. From the early stages, in Girard’s literary scholarship, his characteristic themes of deviated transcendence and its Christian alternative are already evident, along with the apocalyptic note that he first identifies in the novels of Marcel Proust and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The three key refrains are broadly these. First, Girard learns from great literature that desire is borrowed and derivative, that it makes us structurally prone to envy and rivalry, and that pursuing the being of our model or mediator of desire leads to the full range of modern pathologies as addressed for instance by Sigmund Freud and by existentialist philosophy. This mimetic quality of desire has yielded a tragic state of affairs in which people are sacrificed to still the rivalrous escalation of violence—a cultural theme that Girard identifies initially in Greek tragedies, which began to call in question the more familiar mythical dissimulation of this mechanism. In the second stage of his project, moving from literature to anthropology, Girard delineates the universal shape of this phenomenon through a close reading of world mythology and ritual. His simple account of humanity emerging and growing to maturity on the back of this serendipitous discovery for keeping violence under control became the central theme of mimetic theory. The third key refrain is his contemporaneous discovery of a way beyond this state of affairs, which was disclosed in the Hebrew scriptures and then decisively in the Gospels’ passion narratives. As Thomas Aquinas takes up Aristotle to create a larger Christian vision, so Girard takes up Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, Proust, Dostoyevsky, Émile Durkheim, Friedrich Nietzsche, Freud, and Carl von Clausewitz. Mimetic theory is variously illuminated by each of these (and some others) in its dimensions of borrowed desire, escalation in rivalry, cathartic violence, and the threat of apocalypse, with psychological healing and a capacity to negotiate mimetic currents found to be most fully present in Jesus Christ. For Girard, Christ is present not only in person but also incognito as the form

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of conversion, standing behind every advance that humanity makes in mastering violence. Nietzsche is an especially interesting case for Girard. He was the first to understand that Christianity was incompatible with the mythical and the sacrifice of innocents, while rejecting Christ in favor of Dionysus. Having set all this out, I then try to imagine the theological implications of mimetic theory. Revelation is central, but it is inseparable from the process of being caught up in God’s healing and liberating project that has slowly but surely come to light in history, centered on its world-­transforming breakout in Jesus Christ. In light of this, mimetic theory requires a comprehensive, dynamic, spiritual theology to do it justice. The work of Bernard Lonergan has been associated with Girard, along with that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the unofficial theology of Simone Weil—the latter two sharing Girard’s critique of what religion as solely a human creation can descend into. I suggest that the théologie totale of Sarah Coakley is ripe for a Girardian appropriation or, alternatively, that mimetic theory is ripe for appropriation by théologie totale—and this despite Coakley’s persistent unease that Girard unduly problematizes the religio-­cultural category of sacrifice. Girard’s real theological marriage has to be with theological dramatic theory, as it devolves from Hans Urs von Balthasar into the hands of Raymund Schwager. Here is a comprehensive, self-­involving, transformative model that links revelation and salvation. Theological dramatic theory can uphold providence against the problem of evil on the basis of its earthy realism coupled with its eschatological confidence. I seek to show that Girard is compatible with this approach, notwithstanding Balthasar’s own doubts to that effect. I then venture a five-­act Girardian Theo-­drama that seeks to accommodate the evolutionary nature and pan-­historical scope of mimetic theory. A further theological tradition, that of double agency, is applied to fill out this Theo-­dramatic account, in which divine providence is seen to work kenotically, incarnationally—sacramentally—through the within of natural processes. God is no stranger to God’s world, working through its natural and historical processes out of love for the world and respect for creatures who live according to their own natures (including humanity’s mimetic nature).

Conclusion  243

The subsequent challenge is to show how the shadow side of a Darwinian and Girardian world can be squared with theological orthodoxy. Having already affirmed Girard’s grip on the important theological theme of human freedom, I go on in a related discussion to answer John Milbank and other critics who think that Girard abandons theological orthodoxy by making violence ontologically fundamental to creation. Within the developing tradition of Irenaeus, there is scope for a more evolutionary sense of divine providence building stage by stage in light of an eschatological promise—not an onward historical march that sweeps victims aside, but a process that creates as it redeems, transforming the tragic evolutionary givens of life into gift as the Theo-­drama plays out. I then introduce three terms from improvisation theory in the theater. Rather than accepting the tragic as just the way things are, or blocking it in denial of brute reality, providence is an exercise in overaccepting the tragic. Girard is sufficiently attuned to Augustine to insist that evil will never win the day, though he pursues this goal in what I suggest is a more Irenaean manner, with nature and history proceeding toward fullness rather than declining from it. Here a set of alternative perspectives is evaluated and assigned either to accepting or blocking with an eye to the logic (perhaps, the psychology) of each approach—how they are implicated in the sacrificial mechanism and how we might do better. This doing better through overaccepting is worked out with reference to creaturely suffering in a world where life advances through death, where human trauma plays differently in the key of compassion, and where God’s kingdom repurposes the themes of divine violence, wrath, and judgment so that what emerges even from the mouth of hell is not horror but, rather, “the force of love.” Finally, I apply overaccepting to various questions that Girard’s claims for Jesus cannot help but pose for theology: how Jesus should (and should not) be assimilated to the theme of sacrifice and the dark history of religions, how his uniqueness might be understood inclusively rather than exclusively—especially with regard to the Judaism from which Jesus emerges—and, finally, the theology of atonement. Here, the violent God of wrong­headed Christian conviction remains

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entrenched behind formidable defenses. My Girardian proposal is for the overaccepting of Jesus’s atoning sacrifice, so that it becomes a way of talking about liberation from a shame-inducing, false-sacred mindset. This entails a re­appropriation of the ancient Christus Victor view of atonement, in line with the revival of that model in wider contemporary theology. Girard’s compatibility with a comprehensive, participatory, Theo-­ dramatic vision, which faces the tragic reality of life and violence with transforming hope through overaccepting, is the case I seek to make. It is a picture that is realistic about the world yet sure of the Christian hope, and it avoids the mimetic rivalry that is typically manifested in every drive toward complete ideological closure. It is a proposal that must strike a powerful and challenging note: that God is nonvi­ olent, so that the world is best understood and taken in hand accordingly. Here faith joins science in the service of humanizing, liberating change. Yet that promise of change may prove stillborn, according to Girard. His proposal is not for armchair theorists, then. Rather, it is for “strangers and pilgrims on earth” (Heb. 11:13).

NOTES

Introduction 1. Weaver, The Nonviolent God, 89. 2. See Kimball, “Religion and Violence from Christian Theological Perspectives.” 3.  Daly, “Violence and Institution in Christianity.” He later expands the list to thirty-­eight; see Sacrifice Unveiled, 203–4. 4. Neville, A Peaceable Hope, 44. 5.  In keeping with earlier work, see, e.g., my Is Jesus Unique? and Abiding Faith. 6. Bartlett, Cross Purposes, 225. 7. Žižek, Violence, 217. 8.  For some preliminary considerations, see chapter 4, “Modern Institutions and Violence,” in my René Girard and Secular Modernity, 117–41. 9.  Hamerton-­Kelly, Sacred Violence, 84–85.

1. Overture to Mimetic Theory 1.  For instance, in the first three chapters of René Girard and Secular Modernity and an essay, “René Girard, Modernity, and Apocalypse.” 2.  Robert Doran, “Editor’s Introduction” to Girard, Mimesis and Theory, xiii–xiv, on xiv. 3. On the precursors of Girard’s mimetic self in late nineteenth-­ century psychology and the literature of European modernism, see Lawtoo, The Phantom of the Ego. 4. Webb, The Self Between, 16. 5.  Girard, “Valéry and Stendhal” (1954), in Mimesis and Theory, 13–25, on 24. 6. Girard, A Theater of Envy; on Seinfeld, see Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 250. 7.  Girard (with Garrels), “Mimesis and Science,” 220. 8. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 45.  245

246  Notes to Pages 10–13

9.  As Girard puts it many years later, “As long as models and imitators live in separate worlds they cannot become rivals, because they cannot select the same objects.” See A Theater of Envy, 165. 10. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 9. 11. For an early discussion of this phenomenon, see ibid., 101–4, 168–73. 12.  See, e.g., Girard on Toqueville and his literary contemporaries in ibid., 136–37. 13.  Ibid., 88. 14. Girard’s earliest explicit discussion of “metaphysical desire” is in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, chapter 3, “The Metamorphosis of Desire.” Girard identifies such desire in Jean-­Paul Sartre as preceding sexual desire, suggesting a link to his own conclusions about narcissism and coquetry (ibid., 105). Girard diverges from Sartre on mauvaise foi (bad faith), emphasizing its unproblematic mimetic nature as entrapment in the desires of others but also the possibility of escaping from it; see the avant-­propos (preface) to Girard, La conversion de l’art, 7–28, on 20. Girard identifies what amounts to such mauvaise foi in “Sartre’s radical and inverted Flaubertianism”—in his “manifest will to aesthetic malpractice”—whereby Sartrean disgust emerges disingenuously in his rivalry with Gustave Flaubert’s perceived cynical superiority; see Girard, “Rupture and Literary Creation in Jean-­Paul Sartre,” 12. Girard’s connection to Sartre is discussed by Robert Doran in “René Girard’s Concept of Conversion and the Via Negativa,” 174–77. 15.  Antonello, “The Novel, Deviated Transcendency, and Modernity,” 168. Reflecting on art more generally, Girard declares that he is not interested in aesthetics per se but only in the means by which any work of art increases the anguish of its epoch and hence accomplishes its essentially revelatory function; see Girard, La conversion de l’art, 28. Here, art serves the same revelatory function for Girard as does tragedy. 16. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 61. 17.  Girard, “Marcel Proust” (1962), in Mimesis and Theory, 56–70, on 62. 18. Girard, “From the Novelistic Experience to the Oedipal Myth” (1965), in Oedipus Unbound, 1–27, on 1. 19.  Girard, “Interview: René Girard,” 31. 20. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 215. 21. Ibid. 22.  Cited in ibid., 216. 23.  Chantre, “The Steeple of Combray,” 161. 24. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 137. Girard also mentions a scene from The Guermant’s Way in which a young singer is symbolically lynched by the audience; see ibid., 152n1.

Notes to Pages 13–17  247

25. Girard, Resurrection from the Underground, 88. Jean-­ Michel Oughourlian is good on a range of couples’ relationship issues from the perspective of mimetic theory, in The Genesis of Desire. 26.  Gardner, “Democracy and Desire in The Great Gatsby,” 273. 27.  A most apposite term used by Girard’s long-­term interlocutor, the psychiatrist Jean-­Michel Oughourlian, in The Puppet of Desire. 28.  See Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, chapter 8, “Masochism and Sadism.” 29.  Ibid., 105, 162–64. 30.  In the absence of a single review that I have seen with anything sensible to say on the subject, I offer my essay “Making Sense of Kumiko” as a key to understanding the otherwise perplexing 2014 Japanese-­American film Kumiko: The Treasure Hunter. The protagonist, an invincibly delusional young Tokyo “office lady,” is surely one of Dostoyevsky’s possessed. 31. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 270. 32. Girard, Dostoevski: du double à l’unité (Paris: Plon, 1963); this was revised and included (with other essays and a long introduction) in Girard, Critiques dans un souterrain (Paris: Grasset, 1976). This revised version was used for the 1997 English translation Resurrection from the Underground. 33. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 289. For another good, early example of the self-­deceiving, self-­destructive dynamics of prideful modernity as analyzed by Girard, see “Bastards and the Antihero in Sartre” (1965), in Mimesis and Theory, 135–59. My René Girard and Secular Modernity offers a detailed explication of such phenomena with numerous references to Girard, along with a number of new, contemporary examples: see 27–51 in general and 47–51 in particular. 34. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 291, here referring to the conversion of Stepan Verkhovensky in Dostoyevsky’s Devils. 35.  Ibid., 298. 32 36.  Ibid., 297, 300. 37.  Antonello, “The Novel, Deviated Transcendency, and Modernity,” 168. 38.  Girard, “Epilogue: The Anthropology of the Cross,” in The Girard Reader, 262–88, on 284. Of course, the 1972 musical incarnation of Don Quixote, The Man of La Mancha, celebrated rather than lamented the Don’s mimetic craziness, preserving his romantic folly to the end as a sign of his greatness (one might dare to venture, “to dream the mi-­met-­ic-­al dream”). 39.  Girard, “Epilogue: The Anthropology of the Cross,” in The Girard Reader, 262–88, see esp. 283–86; see also Girard, When These Things Begin, 128–33. 40. Girard, When These Things Begin, 129. 41. Girard, Resurrection from the Underground, 140.

248  Notes to Pages 17–23

42. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 310, 311. 43.  Ibid., 312. 44.  Girard, “The Mimetic Desire of Paolo and Francesca,” in To Double Business Bound, 1–8, on 5; see also his Resurrection from the Underground, 140. 45. Girard, Resurrection from the Underground, 141. 46. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 313. 47. Girard, Resurrection from the Underground, 129. 48. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 314. 49.  Goodhart, “Reading Religion, Literature, and the End of Desire,” 153. 50. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 310 (see also 306, 308, 312). For a discussion of mimesis and these figurae in Girard, see a section titled “Conversion and ‘Figural Realism’  ” in Kirwan, “  ‘Strategies of Grace,’  ” 121–24. 51. Girard, When These Things Begin, 128–29. 52.  On Proust and the relation between novelistic and Christian conversion, see Girard, “Conversion in Literature and Christianity” (1999), in Mimesis and Theory, 263–73. 53. Girard, Resurrection from the Underground, 109. 54.  McKenna, “Scandal, Resentment, Idolatry,” 7. 55. Girard, Resurrection from the Underground, 45. 56. Girard, “Racine, Poet of Glory” (1964), in Mimesis and Theory, 96–124, on 121. 57. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 58. 58. Girard, Resurrection from the Underground, 140. 59.  Ibid., 128–29. 60.  Ibid., 128. 61. Ibid. 62.  Ibid., 123. 63.  Ibid., 129. Girard later discussed the adulterous lovers Paolo and Francesca, from Dante’s Inferno, in these terms, describing their “descent into hell .  .  . as a necessary ordeal on the way to final revelation.” See Girard, To Double Business Bound, 5. See the related discussion of Blaise Pascal and l’ordre de la charité in later chapters. 64.  Ibid., 105. 65. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 136. 66. Girard, “From the Novelistic Experience to the Oedipal Myth” (1965), in Oedipus Unbound, 1–27, on 12. 67.  Goodhart, “Difficult Passages,” unpaginated. 68. Ibid. 69.  Girard, “Oedipus Analysed” (1965; first published 1970), in Oedipus Unbound, 28–58, on 51.

Notes to Pages 23–30  249

70.  Ibid., 56. The servant song text referred to is Isaiah 53:4–5. 71.  Looking back to this period from thirty years on, Girard adds that Oedipus emerged as the scapegoat in Oedipus the King and was duly divi­ nized in Oedipus at Colonus; see Girard, When These Things Begin, 23. 72.  Girard, “Oedipus Analysed,” in Oedipus Unbound, 28–58, on 56. 73.  Ibid., 57. 74. Girard, “Symmetry and Dissymmetry in the Myth of Oedipus” (1968), in Oedipus Unbound, 59–94, on 61, 68–69. 75.  Ibid., 83. 76.  Ibid., 86, 89. 77.  Ibid., 90.

2. From Violence to Divinity 1.  I am grateful to Sandor Goodhart for his articulation of the single focus that Girard has pursued in the wake of his first two books; see “Reading Religion, Literature, and the End of Desire,” 155. 2. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 14–23. 3.  Ibid., 31. 4.  Ibid., 33–36. For more on the protective role of taboo in Violence and the Sacred, see chapter 8 on the incest prohibition (in conversation with Freud) and chapter 9 on marriage laws (in conversation with Lévi-­Strauss). 5. Ibid., 79. Of course, actual plagues and other natural disasters spawn social crises and do not only serve as metaphors for them: see Girard, Reading the Bible with René Girard, 171. Hence references to plague and the like may not be entirely metaphorical. 6. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 80. 7.  Ibid., 81. 8.  Ibid., 49. 9.  Ibid., 119–36. 10.  Ibid., 220. 11.  Ibid., 221. 12.  Ibid., 257. 13.  Ibid., 258. 14.  Ibid., 260. 15.  Ibid., 269, 272. 16.  Ibid., 307. 17.  Ibid., 310. 18.  Ibid., 316. 19. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 100. 20. Ibid.

250  Notes to Pages 30–36

21.  Ibid., 82. 22.  Ibid., 126–30. 23. Girard, The Scapegoat, 23. 24.  I summarized this material in my previous book, René Girard and Secular Modernity, 77–80. 25. Girard, The Scapegoat, 42. 26.  Winch, “Inattentive Readings.” 27.  Girard, “Generative Scapegoating,” 103. 28. Girard, The Scapegoat, 51. 29.  Ibid., 56. 30. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 148. 31.  See, e.g., Girard, “Violence in Biblical Narrative,” 391; (with Palaver), “The Bloody Skin of the Victim,” 61–62; The Scapegoat, 104. Girard acknowledges in a letter of 18 May 1977 that Schwager planted this seed, in the latter’s Must There Be Scapegoats? See René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974–1991, 38. 32. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 205–6, on 206. 33.  Ibid., 206. 34.  Ibid., 158. 35.  Ibid., 160. 36.  Ibid., 165. 37.  Ibid., 166. 38.  Ibid., 167. 39.  Ibid., 178–79. 40.  Ibid., 182. 41.  Ibid., 183. 42. Ibid. 43.  Ibid., 235. 44. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 125. 45.  See Girard, in Vattimo and Girard, Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith, 105. 46.  Bartlett, “Paul and Girard Agonistes,” 83, adding that “in Girard, we have the anthropological second coming, as it were, of a biblical concept.” 47. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 186. 48.  Ibid., 187. 49.  Ibid., 192–93. 50.  Ibid., 195. 51.  Ibid., 198, 201. 52.  Ibid., 203. 53.  Ibid., 216. 54. Ibid., 193. See also Girard’s much later work, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 55.

Notes to Pages 37–43  251

55. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 219. 56.  Ibid., 220–23. 57.  Ibid., 223. 58.  Ibid., book 2, chapter 3. 59.  See Girard’s letter to Schwager of 2 November 1975, in René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974–1991, 23–24. 60. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 277. 61.  See Girard’s letter to Schwager of 13 June 1976, in René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974–1991, 29. 62.  See my René Girard and Secular Modernity, 99–102. 63. Girard, The Scapegoat, 105. 64.  Ibid., 111. 65.  Ibid., 126. 66.  Ibid., 145. 67.  Ibid., 146. 68.  Ibid., 147, 148. 69.  See Girard, The Girard Reader, 280; see also I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 189, on the objective miraculous nature of Jesus’s resurrection. The kerygma is the gospel proclamation. 70. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 125, 130–33. 71. Girard, The Scapegoat, chapter 13. Girard had already referred to the Gerasene demoniac in his chapter “The Dostoyevskian Apocalypse,” in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 289, 290, but there he seems simply to be saying that the destructiveness of the ontological sickness possessing the demoniac is highlighted by the pigs’ destruction. 72.  Ibid., 199. 73. Ibid., 203. Recall also the discussion in chapter 1, above, of the form of Christ revealed at the conclusion of great modern novels. 74.  Ibid., 204. 75.  Ibid., 207. 76.  Ibid., 211–12. 77. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 283–84. Such an apparently agonistic account of human origins will be considered in chapter 4. 78.  Ibid., 350. 79.  Ibid., 359. 80.  Ibid., 303, 349, 361. 81.  Ibid., 349. 82.  Ibid., 378–79, 415. 83.  Ibid., 307. 84.  Ibid., 413, 415. 85.  Ibid., 415. 86.  Ibid., 422.

252  Notes to Pages 43–52

87.  Ibid., 429. 88.  Ibid., 430. See the further discussion of this matter at the end of chapter 5, below. 89.  Ibid., 442–43. 90.  Ibid., 310. 91.  Girard, “Nietzsche and Contradiction,” 59. 92. Girard, To Double Business Bound, 62, 73, 74, 79. 93. Girard, The Girard Reader, 251. 94.  Ibid., 252. 95.  Ibid., 252–54. 96.  Ibid., 256. See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 181–82. 97.  Girard (with Adams), “Violence, Difference, Sacrifice,” 33. 98. Girard, The Girard Reader, 260. 99.  Ibid., 254. 100.  Girard, “The Founding Murder in the Philosophy of Nietzsche,” 231. 101.  Ibid., 246. 102.  Ibid., 242–43. Girard is likely referring to this article in his letter to Raymund Schwager of 13 April 1984, confirming his reading of Aphorism #125 in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science as a reflection on the collapse of the false sacred; see René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974–1991, 136 (and esp. 136n399). 103.  Girard, “The Founding Murder in the Philosophy of Nietzsche,” 245. 104.  Girard, “Nietzsche and Contradiction,” 59–60. 105.  Ibid., 64–65 (emphasis added). See also “Discussion” in Hamerton-­ Kelly, Violent Origins, 106–45, on 117. 106.  First broached in my René Girard and Secular Modernity, 113, and here expanded via the Alison connection. 107. Fornari, A God Torn to Pieces, 78. For a further argument along this line, see Gritti on Nietzsche according to Fornari and Girard, in “Nietzsche’s Double Binds.” 108. Fornari, A God Torn to Pieces, 113. 109. Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, 536. 110. Girard, When These Things Begin, 135. 111. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 438–39.

3. From Hominization to Apocalypse 1. See, e.g., Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 58. Girard makes clear that there is only one reality or type of mimesis, though it can manifest itself in both good and bad forms. His example is the possibility of either

Notes to Pages 52–56  253

good or bad mimetic reactions in the incident of the woman caught in adultery in John 8; see Girard, When These Things Begin, 125. Later, Girard speaks of both good and bad mimesis quite plainly, regarding the latter as the choice of human over divine models and as symbolized by Satan; see, e.g., Reading the Bible with René Girard, 122. This does not mean that he has opted for two distinct mimetic realities, however—one mimesis can still suffice, though it is a malleable reality. 2.  Girard (with Adams), “Violence, Difference, Sacrifice,” 23–24. 3. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 221. 4. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 93–104. 5.  Girard (with Adams), “Violence, Difference, Sacrifice,” 21–22. 6. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 93. 7.  Ibid., 95. 8.  Ibid., 98. 9.  Ibid., 102. Cf. “Interview: René Girard” (the Diacritics interview), 35. I thought immediately of George Orwell’s little classic Animal Farm. 10. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 283–84. 11. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 125. 12.  Ibid., 99. 13.  Ibid., 105. 14.  Ibid., 105, 107–8. 15. Ibid., 115. Later, Girard traces this breakthrough at least to the Cro-­Magnon period; see Reading the Bible with René Girard, 41. In Evolution and Conversion (on 123), Girard distances himself from the more pacific “deferred gesture of appropriation” that his one-­time pupil Eric Gans offers as an alternative to the scapegoat mechanism in his own quasi-­Girardian theory of “generative anthropology.” See my remarks on Gans’s alternative in René Girard and Secular Modernity, 66–68. Girard condemns “generative anthropology” for positing an implausible prehistoric social contract, charging Gans with being dismissive of religion and naive about violence. 16.  Ibid., 127–28. 17. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 94. Here he mentions dominance patterns rather than animal rites as the animal precursor to a hominizing scapegoat mechanism. 18. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 85. The English translation uses “humankind” in this passage to render les hommes, possibly aiming to inclusivize the language. However, it concerns me that “humankind” is also more specific, even more technical, and might suggest that the transition to humanity has already taken place, thus contradicting the main thrust of the passage. But that is not Girard’s intention. Later, on the same page, he confirms that “Homo sapiens itself must be the child of the still rudimentary forms of the process I have just described.” Cf. the French original: Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair, Le Livre de Poche (Paris: Grasset, 1999), 129–30.

254  Notes to Pages 56–62

19.  Ibid., 111. 20.  Ibid., 86. 21.  Ibid., 87. 22.  Ibid., 110–11. 23.  Ibid., 90. 24. Ibid.; cf. the French original: Celui par qui le scandale arrive: Entretiens avec Maria Stella Barberi (2001) (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 2008), 141 (translation mine). 25. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 198. 26. Girard, La conversion de l’art, 20. 27.  Steinmair-­Pösel, “Original Sin, Grace, and Positive Mimesis,” 2–3. 28.  Ibid., 4, citing Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 16 (emphasis added). 29. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 91. 30.  Ibid., 90. 31.  Girard, “Animal Scapegoating at Çatalhöyük,” 222. The two standard works on Çatalhöyük reproduce and address a number of the wall paintings, though without Girard’s unifying insights; see Balter, The Goddess and the Bull, and Hodder, Çatalhöyük. Hodder is the long-­term leader of the archaeological excavation. 32. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 116. 33. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 192–93. 34. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 55. 35. Girard, When These Things Begin, 97. For Schwager, this reflects a pedagogical aim on God’s part but not any actual atoning purpose: “God by the law commanded something which he himself did not specifically want, but which—in awakening consciousness of sin—was temporarily needed for humankind.” See Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, 183. A similar conclusion is drawn from a process theological perspective by Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, for whom violence prior to the awareness of genuine transcendence may be labeled evil but is not sinful; see Suchocki, The Fall to Violence, 95, 98–99. 36. Girard, Battling to the End, xvi. 37. Girard, Reading the Bible with René Girard, 77. 38.  Ibid., 112. 39.  Ibid., 116. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 198–99. A footnote is provided to the Deutero-­Pauline text Ephesians 6:12–13, about the whole armor of God, but that represents a negative take on a phenomenon that Paul, and Girard, understand to be far from entirely negative. I noted in chapter 2 a “middle Girard” reference to these powers and principalities as constituting

Notes to Pages 63–69  255

a whole controlling order of reality that has been overcome by the cross, according to Colossians 2:13–15; see Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 192–93. “Late Girard” wishes to go further, however, coming to a more rounded theological assessment of the powers. 43. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 96. 44.  Ibid., 97. 45. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 199. 46. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 98. 47. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 54. 48.  Ibid., 68. 49.  Ibid., 98. 50.  Ibid., 131n3. 51. Girard, Battling to the End, 183. 52. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World; see esp. 205–15. 53. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 215. 54. Girard, Reading the Bible with René Girard, 113. 55. See Schwager’s letters of 31 January 1977, 29 March 1978, and 22  April 1978, along with Girard’s responses of 12 February 1977 and 19 May 1978; in Girard and Schwager, René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974–1991, respectively on 35, 53–54, 59–60 (Schwager) and 37, 61 (Girard). Indeed, Girard largely attributes this breakthrough to Schwager’s influence: see Girard, in Vattimo and Girard, Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith, 93. 56.  See Schwager’s letter of 22 April 1978, in Girard and Schwager, René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974–1991, 59. 57.  Girard (with Adams), “Violence, Difference, Sacrifice,” 215–17; The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 42. See also Hardin, “Sacrificial Language in Hebrews,” 113, 116. 58.  See Maria Stella Barberi’s question in Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 70. 59.  Girard (interview with Doran), “Apocalyptic Thinking after 9/11,” 29–30. 60. Girard, De la violence à la divinité, 1001n (translations mine). The main deletion from the English edition of Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World to which I am referring is the paragraph on p. 243 beginning “The non-­sacrificial reading I am advocating . . . ” 61.  Girard, “Not Just Interpretation, There are Facts Too,” in Vattimo and Girard, Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith, 88–108, on 93. 62. Girard, When These Things Begin, 115. 63. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 216. 64.  Ibid., 216–17. 65.  Ibid., 217.

256  Notes to Pages 70–77

66. Girard, When These Things Begin, 114–15. 67. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 71. 68. Girard, When These Things Begin, 115. 69. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 217; cf. The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 72. 70.  Ibid., 71–72. 71. Girard, To Double Business Bound, 5. 72. Girard, The Girard Reader, 254. 73. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 203. 74. Girard, Reading the Bible with René Girard, 158 (emphasis added). 75. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 205–6. 76. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 151. 77.  Girard (with Bertonneau), “The Logic of the Undecidable,” 13. 78. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 289; Battling to the End, 95. 79.  See, e.g., Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 258, 235. 80. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 161–64; The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 73. 81.  Gardner, “Modernity as Revelation,” 239. 82. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 242. 83. Girard, When These Things Begin, 57, 72. Global homogenization does, however, fight back: consider, for instance, how major commercial brewers buy up local microbreweries and their craft beers while maintaining the original craft beer labeling—a case of the center controlling the periphery. 84. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 7. 85. Girard, When These Things Begin, 87. 86. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 251. See also Girard’s exploration of this “mimetic exhaustion,” or “exhausted mimeticism,” in “Conversion in Literature and Christianity” (1999), in Mimesis and Theory, 263–73; see 264–65, 270. The point is taken up by Peter Paik in his Girardian reflection on the 2012 science-­fiction slasher film Cabin in the Woods, in which young Americans wanly pass up a chance to save the world; see Paik, “Apocalypse of the Therapeutic.” This is a world that nobody will miss, according to a depressive and listless Kirsten Dunst in the apocalyptic 2011 film Melancholia. Consider also various wrung-­out characters in the fiction of Michel Houellebecq, such as François in the controversial 2015 novel Submission, about an unopposed Islamic takeover of France in the near future.   Despite claiming to have previously disregarded this possibility of mimetic exhaustion, Girard appears to identify it early on in Dostoevsky’s character Stavrogin, whom he regards as “the victim of ennui”; see Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 163. Girard also highlights a variant of this phenomenon, in which desire is ostensibly renounced as part of a strategy for appearing self-­sufficient,

Notes to Pages 77–85  257

whereby “in the end the hero reaches a stage of lucid stupefaction which constitutes the final romantic pose”; see Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 273. Despite a superficial similarity, however, this is not the same as his more recently identified self-­exhaustion of mimetic desire. Girard also observes that indifference can overcome the will to power; see To Double Business Bound, 73.   This “mimetic passivity” can be a good thing, however, if it enables resistance to dangerous mimetic escalation. Though Slavoj Žižek points to a related downside, addressing a culture of widespread moral torpor in which the only way to impassion and mobilize people is by the politics of fear; see Žižek, Violence, 40–41. 87. Girard, When These Things Begin, 83. 88. See Girard’s Le Monde interview not long after 9/11, “What Is Occurring Today Is Mimetic Rivalry on a Planetary Scale,” unpaginated. 89. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 8. 90. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 169; When These Things Begin, 63; The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 28–29. 91.  See Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 23–31, on 31. 92. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 175. 93.  Ibid., 181. 94. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 84. 95. Girard, Battling to the End, 18. 96.  Ibid., 17. 97.  Ibid., 21, 42. 98.  Ibid., 18. 99.  Ibid., 216. 100.  Ibid., x. 101.  See my René Girard and Secular Modernity, chapter 5 (“War, Terror, Apocalypse”), for a more detailed discussion of Battling to the End and the violent Islamist question in conversation with Girard. 102. Girard, When These Things Begin, 82. 103. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 72–73. 104. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 186. 105.  In Alison’s postface to the 2010 edition of Raising Abel. 106.  Sherman, “Metaphysics and the Redemption of Sacrifice,” 52–53.

4. Girard among the Theologians 1. Girard, Battling to the End, xv. 2.  Kirwan, “ ‘Strategies of Grace,’ ” 129. 3.  Girard, letter to Schwager of 17 April 1978, in Girard and Schwager, René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974–1991, 55.

258  Notes to Pages 86–90

4. Girard, When These Things Begin, 36. 5. Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, 220, 227. 6. Girard (with Kaplan), “An Interview with René Girard.” Elsewhere Girard defends his commitment to Christian orthodoxy more generally: see, e.g., Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 224; “The Anthropology of the Cross: A Conversation with René Girard,” in The Girard Reader, 262–88, on 288; foreword to James G. Williams, The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred, x. On Girard and incarnation, see also my chapter “Embodiment and Incarnation,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion, ed. James Alison and Wolfgang Palaver (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 193–200. 7.  Schwager, “Christ’s Death and the Prophetic Critique of Sacrifice,” 110. 8. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, xi. 9.  Ibid., 44. 10.  Ibid., 72. 11.  Ibid., 60. 12.  Ibid., 94, where Girard is discussing Paul in Romans. 13. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 220–23; When These Things Begin, 101. 14. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 219. 15. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 189. 16. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 67. 17. Ibid. 18. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 211. 19. Girard, When These Things Begin, 90. 20. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 60. See Girard’s related comments on the divine gift of the resurrection establishing a dissenting minority in the face of false-­sacred consensus in Vattimo and Girard, Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith, 105. 21. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 44. 22. Girard, When These Things Begin, 98. 23. Girard, Reading the Bible with René Girard, 156. 24. Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats?, 222. 25. Girard, Reading the Bible with René Girard, 156. 26.  Ibid., 157. 27. Ibid. 28. Girard, The Girard Reader, 268. 29.  See Bernard Sawicki, OSB, reviewing my René Girard and Secular Modernity, in Ecclesia Orans 30, no. 2 (2013): 648–51. 30.  Father Wrex Woolnough, of the Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane. 31. Girard, When These Things Begin, 92.

Notes to Pages 90–95  259

32.  Ibid., 97. 33.  Ibid., 92. 34.  Ibid., 97. 35.  Ibid., 100. There are other reasons why Roman Catholicism appeals to Girard, but its possession of the truth is central. There is also its fearless adherence to unpopular truths that preserve life (ibid., 85), the papacy as a sign against the undifferentiation of relativism (ibid., 101), the way a depoliticized papacy now makes the Roman Church “The Last Internationale” (see Girard, Battling to the End, chapter 8, 195–210), and the pastoral realism of its approach to the human condition (see Girard, Reading the Bible with René Girard, 190). On James Alison’s Girardian claim for the Roman Church as the only mimetically healthy one (i.e., where you do not have to define yourself against anyone), see my modest apology for Anglo-­Catholicism in “Conversion and Roman Catholicism: An Anglo-­Catholic Ecclesiological Response to James Alison,” St. Mark’s Review 218, no. 4 (2011): 48–55. 36.  See, e.g., the account of Girard’s conversion in When These Things Begin, 129–32. 37.  Ibid., 96. 38.  Ibid., 120. 39.  Ibid., 74. 40. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 192. 41. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 150. 42. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, xix, 3. 43.  See, e.g., Girard’s apparent dismissal of Jesus Seminar–­type conclusions in The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 69. 44.  Ibid., 50. 45.  Girard (with Adams), “Violence, Difference, Sacrifice,” 31. 46. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 190 (emphasis added). 47. Bandera, A Refuge of Lies, 8, referring to Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 90. 48. Bandera, A Refuge of Lies, 15. 49.  Ibid., 7. 50.  Lenehan, “Girard and the Tasks of Theology,” 113–14. 51. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 124. 52.  Girard (with Adams), “Violence, Difference, Sacrifice,” 23–25. Martha Reineke acknowledges this development, bringing Girard into fruitful conversation with the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott as a further stage in her project of building a rapprochement between mimetic theory and depth psychology. She wishes, however, that Girard could have been clearer on the mechanisms of creativity and loving mimesis; see Reineke, “Transforming Intersubjective Space.” 53. Girard, When These Things Begin, 43.

260  Notes to Pages 95–99

54.  The question of human freedom had long concerned Schwager, as Galvin points out in “Jesus as Scapegoat?,” 178. One could imagine that Schwager is not alone in this among post–World War II German-­speaking theologians. Moreover, it is of particular importance for Schwager’s longstanding Theo-­ dramatic project, reaching back to his doctoral work on drama as a category for interpreting the Spiritual Exercises and the life of Ignatius Loyola. 55. Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 4, 309. Schwager sent Girard a copy of this section about him in the Theo-­Drama, which is how Girard first got wind of Balthasar’s concerns: see Schwager’s letter of 24 May 1981, in René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974–1991, 103. A contrary view to that of Balthasar is provided by George Hunsinger, who (making a comparison with Karl Barth) misrepresents Girard as a heterodox Pelagian with a too-­low Christology, in “The Politics of the Non-­V iolent God.” 56. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 15. 57. Girard, When These Things Begin, 52. 58. Dumouchel, “Violence et non-­ violence” (this is a 1981 article, incorrectly ascribed to 1982 and mis­referenced in the English-­language translation of Schwager’s lecture; on the first page, Dumouchel mentions that the article was originally submitted for publication elsewhere in 1979). 59. Schwager, “Mimesis and Freedom,” 42. See also Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, 226–28. 60. Dumouchel, “Mimetic Theory: Concepts and Models,” in The Ambivalence of Scarcity and Other Essays, 195–208. 61.  As neatly put in summing up Dumouchel’s proposal by my colleague Joel Hodge, at the Sydney Conference of the Australian Girard Seminar on 18 January 2013. Dumouchel was our guest in the discussion and pleased with this summary formula. 62.  Dumouchel, “Creation and Conversion in Girard,” in The Ambivalence of Scarcity and Other Essays, 181–93, on 189. 63.  Ibid., 189. 64. Ibid. 65.  Dumouchel’s comments on mirror neurons were made during the Australian Girard Seminar’s Sydney Conference on 18 January 2013. For mirror neurons (and studies of infant intersubjectivity) as highly suggestive of mimetic theory, see my René Girard and Secular Modernity, 51–56; also Garrels, Mimesis and Science. 66. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 283–84; here compared with the French original, Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde: Recherches avec Jean-­Michel Oughourlian et Guy Lefort (Paris: Grasset, 1978), 380. 67.  See Moosbrugger, “Raymund Schwager’s Maieutics,” 63.

Notes to Pages 100–104  261

68.  See also Schwager’s earlier discussion of natural mimetic desire as humanity’s original openness toward God, though readily diverted under the power of a deceptive model, in Banished from Eden, 42–43. In commending Schwager for this Catholic-­minded account of natural human knowledge of God, Robert J. Daly describes hominization as “the process of human beings receiving the gift/offer of self-­transcendence and, more often than not, turning it into self-­assertion.” See Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, 214. 69. Girard, letter to Schwager of 24 January 1991, in Girard and Schwager, René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974–1991, 180. 70.  Schwager, “Mimesis and Freedom,” 35, 41. 71. Girard, letter to Schwager of 30 October 1991, in Girard and Schwager, René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974–1991, 182–83. On human freedom in general, see, e.g., Girard, When These Things Begin, 61, 74; The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 44. 72. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 90. 73.  Girard (with Adams), “Violence, Difference, Sacrifice,” 20. 74. Girard, When These Things Begin, 31. 75.  Girard (with Golsan), “Interview,” 129. 76. Kirwan, Girard and Theology, 109. 77. Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, 88–93. 78.  See Wohlman, “René Girard et saint Augustin,” 266, 267, 273, 275. 79.  R. Williams, “Girard on Violence, Society and the Sacred,” in Wrestling with Angels, 171–85, on 181. 80. Lenehan, Standing Responsibly Between Silence and Speech, lvii–lxii. 81.  Palaver, “ ‘Creative Renunciation,’ ” 145–47. 82. René Girard (with de Mausson), “Simone Weil vue par René Girard,” Cahiers Simone Weil 11 (1988): 201–2; cited in Meaney, “Simone Weil and René Girard,” 571–72n21 (I could not readily obtain the original to check this reference). 83.  Girard (with Adams), “Violence, Difference, Sacrifice,” 14. 84. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 150. 85.  Palaver, “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” 148–53. 86. Weil, Waiting on God, 3, 8, 9, 31; note also her principled preference for Stoic universalism over Catholic tribalism, on 111. 87.  Ibid., 122–23. 88.  Ibid., 42, 74–75, 77–78, 88. 89.  See Astell, “Saintly Mimesis, Contagion, and Empathy,” 127. 90. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 244. This connection of Antigone with Christ in terms of loving sacrifice is picked up in the Girardian conversation by Martha Reineke in her Intimate Domain, xlv.

262  Notes to Pages 105–107

91. Weil, Waiting on God, 123–24; O’Regan, “Countermimesis and Simone Weil’s Christian Platonism,” 199. 92. Weil, Waiting on God, 126–29; Astell, “Saintly Mimesis, Contagion, and Empathy,” 131. 93.  See Meaney, “Simone Weil and René Girard,” 585. 94.  O’Regan, “Girard and the Spaces of Apocalyptic,” 135n15. 95.  Girard, “Conversion in Literature and Christianity” (1999), 263– 73, on 269, and “Marcel Proust” (1962), 56–70, on 69, both in Mimesis and Theory; for Girard on Hölderlin, see Battling to the End, 120–30. 96. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 182. 97. Girard, When These Things Begin, 93. Weil’s resolutely Christian Platonism, which nevertheless opens itself to the tragic, suggests how Girard’s tragic account of human life and origins might position itself to resist the influential Neoplatonist critique of Milbank. 98. O’Regan, “Countermimesis and Simone Weil’s Christian Platonism,” 206–7n32. 99.  Girard (with Kaplan), “An Interview with René Girard.” 100.  See Fodor, “Christian Discipleship as Participative Imitation.” 101.  Mongrain, “Theologians of Spiritual Transformation,” 85. 102. Girard also identifies the rational form of Christian revelation, which he sees as possibly even “super-­rational,” at work incognito in Proust’s conversion from mimeticism and that brings to In Search of Lost Time “the rationality and order which a truly great art demands.” See “Marcel Proust” (1962), in Mimesis and Theory, 56–70, on 69. 103.  Mongrain, “Theologians of Spiritual Transformation,” 81. 104.  Ibid., 82–83. 105. Girard, Battling to the End, 133; here compared with the French original, Achever Clausewitz: Entretiens avec Benoît Chantre (Paris: Carnets Nord, 2007), 235. 106.  Mongrain, “Theologians of Spiritual Transformation,” 100. Perhaps Michael Kirwan has Mongrain in mind when he disputes this assessment, saying that the allocation to Girard of the theologians’ seat #37 at the Académie française has created unnecessary confusion; see Kirwan, “ ‘Strategies of Grace,’ ” 133n37. 107.  Mongrain, “Theologians of Spiritual Transformation,” 102–5. Girard’s best discussion of this theme is in his early work on Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in which he traces the lineaments and identifies the vice-­like grip of the hypermimetic condition that he refers to as underground mystique and ontological sickness; see Resurrection from the Underground, 76, 79, 88, 141. Also helpful on Girard and Cassian is Robinette, “Deceit, Desire and the Desert”; and Lenehan, “Living Faithfully ‘Where Danger Threatens.’ ” 108. Schwager, Banished from Eden, 160.

Notes to Pages 107–113  263

109. Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, 202. 110.  See Alison, “Contemplation in a World of Violence,” in On Being Liked, 1–16. 111. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 14; cf. The Girard Reader, 198. 112.  See, e.g., Laurence Freeman, the current leader of the John Main movement, in his helpful introduction to Christian faith from this perspective, First Sight. See also Grote, “The Imitation of Christ as Double Bind,” 493, where he says that “the stilling of the mimetic process is the essence of silence.” 113.  Palaver, “From Closed Societies to the Open Society,” 112. 114.  Astell, “Violence, Mysticism, and René Girard,” 409–10. 115. Girard, Battling to the End, 131. 116. Ibid. 117. In addition to Astell’s article, “Violence, Mysticism, and René Girard,” I was helped in formulating these thoughts by Rebecca Adams, in her recollection of Girard’s influence for a colloquium marking the first anniversary of his death: see The Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, no. 53 (May 2017), www.violenceandreligion.com/publications /bulletin-­52-­may-­2017/#Tribute (last accessed July 2017). Adams charts a historical journey from narcissism to recognizing the subjectivity of others as equally loved by God. She links this to the development of perspective in Western art. The crucial figure in this story of what we might call developing mystical solidarity is Nicholas of Cusa. Here she draws on a fascinating article by Hoff, “The Visibility of the Invisible.” 118. Hefling, “About What Might a ‘Girard-­Lonergan Conversation’ Be?” 119.  Robert M. Doran, “Lonergan on Imitating the Divine Relations.” 120. Lonergan, Method in Theology, 127, 355. 121.  Ibid., 144. 122.  Ibid., 111. See also Miller, “Imitating Christ’s Cross.” 123. Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 77. 124.  Ibid., 10, 16, 48, 62, 68, 76—and 88–92 on the method of théologie totale. 125.  Ibid., 92. 126.  Ibid., 23. 127. At the time of writing, Coakley’s 2012 Gifford Lectures, “Sacrifice Regained: Evolution, Cooperation and God,” have not been published, though they can be viewed online: http://www.giffordlectures.org /lectures/sacrifice-­regained-­evolution-­cooperation-­and-­god. See also her 2015 DuBose Lectures (at the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee), titled “Return to Sacrifice.” Similar to these are her 2015 Stob Lectures

264  Notes to Pages 116–120

(at Calvin Seminary, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, viewable at https://vimeo .com/146000078, https://vimeo.com/146000316) (last accessed in June 2016). In all these lectures her assessment of Girard is the same: regarding the fallen human condition, Girard’s account is without peer, though at the cost of intruding founding violence into the ontology of creation itself; also, that he fails to affirm the positive value of sacrifice and ritual once they are purified of their reliance on the false sacred. This is despite Coakley’s recognition that Girard and, later, his theological followers offer ample redress on the matter of sacrifice, and notwithstanding James Alison surely completing any rehabilitation that Girard may have needed on the matter of Christian ritual, beyond its false-­sacred origins.   I am heartened to discover that the young American Catholic theologian Chelsea Jordan King confirms my conclusions about Coakley on Girard, both here and in chapter 6, including my suggestion of their potential compatibility; see King, “Girard Reclaimed.”

5. A Divine-­Human Drama 1. Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 4, 297–313. 2. These are the themes of the first and second parts of Balthasar’s great trilogy, with an introductory discussion of beauty, glory, and the underlying form of Christ in The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1. 3. Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats?, 119; cf. Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, 69. 4. Kaplan, René Girard, Unlikely Apologist, 71. 5. Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, 488. 6. Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, 203. 7. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 111. 8. Girard, When These Things Begin, 123. 9. Kaplan, René Girard, Unlikely Apologist, 94. 10. Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats?, 121. 11.  See, e.g., Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 393–94. 12.  Milbank, “Stories of Sacrifice,” 40. 13. Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, 24–25. 14.  This is the premise structuring Milbank’s seminal 1993 work The­ ology and Social Theory. 15.  Milbank, “Can a Gift Be Given?” 16. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 252–53. Here Girard is indebted to the sociologist Marcel Mauss in his thinking on the nature of gift: see Mauss, The Gift. For helpful background on Milbank regarding gift, see Coakley, “Why Gift?”

Notes to Pages 120–125  265

17. Milbank, “Can a Gift Be Given?” Milbank is indebted to Alain Caillé in his discussion of gift: see, e.g., Caillé, “Anti-­Utilitarianism, Economics and the Gift Exchange.” 18.  Scheler’s nostalgia for a hierarchical society is evident throughout his Ressentiment. 19.  Milbank, “Stories of Sacrifice,” 50–51. 20. Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, 13n3. 21.  Schwager, letter to Girard of 4 January 1991, in René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974–1991, 176–77; here referring to Girard, A Theater of Envy, 336. 22.  Girard, letter to Schwager of 24 January 1991, in René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974–1991, 179. 23.  Ibid., 179–80. 24.  Girard (with Adams), “Violence, Difference, Sacrifice,” 20–21. 25.  Milbank, “Stories of Sacrifice,” 56–57n61. 26.  R. Williams, The Tragic Imagination, 150. 27.  Ibid., 150–51. 28. Dulles, Models of Revelation, chapter 9. 29.  See, e.g., Marion, Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness (1997), trans. Jeffrey L. Kossky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 235; see the discussion of resurrection as a “saturated phenomena” in Robinette, Grammars of Resurrection, chapter 2, and Kelly, The Resurrection Effect—also Jesus’s ascension in Kelly, Upward. 30. The similarly open-­ended category of mystery is appropriate, too, though there is nothing mystifying about revelation for Girard, thanks to the definite content and clear intent of scriptural revelation. And, of course, there can always be a “Poirot moment,” when the penny drops and the mystery is unveiled. Girard himself had one of these moments in 1959. 31. Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, 69; Jesus the Forgiving Victim, 40. 32. The return of the historical Jesus to New Testament studies half a century after Albert Schweitzer’s discrediting of the nineteenth-­century quest began with an essay by Rudolf Bultmann’s student Ernst Käsemann, “The Problem of the Historical Jesus,” in his Essays on New Testament Themes, Studies in Biblical Theology 41 (London: SCM, 1964), 15–47. See also James  M. Robinson, A New Quest of the Historical Jesus (London: SCM, 1959). 33. Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, 203. He refers to the Chicxulub crater, the result of a cataclysmic, life-­extinguishing asteroid impact 65 million years ago. 34. Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 388. 35. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, chapter 1. 36.  Wandinger, “ ‘Concupiscence’ and ‘Mimetic Desire,’ ” 158–60.

266  Notes to Pages 125–126

37. Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 4, 308. 38. Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, 206. 39.  Wandinger, “ ‘Concupiscence’ and ‘Mimetic Desire,’ ” 153. 40. Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, 93. 41.  Nicholas Lash pointed out during the late twentieth-­century Christological ferment that humanity cannot truly be known apart from “initial healing of the gap between expression and reality” in Jesus Christ (Lash, “Up and Down in Christology,” 40; cf. Milbank’s fifth Augustinian proposition: see The Future of Love, 338)—a conclusion entirely in keeping with Girard’s theological anthropology (and with that of Barth for that matter), which is only complete with the revelation of Jesus Christ. So, theology “from below” turns out to require the supplement of theology “from above.” Likewise, Milbank accuses Rahner of an extrinsicism surprisingly akin to that of Barth since in Rahner’s case the ground prepared “from below” remains fallow until the seed of Rahner’s “supernatural existential” arrives “from above” (Milbank, The Suspended Middle, 64). 42.  For a thorough discussion of these matters, see my Is Jesus Unique? 43.  I mention in passing a third option in post–World War II the­ology that has been called theology “from the end” (by Vanhoozer, in “Human Being, Individual and Social,” 173), rather than “from above” or “from below.” The reference is to the “theology of hope” school of Wolfhart Pannenberg, for whom the light of revelation shines back on history from the eschaton, which is prefigured in the resurrection. Jürgen Moltmann is another major proponent of this approach. Unlike Rahner, Moltmann seeks to build his theological anthropology on God’s promise rather than on our created nature while, unlike Barth, Pannenberg seeks to accommodate modern scientific understandings of the world. However, I regard both as presenting essentially a sophisticated variant of theology “from above,” in the sense that theologies of hope also look for God entirely outside any system of human meaning. The Catholic imagination calls for a real, converting manifestation of grace in the present world that can be neither entirely alien (“from above”) nor exclusively proleptic (“from the end”); see, e.g., Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 377. 44. McIntosh, Christology from Within. Such categorization of Bal­ thasar’s theology as “from within” did not satisfy Milbank (who accused Balthasar of gnostic tendencies), for whom the theology “from within” of Henri de Lubac’s Catholicism provides the gold standard (Milbank, The Suspended Middle, 14–15). 45. Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 2, 55–56; cf. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, 100. Such an approach is, as Vanhoozer points out, at once informational, expressive, and volitional (Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, 106). Vanhoozer commends the category of Theo-­ drama as an improvement

Notes to Pages 127–129  267

on George Lindbeck’s influential account of doctrinal types, according to which the inadequate and static options of “cognitive-­propositional” and “experiential-­expressive” are superseded by the fully participatory form of developing theological truth that he calls “cultural linguistic” (see Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine). Vanhoozer is alarmed by the potentially unregulated nature of the latter form, however, seeking to subsume all three dimensions under his own overarching scriptural category of “canonical linguistic” (Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, 149). In Vanhoozer’s proposal, I think that the hands are the hands of Lindbeck and Balthasar but the voice is the voice of John Calvin.   Ben Quash offers a recognizably Anglican version of theological dramatic theory, compared with Balthasar’s more “crystallized” presentation, which Quash sees as still too epic, too fixed, and too ecclesially straitjacketed; see Quash, Theology and the Drama of History, 187. 46.  Ibid., 50. 47. Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, 12. 48. Ibid. 49. Quash, Theology and the Drama of History, 37. 50. McClendon, Biography as Theology, 25. There is a connection between what the Protestant McClendon does with great Protestant lives and what Schwager does with Ignatius and the saints of Catholic tradition. 51.  Schwager’s 1970 Fribourg doctorate was titled Das dramatische Kirchenverständnis bei Ignatius von Loyola: Historisch-­pastoraltheologische Studie über die Stellung der Kirche in dem Exerzitien und im Leben des Ignatius (Ignatius of Loyola’s Dramatic Understanding of the Church: A Historical-­ Pastoral Theological Study of the Position of the Church in the Exercises and in the Life of Ignatius). I am grateful to Dom Elias Carr for sharing with me some of his unpublished research on Schwager’s life and work, illustrating the formative role of Theo-­dramatic concerns. 52. Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 4, 309. 53.  Schwager, “Christ’s Death and the Prophetic Critique of Sacrifice,” 109. 54. Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, 16 (cf. 9–10). Schwager summarizes his sense of how each stage of the Gospel drama of Jesus advances on the previous stage through various tensions and apparent contradictions; see 201. 55.  Schwager, “Christ’s Death and the Prophetic Critique of Sacrifice,” 109. 56. Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, 2–9, referring to his earlier full-­length study of key redemption thinkers throughout history, Der wunderbare Tausch: Zur Geschichte und Deutung der Erlösungslehre (Munich: Kösel, 1986). On Schwager’s understanding of Theo-­drama mediating between the

268  Notes to Pages 129–137

Gospel emphasis on Jesus’s praxis and his cross as salvific, see Wandinger, “Salvation through Forgiveness or through the Cross?” 57.  Deane-­Drummond, “Beyond Separation and Synthesis,” 368. 58. Girard, The Girard Reader, 12. 59.  Girard, in Vattimo and Girard, Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith, 105. 60. See Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 220; I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 165; When These Things Begin, 10. 61. Alison, Raising Abel, 134–35. 62. Girard, Battling to the End, 82. 63.  Ibid., xvii. 64. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 40. 65.  Ibid., 63. 66. Ibid. 67. Alison, Raising Abel, 125. Parallels with the proleptic eschatology of what Vanhoozer calls theology “from the end” can certainly be drawn here. 68.  J. G. Williams, “Foreword: René Girard since 1996,” xii. 69.  See my discussion in A God for This World, chapters 2 and 3. 70. Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence, 190. 71. Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats?, 61–62. 72. Girard, When These Things Begin, 116. 73. Thomas, “Summary Analysis,” in Thomas, God’s Activity in the World, 231–40, on 238. 74. Baillie, God Was in Christ, 114. 75. McCabe, God Matters, 14. 76.  Van Beeck, God Encountered, 289. 77.  Ibid., 290. 78.  Thomas, introduction to Thomas, God’s Activity in the World, 1–14, on 1 (emphasis added). 79. See, e.g., Edward Schillebeeckx writing of his Dominican forebear with great affection in “A Saint: Albert the Great,” in God Among Us, 225–31. 80. Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence, 113. 81.  Thomas, introduction to Thomas, God’s Activity in the World, 1–14, on 2. 82.  Ibid. See Summa Theologiae, Ia, 105, 5 & 2; Summa Contra Gentiles, III, 70. 83. Thomas, “Summary Analysis,” in Thomas, God’s Activity in the World, 231–40; see Summa Theologiae Ia, 105, 6. 84.  Gilson, “The Corporeal World and the Efficacy of Second Causes,” in Thomas, God’s Activity in the World, 213–30, on 225, excerpted from Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Random House, 1956).

Notes to Pages 138–147  269

85.  R. Williams, “Redeeming Sorrows: Marilyn McCord Adams and the Defeat of Evil” (1996), in Wrestling with Angels, 255–74, on 269. 86. Farrer, A Science of God, 76. 87.  R. Williams, “Redeeming Sorrows,” in Wrestling with Angels, 255– 74, on 269. 88.  Ibid., 269. 89. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 195. 90. Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 2, 80. 91.  R. Williams, “Girard on Violence, Society and the Sacred” (1989), in Wrestling with Angels, 171–85, on 181. 92. Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 3, 533. 93.  Ibid., 247. 94. Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 2, 284. 95. Milbank, The Suspended Middle, 39. 96. Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, 426, 432–33. 97. Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, 41. 98. Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 5, 52. 99. Girard, The Girard Reader, 283–84; Battling to the End, 196. I am grateful to Ann Astell for reminding me of these references, in her “Violence, Mimesis, and René Girard,” 399. See also Girard, To Double Business Bound, 5. 100.  See Astell, “Violence, Mysticism, and René Girard,” 402. 101. Kaplan, René Girard, Unlikely Apologist, 87. 102.  Ibid., 97. 103. Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, vol. 2, 28. 104. Girard, When These Things Begin, 133.

6. The Shadow Side of Finitude 1.  Girard (with Morin), “L’opposition au darwinisme s’est évaporée”; see also Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 96–97. 2. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 93–99; Evolution and Conversion, chapter 3. 3.  For a fuller discussion of these matters, see my book A God for This World and my essay “Theodicy and Animal Suffering in Darwin’s World.” 4. On the root cause of English divinity responding so badly to Darwin—because he undermined an apologetic mainstay provided by the argument from design—see Don Cupitt, “Darwinism and English Religious Thought,” in Explorations in Theology 6 (London: SCM, 1979), 42–49. 5.  Linzey, “The Conflict between Ecotheology and Animal Theology.” 6.  See, e.g., ibid.; Hart, The Doors of the Sea; Milbank, “The Poverty of Niebuhrianism,” in The Word Made Strange, 233–54.

270  Notes to Pages 147–153

7.  Kingston, “Theodicy and Animal Welfare,” 74. 8.  See, e.g., Girard, When These Things Begin, chapter 7 (“Science”). 9.  See, e.g., Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-BillionYear History of the Human Body (New York: Pantheon, 2008). 10.  In this reflection I am indebted to the following discussions: Wildman, “The Use and Meaning of the Word ‘Suffering’ ”; Stoeger, “Entropy, Emergence and the Physical Roots of Natural Evil”; Murphy, “Science and the Problem of Evil”; Rolston, “Naturalizing and Systematizing Evil”; Peacocke, “The Cost of New Life.” 11. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 113. 12.  Rota, “The Problem of Evil and Cooperation,” 364. 13.  Rolston, “Kenosis and Nature,” 51–52. 14. Ibid., 54–55; cf. P. Williams, “How Evil Entered the World,” 210–11. 15.  Dumouchel, “A Covenant Among Beasts,” 19. 16.  For this theme that Coakley has been developing, see, e.g., her 2015 DuBose Lectures “Return to Sacrifice.” Answering questions at the end of the second of three lectures, Coakley admits that she has staked her life on her belief in a different metaphysical vision, one that is ontologically nonviolent. It seems clear that for Coakley to preserve this commitment, Girard needs to be sacrificed—though I argue that her concerns are unnecessary. In this I am supported by more recently published work, e.g., King, “Girard Reclaimed.” 17. See, e.g., Coakley, “Evolution, Cooperation, and Divine Providence,” 383. 18. Palaver, “From Closed Societies to the Open Society,” 98, citing Bowles’s article: “Conflict: Altruism’s Midwife,” Nature 456, no. 7220 (20 November 2008): 326–27, on 326. 19.  Weigand, “Complex Mimetic Systems,” 75. 20.  Ibid., 73. 21.  Girard, “Mimesis and Violence” (1979), in The Girard Reader, 9–19, on 12–13 (emphasis added). 22. Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats?, 26. 23.  Rolston, “Naturalizing and Systematizing Evil,” 85. 24. Rolston, Science and Religion, 144–46. 25. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 96. 26. Farley, Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion, 107. 27. McCabe, God Matters, 33. 28. Dumouchel, “Mirrors of Nature,” 60. The Star Trek franchise appears to have arrived at the same conclusion. Various characters all sought to become human or more human, from Spock to Data to Seven of Nine. In Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001), however, the computer-­generated “EMH” (Emergency Medical Hologram)—who is required to perform far beyond

Notes to Pages 153–159  271

programmed specifications as the lost ship’s permanent doctor—proved to be a highly mimetic character and was eventually thoroughly humanized, having had to negotiate the spectrum of desire during years of rubbing up against “his” human shipmates. 29.  I am grateful to Sandor Goodhart for his 2015 film seminar paper at Western Sydney University, “Playing the ‘Imitation Game’: Hypermimesis, the Ethical, and Girardian Readings of Ex Machina,” and for helpful email exchanges as he was preparing it. My conclusions differ from his, however. 30. Farley, Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion, 99. 31.  See Schillebeeckx, “I Believe in God, Creator of Heaven and Earth,” in God Among Us, 90–102. 32. Love, Love, Violence, and the Cross, 146. 33.  See Cavarero, Horrorism, drawing on Hannah Arendt and Joseph Conrad. 34. Adams, Christ and Horrors, 210. 35. Girard, letter to Schwager of 13 June 1976, in René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974–1991, 28. 36.  Girard (with Gounelle and Houziauz), from “Debat,” in Dieu, une invention?, 105–19, on 115 (translation mine). 37.  Ibid., 116. 38.  Having written this chapter, it later occurred to me that I could have approached this analysis somewhat differently, drawing not only on La Capra but also more fully on Girard’s own analysis of ontological sickness and its various permutations from Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. I could also have used Nietzsche, following Stefano Tomelleri in his Girardian reflection. He analyzes, for instance, “the self-­delusion of those who hide to varying degrees behind forms of victim-­ playing, remaining increasingly trapped in the secret delights of ressentiment.” See Tomelleri, Ressentiment, 130. 39.  See my René Girard and Secular Modernity, 112–15. The quote is from Bandera, The Sacred Game, 173. I refer in particular to Girard, “Nietzsche versus the Crucified,” in The Girard Reader, 246–53; “The Founding Murder in the Philosophy of Nietzsche,” 242–43, 246; Evolution and Conversion, 220; “The Twofold Nietzschean Heritage,” in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 173, 171 (see also 181); “An Interview with René Girard,” in To Double Business Bound, 227. 40.  La Capra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” 46. 41.  Ibid., 69. 42.  See, e.g., Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, chapter 8; Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 326–35. 43.  La Capra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” 82 (the meta­narrative point is on 83). 44.  Ibid., 70, 66.

272  Notes to Pages 159–167

45.  Ibid., 65. 46.  Ibid. I first submitted the manuscript of this work to the publisher in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s election. It occurred to me then that La Capra’s discussion of “structural trauma,” in dialogue with Girard, goes a long way toward explicating the nature of America’s Brexit-­ style protest vote. 47.  La Capra accurately if dismissively identifies connections between his account of historical trauma and Girard on the sacrificial crisis and its in-­principle sacrificial resolution: ibid., 45n. He is no Girardian, but he draws close at this point. 48. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 275; Goodhart, The Prophetic Law, 113. 49.  La Capra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” 58, 77. Cf. Žižek, Violence, 217. 50. Reineke, Intimate Domain, 257–58. 51.  Ibid., 4–6; referring to Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 78–79. 52. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 311. See my discussion of three recent Woody Allen films on this point in “Against Romantic Love.” Allen has become a mimetically self-­aware enemy of modern romantic histrionics, in favor of something far more ordinary, far less overheated. 53. Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 2, 127–28. This is a good discussion of Augustinian theodicy, with a list of key primary sources. But the picture can be softened, as Ann Astell shows, highlighting a degree of sympathy for victims and a concern that they receive justice, in Augustine’s commentary on the psalms; see Astell, “Hearing the Cry of the Poor.” 54. Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 53. I value Hick’s discussion of Augustine’s theodicy, which is the touchstone of later Western theology. 55. Hunter, Darwin’s God, 14–18. 56.  Ibid., 14. 57.  See Moltmann, The Crucified God. 58. Girard, I See Satan Fall like Lightning, 117; Job, 131. 59. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 319. 60.  Ibid., 303. 61. Milbank, “The Poverty of Niebuhrianism,” in The Word Made Strange, 233–54, on 244. 62.  Milbank, email to the author of 6 August 2013. 63. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 296. 64. This out-­narrating, offering a superior realism, is the burden of Milbank’s essay “The Poverty of Niebuhrianism,” in The Word Made Strange, 233–54, which is a critique of widespread theological capitulation to Realpolitik—see esp. 247–51. 65.  Souillac, “Violence, Mimesis, and War,” 346.

Notes to Pages 167–176  273

66. Hyman, The Predicament of Postmodern Theology, 77 (Hyman’s discussion of “Milbank and Violence,” 73–77, is especially helpful for its insights and references). Even aspects of Augustine are subject to Milbank’s blocking. He is unhappy with what he regards as Augustine actually accepting too much of the world’s tragedy, so that he can re­cast it in a more positive cosmological whole. Milbank has Augustine’s Edenic instinct and his two cities view of history, but not his aesthetic strategy for de­fanging the tragic. My suggestion is that Milbank offers a stronger version of Augustine’s blocking. 67.  MacDougall, “Scapegoating the Secular,” 89. 68.  Ibid., 93. 69.  Ibid., 94. 70.  Ibid., 95. 71.  Milbank, “Can Morality Be Christian?” in The Word Made Strange, 219–32, on 219. 72.  See Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 280; cf. Girard, Battling to the End, xi. 73.  See my René Girard and Secular Modernity, 46–47. 74.  For instance, in its anti-­Semitic persecution narratives; see Girard, The Scapegoat, chapter 1. 75.  Robertson, “Milbank and Modern Secularity,” 91. 76.  Ibid., 85. 77. Reineke, Intimate Domain, 257–58. 78. Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 4, 243. 79. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 267. 80. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 7. 81. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 271, 275; see also Sacrifice, 84–85. 82. Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 4, 161. 83. See Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale; also Quash, Theology and the Drama of History, 195.

7. Divine Overaccepting 1.  Kirwan, “William T. Cavanaugh and René Girard,” 517. 2.  Mairi Nicolson, “Richard Egarr: Early Music Evangelist,” http:// www.abc.net.au/classic/content/2015/06/20/4258491.htm (last accessed June 2015). 3. Wells, Improvisation, 67–68, 105. Wells’s exploration of improvisation goes back to his Durham PhD dissertation: “How the Church Performs Jesus’ Story: Improvising on the Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas,” http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/1462/ (last accessed November 2015).

274  Notes to Pages 176–184

4.  I owe this insight to Curtis Gruenler, from his response to an earlier version of this part of the chapter that I tried out in St. Louis at the July 2015 Conference of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion. 5. Wells, Improvisation, 125. 6.  Ibid., 135–36 (more examples are given). 7.  Kirwan, “William T. Cavanaugh and René Girard,” 511. 8. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, 125. 9.  See, e.g., Miller, “Imitating Christ’s Cross.” 10. Wells, Improvisation, 126. 11.  Ibid., 143, 152–53. 12. Cavanaugh, “From One City to Two: Christian Reimagining of Political Space” (2006), in Migrations of the Holy, 46–68, on 67. 13.  See Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong. 14.  Alison, “Traversing Hostility,” 13. 15. Shults, Christology and Science, 43. 16. Girard, When These Things Begin, 133. 17.  See, e.g., Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, 237, 240, 263; also Jesus the Forgiving Victim, 451; cf. Kirwan, Girard and Theology, 68. 18. Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, 274. 19. Bouteneff, Beginnings, 176. John Hick helpfully discusses the modern development of this Irenaean tradition by Friedrich Schleiermacher; see Evil and the God of Love, III.X. 20.  See, e.g., Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 98. 21.  See Girard (with Gounelle and Houziauz), “Debat,” in Dieu, une invention?, 105–19, on 115–16. 22.  See, e.g., Rolston, “Naturalizing and Systematizing Evil,” 77–79. 23.  Kelly, “Love Your Enemies,” 62. 24. Ibid. 25. Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 240. 26. Delio, Christ and Evolution, 56. 27.  Ibid., 76. 28.  Ibid., 137. 29.  Here Girard is in accord with his Reformed theological critic Hans Boersma, who argues that minimal human violence “in the interest of God’s eschatological, undeconstructable justice .  .  . is a necessary and acceptable accompaniment both of God’s and of our practice of hospitality.” See Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross, 51. Girard does not agree with Boersma on divine violence, however, as we will see in the following chapter. 30. Wells, Improvisation, 151. 31. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy, 63–64. 32. Quash, Theology and the Drama of History, 21. 33.  R. Williams, The Tragic Imagination, 153.

Notes to Pages 184–192  275

34.  Cf. Peter Berger’s discussion of humor as a “signal of transcendence” in A Rumour of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1970), 89–92. 35. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy, 64–65. 36.  See Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist. 37. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 142. The Canadian Girardian film scholar David Humbert regards the massing of crows in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds as a more recent stand-­in for the mimetic crisis; see his Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock, 12. 38. Robinette, Grammars of Resurrection, 358; referring to Wink, Engaging the Powers, 14, 16–17. 39. Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, 97. This is another way of approaching the recasting of protology proposed by Anthony Kelly (see above). 40. Psalm 104:26; cf. Psalm 107:23–32. As ever, there are examples in the psalms and elsewhere in the Hebrew scriptures where the reality of founding violence is not as yet so clearly “demythologized”: see Psalm 74:14, Isaiah 27:1, and apocryphal texts in 2 Esdras. 41. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy, 65. 42. Farley, Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion, 112. 43. Jones, Trauma and Grace. 44.  Ibid., 59. 45.  See Girard, “Violence in Biblical Narrative.” 46. Jones, Trauma and Grace, 59 (emphasis added). 47.  See Alison, “Contemplation in a World of Violence,” in On Being Liked, 1–16. 48.  Reproduced by kind permission of Stainer & Bell, Ltd., London, England, www.stainer.co.uk. 49.  Here I refer to Girard’s extended discussion of “The Skandalon” in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 416–31. 50. Love, Love, Violence, and the Cross, 234. 51.  Ibid., 231. 52.  Alberg, “Scandals Must Come,” 95–97. The reference is to Hosea 6:6. 53. Alberg, A Reinterpretation of Rousseau, 182. 54.  Girard, foreword to Alberg, A Reinterpretation of Rousseau. See also Alberg’s reflection, on 182. 55.  Alberg, “Mimesis as Scandal,” 40; cf. A Reinterpretation of Rousseau, 182. I wonder if Herman Melville’s Ahab is similarly scandalized by the white whale and the ungovernable mystery that it represents, likewise Rousseau’s countryman the Marquis de Sade—with every pornographer after him, scandalized not only by the procreative telos of sexuality but also by the non­exotic companionability of so much everyday marital intimacy.

276  Notes to Pages 192–199

56.  See, e.g., Flannery O’Connor: The Collected Works (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1988). 57.  See Alberg, “Grace Can Be Violent,” 162–64. 58. Alberg, Beneath the Veil of Strange Verses, 119. 59.  The reference is to Jacob wrestling with God in Genesis 32. 60.  Alberg, “Grace Can Be Violent,” 159. 61.  See Wood, “Sacred and Satanic Violence.” 62.  John P. Meier, Matthew, New Testament Message 3 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1980), 122. 63.  See Neville, A Peaceable Hope, 237. 64. Ibid. 65.  Ibid., 204. 66. Alison, Raising Abel, 158. 67. Mikkelsen, Reconciled Humanity, 182. 68. Suchocki, The Fall to Violence, 146 (emphasis added). 69.  Ibid., 144. 70.  Ibid., 147. 71.  Niewiadomski, “Denial of the Apocalypse,” 61. 72.  Cf. Robinette, Grammars of Resurrection, 301. 73.  Niewiadomski, “Denial of the Apocalypse,” 60–61. 74. Schwager, Jesus of Nazareth, 155. 75.  Ibid., 94; see also Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 189. 76. McCabe, God Still Matters, 9. 77. Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats?, 220. 78. Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, 81. 79.  Ibid., 198. 80. McCabe, God Still Matters, 176 (emphasis added). 81.  For a wider exploration of this theme from a womanist perspective, see the African American Girardian theologian Cheryl Kirk-­D uggan in Refiners’ Fire. 82. Milbank, Being Reconciled, 100. Cf. Žižek, Violence, 217. 83. Neufeld, Killing Enmity, 143. 84.  Ibid., 141. 85. Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 302. 86.  Note that Girard has written approvingly of The Passion of the Christ, praising Mel Gibson for taking the passion seriously (though without necessarily getting the interpretation right); see Girard, “On Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.” 87. Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 306. 88. Neufeld, Killing Enmity, 133.

Notes to Pages 199–205  277

89. Neville, A Peaceable Hope, 143, here referring to Luke’s Gospel. 90.  Girard, in Vattimo and Girard, Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith, 63. 91.  Ibid., 62. 92. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 224. 93. Neville, A Peaceable Hope, 87.

8. Christ, the Nonviolence of God 1. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 167. 2.  Ibid., 126. 3. Girard, Battling to the End, xvi. 4.  Kirwan, “A New Heaven and a New Earth,” 328. 5.  Girard (with Adams), “Violence, Difference, Sacrifice,” 29; see also When These Things Begin, 115. Raymund Schwager identified the beginning of this shift in the Old Testament, when the notion of sacrifice was increasingly linked to obedience; see his “Christ’s Death and the Prophetic Critique of Sacrifice,” 121. 6. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 216. 7. Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 2, 68. This well-­known reference to Jesus passing through all the ages of humanity in order to sum up and absorb into himself the whole human experience is in Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, II.xxii.4; see, e.g., Bettenson, The Early Christian Fathers, 80. 8. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 216–17. 9. Girard, When These Things Begin, 97. 10. Girard, Battling to the End, xvi. 11. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 217. 12. Girard, letter to Schwager of 13 June 1976, in René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974–1991, 29. 13. Girard, Reading the Bible with René Girard, 116. 14. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 151. 15. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 218; Schwager argues that the sacrificial requirements of the Old Testament law are best understood in peda­gogical rather than atoning terms; see Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, 183. 16. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 218 (emphasis added). 17. Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement, 211. 18. Neufeld, Killing Enmity, 92. 19. Love, Love, Violence, and the Cross, 128. 20. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 166.

278  Notes to Pages 205–211

21. Girard, Battling to the End, 122. 22. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 183. 23. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 60. 24.  Ibid., 44 (emphasis added). 25.  Ibid., 94. 26. Girard, When These Things Begin, 97. 27. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 211. 28. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 219. 29. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 140. 30. Alison, Undergoing God, 210. 31.  Heim, “Saved by What Shouldn’t Happen,” 222–23. 32.  Ibid., 224. 33. Heim, Saved from Sacrifice, 112. 34.  Ibid., 143. 35.  See Moosbrugger, “René Girard and Raymund Schwager on Religion, Violence, and Sacrifice,” 159, 157. 36.  Hamerton-­Kelly, Sacred Violence, 60. 37.  See, e.g., Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 216–17. 38.  Girard, “Violence Renounced,” 313. 39. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 210. 40. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 189. Recall the development of Girard’s treatment of Jesus’s resurrection, from chapter 2. 41. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 223; see also When These Things Begin, 101. 42. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 218–19. 43.  Depoortere, “Gianni Vattimo and René Girard on the Uniqueness of Christianity,” 881. 44. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 219. 45.  Ibid., 216. 46. Girard, The Scapegoat, 199. 47. Girard, Sacrifice, 65. 48.  Ibid., 95. 49.  Girard (with Adams), “Violence, Difference, Sacrifice,” 24. 50.  Girard, “Epilogue,” in Battling to the End, 216. 51.  Girard (with Palaver), “The Bloody Skin of the Victim,” 65. 52.  Girard (with Meotti), “Intellectuals as Castrators of Meaning,” 4. 53. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 213–14. 54. Kirwan, Girard and Theology, 123. 55.  Girard (with Adams), “Violence, Difference, Sacrifice,” 25–26. 56. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 216. 57. Kirwan, Girard and Theology, 127–28.

Notes to Pages 211–218  279

58.  Ibid., 131. 59. Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, 190–91. 60.  See Kirwan, Political Theology, 184–85, 187–88. 61. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 59 (referring to John 1:14). 62. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 200. 63.  Ibid., 158. 64.  Ibid., 205–6. 65. Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats?, 26. 66. Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, 327. 67.  I set out Girard’s use of the Old Testament material in my René Girard and Secular Modernity, 84–95. 68. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 52. 69. Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, 37. 70.  Van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish-­Christian Reality, part III: Christ in Context, 145. 71.  See Lapide, The Resurrection of Jesus. 72. See “Response by René Girard and Reply to René Girard,” in Goodhart, The Prophetic Law, 77–91, on 80–81. 73.  Girard, in Vattimo and Girard, Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith, 43. 74.  See “Response by René Girard and Reply to René Girard,” in Good­ hart, The Prophetic Law, 87–88. 75.  Ibid., 88–89. 76.  Ibid., 86. 77. Goodhart, The Prophetic Law, 253. 78.  Goodhart, “Reading the Ten Commandments: Torah, Interpretation, and the Name of God,” in Sacrificing Commentary, 122–38, on 137. 79.  Girard, “Response by René Girard,” 82. 80.  Ibid., 83. There is a fascinating dialogue among Girardians reproduced in Goodhart’s volume The Prophetic Law. Schwager is feisty in his challenge to Goodhart, pressing the point that Girard makes, while his Innsbruck colleague Józef Niewiadomski adopts a mediating position. See “A Jewish-­Christian Dialogue,” in Goodhart, The Prophetic Law, 33–55. 81.  Ibid., 91. 82. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 79. 83.  Anspach, introduction to Girard, Oedipus Unbound, liii. 84.  Girard, “Response by René Girard,” 83. 85.  Van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish-­Christian Reality, part III: Christ in Context, 176. 86. See, e.g., Gorringe, God’s Just Vengeance; Brock and Parker, Saving Paradise; Joanne Carlson Brown and Carole R. Bohn, eds., Christianity,

280  Notes to Pages 219–225

Patriarchy, and Abuse (New York: Pilgrim, 1989); Pahl, Empire of Sacrifice; Pahl and Wellman, “Empire of Sacrifice: Violence and the Sacred in American Culture”; Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation. 87.  Arjakovsky, “Orthodox Debates in the Twentieth Century on the Question of Atonement,” 33. 88.  Morrow, “Violence Unveiled: Understanding Christianity and Politics in Northern Ireland after René Girard’s Rereading of Atonement,” 143. 89. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 150. 90. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 54. 91. Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross, 147. 92.  See Aulén, Christus Victor. 93. Bartlett, Cross Purposes, 208–9. Bartlett, a former Catholic priest, believes that Girard has been led astray by Schwager in his positive reappraisal of sacrifice, which diminishes Christ’s impact on “the semiotic fabric of human consciousness” by requiring ecclesial mediation; see Bartlett, “Paul and Girard Agonistes,” 86–89 (the quotation is on 89). At the end of this chapter I argue that Girard does not go far enough in emphasizing the need for a community that mimetically mediates this wider semiotic breakthrough. 94. Ray, Deceiving the Devil, 116. 95. Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries, 106. 96.  Cahill, “Quaestio Disputata,” 422. In her attempt to “recover Anselm from the ‘Anselmians’ ” (421), Cahill (ibid., 422n8) draws on Richard W. Southern, Saint Anselm: Portrait in a Landscape (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 97.  See Campbell, “The Conceptual Roots of Anselm’s Soteriology,” 260. 98. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 90. See also Cahill, “Quaestio Disputata,” 422. 99.  See Aspenson, “In Defense of Anselm.” 100. Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, 6; see also his fellow Girardian Jesuit, Sean Salai, in “Anselm, Girard, and Sacramental Theology.” 101.  See Kirwan, “Being Saved from Salvation.” 102.  Poettcker, “Reassessing Anselm on Divine Wrath and Judgment,” 86–87. 103. Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries, 107. Someone else who identifies Anselmian affinities in Girard is Milbank, in Theology and Social Theory, 396. 104.  Cahill, “Quaestio Disputata,” 424. 105.  See Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries, chapter 8; Brock and Parker, Saving Paradise, esp. chapters 9 and 10; see also Love, “In Search of a Non-­ Violent Atonement Theory”; Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era; Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, esp. chapters 1 and 3.

Notes to Pages 225–230  281

106. Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross, 40. 107. Love, Love, Violence, and the Cross, 113–14. 108.  Streufert, “Maternal Sacrifice as a Hermeneutics of the Cross,” 73, citing a 2002 lecture by Rebecca Ann Parker. 109. Gorringe, God’s Just Vengeance, see chapters 7 and 8. 110.  Ibid., 189, citing Blake, “To the Deists,” from Jerusalem: The Emanation of Giant Albion (after plate 52); see, e.g., William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. ed., ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 201. 111.  Morrow, “Violence Unveiled,” 144. 112. Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, 202–22. 113.  Cahill, “Quaestio Disputata,” 419–20. 114. Dawson, Flesh Becomes Word, 85. 115. Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, 178, citing Jacques-­Bénigne Bossuet, Oeuvres Oratoires de Bossuet (Lille-­Paris, 1891), vol. 4, 287. 116. Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, 179. 117. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 213–14. 118. Schmiechen, Saving Power, 111. 119. Travis, Christ and the Judgement of God, 199. 120.  See Finlan, Problems with Atonement. 121. Finlan, Options on Atonement in Christian Thought, 87–88. See also Love, Love, Violence, and the Cross, 113–14. 122. Schmiechen, Saving Power, 21. 123. Love, Love, Violence, and the Cross, 176–77. 124. Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, 225. 125. Alison, Undergoing God, 62. 126.  Alison, “Traversing Hostility,” 14. 127.  Ibid., 11. Here Alison sounds an otherwise muted ecclesial note in mimetic theory. 128.  Ibid., 9. I subsequently discovered a similar perspective ascribed to Julian of Norwich, which was then linked to the work of Sebastian Moore in The Crucified Jesus Is No Stranger—and of course Moore (like Herbert McCabe) influenced the theology of James Alison: see Rowan Williams, “Julian of Norwich’s Way,” in Holy Living: The Christian Tradition Today (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 169–86; the reference to Moore is on 181. 129. Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, 117; for a related deployment of such maternal imagery, see also Cahill, “Quaestio Disputata,” 428–30; cf. Streufert, “Maternal Sacrifice as a Hermeneutics of the Cross.” 130. Jennings, Transforming Atonement, 135–38. 131. Park, Triune Atonement, 43, 80. 132. Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats?, 210.

282  Notes to Pages 230–233

133. Adams, Christ and Horrors, 277. I do not think we need to take her next step, however, interpreting Eucharistic sacrifice in terms of “the breaded Christ” provided for us to “bite and chomp and tear with the teeth, returning horrors for horrors to God” (309). 134.  Moltmann, “The Crucified God,” 31. 135. Schmiechen, Saving Power, 282. 136. Robinette, Grammars of Resurrection, 325. 137. Travis, Christ and the Judgement of God, 200. 138.  See Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 96. 139. Ray, Deceiving the Devil. 140.  See Peters, “Atonement and the Final Scapegoat,” 180–81. 141. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, taken from 150, 151, and 152, respectively. 142.  Ibid., 139, 142. Girard also says that the loss of protection entailed is a necessary goad to achieving peace by means other than the false sacred; see Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 206. 143. See, e.g., Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 192–93; I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 142, 182; Evolution and Conversion, 224. 144.  See, e.g., Elliot, “The Anti-­Imperial Message of the Cross.” 145. Ray, Deceiving the Devil, 125. 146. Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement, 49. Cahill likewise insists that “the cross properly inspires resistance, not acquiescence.” See her “Quaestio Disputata,” 426. 147. Love, Love, Violence, and the Cross, 150–51; Ray makes the same point in Deceiving the Devil, 141, but refers to “moral Ju-­jitsu.” 148. Ray, Deceiving the Devil, 139. 149.  Ibid., 141. Here three examples come to mind. One is the story of ecclesial resistance to Augusto Pinochet’s torture state in Chile, as told by William T. Cavanaugh in Torture and Eucharist. A second is Dmitri Shostakovich composing his Leningrad Symphony during the city’s nine-­hundred-­ day siege, which became a rallying cry for the beleaguered population. A third is the Netflix prison drama series Orange Is the New Black, which shows how the system can be worked from a position of disadvantage. 150. Heim, Saved from Sacrifice, 236; Harding, “A Unique and Final Work,” 88. A good literary example of this central insight of family systems theory is Stella Gibbons’s comic novel of 1932, Cold Comfort Farm, in which the indefatigable Flora Poste—the thoroughly modern girl—transforms the blighted Starkadder family through the impact of her upbeat self-­assurance. 151. Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross, 182. 152. Ray, Deceiving the Devil, 143.

Notes to Pages 234–239  283

153.  Depoortere, “René Girard and Christus Victor,” 332. 154.  See Aulén, Christus Victor, 72–76, on 72. I read Aulén’s point here as fully compatible with my own interpretation of Christus Victor, though it is differently expressed. 155.  See Loewe, “Irenaeus’ Soteriology,” 1. 156. Schmiechen, Saving Power, 317. 157. Rupp, Christologies and Cultures, 80. Rupp’s reference to the insubstantiality of the modern self in Stendhal and Gustave Flaubert adds a distinctly Girardian flavor to his assessment of which atonement model best suits modern conditions (on 65). 158. Milbank, Being Reconciled, 162. 159. Here I have in mind Charles Taylor’s distinction between traditional “porous” and contemporary “buffered” Western selves. In light of the mimetic theory, however, I retain a far greater sense of Western humanity’s continuing “porosity.” See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), and my comments in René Girard and Secular Modernity, 11. A more relational ontology than is usually credited has been identified in classical atonement theologies by Kotsko, The Politics of Redemption. 160. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 207; see also When These Things Begin, 90. 161.  Ibid., 203. 162. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 60. 163. Girard, When These Things Begin, 114–15. 164. Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, 201. 165.  Schwager, “Christ’s Death and the Prophetic Critique of Sacrifice,” 120. 166.  Cahill, “Quaestio Disputata,” 432. 167. Ray, Deceiving the Devil, 144. 168. Bartlett, Cross Purposes, 13. 169. If Bartlett concedes this achievement to Paul (see ibid., 202), I think he could concede it to Girard as well. 170.  John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (1985), Contemporary Greek Theologians, 4 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997), 140. 171. Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, 103, 100. 172.  Ibid., 5. 173. Most notably, Girard’s chapter “The Catholic Church and the Modern World,” in The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 75–84. 174.  James Alison has most fully addressed the ecclesiological implications of mimetic theory, which forms a central theme in much of his writing. I ventured some way along this path in the long conclusion to my René

284  Note to Page 239

Girard and Secular Modernity and, earlier, in Abiding Faith. My colleague Stephen Pickard sets out a helpful perspective on this issue: see his chapter “A Renewed Sociality,” in Seeking the Church, 81–100. There he advances beyond his teacher, Daniel W. Hardy, upon whom he draws, toward a position that Girard would endorse; see Hardy, “Created and Redeemed Sociality.”

B I B LI O G R A P H Y

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I N D EX

Abelard, Peter, 221–23, 227, 236 absence and loss, 157–59, 161 abuse, 13–14 accepting, 157–58, 174–75 blocking and, 161–62 re-narrating and, 163–64, 169–71 acquisitive mimesis, 10–11, 120 Adams, Marilyn McCord, 154–55, 282n133 Adams, Rebecca, 263n117 agency, 137 See also double agency AI: Artificial Intelligence (film), 153 Aikido, 232–33 Alberg, Jeremiah, 142, 191–93 Albert the Great, 137 Alison, James, 1, 49, 83, 107, 118, 119, 120, 123, 124, 125, 132, 141, 177–79, 185, 192, 195, 196, 205–6, 211, 213, 224, 228–29, 259n35, 264n127, 283n174 altruism, 150 angels, 147 Anglicanism, 2 animal mimesis, 96, 130 animal “rites,” 54, 55, 253n17 “anonymous Christianity,” 124–25 Anselm, 223–25, 227, 231, 280n96 Anspach, Mark R., 217 anthropology Christology and, 209 generative, 253n15 gospel, 105, 106, 119, 145 the supernatural and, 143–44

Antichrist, 65, 79 apathy, 77 Aphorism #125 (Nietzsche), 46 apocalyptic/apocalyptic motifs, 15–16, 35, 82, 83, 132–33 biblical, 194 cultural apocalypse, 20–21, 36 modernity and, 74–75 revelation and, 117 Apollinarianism, 136 apologetics, 90, 91 Aquinas, Thomas, 137 archaic cultures, 60 archaic religion, 57, 58, 60, 62, 69 See also false sacred Ariadne auf Naxos (Strauss), 183–84 Arianism, 136 Aristotle, 137 Arjakovsky, Antoine, 219 art, 246n15 Astell, Ann, 108, 269n99, 272n53 atheism, 141 atonement, 34, 204–5, 218–37 Christus Victor theory, 220, 230–37 Latin theory, 220–21, 223–25 moral influence theory, 221, 222–23 narrative Christus Victor, 232 overaccepting and, 235–37 penal substitutionary atonement, 225–30 sacrifice and, 225–26 Theo-drama and, 234–35 transformation and, 235 value of theories of, 221–22  307

308  Index Augustine, 58, 59, 72, 103, 111, 121, 137, 138, 139, 178–83, 232, 272n53, 273n66 Confessions, 71 re-narrating and, 162–63, 167, 171, 273n66 Aulén, Gustav, 220–21, 283n154 authenticity, 139–40 availability (disponibilité), 139 Baillie, D. M., 136 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 95, 124, 126, 139, 140, 141, 143–44, 169–71 Theo-Drama, 116 Bandera, Cesáreo, 94 Barth, Karl, 124 Bartlett, Anthony, 4, 35, 220, 221, 237, 280n93 Battling to the End (Girard), 61, 80–81, 161 belonging, 104 Bible, the mimetic theory and, 50 mythology and, 33 See also specific books of the Bible blocking, 158–60, 175, 179 accepting and, 161–62 re-narrating and, 162–63, 164–69, 273n66 Boersma, Hans, 220, 233, 236, 274n29 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 103 borrowed desire, 9–10, 120 See also mimesis Bouteneff, Peter C., 179 Bowles, Samuel, 150 brainpower, 55, 56, 57 Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoyevsky), 18, 21 Buddhism, 210 Bultmann, Rudolf, 118 Cahill, Lisa Sowle, 223, 224, 226, 236, 280n96, 282n146

Calvin, John, 226 capitalism, 76 Cassian, John Conferences, 107 Çatalhöyük (Neolithic archaeological site in Turkey), 58 catharsis, 28 Catholicism, Roman, 91, 259n35 Cavanaugh, William, 177, 183, 184, 186, 282n149 Cavarero, Adriana, 154 Chalcedon, 135–36 Chantre, Benoît, 12 Chappie (film), 153 choices, 20–21 Christ. See Jesus Christ Christian conversion, 17–18 Christianity, 24, 85, 86, 91, 92 “anonymous,” 124–25 Evangelical Christianity, 218, 225 Judaism and, 213–18 Nietzsche and, 45, 46, 47–49 overaccepting and, 209–12 as praeparatio messianica, 214 religions and, 209–12 Christian orthodoxy, 57 “Christoformity,” 125 Christology, 88, 208–9 anthropology and, 209 church, 132, 238–39 salvation and, 211–12 Clausewitz, Carl von On War, 80 Coakley, Sarah, 1, 2, 66, 94, 111–13, 122, 145, 150, 151, 242, 263n127, 270n16 Cold Comfort Farm (Stella Gibbons), 282n150 colonialism, 78 Colossians, letter to the, 35 Combray steeple (in Proust), 12 comedy, 184 communication, 143 compassion, 49, 188–89

Index  309 competition, 149–51 concupiscence, 125 Conferences ( John Cassian), 107 Confessions (Augustine), 71 conformism, 105 consciousness, 41, 54–55, 61, 98–99, 118 contemplative prayer, 107, 108 conversion, 16–17, 43–44, 124, 142–43, 248n52 Christian, 17–18, 248n52 novelistic, 9, 16–17, 19–20, 248n52 cooperation, 149–51 cosmic history, 129–33 creation creatio ex nihilo, 185–86 goodness of, 59 groaning of, 180–81 mimetic theory and, 94 redemption and, 178, 182 salvation and, 61–62 creation science, 159–60 creativity, 42–43 crime, 31 Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky), 18 cross, the, 35, 36–37, 104–5, 197, 200, 206 culture archaic, 60 development, 30, 64–65 Gospel and, 124–25 modernity and, 35 origins, 101 persecution and, 31 relativism and, 78 religion and, 31 violence and, 79 Daly, Robert J., 227, 238, 261n68 Dante Divine Comedy, 71 Darwin, Charles, 163–64 Dawson, David, 226

Deane-Drummond, Celia, 129 death, 154 Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Girard), 9–10, 11, 15, 16, 17 De la violence à la divinité (Girard), 68, 255n60 Delio, Ilia, 182 de Lubac, Henri, 121, 266n44 Depoortere, Frederiek, 233–34 desacralization, 31, 32, 46 desire abatement of, 76–77 borrowed, 9–10, 120 for God, 120–21 mediation of, 10, 38, 140 metaphysical, 10–11, 13–14, 42, 120, 122, 141, 246n14 mimetic, 20, 45, 96–97 models, 10, 151 object-focused, 10 romantic, 13 triangular nature, 89 determinism, 95 Devils (Dostoyevsky), 16–17 differentiation, 27, 75–78, 109 “Dionysus versus the Crucified” (Girard), 45 disponibilité (availability), 139 divine attributes. See God Divine Comedy (Dante), 71 divinity, 87 See also God doctrine, 4–5, 176 dominance patterns (animal), 56, 253n17 Doran, Robert, 8, 246n14 Doran, Robert M., 110 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 10, 20 Brothers Karamazov, The, 18, 21 Crime and Punishment, 18 Devils, 16–17 “Eternal Husband, The,” 13 Notes from the Underground, 45

310  Index double agency external mediation and, 140 mimesis and, 139 revelation and, 143 Theo-drama and, 134–38 doubles, mimetic, 10, 27, 33, 47, 98 double transference, 30 drama, 123–28 See also Theo-drama Dulles, Avery, 123 Dumouchel, Paul, 95–97, 150, 152, 153 mimetic theory of, 96 early Girard, 8–24 Ecce Homo (Nietzsche), 45 ecclesiology, 238–39 ecological pyramids, 149 Egarr, Richard, 175 encounter, 123–25 Enuma Elish, 185 environment, the, 81 envy, 139 escalation to extremes, 80 eschatology, 83, 88, 177, 181 eschaton, the, 133 “Eternal Husband, The” (Dostoyevsky), 13 eternal return, 46–47, 133, 158 Evangelicalism, 218, 225 evil, 159–60, 162–64, 177, 179–80 overcoming of, 107 violence and, 130, 131 See also theodicy evolution, 57, 129, 146–52, 156, 180 Christ and, 182 Evolution and Conversion (Girard), 52–53, 55–56, 62, 63, 69, 83 existentialism, 11 Ex Machina (film), 153, 271n29 Exodus, book of, 185 faith reason and, 90 science and, 119, 146, 147

fall, the, 57, 94, 99–102, 130–31, 148, 165–66, 179 fallen angels, 147 fallen humanity, 57, 101 false sacred, 11–12, 44, 46–47, 59–60, 64–65 collapse of, 71–73 return of, 75 revelation of, 40, 89 undermining of, 132, 141 family systems theory, 233 Farley, Wendy, 152–54, 156, 188 Farrer, Austin, 138 feminist theology, 236 finitude, 152, 154–55 Finlan, Stephen, 227–28 forgiveness, 118, 181, 195–96 Fornari, Giuseppe God Torn to Pieces, A, 48–49 founding murder, 101, 130–31 “Founding Murder in the Philosophy of Nietzsche, The” (Girard), 46 Frazer, James Golden Bough, The, 78–79 freedom, 20–21, 136, 152 grace and, 94 mimesis and, 93, 94–102, 140–41 original, 121 rivalry and, 97–99 free will, 39 fundamentalism, 111, 112 Gans, Eric, 253n15 Gardner, Stephen L., 13, 75 Gay Science, The (Nietzsche), 46 generative anthropology, 253n15 Genesis, book of, 33, 185, 186 Gerasene demoniac, 40, 43, 251n71 Gibson, Mel Passion of the Christ, The (film), 227 gift, 174, 176 gift giving, 119–20 Gilson, Etienne, 137

Index  311 Girard, René aim, 92 anthropology, 106 Battling to the End, 61, 80–81, 161 Christianity and, 85, 86, 91, 92 Coakley and, 111–13, 263n127 conversion, 16, 17, 19 Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 9–10, 11, 15, 16, 17 De la violence à la divinité, 68, 255n60 “Dionysus versus the Crucified,” 45 early work, 8–24 Evolution and Conversion, 52–53, 55–56, 62, 63, 69, 83 “Founding Murder in the Philosophy of Nietzsche, The,” 46 Gnosticism, alleged, 116 I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 56, 62–63, 64, 72–73, 231 and Judaism, 212–18 late work, 53–83 Lonergan and, 110–11 middle work, 26–50 “Nietzsche and Contradiction,” 47 “Nietzsche versus the Crucified,” 45 One by Whom Scandal Comes, The, 56, 57, 58, 63, 65, 70 as prophetic, 107 Reading the Bible with René Girard, 53, 61, 71 Resurrection from the Underground, 15 revelation and, 116–22 Sacrifice, 69 Scapegoat, The, 31–32, 38–39 Theater of Envy, A, 121 theological assessment of, 84–114 Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 29–31, 33–36, 42–44, 54, 66–68, 70, 97–99, 117, 203, 255n60 To Double Business Bound, 45 Violence and the Sacred, 27–29, 54, 55, 56, 70, 96–97 When These Things Begin, 60, 68

Girardian Theo-drama, 128–34 global warming, 81 Gnosticism, 116 God action of, 134–38 “death” of, 46 desire for, 100, 120–21 desire of, 141 envy and, 139 existence of, 60 forgiveness of, 196 husbandry of, 155 indwelling of, 89 judgment of, 135, 194–97, 199–200 justice of, 191 kenosis of, 104, 134, 162 kingdom of, 36, 128, 133, 193–94 mercy of, 191 nonviolence of, 34, 198–99 overaccepting and, 177 peace of, 82–83 purposes of, 82 revelation of, 94 rivalry and, 139–44 vengeance and, 199 as victim, 205 violence and, 3–4, 33–34, 36–37, 135, 191, 193, 198–99 wrath and, 196, 199 God Torn to Pieces, A (Fornari), 48–49 Golden Bough, The (Frazer), 78–79 Goodhart, Sandor, 18, 22, 215–17, 249n1, 271n29 good news, 116–17 Good Samaritan parable, 49 Gorringe, Timothy, 225 “Gospel anthropology,” 105, 119, 145 Gospels culture and, 124–25 law and, 37–38 myths and, 92 scapegoating of, 37 Torah and, 215–17

312  Index grace, 124, 136, 140, 195, 205 freedom and, 94 Grand Inquisitor (of Dostoyevsky), 21 Greek tragedy, 21–23, 27 mythology and, 22 Gregory Nazianzen, 139 Gregory of Nyssa, 136 Gunton, Colin, 118 Hamerton-Kelly, Robert G., 5, 206 han, 229–30 Hardin, Michael, 53 Harding, Leander S., 282n150 heaven, 197, 200 Hebrews, book of, 67, 68, 70 Hebrew scriptures, 33 See also Bible, the Heim, S. Mark, 206, 233 hell, 197, 200 Heraclitus, 169–70 Hinduism, 209–10 history revelation and, 117 salvation and, 129–33 history of religions, 203–7 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 105 Holy Spirit, the, 41, 88, 132, 235–36, 237 hominization, 30, 41, 53–59, 94, 97–99, 130–31, 261n68 overaccepting and, 181–82 homogenization, 76 Homo sapiens, 253n18 hope, 155, 171, 214 horror, 154–55 humankind, 253n18 fallen, 57, 101 Hunsinger, George, 260n55 Hunter, Cornelius G., 163–64 Hyman, Gavin, 167 identification with others, 109 idolatry, 100 mimesis and, 120–21 Ignatius Loyola, 128, 142, 260n54

improvisation, 174, 175, 176, 273n3 incarnation, 86, 89, 92, 135–36 overaccepting and, 208–9 individualism, 9 In Search of Lost Time (Proust), 12 interdividuality, 42, 107 Irenaeus, 136, 139, 178–83, 203 I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Girard), 56, 62–63, 64, 72–73, 231 Islam, 210 militant, 77–78, 82 Jacob, 142–43 Jansenism, 226–27 Jesuit meditation, 128 Jesus and the Drama of Salvation (Schwager), 128–29 Jesus Christ choices and, 21 crucifixion, 35, 36–37, 104–5, 197, 200, 206 evolution and, 182 mystical body of, 104 novels and, 18 overaccepting and, 176 resurrection, 34–35, 39, 88, 181, 197, 208, 214–15 rivalry and, 43 sacrifice, 38 uniqueness, 211–12, 215–17 virginal conception, 37, 88 Job, 164 Jones, Serene, 188–89 Judaism, 212–18 Judeo-Christian scriptures, 24, 33 See also Bible, the judgment, 109 mercy and, 129 Julian of Norwich, 229, 281n128 Kaplan, Grant, 117–19, 143 katéchon/katéchōn, 65–66, 132, 180 sacrifice and, 67 Kelly, Anthony, 181

Index  313 kenosis, 104, 105, 134, 162 King, Chelsea Jordan, 263–64n127 kingdom of God, 36, 133, 193–94 redemption and, 128 kingship, sacred, 12–13 Kirk-Duggan, Cheryl A., 276n81 Kirwan, Michael, 102, 211 La Capra, Dominick, 157–58, 158–61, 272n47 Lapide, Pinchas, 214–15 Lash, Nicholas, 266n41 late Girard, 53–83 law, 33, 65 Gospel and, 37–38 Lawtoo, Nidesh, 245n3 Lenehan, Kevin, 94, 103 Leviathan (Russian film), 219 liberalism, 112 liberation theology, 102, 236 Lindbeck, George, 266–67n45 literary criticism, 8–9 Logos, 169–71 Lonergan, Bernard, 110–11 loss and absence, 157–59, 161 love, 62, 109 Love, Gregory Anderson, 154, 191, 205, 225 MacDougall, Scott, 167 madness, 42, 43 mimesis and, 47–50 Marion, Jean-Luc, 123 masochism, 13–14 Mauss, Marcel, 120, 264n16 McCabe, Herbert, 136, 152, 196, 197, 281n128 McIntosh, Mark, 126, 266n44 méconnaissance, 23, 30–31, 36 mediation of desire, 10, 38, 140 meditation, Jesuit, 128 mercy, 129 metaphysical desire, 10–11, 13–14, 42, 120, 122, 141, 246n14

“method acting” school, 139 middle Girard, 26–50 Milbank, John, 1, 2, 83, 94, 106, 111, 112, 119–20, 121, 122, 123, 140, 157, 164–69, 171, 174, 198, 235, 262n97, 265n17, 266n41, 273n66, 280n103 Theology and Social Theory, 165–66 violence and, 167, 169 militant Islamism, 77–78, 82 mimesis acquisitive, 10–11, 120 animal, 96, 130 desire and, 20, 45, 96–97 desire for God and, 100 double agency and, 139 Dumouchel’s theory of, 96 exhaustion of, 76, 256n86 freedom and, 93, 94–102, 140–41 free will and, 39 good or bad, 52, 58, 89, 95, 122, 252n1 idolatry and, 120–21 madness and, 47–50 modernity and, 44–47 overaccepting and, 178 rivalry and, 96–97 violence and, 27, 151 mimetic crisis, 28 mimetic desire, 20, 45, 96–97 mimetic doubles, 10, 27, 33, 47, 98 mimetic entrapment, 96 mimetic exhaustion, 76–77, 256n86 mimetic passivity, 256n86 mimetic theory, 23 Anglicanism and, 2 Bible and, 50 creation and, 94 of Dumouchel, 96 overaccepting and, 207–9 revelation and, 119 salvation and, 129–33 theology and, 86–113 usage of term, 7 ministry, 187–88 miracles, 138

314  Index mirror neurons, 97 misrecognition, 23, 30–31, 36 models of desire, 10, 151 modernity, 73–83, 132, 135, 168–69 as apocalyptic, 74–75 culture and, 35 desacralization and, 31 mimesis and, 44–47 mythology and, 32 overaccepting and, 178 sacrifice and, 37–38 Moltmann, Jürgen, 164, 214, 266n43 monarchy, 12–13 Mongrain, Kevin, 106 Moore, Sebastian, 281n128 moralism, 107 Morrow, Duncan, 219, 225 multiculturalism, 78–79 murder, founding, 101, 130–31 mystery, 90, 265n30 mystical, the, 108 mystical body, the, 104 mystical solidarity, 263n117 mystical theology, 106 mythology, 14, 27, 28, 30–31, 185–86 Bible and, 33 Gospels and, 92 modernity and, 32 tragedy and, 22 truth and, 22 victims and, 31, 32 narrative theology, 127 natural selection, 148–49, 152, 156 Nazianzen, Gregory, 139 negative theology, 103 neo-paganism, 80 Neoplatonism, 137 Neufeld, Thomas R. Yoder, 198, 199, 205 neuroses, 42 Neville, David J., 4, 194, 195, 199, 200–201 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 44–50, 157 Aphorism #125, 46

Christianity and, 45, 46, 47–49 Ecce Homo, 45 Gay Science, The, 46 “Nietzsche and Contradiction” (Girard), 47 “Nietzsche versus the Crucified” (Girard), 45 Niewiadomski, Józef, 73, 195, 279n80 nihilism, 77 nominalism, 165 Northern Ireland, 219 Notes from the Underground (Dostoyevsky), 45 novelistic conversion, 9, 16–17, 19–20 novels, 8–21 Christ and, 18 obedience, 105 obsessions, 107–8 O’Connor, Flannery Violent Bear It Away, The, 192–94 Oedipus, 22, 31, 249n71 One by Whom Scandal Comes, The (Girard), 56, 57, 58, 63, 65, 70 ontological sickness, 14, 71 ontological violence, 185 On War (Clausewitz), 80 Orange Is the New Black (TV Series), 282n149 Origen, 136 original blessing, 58 original sin, 57, 58, 100–102, 121 Oughourlian, Jean-Michel, 77, 247n25 out-narrating, 164–69 See also re-narrating overaccepting, 175–78 atonement and, 235–37 Christianity and, 209–12 doctrine and, 176 God and, 177 history of religions and, 203–7 hominization and, 181–82 incarnation and, 208–9 Jesus and, 176

Index  315

Judaism and, 212–18 mimesis and, 178 mimetic theory and, 207–9 modernity and, 178 politics and, 183–86 revelation and, 187 sacrifice and, 182, 206–7 secularity and, 178 theology and, 177 trauma and, 187–90 violence and, 184–86

pacifism, 4, 66 pagan religions, 60–61, 254n35 Paik, Peter, 256n86 Palaver, Wolfgang, 103, 108, 150 René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, 103 Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 266n43 paradise, 130 Park, Andrew Sung, 230 Parsifal (Wagner), 47, 48 Pascal, Blaise, order of charity, 46, 71, 108–9, 142 Passion of the Christ, The (film), 227 passivity, 105, 126, 232, 256n86 pastoral ministry, 187–88 Paul, St., 140 peace, 82–83, 133 perichoresis, 89 persecution, 31 Pickard, Stephen, 284 Placher, William C., 134 Poettcker, Grant, 224 political correctness, 75 political theology, 102 politics, 183–86 power, will to, 45, 47 powers and principalities, 62–64, 254n42 prayer, 107, 108 primitivism, 78–79 prohibitions, 204 prophets, books of, 33 protology, 181

Proust, Marcel, 12–13, 105, 262n102 In Search of Lost Time, 12 Psalms, book of, 33, 70, 189 pseudomasochism, 13–14, 158 pseudosadism, 13–14, 158 psychology, 98 underground, 14 psychopathology, 42–43 psychoses, 42 public theology, 212 Quash, Ben, 126–27, 266–67n45 Radical Orthodoxy, 111, 112 Rahner, Karl, 124–26, 182, 266n41 Ray, Darby Kathleen, 221–22, 232, 233 Reading the Bible with René Girard (Girard), 53, 61, 71 Realpolitik, 184–86 reason, 90 reconciliation, 34 See also atonement redemption, 104, 160–61, 177, 219 creation and, 178, 182 kingdom of God and, 128 See also atonement reign of God. See kingdom of God Reineke, Martha, 161 relationality, 89–90, 119–20 relativism, 78 religions archaic, 57, 58, 60, 62, 69 belonging and, 104 Christianity and, 209–12 culture and, 31 end of, 103 history of, 203–7 overaccepting and, 203–7 pagan, 60–61, 254n35 primitive, 27 sacrifice and, 34, 203–7 single-victim mechanism and, 28, 30 society and, 28, 30, 37–38 violence and, 209–12

316  Index religiosity, deviated, 103 re-narrating, 162–71 accepting and, 163–64, 169–71 blocking and, 162–63, 164–69, 273n66 René Girard’s Mimetic Theory (Palaver), 103 resentment, 45, 46 respect, 81 ressentiment, 45, 271n38 resurrection, 195 See also Jesus Christ: resurrection Resurrection from the Underground (Girard), 15 revelation, 24, 60–61, 69, 82, 92, 194–95 apocalypse and, 117 art and, 246n15 attunement to, 126 double agency and, 143 elements of, 118 under erasure, 71 Girard and, 116–22 history and, 117 as informational, 117 mimetic theory and, 119 new humanity and, 117–18 overaccepting and, 187 reason and, 90 salvation and, 118, 127 symbols and, 123 Theo-drama and, 122–28 violence and, 131 Revelation, book of, 82 rites, animal, 54, 55, 253n17 ritual, 27–29 rivalry, 55 freedom and, 97–99 God and, 139–44 Jesus and, 43 mimesis and, 96–97 positive, 142 Robertson, Neil G., 168–69

Robinette, Brian, 185, 230, 262n107, 265n29 robots, 152–53 Rolston, Holmes, 149, 151, 180 romantic desire, 13 romanticism, 16 romantic lie, 9 Rota, Michael, 149 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 192 Rupp, George, 235 Russian Orthodox Church, 219 sacred, false, 11–12 sacred, the, 27–29 sacred kingship, 12–13 sacrifice, 27, 28, 66–73, 87, 141, 151–52, 238, 270n16 atonement and, 225–26 Christ and, 38 crime and, 31 crisis and, 31, 97 failures of, 80 history of, 277n5 history of religions and, 203–7 images of, 58 inescapability of, 70–71 katéchon and, 67 modernity and, 37–38 overaccepting and, 182, 206–7 overcoming of, 69 religions and, 34, 203–7 salvation and, 203–4 scapegoating of, 67 self-sacrifice, 69–70, 150 types of, 67–69 violence and, 221 Sacrifice (Girard), 69 sacrificial crisis, 31, 97 sadism, 13–14 saints, 127–28 See also specific saints salvation, 88, 104, 106, 117, 238 church and, 211–12

Index  317 creation and, 61–62 history and, 129–33 mimetic theory and, 129–33 revelation and, 118, 127 sacrifice and, 203–4 sanity, 42–43 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 246n14 Satan/satanic, 34, 60, 61, 63–64, 65, 66, 73, 79, 107, 204 defeat of, 230–32 satire, 184 “saturated phenomenon,” 123 scandal (skandalon), 190–94 Scapegoat, The (Girard), 31–32, 38–39 scapegoating, 23, 87, 88 scapegoat mechanism. See single-victim mechanism Schillebeeckx, Edward, 126, 154, 268n79 Schmiechen, Peter, 227, 228, 235 Schwager, Raymund, 1, 57, 67, 86–87, 89, 95–96, 99–102, 106, 107, 119, 120–21, 127, 128–29, 130, 134–35, 151, 195–97, 213, 220, 221, 224, 230, 235–36, 250n31, 254n35, 260n54, 261n68, 267n51, 267n56, 277n5, 280n93 Jesus and the Drama of Salvation, 114, 128–29 “Mimesis and Freedom,” 95–96, 99–102 science, 40–41 faith and, 119, 146, 147 See also evolution science fiction, 152 scriptures. See Bible, the secularity, 103, 189 overaccepting and, 178 See also modernity secularization, 32 self-awareness. See consciousness self-giving, 180–81, 207 self-sacrifice, 69–70, 150

Shakespeare, William, 9, 241 “A Winter’s Tale,” 121 Shults, F. LeRon, 178–79 sin, 124 original, 57, 58, 179–80 single-victim mechanism, 11, 12–13, 22, 27–29, 35 justification for, 29 religions and, 28, 30 revelation of, 40–41 social institutions, 62–64, 120 sociality, 54, 55, 61, 64–65 social sciences, 86, 88, 91–92, 105–6, 119 theology and, 207–9 society, 28, 30, 37–38 solidarity, 263n117 Solomon’s judgment, 67 Stanislavsky school of acting, 139 Star Trek (ongoing TV epic), 270–71n28 state, the, 65, 66 Steinmair-Pösel, Petra, 58 Strauss, Richard Ariadne auf Naxos, 183–84 structuring violence, 4–5 subversion, 232–33, 282n149 Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt, 195, 254n35 suffering. See trauma supernatural, the, 40 anthropology and, 143–44 supersessionism, 217 surrogate victim, 27–29 surrogate victim mechanism. See single-victim mechanism symbols, 54 revelation and, 123 taboos, 27–29 terror, 3–4 Theater of Envy, A (Girard), 121 theodicy, 147, 155, 159–60, 162–64, 171, 179–80 See also evil

318  Index Theo-drama, 126 atonement and, 234–35 dimensions of, 126 double agency and, 134–38 gift and, 176 Girardian Theo-drama, 128–34 revelation and, 122–28 Theo-Drama (Balthasar), 116 théologie totale (Coakley), 112–13 theology drama and, 123–28 dynamic method in, 110–11 feminist theology, 236 fundamentalism and, 111, 112 Girard and, 84–114 liberation theology, 102, 236 mimetic theory and, 86–113 mystical theology, 106 narrative theology, 127 negative theology, 103 overaccepting and, 177 political theology, 102 public theology, 212 Radical Orthodoxy, 111, 112 social sciences and, 207–9 theological liberalism, 112 théologie totale (Coakley), 112–13 theology from above, 125–26, 266n41, 266n43 theology from below, 125–26, 266n41 theology “from the end,” 266n43 theology “from within,” 126, 266n44 theology of hope, 266n43 transcendental theology, 124–25 See also Theo-drama Theology and Social Theory (Milbank), 165–66 Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (Girard), 29–31, 33–36, 42–44, 54, 66–68, 70, 97–99, 117, 203, 255n60

Thomas Aquinas, 137 To Double Business Bound (Girard), 45 Tomelleri, Stefano, 271n38 Torah and Gospel, 215–17 tradition, 176–77 tragedy, 27, 104, 129, 151, 154, 162–64, 171, 177 comedy and, 184 mythology and, 22 transcendence deviated, 11–12, 15, 19, 64 false, 64 idolatrous, 62 social, 62 vertical, 11, 17–18 transcendental theology, 124–25 trauma, 157–58 overaccepting and, 187–90 structural, 158–60 Travis, Stephen H., 227, 230–31 Trinity, the, 88–89 triumphalism, 217 unconscious, the, 38 understanding, 118–19 undifferentiation, 30, 33, 75–78, 109 van Beeck, Frans Jozef, 136–37 van Buren, Paul M., 214, 218 Vanhoozer, Kevin, 266n43, 266n45 Vattimo, Gianni, 68, 200 vengeance, 33, 45 Verdurins, the (in Proust), 12–13 victims concern for, 79–80 difference and, 31 God as victim, 205 innocence of, 61 mythology and, 31, 32 new, 75 violence, 27–29 archaic, 79–80 Christianity and, 3–4

Index  319

contingency of, 57, 73 culture and, 79 dogma and, 4–5 evil and, 130, 131 God and, 3–4, 33–34, 36–37, 135, 191, 193, 198–99 as horror, 154–55 lawful, 183, 274n29 love and, 62 mimesis and, 27, 151 “official,” 66 origin of, 130 overaccepting and, 184–86 religions and, 209–12 revelation and, 131 sacrifice and, 221 structuring, 4–5 Violence and the Sacred (Girard), 27–29, 54, 55, 56, 70, 96–97 Violent Bear It Away, The (O’Connor), 192–94 Volf, Miroslav, 198–99

Wagner, Richard Parsifal, 47, 48 Walking Dead, The (TV series), 76 Wandinger, Nikolaus, 124–25, 267–68n56 Weaver, J. Denny, 3, 36, 205, 226, 232–33, 234 Webb, Eugene, 9 Weigand, Hans, 151 Weil, Simone, 103–5, 138, 262n97 Wells, Samuel, 176, 177, 183, 273n3 When These Things Begin (Girard), 60, 68 Williams, James G., 133 Williams, Rowan, 103, 123, 138, 139 will to power, 45, 47 Winch, Peter, 31 Wink, Walter, 185 withdrawal, 161–62 woman taken in adultery, 118 Žižek, Slavoj, 5, 256–57n86 zombie fiction, 76