René Girard and the Nonviolent God

Scott Cowdell

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780268104566
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

In his latest book on the ground-breaking work of René Girard (1923–2015), Scott Cowdell sets out a new perspective on mimetic theory and theology: he develops the proposed connection between Girardian thought and theological dramatic theory in new directions, engaging with issues of evolutionary suffering and divine providence, inclusive Christian uniqueness, God's judgment, nonviolent atonement, and the spiritual life. Cowdell reveals a powerful, illuminating, and life-enhancing synergy between mimetic theory and Christianity at its best.

With religion widely seen as increasingly violent and intransigent, the true Christian emphasis on divine solidarity, mercy, and healing is in danger of being lost. René Girard provides a countervailing voice. He emerges from Cowdell's study not only as a necessary dialogue partner for theology today, but as a global prophet offering hope and challenge in equal measure.

René Girard was a Catholic cultural theorist whose mimetic theory achieved a powerful symbiosis of social science with scripture and theology, yielding a unique perspective on humanity's origins, violent history, and future prospects. Cowdell maps this synergy, revealing theological themes present from Girard's earliest writings to the latest, less-familiar publications. He resolves a number of theological challenges to Girard's work, engaging mimetic theory in fruitful dialogue with key themes, movements, and thinkers in theology today.

Bringing a distinctive Anglican voice to a largely Catholic debate, Cowdell gives an orthodox theological account of Girard's intellectual achievement, bearing witness to Christianity's nonviolent God. This book will be of great interest to theologians, seminarians and clergy of all traditions, Girardians, and Christian peace activists.

CHAPTER 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 myself¹—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 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 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 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 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 reduced to its objective qualities, thus provoking the famous Stendhalian 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 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,...

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Overture to Mimetic Theory
• 2. From Violence to Divinity
• 3. From Hominization to Apocalypse
• 4. Girard among the Theologians
• 5. A Divine-Human Drama
• 6. The Shadow Side of Finitude
• 7. Divine Overaccepting
• 8. Christ, the Nonviolence of God
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index