Rene Girard is a true polymath, and is proving to be one of the most important thinkers of the last century and this. His writing encompasses multiple fields, and he has made profound contributions in all of them. As you will see, his thought includes theology, literary criticism, anthropology, psychology, mythology, sociology, cultural studies and philosophy. He has contributed to all of them, and, more to the point, he makes good sense in all of them.
He was born in Avignon, France on Christmas Day, 1923. The majority of his academic career has been in the United States. He received his PhD in history at Indiana University in 1950. Since that time he has taught at Duke, Bryn Mawr, Johns Hopkins University, and he finished his career at Stanford (81-95). He is now the Honorary Chair of an institution called the Colloquium on Violence and Religion. In 2005, he was elected to the Academie francaise, which is the highest rank it is possible for a French intellectual to achieve. For purposes of comparison, the highest rank an American intellectual can attain to is Eagle Scout.
Basic Caveats
As we work through this course, it will become obvious that in most areas I am an enthusiastic Girardian. I believe that his insights explain more things than I thought it was possible for one man to explain. A saying has taken root around the Wilson household—”It’s all in Girard, man!” But though I am deeply appreciative, I am not ready to drink the Kool-Aid. There are a few key areas where conservative Reformed Christians have to reject what Girard is saying. I am going to list them here, but we will talk about them later in the course when you have had a chance to interact with his arguments more fully.
1. The Scriptures are the infallible and ultimate Word of God to man. That means that we always must fit our theories to Scripture, and not Scripture to the theory—however insightful that theory might appear to be. There are a number of places where Girard shows that (while he has a very high view of Scripture) he does not have this view of Scripture.
2. Jesus died as a true propitiatory sacrifice, under the wrath of God. Girard rejects this idea, as you will see. Girard holds that Jesus died the way He did in order to reveal (once and for all) the futility of the “sacrificial way.” We would hold that Jesus died in this way to reveal the futility of all autonomous attempts to substitute man’s idea of sacrifice for God’s. More on this later.
3. There are places where Girard is something of a Marcionite. According to him, the Gospels replace the “violent God of the past with a nonviolent one whose demand is for nonviolence rather than sacrifice” (Reader, p. 18).
4. Scripture consistently sides with the victim against the persecutor, making a distinction between the two. If you are not careful, this can be taken too far, universalizing the persecution. Everyone is therefore equally complicit. Ironically, this universalization is just another way of kicking the victim.
5. When you find a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is one swell hammer, but not everything is a nail.
Imitation and Violence
Imitation (mimesis) causes convergence, and convergence causes collisions and conflict. One of Girard’s central insights is that conflict and violence are the result, not of dissimilarity, but rather similarity. Two toddlers in one room, wanting the same shiny toy, conflict. There is no conflict between either of those toddlers and a dog across town, the one playing with a stick.
Two similar individuals want the same thing. One of them gets there first, and the fact that he clearly wants that object makes the silver medalist want it even more. The winner sees that the runner-up wants it, and this makes him cling to his prize all the more. A mimetic loop, a mimetic escalation, occurs. Conflict is the inevitable result.
Sacrificial violence, imitative violence, is not a way of giving in to blood lust. It is an attempt, largely successful, to control societal violence through imitative inoculation. Substitute an acceptable (and controllable) form of violence as a way of warding off the spontaneous outburst of the real (and far more destructive) thing. One time many years ago, I went to a football game with my father. We entered the dome, where all the fans were whooping and hollering and carrying on, and my dad looked around and said, “Well, it beats a public hanging.”
We can still see this going on, but in much more anemic forms. At the same time, we can see it far more clearly than people used to be able to—which is why it has to be anemic. We are living two millennia after Jesus died. “Victimage is still present among us, of course, but in degenerate forms that do not produce the type of mythical reconciliation (catharsis) and ritual practice exemplified by primitive cults. This lack of efficiency often means that there are more rather than fewer victims” (Reader, pp. 16-17).
Now Girard is quite right that Christ has brought “sacrificial culture to an end” (Reader, p. 18). But He has done it by being the sacrifice that reveals all the others, not by being the non-sacrifice that reveals all the others.
Surrogate Victims
A society is plunged, for whatever reason, into a sacrificial crisis. It could be a plague, a military defeat, or a new teaching about a new god. Mimetic rivalry and conflict have taken root in that society as the ultimate contagion, and the hostility ratchets steadily upward. The “old way” of dealing with this was to allow the crowd to spontaneously choose a victim, in whose guilt they had to absolutely believe. They kill or exile this person in a spasm of righteousness, and the cathartic effect takes effect. Peace is restored. It is fitting that one man die for the sake of the people, and one operator of this system once put it.
Once the frenzy is over, and peace is restored, it become apparent to all that the victim was not just the cause of the problem—he has clearly brought the deliverance also. He is therefore honored with an altar, a cult, or a prophet’s tomb. This is the source of mythology, and it also reveals the point of mythology. The point is to honor the victim without actually acknowledging that our society unjustly murdered or exiled him.
This pattern does not have to be taught, any more than covetousness, or sexual lust, or competition have to be taught. No one has to take their toddlers aside for their preschool lessons in “how to lie.” We are sinners, and we gravitate to this as naturally as rocks fall down. At the same time, we are sinners in a new context—the world that Jesus made new by His sacrificial death on the cross. Now consider the way Jesus was tried and executed, and remember how the gospel insists on telling the story. Until the end of the world, this story of a gross miscarriage of justice on the part of the respected authorities will be the story. And that has wrecked the old way of running the show.