Reason and Violence in Girard’s Mimetic Theory:

              The Anthropology of the Cross.

                                  By

                     Robert Hamerton-Kelly

                     Stanford University (ret)

              Chair of the Board of Advisors:

       “Imitatio: Integrating the Human Sciences.”

 

       I would like to take this opportunity to introduce the work of Rene Girard as one of the noteworthy transformations in the field of Christian thought. Rene Noel Girard was born on Christmas day in 1923 and grew up in Avignon, where his father was curator of the Palais des Papes. Following in his father’s footsteps he trained as a librarian, archivist and medieval historian at the Ecole des Chartres in Paris. The fact that he had no formal training in literature might be fortunate, and is in any case worth mentioning here, because when he turned to literature he asked fresh questions, and at a time when literary interpretation was emphasizing the unique features of the individual work he paid attention to the common features of many works, and thus discovered Mimetic Desire (MD).

       In 1947 he came to a junior position at Indiana University where he wrote a dissertation on the view of France from the United States in the recent decades. He was turned down for tenure at Indiana, an event he says was fortunate because it forced him to start scholarly writing in earnest. We are all grateful to the tenure committee of Indiana University because as a result of their decision RG began to produce a literary, social science, theological, and historical oeuvre that is now, 60 years later, a treasure of 20^th century intellectual achievement and, some of us believe, the Truth that could rescue the western intellectual world from its current trendiness and triviality. Michel Serres, in the customary laudation welcoming RG into the Academie Francaise in 2005, called him the “The New Darwin of the Human Sciences.[1]” I share that view, and Imitatio, the small foundation for which I work has the motto “Integrating the Human Sciences.” As natural selection was a radically new way to understand biology and transformed that science, with profound consequences, so MT (Mimetic Theory) is a transforming insight that recasts epistemology and erases the lines of separation between the natural sciences, the social sciences, the literary sciences and the theological sciences. Our small foundation, Imitatio, for which I work, claims, only half facetiously,  “Epistemological continuity from the quantum to the eschaton.”          

       There are two ways to introduce MT; one is a narrative of its discovery, the other a systematic account of its structure and dynamics. Let me present them both in this order

A Narrative of MT’s Discovery

MT unfolded in four stages.[2] The first was the Literary stage, the second the Anthropological stage, the third the Theological stage, and the fourth the Historical stage. Each stage was marked by an innovating publication coining a term or category, describing it, and then indicating the way ahead for research. 

      

Stage1. The Literary Stage:

 

       Here RG established the category of Mimetic Desire (MD), and the important book is   Mensonge romantique et verite romanesque (Paris: Grasset, 1961). The analysis of the interactions of characters in selected 19^th century novels shows that people imitate each other’s desire and that objects are desirable not through need, scarcity, or intrinsic desirability but because some one else desires them. The other’s desire makes them desirable because the desiring self imitates the desire of that other.

       The biblical story of the first sin shows this to be the case when the serpent makes Eve think that the withholding of the one tree from the gift of all trees shows that God desires it above all others, in effect desires it alone.  This is proven by the fact that God will not give it or share it. Therefore, there is only one tree that God values, namely, the one He will not give, and because her desire imitates God’s desire, it is for Eve herself the only desirable tree. This is, of course, a misunderstanding, as the role of the serpent attests; God is infinitely generous. He withholds one tree for one purpose only, to preserve the difference between the creator and the creature. 

       The tree itself is of passing significance, the desire of the other (God) for the tree is all, and it is that desire that compels Eve’s desire to thwart its rival. The original sin occurred when we made God the loving and generous creator a rival, that is, when our relationship with the source of being turned from gratitude to rivalry, and we willed [3]to displace God and become our own creator.

       Mimetic Desire (MD) is competitive and therefore violent. The desire to possess the object gradually becomes secondary to the desire to best the rival. There is a saying in Hollywood that in this town it is not sufficient that I succeed, my best friend has got to fail. At an early stage of the theory’s development RG called this a rivalry for “being,” a “metaphysical desire.” It is the discontent Augustine spoke of in the opening paragraph of the Confessions, “Thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.[4]” St Paul in Romans 1:18 ff in a Midrash on Gen 3 describes this metaphysical nihilism trenchantly as follows: Because we refuse to honor God as God, He abandons us to our own desires that take the form of lusting for each other as if we could gain from each other the substance we lost when we broke our relationship with God. We are now like the stuffed men of TS Eliot, leaning together to make something of ourselves, and achieving the gravitas of a Guy Fawkes dummy[5].

        We soon discover that the other does not have what we want, and if the other does not have the being we lack he must be it. So we desire now not only to defeat him in the competition for the object, but also to consume him, not only that he be our inferior but that he cease to be altogether, swallowed up in our fake plenitude[6].     

       At this early point in the unfolding we risk confusing the nature of mimetic desire by making too much of the conscious dimension. According to the theory the lust for being is, like all mimetic activity, preconscious, and societies are to be understood not as the result of social contracts or other conscious moves, but as impersonal social systems, of the kind we can understand quite well under the rubrics of systems theory.

      

Stage 2: The Anthropological stage:

 

       This “automatic” feature of mimetic desire is a convenient segue to stage two of the unfolding, where the moment of disclosure is the emergence of the scapegoat. The reciprocal violence of mimetic rivalry deflects from its proper target on to a substitute. The major work for this stage of the theory is, La violence et la sacre  (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1972). RG calls the scapegoat a “mechanism” and thus underlines the non-conscious functioning of the whole phenomenon of MD, from the level of the human individual through the level of human groups. It is “the surrogate victim mechanism” that halts the mob on its way to anarchy and turns it into society by means of the scapegoat. Society is “the lynch mob” that kills or expels the scapegoat.

       This stage unfolds The System of the Primitive Sacred, which has the three moments of Ritual, Prohibition, and Myth respectively.

      

a. Ritual:

        The phenomenon of the scapegoat that stabilizes society reeling with random violence becomes the ritual of human sacrifice. In illo tempore MD became acute violence in hominid groups and threatened to make community impossible. The violence that MD generated had to be contained if the social system were to survive. Being a self-regulating system the mob on its way to anarchy stabilizes itself by generating from within, a scapegoat, who polarizes the whole group against one member and thus unites it.  The war of all against all gives itself the structure of the war of all against one, and this one becomes the god and savior.

       One can imagine how reciprocal violence in the give-and-take of individual reciprocity (vengeance) might congeal from time to time as groups form by common hostility against single figures, until the moment when all groups coalesce against the one and “the community of the lynch mob” congeals. That community is at last human society, held together by the ritual of human sacrifice, which renews the controlling forces of community and conducts violence out of the system.

       The war of “all against all” becomes the war of “all against one” and the “all” united by violence against the “one” is the first stable human community. The community is formed by the act of violence against the scapegoat that coalesces all the previously random and ubiquitous violence in the group as shared hostility against the single victim. Thus a small violence stops a universal violence and forms a community.

       This small violence brings the mimetically rivalrous individuals together in a community of common desire, which is a community of common violence. Just as MD can shift effortlessly from the object to the rival so it can shift from one rival to another and especially follow the centripetal desire of the many as it coalesces against the one. MD has a mercurial propensity to attach itself to objects and persons and transfer its rivalry from one to another to many.

       This “many” of Mimetic desire is “the mob always with us“ that is also called culture, the cyber crowd that greets us every morning and compels our desire to imitate it, to want what it wants, to love what it loves, to kill what it hates . The instances and illustrations of MD are legion and there is a growing literature on MD in all its subtlety, in theology, anthropology, literature and recently, the natural sciences.

       The transference to and fixation of group violence upon the surrogate victim is the moment of transformation from disorder to order, from mob to society, but it is only the first moment and soon it produces the moments of its integration into a larger structure of control. It looks like this:

 

Random mimetic violence- Scapegoat- The Structure of Sacred Violence (sacrifice, prohibition, myth).

      

       This structure of control comprises three phenomena that came to be viewed together as “religion.” It might have come into being as follows: the ur-mob noticed that upon the death of the victim violent rivalry paused for a moment of peace. As they stood for a brief moment together and over against the body of the victim they drew several catastrophically wrong conclusions, comparable to the misunderstanding of God by Eve and the serpent.

       The great lie they told themselves made humanity innocent of all violence, and violence an unfortunate but unusual aberration of humanity’s essential gentleness. We told ourselves that we are creatures whose nature is to desire to know, who are naturally gregarious and co-operative, and who live together because we love each other, and so on.  This is the original and persisting myth.

       The first mistake (“myth-take”) in this larger misunderstanding was the idea that because there was violence when the victim was alive and peace when he died, the victim must have been the cause of the violence. This is the myth of the omnipotent victim. It distorts the idea of sacrifice into a gesture of appeasement of the omnipotent victim-become-god, who left unappeased will return to the community and start the war of all against all, all over again. So, entailed in the myth of the victim’s omnipotence is the divinization of the dead victim, the origin of idolatry. If the omnipotent victim is not appeased he will return to restart the war of all against all. He is appeased by new victims continually offered.

       This “myth-understanding” of the process is in fact a reversal of the actual train of events. In myth sacrifices appease the victim-become-god, in fact the sacrifices appease and control the mob’s (our) by conducting it out of the system in big enough increments to sustain the system’s stability. Thus the “good violence of sacrifice” controls “the bad violence of anarchy” by conducting increments of violence out of the social system on a regular basis, and sponsoring laws and customs of prohibition and the narratives of myth that justify the ritual and the prohibitions. 

       So the ongoing cohesion of human society depends on sacrifice, and the ritual victims are replicas of the first victim who has become the god and makes the demand of sacrifice and thus continues to unite the group. The idol is the glue of society. Primitive human groups are sacrificial systems, held together by the regular offering of victims and the practices pertaining thereto. The “slain lamb is the foundation of the human world (Revelation 13:8)

       .

      

b) Prohibition:

      

       Prohibition is the second moment of the process of social formation through mimetic violence. Like ritual it is a stage in the unfolding of the control of violence by violence in the system of the Sacred.

       Some examples of this role are: Mimetic rivalry is exacerbated by proximity; therefore people too closely related by family must be clearly separated from each other. Hence the taboo on incest, the hostility to twins, and the custom of having boys brought up not by their fathers but by their mother’s brothers. There is a fine quotation from the ethnological literature to illustrate this impulse. When asked if he knew tribe b, the New Guinean answers, “Sure we know them; they are our enemies; we marry them.”

       Reciprocity or the famous anthropology of the gift belongs in this section on prohibition. Gift exchange is controlled by custom so as to prevent escalation from the reciprocity of gifts to the reciprocity of blows. Revenge is the violent form of gift exchange that is controlled by prohibition. For example the saying in the Torah, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” is intended to control vengeance by limiting reciprocity to quid pro quo.

Prohibition, which becomes taboo, law, rules of purity and danger, customs of human relations, is thus the second manifestation of the stabilizing energy of the scapegoat.

      

       c) Myth

      

       The third item is myth. Myth is mendacious talk about the founding activities so as to obscure the violence and thus deceive ourselves and others and so gain an advantage over the duped and deceived in society’s violent arena[7]. The downside of this strategy is that we deceive ourselves and thus fail to make the right diagnoses and choose the right cures. For example, myth tells the story of the surrogate victim as if the killing of victims is a morally good thing, because the victim is guilty of a crime or eager to give his life for the society-become-god. This myth enables us to deny responsibility.

       Thus myth is essentially mendacious and the common usage is correct; a myth is simply a lie, not a poetic Taj Mahal enshrining deep mysteries and proclaiming profound truths, as Joseph Campbell would have it.  If Prohibition avoids violence by ruse becoming custom, myth uses the possibility of symbolism, that one thing can stand for another, that one can represent the many, bought by the first victim’s death, to create a way of talking about that death that conceals violence altogether and turns it into a good energy for driving the social system. Myth in our usage is tantamount to misrepresentation (myth-representation) of violence as gentleness, destruction as construction, and sordidness as heroism.  (c.f. “It is expedient that one man die instead of the people,”[John 11:49-50; 18:14][8]), and murder as martyrdom[9]. The myth of good violence is the foundation of all mendacity. John’s Gospel states it clearly in the 8^th chapter where he has Jesus say of Satan that he is a murderer and a liar from the beginning (John 8:44).

       So ritual (murder), prohibition (ruse) and myth (misrepresentation) are the structuring forces of the human world as the system of Sacred Violence, and the structure as a whole is founded on the scapegoat or surrogate victim, who by letting small increments of violence out of the system enables the structure of big violence to prosper.

      

Stage 3: The Theological Stage:

 

       The third stage of the unfolding begins with the arrival of our sacrificial reflection at the threshold of the Gospel and the revelation of the violence of the Sacred by the Crucifixion of Jesus. The important books are Des choses cachees depuis la fondation du monde; recherches avec J.M. Oughourlian et Guy Lefort (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1978) and   Le bouc emissaire (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1982), Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelles, 1999), and the central category is Gospel vs Myth.

       The Crucifixion of Jesus is the central historical event of the Gospels. Traditional theology includes explanations of why Jesus died. They are the theories of the Atonement, of which there are several, but not one that is authoritative above all others. There is no need to rehearse them here, beyond observing that each of the major ones includes important aspects of the truth, but none the whole truth.  MT is its own explanation of why Jesus died, but it might not rise to the dignity of a theory off the Atonement. We prefer to call it the Anthropology of the Cross and to read it together with the accounts of the Resurrection as a disclosure of the Truth about the human world.

       In this usage “Cross” stands for the message of the Passion Narratives of the Gospels in particular and the NT understanding of the work of Jesus in his dying and rising in general. This work of Jesus has an anthropological and a theological dimension, and MT confines itself to the former. MT sees itself as the Anthropology of the Cross.

       The Anthropology of the Cross is the revelation of the violence of the Sacred. It discloses the structure of the world of “sin and death,” constructed by the Prince of this world who is a murderer and a liar from the beginning.  I cannot pause to specify chapter and verse but if you have any knowledge of the language of the Gospel of John you will recognize its themes here. The cross is primarily revelatory – this is MT’s theory of the Atonement. It does not see the death of Jesus, neither as a sacrifice for sin, nor as an appeasement of God, nor as a satisfaction neither of God’s impeached honor, nor as a moral example, but as a revelation of who we are as individuals and societies and who God as creator and savior.

       Here I want to tell a story of my visit to Creina Alcock, someone whom Wayne Cristaudo appreciates and to whom he asked me to take a copy of his latest book on my visit to South Africa last month. I was escorted to her domicile deep in the Msinga district of Kwa-Zulu-Natal, a very violent place, where her husband had been recently murdered, and where her chance reading of Girard’s Violence and the Sacred, restored her will to live because it interpreted with uncanny precision precisely the sacrificial crisis in which her husband had died. My late cousin who taught at the University of Zululand, his wife, and a huge Zulu policeman named Mr. Shange escorted me. I asked Mr. Shange why there was so much violence. He said that the chiefs had lost their authority over the young men. I asked him if he ever spoke with the young men and he said, “frequently.” “I go up into the mountains and they come to me and I speak to them.” “What do you say to them?” I ask. “I tell them of the two bloods,” he says. “Two bloods? Which are they?” I ask. He replies, “The blood of Abel that cries from the ground for vengeance, and the blood of Jesus that whispers to us all, ‘Peace be unto you’.” I say to him that I think he has the whole Christian message in that statement.

       Vengeance, the reciprocal violence of Mimetic Rivalry, is the world of Cain; Forgiveness, the unilateral renunciation of the right to revenge, is the world of Jesus. The young men of Msinga live in the Cainite world, where violence never stops. The Cross discloses the nature of this world: its emblem is the absolutely innocent young man slowly dying under torture; (Last Lenten season I gave talks entitled, “From Golgotha to Guantanamo; Torture as the Truth of our Time, and every Time”). The first truth of the Passion is that we are creatures who enjoy the relentless, ubiquitous, torturing to death of innocent victims. Thus it reveals our moral and spiritual need.      The second and greater truth of the Passion tells us who God is (‘If you must kill someone kill me, I can take it!”), and the depth of the divine mercy that reveals us to ourselves so that we might consciously at last enter into our true selves, which moment will be the moment of entry into heaven through the gates of hell, through the hell of my part in the world of Cain to the heaven of my true heritage in the peace of Christ, beyond vengeance and beyond myth.

       The anthropology of the Cross is the truth that Myth obscures. Myth, the third moment in the cultural emergence of the world of Sacred Violence, tells the story of the victim as if he deserved to die because he was guilty of a capital crime. The Gospel exposes this founding myth for the founding lie that it is; the victim is innocent, the violence is random and unjustified, and in any case it is not necessary for someone to die in order that others might live. Society does not have to be founded on murder tricked out as sacrifice, and the Cross is beautiful only in the sense that the truth, however ugly, is adorable beyond words.

       Mimetic atonement theory, a phrase RG would never use, and which I do not propose as an ongoing usage either, is, therefore, as follows: Christ died to disclose the underworld of violence that undergirds every institution in this world. This disclosure contains as of first importance the stripping off of the disguise of myth under which the devil appears as an angel, a murderer a magistrate, a predator as a priest, and together they drive God out of His world and on to a Cross.  The anthropology of the Cross is the antidote to the Mythology of good and necessary violence.

 

4. The Historical Stage:

             

       RG’s latest major book, Achever Clausewitz : Entretiens avec Benoit Chantre (Paris: Carnets Nord, 2007) represents the emergence of a fourth stage of MT, in which it deploys its resources to interpret history. It might, however, have come too late to be a theory of history; now it must be a theory of Apocalypse, detailing the advent of the Apocalypse, a theory not of history but of the end of history, as the structure of Sacred Violence, which is the current world, crumbles, initially under the weight of the Gospel’s demythifying power and subsequently under secularism which is the Gospel’s aftermath. Once the cat is out of the bag and the mechanism out the shadow of myth its effectiveness diminished progressively and cannot be restored and the structures of sacred violence crumble even before its secular aftermath. Thus the Gospel’s disclosure of the myth of the guilty victim destroys the mythic edifice of sacred violence.

       RG is also currently interested in the debate between Francois Furet and Ernst Nolte over the historical interpretation of Fascism and Communism [10]

We have discussed these two authors in our biweekly seminars at Stanford, especially at the time that RG was writing on Clausewitz[11].

       This fourth stage is, I believe, where RG’s thinking is now focused and our Stanford seminar contemplates the Apocalypse more and more[12]  

                          

                                  ****

 

 

 A Systematic Account                           

       That is a whirlwind tour through the narrative of the emergence and interpretative power of Mimetic Theory. Let me try now to present the same insight systematically. I do not care much for definitions; perhaps because I am so inept at composing them, so let me call what follows a description (as distinct from the narrative of MT’s emergence, which has preceded this).

      

       1. MT has the characteristics of a great theory.

             

       a) It is a theory in the sense of a paradigm as described by people like Kuhn and Lakatos. That means that it is a grand and overarching orientation to the whole that directs us to what is important and stimulates hypotheses that engender research. In this sense a theory is judged by its fecundity for further research.

       b) It is parsimonious, being a short explanation of a wide field, in fact, immodestly but realistically, I claim that it is a theory of everything (TOE).

       3) Elegance is a corollary of parsimony and MT can be deployed with admirable elegance, especially in the correlation of evidence with explanation. It gives a tight explanation of the evidence of violence in the world.

       

Description/Definition of the Mimetic Theory:

 

       MT is a Theory of human Violence. Violence is spontaneous and reciprocal in the human (social) world. Its characteristic form is vengeance because all human relations are reciprocal and all are therefore rivalrous. Thus MT explains where violence comes from and how violence works.

In Christian terms MT is a theory of Original Sin, and of the Cross of Christ as God’s antidote to that sin.

 

Parsing the  definition

 

       Desire is the energy that moves individuals and groups in the pursuit of life’s goals

       Desire imitates desire and therefore is competitive.

       Because it is competitive Desire is violent, i.e. Mimetic Desire is Violent Desire or rather Desire as Violence and Violence as Desire.

       Mimetic Desire is therefore different from all non-violent forms of imitation, like simple imitation and Aristotelian mimesis, whose definitions lack the element of violence.

       Violence generates the scapegoat as a mechanism for controlling itself by deflecting itself onto an other random victim and conducting violence out of the social system and stabilizing it.

       Religion -in its three modes of sacrifice, prohibition and myth- is the house that violence built to dwell in, stable and secure. Society is organized as Religion (French: Le Sacre).

       Religion therefore is not the cause of violence but rather the effect, “organized violence”, that is, violence controlled and directed.

              The system of Religion persists under the protection of ritual and prohibition and especially under the cover of myth.

       When the system fails, as it is currently failing, religion becomes the cause rather than the container of violence, rather like a melting glacier calves lethal bergs and threatens to break up everything in the throes of its own break-up. In these post religious times control is failing fast and we are facing great bergs of uncontrolled violence[13].

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Faith and Reason from the point of view of  Mimetic Theory

 

       In conclusion let me try to speak to the theme of this conference. I understand, accurately I hope, that this is an historically oriented conference  - on transformations in philosophy during three centuries. How should we classify MT in terms of this trajectory?

       RG says that the philosophic mode closest to him is phenomenology. He was once influenced by Husserl, Sartre, and the early Heidegger, and still speaks appreciatively of Heidegger and Sartre. However, paradoxically, the Heidegger he most recently defended is the later Heidegger whose emphasis was on the Pre-Socratics, that is, on philosophic thought “before philosophy.” Girard has moved beyond these influences to a non-philosophic stance.

       Girard’s discussions of MT are scientific in the matter-of-fact sense. MT is science rather than philosophy, specifically social science. On the trajectory of transformations it is a stage where social science replaces philosophy as framework of interpretation..

       MT has no place or need for faith. It is supported entirely by empirical observation and a simplified phenomenological description. The behavior of desire according to novels; ethnology; the history of the crucifixion of Jesus; the observation of patterns in history; these can all be and in fact are, modes of disclosure for MT.  How these might be more sophisticatedly classified in the context of philosophy, I must leave to competent actors.

       MT might or might not be a transformation in the philosophic interpretation of the Gospel. It is, however, clearly a new take on the old story, a new reading and a new insight and its implication, I think, is that philosophy in the sense the canon from Parmenides and Pythagoras through Plato and Aristotle to current philosophic theology is passé and in any case unnecessary in the task of founding the Gospel truth (faith) in the human world (reason). Mimetic Theory as an anthropology of the Cross gives an empirical account of why the historical fact of the torturing to death of a young man is the moment of discovery of the truth about humankind.

       I suggest that in the recourse to philosophy in the days of its birth, Christian thought was making the best of an inadequate tool-box. Platonic philosophy was the tool that lay to hand and Christian thinkers used it faute de mieux.  Because of that exigency they were unable to penetrate to the truth of violence and therefore could not do justice to the Cross. Because there is no adequate place for violence in their philosophy, the Fathers could not understand the intellectual disclosure made by the Cross. “No anthropology of the Cross no theory of Atonement,” is why to this day there is no single accepted theory of Atonement, and several grotesque or ludicrous ones.  To this day Christianity has labored without a clear, adequate intellectual understanding of the Cross. Reason failed faith in that task, because theologians put their faith in a wrong-headed exercise of reason. We are now in a position to demonstrate that a right reason, namely empirical science in the form of anthropology, can demonstrate the accuracy of the Gospel as a description of the human world.

       Having done that, the task of fundamental theology is complete, for whatever else there is, - Resurrection, Trinity and the Apocalypse - are matters not of reason at all, but of grace communicating to faith, and in articulating these facts of revelation for the sake of the world, faith should use only the essential practical reason necessary for the propagation of the possibility of transformation and new creation by accepting these opportunities. The proper mode of communication for the revealed truths is prayer, liturgy and praxis.

 

                                                       RGHK, 05/04/2009