The Girardian Difference

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

Darwin 09: October 16-17, 2009

Evolutionary Theory (ET) is widely understood to make faith in a beneficent creator intellectually untenable; but there are those of us who think that, on the contrary, ET could be shown to vindicate Christian Theology's (CT) central premise, which is expressed in the symbol of the Cross. To see this vindication one has to view the scene through the lens of Mimetic Theory (MT), and this possibility is the difference Girard makes, or "the Girardian Difference."

Up to the present CT has been unable to unpack and apply the meaning of the Cross because it has lacked a theory of violence. Faute de mieux it entered an alliance with middle and neo- Platonism that set it up for a fall when ET came on the scene. MT at last makes possible a "theology of the Cross" ( the phrase is Luther's) that rises out of an anthropology of the Cross and is more complete than the philosophy of the Cross. (Vattimo and Zizek).

I am a preacher by trade and not a professor and my text is from the Apostle: "For we know that up to the present moment the whole creation groans and writhes in every part of its body like a woman in childbirth (Romans 8:22- My translation)." The Greek prefix "sun" attached to the two verbs emphasizes the totality of this agony, and the whole passage from which this sentence comes shows that the Apostle knows that violence drives the world of nature and humanity. That a violent explosion, a "big bang," set it all in motion would not have surprised him. That "war is the father and ruler of all" (Heracleitus fr. 53, c.f.fr.80) would not have surprised him. He knew that the world of nature and history is founded on a slaughtered lamb.

The whole argument of which my text is a part is that we can endure the painful process of life in a world of violence because the Spirit has infused us with hope for a good outcome. The apostle describes the outcome as "the apocalypse of the children of God," or "… the glorious liberty of the children of God," and he calls it our "inheritance." Thus he signifies the other side of the coin of Crucifixion, namely the Resurrection, which in this world exists as hope (Romans 8:18-25). (Without the Resurrection we have only philosophy - the Cross as the deconstructer of meaning, a sort of Heideggerian hermeneutical hammer to smash logocentrism, and phallocentrism. c.f. Vattimo and Zizek).

How did Paul know this? He did not infer it from a disinterested reading of the phenomena, he learned it in a flash of insight, call it a revelation if you must, into the significance of the slow death by torture of one young Jew named Jeshua. The insight, that this event is the uncovering (apocalypse) of the truth of all things from the big bang to the tiny whimper, from alpha to omega, occurred in what RG calls generally "the miracle of Peter," that is, in the apostolic witness that "this is it." Among the many young Jews being murdered that week, a small group of young fishermen and other drifters, led by Peter, saw that this Jeshua is unique. They "got it."

This apostolic miracle is the crux of CT and being miraculous it does not fall under the purview of natural theology, where the usual debates about creation and ET are lodged. Like the Resurrection, which appears in this world as hope, this apostolic moment of recognition is among us as "faith."

The proclamation of the Cross is a dogmatic stipulation that answers a problem in natural theology and thus shows natural theology to be a dubious enterprise, inspired by the great faux pas in CT, when it, some time after the original Platonism had itself petered out in scepticism, clothed itself in the imaginary garments of middle Platonism, that one treatise (Timaeus) wonder, and began the Plotinian slide into mysticism. When William Paley of this university, inspired by Isaac Newton also of this university dreamed up the essentially Platonic vision of immutable species and evident design, he simply repeated the mistake of Philo, Clement, Origen and Plotinus by writing yet another footnote to Plato (Alfred North Whitehead, also of this university).

The apostolic moment is a dogmatic stipulation, and, here is an essential facet of the Girardian difference, it is also, at another level of discourse, a statement of fact. The Cross summarizes the natural fact that violence drives all the world in all its parts, human and natural, like the paroxysms of a birth mother's body drives a tiny new creation into the horror and hope of the world. The Western philosopher who understood this best is Heracleitus (500 BCE) whose fragment 53 states that war is the father of all and the ruler of all.

With this brief presentation of what I understand to be the core of CT on record, let me now claim that ET supports this core, and that had the questions not all been confused in the fog of middle- and neo-platonic mysticism filtered through Newton and Paley's the religious controversies around ET would have been even more futile and unnecessary than in fact they were.

To wish that they might never have taken place at all is utopian. The worldview of Paley might have been only a step along the way of an ancient faux pas, but it was also integral to the power of Church, Crown and University, and so it was defended against ET with the all the unfair advantages of the entrenched.

Here then is a summary of the Girardian difference: ET supports CT because both are, mutatis mutandis, theories of violence, and this insight is made possible by MT. I am not qualified to elaborate the claim that ET is a theory of violence, and to put it that way might be too rhetorical, but here's what I have in mind. From Jane Browne I learn that Darwin was particularly burdened by the cruelty of nature, in a surprising demonstration of what I learned from scientific friends to call "anthropomorphism." ET might not be a theory of violence strictly speaking but it is clearly a theory that has violence near the center of its focus.

Having strayed into Darwin's mind let me blunder on. I have a hunch that Darwin's atheism came not from a dispassionate reading of the natural phenomena he saw but from a coming together of his personal pain and the "cruelty" of nature. His daughter Ann died young and he was inconsolable; His youngest son died a baby. His other children and himself were sickly. He was personally and mysteriously debilitated for long periods.

It seems to me that existentially speaking it was the problem of evil that took away his faith, as it has done for many honorable men and women. He could not reconcile the cruelty of dying children and the apparently random, violent and prodigal process of life in the system as a whole, with the Christian God he received from Victorian religion and the Enlightenment. This world is far from the best of all possible, and if there is a designer He/She is monstrously cruel.

This is my impression and I do not press it as an argument. I do not consider atheism to be a shameful state from which I must rescue Darwin; but this is my hunch and I cannot ignore it. There is, however more evidence, which might take it a brief way beyond a hunch. Of his four close friends and defenders two subscribed fully to the theory of natural selection and believed in a creator God, Asa Gray and Charles Lyell. Another had evident political reasons for atheism since he was fighting to free thought from church theology and entrenched power, (at a time for instance when only subscribers to the 39 articles could attend the ancient universities of England), and make space for something he called "science" (as distinct from natural history). This was Thomas Huxley, "Darwin's Bulldog." The two remaining members of the group of five were Darwin himself who, during the gestation of Origin, was mourning his dead children, and Joseph Hooker who also lost a little daughter.

Clearly I do not argue that one cannot conclude the absence of a beneficent creator from the evidence alone, but I share a feeling that is almost a certainty that Darwin and Hooker drew the atheist conclusion for reasons brought to the evidence from their personal lives, and Gray and Lyle the contrary conclusion for the same kind of reason, and so mutatis mutandis did Tom the bulldog. ( We have only to consult the recent work of Antonio Damasio to see that my emphasis on the role of existential experiences in scientific thought cannot be summarily dismissed).

If I were to engage in natural theology, also known as fundamental theology, or philosophical theology, which I do not intend ever to do, I would carry on and talk about systems theory and emergence, and marvel that a purely natural system produced, by emergence, a self-criticism and a self-transcendence towards hope. But I am just a reader of the Bible and an historian of Jesus-Jeshua, a young Jew whom the violence of the State and the Temple together tortured to death.

Rene Girard taught me to read that history of Jeshua as a definitive account of the revelation of the surrogate victim mechanism, which by manipulating the violence that comes gushing from the phylo-genetic system, temporarily stabilized the human world; and, furthermore, to read it as a decisive disarming of that mechanism, which now, weakening and disarming, is losing control and stepping aside for the slouching beast to blow up Jerusalem and all of us with it.