January 2008

A Theory of Religion and Violence

By Robert Hamerton-Kelly

Stanford University

Presented in the UCLA Dept of History

            Much of the discussion of religion these days is hampered by the lack of an effective theory of religion. On the popular level the discussion proceeds as if such a theory were unnecessary because everyone already knows what religion is. On the elite level religion is largely beneath contempt excepting as it poses a threat, like some primitive plague that should long since have been eradicated but is rising again on the wings of fear and confusion. When on the latter level the discussion does turn to the need for a theory it treats religion as an intellectual exercise, a sort of philosophy manqué, and, in any case, while “righteously” remarking how much violence religion causes, is not able to explain why this is so.

Not all elite theories have been philosophical; Emile Durkheim, in whose wake Girard sails, told us that religion is the sense the individual has of the group to which he belongs, the experience of that “effervescence” of feeling that occurs in the presence of the rituals and symbols of the group, and especially the martial tramp of boots on the cobbles and the slap of leather. I take the latter image not from Durkheim but from Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860) an erstwhile Lutheran pastor and later Professor of History who studied at Jena and developed an allergy to Napoleon and all things French. He wrote lyrical poems in praise of the Germans, one of which sticks in my mind because it says that the only time the author is free of doubt about the existence of God is when he hears the drums and the rhythmic slap of boot leather on the cobbles, and sees the beautiful young men marching by to glory. I think it was Arndt who gave us the portentous phrase, “Blut und Boden.” Arndt’s poems alone might persuade us of the truth of Mimetic DesireTheory especially in its account of the link between sacrificial death and divine glory, and especially it account of the soil in which this all grows, namely, the mob. The mob makes violence, violence makes religion, and religion makes the gods. Arndt is therefore, a pagan poet and the spirit he celebrates is the effervescence of the mob we saw so clearly in French and German nationalism, and the ceremonies of the Nuremberg rallies.   Poor, Durkheim! He lost his son and most of his best students in the trenches of the Great War. So much for “”effervescence!

This is not a conventional scholarly address in which I give a reliable account of the whole field to date and then carefully, by leave of my peers, push the envelope a modest millimeter; rather it is a brief introduction to another social science based theory, and so we must hurry on after only doffing the hat to these iceberg tips as we sail by. So here I leave these behind and call attention to what somewhat misleadingly we call the “Mimetic Theory” of Rene Girard,[1] which, I hope to show, explains what religion is and why it has such close affinity with violence. I, however, shall here call it the Mimetic Desire Theory for reasons that will become clear. It shows that human society in general began as an act of violence, established itself as a religious community organized for the control of violence by means of violence, and continues until now as a structure of sacred violence, which is currently falling down about our ears so that soon we all shall be unsheltered from a violence once again out of control.      It is important to understand that we are dealing with archaic religion in general, on the level of anthropology, neither the so-called great religions nor the religious institutions of today, excepting in so far as they exhibit the persistence of archaic religion within themselves.

 So let us at last begin; …with a joke: Holmes and Watson are camping, and they wake up in the middle of the night. As they lie there looking up at the profusion of stars, Holmes asks Watson what he deduces from this magnificent display. Wishing to be thorough Watson says, “Meteorologically speaking I deduce it will be a fine day tomorrow; astronomically that it is mid-summer; philosophically that there is order in the universe; and theologically that God is in His heaven and all is right with the world.” “Watson, you’re a fool,” snaps Holmes. “Why,” asks the crestfallen Watson? “What do you deduce Holmes?” “That someone has stolen our tent!” Mimetic theory is like that tent; its evidences are everywhere but many miss its presence, many like Watson are too thorough to pay attention to the simple things in front of them because they believe that the true account must be deep and complicated, and cannot be banal like the mob and the French Triangle.

Mimetic Theory is a theory of archaic religion that is also a generative theory of society and culture. It shows that society and culture began as religion. There are two major moments in the theory, the first concerns human desire and the second concerns the cultural institutions that arise from human desire. Girard assigns different names to these moments at different times in the long history of his exposition. I shall choose two of the more innocuous ones he has used, respectively, Mimetic Desire, and the Scapegoat. In the history of his oeuvre they correspond firstly to the stage of the literary criticism of the novel (Mensonge romantique et verite romanesque, 1961), and secondly to the evidence of Greek Tragedy in the context of the anthropology of late 19^th and early 20^th century (La violence et le Sacre).

I am aware that his methodology in the former case and his evidence in the latter are controversial. In the former case he can be accused of treating literature as a sociological rather than an aesthetic phenomenon, a situation possibly influenced by the fact that he was trained in history and paleography rather than in literature, and began to teach literature without any specific literary training. In the latter case he can be accused of using ethnological texts that are too much products of the colonial structures many of them were meant to serve, or too naively empirical and objective. All I shall say to those possible criticisms is that the post-Schiller stage of acute aestheticism and the post modern phase of acute skepticism, which have virtually emptied both literary and ethnological texts of a publicly affirmable meaning, are both passé and one might say of Girard what that legendary gentleman is reported to have said of himself, namely, “By never changing my style I have found myself in the height of fashion three times in my life.”   

I shall now introduce each of the two moments, and it will soon become evident how persuasively Mimetic Theory explains religion as successful human behavior rather than failed human thought. 

Mimetic Desire:

Plato and Aristotle taught us that imitation is integral to human reality. Plato’s reality is a structure of ideas and imitations, the latter being inferior to the former, and Aristotle makes the human eagerness to imitate part of the essence of being human, along with the desire to know, and the phenomenon of grouping that he calls politics. Aristotle gave us a subtle theory of mimesis with respect to the theater, where we are absorbed into the emotions of the protagonists and eventually experience along with them a climax of pity and terror; finally to be discharged in a great exudation of emotion he called katharsis or purification. The theater shows how we can be made to imitate the emotions of others, to care about the play’s protagonists even more than we care about the actual people around us[2]

The aesthetic/psychological category of katharsis is an important category for Girard’s mimetic theory as we shall see; at present we note that there is one aspect of imitation that Girard emphasizes and Aristotle misses, at least explicitly, the fact that imitation is not just a replication of external action or style, nor of internal emotion or affect, but fundamentally an imitation of desire. I imitate the other’s desires, that is, I want what he wants – however differently I might express and pursue that identical goal. One can say that the Aristotelian actor implies this imitation of desire because emotion can only arise out of desire, and secondly, that without the imitation of desire there would be no empathy between the actor and the audience, but Aristotle takes this for granted and does not theorize it. Girard makes it the center of his theorizing, and from this center he moves by the dynamic of the imitative forces of the mind spiraling upwards into rage, towards an understanding of perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the Tragedies, both Greek and Shakespearean, namely, their lurid violence.      

 

Aristotle has violence and he has the emotions tending to fear and pity, and he has the explosion of emotions in the katharsis, but he has no explanation of how and why the emotions operate together in this way, and especially why they inexorably generate violence.  For him it is one thing after another, for Girard it is one thing generating another, namely, mimetic desire escalating to violence by virtue of imitating the desire of the other, by wanting what the other wants.

To sum up this section: In Girardian discourse Mimetic means imitative, as in Aristotle, but unlike Aristotle Girardian mimesis imitates primarily and specifically, not the whole range of external and internal actions, but the desire of the other. “I want what you want, and nothing else, and I want it not because I need it but because you want it. Your desire creates my desire and these identical desires must be rivals. “ The account of the human fall from grace in Genesis 3, that warrants doctrines of original sin in Christian orthodoxy, is a vivid account of this mimetic desire at work and one of many ways the Bible points it out. God withholds only one tree (or two) and that is the only tree Eve really wants, not because she needs it but because God wants it.  The reptilian cortex of her brain (Please note that this is poetry not science) whispers to her that since of all the trees there are God chooses only one for his exclusive use, Eve must have it, not because it is the only valuable one by some objective calculus, but because God’s desiring it makes it desirable. Thus the relationship between the creator and the creature changes from grateful dependency to mimetic rivalry, we all become what the Apostle Paul calls “enemies of God” and when we get the opportunity we kill him. On the Cross of Christ we Christians see the generous God (agape) whom our mimetic activity transformed from a friend who gives into a rival who contests, and killed.

We pause here to meditate briefly on the inward horror of mimetic desire; discussing it last week, a mature Girardian colleague and I agreed that it  “seriously scary.” Regard: Your desire that I want to imitate is the deep dynamic of your life’s project, who you are at the deepest level of your personal excellence and being; I don’t want merely to be like you, I want to be you, that is, I want not merely to displace you, I want to replace you. I don’t want merely to win, I want you to lose, and not relatively but absolutely; I want you to cease to be and there where once you were I shall be. (Have you ever been treated as if you were not there, not the simple passive aggressive sulk, but the business situation where one or another of the other participants seems to want you not to be?).  Girard once called this aspect of mimetic desire “Metaphysical” desire, and here we see why, it desires not merely the goods, or the fame, or the lovers, or the beauty of the other, it desires the being of the other. It is not sufficient that I win, you must lose, and lose big; you must cease to be; you must die. Mimetic Desire is therefore murderous by nature; it is the presence that the Gospel of John calls the devil, “a murderer and a liar from the beginning.” So far we have seen its, soon we shall see its mendacity. 

It is important to note here that I can imitate your desire without imitating your surface- or even emotional-level actions; I can imitate your desire, take over your goal, without appearing at all to act or be like you. Girard has said that mimetic desire is a form of guile that has to be met with double guile; and some of us believe that he has deployed the double guile that unmasks “the terror of the night…the arrow that flies by day…the pestilence that stalks in darkness, …the destruction that wastes at noonday (Psalm 91:5-), that is the reptilian envy that rots so many relationships. He believes that long ago this guile was deployed in the Bible, especially in the narratives of Jesus’ suffering and death as the innocent victim in a world of envious accusers and lying backstabbers. Girardian desire is like Aristotelian desire except when it isn’t and it isn’t at the point of imitating not the actions or appearances of the other, but his desires, the point of commandeering his life’s goal and thus committing lethal violence.

 Here is a recent example I came upon two weeks ago; it does not illustrate the murderous heart of mimetic desire that I have been trying to describe directly, but it does show that mimetic desire has not changed or become invisible to good artists.  It does show the murder indirectly however, Alan’s friends at the moment want not just to displace him, they want to replace him in her bed forever; it’s only the next morning that they find relief in the opportunity to give her back to him, to get flush her like a used condom. Shakespeare called this “love by another’s eyes,” (Two Gentlemen of Verona) and my fellow South African expatriate, the 2003 Nobelist for literature, JM Coetzee, describes it as follows; a 29 year woman with a derriere she deploys as a weapon of mass distraction muses as follows: “It’s interesting when men put on a show for each other. I see it with Alan’s men friends too. When Alan brings me along to some office get-together, his friends don’t say, ’What a knockout you’ve got there! What tits! What legs! Lend her to me for the night! You can have mine!’ They don’t say it but that’s what’s flashing between them. I can’t count how many veiled and not so veiled propositions I have had from Alan’s so-called friends, not in front of Alan but that Alan is aware of nevertheless, at some level, because that is what I am for, that is why he buys me new clothes and takes me out; that is also why he is so hot for me afterwards, while he can still see me through other men’s eyes as someone fresh and alluring and illicit[3].” Here we have Sherlock Holmes’ purloined tent at an office party in Adelaide, South Australia, in 2005. Girard first theorized this gem of insight in 1961 while reading Dostoievsky’s “The Perpetual Husband,” the story of a man whose wife cuckolded him all their life together and then died. When that man chose a new bride, the first thing he did after the engagement was to introduce the new bride to the old lover. Some mistake the perpetual husband for a masochist, but he is not that at all, he is rather a hyper-mimeticist who cannot generate even the pretence of desire for his women unless he has a model (and obstacle) whose desire he can piggyback on.[4]

In Diary of A Bad Year Coetzee shows that he has heard of Girard; he writes (P13): ”In comfortable times we forget how terrible civil war is, how rapidly it descends into mindless slaughter. Rene Girard’s fable of the warring twins is pertinent: the fewer the substantive differences between the two parties, the more bitter their mutual hatred.” This comment is unfortunately shows that the commenter has heard of Girard, but not much, and understood even less, especially the real nature of mimetic desire; so Girard appears as just another slightly wiser moralist rather that the epistemological revolutionary that he is. For example, one might point out that the phenomenon of the twins is not a fiction but a datum of ethnology, a fact not a fable, that in some societies twins are either widely separated or one or both killed, because they are too much alike and so threaten to re-ignite the mimetic rivalry that the religious system exists to prevent. One might also point out that civil war does not descend into mindless slaughter, it begins, continues and ends as mindless slaughter; that is, it is through and through driven by murderous mimetic desire and not Platonic rational choice, just like the cheerleader competitions that drove a Texas mother to murder. Slaughter never has a mind, only a reason and a rationalization.

I am indulging myself here, telling a few of the many stories MT has discovered for me, trying as much to entertain as instruct you and show you what n sinister, sardonic world you will see when you wear these (as opposed to Aristotle’s) mimetic eye glasses; hilarious with the pathos of our once hairy species snatching at each other’s bananas, later with their thought that it was in control of all snatching if they had a contract, and now are snatching everything they see, by and without rational contract, just as we always have. Through these spectacles you will see how simply true- to-life, and therefore radically new, this way of knowing is. It is the epistemology of the great literary artists, of Shakespeare and the Bible, and now mirabile dictu it seems to be the epistemology that neuroscience is unveiling for us. Our next question here is: “Given the presence in us and among us of mimetic desire, why are we not long since extinct? How did it come to pass they we survived, not just as solitary figures who met and mated by accident, as Rousseau’s early and blissful humans did, but as groups organized more and less efficiently for procreation and survival? The answer is religion.

 

The Scapegoat:

 

With murderous mimetic desire under our belts let us set out on our journey from chaos to creation. The narrative I am about to present is not a fable or a “just so story,” it is factual. It is what actually happened. How do I know? In the same way that the other paleo-anthropologists know what they claim to know; by dotting the signs left behind in the layers of earth and the layers of culture, and then joining the dots. Like a wide range of descriptive and reconstructive science, mimetic science has evidence, old and fragile but as good as any and better than most in its class.

There is no doubt that in illo tempore members of the groups of our hominid ancestors imitated each other’s desire and became murderously competitive. The social cohesion of these groups was therefore pitifully unstable, as they teetered on the cusp between animal hierarchies and human society. Their original state was, in the phrase of Thomas Hobbes, “a war of all against all,” and such a war could only be fatal for all, unless an antidote appeared. Spontaneously the antidote did appear; he was the scapegoat, the single victim on whom the mimetic and therefore contagious violence of each one in focused, and the war of all against all became the war of all against one. The rivalry of the one against everyone became the rivalry of all against one. Suddenly, spontaneously, like those mutations in neo-Darwinian theory the mob congealed in a common desire for the being of a single victim, a move so clearly understood by the High Priest Caiaphas when he said to the conspirators against Jesus: “ You know nothing at all. You do not understand that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish (John 11:49-50).” Precisely, and if you need further persuading look at the way the military dealt with the Abu Ghraib torture scandal by throwing a few lower echelon soldiers to the prosecutors and exonerating the mob of officers and bureaucrats.

No one decided to make this move, not least because it was made before there was a capacity to decide. Our Latin archetype for “decide” is the verb decidere, to cut, namely to cut the throat of the sacrifice, in illo tempore, to murder the solitary, surrogate victim. This is what must have happened: secondary mimetic urges drove one hominid to join one other hominid in punishing a third, and then the dynamics of the whole group changed, a change that might have been rationalized as “join the stronger side!” Hairy folk, birds of a follicle flocked together and the first human society arrive. This self-serving move might indeed have been the very first act of rational decision in the human record. The first reason driven movement – “cover you back, join the mob, and don’t stand out.”  It takes a good novelist to imagine this process convincingly, and many mutatis mutandis already have, but in any case we can see how eventually everyone in the group copies everyone else’s desire for the metaphysical substance of the solitary victim. “Because everybody wants him he must be good to eat!”

So the first peace was the peace of membership in the (lynch) mob, the first solidarity the shared mimetic desire for the victim’s being.  Thus the social system turned out to be self-healing and the emerging scapegoat not only stabilized its existing self but also laid track for its journey into the future. Culture was set to come out of the emergent victim, and the architecture of the surrogate victim mechanism was already laid down. [5]

 

 

 

The original drama therefore, takes place as follows: At a point of crisis in the dynamic cohesion of the group, when the mimetic rivalry of the war of all against all threatens to destroy that cohesion altogether, the social system rectifies its increasing instability by spontaneously extruding the surrogate victim or scapegoat; the group dynamic then shifts from all against all to all against one. The important term here is “spontaneously”; an ongoing and depressingly incorrigible error even of those of us who try to use MT is that we cannot escape Plato, that is, cannot imagine a spontaneous mutation in a social system, a group of  “humans” behaving without logos, historical events as natural phenomena. This is what I understand our colleague Damasio to mean by “Descartes Error.” For the majority of us, all historical change must pass through the stage of the idea, and so we are told that our hairy ancestors “decided” to focus their fatal rivalry on one rather than one another. This “deciding” is simply the old liberal “social contract,” which provides the myth of the state as a rationally contrived, and therefore, rationally controllable entity.[6]

The self-correction of the social system is emphatically a natural not a rational phenomenon. It happens on the cusp of hominization, even as the cusp itself; that is, it is the cusp event that begins human culture, the first act in and of the human world, and therefore, the deed that founds the world. Before it we were hominids, after it we are homo sapiens sapiens. We did not decide upon the scapegoat mechanism, rather, because of the spontaneous generation of the mechanism we are able to decide. The bible calls the moment of emergence of the mechanism the word of God, which created light and order and the human mind, the natural scientists call it nature if they call it anything at all, which of course is not necessary for most of that science, for which the fewer words and the more mathematical symbols, the better.

The immediate effect of the primal murder was not only group solidarity but also group distinctions, both internal to the group and with reference to other groups. Packs of baboons cohere because of hierarchical distinctions based on the alpha male; the human pack coheres because of a richer network of distinctions that ramifies from the surrogate victim. The body of the victim is the place where distinctions are generated and deployed.[7] Culture is defined as a field of distinctions, and MT knows where they come from, from the first differentiation between the murderous mob and the victim.

The mob halts its hubbub and stands mutely perplexed. Slowly it dawns that they have experienced something new, a time of unity rather than rivalry, of peace rather than war. There lies the corpse of the victim; here stands the newly united mob, the first ever, human community. What to do? The first thing that grabs our attention in this scene is the physical area between the astonished band and the broken body, the dusty, blood-bespattered no man’s land between. Who will dare to cross it? Who will lay a hand on the body?

 In addition to Girard, this creative moment and this differentiation, have been creatively theorized by Sigmund Freud, and by UCLA’s own Eric Gans, the founder of generative anthropology and a dissenting member of the Girard family. His theory is that the first response was not a sortie across the plaza but a discussion, that is, human speech began at this moment. It stands to reason if only because at last we could stop shouting war cries at each other and spend time “getting to know you.” So for Gans culture began as culture, while for Girard culture began as religion. The road from Gans’ primal scene leads to the classroom, from Girard’s to the altar, the battlefield and the office water cooler. Gans is too civilized for us orthodox Girardians, but unlike Freud, is still here, so the debate within the Girard school can go on.  We recognize the power of his interpretation even as we orthodox Girardians demur rather than defer.

It is important to understand that the religion we are dealing here is archaic religion not the recent so-called great religions. The latter come within our purview only in so far as they demonstrate that they still have archaic violent religion within them, which for s Girardians means the demonstration that the message of the Bible has not made sufficient headway there.

I must rush on: here is what happened in the first half hour of human community, in the deafening silence of after the murder, broken suddenly for the mute Cain by the scream of Abel’s blood to God. I take the Bible as my guide now: God says to Cain, who is angry because his offering of grain has been rejected: “Why are you angry and why has you countenance fallen? If you do well will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it (Genesis 4:6). Sin’s desire for you, what is that, if not the mimetic force of Abel’s triumph grabbing Cain and hurling him into homicide.

The event of the surrogate victim brings culture into being as religion, in the form of three founding institutions, namely, ritual, prohibition and myth. The attempt by the killer mob to come to terms with what has happened drives the action, and in the beginning we can barely see it. Did they talk? Did they simply act without talking and the talking come later? We are on the cusp, as I keep saying, between the hominid and the human and we cannot know precisely In any case as soon as perspective begins to emerge we discover the most astonishing fact, that the founding institutions are all mistakes or lies. If one may talk of interpretation at this early stage the humanizing hominids got the interpretation wrong consistently.

For the Christian this smells like the Gnostic heresy equating creation and fall; we are congenital liars, we were created that way so there never was a chance to get it right, and if there never was a chance to do right there cannot be an original sin. This conclusion does not follow, and in case some of you might be storing up a question let me answer it here. It may only have been a for a nanosecond, but the Bible does say there was an Eden that was freely forfeited, which in our narrative, is the possibilities open to that the stunned mob in that first half hour. They had the opportunity to acknowledge the reality that the we the mob are responsible for our violence, and that another form of fellowship is possible – how about a fellowship organized on breaking bread and drinking wine together in remembrance of the victim and as a pledge to each other never to do such a thing again, and how about making laws to help us avoid it, and how about always telling the truth to each other about our own murderous violence. Perhaps we could also make effigies of the dying victim and mount them in our gathering places to remind us what kind of creatures we are and to warn us against ourselves; perhaps a twelve step program,” I am a recovering murderer.” That first human community of assassins could have done some of those things, but what we in fact did is far different and is now at last falling apart[8].

  This is the rationalization we are able to reconstruct somewhat later in the process: Since when he was alive there was violence and when he died it ceased, the victim must be responsible for the violence and hence we learn that he is very powerful; he can cause violence and he can bring peace. This we might call the lie of the all-powerful victim, and this in turn is the point of origin of the lie of the all-powerful god. The response to the all powerful victim takes the following forms:  1) Ritual: in order to keep the pacifying power strong we reenact the murder regularly in the rite of human sacrifice; 2) Prohibition: In order to control the incidence of mimetic phenomena, which we intuit are dangerous for our peace, we enact prohibitions to minimize the chance that mimetic infection will occur, taboos like the incest taboo, or the taboo on twins; 3) Myth: We tell the story of what happened in such a way as to obscure our responsibility for the violence and justify the laying of the blame on the one guilty other.

So we could show how many of the important categories of the human sciences emerge from the victim by myth interpretation - exchange and the gift; vengeance, guilt – but we do not have the time.

 

Conclusion:

 

The way ahead:

 

At this point of conclusion I would like to mention one possible way ahead in Girardian studies, which this event is helping to launch. In 2004 at the COVR meeting in New Mexico I heard a young psychologist from Fuller School of Psychology discussing the interface between mimetic desire theory and the neuro-sciences, and this jogged my memory of information Dr William Hurlbut had given us at the COVR meeting at Stanford in 1996, concerning empathy and some new Italian discoveries of what they were calling “mirror neurons.” I had been trying in an off and on way to interest someone in this line of research, and here he was, Scott Garrels. He went ahead and by last year had, with the support of the Templeton Foundation, organized a workshop at Stanford on the subject, at which two pivotal researchers in brain and mind studies were present. They were Vittorio Gallese from Parma on “mirror neurons” and Andrew Meltzoff from U Washington on child development. One astonishing finding of the workshop is that Meltzoff has results from his experiments with very young children that converge with the mirror neuron evidence, and all seem to have been anticipated by Girard’s work on desire fist published in 1961. I was there too, and took what I regard as the astonishing promise of this workshop to a wealthy young entrepreneur, a baby billionaire former student of Girard and me, and now we have a modest foundation called Imitatio Inc and are moving ahead on the way between mimetic desire and neuro-scientific studies.

The agenda for studies of our particular kind of imitation, mimetic desire is in process of being set, but there are some obvious things that can be said at this stage.

The whole field of the understanding of Imitation has been renewed; what we have known since Aristotle and made a mainstay of our studies of psychological development since Piaget is all to be redone. Imitation is not a consciously learned technique but rather a preconscious capacity for learning, that is, not the learned but the process of learning. This greatly illuminates the general basis of the theory of mimetic desire.

However, mimetic desire is a special instance of imitation; it is the imitation of desire narrowly and specifically, and it leads to violence. This is the first premise of our whole theory; if this can be empirically warranted then we have closed a major gap in the continuum of explanation from the natural to the human levels and have provided a premise for integrating the human and natural sciences at and across the boundary between brain and mind. We have rectified Descartes’ error.

If this can be warranted then the explanations of society, politics, manners, religion and faith so powerfully provided by mimetic desire theory, can be linked to human nature literally, that is biologically, and we shall have a unified theory of everything human.

For myself I intend to study desire again, from a phenomenological point of view, using linguistic, literary and other sources. Late one recent night I started making the following list of qualifiers for Desire: Devouring, Desperate, Dark, Domineering, Dismal, Distorting, Distending, Dreadful, Draconian, Dangerous. I ascertained that in Latin the verb is desiderare, to need, but in Greek it is epithumeo – to set one’s heart upon, lust after etc. I observed that epithumeo includes the root thu which means sacrifice and then saw in LSJ that  epithumiasis is “an offering of incense,” thuma, animal victim of a sacrifice, and thu refers specifically the smoke or savor of a burnt offering. The LXX (Greek OT) uses epithu… in Ex 20:17 in the prohibition, “Thou shalt not covet” and St Paul quotes this in Romans 7:7, and Augustine renders it concupiscentia. So we are again at the tap root of the Western Christian moral tradition of lusts (libido) and their prohibitions, the lust to dominate, the lust to possess, and lust to use sexually.  (How our point of view changed when Helvetius the Enlightenment figure changed lusts to interests!).

Much of the hostility to mimetic desire theory comes from the accurate perception that it is a revival of traditional Christian moral theology, and for that matter, of Christian Atonement theory as well. So let me at last come clean: mimetic desire theory is Christian and it is true. Live with it.