Un calife autrefois, à son heure dernière,
Au Dieu qu’il’ adorait dit pour toute prière:
“Je t’apporte, ô seul roi, seul être illimité,
Tout ce que tu n’as pas dans ton immensité,
Les défauts, les regrets, les maux, et l’ignorance.”
Mais il pouvait encore ajouter l’espérance.(Once a caliph, in his last hour, prayed to God, whom he worshipped: “I bring thee, O only and almighty king, that, which in your immensity, you lack—faults, regrets, pain, and ignorance.” He could have added hope.)
Hope in the midst of “a dark night.” Hope despite “the faults and the ignorance.” That was Voltaire in his famous poem on the Lisbon earthquake. Girard, the man of faith striving for sanctity, could say the same thing. But that is not the conclusion of his mimetic anthropology.
Intended to be a scientific display of the hermeneutic power of the Christian revelation at its deepest level, Girardian anthropology, to the surprise and disbelief of most Girardians, ended up declaring in his last book, Achever Clausewitz (Battling to the End), that the revelation has failed, “it has not been heard.”
Did Christianity predict its apocalyptic failure? A reasonable argument can be made that it did. This failure is simply the same thing as the end of the world. From this point of view, one could argue that the verse “when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” is still too full of hope.
The relevance of the apocalyptic texts is therefore absolutely striking . . . They say paradoxically that Christ will only return when there is no hope that evangelical revelation will be able to eliminate violence, once humanity realizes that it [i.e., the evangelical revelation] has failed. Christians say that Christ will return to transform the failure into eternal life . . . The positivity of history should not be eliminated, but shifted. The rationality that mimetic theory seeks to promote is based entirely on the shift. Saying that chaos is near is not incompatible with hope, quite the contrary. However, hope has to be seen in relation to an alternative that leaves only the choice between total destruction and the realization of the Kingdom.
No wonder he is convinced “that history has meaning, and that its meaning is terrifying.” “From this point of view,” he says. What point of view is that which offers such a dismal vision? At a certain moment Benoît Chantre asks the following question:
BC: You are leaning toward the worst . . . Why do you think that the “epiphany of identity” [of all men] necessarily has to take an apocalyptic turn?
RG: Because the Gospels say so and because the fact has become so obvious . . .
Let us leave aside the question of whether or not it is so obvious. It is true that the Gospels announce a terrible apocalyptic situation of unparalleled violence:
For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the sufferings . . . For there shall be then great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, neither shall be (Matt 24:7–21).
But these are the words of Christ, and there is a reason why he is telling these things to his disciples: he wants to prepare them, to tell them that it is possible to maintain the faith through the devastation: “he who endures to the end, will be saved” (Matt 24:13). He wants them and the world to remember that these were his words, so that “when these things begin to come to pass, look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is at hand” (Luke 21:28). And the words of Christ in John the Apostle:
I will not leave you orphans: I will come to you. Yet a little while and the world sees me no more. But you see me: because I live, and you shall live (John 14:18).
These things have I spoken to you that you may not be scandalized. They will put you out of the synagogues: yea, the hour comes, that whosoever kills you will think that he does a service to God. And these things will they do to you; because they have not known the Father nor me. But these things I have told you, that when the hour shall come, you may remember that I told you of them (John 16:1).
So, yes, “the Gospels say so.” But why does he leave out the hope that Christ attaches to his own words? Let me repeat the question I formulated a moment ago: “What point of view is that which offers such a dismal vision?” Clearly, one that focuses on the inevitability of what is going to happen to humanity, and ignores the voice that announces it—thus separating the message from the messenger, in order to define the Apocalypse in strictly human terms, because apocalyptic violence is not God’s violence, “it is all on our side.” It is the hypermimetic violence, about which he has been talking from the beginning, the backbone of a theory without “the slightest recourse to transcendence.” A theory that converts a divine message into a strictly human one. Thereby eliminating all hope. Thus, as we move ineluctably toward the end we are simultaneously regressing toward the origin, the foundational violence, except that now violence can no longer be the foundation of anything:
BC: On one hand, we would have the escalation to extremes [the inexorable worsening of our reciprocal violence], and on the other a return to origins . . . toward what you call the founding murder. The two movements would be linked: the closer we get to the end, the further back we go. The more history tends toward the worst, the less we will be able to hide the need for a clear discussion of archaic religion.
RG: Exactly. It is now time for that discussion. This is why mimetic theory does nothing but analyze archaic religion. . . . It is now clear that the further we progress in history, the further we regress back to that Alpha point. Historical Christianity and what we are obliged to call its “failure” is nothing but the accelerated bridging of the beginning and end of time.
Within the logic of the theory, this regress toward the origin follows the failure of the Christian Revelation and the concurrent absence of Christ. For in the beginning there was nothing but the hypermimeticism of the crowd and the blind automatism of the scapegoat mechanism, which is the “scientific” Girardian way of talking about “original sin.” The problem is that scapegoating, which appeared to work well all by itself in the beginning, no longer works, so reconciliation, a new beginning, cannot happen either. We are, according to theory, back at the origin engaged in a state of desacralized violence beyond our control, because we have no sacrificial way to stop it, and Christ is no longer with us. It is a complete dead end. Humanity is trapped. There is no escape. Complete annihilation is imminent.
At that moment, what does it mean to say that “Christ will only return when there is no hope that evangelical revelation will be able to eliminate violence, once humanity realizes that it [i.e., the evangelical revelation] has failed”? Does that mean that Christ wants to teach humanity a lesson, let humanity learn the hard way, through horror and despair: see what happens when the evangelical revelation does not work? Will Christ return in glory to tell us, “I told you, why did you not believe in me?” Will “God’s patience” be satisfied now? Will he accept our panicky repentance out of despair as a proper reparation for not believing in his Son? Will he believe in our sincerity when we receive his returning Son proclaiming, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”? For this will be, according to Christ, what he will hear upon his return.
This is obviously absurd. My point is that Girard’s anthropological hope out of complete hopelessness, hope in the face of “an alternative that leaves only the choice between total destruction and the realization of the Kingdom” is not Christian hope at all, but despair. And my point is also that this unbelievable apocalypse is the only one available within the scientific parameters of mimetic anthropology; an anthropology which can discover and explain the scapegoat mechanism and how it works, from a human perspective, which is no small feat. But that is all it can do. Hope, Christian hope, which is inconceivable without divine forgiveness, as Girard knew perfectly well, is beyond its purview.
But he forgot. As he reads Clausewitz’s On War and meditates on the future of Europe and the world, he realizes Clausewitz is really talking about the ultimate mimetic structure and dynamics of human violence, about its inherent open-ended character. It is ultimately the old duel between enemy brothers in a world-wide dimension. It is the destruction of Europe and the rest of the world. It is the apocalypse. And it is all predicted in the Gospels. It is Christ himself who told us. Yes, I have no problem with that.
But he goes further. What he sees in the Gospels, he thinks, can be explained much better, from a human perspective, by mimetic anthropology. At which point, he pays no attention to the explicit expressions of hope and support in Christ’s words. As a result, he drives himself into a hopeless dead end. He becomes a victim of his own logic: if you concentrate on the predicted facts alone, as a scientific approach seems to demand, and put aside the predicter, i.e., Christ, who happens to be the only reason for hope, of course you will end up in a hopeless situation. To make matters even worse, the factual hopelessness of the scientific view now becomes, in turn, the proof that Christ is no longer there: and the epistemological circle is complete. All hope has been blocked out. But Girard is a Christian man, he knows that such a dead end is not Christian. There must be hope still. Yes, as long as we realize that we have reached a dead end and that, therefore, Christ, the Kingdom of God, is our only option.
This hellish circularity could have been easily avoided by trusting the words of Christ to begin with. Why did we have to convince ourselves scientifically that what Christ said was coming, was really coming? Why did we not trust him, and him alone? Why did we have to drive ourselves into despair? Or was all this trial and tribulation a doubtful prelude to the final trusting gesture of leaving everything in the hands of God, the gesture with which we began: “yes, yes, God is taking care of it”?
As I said, Battling to the End caught many Girardians by surprise. I was devastated. We had not talked the way we used to talk in the good old days at Buffalo, in a long time, although we never lost contact. My only personal contact with him after the publication of the book was a rather brief conversation at an annual meeting of COV&R in California. I did not know how to approach the subject. I made some general remark about being a bit surprised. I do not know whether he understood what I was trying to say. This is what he said: “Benoît has helped me a lot. I could not have done it all by myself. I no longer have the strength.”
Others found the book “unsettling, eccentric” (Michael Kirwan, Evolution and Conversion, xx), “strikingly somber” (Kirwan, Girard and Theology, 145), and a “troubled work” (Scott Cowdell, René Girard and the Nonviolent God, 75). James Williams, whose “Foreword” to Resurrection from the Underground in 1996 spoke of Girard as “a thinker . . . more positive and optimistic concerning human possibilities under God, could scarcely be imagined,” now, after his encounter with the Girard of Battling to the End, finds him “with a more pessimistic view of the success of Christianity.” “In this conversation with Benoît Chantre he makes a 180-degree turn to comment at length about the crisis of Western culture and civilization, although not at all in a hopeful, activist, fashion,” which is really an understatement. “Do we dismiss his insights as the ramblings of a disillusioned sage, or do we recognize in their prophetic vehemence a strategic understanding of the in-between time of our ‘modernity,’ precariously advancing between Progress and Abyss?”
Christian hope must be rescued from this scientific apocalypse. We must remember basic things, things which Girard knew perfectly well and yet rendered irrelevant in the context of mimetic anthropology. Christian things like those of which Father Kelly has recently reminded us in a marvelous article, which ought to be “ruminated” upon morossisime by those of us who suffered through the reading of Battling to the End:
The key element in the relationship of God to the world—that is, from “before the foundation of the world”—has been the presence of the crucified and risen One: “Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and Hades” (Rev 1:17b–18). Without this backdrop of a divine self-sacrificial love and our participation in it through mercy and forgiveness, history can seem like a dismal obituary. But any such conclusion based only on violence, hatred, and death as the drivers of our human history would be premature without the special energies of Christian love and hope. These virtues breathe with God’s limitless self-sacrificial love, as it creates the universe, forms humanity, forgives sins, brings healing, and promises the transformed integrity of finding God “all in all.”
I could not have said it any better myself. Girard’s scientific pessimism, or hope out of despair, was not always apparent. He sounded optimistic in The Scapegoat (1986):
In reality, the world’s lack of belief is perpetuated and reinforced only because the historical process is not yet complete, thus creating the illusion of a Jesus demystified by the progress of knowledge and eliminated with the other gods from history. History need only progress some more and the Gospel will be verified. “Satan” is discredited, and Christ justified. Jesus’ victory is thus, in principle, achieved immediately at the moment of the Passion, but for most men it only takes shape in the course of a long history secretly controlled by the revelation.
He also spoke of the “victory of the Cross,” in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (2000). It is true, as noticed by Dupuy, that the ground on which his anthropological pessimism is built was already there as early as Things Hidden (1978):
Every advance in knowledge of the victimage mechanism, everything that flushes violence out of its lair, doubtless represents, at least potentially, a formidable advance for men in an intellectual and ethical respect but, in the short run, it is all going to translate as well into an appalling resurgence of this same violence in history, in its most odious and most atrocious forms, because the sacrificial mechanisms become less and less effective and less and less capable of renewing themselves . . . Humanity in its entirety already finds itself confronted with an ineluctable dilemma: men must reconcile themselves for evermore without sacrificial intermediaries, or they must resign themselves to the coming extinction of humanity.
However, he expected that, eventually, universal knowledge of the victimage mechanism would prevail and move humanity toward some sort of global reconciliation, as he acknowledges in his last book. Nobody spoke of pessimism at that time. In fact, from what he told me, the 1978 book was very well received by the Catholic hierarchy, both in Paris and at the Vatican. It was not long thereafter that he was invited to a meeting with the Pope in the company of a few other French intellectuals, which I mentioned earlier. I seriously doubt that John Paul II would have had much interest in meeting with the author of Achever Clausewitz. Let me bring up again those crucial words of the Holy Father’s in Crossing the Threshold of Hope:
Of what should we not be afraid? We should not fear the truth about ourselves. One day Peter became aware of this and with particular energy he said to Jesus: “Depart from me Lord, for I am a sinful man” (Luke 5:8). . . . Christ answered him: “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.” (Luke 5:10)
“We should not fear the truth about ourselves.” There it is, in a nutshell, the most radical antidote to what Girard says in Achever Clausewitz. But the truth about ourselves was revealed to us by the Crucified. Those creatures trembling under “the black Typhon or barbarous Ahriman,” petrified with sacred horror, shrunk into themselves, must be something extraordinary, since they were loved by God to such an extreme, to be rescued by the Son of the Living God at such a price.
The amazing thing is that nobody has understood the extent of that price in human terms, its universal scope, better than Girard. After his conversion he did nothing but explore and explain to us what that price was from the beginning. What happened then? Was he overwhelmed by what he found? Did he faint? Was there a doubting moment when he felt that faith was not enough, that science must come to the rescue? Listen again to his words:
BC: The more history tends toward the worst, the less we will be able to hide the need for a clear discussion of archaic religion.
RG: Exactly. It is now time for that discussion. This is why mimetic theory does nothing but analyze archaic religion.
What else could that mean if not that, in view of what the Gospels prophesy, it is urgent that we pay attention to what mimetic theory has been telling us? Girard was not trying to undermine the faith, of course. But in view of what he saw as the failure of the evangelical revelation, in view of the fact that we did not listen, it has become increasingly clear that a discussion of what mimetic theory has been doing from the beginning is urgent. There is something profoundly sincere, and incredibly naive, in this Girardian appeal for us to listen. There is something of the spirit of prophecy in it. He is not trying to be a substitute for Christ, of course. He would much rather be his prophet.
But to no avail. The scientific language of mimetic anthropology constitutes itself on the basis of an a priori expulsion, or absence, of any religious belief. It is not the Evangelical revelation, the word of Christ, that has failed; what has failed is mimetic anthropology. We wanted something scientific “without the slightest recourse to transcendence.” And that is exactly what we got. We reap what we sow. Therefore, there is nothing between us and the Kingdom, except our violence, which is what has been revealed to us, according to mimetic anthropology. “The truth about violence has been stated once and for all. Christ revealed the truth that the prophets announced, namely that of the violent foundation of all cultures.”
Let us review it once more. Girard said that it was Christ who revealed the truth about human violence. Christ gave us “universal knowledge of violence.” He thought that this would lead to general reconciliation. It did not happen. Therefore, the Christian Revelation has failed historically. However, that knowledge of violence was the foundation of mimetic anthropology; it made mimetic anthropology possible. This being so, how can mimetic anthropology help where “universal knowledge of violence” failed? It does not make any sense. Mimetic theory will simply add another layer of futility to our hopeless predicament.
Nevertheless, by the mercy of God, we cannot manage to block the view completely. In spite of everything, the sound of hope can still be detected underneath the “sound and the fury” of the futile and meaningless surface:
Apocalyptic thought recognizes the source of conflict in identity, but it also sees in it the hidden presence of the thought of “the neighbor as yourself” which can certainly not triumph, but is secretly active, secretly dominant under the sound and fury on the surface. Peaceful identity lies at the heart of violent identity as its most secret possibility.
Is this not the moment of conversion? Similar, perhaps, to the conversion of the literary author. The end of the novel. The end of all novels, of literary fiction itself. Have we reached the end of theory in a similar way? Let us see:
It is not the Father whom we should imitate, but his Son, who has withdrawn with his Father. His absence is the very ordeal that we have to go through. This is when, and only when, the religious should no longer be frightening, and the escalation to extremes could turn into its opposite. Such a reversal is nothing more than the advent of the Kingdom. What form will that advent take? We cannot imagine it. We will be able to do so only if we abandon all our old rationalist reflexes. Therefore, once again, everything depends on the meaning we give to religion. The one that mimetic theory seeks to construct is relevant because it is anchored in a tradition and is also not incompatible with the advances of the “human sciences.”
Obviously, we are not there yet. We are still trying to sell the higher merits of our theory. Are our new “rationalist reflexes, anchored in tradition and compatible with the advances of the ‘human sciences,’” so different from the “old rationalist reflexes”? Should we not abandon them as well?
Then, all of a sudden, the entire argument in Battling to the End tilts silently out of its rationalist impasse toward individual conversion. In a book about the fate of humanity as a whole, which advises “to reason more and more at a global level, leave behind strictly individual perspectives, and consider things in big chunks,’” a most individual perspective, that of the poet Hölderlin’s conversion, is placed at the center:
This book is based on long discussions with Benoît Chantre, and has been entirely reworked and rewritten by him. We established the definitive version together. We follow Clausewitz’s text very closely. Conversation’s blessings include surprises and new connections. Little by little, we came to see that various authors, poets and exceptional people were crucial to our discussion. A whole constellation of writers and thinkers finally merged with our thinking. I consider this a little like the communion of saints. The enormous problems that we have raised based on a single text have highlighted these people, and the central thinker has seemed to us to be the poet Hölderlin.
We have left our scientific anthropology behind. We have left behind the theory that tells us that individual conversions will not change anything at large. We are now talking about individual conversion, that of Hölderlin, “which will help us understand what is happening.” After all, the transition “from reciprocity to relationship, from negative contagion to a form of positive contagion [which] is what the imitation of Christ means . . . is on the level of a specific conversion.” There is no other way of meeting the Christ who saves, except individually. “I am not praying for the world but for those whom thou hast given me, for they are thine; all mine are thine, and thine are mine, and I am glorified in them” (John 17:9). Society at large is in a state of panic, “has gone crazy” at the approach of the truth:
The reason that people fight more and more is that there is a truth approaching against which their violence reacts. The Christ is the Other who is coming and who, in his very vulnerability, arouses panic in the system. In small archaic societies, the Other was the stranger who brings disorder, and who always ends up as the scapegoat. In the Christian world, it is Christ, the Son of God, who represents all the innocent victims and whose return is heralded by the very effects of the escalation to extremes. What will he declare? That we have gone crazy, that the adulthood of humanity, which he announced through the cross, is a failure.
The only way to escape the maddening failure of Christianity, which is the subject matter of Battling to the End, is an individual way. This is why Hölderlin’s “withdrawal” is so significant:
Hölderlin’s withdrawal occurred at the very point when there was a frightening acceleration of history in Germany. In this, the poet was infinitely more lucid than his friend Hegel. It is as if he felt the terrifying future and saw that humanity would be unable to hear the truth. This is why I see in his distancing not only an apocalyptic attitude, but also a form of rediscovered innocence and, I dare say, holiness.
This withdrawal, this distancing, is essential. He retreats from a vision that both terrifies and fascinates, from the spectacle of a society insanely trapped in reciprocal violence. “Some human beings resist desire and being carried away by mimetic violence . . . To talk about freedom means to talk about man’s ability to resist the mimetic mechanism.” We “resist desire,” “being carried away,” by averting our eyes from the object of desire; by withdrawing, by distancing ourselves from its powerful attraction. But human beings cannot cease to be mimetic. We will follow a model. We are free, however, to choose a model who will not only never become our rival, but who will also not take our freedom away. A god would take our freedom away. “The Greeks never thought to imitate gods”—nor heroes, I should add. But our God recedes into the distance, though he is still close enough to be our model and also to preserve our freedom. Christ is the perfect model, both God and man. Christ or Christ-like figures, saints.
This is the kind of reasoning behind the choice of Hölderlin as a model of behavior in the midst of an apocalyptic vision: “The presence of the divine grows as the divine withdraws: it is the withdrawal that saves, not the promiscuity . . . Hölderlin thus felt that the Incarnation was the only means available to humanity to face God’s very salubrious silence.” “Resisting desire,” “resisting being carried away,” on one hand, and, on the other, following the perfect model at the perfect distance, imply each other.
Carl von Clausewitz fell silent before the madness of which he did not dare to talk, the maddening violence of endless reciprocity between polar opposites. The madness of which mimetic anthropology has been talking from the beginning. The maddening ambivalence of the sacred victim, in which it all began. The madness before which all knowledge disintegrates, including everything that mimetic anthropology had been saying from the beginning, always centered around the murder of the human victim. Knowledge is useless, powerless, before the collective madness. Girard knew this. Why should he keep talking about it? He pokes fun at himself: Oh! Those millions of victims, shouldn’t God apologize to us? But he knows where the truth lies that can rescue a human from madness. It is inside, in the most intimate interiority, revealing, not only the interiority itself in its light, but the whole world in its light. The Christ who speaks in the intimacy of the soul is the Savior of the world, and vice versa, the Savior of the world can only be heard in the intimacy of the soul.
Clausewitz’s silence, Hölderlin’s withdrawal. In the end, mimetic anthropology becomes an exploration of the reasons for such a silence and withdrawal, which can only be the very reasons for mimetic anthropology itself to fall silent and withdraw. Enough is enough. It is the hour of truth. Let Christ speak. The rest is madness.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from The Truth of Mankind: Reflections on Girardian Theory (Angelico Press, 2024. All rights reserved.
