René Girard and the Nonviolent God

By Scott Cowdell

In his latest book on the ground-breaking work of René Girard (1923–2015), Scott Cowdell sets out a new perspective on mimetic theory and theology: he develops the proposed connection between Girardian thought and theological dramatic theory in new directions, engaging with issues of evolutionary suffering and divine providence, inclusive Christian uniqueness, God's judgment, nonviolent atonement, and the spiritual life. Cowdell reveals a powerful, illuminating, and life-enhancing synergy between mimetic theory and Christianity at its best.

With religion widely seen as increasingly violent and intransigent, the true Christian emphasis on divine solidarity, mercy, and healing is in danger of being lost. René Girard provides a countervailing voice. He emerges from Cowdell's study not only as a necessary dialogue partner for theology today, but as a global prophet offering hope and challenge in equal measure.

René Girard was a Catholic cultural theorist whose mimetic theory achieved a powerful symbiosis of social science with scripture and theology, yielding a unique perspective on humanity’s origins, violent history, and future prospects. Cowdell maps this synergy, revealing theological themes present from Girard’s earliest writings to the latest, less-familiar publications. He resolves a number of theological challenges to Girard’s work, engaging mimetic theory in fruitful dialogue with key themes, movements, and thinkers in theology today.

Bringing a distinctive Anglican voice to a largely Catholic debate, Cowdell gives an orthodox theological account of Girard’s intellectual achievement, bearing witness to Christianity’s nonviolent God. This book will be of great interest to theologians, seminarians and clergy of all traditions, Girardians, and Christian peace activists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Nov 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9780268104566

Scott Cowdell

Scott Cowdell is associate professor and research fellow in public and contextual theology at Charles Sturt University, Canberra, Australia, and canon theologian of the Canberra-Goulburn Anglican Diocese. He is author and editor of a number of books, including Violence, Desire, and the Sacred: Girard's Mimetic Theory Across the Disciplines (edited with Chris Fleming and Joel Hodge).

Book preview

RENÉ GIRARD AND THE NONVIOLENT GOD

RENÉ GIRARD

and the

NONVIOLENT GOD

Scott Cowdell

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

www.undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2018 by the University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cowdell, Scott, author.

Title: René Girard and the nonviolent God / Scott Cowdell.

Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018043814 (print) | LCCN 2018044785 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268104559 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268104566 (epub) | ISBN 9780268104535 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268104530 (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Nonviolence—Religious aspects—Christianity. | God (Christianity) | Girard, René, 1923–2015. | Anglican Communion—Doctrines.

Classification: LCC BT736.6 (ebook) | LCC BT736.6 .C69 2018 (print) | DDC 230/.046—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043814

∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

for Peter Thiel, and Imitatio

I was a stranger, and you welcomed me (Matt. 25:35)

When Jews and Christians came to use the word god it was already lying around and meaning something else.

—Herbert McCabe, God Still Matters

The God of Christianity isn’t the violent God of archaic religion, but the non-violent God who willingly becomes a victim in order to free us from our violence.

—René Girard, Evolution and Conversion

Je vous nomme désormais le nouveau Darwin des sciences humaines.

—Michel Serres, Réception à l’Académie française de René Girard

Here comes René Girard, the Poirot of theology.

—Sebastian Moore, The Contagion of Jesus

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Overture to Mimetic Theory

2. From Violence to Divinity

3. From Hominization to Apocalypse

4. Girard among the Theologians

5. A Divine-Human Drama

6. The Shadow Side of Finitude

7. Divine Overaccepting

8. Christ, the Nonviolence of God

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I greatly appreciate the congenial working environment afforded me by the Charles Sturt University Centre for Public and Contextual Theology (PACT), along with PACT funding to attend conferences of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion and the American Academy of Religion. For all this and more I thank our director, Stephen Pickard.

To those who kindly read and commented on all or part of this work in draft, I owe my sincere thanks for their time, encouragement, and (in one or two cases) their prudent advice: Jeremiah Alberg, Sandor Goodhart, Curtis Gruenler, Wayne Hudson, Stephen Pickard, Brian Robinette, and Bruce Wilson. Further thanks go to Jeremiah Alberg and Brian Robinette, who proved generous (if readily identifiable) anonymous reviewers for the publisher, and especially to Wayne Hudson and Bruce Wilson for their long-standing interest and support.

Once again, the University of Notre Dame Press has taken good care of me. To Stephen Little, Matthew Dowd, Maria denBoer, Wendy McMillen, and Susan Berger I offer my particular thanks. I thank Christopher Brennan for the index and Stephen Pickard for a PACT grant to fund its preparation. The striking cover image we are using features a piece of art glass by the Swedish sculptor Bertil Vallien. It was photographed by my wife, Lisa Carley, against a backdrop of plantation shutters slightly ajar. I thank Kosta Boda (in their 275th anniversary year) for kind permission to use this image (www.kostaboda.com), and I thank Lisa—not only for this photograph but for her support during another writing project and, more generally, for thirty-two years of love, loyalty, and laughter.

It would not have been possible for me to conduct research for and write this book without a generous three-and-a-half year fellowship from Imitatio, the Girardian arm of the San Francisco–based Thiel Foundation. My thanks to Jimmy Kaltreider, Lindy Fishburne, Trevor Cribben Merrill, the Research Committee and Board of Imitatio, and especially Peter Thiel—arguably René Girard’s most influential former pupil—to whom this work is gratefully dedicated.

Canberra, Australia

Octave of Easter

April 2018

Introduction

This is a book about René Girard (1923–2015) and what he brings to Christian theology. It comes at a time of dawning recognition about the significance of mimetic theory for theology, though the nature of that significance remains less clear. This book aims to provide that clarity. It seeks to mediate between Girard’s oeuvre and what we might call mainstream, orthodox theology—it is a particular concern of this study to show that Christian belief need not be bent out of shape to accommodate mimetic theory.

In so doing, questions need to be addressed about the compatibility of Girard’s self-declared scientific program with theology’s authoritative sources: scripture, creeds, and persistent tropes regarding creation, revelation, providence, Christology, eschatology, and atonement. Among the theological critics of mimetic theory to receive attention here are Hans Urs von Balthasar, John Milbank, and Sarah Coakley. Girard’s theological interlocutors and interpreters are also present, most notably Raymund Schwager and James Alison.

In this undertaking, the reader may detect a new accent in theology’s engagement with mimetic theory. Girard has received theological attention, both positive and negative, within his own Catholic Church and throughout the Protestant world. There has also been a smattering of Eastern Orthodox writings on Girardian themes. But there has not been extensive engagement with mimetic theory in Anglican theology, though Girard has been welcomed (with serious reservations) at the Catholic end of Anglicanism by Milbank and Coakley. Recurrent themes in this study reveal certain Anglican preoccupations on my part, as a theologian who has been influenced intellectually, but also spiritually and personally, by mimetic theory. If the integration of faith with reason, theology’s engagement with culture, and the ecclesial mediation of personal transformation all add up to a single gift and task for me, as a characteristically Anglican way of being Christian, so the discovery and exploration of mimetic theory has illumined and deepened my Anglican sensibilities.

First, consider the threefold cord not quickly broken of scripture, tradition, and reason. Anglicans who align their theological sympathies with those of Richard Hooker—the great apologist of the Elizabethan Settlement—believe that, while scripture is primary, nevertheless any adequate hermeneutics must involve respectful conversation with the church’s creedal traditions and with the canons of reason (reason being conceived more broadly than today’s instrumental rationality typically allows). Girard is manifestly sympathetic to maintaining this conversation. Second, with this structural commitment in Anglican theological method comes its predilection for situating doctrine in close proximity to prayer, worship, and the cultivation of Christian character. This association of rational theological discourse with personal and communal transformation through word, sacrament, and common prayer is highly compatible with Girard’s insistence on linking theoretical insight with personal conversion. Third, the aforementioned Elizabethan Settlement manifested classical Anglicanism’s commitment to maintaining peace in both church and nation. This emphasis perseveres in a characteristic spirit of irenicism and public-mindedness in Anglican theology, which finds obvious resonances in Girard. His mimetic theory represents wisdom for the common good, beyond any sectarian agenda. He also declares that rivalrous self-definition and scapegoating should be off-limits to Christians. Both these commitments echo Anglican sensibility at its best.

From motives that may be discerned in the conception of this study, we now turn to an overview of its contents. The first three chapters offer a close reading of Girard’s oeuvre, exploring what I call his early, middle, and late phases. These chapters reveal theological synergies that developed throughout Girard’s literary and social-scientific researches, along with a kernel of the whole mimetic theory that was already present at the beginning. Next, we turn to a theological assessment of Girard’s social-scientific program, considering how he might fit best into today’s theological conversation. In the two following chapters, on divine revelation and divine action in an evolutionary world, mimetic theory is aligned with divine providence conceived in kenotic and incarnational terms. The preferred vehicle for this alignment is theological dramatic theory, as illuminated by the double agency tradition. In two final chapters we look at key theological concerns that have been laid at Girard’s door. These include the tragic cast of mimetic theory and its apparent ontologizing of violence. Girard offers theology a way beyond the standard options that too readily either embrace or deny such tragic, violent elements. Here I invoke a practice called overaccepting, which comes from improvisation theory in drama. Overaccepting provides a key to how certain contested theological themes can emerge less problematically in light of mimetic theory. The concentration is on divine providence in general and Jesus Christ in particular—who he is, what he does, what can and should be said of him, and what ought not to be said—from the perspective of divine nonviolence.

Such divine nonviolence, it must be admitted, is honored more in the breach than in the observance—and mimetic theory does not gild the lily when it comes to Christian involvement in violence. It distinguishes between a central arc of biblical revelation and particular passages that reflect an earlier, more violent religious imagination. It regards many such texts of terror as having been recontextualized by later biblical writers, though they were not excised, and the sentiments they express have certainly resurfaced throughout Christian history. Indeed, as the Mennonite theologian J. Denny Weaver reminds us,

There can be no doubt whatsoever that much of the Christian tradition has assumed a role for divine violence and that an integral dimension of the traditional understanding of the omnipotence of God is the presumed prerogative of God to exercise violence. That divine exercise of violence appears in the Old Testament and the New Testament and is prevalent in theology at all levels today.¹

In terms of practice, the church abandoned an early pacifist inclination for a developing tradition of just war theory, in the midst of which the crusades erupted as an excess of religiously sanctioned violence.² The Jesuit theologian Robert J. Daly lists thirty-six historical moments when Christianity had the chance to revive its peaceful origins. But for every instance of peace carrying the day (from early Christian refusal of military service, to medieval and Reformation-era peace movements, to the Quakers, antislavery, and the pacifist churches, on to today’s Christian movements for liberation, justice, and peace), there are many examples of Christianity endorsing and perpetuating violence. These include caesaropapism, just war theory, the crusades, the Inquisition, the witch trials, the so-called religious wars of early modernity, slavery, modern militarism, anti-Semitism with the Holocaust, and Christian involvement in more recent ethnic violence.³ Yet there is a counterwitness that challenges every such trend, which New Testament scholar David J. Neville ventures to hold up. If the voice of Jesus breaks through the strata of later interpretative traditions with sufficient clarity, he writes, it should be heeded. One such instance . . . is the moral stance of Jesus with respect to violence.⁴

With this history in mind, it is desirable to avoid perpetuating an intellectual version of violence by subjecting the gospel to an unjustifiable conceptual rigidity.⁵ Accordingly, the ex-Catholic Girardian theologian Anthony W. Bartlett is concerned about the attempt at full conceptual coherence by the tradition around the dogmatic legacy.⁶ I am more confident than Bartlett that this risk can be avoided while honoring the language and concepts of creedal orthodoxy and that this is important for Girard’s theological reception. However, with Bartlett, I resist any ideological annexing of the gospel. That way lies the sacrifice of inconvenient facts, persons, and movements, signifying a return to structuring violence.

Something that marks this study is a critical willingness to bear with the language and imagery of violence while repurposing it, so that mimetic theory in theological hands does violence to structuring violence. This is the violence that Slavoj Žižek refers to as a radical upheaval of basic social relations, which rather than perpetuating the cycle of violence rejects and overturns it. As Žižek says, with characteristic irony and provocation, the monsters of history were not violent enough, in that they left the underlying system of violence undisturbed.⁷ This is precisely what Girard refuses to do as he points the way via redeemed mimesis to transformed human relations. So Girard brings more to theology than an analytic tool or even a grand theory. Mimetic theory is both of these, but more besides. It is an impetus to personal transformation and also to wider reform—though further discussion of how Girard might support a positive account of modernity’s secular spaces, and what mimetic theory can bring to the sociopolitical arena, will have to await another opportunity.⁸

It remains an open question whether Christians, Jews, and others will avail themselves of the resources that mimetic theory provides for faith, spirituality, and practice. Those who do will discover what can come only from a nonviolent God: the power to challenge the cultural nexus of violence, scapegoating, and a purely human sacred that Girard has identified. Since sacred power depends on the conspiracy of all to maintain it, as Girardian biblical scholar Robert Hamerton-Kelly concludes, those who withhold consent from the conspiracy are dangerous and their gracious irony threatens the foundations. They are the ‘nothings’ that God uses to bring the ‘somethings’ to nothing (1 Cor. 1:28).⁹

CHAPTER 1

Overture to Mimetic Theory

Christ wanted to make humans into superhumans, but by means opposed to those of Promethean thought.

—René Girard, Resurrection from the Underground

The usual way to present René Girard’s mimetic theory—and I have done this myself¹—is according to the three chronological stages of its articulation in print. First, there is his account of borrowed desire, commencing with Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961) (literally romantic lie and novelistic truth, translated as Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 1965). Second, Girard’s scapegoat theory of human origins, culture, and religion is articulated in La violence et le sacré (1972) (Violence and the Sacred, 1977). Third, a new stage of religion appears, with the Judeo-Christian breakthrough beyond deviated transcendence, as set out in Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (1978) (Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 1987). Here, Girard seeks to demonstrate that the role of founding violence against a victim is definitively and world-transformingly outed and undermined by the Hebrew prophets and the Christian Gospels. One might then add an apocalyptic addendum, based on Girard’s late, troubled work Achever Clausewitz (2007) (literally completing Clausewitz, translated as Battling to the End, 2010), in which modern military history discloses a potentially unstoppable apocalyptic escalation to extremes. Such a three-stage approach is fine as far as it goes, and it proves pedagogically useful, but it misses subtleties of interpretation that I do not want to pass over in this book.

I also need to update my usage of mimetic theory. In René Girard and Secular Modernity (2013) I used it, perhaps pedantically, to refer to the abovementioned first stage only, whereas the community of Girardian scholarship has settled on a more comprehensive usage. Mimetic theory now normally refers to all three dimensions of Girard’s vision: the interdividuality of desiring, the scapegoating, and the Judeo-Christian breakthrough.

However, I have come to realize that all three elements are to some extent present from the beginning for Girard, so that these discoveries should not be strictly linked to the order of their appearance in a series of major publications. Hence, under the heading early Girard, we will find the false sacred already discernible within the logic of borrowed desire, with prophetic insight recognizable from the start in the foundations and atmospherics of Girard’s novelistic conversion and in his diagnosis of modern mimetic ills. These ills can be seen to harbor a sacrificial imperative, too, along with a dose of apocalypse now. Though the full exposition of these themes has to await Girard’s later works from the 1970s to the 1990s and beyond, as we will see, the full picture can already be sketched in an overture to mimetic theory, which is the task of this chapter.

Middle Girard will refer in the following chapter to his theorizing of religion and of the Judeo-Christian breakthrough that opened a door to secular modernity. This is not a new departure, or even a further stage, so much as the exploration and explanation of a single dense insight that had dawned on early Girard. In chapter 3, we will see how late Girard comes to acknowledge a positive aspect to sacrifice. He also fills in some gaps regarding humanity’s beginning and likely end: in developed reflections about hominization and apocalyptic intimations regarding humanity’s future. Throughout Girard’s whole oeuvre, then, mimetic theory emerges in dialogue with Judeo-Christian faith, revealing a human future beyond the sacred that contains violence (i.e., in the dual sense of both expressing and limiting violence). These discoveries of Girard invite a more detailed theological engagement with mimetic theory, which will follow in subsequent chapters.

Early Girard: Great European Novels

Proust and Dostoyevsky do not define our universe by an absence of the sacred, as do the philosophers, but by the perversion and corruption of the sacred, which gradually poisons the sources of life.

—René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel

Girard’s research into motifs of transcendence in five key European novelists, including Proust and Dostoyevsky, was the occasion and catalyst of a religious conversion.

—Michael Kirwan, ‘Strategies of Grace’

I also discerned that your first work, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, was a direct preparation for La violence et le sacré.

—Raymund Schwager, letter to René Girard, August–September 1976

By the 1950s, Girard was teaching French literature in America and developing his distinctive way of reading novels. Beyond the then-fashionable methodologies of New Criticism, with its purely textual focus attuned to aesthetic and formalistic concerns, and literary history, attending to contextual factors and authorial intention, Girard was gravitating to an approach at once scientific and aesthetic, rational and intuitive. As Robert Doran explains, Girard sees the literary text as an embodiment of an intuitive understanding of the human condition,² surpassing the typical structural, existential, and historical concerns of literary criticism. This combination of emphases was also important in the French intellectual ferment from which Girard emerged, as psychology and structuralism combined in Jacques Lacan, and as grand theory from the era of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx yielded to the concerns of existentialism and psychoanalysis. This ferment was signaled by the appearance of a pre-Freudian version of the unconscious in Pierre Janet that is more amenable to a mimetic account, along with fin de siècle interest in crowd behavior and hypnosis—the emerging modernist literary self is riper for a mimetic reading because it comes without qualities.³ Eugene Webb points to the scope for Girard’s new synthesis to arise at a confluence of the characteristically French awareness of the sociality of personhood and its tradition of belief in the Cartesian autonomous self.⁴ Against this background, the atmosphere of postwar French soul-searching and American debate in the humanities provided the immediate context in which Girard began to think of personal desire as social and mediated.

So, there is no ready separation of the individual and the collective according to mimetic theory. The modern Western individual is wrong about being self-made and self-contained. Our desires are not in fact original but borrowed, though this conclusion is rarely either obvious or welcome. Good modern literature reveals it, however. Already in a 1954 article, Girard identified in nineteenth-century French literature an awareness of this perpetual shifting from one Ego to another by which we have defined ‘individualism.’⁵ In his first book, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961) (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 1965), and in some articles from the period, Girard explores this discovery by writers who have undergone what he calls a novelistic conversion, away from the romantic lie of detached selves and autonomous desires. Girard offers a highly developed and nuanced account of this borrowed desire, which in later decades he further refines while adding to the list of those who have recognized it—from William Shakespeare to Jerry Seinfeld.⁶ Beginning with the desires of Don Quixote, which were awakened by reading about Amadis of Gaul and his medieval knightly exploits, through to the snobisme of French salons so knowingly portrayed by the later Marcel Proust, Girard identifies various reifications of desire and traces their elaboration. As he recalls, I realized that Cervantes talks about the old chivalry just as Proust talked about the snobs of the Fauberg St.-Germain in the early twentieth century. When I realized that, I had my first book.⁷ The key idea, contrary to the object focus of desire according to Sigmund Freud, is that this or that object is only desirable because the model or mediator of our desire has awakened our desire for it by their own desiring. Girard realizes that the closer the mediator comes, the greater his role becomes and the smaller that of the object, and, accordingly, that Dostoyevsky by a stroke of genius places the mediator in the foreground and relegates the object to the background. Hence, for Girard, at last novelistic composition reflects the real hierarchy of desire.⁸

When external mediation of that desire is in play, envy is averted—as between Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, whose separation in terms of social status ensures that any borrowing of desire between them is unlikely to lead them to the same object.⁹ In other words, they do not enter into internal mediation: a situation in which the subject’s desire for an object comes to coincide with their model’s desire for the same object.¹⁰ Think of two friends who fall out once both have come to share the same love interest. The desire of one has possibly awakened the desire of the other, whereupon the desire of both is likely to escalate further, with each serving as mediator of the other’s desire. The model thus becomes a model obstacle for their subject and, as things progress, vice versa. Such rivalry can quickly escalate to the point that mimetic doubles or monstrous doubles emerge to become indistinguishable rivals and enemies, eclipsing the original object of desire.¹¹

As social hierarchies break down, a newfound modern equality leads more readily to internal mediation and the envy it breeds, as Alexis de Tocqueville keenly observed in a book that proved illuminating for Girard, Democracy in America.¹² So, what Girard came to call acquisitive mimesis is revealed to be at best partial. Desire is fixed most truly on its model, and the real focus of acquisition is the being of that model—this is why acquiring an object typically fails to satisfy because this or that object is only ever a proxy for the being of the model, which remains elusive. Girard recognizes that the moment the hero takes hold of the desired object its ‘virtue’ disappears like gas from a burst balloon. The object has been desecrated by possession and reduced to its objective qualities, thus provoking the famous Stendhalian exclamation: ‘Is that all it is?!’¹³ This illustrates Girard’s version of existentialism, but a version in which existentialism’s ontologically insecure, fundamentally unattached individual actually remains highly attached and hence ever-more-completely insecure. This attachment of our desire to its model, hence the attachment of our individuality to the being—ideally, the prestigious being—of that model, is referred to by Girard as metaphysical desire.¹⁴

For Girard, as Pierpaolo Antonello observes, the successful novel is either a magnifier of the pitfalls of metaphysical desire or [it] is ultimately uninteresting.¹⁵ And indeed, from the second chapter of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Girard is already contrasting the essentially false-sacred dimension of such desire for the being of its model with the authentic transcendence revealed according to Christian faith: Deviated transcendency is a caricature of vertical transcendency. There is not one element of this distorted mysticism which does not have its luminous counterpart in Christian truth.¹⁶ He sees that such desire makes us gods for one another, writing elsewhere at the time that for Proust, as for Dostoyevsky, transcendence, which, in the past, separated the worshipper from the worshipped, now separates individuals from each other and forces them to live their relationships at the level of a corrupted religiosity.¹⁷ In the mid-1960s, at what may well mark the midpoint between his early work on the novel and his ground-breaking Violence and the Sacred, Girard concluded that to desire is to believe in the transcendence of the world suggested by the Other.¹⁸ Here is Girard’s false sacred—the deviated transcendence that constitutes the deepest truth that he has discovered about human existence—appearing well before he uncovered its origins in a scapegoat mechanism at the birth of human culture, as fully disclosed later in Violence and the Sacred. Yet this mechanism is foreshadowed even in these earliest Girardian explorations of desire, in which individual and collective can become indistinguishable, and when role-modeling and creativity vie with rivalry and violence as desire plays out. In a 1978 interview, he recalls that "at the time of Mensonge Romantique . . . this mimetic nature of victimage did not escape me, [though] its enormous potential in regard to primitive religion certainly did."¹⁹ Girard draws attention to some particular instances in Proust and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

First, to Proust. Benoît Chantre points to Girard’s discussion of the steeple at Combray from In Search of Lost Time. The church steeple represented for Proust a vector of transcendence in the midst of what Girard called human and earthly gods of internal mediation.²⁰ The church steeple serves as axis mundi for the world of Combray, though the verticality of genuine transcendence has been replaced by a faux transcendence played out horizontally and purely anthropologically in the town. Girard explains how the steeple allows Proust to address the false sacred, with its systole and diastole of disorder and renewed order:

The nearer the mediator comes to the desiring subject the more remote transcendency becomes from that vertical. It is deviated transcendency at work. It drags the narrator and his novelistic universe further and further from the steeple. . . . The greater the distance from the mystic centre, the more painful, frenzied, and futile the agitation.²¹

The movement referred to is illustrated by the explosion of crows from that tower at dusk and their eventual return, pacified. This suggests to Proust a reality that was deadly no more but benign.²² Chantre sees Girard’s interest in the steeple and its crows as foreshadowing both the circulating dynamic of sacrificial religion that he would later explicate and its messianic overcoming by genuine transcendence that will complete his mimetic theory. That phrase, deadly no more but benign, for Chantre, resembles in a most striking fashion the development of Girard’s central intuition, as if everything to come was implicitly there from the beginning.²³

With hindsight, Girard draws attention to another passage in Proust for its insights into the scapegoat mechanism. The Verdurins, like a group of cannibals, mock Saniette, yet the praise that Saniette later attracts in the same circles is deemed by the narrator to be equally explicable: by comparison with how kings are as likely to be condemned as acclaimed. And, indeed, sacred kingship provides Girard with important anthropological evidence for his later account of the slain victim becoming the sacral foundation of culture. For Girard, this text of Proust contains everything and tells everything, even the ultimate divinization of the victim, and the victimary and ritualistic nature of monarchy, but at the time I did not realize it.²⁴

Second, to Dostoyevsky. The virtual pimping out of a man’s wife to his friend in order to boost his own flagging desire in The Eternal Husband offers Girard another example. These

attempts of the eternal husband to lead the woman of his choice to the feet of the idol resemble the sacrifices of primitive religions closely enough to be mistaken for them. They resemble the barbaric rites that the cults of blood, sex, and the night demand of their devotees. The possessed, too, lead their women to Stavrogin’s bed.²⁵

Stephen Gardner recognizes these early forays as prefiguring Girard’s developed sacrificial mechanism: the second (and chronologically the first) being that of romantic self-immolation, the self-defeating and ultimately self-destructive character of modern ‘romantic desire.’²⁶ Proust, Dostoyevsky, and, later, Friedrich Nietzsche helped Girard to trace these darker implications of desire. The key is desire’s connection to its model, whose projected mirage of fuller being is bound to disappoint. Herein Girard identifies the root of what he regards as a chronic modern Western restlessness, as desire passes from object to object and frustrated acquisitiveness escalates—shifting also from model to model as the being of one after another proves elusive or unsatisfying. Hence each conquest necessitates further conquest, as yet one more apparent sexual, financial, or career-advancing annexation of a model’s being (i.e., by conquest) leaves the puppet of desire²⁷ unfulfilled, casting about for a worthier model. Here is an explanation for masochism and sadism, too, which Girard wrests from Freud’s grasp. He reveals them to be a pair of mainstream (i.e., rather than deviant) mimetic conditions that are only tangentially sexual if at all (accordingly, Girard refers to them as pseudomasochism and pseudosadism). The being of a model is the thing, and the more abusive that model the better. Such an abuser must surely occupy a level of being that is superior to our own, as evident from their contempt for us. Many cringe willingly before such a model, luxuriating in their ill-treatment, while others aspire to the obviously superior status of their abusive model by becoming abusers themselves—masochism and sadism tout simple.²⁸

All sorts of dysfunctional dynamics can be generated out of this basic mimetic pattern. Self-destructive ambition, the addiction that stumbles headlong into the false promise of enhanced being, the narcissism of dandyism or coquetry that feeds on and in turn feeds the desire of others²⁹ (hence the renown of celebrities that seemingly comes from nowhere and in fact amounts to nothing); the oppositional defiant disorder of uncontrollable children, perpetually affronted adolescents, angry young men, and antiheroes; the reckless risk-taking among life’s adventurous winners twinned with the programmatic self-destructiveness of life’s habituated losers—these can be accounted for in terms of desire that has broken free of objects and become entirely obsessed with the being of models. And this path is always ultimately downward. The end point of metaphysical desire—in art and literature, as in life—is ugliness, death, and the inanimate, where modern fascination eventually comes to rest. This is because everything more life-affirming that one has (or might have) sought and welcomed must eventually yield what all metaphysical desire yields, which is nothing but disappointment—surely, then, only that which is so superior that it yields us nothing could ever truly satisfy.³⁰

Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, along with his Devils and Crime and Punishment, prompt Girard’s most searching reflections on what he calls underground psychology, or ontological sickness. This condition manifests itself in the worst instances of metaphysical desire bringing people undone through prideful, obsessive, misdirected, misunderstood, or just plain muddled cravings, which are actually rooted in the desire to create oneself out of the being of a supposedly worthy other (by either emulation or opposition). The Girard who later explicates the culture-preserving function of mythology here identifies the greatest modern myth of all: that of our own detachment and autonomy, despite our entire reliance on the desire and being of others.³¹ Only later did Girard come to articulate a more positive account of mimesis to offset his early insights into its capacity for fostering wretchedness—and, as we will see, there is certainly scope for conversion away from this stifling reality.

We have noted the early appearance and at least partial recognition of sacrificial motifs. The apocalyptic dimension that has come to characterize Girard’s latest work is also present early on. It is identified in the condition of lost moderns who destroy themselves and others in pursuit of an illusory being, which Girard sets out in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. It is present in his discussion of Proust, who regarded World War I—the first of the twentieth century’s great conflicts over abstractions—in terms of internal mediation writ large. The mutually slavish copying of the French and Germans, which Proust observes, is remarked upon by Girard—an apocalyptic insight that only emerged fully in Achever Clausewitz (2007, translated in 2010 as Battling to the End). He first explores it in a chapter of Deceit, Desire, and the