Month: October 2024

René Girard, Conversion and its Consequences

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

(René Girard, Part 3)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky – a central figure in Girard’s journey

Rene Girard’s first book, the fruit of his thinking and research in the 1950s was published in 1960. It was called Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.   Writing it resulted in not just a fascinating study of the genesis of  great writing but it also transformed his own life forever.

He describes his attitude and disposition as he started work on that book. It was “very much in the pure demystification mode: cynical, destructive, very much in the spirit of the atheistic intellectuals of the time. I was engaged in debunking.” He realised  that at the heart of his negative attitude was just one manifestation of his theory of imitative desire, mimesis. He was following the crowd. 

In writing Deceit, Desire and the Novel he explores what he takes to be the mind, the thought process and even the souls of great novelists. Among whom, as explicit models of his theory, are Marcel Proust, Dostoevsky and Cervantes.

He argues that with a number of great writers their first conception of their novels was very different from what they ultimately became. “The author’s first draft is an attempt at self-justification, which can assume two main forms. It may focus on a wicked hero, who is really the writer’s scapegoat, his mimetic rival, the one whom he desires to debunk, whose wickedness will be demonstrated by the end of the novel. It may also focus on a “good” hero, a knight in shining armour, with whom the writer identifies, and this hero will be vindicated by the end of the novel.”

But Girard then puts the writer to the test and argues that If the writer has a potential for greatness, after writing his first draft, as he rereads it, he sees the trashiness of it all. His project fails. The self-justification the novelist had intended in his distinction between good and evil will not stand self-examination. The novelist comes to realise that he has been the puppet of his own devil. He and his enemy are truly indistinguishable. The novelist of genius thus becomes able to describe the wickedness of the other from within himself, whereas before it was completely artificial. 

“This experience is shattering to the vanity and pride of the writer. It is an existential downfall. Very often this downfall is written symbolically, as illness or death, in the conclusion. In the case of Proust and Dostoyevsky it is explicitly presented as a change in outlook. Or to take Don Quixote, on his deathbed he sees finally his own mimetic madness, which is also illness and death. And this existential downfall is the event that makes a great work of art possible.”

In this imagining of the writer’s mind, Girard sees the following happening: once the writer experiences this collapse and a new perspective, he can go back to the beginning and rewrite the work from the point of view of this downfall. It is no longer self-justification. It is not necessarily self-indictment, but the characters he creates are no longer “Manichean” good guys or bad guys.

“So the career of the great novelist is dependent upon a conversion, and even if it is not made completely explicit, there are symbolic allusions to it at the end of the novel. These allusions are at least implicitly religious. 

“When I realized this, I had reached a decisive point in the writing of my first book, above all in my engagement with Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky’s Christian symbolism was important for me. Demons (The Possessed), presents Stepan Verkhovensky, whose deathbed conversion is particularly moving, but there is also the end of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. The old Verkhovensky discovers that he was a fool all the time and turns to the Gospel of Christ. This is the existential conversion that is demanded by a great work of art.

“When I wrote the last chapter of my first book, I had had a vague idea of what I would do, but as the chapter took form I realized I was undergoing my own version of the experience I was describing. I was particularly attracted to the Christian elements, for example, Stepan Verkhovensky’s final journey… So I began to read the Gospels and the rest of the Bible. And I became a Christian.”

Girard, however, later reflecting back on that conversion, realised that it was no more than what he called “an intellectual-literary conversion”, something deeply satisfying, even enjoyable. But he realised that his initial conversion did not imply any change of life. The change in his life came when he found out that he had a cancerous spot in the middle of his forehead. A biopsy revealed a cancerous growth. “From that time on I was pretty scared.  For all I knew, I had melanoma, the worst form of skin cancer.” 

It turned out to be a false scare but it brought him to a point where his intellectual conversion, which was a very comfortable experience, self-indulgent even, was totally changed. “I could not but view the cancer and the period of intense anxiety as a warning and a kind of expiation, and now this conversion was transformed into something really serious in which the aesthetic gave way to the religious.”

This was an agonising time. But for him it was significant that it coincided with the liturgical period of Lent in 1959. He was aware of this although he had never been a practicing Catholic. He was now thirty-five years old. Then on the Wednesday before Easter, his doctor gave him the ‘all clear’. That Wednesday is traditionally the end of  the lenten period of penance, the beginning of the holiest part of Holy Week. 

After that experience, he went to confession and  had his children baptized. His wife and he were remarried by a priest. So on Holy Thursday he went to Mass and received  the Eucharist. “I felt that God liberated me just in time for me to have a real Easter experience, a death and resurrection experience.”

He later reflected that the prior conversion was too easy. “it entailed no demands or commitments which I perceived at the time, but it prepared the way. So with the definitive conversion I was both emotionally and mentally prepared to accept God’s grace and believe.”

In his interview with James Williams, the editor of A Girard Reader, a collection of key extracts from his books, he describes himself as just ‘an ordinary Christian’.

In that interview he revealed some things about what being a Christian meant to him and what he saw as some essential commitments for any true Christian. Williams asked him about his dispositions towards non-Christians and a pluralistic society? He was asked “Do you favour converting all non-Christians to Christianity?”

Girard simply recalls what Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” and that he told his disciples to go into the world and make converts. “If we give that up, are we still Christian? The idea that if we respect other religions more than our own and act only according to politically correct principles, peace will break out all over the world is fantasy and delusion. I think the Christians who do not want to share their faith do not really believe. The fear of religious tyranny – meaning the forced imposition of our Faith on others –  is an  anachronism. It is a false issue which puts political correctness ahead of the truth and the only way of telling it (the truth) is by connecting with people”

On a  question related to the mission Christ gave his disciples, Williams also asked should one’s Christian faith enter into one’s approach to other religions and cultures? Or is it necessary to “bracket out” one’s faith in order to do scholarly work or to be a thinker?

To this he answered, “I don’t think you can bracket out a faith which is responsible for the best in the modern world. That is totally artificial. I don’t think you can bracket out any idea or ideal that you really hold — or that holds you. If you bracket out something that is central to your life, you become a shadow of yourself and your intelligence is not effective.”

Asked about those who advocate the suspension of their own belief in their approach to other religions he said, “No, that is a Stoic term, and you can practice that if you believe in Stoicism. But it has nothing to do with being a Christian or with real Christianity.

“If you believe that Christianity is the truth, including societal truth, you are not going to reach the truth by bracketing it out. You can see the result of this method all around us, in the current academic debacle for instance. The biblical scholars who are still talking in terms of bracketing truth out are still thinking in nineteenth-century terms. They are on their way to a goal which the deconstructors reached long ago. If we must have nihilism, let us not dilute it with water and let us drink it full strength, with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the deconstructors. In order to reach the end of the present crisis we must…not interminably repeat attempts which already failed a hundred years ago, like “the quest for the historical Jesus.” Mine is a search for the anthropology of the Cross, which turns out to rehabilitate orthodox theology.

The interviewer then raised the question of freedom and totalitarianism. Girard responded by drawing attention to what he saw as the two forms of totalitarianism. One tries to destroy the concern for victims openly and directly. Its proponents basically attempt to kill as many victims for as little reason as possible. To him this was effectively  a process of mass scapegoating.

Then he went on to point out that today there is in place a process of insidious totalitarianism. In this it is hard not to think that he was foreseeing the bizarre way in which political correctness has degenerated in all the excesses of ‘woke’ culture. 

“Communism in many of its forms was insidious, but it will probably be replaced by ideologies still more insidious which outflank the Gospel on the left, presenting themselves as better than the Gospel…Some of these people see themselves as super-Christians, but they are heirs of the predecessors of Marx who thought they could achieve a new humanism. Feuerbach, for example. But they laid the groundwork for a disrespect of truth. I think it would be helpful to study Feuerbach, who was a primary agent of the transformation of Christianity into Marxism.”

On the question of death, dying and assisted suicide he had this to say. 

“The experience of death is going to get more and more painful, contrary to what many people believe,…euthanasia will make it more rather than less painful because it will put the emphasis on personal decision in a way which was blissfully alien to the whole problem of dying in former times, It will make death even more subjectively intolerable, for people will feel responsible for their own deaths and morally obligated to rid their relatives of their unwanted presence.

Euthanasia will further intensify all the problems its advocates think it will solve.

Rene Girard firmly believed that Christianity had all the answers to the existential problems which confront us in this world and we are presented with choices which our mimetic desires suggest to us.

“One should always look to the Gospels.”

“What are the prescriptions of the Kingdom of God? Basically, give up a dispute when mimetic rivalry is taking over. Provide help to victims and refuse all violence. I find the allegory of the sheep and goats in Matthew 25 to be a key text; it’s all there. When we identify with the person in need or who has been victimized, we encounter the Son of Man, Jesus. What the mimetic theory as such facilitates is the understanding that these ethical prescriptions or principles are against the mimetic spirit of the mob. The Gospels show that faith emerges when individuals come out of the mob.

“All the excesses of the modern world are distortions of Christian truth. The fact that there is a new type of individual in Christianity is the most important thing in the world. The Christian person is new and would have been viewed by traditional cultures as subversive. The only difference is that our narcissistic culture is a deviation and a caricature of the Christian person, not its fulfillment.”

René Girard, The Golden Bough and Mimesis

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

René GIRARD, PART 2

René Girad was born into a Catholic family in Avignon in France on 25 December 1923. His father, Joseph Girard, was a historian.

René studied medieval history at the École des Chartes, Paris. In 1947, Girard went to Indiana University. He was to spend most of his career in the United States. Although his research was in history, he also taught French literature. A multi-disciplinary character was a marked feature of his academic interests. This facilitated his occupation of positions in a variety of prestigious institutions – at Duke University, Bryn Mawr College and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where he became a full professor in 1961.

In 1981, Girard was appointed Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization at Stanford University, where he remained until his retirement in 1995 and subsequently in an active emeritus role. On 17 March 2005, Girard was elected to the Académie française.

Throughout these years he published just short of 30 books, covering all the interlocking disciplines which were the subjects of his thought and research,

Girard’s reading of Dostoevsky, in particular, The Brothers Karamazov and The Possessed (Demons) – especially the deathbed. conversion of Stepan Verkhovensky in that book – were influential in his conversion from agnostic to Christianity. But equally important was where  his reading of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough led him.

Girard read and studied Frazer’s book before his conversion to Christianity. He suspected flaws in Frazer’s reading of mythology and how it contradicted  the Bible.

In The Golden Bough Frazer catalogued all the mythic scapegoats of the ancient stories. But he confused the scapegoating of Christ with the ancient mythical scapegoats. Frazer failed to see that Christ was an innocent victim of scapegoating.

From his murderers’ point of view his death would save the people, as Caiphas said in his unconsciously prophetic utterance. Girard says that Frazer was perfectly right to point to the similarities between the ancient myths and Christianity – in both instances you have a victim who is killed by an entire community. In the ancient myths the victims were eventually seen as gods. In Christ’s case the victim was in fact God incarnate.

“But what Frazier didn’t see, which is the simplest thing of all and should convince everybody immediately, if they were honest, that Christianity is very different from mythology – while being the same. It is exactly the same situation but it is very different because Christianity tells you that Christ was innocent whereas all myths tell you that the victim is guilty….People don’t see that this is the first time in the history of mankind that a myth occurs where the victim is not guilty but innocent, sent by God himself.”

Answering why Christ’s death on the Cross is a saving event, Girard explains that “If you read the ‘mythical’ situation the way I do you can see there is something that is not purely human about it. In classical mythology we are offered all these victims and we take them for culprits, and so forth. In the case of Christianity there are a few disciples who say ‘no, no, He is not guilty’, who maintain to the end that he is innocent. Therefore they say the truth simply. They say a truth which is anthropological before being religious, but which is the same thing.”

Girard points out that Christ’s death on the Cross frees humankind from this deep, profound, inescapable and largely hidden cycle of the scapegoating impulse in which his mythologies imprisoned him. Scapegoating in biblical accounts goes back to the story of Cain and Abel and features in many other biblical accounts – for example in the suffering endured by the prophets. Christianity asserts with certainty that it is the only true religion. It tells the truth about man and about God.  In an interview with Peter Robinson of Stanford’s Hoover Institute, Girard commented, ”Very few people take this statement seriously, as you well know. They should take that literally.” Answering the question as to why don’t they see that Christianity is different, he replies, “They do not want it. Christianity destroys mythology.”

Girard’s rebuttal of Frazer’s errors is complex, the details of which we do not have the space to unravel here. But at the root of it he finds  “That incoherence traditionally attributed to religious ideas…associated with the theme of the scapegoat. Frazer treats his subject at length; his writing is remarkable for its abundance of description and paucity of explanation. Frazer refuses to concern himself with the formidable forces at work behind religious significations, and his openly professed contempt for religious themes. (This) protects him from  unwelcome discoveries.” 

At the heart of Frazer’s total mis-reading of the Passion of Christ is his rejection of the sacrifice at its heart. Girard comments that anyone who tries to subvert the sacrificial principle by turning to derision invariably becomes its unwitting accomplice. Frazer is no exception. “His work in treating the act of sacrificial substitution as if it were pure fantasy, a non phenomenon, recalls nothing so much as the platitudes of second-rate theologians.” 

Because of a wilful blindness, Girard alleges, modern thinkers continue to see religion as an isolated, wholly fictitious phenomenon cherished only by a few backward peoples or milieus. And these same thinkers can now project upon religion alone the responsibility for a violent projection of violence that truly pertains to all societies including our own. This attitude is seen at its most flagrant in the writing of Frazer. Along with his rationalist colleagues and disciples, he was perpetually engaged in a ritualistic expulsion and consummation of religion itself, which he used as a sort of scapegoat for all human thought.

Elsewhere Girard argued that the historical phenomenon of Christians warring with Christians was not in fact a Christian phenomenon but its contrary.

Girard’s second revolutionary idea is that of mimetic desire, that is desire driven by the impulse to imitate another or the other. Mimesis = imitation. This can be good or bad. In Sacred Scripture there are two short passages which lead us to a consideration of René Girard’s theory. By this theory he potentially de-fangs the pernicious analysis of human desire inflicted on us by Sigmund Freud.

In the third letter of St John we are exhorted,

“Beloved, do not imitate evil but imitate

good. He who does good is of God; he who does evil has

not seen God.”

In the letter of St James we are asked:

“What causes wars, and what causes fighting among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill.

And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war.”

Girard identifies a triangular relationship in desire – object, model and subject are the same. In his interview with Girard, Peter Robinson puts this in the simplest of terms: 

Serpent, Eve, apple?

Girard accepts this. “Serpent in the mimetic theory of desire is an image of the mediator, the one who directs the subject towards the bad desire.

The churches, you know, who know what they are talking about, better than most people think, know that example is the key to bad as well as good behaviour. This is what I call mimetic desire.”  In the pursuit of illicit desires this is what we call  the occasion of sin.

The imitative nature of desire will often lead to conflict, sometimes violent and catastrophic conflict. Mythology warns us of this: Paris desires Helen and makes Menelaus his enemy and the end of it all is the destruction of Troy.

In this reading of our nature and the process of desiring, Girard identifies good and bad desires – good desires leading to human fulfilment, bad desires leading to rivalry and conflict. One of the great classical spiritual books, Thomas a Kempis’, The Imitation of Christ, points us in the direction of God  – as all great spiritual writing does, encouraging us to do as St James did.

But as Girard points out, people polarise around objects of desire. This is true even for food, shelter, places where you can live and so on. But because of limited availability, scarcity, conflict ensues. Desire to have what the other has, and which we have no right to have, makes for conflict, envy, aggressive attempts to acquire it.

Gil Ballie, is a lay theologian and one of the leading interpreters of Girard’s thought. He summarises mimetic attraction  and its importance in terms of the current crisis in our culture.

We are, he says, in a civilizational crisis, one that is the outworking of anthropological mistakes that have long festered. Increasingly in the history of Western culture, mistakes which we have forgotten or ignored or misconstrued. Among these he lists mimesis, but also  “the most essential fact of human existence, namely, religious longing.” 

“This feature of the human condition is vastly more important than the opposable thumb or the discovery of fire. Our mimetic predisposition cannot be overlooked without catastrophic consequences, nor can its role in mankind’s religious life be discounted. The great question is: how is this religious acuity awakened and thereafter properly ordered? No small number of people have tried to dispense with it as the residue of an earlier stage of human affairs. It is only a matter of time, however, before that religious longing is transferred to ideologies that promise to relieve the boredom of not having a real religion, ideologies that exonerate the violence of their adherents.” 

Baillie cites a moment in the tragic life of the poet Sylvia Plath which tragically illustrates our emptiness and our struggle to escape from it. He quotes a passage in Plath’s journals where she longs for God and for purpose in her life. In desperation, she toys with the possibility of committing herself completely to some political “cause” with a capital “C,” the violence of which could be justified as a “splurge of altruism.” Countless people today, he says,  are doing exactly that. Plath’s final desperate response was suicide.

“There is one feature of this quintessential religious longing that must be recognized: it is always mediated. It is awakened by another or others. The entire biblical canon and the history of the Church provide the guidelines for properly channeling this religious longing, and it does so by showing us countless examples of sinners and saints whose lives and legends convey something about how our religious longing might properly be channelled and ordered.”

In the final part of this series we will look at Girard’s personal journey and how his conversion and deep religious life brought him and us to an understanding of mankind’s deepest aspirations and how to fulfil them.