All Desire is a Desire for Being, page 22
MT: A tilaka, like the Hindus make on their foreheads before going into the temple.
RG: A religious sign. And then, a short time later, some somewhat abnormal symptoms appeared at the very spot where the tiny operation had been performed.
My doctor’s peace of mind was slightly disturbed by this, much less, it must be said, than the first time, while I, to the contrary, was much more upset. It was clear to me that my cancer was moving on to a new stage, and that this time it could only be fatal.
My dermatologist was severe, and, ever since that period, he stands in my eyes for everything that’s intimidating and even fatal about the American medical system, which may well be the best in the world, but which is also remorseless, not only from a financial point of view but also because of its extreme reluctance to reassure the clientele, so as to avoid nourishing false hopes. That doctor reminds me a bit of those highway robbers who rapidly empty your pockets while constantly making death threats. You shouldn’t even think about putting up the slightest resistance. And a few moments later, you find yourself lying on the pavement, completely healed.
In my case, the anguish lasted a little longer. It began in the week of Shrovetide. Before the liturgical reforms of the last council, the Sunday of Shrovetide inaugurated a period of two weeks devoted to preparing for the forty days of Lent, during which the faithful, in imitation of Jesus and the forty days he spent fasting in the desert, are supposed to do penance in cinere et cilicio, ‘in ashes and sackcloth.’
I prepared for that Lent as never before, I assure you, and Lent itself was excellent, too, because my worries increased to the point of keeping me awake at night, until the day when they were banished as suddenly as they had begun by a last visit to my medical oracle. Having performed all of the necessary tests, the good fellow declared me healed, exactly on Holy Wednesday, which is to say the day in holy week that comes before the Passion properly speaking and Easter Sunday, which is the official conclusion of all penance.
I’ve never known a holiday to compare to that day of deliverance. I thought I was dead, and, all at once, I was resurrected. And what was most amazing for me about the whole thing was that my intellectual and spiritual conviction, my true conversion, had occurred before my great Lenten scare.
If it had occurred afterwards, I would never have truly believed. My natural skepticism would have convinced me that my faith was a result of the scare I had received. As for the scare, it could not be due only to faith. My dark night of the soul lasted exactly as long as the period prescribed by the Church for the penance of sinners, with three days – the most important of all – mercifully subtracted, no doubt so that I could calmly and quietly reconcile myself with the Church before the Easter holiday.
God had called me to order with a jot of humor that was really just what my mediocre case deserved. In the days that followed Easter, which the liturgy reserves for the baptism of catechumens, I had my two sons baptized, and I arranged for a Catholic wedding ceremony. I’m convinced that God sends human beings a lot of signs that have no objective existence whatsoever for the wise and the learned. The ones those signs don’t concern regard them as imaginary, but those for whom they are intended can’t be mistaken, because they’re living the experience from within. I understood at once that, if I escaped it, the memory of the ordeal would sustain me for the rest of my days, and that’s exactly what happened.
From the beginning, my Christianity was bathed in an atmosphere of liturgical tradition. There are some conventionally anti-Christian people who want nothing but the best for me and who try at all costs, so as to defend my reputation in intellectual circles, to make me out to be a dyed-in-the-wool heretic, a ferocious enemy of ‘historical Christianity,’ ready to plant bombs in all the baptismal fonts.
By saying that the Church remained sacrificial for a long time, did I really deliver a ritual kick after the example of all the asses who are savagely bent on hounding our Holy Mother at present? It must be admitted that I probably displayed some mimetic demagogy in the way I expressed myself.
I would have done better to situate my remarks in the context of our entire religious history. But I didn’t want to repeat the error of the Pharisees that I was talking about earlier, the ones who say: ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we wouldn’t have taken part alongside them in the founding murder.’ The last thing I want to do is to condemn the faithfulness, obedience, patience, and modesty of ordinary Christians or the virtues of the generations that came before us. We’re terribly lacking in those virtues. I’m too much a man of my era to possess them myself, but I revere them. Indeed, nothing seems more conformist or more servile to me these days than the hackneyed mythology of ‘revolt.’
Remnants of avant-gardist jargon are sprinkled through my books, but my true Christian readers weren’t led astray: Father Schwager, Father Lohfink, von Balthazar in his late period, Father Corbin, Father Alison, and many others.
MT: A last question. You’re the only person or at least one of the only people to say the things you say, and you also entitled one of your first books Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Are you a prophet?
RG: Absolutely not. I’m just a sort of exegete. All prophecy stops with gospel Revelation. Jesus’s phrase, ‘I will reveal things hidden since the foundation of the world,’ is in the future tense because it’s a citation from the Old Testament that he applies to Christian Revelation. One day, after the publication of the book that bears this fearsome title, some Italian friends showed me an article from the Corriere della Sera in which Madame Françoise Giroud explained to the Milanese that in Paris there was a new megalomaniac on the loose who was even more hilarious than the rest of his tribe: he claimed to reveal, all by himself – hold on to your hats – ‘things hidden since the foundation of the world.’ Every day I see people who think I made the title up on my own, and they judge me just about as much as Madame Giroud did. Of the first articles written about my religious ideas, a good half, I think, were of this type, though they were usually less amusing than the article by Madame Giroud, whose prose really isn’t half bad, especially in Italian.
MT: But why did René Girard come along now? Why not in the year 1000, or in the year 1500?
RG: Now you’re going overboard. Three quarters of what I say is in Saint Augustine.
MT: Sometimes I tell myself that, to the contrary, all you’re doing is sticking as closely as possible to the project and commentaries of the apostles. For example, a little bit earlier,fn3 you cited the prophet Joel, and I’ve noticed since that it’s merely a citation from Peter at the beginning of Acts. But I think you’re even closer to Paul – with a more modern vocabulary and the knowledge of what’s happened over the last two thousand years.
RG: The citation from Joel is behind all the texts we’re talking about, which always associate it with the Holy Spirit. Here it is, in the New Jerusalem Bible version:
After this I shall pour out my spirit on all humanity. Your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old people shall dream dreams, and your young people see visions. Even on the slaves, men and women, shall I pour out my spirit in those days.
What I bring to the table, I think, is a reversal of the conclusions of the comparativist movement, which was sparked by the huge amounts of anthropological research conducted in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was discovered at that time that violence, which is always collective and always resembles the violence of the Passion, is already there, everywhere, at the heart of primitive religion. This idea is correct, in my view it may even be the essential discovery of modern ethnology, which, since then, hasn’t discovered much of anything.
Ethnologists jumped on this information, which they saw as irrefutable proof that Christianity is just another religion. As for the Christians, they sought to parry the blow by showing that Christianity is original after all, original in the romantic and modern sense, ‘esthetically new.’ They didn’t understand that, instead of fleeing the parallel between Christian and other religions where violence was concerned, they should have thought about it and seen that Christianity interprets that violence in a way that’s completely different from primitive religion. Its originality consists in going back to the origin and unveiling it.
Paradoxically, the only one to understand this a little was Nietzsche, him again, Nietzsche in his last days of lucidity, with essential things to say about religion, things that Heidegger never wanted to hear. Let’s let him speak:
Dionysus versus the ‘Crucified’: there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom – it is a difference in the meaning of it.
Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilation.
In the other case, suffering – the ‘Crucified’ as the innocent one – counts as an objection to this life, as a formula for its condemnation.fn4
It can be said without paradox, or almost, that this text is the greatest theological text of the nineteenth century. It is mistaken only about the innocence of Jesus, which isn’t an argument against life, a mere ‘calumny’ of other religions – the expression is found in a nearby text – but the naked truth: in other words, it’s the lie of all essentially mythical religions that the gospel Passion unveils by turning it inside-out like a glove. The Gospels denounce the idea that not only the victims of Dionysus but also Oedipus and all the other mythical heroes are guilty of the most varied plagues and calamities, which their expulsion ‘heals’; it denounces the violence of religions founded on arbitrary victims. And it’s that unveiling that has been shaking the foundations of our society ever since.
Nietzsche’s only error, a properly Luciferian error (in the sense of ‘bringer of light’), was to have chosen violence against the innocent truth of the victim, a truth that Nietzsche himself was the only one to glimpse, in contrast with the blind positivism of all the atheist ethnologists and the Christians themselves. To understand that the twentieth century and its genocides, far from killing Christianity, make its truth all the more dazzling, you just have to read Nietzsche from the proper angle and to situate all the disasters caused by our Dionysian and sacrificial choices along the axis of his writings, the first of those disasters being the madness that was getting ready to swoop down on the thinker himself – a madness every bit as significant as the political and historical insanity that followed.
Translated by Trevor Cribben Merrill
Violence and Religion: Cause or Effect?
The question of violence and religion arouses a great deal of justified interest today. It is a difficult and complex question. If we simply ask ‘is this or that religion violent or peaceful?’ we do not take into account the fact that violence comes from us human beings. We all believe this regardless of whether or not we believe in God. The question of religious violence, therefore, is first and foremost a human question, a social and anthropological question, and not a directly religious question.
I am going to focus on the role of violence in archaic religions and in the biblical religions. Which religions should be called archaic or primitive? My short answer is that all religions are archaic that are now dying or already dead. This definition includes all the religions of the small non-literate cultures that still existed one, two, three, or four centuries ago. It also includes the religions of the ancient world and all the prehistoric religions about which we know nothing. There probably were religions long before the painted caves of Cro-Magnon man in Southwestern France, 30,000 and 40,000 years ago.
Among modern humanists, there has been a long tradition of interpreting religion as some sort of narrative, in which its practitioners were supposed to believe. In the nineteenth century, for instance, the French philosopher Auguste Comte regarded all religions as failed attempts to account for ‘the mysteries of the universe.’ The postmodern theory of religion is not very different. Theorists call religions ‘grand narratives,’ which they regard as entirely fictional, as they do almost all texts.
The archaic religions are completely indifferent to the mysteries of the universe. The only narratives they have are not ‘grand’ but small, strictly limited to the local genesis of the cults to which they belong. To Darwinian biologists and sociobiologists the fact that religion may be as old as humankind itself suggests that it must have some more vital function than satisfying our idle curiosity about the mysteries of the universe. If it did not, it would have disappeared long ago.
In my opinion, the relationship between violence and religion is so entangled that it should not be mentioned unless one considers the problem in its entirety. I am going to summarize my views on the subject. To do so in the limited space of this essay, however, I must streamline my observations so much that some points may seem arbitrary.
Intraspecies violence already exists among animals, notably in sexual rivalries, but it remains moderate. The victor spares the vanquished, and this is how the relations that play the main role in animal life are established. They are relations of dominance. Human beings are more violent than animals since they often kill each other. We blame this state of affairs on aggression. The problem with this notion is its one-sidedness. It aggressively divides mankind between the aggressors and the aggressed, and we include ourselves in the second category. But most human conflicts are two-sided, reciprocal.
We are competitive rather than aggressive. In addition to the appetites we share with animals, we have a more problematic yearning that lacks any instinctual object: desire. We literally do not know what to desire and, in order to find out, we watch the people we admire: we imitate their desires. Both models and imitators of the same desire inevitably desire the same object and become rivals. Their rival desires literally feed on one another: the imitator becomes the model of his model, and the model the imitator of his imitator. Unlike animal rivalries, these imitative or mimetic rivalries can become so intense and contagious that not only do they lead to murder but they also spread, mimetically, to entire communities. They probably would have annihilated our species if something had not prevented this outcome. What was it?
The foundational myths of archaic religions suggest an answer. They describe the birth of the religion to which they belong. They all begin with a mimetic crisis and conclude with the same type of drama: a single victim is killed by the entire community and is finally divinized. In the Oedipus myth, for instance, the citizens of Thebes firmly believe that this hero not only killed his father and married his mother but also brought a plague epidemic to the city of Thebes. Because of this, they believe that he certainly deserves to be punished. Myths present their single victims as guilty and the mobs who do the killing as innocent.
The Twentieth-Century Rejection of Realism
As I have already observed, during much of the twentieth century, it has been fashionable to believe that myths and other religious texts are purely fictional. If all religious texts are imaginary, the differences between them originate in the private imaginings of a few individual authors and do not have anthropological and social significance. I believe, however, that all the recurrent features in the texts of archaic myths militate against the fictional theory. To begin with there is nothing poetic or playful about these texts. They sound much more like echoes of mob violence reported by the mobs themselves. Four categories of clues, in my view, support this hypothesis:
1) In many myths, the people seem terrified by their prospective victim, concerned solely with protecting themselves from this frightful monster. In reality, the victim seems to be in the situation of the persecuted narrator in the biblical psalms, surrounded by menacing crowds and completely helpless. In the end, the single victim always dies and the people are unharmed.
2) Many of the crimes attributed to the single victims are obvious stereotypes that reappear in myth after myth, such as rape, infanticide, bestiality, and the like. The parricide and incest of Oedipus belong to this group. Far from being the unique insight imagined by Freud, they are banal accusations of the type still bandied around nowadays by mobs on the rampage. Highly revealing as well are such magical accusations as the evil eye, the supposed power to kill with a single glance. These are opportunistic accusations routinely resorted to by mobs to justify killing whomever they feel like killing.
3) Another highly revealing clue is the physical impairment of many victims: some limp; others are one-eyed, hunchback, or crippled. These handicaps suggest how mobs really select their victims. Animal predators select visibly abnormal prey because they are easier to spot and to catch. Something similar happens, it seems, in the human world: visibly ‘damaged’ individuals attract the attention of mobs.
4) Another telltale sign, I think, is the remarkably large number of mythical heroes defined as ‘foreign.’ In isolated and ignorant communities, cultural differences are disturbing. A visiting stranger may start a panic and be attacked simply because his speech and mannerisms differ slightly from the local standards. I do not claim that myths are accurate accounts of the mob phenomena, but rather that the phenomena are real while the accounts are systematically inaccurate, always distorted in the manner that is to be expected from a bunch of unrepentant killers reporting their own actions. That is the reason why the victims are always portrayed as guilty and the mobs never make the slightest mistake. They always kill a bona fide troublemaker. It was not the discovery of some authentic criminal, as claimed by myths, that reconciled these archaic communities; it was the illusion of such a discovery. The communities mimetically transferred all their hostilities to the single victim and became reconciled on the basis of the resulting illusion.
How can the same imitation, the same mimetic contagion that previously caused the mimetic rivalries and therefore the violent disintegration of the community suddenly turn into a force for the reintegration, the reconciliation of the community?
