Victims, Violence and the Sacred: the Thought of Rene Girard

Leo D. Lefebure

Religious traditions promise to heal the wounds of human existence by uniting humans to ultimate reality. Yet the history of religions is seeped in blood, sacrifice and scapegoating. The brutal facts of the history of religions pose stark questions about the intertwining of religion and violence. How does violence cast its spell over religion and culture, repeatedly luring countless "decent" people--whether unlettered peasants or learned professors--into its destructive dance? Is there an underlying pattern we can discern? The French literary critic and anthropologist Rene Girard has provided a compelling set of answers to these questions. He claims to have discovered the mechanism that links violence and religion. The extent of his claim is even more audacious he believes that in the mechanism linking violence and religion lie the origins of culture. A growing number of biblical scholars, theologians, psychologists and economists have turned to Girard's wide-ranging theory to understand their respective fields. His works have been widely read in his native France, and international conferences have explored the implications of his theory for different fields. Robert Hamerton-Kelly and James G. Williams have interpreted the Bible in light of Girard's theory. Catholic theologian Raymund Schwager has used Girard's proposal extensively in his theological reflections. Working closely with Girard, French psychiatrists Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort have proposed an "interdividual" psychology which stresses the radically social nature of the self and interprets phenomena such as desire, possession, hysteria, trance and hypnosis in Girardian terms. French economists Paul Dumouchel, Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Andre Orlean have interpreted such economic problems as the market, competition, scarcity, wealth and monetary value in light of Girardian theory. The Colloquium on Religion and Violence meets regularly to explore the application of Girard's ideas to a wide range of areas, and the colloquium's journal, Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, publishes research on Girardian theory. A recent book by Gil Baillie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads, has brought Girard's ideas to a larger audience in the U.S. According to Girard, human culture has been founded on two principles, which he calls "mimetic rivalry" and the "surrogate victim mechanism." Mimesis refers to the propensity of humans to imitate other people both consciously and unconsciously. Girard developed a mimetic theory of the self in his early work as a literary critic (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure [French, 1961; English 1965]). Such novelists as Cervantes, Stendhal, Dostoevsky and Proust taught him that humans learn what to desire by taking other people as models to imitate. Aware of a lack within ourselves, we look to others to teach us what to value and who to be. Girard observes that the desire to appropriate another person's possessions, loves and very being may seem innocent at first, but it poses a fundamental threat to community life. In imitating our models, we may come to approach their power and threaten their own position--in which case they quickly become rivals who tell us not to imitate them. When we imitate the model's thoughts, there is harmony; when we imitate the model's desires, the model becomes our obstacle and rival. Mimesis thus inexorably leads to rivalry, and rivalry leads sooner or later to violence. From his study of mimetic desire in the modern novel, Girard turned to the relation of violence and the sacred in early cultures, especially in primal religions and Greek tragedy. In 1972 he published La Violence et le Sacre (English: Violence and the Sacred, 1977), a work that ranged widely through the fields of ethnology and anthropology. In Girard's judgment, the conflicts that result from mimesis repeatedly threaten to engulf all human life. Escalating violence renders humans more and more like each other, leveling distinctions and sweeping people up into ever greater paroxysms of violence. Mimesis leading to violence is the central energy of the social system. During the course of evolution, Girard believes a long series of primal murders, repeated endlessly over possibly a million years, taught early humans that the death of one or more members of the group would bring a mysterious peace and discharge of tension. This pattern is the foundation of what Girard calls the surrogate victim mechanism. Often the dead person was hailed as a bearer of peace, a sacred figure, even a god. Fearful that unrestrained violence would return, early humans sought ritual ways to re-enact and resolve the sacrificial crisis of distinctions in order to channel and contain violence. "Good violence" was invoked to drive out "bad violence." This is why rituals from around the world call for the sacrifice of humans and animals. For Girard, the sacred first appears as violence directed at a sacrificial victim, a scapegoat. Every culture achieves stability by discharging the tensions of mimetic rivalry and violence onto scapegoats. Scapegoating channels and expels violence so that communal life can continue. As mimetic tensions recur, a new crisis threatens, and sacred violence is once again necessary. In Girard's view, myths from around the world recount the primordial crisis and its resolution in ways that systematically disguise the origins of culture. Later cultures use judiciary systems to contain violence. But even when cultures no longer practice sacrifice directly, they still continue to target certain individuals or groups as scapegoats so that violence will not overflow its banks and threaten others. The lynch mob is at the foundation of social order. According to Girard, every culture arises from the incessantly repeated patterns of mimetic rivalry and scapegoating. Some authors, like the Greek tragedians, caught a glimpse of the underlying dynamics of the cycle and the arbitrariness of the choice of victim. But only the Bible, Girard contends, offers a full unveiling of the pattern of violence and a rejection of it. Girard began his career as a secular thinker unaffiliated with any religious tradition. The course of his research and reflection led him to conclude that the Christian revelation unveils the patterns of violence and provides the divine response. Having become convinced that the gospel alone reveals the full truth of the human condition, Girard entered the Catholic Church. Girard expressed his Christian perspective in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (French, 1978; English, 1987), a book composed in dialogical form with Oughourlian and Lefort as interlocutors. His later work, The Scapegoat (French, 1982; English, 1986), continues his exploration of biblical themes and offers a good introduction to his thought. According to Girard's interpretation of the Bible, the people of Israel were, like all other people, steeped in the surrogate victim mechanism. But the biblical authors, especially the psalmist, the prophets, and the sages of Israel, recognized the primordial pattern and denounced it. Many psalms express the perspective of the victims, and the author of the Book of Job sides with the maligned Job rather than his friends. The Suffering Servant poems present the age-old mythological drama: a crowd surrounds an innocent victim and heaps abuse upon him. The point of view, however, has changed. The biblical author does not accept the charges; the victim is innocent and is vindicated by God. Such is also the message of the New Testament. In Jesus, God appears in history as the innocent victim, who goes to his death as the scapegoat. Far from demanding victims, God identifies with the victims and thus exposes the surrogate victim mechanism as a fraud and deception. God responds to our violence with nonviolent love. Paul's conversion turns on the realization that he is persecuting God. The realization that God is on the side of the victims is, for Girard, the center of biblical revelation. Girard laments that throughout its history the church has largely ignored this message. It has misinterpreted the death of a Christ as a sacrificial offering to a God who demands victims. For centuries the true meaning of the gospel was lost, and Christians continued the cycle of scapegoating others, especially Jews. The anti-Jewish texts of the late Middle Ages offer Girard some of the clearest examples of the scapegoating mechanism at work. At last, however, the message has begun to register. According to Girard, modern movements on behalf of oppressed peoples, even though often outside or opposed to established Christianity, are the heirs of the Hebrew prophets and the New Testament. As Friedrich Nietzsche noted, Christianity sides with victims, not conquerors. Prior to biblical revelation, Girard claims, cultures achieved relative levels of social stability through scapegoating certain individuals. Over the centuries the impact of the gospel on culture has largely destroyed the power of the surrogate victim mechanism. Conventional culture is now in a painful process of disintegration. History as we have known it for millennia is coming to an end, and we face a dramatic, even apocalyptic, choice: total destruction or total renunciation of violence. What is striking about Girard's proposal is the wide range of data that do bear the hallmarks of mimetic rivalry and the surrogate victim mechanism. The insights of great novelists and dramatists into the volatility of mimetic desire, as interpreted by Girard, are profound and persuasive on an intuitive level. Similarly, the analysis of the surrogate victim mechanism can find much evidence in a wide range of cultures. It is frightening to note how often social bonding has taken place through the exclusion of certain groups and through periodic violence directed at unfortunate individuals. Lynch mobs and pogroms punctuate human history. When mimetic theory is extrapolated into the explanation of all institutions of all human cultures, however, doubts arise about the status of the evidence and the assumptions of the argument. Too often discussions of Girard tend toward an all-or-nothing choice: either uncritical enthusiasm or skeptical dismissal. It is helpful to distinguish between the intuitive power of Girard's proposal, which can be quite compelling, and the logical status of many of the claims advanced, which remains problematic. Girard has proposed a hypothesis which is most intriguing, but it has by no means reached the stage of empirical verification, and in many cases it is difficult to see how verification could be achieved. The theory of the primal murders and the primordial origin of religion and all human culture in the surrogate victim mechanism is highly speculative because we lack adequate data from the period that Girard takes as foundational for all human culture. Girard seeks to reconstruct a form of mimesis prior to symbols, a mimesis which would take place as the origin of human consciousness and of culture and religious symbolism. However, there remains a gap between what we can reconstruct of the primitive drives of hominids and the emergence of higher cognitive and symbolic capacities. Girard claims to have found the missing link, but one wonders whether the power of mimesis and the effect of the primal murders can really account for the entire range of development of early humans. Was the surrogate victim mechanism really the motor driving the development of the human brain in interaction with cultural factors, as Girard claims? How can we possibly know? In addition, the link between the putative crisis of distinctions and the first manifestation of the sacred remains tenuous. For Girard, "the sole purpose of religion is to prevent the recurrence of reciprocal violence" (Violence and the Sacred). Girard also claims that "humanity's very existence is due primarily to the operation of the surrogate victim." Furthermore, he argues that "the origin of symbolic thought lies in the mechanism of the surrogate victim," and that this mechanism also "gives birth to language and imposes itself as the first object of language." "It is the surrogate victim who provides men with the will to conquer reality and the weapons for victorious intellectual campaigns." All this seems overstated, and it is hard to see what would count as verification from the earliest periods of human existence. Moreover, the evidence of later ages is itself ambiguous. There are many texts and practices that fit Girard's theory rather well, but others are less clear. Joseph Henninger has pointed out that many cultures have offered bloodless sacrifices, such as fruits, grains, foods from plants, milk and milk products, and alcoholic libations. These are presented to supernatural beings who often do not need them, and the primary motives are thanksgiving and homage. Henninger argues that the offering of first fruits in many cultures involves intellectual assumptions and emotions that are far removed from the scapegoating patterns that Girard identifies. Moreover, there is no evidence that the sacrifice of humans and animals is more ancient than the offering of first fruits. Girard's theory risks being a tour de force which explains too much by explaining everything. Girard claims that most of historical culture is involved in a conspiracy to cover over its origins, and this sets up a logical difficulty in assessing the evidence. If the surrogate victim mechanism appears only in fragmented form, supporters of the theory can claim that this reflects the attempt to cover over the guilty, violent origins of culture. The problem with such a hidden mechanism is that the claim cannot be refuted. Questions also arise concerning Girard's interpretation of modern history (a perspective that Baillie has made the center of his own work, Violence Unveiled ). Girard gives the biblical tradition credit for awakening concern about the plight of victims and for being the driving force in the development of modern science and the quest for social justice. Amid the manifold forces at play in recent centuries, one factor is named over and over again--the biblical tradition--while the role of other factors is marginalized or dismissed. Certainly, Christianity had a massive influence on the sociopolitical and intellectual history of Europe, but it seems simplistic to posit the subterranean influence of the gospel alone as the driving force of modern cultural history, especially when so much of modern history understood itself as a reaction against Christianity. According to Girard, the mass murders of the 20th century have occurred because the gospel has undermined the traditional sacrificial system that previously protected societies from outbreaks of unrestrained violence. Now that the sacrificial system is collapsing, the old mechanisms try more and more desperately to function and so demand more victims. Whether this adequately explains the mass murders of this century is doubtful. Earlier ages knew mass slaughter, but they did not have the technology to kill on the same scale. If earlier centuries had been able to perform actions like the fire-bombing of Dresden or the nuclear bombing for Hiroshima, they probably would have done so. Whether the scale of the purges of Stalin or Mao and other mass murders can be explained as due primarily to the gospel's unmasking of the scapegoat mechanism is unlikely. Girard concludes his reflections with an appeal about the future. "For the first time," he says, humanity faces "a perfectly straightforward and even scientifically calculable choice between total destruction and the total renunciation of violence." In this apocalyptic context, Girard presents a stirring call to wake up, to acknowledge the dynamics of history, to renounce the patterns of violence and scapegoating, and to allow the nonviolent appeal for the gospel to transform the earth. It is a powerful and moving appeal. However, it is difficult to see how such an all-or-nothing choice for the future could be "scientifically calculable." It seems more likely that neither alternative will take place, at least in the foreseeable future. Rather than either a total destruction of human life or a total renunciation of violence, we are more likely to muddle through with limited conflicts repeatedly breaking out but not escalating to total destruction, whether nuclear or ecological. One problem in assessing the appeal for nonviolence is that Girard does not define exactly what behavior counts as violence. If violence is something broader than causing physical injury to another person, then different cultures have very different perspectives on what constitutes violent behavior. The failure to define the meaning of violence leaves the call for a renunciation of violence vague. The dramatic rhetoric of either total destruction or total renunciation of violence leaves us in a situation in which the very meaning of effective action is unclear. Is an economic boycott that seeks to end injustice an act of violence? At what point do economic sanctions that result in the deaths of children become an act of war? Buddhists pondering the First Precept note that if you boil water, you commit an act of violence against the microorganisms in it. Girard insists on surrendering the distinction between "good" and "bad" violence, but the lack of a working definition of violence leaves the concrete means of influencing the course of events unclear. Alfred North Whitehead asserted with his characteristic playfulness: "It is more important for a proposition to be interesting than that it be true." Propositions for Whitehead are "tales that might be told," visions of possibilities relevant to a particular situation. Even if it turns out that the universalizing claims of Girard's theory are not sustainable, his work nonetheless calls attention to widespread dynamics of cultural and religious life that have too often been neglected by theologians. For this, we owe him a debt of gratitude. RELATED ARTICLE: Works by Rene Girard Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965. Violence and the Sacred. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. The Scapegoat. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. With Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort. Stanford University Press, 1987. Job: The Victim of His People. Stanford University Press, 1987. A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare. Oxford University Press, 1991. RELATED ARTICLE: Works about Girard (or applying Girardian theory) Knowing Jesus. By James Alison, O.P. Templegate Publishers, 1994. Raising Abel: The Recovery of Eschatological Imagination. By James Alison, O.P. Crossroad, 1996. Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. By Gil Baillie. Crossroad, 1995. The Gospel and the Sacred: Poetics of Violence in Mark. By Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly. Fortress, 1994. Sacred Violennce: Paul's Hermeneutic of the Cross. By Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly. Fortress, 1994. On the Way of Freedom. By Roel Kaptein (with the cooperation of Duncan Morrow). Columba Press, 1993. Models of Desire: Rene Girard and the Psychology of Mimesis. By Paisley Livingston, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Violence and Difference; Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction. By Andrew J. McKenna. University of Illinois Press, 1992. The Puppet of Desire: The Psychology of Hysteria, Possession, and Hypnosis. By Jean-Michel Oughourlian. Stanford University Press, 1991. Must There Be Scapegoats? Violence and Redemption in the Bible. By Raymund Schwager. Harper & Row, 1987. Curing Violence. Edited by Mark I. Wallace and Theophus H. Smith. Polebridge Press, 1994. Fragments of the Spirit: Nature, Violence, and the Renewal of Creation. By Mark I. Wallace, Continuum, 1996. The Self Between: From Freud to the New Social Psychology of France. By Eugene Webb, University of Washington Press, 1993. Leo D. Lefebure teaches theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Illinois. His article on Buddhist-Christian encounters appeared in the CENTURY October 16. COPYRIGHT 1996 Christian Century Foundation COPYRIGHT 1996 Information Access Company