Introduction: A New Optic
This volume is an investigation into the possible convergence of a prominent Christian theorist of religion, RenĂ© Noel Girard (1923â2015), and the scriptures, traditions, and beliefs of Islam. It is the fruit of several conferences and much scholarship, involving specialists in Girardâs âMimetic Theoryâ and academics from both faith traditions and Jewish scholars. It records a bracing intellectual and spiritual adventure, but a challenging one, not least, because there are two time frames in operation. On the one hand, authentic and respectful inter-religious dialogue requires time and a painstaking readiness to listen to the other and to learn from them. This cannot be a short-term project. Considered from another angle, however, time is what we do not have. The challenges we face as a speciesâpolitical and ecologicalâurgently require a conversion to new patterns of behaviour. The great religious traditions provide us with a vocabulary to describe our context: âapocalypticâ. Can they also provide us with the wisdom we need to survive? The answer, we hope, is âyesâ; but there is no time to lose.
The late Robert Hamerton-Kelly has urged the importance of Girardâs âMimetic Theoryâ because of its relevance to our time. Above all, because it explores the persistent connection between religion and violence which has become a clichĂ© in both intellectual and popular circles. He reminds us that âthe power of a theory is its ability to guide our attention to the important phenomena in the fieldâ:
I believe that the overriding fact of our time is violence; therefore a theory that attempts to make sense out of violence is more likely to orient us to the points in the field that are salient for our time ⊠there is a congruence between our times, our texts, and our tradition that makes for a powerful interpretive constellation. (Hamerton-Kelly 1992, p. 5)
âOur time, our texts, and our traditionâ. Hamerton-Kelly was a Christian theologian, with particular expertise in the New Testament; so the âtexts and traditionâ he refers to here are primarily those of Christianity. The question that concerns us here is whether this âinterpretive constellationâ can, or should, include the texts and tradition of another world faith, namely, Islam.
Violence is our starting point, simply because it is the âoverriding fact of our timeâ. But it cannot be our finishing point. The present volume is not, or not just, another contribution to the massive literature on âreligion and violenceâ. Girardian theory differs from other treatments of this dismal subject because of its peculiar status, as ânot-quite theory of religionâ and ânot-quite theologyâ. Girard makes huge claims, citing anthropological, social, historical, psychological data; but the argument in which this data is deployed points towards the âinsiderâsâ experience of religion. The theory speaks of personal and group conversion and the rejection of idolatry; it takes seriously religious practices of asceticism and right worship.
Girardâs work can be described as a âtheologically inflected anthropologyâ. More dramatically, the philosopher Jean-Marie Domenach (1988) speaks of a âvoyage to the end of the sciences of manâ. According to Domenach, Girardâs thinking sails perilously close to the abyss of nihilism, before performing an amazing volte-face which brings the human sciences âgloriously back to the Kingdom of Godâ. Sometimes, as Girard himself has noted, a thinker will push so far into scepticism or unbelief, only to find himself coming out the other side.
In Girardâs own case, a new awareness of the importance of Christianity struck him as he was preparing a book on great western literature in the late 1950s. At the same time, a health scare shook him into returning to the practice of Catholicism after several decadesâ absence. But such a change of optic is rare (especially among French intellectuals). We have spoken of an âinterpretive constellationâ; let us consider another cosmological image. A character in Jumpers, a play by Tom Stoppard, asserts to his philosopher colleague that it was perfectly understandable that people should believe the sun went around the earth because, prior to the astronomical discoveries of Copernicus, âthatâs what it looked likeâ. His colleague retorts: âIn that case, what would it have looked like if the earth went round the sun?â
The answer, of course, is âexactly the sameâ. Thanks to the advancement of science, people were eventually able to adjudicate between these two optics; but to anyone without access to astronomical investigation, there is nothing to choose between them. We cannot say that people in the Middle Ages were âdeceived by appearancesâ or that âtheir eyes deceived themâ. Nevertheless, those people found one explanationâthe geocentric oneâto be more intuitively convincing and persuasive than its (correct) alternative, the heliocentric.
Why should this be so? Is it sheer force of habit and intellectual inertia that makes us âseeâ things one way, rather than the other: basically, a lack of creativity and imagination?
Or are there more sedimented resistances within us, to those changes of perspective that dislocate us, not just physically but spiritually and existentially? The trial of Galileo is the notorious example of âknowledgeâ clashing with âhuman interestâ. Galileoâs observations (or so we are told) were suppressed, on account of their perceived challenge to political and religious authority. In this way, the Galileo affair becomes the paradigm example of a perennial stand-off between âfaithâ and âscience/reasonâ.
In Stoppardâs play, the lunar landing of 1969 is a traumatic symbol of relativized humanity, seen, for the first time, whole and vulnerable. The âCopernican Revolutionâ, and its decentring of mankind, is a symbol for the dethroning of God. Modernity has exiled God to the extremities of distant causality, before declaring the idea of deity to be obsolete and dispensable altogether.
From this modern secular perspective, religious believers have been and continue to be in thrall to a âgroupthinkâ which imprisons them in one optic and prevents them from trying out another lens.
RenĂ© Girard advocates a âCopernican Revolutionââone which, surprisingly, goes against the grain of modernity, by drawing us back to religious belief rather than away from it: a âvoyage to the end of the sciences of manâ. His work is an engagement with, but also a riposte to, the âmaster thinkersâ of sceptical modernity: Freud, Nietzsche, and to a lesser extent, Marx, each of whom has sought to overcome religious belief by offering sets of alternative optics. What just looks like evidence for divine existence is, in fact, something otherwise: the projections of a powerful âgroupthinkâ (engendered by arrested psychological development or by resentment at unequal power relations or by the anguish of alienating social and economic conditions).
Girard turns the hourglass on its head: what would human existence just look like, if its turbulence and fearful discontents were the product, not of social or personal alienations but of our encounter with, and resistance towards, the advent of the Living God?
RenĂ© Girard is âCopernicanâ in two ways: firstly, as a thinker who brings us back, surprised, to the possibility of faith, after the ravages of critical assault (consider the famous words of the philosopher Paul Ricoeur: âbeyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called againâ).1 Secondly, and more specifically, Girardâs contribution to the rather tired debate of whether religion is a âcauseâ of violence sees him invert the hourglass once more. His âMimetic Theoryâ asserts a kind of relationship of complicityâbut asks whether the causal flow is the other way: âviolence causes religionâ.
Part One: Mimetic Theory; A Brief Overview
RenĂ© Girardâs first book Deceit, Desire and the Novel was published in 1961 (Girard 1965 [1961]). In this work, he describes how five great European writers, Cervantes, Flaubert, Stendhal, Proust, and Dostoevsky, portray in their novels a sort of transcendence or conversion process, not necessarily in the Christian sense, which involves the collapse of âthe autonomous selfâ, or the romantic idea that we are totally independent individuals whose wants and desires originate within ourselves. Each of these writers was aware that desire is âmimeticâ, or imitative, and that we learn to desire through the eyes of another or others.
To express this geometrically: desire is a triangle of subject, model, and object. What begins as acquisitive desire, involving an object or something of a tangible nature, can take on a metaphysical nature, such as the desiring of anotherâs reputation, fame, state of well-beingâor even personal fulfilment or holiness; not so much what the model has, but what they are.
All desire is mimetic, but not necessarily in a negative, conflictual sense. Jean-Michel Oughourlian recounts:
This âdisorderâ does not simply refer to the disordered psyche; it has important repercussions in social existence. Girard maintains that in archaic societies, acquisitive mimesis (the covetousness directed at the possessions of another person) was an ever-present source of rivalrous violence. As violence, by its mimetic nature, is highly contagious, this posed a constant threat to the communityâs very survival. Entire communities would be wiped out in conflicts over scarce goods, as no mechanism existed to arbitrate these conflicts. With no police force, judicial system, or social contract to control it, violence was dispelled by sacrificial rites, which evolved as an outlet of diffusion and containment. Consequently, the build-up of violence in a community would be contained by projecting the violence onto someone or something. The victim was usually vulnerable: a prisoner of war, a tribal outcast, or a person without connections in the community. This eliminated the possibility of retaliation that would prolong or reignite the violence. I...My years of research and clinical observation have convinced me that it is indeed desire that humanises us, that impels us to unite with each other, to associate with each other, to assemble in groups, and also, as we will see, to resemble each other. It forms us in proportion as it animates us and arouses our thoughts and feelings. Desire leads us to seek out the company of others, their approval, their friendship, their support, and their recognition. But this can also be accompanied by rivalry and hatred; it can arouse both love and violence. (Oughourlian 2010, p. 11)