Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith

A Dialogue

Gianni Vattimo, René Girard, William McCuaig, Pierpaolo Antonello

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780231520416
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

The debate over the place of religion in secular, democratic societies dominates philosophical and intellectual discourse. These arguments often polarize around simplistic reductions, making efforts at reconciliation impossible. Yet more rational stances do exist, positions that broker a peace between relativism and religion in people's public, private, and ethical lives.

Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith advances just such a dialogue, featuring the collaboration of two major philosophers known for their progressive approach to this issue. Seeking unity over difference, Gianni Vattimo and René Girard turn to Max Weber, Eric Auerbach, and Marcel Gauchet, among others, in their exploration of truth and liberty, relativism and faith, and the tensions of a world filled with new forms of religiously inspired violence.

Vattimo and Girard ultimately conclude that secularism and the involvement (or lack thereof) of religion in governance are, in essence, produced by Christianity. In other words, Christianity is "the religion of the exit from religion," and democracy, civil rights, the free market, and individual freedoms are all facilitated by Christian culture. Through an exchange that is both intimate and enlightening, Vattimo and Girard share their unparalleled insight into the relationships among religion, modernity, and the role of Christianity, especially as it exists in our multicultural world.

1	CHRISTIANITY AND MODERNITY Gianni Vattimo and René Girard

PIERPAOLO ANTONELLO: I would like to begin our dialogue with the two terms that supply the framework for this encounter: Christianity and modernity. Your conceptual instruments are different—anthropological for Girard, philosophical for Vattimo—but you wind up saying more or less the same thing: that modernity, as constructed and understood by the European West, is substantially an invention of Christianity. Your research has led you to the apparently paradoxical result that Christianity is responsible for the secularization of the world. The end of the religions was brought about by a religion. In a recent book, Girard actually informs us that “in its modern acceptation, atheism is a Christian invention.”¹ Hence it is a historical and philosophical error from your vantage point to regard secularization and laicity, as these terms are commonly understood, as being opposed to, and in conflict with, Christianity. How can we explain this apparent paradox?

RENÉ GIRARD: To articulate the reasons for this from my point of view, we have to start from an anthropological and historico-evolutionary perspective. I link secularization and Christianity essentially because Christianity caused a break in the cultural history of mankind, in particular the history of mankind’s religions, which for tens of thousands of years had allowed primitive communities to avoid self-destructing. Human beings are often violent, in fact, more violent than animals. But this violence has to be clearly understood. When I speak of violence, I don’t mean aggression; violence is something I consider inherent in social dynamics, where it occurs in the form of reprisal, vendetta, the urge to take an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The reason is that human beings are inherently competitive and, as I call them, “mimetic”: they always desire the same things others do, and they tend toward a type of conflict that is internal, reciprocal, and potentially never ending, giving rise to vicious circles of violence that, prior to the institution of judicial systems, only religion, with its norms, rituals, and taboos, had the capacity to confine. Myths, especially myths of origin, always begin by recounting a crisis in human relations, which often takes the guise of an “affliction” or “plague.” This crisis is normally resolved through a dramatic alteration in the mimetic unanimity: the violence of the community, collective violence, all devolves onto a single victim, a victim chosen for arbitrary reasons. The killing of this victim reestablishes the social order. So precious and fruitful is the latter that the community is led to invest the very victim it has expelled with sacral power, divinizing it. “To sacrifice” in fact means “to make sacred.” In broad outline, this is the mythical structure of the primitive cultures and religions, the foundational act of which is the lynching or the expulsion, real at first, and later symbolic, of an innocent victim.

What Christianity does is to depart from this primitive mind-set—because, contrary to what anthropologists have often maintained, Christianity is not a myth like all the others—by completely reversing the perspective. In myth, the standpoint is always that of the violent community that discharges its violence onto a victim it sees as guilty and whom it expels as a means of reestablishing the social order. In the mythic account the victim is always guilty, and is represented as such. Think of Oedipus, who commits parricide and incest and for that is expelled from the city. Freud takes this myth at face value, believing that what it represents is true, whereas Christianity helps us to understand the hidden and repressed truth. Myth in the natural religions stages a masquerade of sorts, and the crowds, gripped by the mimetic paroxysm, believe in it; they remain “ignorant” precisely because, as the gospel says, “they know not what they do” when they are subject to the mimetic frenzy. From the socio logical and anthropological point of view, Christianity denies this mythic order, this mythical interpretation, because it recounts the same scene, but from the point of view of the victim, who is always innocent. Hence Christianity is destructive of the type of religion that brings people together, joining them into a coalition against some arbitrary victim, as all the natural religions have always done, except for the biblical ones.

Christianity reverses this situation, demonstrating that the victim is not guilty and that the unanimous crowd knows not what it does when it unjustly accuses this victim. Examples can already be found in the Old Testament, prior to Christ’s Passion, which for me represents the revelatory culmination of the innocence of the victim sacrificed by an unjust and violent community. Take the case of Isaiah 52–53, where it is evident that the victim is innocent but is condemned just the same by the crowd in the grip of the mimetic contagion, in other words, in the unanimous conviction that it has detected the one guilty of having caused all its own internal crises. In these circumstances we do not have individual behavior or conscience, only the unanimous logic of the crowd. Even Peter gives in to this temptation during the Passion, when he finds himself in the midst of the mob accusing Christ and denies him. With the gospel and the Passion of Jesus, this anthropological truth about humanity is revealed, put on display in its entirety: we, in our history as cultural animals, have always sought scapegoats in order to resolve our crises, and we have killed and then divinized them without knowing what we were doing. Christ’s Passion shows us what we were doing and does so in stark terms: Jesus is an innocent victim sacrificed by a crowd that turns unanimously against him after having exalted him only a few days before—and for no particular reason. Awareness of this kind causes the mechanism of misrecognition and cognitive concealment that underlay the mythical schema to fracture. Henceforth we can no longer pretend not to know that the social order is built upon the blood of innocent victims. Christianity deprives us of the mechanism that formed the basis of the archaic social and religious order, ushering in a new phase in the history of mankind that we may legitimately call “modern.” All the conquests of modernity begin there, as far as I am concerned, from that acquisition of awareness within Christianity.

ANTONELLO: Gianni Vattimo, your perspective incorporates Girard’s premises, especially as they are set out in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, but gives them a different, philosophical declension, integrating them into Heidegger’s thinking on the end of metaphysics and the dissolution of Being, meaning of any ontologically stable truth. Through the incarnation and death of Christ, and the consequent revelation of the violent mechanism of victimhood that underlay the sacred and the natural religions, we learn that it is actually God who “weakens himself,” opening a space in which mankind may achieve emancipation, to the point of actually being able to become “laic” and “atheist.”

GIANNI VATTIMO: First of all, I ought to state that René Girard has helped to inspire my own conversion—although I’m not sure how pleased he would be to find out what he has converted me into! Reading Girard’s work was as decisive for me as it was to read some of the works of Heidegger, which left a profound mark on me in a different period of my life, and not just in intellectual terms but existential and personal ones too. Girard made it possible for me to grasp the historical-progressive essence of Christianity and modernity, the meaning of their eventuation. All of us who were raised in Catholic cultures normally assume that there is an antithesis and an opposition between being Christian and being modern. The French Revolution, the thinkers of the Enlightenment, democracy, liberalism, all the “errors” condemned in the papal Syllabus of 1864—for those who have read it—were conceived in opposition to religious faith, and Christianity in particular, which was seen as conservative and obscurantist. Modernity was one thing and Christianity something else. In philosophy, to be Christian one had to turn back to philosophers of the past, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and so on.

Discovering Girard meant discovering that Jesus came to disclose something the natural religions had failed to reveal. He disclosed the victimary mechanism on which they were founded—a revelation that enabled us to undermine and finally dissolve a number of beliefs that were proper to the natural religions. The very history of Christianity is the history of the dissolution (assisted, I am Catholic enough to believe, by the Holy Spirit) of the natural-violent and natural-sacred elements that the church had retained. All the disciplines the Christians imposed on themselves in the tradition have something violent, but they are also linked to an imposition that has, in some manner, secularized itself. The key term that I began using after having read Girard is just that: secularization, which I take to mean the effective realization of Christianity as a nonsacrificial religion. And I carry this line of thought further because I see many of the apparently scandalous and “dissolute” phenomena of modernity as positive. In this light, secularization is not the relinquishment of the sacred but the complete application of the sacred tradition to given human phenomena. The example that springs to mind is Max Weber, who sees the birth of capitalist society as the legitimate offspring of the Protestant spirit. So in this sense I have a positive theory of secularization, one that originates from a reinterpretation of scripture by the church in which there is no victimhood. Ultimately, Christianity is the religion that opens the way to an existence not strictly religious, if we take “religious” to mean binding restraints, imposition, authority—and here I might refer to Joachim of Fiore, who spoke of a third age of the history of humanity and the history of salvation, in which the “spiritual” sense of scripture increasingly emerges and charity takes the place of discipline.

Starting from these premises, which as I say I derived from reading Things Hidden, I would however put the following question to Girard: hasn’t Christianity introduced into the world something that really ought to consume the ecclesiastical apparatus, too? There is a dynamic element in the Christian revelation that said, “Look, the victim mechanism of the religions is horrible, and we must change it.” But how far do we go with that? To what extent must Christianity consume all the elements of violence that there are in the religious traditions? If Catholic orthodoxy declares that no one may have an abortion, no one may divorce, there can’t be experiments on embryonic stem cells, and so on, is this not the persistence of a certain violence belonging to natural religion within the framework of a historical-positive religion that revealed nothing except love? Jesus Christ came into the world in order to reveal that religiosity consists not in sacrificing but in loving God and our neighbor. All the things in the Church that don’t boil down to this, aren’t they still forms of natural victim religion?

ANTONELLO: René Girard, how do you respond to this objection? And what is the relationship between historical Christianity and the “sacred” heritage that the gospel of Jesus tries to supersede?

GIRARD: Gianni Vattimo is highly intelligent and simpatico, and I have great esteem for his ideas. What he has tried to suggest to you is that I approve everything the Church is, and has done, in the world. I do not maintain that Christianity has transformed the world to the extent it ought to or could have done. Christianity fought against the archaic religions, and it still struggles against more or less explicit forms of the sacred. Historical Christianity has maintained elements of archaic religion, of historical religion, and given that society, politics, culture, and the whole world in which we live are historical, the same thing holds true for the religions. There has been and there still is an attempt at adaptation, at adjustment, but obviously that requires a great deal of time because the Christian idea came into a world in which territoriality was strong, the concept of vendetta was strong, and the actions of human beings were highly constrained by the actions of groups, by mechanisms of unanimity that we may call tribal. The Christianity that tries to enter into this world, which is a world of perils, does not have an easy time; clearly, it takes thousands of years of effort before it is able to break certain things down. This is what Vattimo doesn’t see—or perhaps he is less obsessed than I am.

We know that we are living in a world in which the possibilities and the potentials for action on the part of mankind are constantly expanding, with ever more far-reaching repercussions. Primitive man often did not even dare to cultivate a particular piece of ground on account of the respect and fear with which the spirits that occupied it filled him (all those divinities that permeated nature and that, in my opinion, were originally scapegoats transformed into gods), whereas we no longer feel that sort of fear.

I agree with the view that the Enlightenment was a historical turning point, when the Christian and Western portion of humanity realized that the world was changing, that people were more free, that there was greater scope for action on the part of mankind, on account of the fact that the world was becoming desacralized in comparison with circumstances in pre-Christian times, or even just in the Middle Ages. But the erroneous belief took hold that this was only the upshot of the actions of men, of individual geniuses or the genius of the human species in general. At the same time, though, there was no corresponding growth in awareness of human responsibility in the world. We have ever more powerful weapons, but conversely we have very little sense of responsibility. If our cultural evolution has led us to substitute ourselves for God, then we had better realize that we have taken on an enormous responsibility, and we ought to be asking ourselves what the importance of religion is in an entirely different manner than that adopted by the communications media at the present time. From the perspective of the mass media, religion is seen as a mode of thought alien to human nature, a something-or-other that arrives as constriction, as impediment, as something that might be bad for your health: religion is as harmful to mankind as tobacco. But this discourse overlooks the fact that religion forms part of human nature, that having religious beliefs is in human nature, and on that basis religion cannot fail to have an anthropological and social purview. Today we are obliged to ask ourselves what it means to live in a world in which it is claimed that we can do without religion. Is there not danger in this, especially the danger of an eruption of violence? In a world in which, as we know, we are moving in a direction that could actually lead to the end of the world as we know it, doesn’t the disappearance of religion expose us to the risk of finding ourselves in an “apocalyptic” dimension? Obviously what I am saying is incompatible with the apocalyptic mode of fundamentalist Protestantism, which foresees the destruction of the world by the violence of God, because that mode is essentially anti-Christian. In my view the truly apocalyptic texts, which unfortunately are seldom cited, are chapter 13 of the gospel of Mark, and chapter 24 of Matthew, which, from the viewpoint of fundamental Christianity, I regard as even more important than the Johannine Apocalypse.

And yet, knowing what is at stake, we make a joke out of biblical texts like the Apocalypse when we ought to be taking them seriously, seeing that in the Apocalypse the end of the world is linked specifically to Christianity. Because Judaism and Christianity are aware that if we try to do away with all the prohibitions, the limits that the archaic religions imposed, we are putting at risk not only ourselves but the existence of the whole world. It was from this awareness that the archaic religions arose, in fact. We today, on the other hand, conduct ourselves as though we were the masters of the world, the lords of nature, with no mediation or arbitration, as though nothing we are doing could have negative repercussions. But we all know perfectly well that these archaic taboos had force and significance. Neither human beings nor nations can live without an ethic. It is pleasing to imagine and profess that anything is possible, but in reality every one of us knows that there are limits. If human beings and nations continue to evade these responsibilities, the risks will become enormous. Vattimo would have us believe that we might be able to live in some sort of Eden if we simply realized that we were already there, if we realized that these dangers do not exist, but unfortunately the world around us pays him no heed.

We are in need of a good theory of secularization because secularization also entails the end of the sacrificial, and that is a development that deprives us of the ordinary cultural equipment for facing up to violence. There is a temporality to the sacrificial, and violence is subject to erosion and entropy, but Vattimo’s approach seems to me to combat its symptoms. When, thanks to Christianity, we get rid of the sacred, there is a salvific opening up to agape, to charity, but there is also an opening up to perhaps greater violence. We are living in a world in which we know that there is less violence than in the past, and we take care of the victims in a way that no other civilization has ever known, but we are also the world that persecutes and kills more people than ever. The world we are living in gives the impression that both good and evil are on the rise. And if one has a theory of culture, he or she must account for the extraordinary aspects of this culture. In his book Belief, Vattimo uses Max Weber’s view of secularization as the source of the disenchantment of the world. You say that “disenchantment has also produced a radical disenchantment with the idea of disenchantment itself.”²

I agree. For all his intelligence, Weber only went part way in bringing to light this paradoxical process, represented as it is by the contemporaneous presence of great development and a high degree of disintegration. But it has many other aspects that are intensifying with the passage of time and growing ever more fascinating as they do so.

VATTIMO: I may have oversimplified Girard’s thought in my opening statement. I certainly do not understand him as someone who wants to impose a freeze, and I didn’t mean to make him more papist than he may appear to be. In him, even in what he has just stated, one feels the presence of an idea of human nature as something that, in some manner, sets limits. I, in contrast, am convinced that, following the same path, one could also deconstruct the limit-setting conception of human nature. Gianni Baget Bozzo would say that Jesus took human form so he could explain to us that the devil exists and poses real danger.³ But then, he could have sent us a letter, and avoided getting himself crucified! Christians of a different stamp than Baget Bozzo might say that Jesus took human form not just to reveal that evil exists but also in order to destroy it. He didn’t come to tell us, “Remember that you will die,” but rather to proclaim, “Death, where is your victory?”

With Girard’s theory as a point of departure, it is possible to really elaborate a discourse on Christianity that doesn’t describe “true” human nature but changes it, redeems it. Redemption lies not just in knowing that God exists but in knowing that God loves us and that we need have no fear of the darkness. How far down this road can we push ourselves? My objection to Girard, and my own idea, is that with Christianity we can truly say, “Thanks to God, I’m an atheist”; in other words, thanks to God I’m not an idolater, thanks to God I don’t believe that there are laws of nature, I don’t believe there are markers beyond which we cannot go. I believe only that I ought to love God above all else and my neighbor as myself.

A conservative Catholic might ask me: “But when you say you love God, what is it you lo...