Victims, violence and the sacred: the thought of Rene Girard - includes bibliographies of books by and about Girard - Cover Story

Christian Century, Dec 11, 1996 by 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.