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A view from the stern: James Alison's theology (so Far)
Anglican Theological Review, Fall 1999 by Hefling, Charles
The answer to the first question is yes. The state of affairs that is passing away began, once and for all, and what it began with was a collective murder. In one and the same event, certain pre-human anthropoids became human; they entered into a mimetic interdividuality that was rivalistic, not pacific; and they fixed irrevocably the trajectory of what we know as religion, consciousness, memory, desire, and language (joy 254-56). All this might have been different; human sociality might have been established on recognition rather than appropriation of the other; but instead mimesis went the way of acquisition, rivalry, and antagonism, to violence that dissipated with the murder of one individual, the first victim.
This version of the fall is speculative, of course, and very Girardian. Alison makes no claim to the contrary. What it would thus seem to be incumbent upon him to show is that Girardian speculation belongs in a discussion of the Christian, theological idea of the fall. Hence the second question posed above: what grounds has he for positing a collective murder as the originating sin?
To begin with, although Alison is engaged in speculation, he does his speculating with "Easter eyes." What has revealed the intelligence of the victim is the contingent event of a lynching, Christ's passion, and this fact is a clue that human fallenness, now disclosed, began with a contingent event that was similar. The argument here, based as it is in a kind of typological correspondence, cannot stand on its own; by itself it asserts the non sequitur that there must have been an original collective murder because a later collective murder exposed the pattern that all collective murders exemplify. Nor does it stand alone. in backing it up, Alison draws in an unconventional way on the New Testament. Humankind's non-necessary yet universal solidarity in sin is for him a thoroughly historical solidarity, and its origin, therefore, a historical origin in time. In the same way that the cultural character of selves provides a way to show how original sin can affect each human life from its first moment, so too he wants his version of the fall to provide a way of showing how original sin can have affected the human race from its first moment. As originating, in other words, original sin must have been the earliest sin, first in a historical sequence. Accordingly, Alison asks what the apostolic witness to Christ has to say about "beginnings," and more particularly what connections are made in the New Testament between Christ's death and what happened "in the beginning" as told in the opening narratives of Genesis,
Now, for a follower of Girard, it is plain as can be which tale is the most relevant-Cain and Abel-and allusions to this episode do appear in the gospels. For Augustine, however, taking his cue from Romans, the relevant bit of Genesis was the very beginning-Adam and Eve, the tree and the serpent-and Western theology has of course followed suit. Instead of choosing one or the other, Alison's strategy is to meld these two stories and add Noah and the tower of Babel to the mix. Then, by means of some rather perplexing exegesis that he calls a "rigorously christological reading," he presents the four episodes about "the beginning" as a composite exhibition of murder, desire, and the founding of sociality based on victimization, all related to each other.
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