A view from the stern: James Alison's theology (so Far)

The resurrection, however, though it provides a basic methodological orientation, does not give Alison his conceptual tools. These he borrows from Girard. At one time, he writes, "there was an area of human life that was radically unknown, maybe even unknowable. And this area of human un-knowing was laid bare, opened up," when Jesus was raised (Knowing 33). But what opened up its being opened up, so to say, was Girard's oeuvre. If we ask more specifically what the resurrection has disclosed, a big part of the answer falls under the rubric of what is called in Girard circles "the scapegoat mechanism," and while Alison does refer constantly to Scripture his interpretations are deeply influenced by Girard's "mimetic theory." Indeed, both Raising Abel and The joy of Being Wrong begin with summaries of the relevant Girardian themes, and the reader who skips these introductions had better be familiar with what they introduce.

The ideas Girard has developed are not yet common coin, although they have been circulating more and more widely, so they should perhaps be introduced here as well. Fortunately, a very brief sketch will do, as readers of this journal have a fuller account close at hand in the admirable outline published here in 1998 by Dom Andrew Marr (ATR LXXX:4,590-603). The two Girardian tenets that are most germane for present purposes are the triangular structure of desire and the dynamics of victimage. Certain others will be mentioned as need arises.

Desire is fundamental (though not "foundational") to being human and to human being. Our consciousness is constituted by-in a sense it is--desire. The plural pronoun "our" is deliberate, for the constituting is social. When we desire such-and-such, we desire it not spontaneously but inasmuch as desiring such-and-such is suggested by a model. "My" desire is mediated, in other words, by another's desire for such-and-such. Through mimesis, that is through my imitating of this other's desire, the desire becomes mine and I become a suchand-such desirer. The three corners of the Girardian triangle, then, are the model who mediates, someone else who desires imitatively, and the object of their common desire. Alison is good at giving effervescently straightforward examples, and rightly insistent that what goes for ice cream and bomber jackets goes as well for matters of far greater moment. All desiring-for lovers, for qualities, for prestige, for God-is desiring in accord with the desiring of a mediator. And it may be noted, as an important corollary, that desire at its deepest is not, as any number of philosophers and theologians have supposed, a desire to be desired by another. Deeper still is desire to be, and since conscious being is being in relation to other(s), my very being, in the most significant senses of the word, comes to me mimetically.

This is to anticipate, however. Returning to the more elementary occurrence of mimesis, if such-and-such-that which I desire because so-and-so desires it-is the sort of thing that so-and-so and I can both pursue or have, well and good. But if the such-and-such is indivisible, rivalry cannot but spring up between me and the mediator of my desiring. So-and-so and I become "mimetic doubles," like Demetrius and Lysander in Midsummer Night's Dream. Whether rivalry is the only upshot of mimesis as Girard himself analyzes it is a disputed question. Since I am concerned only with Alison's interpretation, the point can remain moot. He thinks rivalry is not a necessary consequence; nor is acquisitiveness the only form that mimetic doubling takes. There is a pacific mimesis, and as we shall see it plays an important role in Alison's theology. Still, mimesis commonly is acquisitive; almost inevitably it does give rise to rivalry, and rivalry in turn works itself out as violence of some kind.