The Tablet: The distortion of René Girard
René Girard has been mentioned a lot of late in many ACP posts. Check out this article in The Tablet by Michael Kirwan. (Registration required). Update: Full article below, submitted by Paddy Ferry.
The ideas of the French social theorist and critic are being actively twisted by influential figures around President Donald Trump
René Girard (1923-2015) is one of the most significant Catholic thinkers of recent times. At the core of his “mimetic theory” is his discernment of a connecting pattern between a certain kind of social formation – the mobilisation of one group over against another, or against a vulnerable victim – and the sacred imagination. He argues that this construction of an identity “over against” lies at the heart of much religious behaviour.
Full article submitted by Paddy Ferry:
The ideas of the French social theorist and critic are being actively twisted by influential figures around President Donald Trump
René Girard (1923-2015) is one of the most significant Catholic thinkers of recent times. At the core of his “mimetic theory” is his discernment of a connecting pattern between a certain kind of social formation – the mobilisation of one group over against another, or against a vulnerable victim – and the sacred imagination. He argues that this construction of an identity “over against” lies at the heart of much religious behaviour.
Girard, who taught at Stanford, near San Francisco, acknowledges a complicity between violence and religion, but not the one that secularist thinkers allege. Girard returned to Christianity when he recognised the importance of the gospel for discerning and resisting this violent polarisation. Even as an agnostic, he admired the Young Christian Workers in wartime France, who were able to avoid being sucked into entanglement with extremists of the left or the right.
Girard stressed the need for the intellectual to stand “above the fray” as far as possible. This was not an argument for lofty disengagement or cheap neutrality. Rather, Girard’s anxiety about taking sides was to do with the risk of forming “mimetic doubles”: two opponents hurling the same insults at each other, mirror images, using the same tactics. Genuine differences are thereby eroded in a vicious spiral of mutual resentment.
This insight is – or should be – an antidote to political and cultural polarisation. Which makes his appreciation by key members at the vanguard of Donald Trump’s administration perplexing. J.D. Vance credits Girard, alongside St Augustine, as key influences on his journey to embracing Catholicism. Vance’s political sponsor, the libertarian tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who encountered Girard at Stanford, has generously supported the dissemination of Girard’s ideas through his Imitatio project.
What’s going on? A clue lies in the “apocalyptic” tone of Girard’s later work. He argued that multiple crises – political, financial, security, ecological – meant we were now at the “end times” and political institutions such as the nation state can no longer save us from catastrophe. Thiel’s thinking is predicated on similar convictions. He sees a parallel between the exhaustion of liberalism in 1920s Germany and the contemporary United States.
Thiel acknowledges the significance of the political theology developed in the 1920s by the German legal theorist, Carl Schmitt, whose rejection of liberalism as incoherent and ineffective led him to become an apologist for the National Socialists after the collapse of the Weimar regime. Schmitt argued that politics is inherently conflictual, and that God does not wish for human beings to co-operate with one another (he cites the Tower of Babel episode in Genesis). Another key idea is the “state of exception”, whereby the sovereign is “above” the law (as when President Trump declared on social media, channelling his inner Napoleon, “He who saves his country does not violate any law”).
There is an overlap between Schmitt’s diagnosis of the fragility of secular liberalism and Girard’s. Where they differ is in the cure. Schmitt opts for a dark, violent parody of the gospel revelation. Girard calls upon the true, non-violent God revealed by and in Jesus Christ. We need, Girard argued, not extremist alternatives to liberal democracy but “a more reasonable, renewed ideology of liberalism and progress”.
Thiel appears convinced of the diagnosis, but does not distance himself from Schmitt’s totalitarian remedy. The biggest threat we face, he repeatedly insists, is a “one-world totalitarian government”, which in a series of lectures he gave in San Francisco last Autumn he called “the Antichrist”. And in his alignment with Trumpism, it is clear that the “totalitarianism” which Thiel rejects is that of the left.
The appeals to the Bible and to Christian tradition made by the religious right are selective and distorting. The apocalyptic texts, with their anxieties about Armageddon and the Antichrist, must be read from the perspective of the gospels, and not vice versa. The teaching and example of Christ – the Good Samaritan of Luke 10, or Jesus’ anonymous identification with the marginalised in Matthew 25 – need to be at the centre of our religious imagination.
The US Catholic bishops’ condemnation of Trump’s executive orders on the treatment of immigrants and refugees are thoroughly Girardian in their defence and protection of the victim. In the looking-glass world of the Trump administration, there are many dispiriting distortions of Christianity and its values. It should not surprise us that a complex and often ambiguous thinker like Girard should be likewise misappropriated.
René Girard witnesses to the God of Jesus Christ, a God who is utterly beyond violence, and who has called us, through the Resurrection, into a pacific community which strives to imitate his compassion. In one of his most important works, Girard discussed the Ten Commandments, and how the prohibitions of the last nine all derive from the first, the prohibition of idolatry. The Maga programme consists of the systemic mobilisation of resentment, and a performative cruelty toward victims. It is energised by the veneration of a false and vicious “sacred”, invested in its messianic leader. If Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance are indeed committed to this programme, then there is a serious dissonance in their use of Girard’s mimetic theory. And unlike those who crucified Christ, they know what they are doing.
Michael Kirwan SJ is the director of the Loyola Institute, Trinity College Dublin, which teaches and researches in theology in the Catholic tradition, including an MPhil in Christian Theology. For more information about postgraduate study, you can attend our webinar on Tuesday 10 February, 6-7 p.m.
That article gets better as it goes along, but I would not have begun it in that way. Girard is much clearer in giving a name to the ‘all against one’ theme that recurs in scripture – and history – so often – ‘scapegoating’ – and in arguing that, as an exposure of the injustice of scapegoating, the Bible has no peer in ancient literature.
That’s why e.g. JD Vance is deluded in thinking of himself as a Girardian – when he can cruelly and consciously support the fiction that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were ‘eating the dogs’ – in Trump’s foul imagination. Trumpism is centrally a scapegoating ideology, even an echo of the lynching epidemic in the south following the US Civil War of 1861-65.
Nevertheless Michael Kirwan’s intro to Girard (‘Discovering Girard’), is one of the best.
That we tend to derive our desires by unconscious imitation is Girard’s central insight, along with the idea that this problem inevitably causes conflict when the desired object cannot be shared – e.g. a kingship. That likely rivals can then, to avoid a mutually destructive conflict with one another, ‘pick on’ a likely third party is the classic pattern that he discerns in history, the bible and even current Great Power jostlings.
To my mind the grisliest example is the Yalta agreement of 1945 on the fate of the White Russians – the anti-Bolsheviks who had sided with Germany in World War II. The postwar peace rested upon their extermination by Stalin, with allied British officers handing over imprisoned white Russians in eastern Europe to the Russians. What followed was awful.
What might happen to Ukraine at the hands of Putin and Trump could be far worse. Does Trump even care?
Why did Christian bishops lose this understanding of ‘covetousness’ after Constantine? Because Constantine was obviously himself a mimetic rival, and imperialism thrives on covetousness, but no one could say so. Letting covetousness rip is the very definition of pride (e.g. Henry II and the invasion of Ireland in 1171) but no one could say that either. That’s how Catholic moral theology became so unbalanced, fixated on sex.
YouCat’s blanking of pride and covetousness, while detailing the birth regulation rules imposed by Humanae Vitae in 1968, is a classic example. How else could that book wind up attributing the death of Jesus solely to the will of God? Constantinian theology dressed up as supreme piety! That it totally lacks any hint of insight into the genealogy of violence shows that Girardian insight is still both lacking in, yet sorely needed by, the ‘magisterium’.
Thanks, Seán.
I think you first mentioned René Girard’s theory during a discussion on Anselm’s supstitutionary atonement idea — that Jesus had to die as a ransom to calm his Father’s rage due to Adam’s sin, a sin we have all inherited inter generationally.
Jesus had to die to save us from his Father’s rage. (I am repeating all this just to ensure that my understanding of this is correct.)
Am I also correct in thinking that Anselm’s idea has now been completely debunked by scripture scholars and theologians?
Am I also correct in thinking that the Catechism of the Catholic Church is still full of Anselm’s idea?
To be fair to St Anselm of Canterbury, Paddy, he writes not of God’s ‘rage’ but of God’s ‘honour’ and God’s ‘justice’ – both of which – according to himself – require the ‘satisfaction’ of the alleged unpayable debt that Anselm discerns in our own merely human inability to provide full reparation for our sins by our own sufferings.
He did, however, also argue, that God as the supreme being is exempt from the rule against taking revenge.
This ‘satisfaction’ explanation for Jesus’s acceptance of the cross is indeed referenced in CCC 615.
Although elsewhere, e.g. in CCC 218-221, the Catechism speaks of God’s unconditional and eternal love, it never gets around to arguing that Jesus acceptance of crucixion was simply the fulfilment of his own teachings agaist reciprocal violence – an interpretation fully in line with the statement in Dignitatis Humanae (1965) that Christian truth cannot be conveyed by force.
I see CCC 615, combined with this hesitation, as the continuing influence of St Anselm and therefore also as the root of the extraordinary decision of YouCat to explain the death of Jesus solely in terms of God’s will (Q98). That completely ducks the challenge of explaining the violence of the crucifixion in terms of the pride of Jesus’s accusers and judges.
In blanking completely the deadliest of the seven deadly sins YouCat is a late catechetical monument to Christendom – the baneful historical association of the church with the violence of the state.