René Girard (1923-2015)

The "new Darwin of the human sciences"

Girard's ambition was that of the great unifiers. Just as Darwin had reduced the profusion of living things to a single principle, Girard claimed to reduce the profusion of cultures — religions, myths, prohibitions, sacrifices, tragedies — to a single founding mechanism: collective violence channelled onto a victim.^[9][10] This claim to unity explains both the enthusiasm of his disciples and the irritation of his adversaries: a theory that explains everything alarms as much as it fascinates.

What is striking is the method. Girard was neither a field sociologist nor a laboratory psychologist, but a reader. He read Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Proust, then Sophocles, primitive myths, the prophets of Israel and the Gospels, as documents on human nature. His strength was to take great works seriously as sources of knowledge, not as mere ornaments.^[11][12]

A convert whom his science led to Christ

Girard's journey reverses the modern suspicion. One ordinarily expects a scholar, in studying religion, to "dissolve" it into illusion. Girard travelled exactly the opposite road: starting from a quiet atheism, it was his very research that led him back to the faith of his childhood, abandoned at the age of twelve.^[13] By honestly seeking where the knowledge of violence enclosed in the Gospels came from, he came to conclude that it could "not be of human origin".^[14]

"The fact that authentic knowledge of violence is enclosed in the Gospels cannot be of human origin." — René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World^[15]

This sentence sums up the whole of Girard: it is not piety that leads him to the Gospel, but the logic of his anthropology. He joins here the great line of French intellectual converts, that of Pascal, Maritain and Gilson: men whom the rigour of thought, and not its abandonment, brought to their knees.

An apologist in spite of himself

Girard always refused to present himself as a theologian or a preacher.^[16] He wanted to remain an anthropologist, reasoning from texts and facts, without appealing to the supernatural as a wild card. That is precisely what gives his work its apologetic force: an agnostic reader can follow the reasoning step by step — desire, rivalry, crisis, victim — and discover, at the end, that the text which reveals this mechanism is the Gospel. Faith is not assumed at the outset; it emerges as a conclusion.

That is why many contemporary Catholic apologists — including English-speaking preachers such as Robert Barron — have seized upon Girard: he offers a demonstration "from below", starting from the human sciences, of the absolute singularity of Christianity in the history of religions.^[17][18]

Biographical landmarks

A son of Avignon and a citizen of America, Girard spent his whole career in the United States, yet writing most of his work in French. His life spans the century: born under the Third Republic, he died in the Silicon Valley of which he would, unwittingly, inspire several figures.^[19][20]

The son of the curator of the Palais des Papes

Girard grew up in the shadow of the Palais des Papes, of which his father was curator.^[21] The detail is not anecdotal: the child was trained in archives, in documents, in the most demanding historical method — that of the École des chartes, which teaches never to advance a fact without its source. This discipline of the document explains how Girard would later read myths and Gospels: not as reveries, but as exhibits on human violence.

The American from Baltimore: the 1966 symposium and "the plague"

In 1966, at Johns Hopkins, Girard organises the symposium that brings French Theory into America — Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and above all a young Jacques Derrida whose paper launches deconstruction across the Atlantic.^[22] Irony of history: Girard, who had opened the door, would soon judge this relativist current to be the "plague" of American universities. Against generalised suspicion and the dissolution of all truth, he would defend to the end the idea that great texts say something true about man.

The Académie française (2005)

Election to the Académie française, on 17 March 2005, crowns a long-debated body of work.^[23] Girard succeeds there a religious, the Dominican Ambroise-Marie Carré: by the chance of seats, the anthropologist of religion enters the line of a preacher. His reception, on 15 December 2005, publicly seals what he had become: no longer merely a brilliant literary critic, but the author of a Christian anthropology taken seriously even in the most secular scholarly circles.

Girard's work is not a collection of theses, but a single edifice, built in three stages: first desire (1961), then violence and the sacred (1972), finally biblical revelation (1978). Each book adds a storey without ever renouncing the earlier ones.^[24][25]

Mimetic desire: we desire according to the desire of others

The starting point is a discovery made among the novelists. Against the Romantic illusion of a spontaneous desire, springing from the subject toward the object, Girard shows that human desire is triangular: between subject and object there always stands a model, a mediator, whose desire the subject imitates. We do not desire directly; we desire what the other shows us to be desirable.^[26][27]

That is what Girard calls novelistic truth — revealed by the great novels — as opposed to the Romantic lie, the flattering illusion of an autonomous and original desire. Don Quixote does not desire on his own: he desires through Amadis of Gaul. The Stendhalian or Proustian lover desires the object only because a rival desires it.

External mediation and internal mediation

Girard distinguishes two regimes of imitated desire.^[28]

• In external mediation, the model is out of reach, separated from the subject by an unbridgeable distance (Don Quixote and the legendary knight). Imitation remains peaceful, almost religious: one does not compete with a hero of romance.
• In internal mediation, the model is close, accessible, present in the same world as the subject. Then the model becomes a rival: it desires the same object, it stands in the way. The more men are equal and close — as in the modern, democratic world — the more mediation becomes internal, and the more conflictual desire becomes.

From model to rival: the double bind

The drama is that the model sends a contradictory message: "Imitate me" and, at the same time, "Do not take what I desire". The disciple who obeys the first command necessarily violates the second. The admired model turns into a hated obstacle — not despite admiration, but because of it.

"Only the being who prevents us from satisfying a desire which it has itself suggested to us is truly an object of hatred." — René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel^[29]

The mimetic crisis and undifferentiation

When internal mediation generalises, rivals multiply and imitate one another until they become interchangeable. Each copies the other's violence; the differences that structured society — ranks, roles, prohibitions — collapse. Girard names this moment the mimetic crisis or "sacrificial crisis": a generalised undifferentiation, a war of all against all in which no one can any longer be told apart from his adversary.^[30][31] It is the chaos that myths recount as plague, flood or scourge: the metaphor of a contagious violence threatening to destroy everything.

The victimary mechanism: unanimity against one

It is here that the solution surges forth, blind and spontaneous. In the crisis, the imitation that set each against all suddenly flips: the violence of all, instead of dispersing, converges onto a single victim. One individual — often marked by a sign that designates him: the foreigner, the cripple, the king, the woman, the lame — suddenly crystallises unanimous hatred. He is killed or cast out; and, this murder accomplished, peace returns.^[32][33]

The apparent miracle — in a single stroke, fury subsides — makes the community believe the victim was guilty of the crisis, then, because its death restored peace, that it was also beneficent, sacred. The victim is thus both accursed and divinised: this is the origin, according to Girard, of the sacred itself.

"The sacred is violence." — René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World^[34]

The founding murder and the birth of the sacred

This collective murder — the founding murder — is, for Girard, the hidden act at the origin of all culture. Men do not want to know on what their peace rests; they forget the real victim and transfigure it into a god.^[35] All archaic culture would thus be built on this repression of founding violence.

"Men do not want to know that the whole of humanity is founded on the mythical concealment of its own violence." — René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World^[36]

Rite, prohibition, myth: the three veils of archaic religion

From this founding murder derive, according to Girard, the three great institutions of primitive religion, all sharing one function: containing violence by re-enacting it or forbidding it.^[37]

Myth is therefore, in Girard, a text of persecution: it tells the truth that there was a victim and a murder, but it lies about the essential — it presents the victim as guilty and the murder as justified.

The stereotypes of persecution (The Scapegoat, 1982)

In The Scapegoat, Girard refines his analysis by identifying the stereotypes of persecution — the recurring traits found in narratives where a crowd turns on a victim, whether an ancient myth or a medieval text accusing the Jews of poisoning the wells during the plague.^[38][39] He distinguishes four: a crisis that erases differences; stereotyped accusations ("undifferentiating" crimes: parricide, incest, poisoning); victimary marks designating the target (deformity, strangeness, extreme position); and finally violence itself. Knowing how to read these stereotypes means learning to recognise a lynching beneath the veil of the narrative that justifies it.

An intellectual conversion (around 1959)

Girard's great inner rupture came not from a sermon but from his work. While writing Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, meditating on the great "novelistic conversions" of his authors — Don Quixote, Julien Sorel, Dostoevsky's heroes, who in the end renounce their proud desire — he himself lived a conversion.^[40][41] He had abandoned the faith at twelve; it was the power of the Bible, rediscovered in adulthood, that called him back.

"I believe the Bible is of such power that it can give anyone back his childhood at any moment." — René Girard^[42]

The Lent of the tumour and the deliverance of Maundy Thursday (1959)

To this intellectual conversion was added an ordeal of the body. During Lent 1959, a doctor detected a small skin tumour in Girard. Anguish ran through the whole of Lent; deliverance — the news that the lesion was benign — reached him as Easter approached.^[43] Girard read a sign in it, with that humour which never left him:

"I never knew a feast to compare with that deliverance. I saw myself dead, and, in a single stroke, I was risen again." — René Girard^[44]

He added that God had "called [him] to order with a hint of humour".^[45] After that Easter 1959, he had his two sons baptised and had his marriage regularised in the Church: the intellectual convert had become a practising Catholic.

The third and final storey of the Girard system is also the most decisive for Ignispedia. Having shown that all myths hide the innocence of the victim, Girard expected to find one more myth in the Bible. He found the opposite.

The Bible takes the side of the victim

Whereas myth recounts the crisis from the standpoint of the crowd and proclaims the guilt of the victim, the Hebrew Bible, little by little, reverses the perspective: it takes the side of the victim and proclaims its innocence. Girard sums up this reversal in a dense formula: the Bible "de-divinises the victim and de-victimises God".^[46] Murdered Abel, Joseph sold by his brothers, Job accused by his friends, Isaiah's Suffering Servant: everywhere Scripture takes up the cause of the persecuted, against the persecuting crowd.

The Gospels unveil "things hidden since the foundation of the world"

What the Hebrew Bible began, the Gospels complete. The very title of Girard's masterwork takes up a word of Christ, quoted by Saint Matthew (Mt 13:35, echoing Psalm 78): Jesus comes to reveal "things hidden since the foundation of the world".^[47] These hidden things are precisely the founding murder and the victimary mechanism on which, unbeknownst to men, all cultures rest.

The narrative of the Passion is the culminating point. It presents every trait of a collective lynching — a unanimous crowd, an innocent condemned man, lying accusations — but told at last from the standpoint of the victim, and proclaiming his innocence. Where myth divinised the lynched man by hiding the crime, the Gospel unmasks the crime and exonerates the crucified.

"By revealing their innocence, biblical inspiration desacralises scapegoats." — René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes^[48]

Christ, the innocent victim who unmasks the mechanism

For Girard, Christ holds a unique place: he is the perfectly innocent and perfectly consenting victim, who, far from sustaining the lie, unveils it. His very word from the Cross names the ignorance that keeps the victimary machine turning:

"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." — Jesus, Gospel according to Saint Luke (Lk 23:34)^[49]

This sentence, Girard stresses, states exactly the truth of his anthropology: the scapegoat mechanism "can function only by virtue of the ignorance or unawareness" of the persecutors.^[50] Once the mechanism is known, denounced, brought into full light by the Gospel, it loses its power to create unanimity and found peace. Christianity thus deprives humanity of its ancient sacrificial remedy — to offer it another: renouncing violence and forgiveness.

Satan, the "liar and father of lies"

Girard gives a precise anthropological content to the figure of Satan in the Gospels: Satan is not first a horned character, but the name of the mimetic mechanism itself — the process which, through desire, rivalry and accusation, sets men against one another, then reconciles them in murder.^[51] Satan is a "liar and the father of lies" because he is the very principle of the concealment of the victim. The title I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999) takes up Christ's word in Saint Luke (Lk 10:18): Revelation makes Satan "fall" — that is, strips the victimary mechanism of its veil and its efficacy.^[52]

The debate on sacrifice and Girard's revision

On one point Girard evolved — and the point matters for a Catholic reader. In Things Hidden (1978), he refused to call the death of Christ "sacrifice", for fear of confusing it with the bloody sacrifices of the archaic religion he was combating: he saw in it a misunderstanding that would drag the Gospel back down to myth.^[53] This anti-sacrificial position shocked many theologians, who saw in it a denial of the redemptive value of the Cross.

Girard later revised his position. In The One by Whom Scandal Comes (2001) in particular, he admitted that two senses of the word sacrifice must be distinguished: archaic sacrifice, which immolates a victim to discharge violence, and Christian sacrifice, the total gift of self through love, which is the exact reversal of the first.^[54][55] The Cross is not one more sacrifice: it is the sacrifice that ends sacrifices.

This revision shows an honest researcher, capable of correcting a thesis out of fidelity to the truth — and brings Girard, in the end, closer to the classic Catholic doctrine of Redemption.

A concern for victims born of the Gospel

Girard draws from his theory a striking reading of the modern world. Our civilisation is distinguished from all others by an obsession: concern for victims. No society before ours had made the defence of the weak, the persecuted, minorities, a supreme value. Where does this unprecedented sensibility come from? From the Gospel, Girard answers: it is the Christian revelation of the innocence of the victim which, diffused in consciences over twenty centuries, made persecutions unbearable.^[56][57]

But Girard also sees the possible perversion of this concern: victimism, the bidding war of competing victimhoods, the transformation of the defence of victims into a new weapon of accusation. Secularised Christianity can turn against itself the weapon it forged. Modernity is thus "evangelical" even in its excesses — even when it believes it has rid itself of the Gospel.

Battling to the End: the escalation to extremes

In his last great book, Battling to the End (2007), written with Benoît Chantre, Girard gives his theory an openly apocalyptic turn.^[58] Re-reading the Prussian theorist of war, he finds there the concept of the "escalation to extremes": deprived of the brake once constituted by the sacrificial mechanism — now unmasked — human forms of violence have no stopping mechanism left and tend to spiral without limit.

For Girard, Revelation comes at a price: by removing humanity's archaic remedy, it places it before a radical choice — evangelical renunciation of violence, or violence without restraint. To "battle to the end" is to dare to see that the apocalypse has begun: not as a punishment sent by God, but as the consequence of a humanity refusing the only way out Christ showed it.^[59]

What the Church can receive

Girard's contribution to Catholicism is immense. He provides a rare anthropological apologetics: a demonstration, conducted with the tools of the human sciences, that Christianity is not "one mythology among others" but the anti-myth par excellence, the text that breaks the lie on which all cultures rest.^[60][61] In an age that readily files faith among archaic fables, Girard reverses the charge: it is myths that lie, and the Gospel that tells the truth. His reading of the Passion, of concern for victims, of the figure of Satan, offers the preacher and the apologist powerful weapons.

Limits and criticisms

Ignispedia does not canonise Girard. His system has been criticised, including by friends of the faith, on several points.^[62][63] He has been reproached with reductionism: explaining everything by mimetism and the scapegoat, at the risk of flattening the richness of religions, cultures and revelation itself. His first anti-sacrificial position (1978) contradicted the Catholic doctrine of Redemption, before he revised it. Exegetes have judged his reading of the Bible at times tendentious, selecting the texts that confirm his thesis. Academic critics — René Pommier, among others — have mocked the scale of his claims.^[64]

A Catholic may therefore hold Girard to be a fruitful master without making him a doctrinal authority: receiving his light on violence and the scapegoat, while keeping the distinctions that the theology of Redemption imposes, and without reducing the mystery of Christ to an anthropological function.

The greatness of a witness

What remains is the essential. One of the greatest minds of the 20th century, starting from unbelief and armed with only the human sciences, spent his life seeking the truth about violence — and this search threw him at the feet of the Crucified. At the end of Battling to the End, Girard confessed his faith without detour, in the certainty that the Cross, and not violence, will have the last word. Ignispedia hails in him a brother of the great converts — Pascal, Maritain, Gilson — and a companion on the road for every Catholic who wants to understand, with the tools of his time, why "authentic knowledge of violence enclosed in the Gospels cannot be of human origin".^[65]

• Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) — the other great French thinker of man's misery and greatness, whose "man who surpasses man" resonates with Girard's anthropology.
• Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) — the philosopher converted by Léon Bloy, another master of believing intelligence in the 20th century.
• Étienne Gilson (1884-1978) — the historian of medieval philosophy, another great figure of French Catholic reason.
• Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) — the theologian of the supernatural and of religions, whose work illuminates the place of Christianity among myths.
• Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) — the theologian who discussed the Girardian reading of the Cross in his Theo-Drama.
• Fabrice Hadjadj (born 1971) — a contemporary Catholic thinker who extends, in his own way, reflection on violence, the body and faith.