René Girard, Modernity, Apocalypse, Part II

In the last essay, I gave an account of René Girard’s conflicted modernity, and hence his idiosyncratic postmodernity. In this second installment, I seek to show a profound and often unrecognized, but absolutely critical, undertow in his work—the agency of the biblical text giving rise to new human possibility. This makes Girard “apocalyptic” in a transformative, redemptive sense rather than the typical violent one.

The work of Benoït Chantre, Girard’s most important colleague and conversation partner in the final phases of his career, has become indispensable in understanding this perspective. His mammoth Biographie (2023) is a gold mine of critical information, but his little book, The Time Has Grown Short (2022), is vital, in short form, for establishing the textual integrity of Girard’s thought

Jam van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece, detail on the center section, Adoration of the Lamb, 1432.

As Chantre insists, Girard’s work cannot be reduced to clumsily separated, social-theory mechanisms—mimesis, the scapegoat, the functional role of scripture. It has to be embraced as a single, integral, and finally messianic thesis. I consider this to be singularly true because Girard’s hermeneutic depends crucially on texts and, I would say, textuality itself: on the potential of written traditions over time to bring to the surface what really was not known before about the depths of human meaning. And, if this is the case, we must pay attention to Girard’s own texts as a whole, especially those at the high point of his writing. His major book Things Hidden Since the Foundations of the World (1978), from which I quote here extensively, sold widely in France when it was first published, establishing his thought for a larger public both in France and the U.S. In the explicitly biblical section of this book (Part II, “The Judaeo-Christian Scriptures”) he lays out a core dynamic that goes deeper than the mechanisms of mimesis. He shows a textual tradition that works to reveal the human victim out of compassion and redemptive purpose. It amounts to a new human transcendence erupting, not from metaphysical principles or argument, but from a tradition of writing over an extended period that maintains its singular, revolutionary perspective. Focusing on this center emphasizes that Girard’s thought must be treated simultaneously, with every kinetic part belonging to a live nucleus of new meaning. The integral textual dynamic in Girard’s work acts as the real backbone of his thinking and provides his unique postmodernism, as well as the authentic, and nonviolent meaning of his apocalyptic vision.

Biblical scripture is a historically contingent, individual textual tradition that attains universal significance. “In our interpretation, divine intervention no longer violently changes the course of human history and suspends its ordinary laws of development. On the contrary, a text does disturb these laws, but only to the extent that it gradually reveals the state of sacrificial misapprehension protecting people from their own violence” (my emphasis). Girard stresses the revelatory, disclosive function of the text, but it cannot be separated from an ultimate redemptive sense and function.

What is a text but a signifying conversation—a conversation, in this case, seeking a conversion? In the past, the biblical text has been seen as the service of a legalized scheme of judgment and salvation lying outside and beyond it. But Girard’s postmodern gospel is an intra-worldly disruption that offers its own relational solution. The disruption is revelatory and not violent while, as we have seen, it also makes violence more terminal than ever before. This is then the full significance of the term “apocalyptic:” essentially revelatory and “bearing out” violence in and by its process, but behind that necessarily beneficent and transformative, at the service of nonviolence. Humanity is thrust back on its internal relational dysfunction apparently without recourse—beyond relentless repetition of the “enemy” motif, equally certain both to awaken an age-old response and fail as a conclusive strategy in the contemporary situation. But then, precisely in these circumstances, nonviolence must appear as the inevitable rational option of humanity.

Vincent van Gogh, Still Life with Bible, 1885.

As Girard puts it:

“In a world where violence has been truly revealed and the victimage mechanisms have ceased to function, humans are confronted with a dilemma that is extraordinarily simple: either they renounce violence, or the incalculable violence that they set off risks annihilating them all, ‘as in the days of Noah.’”

On the surface this might seem a bald, stark, doomed choice: take it or leave it with the strong suspicion that we’ll leave it! But underlying the choice, there is the gracious matter of a text that carries a transcendence, and of sharing that transcendence as revealed within the field of religiosity infected and overturned by that text. As Girard says, “The authentic knowledge about violence and all its works to be found in the Gospels cannot be the result of human action alone.” Or as his conversation partner in this book, Jean-Michel Oughourlian, says even more illuminatingly, suggesting that Girard came to his revelatory insights under the powerful “from below” ontological pattern of Heidegger’s thought: “Like Heidegger, you ask us to consider the possibility that this history, even though it is accomplished by human beings and by human beings alone, is not entirely human, is not only human.”

So, Christianity becomes a matter of a teaching and a communication—a revelation of meaning—of infinite nonviolence. The nature of the New Testament’s transcendence has to be understood. It does not take place in a unitary field, as it were perhaps two Manichean deities, benign and malign, battling it out in a single field of combat. A conflict like this takes place within the same transcendence established by generative violence. In contrast, the transcendence of nonviolence is first of all an empty tomb in which the status of our own perception is at stake. We do not understand what we see. Something new has to break through in order to create an entirely new transcendence occupying the same perceptual space—communicating not generative violence but rather peace, forgiveness, and generative nonviolence.

In a powerfully prescient passage, Girard states this thought of one perceptual space—same but utterly different:

“Far from eliminating divine transcendence, the non-sacrificial reading shows it to be so far from us, in its very closeness, that we did not even suspect it to be there. Invariably, it has been concealed and covered up by transcendent violence . . . To rid ourselves of this confusion, to detect transcendent love . . . we have to accept the idea that human violence is a deceptive worldview and recognize how the forms of misunderstanding that arise from it operate.”

Then at once: “Since both [forms of transcendence, violence and nonviolence] surpass all cultural differences, the two structures, paradoxically, amount to very much the same thing, which is why it is possible to pass from one to the other by an almost instantaneous conversion. But at the same time, there is also a radical, an abysmal opposition between them…” (my emphasis).

It is the shattering perspective of this revolutionary, revelatory transcendence that underlies—like a beautiful hidden planet in remote orbit of the solar system, only now revealed—the sweeping range of Girard’s telescopic investigation. And it is the discovery of nonviolent transcendence that has been lost in the current publicity, perhaps even notoriety, surrounding Girardian thought because of its embrace by a figure like Peter Thiel (see one of many online interviews). The current superficial uptake of Girard in certain political and pop arenas—insisting on relentless mechanisms of mimesis needing a violent mechanism of containment—seems completely oblivious of the in-breaking transcendence of Girard’s work and, therefore, seriously misrepresents him.

Christ Pantocrator in the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Old City of Jerusalem, CC 4.0.

Violence could not be exposed as a transcendent theme in its own right unless there was clarifying contrast of transcendent nonviolence. Competitive or mimetic violence is so embedded and generative it would be impossible to see this without an entirely alternative nonviolence not in any way implicated in that first generativity. Therefore it represents a second generativity, and this is divine revelation in itself. Girardian revelation then becomes a necessary addition to the genealogies of the modern, not in any sense of religion making a comeback to contest the secular, but in a sense internal to the secular itself. Does not a present saeculum tend necessarily in itself toward a saeculum to come?

To return then to the exordial question of my first essay—what must we let go of to become truly human?—the conclusion has to be, with emphasis, that what’s at stake is not a personal moral matter. Rather, it’s a human existential choice, in every sense an anthropological choice. The correct term for it is conversion (metanoia), but applying at the level of the whole community. To embrace the transcendence of nonviolence involves a letting go not simply of an individual way of being, but a collective one, and ultimately on a planetary level. This is why I think Girard seemed to draw back from the immensity of what he was proposing. But the enormity of the challenge is not to be thought of essentially, at its first order of significance, as a political question. It has instead the nature of a gospel, something to be “proclaimed” to all nations. The transcendence that Girard announced carries its own insistence in the texts he interpreted, literary and biblical, and in the ones he himself constructed. The audacity of this transcendence does not derive from any single author or even humanity as such. It comes from itself alone and speaks to all humanity on its own authority. It is the unfathomable audacity of the gospel kerygma. And then, secondarily, yet still authentically, it is the epochal achievement of Girard’s singular postmodern writing.