{The late Rene Girard—literary critic, amateur anthropologist, and theologian—has become a latter-day object of cultic devotion, a veritable icon of postmodern and postliberal theology, all because he managed, according to his admirers, to Figure It Out. Kudos to him! Now we just need to determine What Difference It Makes…}
Scott Cowdell:
Religion for Girard is not about finding or making personal meaning. It is less of a private search and more of a public function, having to do with managing violence for the preservation of society. He distinguishes between religion as an evolved concomitant of human culture and religion (typically, Judaism and Christianity) as a form of countercultural witness. Girard sees the Christian gospel outing and undoing the violent false sacred that undergirds human religiousness. The protective sacred, however, while mortally wounded by the gospel, was not killed outright. Consequently, the gospel finds itself socially marginalized, within the church as well as outside it, for its countercultural unwillingness to maintain anybody’s status quo.
For Girard, the rise of a sovereign individual God, and of the sovereign human individual, finds inspiration much earlier than the rise of nominalism—certainly much earlier than the modern individual whom we first glimpse in medieval romance and the emerging middle class. This separation of God from the social matrix, and the indiscriminate honoring of all human persons, was first of all a biblical development, as the victim mechanism began its undoing by the real God.
Rather than Blumenberg’s late medieval nominalist account—which Taylor welcomes as “the intellectual deviation story” and which is championed today by the Radical Orthodoxy movement in theology—or Weber’s economic path to modernity focused on the Protestant ethic secularizing monastic discipline, or the structural theory whereby belief in a transcendent God who remains incarnationally invested in the world provides a perfect seedbed from which secular modernity might emerge, Girard goes deeper, darker, and further back. He declares the defeat of a violent cultural habitus that had evolved among mimetic creatures. The fact of such mimeticism, the scapegoat mechanism with its various religious echoes, and the way things are unraveling since that religio-cultural bubble was burst by the gospel, together account for the rise of secular modernity.
Girard does not wring his hands with the existentialists and the New Age movement over secular modernity’s spiritual homelessness. The disenchantment of which Weber wrote (as a necessary consequence of our grasping the levers of history to make our own future) is closer to Girard’s view and is not a thing to be lamented. However, Girard accounts for this disenchantment differently from Weber. The unified religio-cultural world, extending from human origins to premodern societies, provided a sense of metaphysical belonging, a unified cosmos, and a place for us in the scheme of things, all of which has departed to the sound of lament from modernity’s various critics. Yet Girard reminds us that togetherness and personal security are typically rooted in a violent compact and its mythico-ritual reinforcement, so that the price of liberation for a future of genuine human dignity and self-determination is the risk of isolation, exposure, and emotional flatness. This is because the false sacred has been punctured. Disenchantment is thus the price of Christian maturity and closeness to God, according to a Girardian reading, as Saint John of the Cross intuited at the onset of modernity with his “dark night of the soul.” Of course, Girard is also aware that a form of enchantment returns in secular modern times as we struggle to get by without the former social protection that religion provided.
Politically, Girard is conservative in the sense of society’s need for law, order, and religiously motivated disciplines, as well as in his robust dismissal of romanticism, sentimentality, political correctness, and pacifism. Yet he is a progressive in the hermeneutic of suspicion with which he confronts today’s several sacred cows: the state, the global market, ideology, and militarism. Hence Girard calls himself a moderate, disavowing whichever political or ideological program of human perfectibility. This position may also have something to do with his genuine perplexity on being faced by the apocalyptic future that he predicts. He dismisses the modern myth of progress, expressing as it does Hegel’s confidence that the back-and-forth of history will eventually achieve resolution. It is a fragile modernity, an incomplete secularization, and a dark future that Girard offers us—unless we learn the Gospels’ lesson and draw back from the brink.
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Scott Cowdell, René Girard and Secular Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press)
We must imagine the scapegoat happy--right?
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