The Girard Reader (58 page)

R.G.:
It is the beginning of the holiest part of Holy Week. So on Holy Thursday I went to

Mass after going to confession. I took the Eucharist. I felt that God liberated me just in time

for me to have a real Easter experience, a death and resurrection experience.

J.W.:
So resurrection and conversion are very difficult to distinguish . . .

R.G.:
Conversion is resurrection. But conversion is a more objective reality than what we

call objective the rest of the time. Awareness of guilt is forgiveness in the Christian sense.

Since I tend to analyze everything to death, I might not have believed in my own experience

of conversion if I had converted as a result of fear rather than before I had experienced the

fear. The prior conversion was too easy; it entailed no demands or commitments which I

perceived at the time, but it prepared the way. So with the definitive conversion I was both

emotionally and mentally prepared to accept God's grace and believe.

J.W.:
Your experience is similar to the Gospel pattern of discipleship. Recently, in

preparation for writing a paper on discipleship, I conferred with scholars in Judaism,

Hinduism, etc., and I found that the Gospel pattern is evidently unique: the disciples are

initially called, but they fall away and then return through a kind of second conversion, which

is associated with the resurrection.

R.G.:
That's true . . . true of all the martyrs in fact.

J.W.:
I think you have already begun responding to a question in which many readers will be

interested: what is important for you in the practice of faith?

R.G.:
I am not really ritualistic. I pray, but I don't really enjoy ritual that much. I do enjoy the Gregorian Mass. We are lucky to have the Gregorian Mass at Stanford, thanks to William

Mahrt, who has been devoted to it since 1963. I attend Mass every Sunday of course, as well

as on the obligatory holy days. I am an ordinary Christian.

J.W.:
What about non-Christians and a pluralistic society? Do you favor converting all non-

Christians to Christianity?

R.G.:
Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life," and he told his disciples to go into the world and make converts. If we give that up, are we still Christian? The idea that if we

respect other religions more than our own and act only according to PC peace will break out

all over the world is fantasy and delusion. The Christians should certainly enjoy the freedom

to spread their faith as much as the other religions.

____________________

8.
Quand ces choses commenceront
, 194.

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You see, is Christianity really so powerful that it should be forbidden to spread its ideas,

whereas other religions should be allowed that same right?

J.W.:
You are advocating freedom of religious expression. . . .

R.G.:
Of course. I think the Christians who do not want to share their faith do not really

believe. The fear of religious tyranny is an anachronism, a false issue which puts political

correctness ahead of the truth. I believe there is a truth, and the only way of telling it is by

connecting with people.

J.W.:
A question related to the conversion of others, yet distinct from it, is whether one's Christian faith should enter into one's approach to other religions and cultures? Or is it

necessary to "bracket out" one's faith in order to do scholarly work or to be a thinker?

R.G.:
I don't think you can bracket out a faith which is responsible for the best in the modern world. That is totally artificial. I don't think you can bracket out any idea or ideal that you

really hold -- or that holds you. If you bracket out something that is central to your life, you

become a shadow of yourself and your intelligence is not effective. There is no science

without faith. Everything great is always a question of faith. Of course, I suppose you could

speak of a kind of
kenosis
of faith, that is, emptying yourself of mimetic rivalry as you

approach others and your intellectual work. This is a sort of kenosis from below, as

contrasted to the
kenosis
of Christ from above according to Philippians 2. As your faith

grows, the more you empty yourself of rivalry and self-aggrandizement and the more you feel

impelled to communicate to others,
with
others, the truth you have experienced. This belongs

to the essence of Christianity. The idea of silencing Christianity in the name of Christian

humility is a Christian idea gone mad -- as Bernanos used to say:
une idée chrétienne devenue

folle
, like much of the madness in our world.

J.W.:
So you would not agree with Mircea Eliade's advocacy of practicing epoche, the

suspension of beliefs and assumptions in the approach to other religions?

R.G.:
No, that is a Stoic term, and you can practice that if you believe in Stoicism. But it has nothing to do with being a Christian or with real Christianity.

J.W.:
But isn't there an ethical impulse which goes with faith in Christ and becoming a

disciple that involves trying to see from the other's point of view? Isn't the Christian directed

toward the other, or through God to the others?

R.G.:
That is true, but it doesn't mean espousing the other's mythology. It means trying to

understand the other's situation, why he believes what he believes, and so forth. But I don't

think there is any good sense in which a Christian could bracket out Christianity. Christianity

based

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on the Gospels must be experienced as a twofold calling: to commitment of the whole person

to God and to interpretation of the Gospel texts.

If you believe that Christianity is truth, including societal truth, you are not going to reach

truth by bracketing it out. You can see the result of this method all around us, in the current

academic debacle for instance. The biblical scholars who are still talking in terms of

bracketing truth out are still thinking in nineteenth-century terms. They are on their way to a

goal which the deconstructors reached long ago. If we must have nihilism, let us not dilute it

with water and let us drink it full strength, with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the deconstructors.

In order to reach the end of the present crisis we must first experience it fully, we must not

interminably repeat attempts which already failed a hundred years ago, like "the quest for the

historical Jesus." Mine is a search for the anthropology of the Cross, which turns out to

rehabilitate orthodox theology.

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Glossary

Culture.
Everything -- assumptions and common ideas, roles, structures, etc. -- which

enables human beings to exist together without being overcome by chaos, violence, random

murder. According to the mimetic scapegoat theory, culture is founded by scapegoating and

maintained by a system of differences which is rooted in a nonconscious, concealed

scapegoat mechanism (see Scapegoating). "Difference" here refers to the basic distinction

arising from victimage and the beginning of culture (which of course may have actually taken

place over hundreds of thousands of years). The originary distinction is the one between

"here" or "us" by contrast to "it" or "that," the victim. This could have been originally a reflexive gesture or sign rather than spoken words. From this distinction all others stem:

language, roles, rules, institutions, etc.

Dionysus.
Known also as Bacchus, he was a wandering god, associated with wine and

madness, and the bringing of culture. The myths of Dionysus include a version in which the

Curetes, or Cretan warriors, encircle the infant Dionysus and save him from Zeus, while

another version narrates that the Titans, predecessors of the Olympian gods, seduce him with

trinkets, encircle him, cook him, and devour him. Dionysian ritual was associated with the

dismemberment of a sacrificial victim, probably a ritual repetition of what was believed to

have happened to the god/victim himself. Friedrich Nietzsche was fascinated with Greek

culture and with Dionysus in particular. In one of his early books,
The Birth of Tragedy
, he

maintained that music first emerged from the cult of Dionysus. In that early work

"Dionysian" was a metaphor for the vital, passionate, sacrificial, and destructive side of

human culture, whereas the "Apollonian," from the god Apollo, was a metaphor of human

imposition of order and constraints. It was, according to him, a kind of veil covering the

Dionysian abyss. Although Nietzsche came to modify this distinction between the Dionysian

and Apollonian, Dionysus continued to be his paradigm of the concrete reality of life in all its

fruitfulness and destructiveness, a paradigm that he opposed to Christ or "the Crucified." In
The Will to Power
no. 1052 Nietzsche wrote of "Dionysus versus the 'Crucified'" as the fundamental antithesis of his thought. After his mental breakdown he signed letters

alternately as "Dionysus," "the Crucified," and a nonsense word that may have included part of

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Cosima Wagner's name (the wife of the composer with whom he was probably infatuated).

Faith.
The person's complete trust -- or "existential" knowledge if faith is considered a kind of knowing -- that s/he belongs to the God who sides with victims, with scapegoats; for

Christians the trust or existential knowledge directed to God is based on Jesus Christ as

model or mediator (see Model/Mediator). In mimetic desire (see Mimesis) the tendency is for

the relationship between subject and model to become one of conflictual, potentially

destructive rivalry. The tenor or "spirit" of the relationship is satanic (see Satan). But in faith the person enters into communion with others through the relationship of perfect love shared

between God the Father and Christ the Son. The Spirit of the relationship is union, trust, self-

giving.

Mimesis/Mimetic Desire.

A. Mimetic Desire.
Mimesis is practically synonymous with mimetic desire. Mimesis evokes desire. Desire constitutes mimesis. 1. Mimetic desire is a kind of nonconscious imitation of

others, but it is important to stress that the word "imitation" has to be joined with the

adjective "appropriative" or "acquisitive." Mimesis seeks to obtain the object that the model desires. The function of culture is to control and channel this potential conflict over the

object.

B. Metaphysical Desire.
As mimetic or interdividual beings we associate being or reality

with the other, the model or mediator. Our deepest desire is not for things or objects, but to

be
. In struggles with the modelrival, and particularly when the subject seems to come to a

dead-end against the model-obstacle, it becomes apparent from a mimetic analysis that the

subject wants the being of the model-mediator. This is the source of fascination, hypnosis,

idolatry, the "double," and possession. The experience of the double occurs when the model-

obstacle as overpowering other is so internalized that the subject does not experience a

distinction of self and the model-mediator. The subject is thus "possessed" by the other. The extreme alternatives are suicide or murder of the model-obstacle. Other possibilities are

schizophrenia, escape into a new identity, and liberation through the release experienced in

love and forgiveness. This latter is the work of a good or conversionary mimesis.

C. Mimesis as Good.
Girard does not hold that mimetic desire is inherently bad or

destructive. It is the structure and dynamic enabling human beings to open themselves to the

world and engage in loving

____________________

1. In the concluding conversation with Girard, he speaks of the need for another term than

"desire" because it is so intimately associated with the influence of Freud's sexual theory; see p. 268.

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relationships. It is what he has in mind in
Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World

when he speaks of "good contagion" and "nonviolent imitation." If it becomes effective in a fundamental change of personality through the imitation of God or Christ, it could be termed

"conversionary mimesis" or "conversionary imitation."

Model/Mediator.
The person, group, or human reality with which the individual is in a

mimetic relationship (see Mimesis). We are never immediately conscious of mimesis and for

the most part we are involved in mimesis unconsciously. The model
mediates
reality (world,

experience, specific assumptions about life-settings, etc.) to the subject. We are thus always

interdividuals
, Girard's only neologism. It refers to our intersubjective make-up; as human

beings we are not the other or model, but on the other hand, we are constituted by the other or

model, and so the self is a set of mimetic relationships operative in the individual, both in the

present and from the past.

A. Internal and External Mediation.
In
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel
Girard distinguished between internal mediation, the situation when the subject's and the model's objects of desire

overlap and become a matter of rivalry; and external mediation, where the model or mediator

is removed from the individual (whether historically, ontologically, or however) and so there