Excerpt of "René Girard and the Nonviolent God"

RenĂŠ Girard and the

Nonviolent God

Scott Cowdell

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

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University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu Copyright © 2018 by the University of Notre Dame All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-­­­in-­­­Publication Data

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CO N T EN T S

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1 1. Overture to Mimetic Theory

6

2. From Violence to Divinity

25

3. From Hominization to Apocalypse

51

4. Girard among the Theologians

84

5. A Divine-­Human Drama

115

6. The Shadow Side of Finitude

145

7. Divine Overaccepting

173

8. Christ, the Nonviolence of God

202

Conclusion 240

Notes 245 Bibliography 285 Index 307

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Introduction

This is a book about René Girard (1923–2015) and what he brings to Christian theology. It comes at a time when there is little doubt about the significance of mimetic theory for theology, though the nature of that significance remains less clear. This book aims to provide that clarity. It seeks to mediate between Girard’s oeuvre and what we might call mainstream, orthodox theology—it is a particular concern of this study to show that Christian belief need not be bent out of shape to accommodate mimetic theory.

In so doing, questions need to be addressed about the compati­ bility of Girard’s self-­ declared scientific program with theology’s authoritative sources: scripture, creeds, and persistent tropes regarding creation, revelation, providence, Christology, eschatology, and atonement. Among the theological critics of mimetic theory to receive attention here are Hans Urs von Balthasar, John Milbank, and Sarah Coakley. Girard’s theological interlocutors and interpreters are also present, most notably Raymund Schwager and James Alison.

In this undertaking, the reader may detect a new accent in theology’s engagement with mimetic theory. Girard has received theological attention, both positive and negative, within his own Catholic Church and throughout the Protestant world. There has also been a smattering of Eastern Orthodox writings on Girardian themes. But 1

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2 R ENÉ GIR AR D A ND THE NONV IOLENT GOD

there has not been significant engagement with mimetic theory in Anglican theology, though Girard has been welcomed (with serious reservations) at the Catholic end of Anglicanism by Milbank and Coakley. Recurrent themes in this study reveal certain Anglican preoccupations on my part, as a theologian who has been influenced intellectually, but also spiritually and personally, by mimetic theory. If the integration of faith with reason, theology’s engagement with culture, and the ecclesial mediation of personal transformation all add up to a single gift and task for me, as a characteristically Anglican way of being Christian, so the discovery and exploration of mimetic theory has illumined and deepened my Anglican sensibilities.

First, consider the “threefold cord not quickly broken” of scripture, tradition, and reason. Anglicans who align their theological sympathies with those of Richard Hooker—the great apologist of the Elizabethan Settlement—believe that, while scripture is primary, nevertheless any adequate hermeneutics must involve respectful conversation with the church’s creedal traditions and with the canons of reason (reason being conceived more broadly than today’s instrumental rationality typically allows). Girard is manifestly sympathetic to maintaining this conversation. Second, with this structural commitment in Anglican theological method comes its predilection for situating doctrine in close proximity to prayer, worship, and the cultivation of Christian character. This association of rational theological discourse with personal and communal transformation through word, sacrament, and common prayer is highly compatible with Girard’s insistence on linking theoretical insight with personal conversion.

Third, the aforementioned Elizabethan Settlement manifested classical Anglicanism’s commitment to maintaining peace in both church and nation. This emphasis perseveres in a characteristic spirit of irenicism and public-­mindedness in Anglican theology, which finds obvious resonances in Girard. His mimetic theory represents wisdom for the common good, beyond any sectarian agenda. He also declares that rivalrous self-­definition and scapegoating should be off-­limits to Christians. Both these commitments echo Anglican sensibility at its best.

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Introduction 3

From motives that may be discerned in the conception of this study, we now turn to an overview of its contents. The first three chapters offer a close reading of Girard’s oeuvre, exploring what I call his early, middle, and late phases. These chapters reveal theological synergies that developed throughout Girard’s literary and social-­scientific researches, along with a kernel of the whole mimetic theory that was already present at the beginning. Next, we turn to a theological assessment of Girard’s social-­scientific program, considering how he might fit best into today’s theological conversation. In the two following chapters, on divine revelation and divine action in an evolutionary world, mimetic theory is aligned with divine providence conceived in kenotic and incarnational terms. The preferred vehicle for this alignment is theological dramatic theory, as illuminated by the double agency tradition. In two final chapters we look at key theological concerns that have been laid at Girard’s door. These include the tragic cast of mimetic theory and its apparent ontologizing of violence. Girard offers theology a way beyond the standard options that too readily either embrace or deny these tragic, violent elements. Here I invoke a practice called overaccepting, which comes from improvisation theory in drama. Overaccepting provides a key to how certain contested theological themes can emerge more clearly in light of mimetic theory. The concentration is on divine providence in general and Jesus Christ in particular—who he is, what he does, what can and should be said of him, and what ought not to be said—from the perspective of divine nonviolence.

Such divine nonviolence, it must be admitted, is honored more in the breach than in the observance—and mimetic theory does not gild the lily when it comes to Christian involvement in violence. It distinguishes between a central arc of biblical revelation and particular passages that reflect an earlier, more violent religious imagination. It regards many such “texts of terror” as having been re-­contextualized by later biblical writers, though they were not excised, and the sentiments they express have certainly resurfaced throughout Christian history. Indeed, as the Mennonite theologian J. Denny Weaver reminds us,

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4 R ENÉ GIR AR D A ND THE NONV IOLENT GOD

There can be no doubt whatsoever that much of the Christian tradition has assumed a role for divine violence and that an integral dimension of the traditional understanding of the omnipotence of God is the presumed prerogative of God to exercise violence. That divine exercise of violence appears in the Old Testament and the New Testament and is prevalent in theology at all levels today.1

In terms of practice, the church abandoned an early pacifist inclination for a developing tradition of just war theory, in the midst of which the crusades erupted as an excess of religiously sanctioned violence.2 The Jesuit theologian Robert J. Daly lists thirty-­six historical moments when Christianity had the chance to revive its peaceful origins. But for every instance of peace carrying the day (from early Christian refusal of military service, to medieval and Reformation-­ era peace movements, to the Quakers, anti-­slavery, and the pacifist churches, on to today’s Christian movements for liberation, justice, and peace), there are many examples of Christianity endorsing and perpetuating violence. These include caesaropapism, just war theory, the crusades, the Inquisition, the witch trials, the so-­called religious wars of early modernity, slavery, modern militarism, anti-­Semitism with the Holocaust, and Christian involvement in more recent ethnic violence.3 Yet there is a counter-­witness that challenges every such trend, which New Testament scholar David J. Neville ventures to hold up. “If the voice of Jesus breaks through the strata of later interpretative traditions with sufficient clarity,” he writes, “it should be heeded.

One such instance . . . is the moral stance of Jesus with respect to violence.”4 With this history in mind, it is desirable to avoid perpetuating an intellectual version of violence by subjecting the gospel to an unjustifiable conceptual rigidity.5 The ex-­Catholic Girardian theologian Anthony W. Bartlett is concerned about the “attempt at full conceptual coherence by the tradition around the dogmatic legacy.”6 I am more confident than Bartlett that this risk can be avoided while honoring the language and concepts of creedal orthodoxy, and that this is important for Girard’s theological reception. However, with Bartlett, I resist any ideological annexing of the gospel. That way lies

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Introduction 5

the sacrifice of inconvenient facts, persons, and movements, signifying a return to structuring violence.

Something that marks this study is a critical willingness to bear with the language and imagery of violence while repurposing it, so that mimetic theory in theological hands “does violence to structuring violence.” This is the violence that Slavoj Žižek refers to as “a radical upheaval of basic social relations,” which rather than perpetuating the cycle of violence rejects and overturns it. As Žižek says, with characteristic irony and provocation, the monsters of history were not violent enough, in that they left the underlying system of violence undisturbed.7 This is precisely what Girard refuses to do as he points the way via redeemed mimesis to transformed human relations. So Girard brings more to theology than an analytic tool or even a grand theory. Mimetic theory is both of these, but more besides. It is an impetus to personal transformation and also to wider reform—though further discussion of how Girard might support a positive account of modernity’s secular spaces, and what mimetic theory can bring to the sociopolitical arena, will have to await another opportunity.8 It remains an open question whether Christians, Jews, and others will avail themselves of the resources that mimetic theory provides for faith, spirituality, and practice. Those who do will discover what can come only from a nonviolent God: the power to challenge the cultural nexus of violence, scapegoating, and a purely human sacred that Girard has identified. “Since sacred power depends on the conspiracy of all to maintain it,” as Girardian biblical scholar Robert Hamerton-­ Kelly concludes, “those who withhold consent from the conspiracy are dangerous and their gracious irony threatens the foundations.

They are the ‘nothings’ that God uses to bring the ‘somethings’ to nothing (1 Cor. 1:28).”9

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