Gone Nuclear (or New Creation?)

I just got back from a board retreat planning for the Theology and Peace conference in May. We were reading some of René Girard’s latest book Battling to the End. I just got my own copy and have been reading continuously. Girard has been my intellectual mentor for twenty years and his influence is all over the Wood Hath Hope website. But in this latest book he's gone nuclear. In Paul Simon’s words it’s “the bomb in the baby carriage,” and I mean it—in respect of what it describes, what it projects and its effect on me.
In one way it’s a great book, the greatest since Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. It deals with a rich palette of sources, explains crucial biographical and spiritual things that weren’t explained before, and brings Girard’s intellectual career to a concentration and focus that is in every way apocalyptic.

The key concept is “the duel,” the fight to the death or battle to the end. This of course fits with Girard’s central idea of mimetic desire and rivalry—the more you want something, the more I want it, the more you fight against me, the more I fight against you. But now it becomes a global theme, a matter of global history. The image that comes to me as I read it is of twin clouds: you know the sort, the terrifying locust swarm or demon-filled type that appear in horror movies and bear down on you without hope of escaping. But there are in fact always two of these clouds and they battle each other, with equal power, until local circumstances, chances of time, place and resources, lead to the collapse of one or both clouds. But now—and this is the crucial point—local circumstances are no longer local and resources for violence have reached a point of near infinite availability. So we are very close to the moment when the dueling demon-filled clouds will not self-terminate for lack of resources for either or both but will irresistibly concentrate the whole world in their explosion, the whole human space, annihilating the entire planet. It’s the opposite of the concept of deterrence, where the planetary force of each side rationally neutralizes the other. Here each side mobilizes the other to the point of symmetric global violence—to the end.

Again and again Girard says he does not think we have the wherewithal—the will, the desire, the conversion—to pull back from the brink. But now here’s the really terrible thing: we did not get into this situation simply on our own, by dint of our endless Cain-versus-Abel way of being human. We were brought here also and especially by biblical revelation. Because the Passion of Christ reveals, and so discredits, the age-old solution to mimetic violence which is the scapegoat, the third party we can all blame, it makes rivalries factually worse. They have no place to go, except against each other, again and again and again. Here is a representative statement of this terrible character of Revelation.

"The Passion brings war because it tells the truth about humanity, and deprives it of any sacrificial mechanism. Normal religion, which creates gods, is the one with scapegoats. As soon as the Passion teaches people that the victims are innocent, they fight. This is precisely what scapegoat victims used to prevent them from doing. When sacrifice disappears, all that remains is mimetic rivalry and it escalates to extremes. In a way, the Passion leads to the hydrogen bomb: it will end up exploding the Powers and Principalities [governing human institutions]. The apocalypse is nothing but the incarnation of Christianity in history, which separates the mother from the child." [Italics original, pp. 198-9.]

In one sense I believe this to be true but at the same instant, in the very same measure and heartbeat, the Passion is filled with forgiveness and peace, and that is what makes final and deep sense of this apocalyptic revelation. So here is what I miss in this book, and to a critical degree: an equal and equivalent world history of love alongside the world history of violence. In a couple of places Girard does suggest this—that the Holy Spirit is present in history—but over and over he asserts the crushing force of human violence opposed to the good news of the gospel. The evidence he stacks up and the logic he demonstrates are compelling, but there is just as much possibility of an alternative dossier. Here are some examples.

Various national commissions on truth and reconciliation; apologies by nations or other groups for historical wrongs against races, nations, individuals; the nonviolent collapse of the Soviet Empire; the outpouring of compassion and help for places like Haiti hit by natural disaster; President Jimmy Carter’s humanitarian work and that of so many like him; philosophy itself, its long arc of exposure to Revelation and its deep infection by its themes; the emerging church movement and the way it is affecting the mainline denominations; art, movies and songs where violence, forgiveness and Jesus are key transformative motifs; movement in contemporary theology, especially upheaval around atonement doctrine; developments in the biological sciences, particularly in the area of mirror neurons; Girard’s work itself on literature, novelistic conversion and the central disclosure of the victim, etc.etc.

It’s not a question, however, of seeing which list is longer and more impressive, that of violence or that of compassion. Grace has a strange complicity with sin because it is always a matter of forgiveness. Where sin abounds grace abounds the more, where hatred is, only there perhaps can love be authentic, and where violence abounds compassion is multiplied. The issue then becomes as much theological as historical and it is when we come to this path of thinking that my objections to Battling to the End are more than just a matter of rhetorical emphasis or historical aesthetics.

Christian theology derives from the gospel which is first and foremost a proclamation of the death and resurrection of Jesus. There is very little resurrection in this book, and because of that there is no sacramentality at all. The Resurrection has to be real event in time and space otherwise we are all in our sins, the victim is not vindicated, and it’s all a lie which makes everything worse, just as Nietzsche said. The Resurrection cannot just be a doctrinal concept, an article of the creed, still less a figment, a mythical elevation of Jesus. There has to be a real break in the human sign system, and within that a break in the actual biology of death, for the archaic mode of humanity to be made into something truly new. Anyone who has read Girard attentively knows that the actual death of the victim is everything. It is what founds human culture. For that to be broken open and destabilized would necessarily require a qualitative eruption of life in the midst of murderous death. Without the resurrection the gospels would be a Greek tragedy and the final word would have been the chorus-style remark of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, “we had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel (but really he messed with forces too big for him…).” The Burton Mack/Dominic Crossan style reading of the gospels—where the disciples fooled themselves and others into the resurrection—is from a Girardian point of view simply impossible. You cannot think outside of the guilty scapegoat because the guilty one who brings peace is the event of thinking itself.

Instead something happened to the Emmaus disciples that changed their sign system from outside and inside all in one go: the victim was in fact alive… And at some level, which is impossible to describe empirically but not to experience, the event is objective. It is a real transformation of the space-time continuum, one in which death and murder, murder and death, no longer rule. Resurrection is not a pagan resurrection, a human transference of immortality and transcendence because of the scapegoat effect (Girard seems even tempted to think of it that way because of what he calls distance—cf. pp. xv & 102—but that’s a more subtle discussion for somewhere else). It is a real reversal of death and the kingdom of death, the only thing able to reconstitute our sign system, our thinking, toward forgiveness, self-giving, love: in other words the proclamation of the gospel.

Sacraments are the realization of human space in which this transformation is experienced. Sacraments say again and again this really happened in our world and to our world. They are real stuff that feels totally different, water, oil, bread, wine, people, touch, place, time, the concrete witness of a transformed universe. They are the leaching of Resurrection into our lived world. They are a bio-semiology of life and love in the midst of history. Battling to the End takes place in a world without sacramentality and so history is doomed. Yes, there is mention of the Roman Catholic church, but that seems only to come at the intellectual level, as some kind of privileged guardian of a truth betrayed. What about the billions and billions of meals in our world into which the Resurrection has leached, the Big Macs, the New York pizzas, the Sushi, the burritos and the curries, the dips and the ice cream? Of course they are all mixed up with human culture, consumerism, greed and violence, but none of them either can be totally alien to the new humanity of Jesus. The disciples at Emmaus were probably eating the first century Palestinian equivalent of a Big Mac—it wasn’t a church they were in. Jesus, the new human, simply made their meal a gesture of the humanly new and because of that no meal is ever the same again.

None of this is to say that Girard is not possibly right, that we will not eventually blow ourselves to smithereens. But even if we do—and Girard’s book may be read positively as an eleventh hour warning that may work negatively to stop us—that will not change the fact that we are sitting right now on top of a new creation, experiencing the Resurrection of the truly human one in many, many subtle shifts of our human system. As Paul says nothing present, and nothing to come, neither power, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. The accent falls on the “in” and the meaning of God’s love is right here and now. The resulting spiritual attitude is one of intense hope, not world-weary despair. And what after all is more likely to bring the world to a true change of heart: an implacable logic of violence, or a boundless table of life?