Virtually Christian, Chap. Two (Part One)

Last Friday's study kicked off with a brief account of the career of René Girard and the development of his key scientific proposal: original crises of violence among groups of early hominids gave birth to human culture, including language, rules and ritual. The bible’s story of Cain and Abel says essentially the same thing.

Because enormous stress has been put on the story before it—the disobedience of the first parents—the second Genesis story of human origins has not received the attention it deserves. It is in fact parallel to the Garden of Eden story and deals with the same core theme: rivalry as the source of alienation, violence and sin: in one case human rivalry with God, and the other human rivalry with humans. It is this second story in fact which first mentions the word “sin” and it goes on to bring a vital further reflection--the birth of culture from violence. Cain the killer becomes the founder of the first city, and then retaliatory violence escalates until Lamech boasts of “seventy sevenfold vengeance”. Lamech’s children, however, seven generations in a line beginning with Cain, are the founders of cattle herding, music and metallurgy.

This evolutionary anthropology is presented alongside what looks like the constant figure of God, but actually God is shown to change and his plans to go awry. God at first provokes the rivalry (because of a preference for animal sacrifice he never explains), then protests the rivalry, then protects its outcome, and then the system of protection he provided grows inside human history to a devastating level of mass murder. Read anthropologically we can see the hugely dangerous function of desire (Cain wants what Abel wants/gets), its result in the first murder, and then the actual outcome of the murder is the growth of human culture and, at the same time, redoubling violence. (The cultural emergence of blood sacrifice is first introduced as a “given” but then is framed in the overall story as murder: because the actual killing of Abel produces the same desired benefit of God’s favor/ protection as it did for Abel, this time for Cain.)

Girard simply presents this story in credible factual detail: on an evolutionary timescale, going back a million years or more, terrible crises of group rivalry and violence among our hominid ancestors—of all against all—were resolved by the function of the single victim, the scapegoat. With everyone fighting everyone because of desire and rivalry, suddenly the fall of one singles out the “guilty” one on whom all the violence then descends. With the peace resulting from the killing there is the beginning of the sacred, of the god, and then of ritual and myth, i.e. culture. Girard’s anthropological proposal can today claim the theological importance which Ambrose and Augustine’s legal insistence on Adam and Eve’s “original sin” had during the intervening centuries.

There is an extra reason why Girard must be taken so seriously. His thought of original violence is rooted in a prior analysis of human relations termed “mimetic desire” which itself explains human violence. Human desire is imitated or mimetic, and that is why it is so incredibly powerful and easily leads to violence: the more you want something, the more I want it!

There are plenty of examples of this type of imitation from family life, especially from children: one child wants what another child wants. But also adults: Jerry (who is retired!) goes to a restaurant and first checks out what everyone else is eating to see what he actually wants…

The recent discovery of mirror neurons has added further, hard-science evidence for this kind of behavior. We watched a valuable PBS short video that can be found at: http://video.pbs.org/video/1615173073/

The very neurons that control actions in humans act to mirror the same perceived actions in others. As the video demonstrates the neurons allow us to mimic the emotions of others, and that must include desire, the mainspring of so many emotions. In the images of faces in the video we could in fact see violence at work and directly imitated in the brain of the viewer.

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All this material was by way of introducing the essential argument of Virtually Christian, laid out in the second chapter of the book, and in pages 105-110. If violence gives birth to culture it must give birth to the human sign system that carries culture. Girard in fact says this explicitly, and the bible implies it when it says language is a human activity and production: God brings all the animals to the man “to see what he would call them…” Girard argues that the original symbolic moment or (“center of signification”) is the death of the victim. But VC argues, in addition, that this moment carries in itself a binary, what it calls an on/off switch. The original victim contains in him/herself the “bad” for which s/he is blamed and then the “good” of the peace which his/her death then produces.

None of this is brought to conscious recognition but resides deep within the original “thought” produced by the victim, the first fixing of an abstract or transcendent human meaning which is not instinctual. Within that original meaning lives both the negation of the victim and the affirmation of the order she brings.

This double-sidedness or negative/positive in the origin of signs conforms with a standard result of the study of signs (semiotics), i.e. their binary nature. Our discussion described many of these binaries, up/down, east/west, male/female, in/out, etc., and we could see how vital this on/off switch is to the construction of the human universe. It is easy to conclude, therefore, that this critical function of language is derived from the original on/off switch of the primary victim. From where else, on this hypothesis, could such a powerful world-making function of signs be derived? For, of course, we remember that one of the first functions of on/off is to decide who is part of our group and who is not, who is embraced and who is excluded.

We then came to the central point. If we accept that human beings are a system of binary meanings, based in violence, and communicated along neural pathways in a whole range of ways--from facial expressions, through language, images, print media, T.V., consumer goods, internet, movies, etc.—then a nonviolent intervention at the very root of the sign system must give birth to a new sign system, i.e. the communication of a different way of being human.

Jesus is the figure who brings the negated victim to light but not as violence, rather infinite forgiveness. He therefore undoes negation itself and becomes the sign that subverts our sign system from within. He undoes all its divisions and exclusions, in order to affirm the other in love, overcoming violent difference with the revolutionary sign of cross and resurrection

The gospel record shows that he did this as a matter of program in his active ministry, inviting all the excluded to table with him and earning thereby the hostility of those who (like the rest of humanity) lived by exclusion. He then went on in the cross and resurrection to provide a sign that overcomes exclusion throughout all of history.

The body of the victim, previously hidden and negated, arises now as generative love and thereby enables a new absolute “yes” to creation rather than an endless series of “yes and no” (see 2 Cor.1:19-20).

But then the question arises, if this is the case, surely it would have left some evidence in our actual sign system. And this is in fact the conclusion of VC, moving it along the trajectory of its argument. The book discovers concrete evidence of an eruption within our sign system during the Middle Ages. It assembles signs from the13th century movement of Romantic thought and feeling, in poetry, art and devotion. It describes the ideal of “non-possessive” desire in courtly love and at least a hint of nonviolence in some of the Arthurian legends. In Christianity itself devotion to the Eucharist was a powerful experience of a nonviolent sign. The feast of Christmas is perhaps the single most evident case of a profound shift in our repertoire of signs derived from this period. The popular tableau of the crib begun by St. Francis manifests, despite all the exploitation, a perennial sense of absolute earthly peace.

The objection was raised that the Middle Ages were violent and bloody (viz. the Crusades) and anything but “gentle”, so how could these claims be made? The answer is that it’s the emergence of nonviolent set of signs which is being argued not a nonviolent Christianity as such. At the same time as these nonviolent signs there were in fact very violent signs produced in Christianity, i.e. the violent doctrine of atonement and the papal militarization of the church. It’s clear these other signs were the main mobilizing forces of religious and political Christianity and this is hugely important if we’re thinking about Christian meaning as in fact a system of signs. The very polarity or contradiction of Christian signs serves to reinforce the argument that signs are the issue, and it’s a question then of which are the deeper, more authentic ones.

But perhaps an even more telling response is that the nonviolent semiotics of the Middle Ages were a discovery more of poets and artists, plus one or two crazy saints like Francis, rather than a matter of church doctrine or practice. In other words, it is truly a matter of signs and signification, rather than formal systematic thought. Christ is changing our signs and meaning despite the best efforts of churches and theologians to make his meaning conform to the meaning of the world by effectively transposing it out of the world. Signs are to be understood as evidence of the deep work of Christ to transform our human condition, rather than the products of church authority negotiating our salvation for us.

                                                                                             
                                           Martin Luther King Day, 2011