Violence and the Kingdom of God:

Introducing the Anthropology of René Girard

Biographical Sketch of René Girard

René Girard was born in Avignon in 1923. In 1947, he graduated from the École des Chartres in Paris with a degree in medieval studies. The next year, he moved to the United States where he has lived out the rest of his academic life. He received his Ph.D. from Indiana University and then was asked to teach some courses there in French literature. It was at this time that Girard wrote his first works of literary criticism. His next major appointment was at Johns Hopkins University in 1957 where he served in the Department of Romance Languages. It was during the winter of 1959 that Girard experienced a conversion to the Christian faith and became a Roman Catholic. Between 1971 and 1976, Girard taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo. At this time, in 1971, he wrote his seminal book Violence and the Sacred, which was translated into English in 1977. When this book appeared in English, it gained much interest in the academic community. As soon as this book was hot off the press in its French version, Raymund Schwager, a theology professor at the University of Innsbruck, read it and immediately traveled to Avignon where Girard was spending the summer to discuss the book. From this time up to Schwager’s untimely death in 2004, the two collaborated closely in the development of mimetic theory. In 1978, two years after joining the faculty of Johns Hopkins University, Girard wrote his most important book Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. It was in this book that Girard came out of the closet as a Christian, to the consternation of many academic colleagues, especially after its English translation was published in 1987. By this time, Girard had been the Andrew Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization since 1981. Girard retired from this post in 1995, but continues to serve Stanford University as a professor emeritus.

Finding Mimetic Desire in Literature

For René Girard, mimesis is the fundamental anthropological characteristic of human behavior. Human beings are creatures who imitate. Without mimesis, there would be no human culture. We learn to talk and act in society by mimicking the behavior modeled for us by others. It is not this external imitative behavior that most catches Girard’s interest, however. What Girard focuses on most is our tendency to imitate the desires of other people. Although we tend to think our desires are autonomous, that they originate from ourselves alone toward certain objects, Girard suggests that our desires are primarily stirred by the desires of others. As a result, our desires, far from being autonomous, are intertwined with the desires of other people. This focus on the mimetic quality of human desire does not deny the basic biological drives that humans have. These drives are very real. But the mimetic quality of desire is so strong that the natural biological drives are caught up in it.

The mimetic quality of desire is often observed in the nursery. When one child reaches for a toy, another child suddenly wants that same toy rather than any of the other toys in the room. At which point the first child wants the toy even more than before. Before long, several children are fighting over one toy while other toys lie around, neglected. Girard calls this imitation of desire “mimetic rivalry.” Although we adults might shake our heads over this childish behavior, we often end up acting like the children in the nursery. When one man shows an interest in a woman, chances are a friend of his will suddenly become interested in her as well, even if he hadn’t given her a thought before.

It was the insights of the greatest novelists of that past five centuries that first called Girard’s attention to the mimetic quality of human desire. He noticed that when Don Quixote chooses to imitate Amadis of Gaul in all things, it is Amadis of Gaul who chooses Don Quixote’s objects of desire for him. Since Amadis of Gaul is a fictional character and a far greater knight than Don Quixote could ever be, Don Quixote’s mimetic relationship to Amadis of Gaul is not harmful, except for the bruises he suffers when he attacks some windmills. A problem in our cultural reception of this book, however, a problem with serious consequences, is that both Don Quixote and many of his readers fail to realize that “chivalric passion defines a desire according to Another, opposed to this desire according to One-Self that most of us pride ourselves on enjoying.” So deeply do Don Quixote and Sancho Panza borrow their desires “that they completely confuse it with the will to be Oneself.”

The situation is quite different when the desires of one person are aroused by another live person who has roughly equal power and ability. Girard finds this sort of mimetic rivalry throughout the novels of Stendahl. At the beginning of The Red and the Black, M. Rênal, mayor of his village, assumes that M. Valenod covets the tutor, Julian, whom he has hired for his own children. M. Rênal follows up his fantasy by resolving to offer his tutor more money. Suddenly, Julien has become more valuable simply because he seems to be desired by a second person. Advertizing appeals primarily to this same mimetic drive with it’s basic message: Everybody wants this product, not everybody can have it, but you can, if you buy it now.

A short story by Shirley Jackson illustrates mimetic desire so clearly that one who believes in time travel might be inclined to think that Jackson moved forward in time to read Girard’s books and then wrote the story to illustrate his theory. The title of the story is “Seven Types of Ambiguity.” A college student haunts a bookstore that has a rare copy of William Empson’s book Seven Types of Ambiguity, a somewhat rarified study in aesthetics. A hefty man comes into the store with his wife. Having recently come into a lot of money, this man wants to buy a large number of books to make up for many lost years when he did not have the opportunity to read. The student guides the customer through several books in the store, advising him as to which books seem best suited to his needs. At this stage, the customer is desiring these books through the desires of the student in a constructive way. By reading the recommended books, that desire can deepen within himself even as the two share it. But the student also lets on that he desires the rare copy of the Empson book. It is obvious to the reader that while the Thackeray novels are a suitable recommendation, the customer is clearly not at all equipped to get much out of William Empson’s book. And yet, when the customer comes to the cash register, he casually adds Empson’s book to the rest of the books that he is buying. Clearly, he desires the book only because the student desires it, and not for any intrinsic value it can have for him.

Girard calls the scenario where the desires of two people converge on the same object a mimetic triangle. In The Red and the Black, M. Rênal and M. Valenod formed a mimetic triangle with the tutor, Julian. Much more commonly in literature, mimetic triangles are formed by two men desiring the same woman or two women desiring the same man. Given the fantasy that accompanies the formation of these triangles, as Stendahl’s example amply proves, one would expect that mimetic triangles would be inherently unstable. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream shows us how unstable such mimetic triangles can be. At the beginning of the play, Lysander and Demetrius both pursue Hermia, Helena having been forsaken by Demetrius. But half way through the play, due to Puck’s mixup of enchantments ordered by the Fairy King Oberon, Lysander and Demetrius both forsake Hermia and chase after Helena. The fanciful setting of a forest where fairies play their pranks on the humans while simultaneously acting out their own mimetic triangles highlights the power of mimetic desire to enchant those who fall sway to it. Hermia herself pinpoints the dynamics of mimetic desire when she cries out: “Oh hell! To choose love by another’s eyes!”

If desire is as mimetic as Girard suggests, then it follows that one persons love for another will sometimes need to be validated by someday else. This validation occurs if the second party’s desire is inflamed in the same way as the first’s. Fyodor Dostoevsky illustrates this dynamic of mimetic desire quite clearly in his novella The Eternal Husband. After the death of his wife, Pavel Pavlovitch Trusotsky searches out the men who were rivals to his wife’s affections. He finds Velchaninov and becomes his companion. Later, when Trusotsky decides to remarry, “he cannot hold to his own choice inasmuch as the appointed seducer has not confirmed it.” That is, his rival must desire the same woman he desires. Velchaninov does just that, and Trusotsky loses the woman to his rival. Understanding this dynamic of mimetic desire makes the otherwise puzzling opening scene of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale intelligible. Leontes urges his best friend, Polixenes, to admire his wife Hermione, but as soon as he does, Leontes becomes insanely jealous and sets off a wave of violent reaction that is only partially resolved at the end of the play.

.Dostoevksy builds much of the plot of The Brothers Karamazov around the mimetic triangle created by Fyodor Karamazov and his son Dimitri with Grushenka. For her part, Grushenka not only actively fuels this rivalry, but she tries to stoke the fires further by drawing yet another Karamazov, Alyosha, into the fray. Alyosha, however, being a devout follower of the holy man Zossima, declines to play the game. Alyosha’s charitable behavior leads Grushenka to repent of her actions, and she no longer tries to fuel the rivalry between Dmitri and his father. Unfortunately, Fyodor and Dmitri Karamazov prove that the presence of Grushenka is no longer necessary for them to pursue their mimetic rivalry with each other, with tragic results. In contrast, Alyosha weans a gang of boys away from their scapegoating behavior toward another boy, LLusha, and brings that boy back into fellowship with his mates by inspiring the boys to imitate his desire for Llusha’s well-being. It is important to note here that Dostoevsky is showing how mimetic desire can be a good thing when the shared desire is for a good that can be shared. All of the boys can share in the love for Llusha, and they do.

Since so much of Girard’s literary analysis and study of anthropology stresses the negative consequences of human mimesis, it is important to elaborate further on the potential for good in mimesis as it is illustrated in The Brothers Karamazov. In an interview with James Williams, Girard points to the constructive mimesis on the part of Jesus:

...As to whether I am advocating “renunciation” of mimetic desire, yes and no. Not the renunciation of mimetic desire itself, because what Jesus advocates is mimetic desire. Imitate me, and imitate the father through me, he says, so it’s twice mimetic. Jesus seems to say that the only way to avoid violence is to imitate me, and imitate the Father. So the idea that mimetic desire itself is bad makes no sense.

We shall see further on that, in Girard’s eyes, it is Jesus who gives us the clearest model of mimetic desire as a fully constructive force. It is no accident that the one member of the Karamazov family who manages to break free of the mimetic violence in his family is influenced by a holy man who has given himself over to the imitation of Christ.

The object of a peacefully shared mimetic desire becomes more substantial in the eyes of the beholders. In Shirley Jackson’s story “The Seven Types of Ambiguity,” the novels of Thackeray grow in importance when the student stirs the customer’s desire to read them. But when mimetic rivalry sets in, we get the opposite effect: a shrinking object. Girard explains: “As rivalry becomes acute, the rivals are more apt to forget about whatever objects are, in principle, the cause of the rivalry and instead to become more fascinated with on another. In effect the rivalry is purged of any external stake and becomes a matter of pure rivalry and prestige.” When the heat of mimetic rivalry dissolves the original object of the rivalry, the rivalry degenerates into conflict for the sake of conflict. So it is that the reality of William Empson’s book becomes invisible to the customer, as he has no idea what he is adding to his collection of books. The identities of Hermia and Helena are blurred when they are triangled by Lysander and Demetrius in Midsummer Night’s Dream. The rivalry between Dmitri Karamazov and his father becomes all the more intense when Grushenka drops out of the triangle. The rivals become mirror images of each other, returning tit-for-tat endlessly. They become what Girard calls “mimetic doubles.” The more intensely two people engage in mimetic rivalry, the more likely it is that more people will join in. It is possible for such a conflict to reach epidemic proportions to the extent that the existence of a society is threatened. When Girard followed up his literary studies with anthropological research into early human cultures and their sacred institutions, he came to the conclusion that almost always, and probably always, humanity went the way of Fyodor and Dimitri rather than the way of Alyosha and Zossima.

Sacred Violence

The study of conflict resulting from mimetic desire in the confined social network of the novel led Girard to examine the impact of this behavior on larger social groups. In noting that mimetic rivalry is contagious, Girard argues that “if the number of individuals polarized around a single object increases, other members of the community, as yet not implicated, will tend to follow the example of those who are.” The resulting escalation can easily reach a boiling point where “the mimetic frenzy has reached a high degree of intensity,” that we can “expect conflictual mimesis to take over and snowball in its effects.” This snowballing of mimetic conflict threatens to destroy the whole society. And yet, Girard noted that in archaic societies, peace suddenly and mysteriously emerged out of the mimetic conflict of all against all. How did this happen? Girard speculates that right at the crucial point, when a society teetered on the brink of destroying itself, the mimetic contagion suddenly focused on one person. This one person, and this person only, was deemed responsible for the social chaos. First, everybody had imitated everybody else in reciprocal violence. Then, suddenly, everybody imitated everybody else in blaming one person for the social chaos. The responsible person was then killed or possibly expelled through spontaneous mob violence. The immediate relief of peace and order was dramatic. So great was the sense of awe in the face of what happened that the person killed was then worshiped as a deity. The person who, earlier, was deemed totally responsible for the social violence, suddenly was deemed totally responsible for the peace. Girard refers to this process as the scapegoating mechanism. This “solution” was not the result of human ingenuity. Rather, the social escalation of mimetic contagion itself triggered the mechanism of collective violence. In order for collective violence to stabilize a society, it is essential that nobody suffer a moral hangover as a result of the event. One dissenting voice would be enough to spoil everything. Moreover, the lynching of the victim must not be seen for what it is. There must be a total forgetting of what actually happened.

Although it was necessary that the truth of collective violence be forgotten, it was also necessary that society both sustain the camaraderie generated by that violence and find ways to prevent these crises from happening again as much as possible. The camaraderie was sustained by ritual and myth, and the repetition of mimetic conflagration was controlled by prohibitions designed to prevent scenarios of mimetic rivalry. After using mimetic theory to reconstruct societal meltdown and its “solution,” Girard examines these three effects of this “solution” that became the three pillars of human culture: myth, ritual, and prohibition.

In many cases, animal sacrifice became a substitute for human sacrifice. But if the catharsis of animal sacrifice was not enough to sustain a society, then human sacrifice was re-instituted. The Aztecs are only a particularly notorious example of this practice. Far from being an isolated phenomenon, the practice of Human sacrifice constantly turns up in ancient cultures throughout the world, thus lending support to the importance Girard gives it as a fundamental practice of the primitive sacred.

It is, however, in his analysis of mythology that Girard’s insights are particularly interesting. In myths scattered throughout the world, Girard finds both hints of their violent origins and attempts to cover up that violence. Many deities created the world through a process of their own dismemberment. Purusha, for example, created the cosmos and then the castes out of various parts of his body. Other myths, such as Marduk’s defeat of the sea-monster Tiamat, tell of strife at the dawn of creation. Sometimes the mimetic doubling in a community is portrayed in a myth of two brothers who fight to the death, such as the slaying of Remus by Romulus. In a myth of the Yahuna Indians, Milomaki, a singer who enchants the populace with his music, is deemed responsible for numerous deaths through fish poisoning. He is cremated on a funeral pyre and from his body grows the first paxiuba palm tree in the world. Oedipus, deemed responsible for the plague that has stricken Thebes because he killed his father King Laius and then married his mother, is duly expelled from the city. The myths of Milomaki and Oedipus are good examples of the mimetic crowd activity of adulation and persecution. Even today, we can see that celebrities and heads of state are common targets for social opprobrium. There is no question of giving a fair trial to the likes of Tiamat, Milomaki or Oedipus. To question the guilt of any of these victims would spoil the mechanism of collective violence. It is essential that the victim have no voice. Gil Bailie points out that the root of the Greek word mythos is mu, which means to close or keep secret. Aeschylus understood the importance of silencing. When Agamemnon was about to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, he ordered that his daughter’s mouth be gagged. In this understanding of religion, there seems to be no place for God. That is precisely Girard’s understanding of the case. God has nothing to do with a religion that operates on the basis of sacred violence.

Girard also finds traces of mimetic crises in common prohibitions which are also found worldwide. The fear of mimetic doubles makes intelligible some taboos that otherwise make no rational sense, such as the dread of twin births that often led to the infanticide of at least one of the children. Girard also suggests that ancient prohibitions such as the one against incest are best understood in this way:

The most available and accessible objects are prohibited because they are most likely to provoke mimetic rivalries among members of the group. Sacred objects, totemic foods, female deities—these have certainly been the cause of real mimetic rivalries in the past, before they were made sacred. That is the reason they were. Therefore they become the objects of strict prohibitions.

The structuring of society along hierarchical lines also creates safeguards against societal breakdown through a mimetic crisis. When an object of desire is not attainable because the desired person is of a much higher social class, or economic factors make the material objects unattainable, then mimetic rivalry is significantly reduced. Unfortunately, this “solution” requires victims just as much as sacrificial rituals do as such societal arrangements inevitably institute violence perpetrated on those placed in lower ranks. That the four castes of India’s social system are carved out of the pieces of the dismembered Purusha is a particularly vivid illustration of the connection between sacred violence and social structures.

The Hebrew Bible

The human dilemma of the primitive sacred as René Girard sees it does not have any way out of it. If the solution to societal crises requires a social act whose truth must be concealed, how can humanity possibly come to see the problem? Even if few people should see this reality clearly, they would almost certainly become mute victims themselves before they had a chance to spread the word. Girard does not, in fact, see how it is possible for humanity, on its own, to see the truth of sacred violence and act effectively to abolish it. In the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, Girard sees a record of God’s revelation of this fundamental truth at the root of human culture and the opening of a way out of the mechanism of sacrificial violence. Not surprisingly, there is much tension in the Bible between God’s revelation and the old projections of human violence on God. It takes time for God to wean humanity from the old means of keeping society from falling apart.

Girard points out many instances in the Hebrew Bible that provide a radical contrast with the mythology of the primitive sacred, even when, superficially, they seem to be very similar. Like Romulus, Cain kills his brother and becomes the first founder of a city (Gen. 4:17). It is significant that no clear reason is given why Abel’s offering should have been more acceptable to God than Cain’s. In a crisis generated by mimetic rivalry, nothing matters except the rivalry itself. The crucial difference between this story and that of Romulus and Remus is that the blood of Remus is mute, but the blood of Abel cries from the ground. The victim has been given a voice. Although Joseph’s brothers blame Joseph for their violence against him, the narration makes it clear that Joseph is a victim of his brothers’ jealousy. More important, Joseph becomes an agent of reconciliation as a live human being rather than a dead one. Saul was driven to a murderous rage when David was credited with slaying tens of thousands and Saul only thousands (1 Sam. 18:7). Not only that, but when his son Jonathan befriended David, Saul tried, in vain to draw his son into his mimetic rivalry against David. Through his renunciation of that rivalry, Jonathan witnessed to a new way for humans to relate to one another in the fear of God.

Although the Jewish religion is founded on violence, there is a radical difference in its story from the founding mythology of other religions. This time, the story is told from the viewpoint of the victims rather than the victimizers. The Jews are the collective victims of the Egyptians who had enslaved them. God’s deliverance of the Jews from slavery did not, however, heal them of their own problems with mimetic rivalry and collective violence. Violent tensions erupted periodically during the journey through the desert. In some instances, the people ganged up on Moses and Aaron. In other instances, the people ganged up on somebody else. After scoring a major victory at Jericho, Joshua suddenly suffered a defeat at Ai that seemed inexplicable until the casting of lots revealed Achan as the one responsible for stirring God’s anger by taking some of the booty for himself, as if it is likely he was the only one who committed this crime (Joshua 7). The divinely sanctioned stoning of Achan and his family rightly horrifies sensitive readers. It is important to note, however, that far from constructing a myth to cover the collective violence, stories such as this show the collective violence for what it really is. That such violence was projected unto God in the Hebrew Bible shows that the association of God with violence was still alive even among the chosen people.

The sacrificial violence practiced by the other nations proved to be a constant temptation to Israel. The prophets constantly denounced the people for “offering up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them, nor did it enter my mind that they should do this abomination, causing Judah to sin” (Jer. 32:35). Josiah tried to abolish this human sacrifice, but, unfortunately, he did it by having all the prophets of Baal slain on their altars (2 Kings 23:20). Even in the act of fighting the victimization of the innocent, Josiah created more sacrificial victims than there already were. This problem of defending victims by creating victims remains a pitfall for many advocacy groups today.

Although Israel’s sacrificial cult did not involve human sacrifice, it still received denunciations from prophets in oracles such as:

I hate, I despise your festivals,

and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. (Amos 5:21)

Or:

I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams

and the fat of fed beasts;

I do not delight in the blood of bull,

or of lambs, or of goats. (Is. 1:11)

Isaiah draws a close correlation between sacrificial rites and social violence where widows and orphans are sacrificed to the interests of those making the sacrifices.

When you stretch out your hands,

I will hide my eyes from you;

even though you make many prayers,

I will not listen;

your hands are full of blood,

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;

remove the evil of your doings

from before my eyes;

cease to do evil,

learn to do good;

seek justice, rescue the oppressed,

defend the orphan, plead for the widow (Is. 1:15-17)

We see the same zeal for social justice linked with denunciation of sacrifices in Amos. Raymund Schwager says: “If, according to its basic structure, the sacrificial cult is a ritual repetition of the scapegoat mechanism, then it cannot by itself pave the way to the true God.” Bible scholars and theologians debate whether the prophets intended to abolish the sacrificial cult or maintain the cult and add social justice to it. Ezekiel, a member of the priestly caste, did prophesy the institution of a reformed sacrificial rite rather than its abolition, but most other prophets seem to have demanded its abolition. In any case, the oracles of Isaiah and Amos challenge the practitioners of the sacrificial cult to prove that one can both make sacrifices and act justly in society. The implication is that if justice does not happen, it may be a sign that the cult should be abolished. A second thing these oracles did was provide an ethical alternative to sacrificial rites that the rabbinic tradition could build upon after the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 A.D. Schwager observes: “How little belief in Yahweh depended on sacrifices is shown by the fact that it could survive undamaged the cultless periods after the first and second destructions of Jerusalem.”

The psalms, too, question the sacrificial cult by linking it to social injustice, but much more often, they deal directly with collective violence as experienced by the victim. The Psalmist is often surrounded by enemies who combine violence with lying: “More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause; many are those who would destroy me, my enemies who accuse me falsely. What I did not steal must I now restore?” (Ps. 69:4). Raymund Schwager says that this psalm “says of its deadly enemies that they are very numerous, are deceitful, and hate without cause. These three elements can be found again and again in the description of the enemies.” These are, of course, fundamental elements in Girard’s theory where the collective has lost touch with the cause of its violence and it depends on lies to cover up what it is really doing. Schwager goes on to point out that when the psalms give us the voice of the “single individual suffering collective violence, it is clear that that person does not face many individual enemies separately, but they unite against him or her.” The opening lines of Psalm 2 where “the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and his anointed” is a particularly clear example of this conspiratorial thinking. But even complaining of acute suffering at the hands of others, the Psalmist does not claim to be innocent of all wrong doing. The Psalmist only claims to be innocent of the specific accusations of the enemies. This lack of innocence is particularly noticeable in the Psalmist’s cries for vengeance on the persecutors with such choice imprecations as: “Let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see, and make their loins tremble continually” (Ps. 69: 23). These sentiments are understandable, but they also demonstrate that the Psalmist is still caught in the encompassing violence that requires victims.

The scenario of all against one reaches its most powerful disclosure in the Hebrew Bible in the Songs of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah. As in the complaints in the psalms, it is stated clearly that the Servant of Yahweh was persecuted without cause. “By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people...although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth” (Is. 53:8-9). These songs of the suffering servant, along with many of the “Passion” psalms Psalm 22 in particular, have often been understood as prophecies of the Passion of Christ. Mimetic theory suggests, however, that these prophets were not predicting the future by gazing into a crystal ball. The prophets were disclosing the very same story that was being repeated time and time again, and would be repeated yet again when the Logos came into the world and became flesh (Jn. 1:14).

Sandor Goodhart, a Jewish thinker involved with Mimetic Theory, tells us that Isaiah’s disclosure of collective violence entails a disclosure of our participation in that violence: “The pain he bears and the disease he carries are the product at least in part of our own behavior toward him—although we commonly deny responsibility for that behavior. . . . We blamed him for our transgressive behavior and that constituted his wound.” As a Jew committed to Mimetic Theory, Goodhart wrestles with how to articulate the relationship between the Jewish tradition and Christianity. Understandably uncomfortable with any supercessive outlook, Goodhart insists that the theory of the innocent victim is “an old Jewish theme.” He goes on to suggest that Christianity makes central “the persecutory structure”that “comes to dominate Jesus’ life . . . a structure which in the Jewish context is subsumed with the more general formulation of the anti-idolatrous.”