Category Archives: René Girard

Bewitched, Bothered, and Repentant

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???????????????????????????????????????????The persecution of so-called witches in Salem Massachusetts in 1693 is well-known as a notorious event in American history. Not so well-known is the spiritual journey of one of the judges on the panel that ordered the execution of the twenty convicted prisoners. The biography of him by Eve Laplante is not a particularly good book with its chronological skips and copious details that are of not great interest, but she does bring the remarkable land telling story to light.

Samuel Sewall was a good and generous and devout man. Bracket out his voting for the twenty executions and one finds nothing reprehensible about him and much to commend. What happened?

The type of Calvinistic spirituality in colonial Boston posited a God of boundless mercy but a god who could just as quickly break out in wrath. When several of his children died in infancy, Sewall wondered what he had done to deserve this grief. When the English government revoked the colonial charter and  then French and Indians attacked and destroyed coastal cities to the north, he wondered what the community had done to deserve these calamities.

Laplante describes Salem Village as “beset with squabbles” where “neighbor battled neighbor over land boundaries, crops, and grazing rights.” Moreover, the congregation habitually battled with successive ministers over due compensation for their work. Not surprisingly, the witchcraft accusations started in the home of the incumbent minister, Samuel Parris. Many of those accused were involved in the various ongoing disputes and many of the accusers were servant girls suddenly empowered to get back at those who were normally their social betters.

Samuel Sewall, accepting the social advancement that came with the appointment to the panel of judges, was among those trying the cases. All of those condemned were convicted on what was called “spectral evidence.” This was the phenomenon of one or more witnesses seeing a spectral image of the accused person committing foul deeds of the devil. There can be no more powerful image for the mirage thrown up by what René Girard calls the skandalon, the stumbling block. One’s rival has been transformed into a spectral image of wickedness.

In the days of the primitive sacred, according to Girard, one death was enough to reconcile a community. In Salem, twenty deaths and counting wasn’t nearly enough. Girard leads us to expect this to be the case in the wake of the Gospel’s unveiling of the truth of collective violence. There are two fundamental reasons the witch trials ceased and the remaining prisoners were all freed. 1) There was never any unanimity that the witches were guilty. One judge had resigned early on in protest. Sewall’s own minister at Third Church was among the clergy who opposed the persecutions. 2) There was no end in sight if the persecutions continued. Anyone at all could be accused regardless of social position.

Although Sewall kept a thorough diary of events and thoughts, the months during these witch trials are surprisingly and dismayingly empty. This is a huge disappointment for one who would like more insight into Sewall’s reflections at the time, but the empty pages speak volumes that no amount of words could tell. Sewall could not face what he was doing.

There are some hints as to what lead to Sewall’s public declaration of guilt and remorse during worship at Third Church. Sewall had been publically snubbed by his minister on more than one occasion. That probably made him think. During a family funeral service for yet another dead child, his eldest son read from Matthew the verse that includes: “”I will have mercy and not sacrifice,” a key verse for the unequivocal love of God and total rejection of persecutory violence.

Through this sobering experience, Sewall went on to show insight into two major issues way beyond that of almost all of his contemporaries. 1) In spite of the Indian attacks that had been the scourge of the colony, Sewall wrote of the inherent dignity of native Americans as worthy of salvation on an equal footing with his own race. 2) Sewall wrote the first anti-slavery treatise composed on North American soil, using the story of Joseph as his proof-text.

Like St. Paul, Samuel Sewall learned some things about victimization from being a persecutor. We can all learn from the man who stood in the midst of his congregation with his head bowed while his minister read his confession.

Mimetic Desire and Truth (2)

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yellowTulips1We tend to think our likes and dislikes and beliefs and unbeliefs are our own. “I like apple pie.” “I hate pickles.” “I believe that Jesus rose from the dead.” “I don’t believe in a conspiracy of interplanetary lizards to take over the planet earth.” As I admitted in my first post in this series, I reflexively think in these terms in spite of all the reading and reflection on mimetic desire that I’ve done. But if desire is mimetic, then all of our likes and dislikes, beliefs and unbeliefs are connected with those of other people.

There is, of course, a distinction between appetite—our bodily needs and gut reactions to various things—and desire, which is mimetic, but pinpointing the distinction in our ongoing experience is sometimes tricky. We all need to eat, but the specific foods we desire are colored by desires of others for specific foods. What we eat may depend on what is available, but when there is a choice, although individual preferences may be present, the desires of other people tend to make some foods more desirable than others. My parents encouraged a desire for roast beef and shrimp. The former never take that much but the latter sure did. Even so, during an impressionable period of my life when I was just starting to live into my conversion back to Christianity, a couple of my best friends were so strong on the desire for steak that I fooled myself into falling in with their desire when I really would have preferred crab cakes. I wasn’t really put under pressure or anything; it was just the ambient desire trumped what I more naturally liked.

In non-rivalrous situations, this imitation of desire is not a problem and is often a good thing. It was the sharing of a desire for good music in the church choir I sang in as a boy that awoke my own interest in music. One could speak of this as an individual choice in that not all choristers got interested in music to the extent that I did, but following up this interest brought me into the community of music lovers. Books, such as The Victor Book of the Symphony and people I knew introduced me into the “canon” of classical music and instilled in me a desire for the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms and others. I was dismayed and disappointed when the Symphonie-Fantastique by Berlioz didn’t take and it leaves me cold to this day. In those days, Gustav Mahler’s canonicity was in dispute until Leonard Bernstein put him in the composers’ hall of fame so I had to make a choice. It was a no-brainer as soon as I heard one of his symphonies.  Even so, my growing sense of what I liked and disliked was never unaffected by the mimetic desire floating about in my musical ambience. When a sophisticated friend of mine dismissed some great works, it was difficult for me to see beyond his prejudices and get a sense of what was true about the music.

It is also more possible to see the truth of other people in a non-rivalrous situation than one fraught with rivalry. In such a situation, two young men can appreciate the qualities of the young woman who is currently coupled with his friend, sharing gently in his friend’s desire but not becoming a rival. This is the situation in the beginning of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s TaIe. Polixenes appreciates the qualities of his friend’s wife Hermione without envy, but Leontes projects is own jealousy on his friend with terrible results. That is, with the entry of envy and rivalry, the truth ceases to be expansive and shared; it becomes distorted. I will examine this distortion in my next post in this series.

Continue on to Mimetic Desire and Truth (3)

See also Mimetic Desire and Mimetic Rivalry

Mimetic Desire and Truth (1)

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eucharist1Truth is an important matter but one we often take for granted. We often think we know it or, like Socrates, know that we don’t know it. We often treat truth like the air we breathe. We assume it’s there and we’re taking it in every time we kick a stone in front of us. The question of truth can easily make us as cynical as Pilate.

Although we might cavalierly think of truth as the air we breathe, we think of truth as an individual matter with each of us, as individuals, kicking a stone. I should talk—or write—I do the same thing myself out of force of habit.

Girard’s teaching on mimetic desire puts the question of truth into a whole new ball park where a new game is played by different rules. More accurately, Girard is pointing out that we have been in the wrong ball park, playing the wrong game with the wrong rules since the dawn of civilization.  We could dismiss Girard as a cranky Frenchman and me as a quixotic Benedictine monk, or we could look around at this new ball park and new game to see what riches are there, riches that actually have been gathered for us by many people who have helped Girard and the rest of us see this old game for what it is so that we can play a new game. Sort of like new skins for new wine.

In this new ball game, we realize that desire is not individual, but mimetic. That is, we copy the desires of other people and they copy ours. This simple but subtle truth means that we do not, cannot, see anything in the world as me, myself and I seeing this thing, but we only see things through the desires of other people. Take something simple like shoes. A shoe is a shoe is a shoe. But that’s not the way it works out. Some shoes are fashionable while some are not. A friend of mine told me how the shoes his son wore to school were a social problem because they weren’t the style other kids wore. Not surprisingly, the shoes in style were rather expensive, forcing my friend to choose between added financial hardship and hampering his son’s social life.

The old Negro spiritual says: “all God’s chillin’ got shoes.” But do they? If they did, they wouldn’t be such a big deal in Heaven. The bare feet of black slaves is a result of mimetic desire that lead many white people who had the money and social power to own other people and choose whether or not they would have shoes.

This is the first of a series of blog posts on this topic.

Continue on to Mimetic Desire and Truth (2)

For those unfamiliar with the idea, see Mimetic Desire and Mimetic Rivalry.

New page for collecting posts by Topic

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vocationersAtTable1I have just started a page that collects blog posts by topic. This will save me from cross-referencing posts to help orient the reader, especially on the topic of mimetic desire that I have written on often & will have much more to say as I reflect more and more on this phenomenon. I now have a page collecting articles on mimetic desire that are available here.

Essay on spiritual renewal

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buddingTree1I have just posted the text of a talked that I gave at a Theology & Peace conference in Chicago a few years ago called Living by the Breath of God: a Spirituality of God’s Desire. It collects many of the ideas of I have working with on my recent blog posts & it might help some of you get a more coherent view of the vision I continue to develop. You can read this essay here.

Human Swords, God’s Peace

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vocationersAtTable1Jesus’ words that he came not to bring peace but a sword (Matthew) or division (Luke) are startling, coming from a man who is commonly referred to as “the Prince of Peace.” Does this mean that Jesus is a war-god of some sort after all? Since Jesus never used a sword and rebuked Peter from using one at Gethsemane, and died rather than call on legions of angels to defend him and beat up his enemies, and approached his disciples and even the persecutor Paul with forgiveness after rising from the dead, it is fair to assume that Jesus is not in the least encouraging swords and divisions, but is warning us that we will have both as long as we experience the world in terms of us vs. them.

The approach to scripture inspired by René Girard and colleagues such as Raymund Schwager and James Alison is strongly committed to an unequivocally loving God who seeks only peace as opposed to any two-faced Janus-like deity who is capriciously loving one moment and wrathful the next. This approach tends to interpret “wrath” associated with God as human projections that distort the truth of God’s unconditional love. Basic to Girard’s thinking is the conviction that humans tend to unify conflictive societies through scapegoating vulnerable victims with collective violence. Society has regained peace—for a time—but at a cost to at least one person. This sort of a peace simply has to be disrupted once and for all by a God who is unequivocally loving and who wishes that not even one person be lost. According to Girard, this is precisely what Jesus did by dying on the cross and exposing the reality of collective violence for what it is.

As a result, we now have a world where there is an ever heightening awareness of victims, but a serious lack of anywhere near a corresponding awareness of the need for forgiveness. Without forgiveness, awareness of victims increases resentment and escalated conflict. Since the awareness of victims does not allow collective violence to bring peace to a society, there is nothing to stop the escalation of violence. As resentment grows rampant, it infects every level of society including the family so that family counselors are in great demand to try and talk people into giving up their resentment against those closest to them. They often fail as much as conflict mediators in political hotspots and for the same reason. Resentment becomes a defining factor of many lives and defining factors are not easily given up. So it is that the coming of Jesus the forgiving victim has brought swords and divisions.

The offer of peace and forgiveness, for all of the divine love behind it, inevitably causes division between those who accept it and those who don’t. There are two possible reactions to such a choice and a unanimous conversion to God’s peace wasn’t in the cards then any more than it is today. (Of course we humans stack the deck heavily against peace.) For those of us who seriously try to choose peace, it is tempting to think we are on the “peaceful” side of this division but we need to realize that the Word, the forgiving victim, is a divisive two-edged sword “piercing to the division of soul and spirit” and “discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” as the author of Hebrews puts it. That is, the pure forgiveness of the divine victim shows up the least bit of resentment we allow ourselves to harbor in the farthest, darkest, corners of our souls.

The escalation of violence occurring right at the time of this writing is a sure cause of discouragement. What we can do is take hope, primarily for ourselves, but also for our personal relationships and for humanity as a whole that the offer of peace from the forgiving victim remains open to all of us at every time of day and night and this offer will never end no matter what we do with our swords and divisions.

Transfiguration of the Material World

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transfigurationThe Transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Tabor is celebrated twice in the Church Year. The celebration on the last Sunday before Lent stresses the event’s preparation for the death and resurrection of Jesus. The celebration in August, being a standalone feast, can be seen as a celebration of Creation in all its materiality. Since there is no feast of the Creation, any celebration that points to our origins in God’s creative Desire is for the good.

That Jesus’ body and his clothing should be transfigured by a dazzling light is about as powerful a sign of the goodness of the material world as anything could be. The only fly in this primordial ointment is the suspicion that if the material world needed to be transfigured, then it wasn’t all that perfect to begin with. That is, the material world is impure, at least to some extent, and needs to be purified. Eastern Orthodox writers, however, suggest that it wasn’t that Jesus was transfigured on Mount Tabor, but that the disciples’ eyes were opened so that they could see the transfiguration that, for Jesus, was an ongoing reality.

The powerful and startling story of the transfiguration of Seraphim of Sarov emphatically illustrates this truth. Seraphim was discussing spiritual matters one night with his disciple Nicholas Motovilov when suddenly Nicholas saw his staretz engulfed in transfiguring light. When Nicholas remarked on this, Seraphim said he had not changed but Nicholas’ ability to see had changed. Not only that, but Nicholas, unknown to himself, was also shining in the same transfiguring light.

If we can see all of the material world from the simplest atoms to the grains of dirt to squirrels and cats to humans in the transfigured light in which they, we, are all created, we will not reach out to grasp anything out of a lust for ownership or push anything or anyone away with expulsion. (See Connecting our Desires.) The catch is that we must be transfigured ourselves in this same light in order to see the transfigured glory all about us.

This need brings us back to the second and more fundamental meaning of the Transfiguration: the redemption of the groaning created world (Rom.8) by the cross and resurrection of Jesus. If our vision of reality is occluded by society’s tendency to hold itself together through the victimization of others through ownership and/or expulsion as Egypt was under Pharaoh, then we will not see the transfigured truth of the world under the Risen forgiving Victim breathes the Paraclete through our eyes and mirror neurons to show us the truth. (See Mirroring Desires.)

Yes, God’s act(s) of Creation is the beginning of the universe but Creation is also each present time of the universe up to and including the present moment and Creation is the End of the universe in the sense of being its goal. It is God’s creative work in redemption all along that has alerted us to the truth of Creation, starting with the deliverance of a ragtag group of slaves expelled from Egypt, continuing with the return of the Jews from their Babylonian exile to the Resurrection of Jesus where Mary Magdalene enters a garden to recalls the Garden of Eden and mistakes the risen Jesus for the gardener.

May we open our eyes to see this renewed glory within ourselves and around us, a glory filled with God’s Desire for all Creation.

Mary and Martha at the Feet of Jesus

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mary&Martha

The story of Mary and Martha of Bethany in Luke’s Gospel has often been interpreted as comparing the active life to the contemplative life. Many writers have suggested that the active life is good but the contemplative life is better. Those of you who have been following my blog where I have been developing the thought of René Girard and his colleagues will likely become a bit suspicious of a possible rivalry between the two sisters and a deeper suspicion of an interpretation that seems to foster rivalry between Christians who feel called to either a contemplative or active vocation, or a combination of both.

In placing this story directly after the parable of the Good Samaritan, it seems likely that Luke does not intend to put action and contemplation in conflict in any way. Instead, Luke is drawing a hidden harmony between the two. If God really is totally beyond rivalry of any kind, then God is not a rival with our neighbor for our affections and concern.

The many stories of sibling rivalry in the Bible incline us to look for it here, but in this case, we only half-find it. Martha is upset with Mary, but Mary shows no signs of being upset with Martha. Those who interpret this story as contrasting the active and contemplative lives take Jesus’ gentle reproach of Martha as indicating that she is distracted from him by her busywork. But if Jesus is not offended by Martha’s attention to work instead of him since Jesus does not put himself in rivalry with such work, then the words mean something else. I suggest that Jesus is pointing out that Martha is not distracted from Jesus by her work; she is distracted from her work by resentment of her sister. Mary, for her (better) part shows no sign of being distracted by Martha.

In his book Beneath the Veil of Strange Verses, Jeremiah Alberg suggests that Mary and Martha “represent two ways of reading the Gospel or two ways of listening to the Lord.” Martha represents us when we are offended by Jesus because he “does not help us with our projects, and that he does not command others to do the same.” In short, Martha is offended that Jesus does not “support” her. Mary, on the other hand, represents us when we sit at Jesus’ feet without offense, without asking to be “supported.” When we do that, we are held up by Jesus whether we realize it or not.

It isn’t a matter of being active or contemplative; it’s a matter of being focused on Jesus without resentment because Jesus has no resentment. In any case, the wisest commentators on this story suggest the Mary has need of Martha and Martha has need of Mary and a mixed life of action and contemplation is best. In the preceding parable, it was the Samaritan who was focused on Jesus through his focus on the victim while the priest and the Levite were focused on their standing in the community. If we are focused on Jesus, we will be attentive to our neighbor without rivalry or resentment, which will set us at Jesus’ feet.

Dispossessing a Town Possessed: The Gerasene Demoniac

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peacePole1The story of the Gerasene demoniac and the herd of pigs running off a cliff bewilders modern readers. In his book The Scapegoat, René Girard offers an anthropological interpretation based on the concept of mimetic desire. According to this theory, the desires of all the people in any town, not just Geresa, are intertwined. That is all of the people are possessed by each other. If one person stands out as being “possessed,” that person is possessed by mimetic rivalries in the town that have reached (or sustain) a crisis level  that is pushed into one victim, the “designated patient,” to use the term of Ed Friedman.

When Jesus and his disciples arrive on the scene, they are not greeted by the mayor or any of the “normal” people; they are greeted by the demoniac who begs Jesus not to torment him (them). That the demon(s) gives its name as “Legion” confirms that this man is possessed by the community, including political possession of the Romans as possession by an invader increases the tensions within a local community. The demoniac is regularly chained but regularly breaks free in a pattern that mimics the repetition of ritual. That is to say, this pattern represents the town’s sense of stability, much as the incarceration of multitudes of black youths from the ghettos gives the US a similar sense of stability today. 

Jesus sends the demons into the herd of pigs that then runs off a cliff into the sea. We have here an interesting reversal of the scapegoating mechanism since usually it is the town that drives a single victim off the cliff, a fate Jesus has narrowly avoided himself. Upon seeing the formerly possessed clothed and in his right mind, the townspeople ask Jesus to leave. One would think that they would be happy to see a sick person cured and would ask Jesus to stay and cure everybody else of whatever ails them. But they don’t. Why? Because the people of the Gedarene region are not happy over being robbed of their victim. The demons requested that they not be expelled from the town because the people, possessed by their rivalries, wanted to remain possessed. When robbed of their victim, the possessed town implodes in its collective violence and becomes the sacrificial victim.

The anthropological dimension of this story can be seen more clearly by comparing it with the Samaritan woman at the well, which has none of these mythological trappings. It is the woman at the well, and not any of the other people of Sychar, who greet Jesus. The woman is alone at the most social place in town, an indication that the woman is the town’s scapegoat. There is no exorcism but the woman eventually becomes possessed by Jesus when she drinks the water he has to give, just as the Gerasene demoniac became possessed by Jesus. The woman goes to tell the townspeople about Jesus as the Gerasene demoniac was told to spread word of what Jesus had done in his own area. The story in Sychar has a happier ending in that the people come out to listen to Jesus, a mimetic process where they give up their collective victim in exchange for the water of rebirth that Jesus has to give. Perhaps this foretells a happier ending for Gerasa someday and a happier ending for our own society.

 

Unwinding the Judgment of Solomon

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wreckedTrees1Among writers of Y/A novels, Neal Shusterman has shown some of the most acute insight into social processes. Nowhere is this stronger than in his novel Unwind and its sequel Unwholly. In this dystopian novel, a civil war in the U.S. over reproductive  was suddenly brought to an end with an agreement that abortion would be illegal under all circumstances, but that all young people between the ages of thirteen and eighteen could be handed over by parents or guardians to be unwound, a harvesting of 98% of body tissue for medical transplants to other people.

This scenario is a classic example of a violent society making peace at the expense of victims. In Unwind, a troubled teen boy whose parents found too troublesome when they had such an easy out, a girl raised in a state orphanage where many surplus babies go who wasn’t quite talented enough to be worth keeping when the facility needs space for other surplus children, and a boy who was a tithe, the tenth child in a family in a group that gave the tenth child in a family to be unwound as a gift back to “god” and society.

Although the reader may rightly react to the idea with horror, the dystopian “solution” is not that surprising to anyone who has studied René Girard and his colleagues who have demonstrated that this type of “solution” to conflict is common in almost all societies since the dawn of humanity. This novel and its sequels is as a midrash on the Judgment of Solomon, a story Girard cites as a prime example of the Hebrew Bible’s revelation of sacrificial violence. The two disputing mothers became indistinguishable mirror images of each other until Solomon asked for a sword and ordered that the baby be cut in half. One woman preferred the slaughter of the child to letting the other have it, but the other woman preferred the other woman have the child and so that it could live. The biblical story thus has a happy ending. Shusterman’s novel shows us what the triumph of the sacrificial woman is like for a society. As a mini-parable within the story, one of the boys on the run was signed over for unwinding because his parents were going through a bitter divorce and could only agree that they would rather nobody had their son than that the other had him and he lived.

Shusterman also shows, especially in the second book, how the culture has become highly sacrificial, with unwinding having become a way of life. The political advertising media pushes unwinding by encouraging a sense of entitlement not only to a new hand if the old is cut off, but of better, more athletic and better-looking body parts and a “brain-weave” to make one smarter. In Unwholly, a Frankenstein-like experiment has resulted in the creation of a “new” person out of unwound body parts. Sacrifice has created a sacrificial youth. Sacrifice of others has become an end in itself.

Abortion is a topic that many people have very strong opinions about. Even when one’s opinion is mixed, each part of the mix is powerful. The hazard of navigating such a severe debate is that of being so passionately sensitive to one potential victim as to harden one’s heart to others. The Judgment of Solomon and this series of novels is a solemn warning of the dangers of losing ourselves so deeply in conflict that we do not see the victims we create.  A violent situation such as the sacrificial system depicted here adds the problem of how to break the system without violence that creates more sacrificial victims. This growing problem is something Shusterman will be exploring in the subsequent volumes of the series.