Tag Archives: René Girard

The Good Shepherd in the Desert

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goodShepherdIf Jesus is the “living interpretive principle of scriptures, as James Alison says, then the Parable of the Good Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to search out the one lost sheep should be a powerful and accurate interpretive lens for other passages in scripture.

In the RoCa lectionary, this Gospel is coupled with a tense episode in Exodus 32. As he comes down the mountain with the tablets of the Ten Commandments, he finds that Aaron has set up a golden calf for the Israelites to worship. God tells Moses to get out of the way so that his wrath can “burn hot against them.” Doesn’t sound like a good shepherd.  Instead, it is Moses who acts out the part of the good shepherd by interceding with God, as Abraham did earlier to avert the divine wrath from the people. At the end of this same chapter, there is another narration of Moses coming down the mountain. This time, he is so furious he breaks the tablets and then rallies the Levites to his side to slay thee thousand people who were worshipping the golden calf. Although Moses claims to be doing God’s work, what we have is a narrative of human rather than divine violence. Moses doesn’t look like a good shepherd this time, but the morning after this monstrous slaughter, Moses intercedes with God to forgive the people although it is a bit late for the three thousand who were slain. This strange doubling of narrations seems to point to a debate in the Jewish tradition moving in the direction of unveiling God’s love for God’s people.

In 1 Corinthians 10, St. Paul refers to this incident by saying “we must not indulge in immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day.” (He ups the death toll.) In isolation, this is about the chilliest verse in the Pauline epistles but in its sacramental context, it is much more in keeping with Jesus the Good Shepherd. Leading into this verse, Paul says that “we were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same supernatural food and all drank the same supernatural drink.” This, in turn, recalls the reinterpretation of the Flood in 1 Peter where the water corresponds to the baptism that delivered Noah and his family and delivers us now. The Genesis story clearly indicates a social meltdown with a few, probably the intended victims, escaping. The Exodus story refers to the social meltdown in Egypt that lead to the expulsion of the Israelites. In the desert, the Israelites had their own social meltdown centered around rivalry between Moses and Aaron. (Arnold Schönberg’s opera Moses and Aron portrays this rivalry with great insight.) For both Peter and Paul, baptism is the deliverance from the surrounding sacrificial society into the Kingdom centered on the Eucharist, the new way of gathering without need of victims and certainly not needed the slaughter of three thousand. Paul is not, then, warning his readers against a wrathful deity but against a wrathful society that will engulf them if they return to its sacrificial ways, just as a relapse into the wrathful society of Egypt lead to a meltdown in the camp and the deaths of thousands.

Jesus the Good Shepherd does not strike dead those who re-enter a sacrificial society that today manifests hardness of heart to the extent of trying to prevent fundamental ministries such as feeding the hungry. Instead, Jesus enters into the heart of the society to bring back all who are lost. Rather than starting a bloodbath, we should intercede for all such people as Moses did and follow Jesus in searching for the lost.

See also: The Communal Good Shepherd

Mimetic Desire and Truth (3)

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Xenia1In my last post in this series, I noted the example of Polixenes in The Winter’s Tale who showed a reasonably accurate view of reality by praising the qualities of Hermione, but that the jealous rage of her husband Leontes distorted the reality deeply. It is the same distortion that happens in the nursery when children fight over one toy as if it were the only one when the reality is that there are many toys to play with. Mimetic rivalry over romantic partners will likewise distort the human reality in a school or other social setting. In a non-rivalrous situation, girls can imitate each other in finding various boys desirable and, like Polixenes, can admire the choices their friends make. But if two or more girls are in rivalry with each other, perhaps over something such as the position of captain on the girls’ field hockey team, then they will cease to see the qualities of the boys more or less for what they are. It is often said that love, especially infatuations, is blind, but conflicted mimetic desire is much more blind than that.

It is important to distinguish honest disagreement from rivalry. In both cases, there is mimetic desire but in the former case, it is a shared desire to arrive at truth or discernment of right action. In the latter case, the two people are trying to outdo each other for the sake of outdoing each other. The shared mimetic desire is a victory over the other and truth and right action fall by the wayside.

The movie “Doubt” is an excellent illustration of this kind of situation. With Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius are permanently locked in mimetic rivalry, it is not possible that the truth of whether or not the priest has abused Donald Miller, the Afro-American boy in the parish school, can be known and that is why the movie never resolves the question. Donald Miler, of course, is clearly a victim of this strife regardless of what has or has not really happened.

There is a qualitative difference between honest disagreement and rivalry but it is also a fine line between them.  We can easily start with honest disagreement and fall into rivalry if we allow ourselves to become more obsessed with the person we disagree with than with trying to see what is true and what should be done. This matter calls for constant self-examination where we continually ask ourselves as honestly as we can: What side of this line am I on? How far on that side am I? We also have to keep alert to whether we are actually listening to what the other is saying or if we are only thinking about what we want to say. If we neglect this self-examination, we are pretty certain to fall over into the wrong side of this divide and become lost in mimetic entanglements.

A shared mimetic desire for truth does not guarantee that truth will be reached since our viewpoints cannot encompass all relevant realty but it is a sine qua non for reaching some semblance of the truth. On the other hand, when we are locked in mimetic rivalry with others, it is not just some abstract principle of what is true that is a casualty, but real human beings will suffer as victims, like Donald Miller in “Doubt.”

Continue on to Mimetic Desire and Truth (4)

See Mimetic Desire and Truth Series

See Mimetic Desire and Mimetic Rivalry

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.

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.

Connecting our Desires

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vocationersSayingGrace1If mimetic desire, grounded in our mirror neurons, holds us all together whether we like it or not, why are we human beings so far apart and alienated from each other? Perhaps the catch is: “whether we like it or not.” If we don’t like being connected with the desires of other people, we will either claim ownership of our desires and dare anybody to challenge this ownership or try to expel the other. Both claiming ownership or expulsion only lock us tightly in rivalry with them so that our desires don’t connect. Instead they crash into each other into a soup boiling over so that nobody gets anything except more rivalry for the sake of rivalry. [See Mirroring Desires below if you haven’t read it already.]

In the history of race relations between blacks and whites in the U.S., from the standpoint of while people, we have had ownership through the institution of slavery and expulsion through segregation such as Jim Crow Laws or what one might call “social custom.” Those of us who deplore such attitudes and their results tend to expel racists, convinced that they deserve it. There is a dangerous tendency to believe that rivalry is a good thing in a righteous cause. Unfortunately, righteousness with this attitude is self-righteousness and rivalry in a good cause still makes that cause disappear in through over-involvement with our rivals.

There is an even more insidious problem here, however. It is well-known that the people who most strongly deplore others for certain actions or attitudes are often disturbingly prone to at least the temptations to the same actions and attitudes. Although statistics consistently estimate that roughly six times as many white people than blacks commit drug offenses, ten times as many blacks are sentenced to prison for drug offenses. All the while, there is consistent denial from those involved in the justice system that there is any racial bias affecting this situation. If these denials are as sincere as, to a chilling degree, I fear they are, then there is a lot of preconscious racial bias circulating like a plague. Speaking for myself as I confessed in Recovering Racists, I think that we all have a serious need of becoming more aware of our preconscious attitudes.

This post isn’t just about race relations; it’s about human relations. Our connections to the desires of other people can attract us to some but repel us from others. We tend to find ways to feel righteous about being repelled by some people but we are often rationalizing our preconscious reactions without ever actually thinking about them. Other posts on this blog and my book Tools for Peace look at spiritual practices for living with mimetic desire constructively. On technique is what moral theologians traditionally call a moral examen. This examen needs to be focused on our preconscious reactions to people so as to make them more conscious. This gives us the chance to do something constructive with them. One thing I find helpful is to look a person in the eye. That can easily transform the person before us.

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.

PETER AND PAUL: The Church’s Quest for Mimetic Unity

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Sts_Peter_and_PaulThe presence of two strong personalities roughly the same sphere of influence is a perfect recipe for mimetic rivalry that can tear the social fabric apart until it is resolved either through implosion or collective violence against a victim. There is evidence that precisely these sorts of tensions played out between Saints Peter and Paul but there is also evidence of attempts at reconciliation between the two and further reconciliation on their behalf in the early Church to provide a very different model for the relationship between two strong outstanding personalities.

In the Acts of the Apostles Luke seems to have taken great pains to balance the impact of the missionary work of these two apostles under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. That Peter drops out of the narrative half way through the book and the seemingly abrupt ending with Paul awaiting trial in Rome diminishes the importance of even these great saints and emphasizes their subordination to the Holy Spirit. At the momentous Council of Jerusalem where the two apostles meet, at the heart of the book, the situation is ripe for conflict, but Luke presents the Council as an amicable solution to their conflict. Luke heightens the reconciliation by having Peter speak up Paul him in with words that sound a lot like a speech Paul could have made himself. That is, Peter imitates Paul to support his position at a time when he could have become a mimetic double in conflict with him. Peter’s earlier struggle over the appropriateness of preaching to of the Gentiles resolved by his vision of a sheet coming down from Heaven with both clean and unclean animals on it sets up this reconciliation. James plays the role of the mediator who states the amicable solution that allocates a separate sphere for Jews and Gentiles so that the two groups need not compete but are given space to follow the guidance of the Spirit. Paul’s letter to the Galatians tells a different story full of tension. Although Peter and gave Paul received “the right hand of fellowship” in Jerusalem, he later found it necessary oppose Peter “to his face” for rejecting table fellowship with Gentiles. Perhaps Peter had suffered a relapse of his own tendency to be swayed by the wrong mimetic crowd, such as happened to him in the courtyard of the high priest when he was surrounded by fellow Jews were against that fellowship. We never learned if this quarrel was ever healed between them in this life before it was healed posthumously in the hagiography and liturgy of the Church but there are hints that it probably was.

In writing to the Corinthians, Paul took pains to quell rivalry that had triangulated him with Peter by taking them severely to task for using such slogans as: “I am for Paul,” “I am for Cephas.” Far from fanning the flames of conflict, Paul distances himself from it in no uncertain terms and renounces any possible gain he might get from the “Paul” Party in Corinth. Although Peter is not believed to be the author of the Second Epistle bearing his name, it is significant that he refers to “our brother Paul, who is so dear to us.” At the very least, these words attest to the Church’s corporate effort to maintain a peaceful relationship between the two apostles. Peter says that Paul wrote “with the wisdom that is his special gift,” but then he cautions his readers that some points in Paul’s letters are hard to understand and are “easily distorted by uneducated and unbalanced people.” Tension and reconciliation between the two great apostles are themselves held in close tension here. A generation later, St. Clement of Rome writes the Corinthians to rage over an “abominable and unholy schism” in the community fueled by jealousy and envy. As a counter-example, Clement describes the deaths of Peter and Paul, stressing the harmony between the two great apostles. A century or so later, St. Ireneaus called the Church of Rome “the greatest and most ancient Church, founded by the two glorious apostles, Peter and Paul.” Archaeological investigations along the Appian Way have unearthed rooms with inscriptions honoring both saints together and a bronze medal dating from the first half of the second century pictures the heads of the two saints on the same side of the medal.

The Golden Legend, a 13th century compilation of saints’ lives by Jacob of Voragine is not the book one goes to for the most accurate history of the early church or anything else, but it is one of the best books for studying the way saints have been presented as models to the faithful. In his entry on Paul, Jacob explicitly curbs the alleged rivalry with St. Peter when he says: “We find that at different times Paul is portrayed as Peter’s inferior, as greater than Peter or as Peter’s equal, but the fact is that he was inferior in dignity, greater in preaching, and equal in holiness.” Jacob seals this unity by affirming the early Church’s legend that they were martyred under Nero on the same day. Before they were parted for their executions, Jacob records that Peter and Paul exchanged benedictions of each other.

This reconciliation between these two apostles is effected by their sharing the same feast day on June 29 when the other apostles get a day each for themselves. The Magnificat antiphon for First Vespers of this feast says: “Peter and Paul were at one in their love of the Lord: neither in life nor death were they divided.” The second half of this text comes from David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan (2 Sam. 1:23), so that a verse referring to the protracted mimetic struggle between David and Saul is applied to another problematic relationship to heal whatever division there may have been in real life and offer the Church a model of mimetic amity.