Bulletin 48 – May 2016

In his correspondence with Girard, which was published as vol. 6 of the Gesammelte Schriften, from 1980 onwards Schwager repeatedly tells about his work creating articles about the history of soteriology. They were partly prepared in university seminars and were published for the first time as a series of articles in the academic journal of Innsbruck Jesuits, Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie. On September 30, 1984, Schwager announces the completion of the final article – on Hans Urs von Balthasar; he plans to round up the project by presenting current theologians’ divergent theories of sacrifice and then to publish the eleven articles together in one volume. Such a collection was planned from the beginning; all the articles have the same structure. When the collection appeared in 1986, it contained only 10 essays, complemented by a preface, dated October 1985, a short introduction, and a very brief final reflection. The planned article on sacrifice was not included, and the collection was an almost unchanged reprint of the journal articles. Sometime between January and May 1986 Girard congratulates Schwager on his new publication, a copy of which he had received. Very soon Schwager tried to find an American translator for this book, but all efforts so far have not succeeded in bringing that about.

The volume reviewed here is volume 3 of Schwager’s Gesammelte Schriften, which are edited by his former Innsbruck students, this one by Nikolaus Wandinger. The new edition contains the unchanged texts, set in a larger print space, thus enhancing readability and gravity, and providing the page numbers of both previous publications for easy referencing. The editor’s extensive editing report (pp. 11-35) relates the genesis and reception of the work. In place of a thematic index, which the original collection did not contain, Schwager’s notes regarding the first eight essays are provided (pp. 551-559); additional features are a reworked index of persons (pp. 543-550) and editorial remarks listing the few corrections that were made (mostly orthographic in kind) and giving information about the genesis and the biographical context of the texts (pp. 540-542). The bibliographical references in the footnotes were rendered more precise and a complete bibliography was added (pp. 521-539). Thus this volume comes very close to a historical-critical edition. It makes for joyful reading through its high quality paper, generous design, and the care taken by the editor and all collaborators. The more regrettable is one faux pas which I note at the express wish of the editor: the subtitle on the contents page (5) and on a partition page (37) erroneously makes soteriology (German: Erlösungslehre) to theology of original sin (German: Erbsündenlehre).

The ten essays span the whole of church history, but they are no comprehensive history of Christian soteriology. Instead, theologians and controversies have been selected that are still of importance today because of their high intellectual rank and their historical consequences, although an element of randomness cannot be excluded. The systematic purpose this collection follows is making the positions and controversies of past centuries fruitful for current soteriology. At the same time these are confronted with mimetic theory. This theory is the hermeneutical tool that guides the argument of the whole book. The essays are structured accordingly: a first section presents the position of a historical author; a second section critically discusses it by bringing it face to face with mimetic theory, so that mimetic theory’s arguments are brought to bear in turn on the historical thought. The first six essays deal with theologians of the patristic age: Irenaeus of Lyon and Marcion, Athanasius the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine and Pelagius, and Maximus the Confessor; Anselm of Canterbury is the sole representative of medieval theology; the following 900 years are covered by a rigorous selection containing only Martin Luther, Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar.

It is difficult to discern Schwager’s main focus. The reason for this might be Schwager’s historical meticulousness in presenting the theologians’ positions, and also the monographic form of the essays. However, three themes are of utmost importance: mimesis, freedom, drama. In their mutual interconnectedness they constitute the thread linking the array of thoughts and information, which the book provides; these cannot be related here in detail.

References to mimetic theory pervade the whole book; problems of rivalry recur everywhere. Especially for the patristic time mimetic analysis are very fruitful. This is true first for the controversy between Marcion and Irenaeus of Lyon about the relationship between the Old and New Testaments: Marcion counter-posed the just creator of the Old Testament with the New Testament God of love. Irenaeus, however, claimed that love and justice are one in God as the all-encompassing reality, and he insisted on the unity of the two testaments. Church theology sided with him, but to this day it has not succeeded in providing a satisfactory solution to the two problems he posed – the relationship of the two testaments and of God’s mercy and justice. In the light of Girard’s theory of the sacred, Schwager explains the connection between violence and the image of God and interprets the Old Testament writings, whose ambivalence resonated so strongly with Marcion, as mixed texts.

A similar path is taken with another topic that ranked high in the patristic Church: Christ’s victory over the devil. In August 1980 Schwager wrote to Girard: “A theme figuring prominently with Church fathers was the cross as a victory over the devil. Yet, none of the fathers succeeded in formulating a coherent theory.” The motif was, however, so commonplace that it had to be taken seriously. But if one interprets Satan as a hidden, collective, evil mechanism of humanity, as mimetic theory does, the confusing assortment of patristic imagery about the devil can be brought to make sense, and, moreover, the accord of these images with the New Testament becomes visible.

The idea of mimesis also helps to better understand the controversy between Pelagius and Augustine. Pelagius taught, in the tradition of the Greek fathers, that the human person becomes an image of God by imitating Him. Augustine objected vehemently because he recognized the problem inherent to all mimesis. Even when imitating something good, it tends towards rivalry and violence. Moral optimism easily deteriorates into aggressive self-righteousness. This ambivalence was also seen by Maximus the Confessor.

By protesting against Pelagius’s moral optimism Augustine points to the problem of freedom. Many church fathers simply presupposed human freedom but did not reflect on what that entailed. Personal categories were to be developed in a long-winded process – oftentimes in interdependence with Christology. It had to be realized gradually that the full humanity of the God-man entailed a free human soul. Yet, this made it even more difficult for the church fathers to allow for human freedom in Jesus, because for them freedom means the freedom of choice between good and evil – an absurdity for the God-man.

Granted, even Augustine does not deny human freedom, but he excludes any role for it in the relation of humans towards God; his main concern is the gratuity of grace, and this leads him to formulate his doctrine of predestination. He pessimistically supposes that most human persons are hopelessly damned as sinners; those few, however, to whom God directs Christ’s grace, cannot resist this grace and are thereby predestined for salvation. That way Augustine leaves the Church a highly problematic inheritance. It becomes difficult to distinguish divine grace from randomness. The ancient, sacrificial thinking that is fixated on a supposed rivalry between humans and God (or the Gods) is still at work.

The only medieval theologian covered is, as mentioned, Anselm of Canterbury. His theory of satisfaction is only treated in passing, however. Instead his theory of freedom is broadly discussed, because it overcomes the aporias of the church fathers. The choice that is a necessary element of freedom is not between good and evil but between good and better. Anselm gained this insight in Christology when he searched for the necessary reasons of the incarnation.

Drama – this term only appears when Luther’s, Barth’s, and Balthasar’s theologies are treated; in connection with them Schwager develops his own dramatic theology. Regarding their length alone, one can see that the main emphasis of the book lies with these three final essays. Looking at Luther and Barth, Schwager accentuates, as before, what he has learned from these thinkers. The critique that – in the wake of Augustine – they accord no role for human freedom in the relationship to God is only secondary. Much more important is Luther’s sensitivity for the dramatic element in Jesus’ life and thus – through their discipleship – also in the lives of the faithful. Like no one before, Luther took Jesus’ temptation in his passion seriously. When interpreting Romans 7:14-25, one of the classical inter-denominational points of disagreement, Schwager sides with Luther in that this passage talks about the human person under grace. It is exactly for him/her that simul iustus et peccator – simultaneously just and a sinner – is valid. Faithful existence then means participation in Jesus’ struggle against sin.

Barth has utmost significance for modern theology by reformulating the doctrine of predestination; it is being linked up with Christology. The centerpiece of Barth’s theology is the person of Jesus Christ, his cross and resurrection, around which all other topics are grouped. The crucified bears God’s damnation of sinners and through this, God directs His grace to all human beings.

Balthasar, who is treated in the final essay, takes up this idea, but he insists on human freedom playing a role in the relation to God. The history of revelation and faith thus becomes a dialogical, dramatic interaction. In order to be able to look at the manifold dimensions of this drama, Balthasar strives to integrate the traditions of European theater into his theology. In the wake of Barth, his soteriology emphasizes the faithful meditation of the Passion, of “Jesus’ Hour,” which has its low point in Jesus’ descensus ad inferos. This descent now is not understood, as it was in the patristic Church, as a victorious conquest of Hades by the Risen One, but strictly as a descent into hell, where Jesus has to suffer the terrible wrath of God on the sin of the world.

In critically appraising Balthasar’s work, Schwager sketches the four acts of Jesus’ life-drama, which will later – complemented by a fifth act – form the backbone of his own Jesus in the Drama of Salvation – thus already building the bridge toward his later book. In his treatment of Barth, Schwager had already asked whether the emphasis on God’s wrath – even if it was borne by Christ alone – does not entail an image of God that is in equal measure condemnation and love; similar objections are now raised against Balthasar’s formulations of divine wrath: they entail an identity of good and evil in God.

I wholeheartedly agree with these objections. Why does the Christian language of the wrath of God draw so exclusively on Old Testament passages that – in addition – are interpreted in a one-sided manner? Why is God’s wrath matter-of-factly associated with punishment and destruction? Wrath can be described in a purely formal way as an intense emotional response. It certainly urges one towards an active engagement, an action. Yet, does that always have to be destructive punishment? Isn’t there also a wrath of love that energetically presents the other with the wrongness of his/her actions and prods them towards conversion at the same time, offering possibilities of recompense? I would understand Jesus Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection within such a framework. Then Balthasar’s meditations about “Jesus’ Hour” become obsolete. To endure God’s loving wrath may be exhausting but it does not lead into the hell of desperation because love and joy are already inherently present in God’s anger as His actual concern. The pain is birthing pain. God “gives birth” to new, eternal life.

The Miraculous Exchange is the title of the book as well as that of the essay on Gregory of Nyssa. By this choice Schwager places his book in the tradition of patristic soteriology. It also shows high appreciation for Gregory’s thought. Some of his positions are hotly contested; however, his image of God, which emphasizes God as perfect goodness, and his leaning towards universal reconciliation are highly praised as being of permanent importance for the Church and theology. Gregory also intuited that the pivotal point of the miraculous exchange is not the incarnation but Christ’s death: Christ bore human maliciousness and repaid it with forgiveness and love, with the gift of eternal life. Luther continued this motif with his talk about the “happy exchange and struggle.”

It is exciting to follow this development of the doctrine of predestination. While it was closely interwoven with a pessimistic view of salvation in Augustine, it was being opened up towards God’s universal salvific will and the hope for a complete reconciliation in Barth and Balthasar, a concern that Schwager wholly subscribed to in his theological work. His history of soteriology shows that Schwager was a theologian of great intellectual capability; his connection of theology and mimetic theory benefits both sides.

“Part I: Media and Representation” contains three essays that treat broad questions of scapegoat dynamics in media. “Part II: Film,” by far the longest, presents nine articles analyzing movies, most of them Hollywood blockbusters (A.I.: Artificial Intelligence; The Hunger Games; the Batman/ Dark Knight trilogy; The Matrix; The Cabin in the Woods; some Woody Allen romances; The Shining; The Ice-Storm; The Hi-Lo Country). “Part III: Television” rounds things out with three studies, two of them hitting the bull’s eye of the powerful new genre of the multiple-season long-arc drama (Mad Men; Homeland; Dexter). The pieces vary in their thoroughness of excavation, the intensity of their searchlights, and their readiness to query or qualify (rather than just “apply”) Girard’s ideas. The writers sometimes refer to their contributions as “chapters.” Insofar as “chapters” suggests a unity and continuity between pieces and no such unity emerges, nothing beyond the commitment to working with mimetic theory, the editors might benefit by focussing future volumes on a commonly, constantly pursued question rather than employing a “topic X in the light of mimetic theory” format.

Part I opens with “On the One Medium” (7-15) by Eric Gans. Gans explores with his characteristically adventurous authority what he deems “the apparently definitive phenomenon of the Internet as the One Medium that, precisely, reduces all earlier media to secondary differences of platform and presentation” (8). I was reassured, as one not born digital and thus condemned to bafflement at students who lope through campus courtyards head-bent into cell phones, by one of Gans’ verdicts: “art-objects and performances have a physical presence that cannot be reproduced with equivalent effect on a screen. Scenes and screens can never become wholly interchangeable” (14). Also in Part I, John O’Carroll demonstrates that the scapegoat analyses in Stanley Cohen’s 1972 classic Folk Devils and Moral Panics grow from ideas neither as sociologically coherent nor as anthropologically mature as those of Girard (17-32).

Opening Part II, Paul Dumouchel’s “Mirrors of Nature: Artificial Agents in Real Life and Virtual Worlds” is nothing less than brilliant. Dumouchel ducks and weaves through art and nature, original and copy in Hobbes and Plato, shares data from recent experiments in social robotics and virtual reality, and presents a laser-precise treatment of Spielberg’s A. I. – in his conclusions, respectfully holding Spielberg responsible for his failure to show this: “… you cannot make a robot that can have only one emotion, love, independently of other strong feelings, and… our [human] ability to love is not without relation to our propensity for violence” (60). Regarding the question of what it takes “for an artificial agent to appear real,” Dumouchel enigmatically proposes: “He (it) must be mimetic, vulnerable, non-autonomous in its desire, and capable of violence—and we must further be ready to recognize it as the origin of its own actions” (60). I linger over the logical tension between one’s desiring non-autonomously and one’s being recognizable as the origin of one’s own actions, wondering whether Dumouchel wishes us to assume that it is a founding paradox of the human.

I missed in the theatres and thus have long been curious about the horror flick The Cabin in the Woods, but Peter Y. Paik’s summary of its contents (109) in his “Apocalypse of the Therapeutic: The Cabin in the Woods and the Death of Mimetic Desire” makes it sound like such an extravagant hybrid of adolescent sci-fi and silly demon lore that I may not bother. And yet I find convincing Paik’s thesis that we should supplement Girard’s critique of active nihilism with a critique of what Paik calls the “passive nihilism” represented in The Cabin in the Woods, “the hallmarks of which are resignation, self-disgust, morbidity, and the readiness to resort to opiates and euthanasia as an escape from these feelings” (112). Paik argues that “Girard’s theory must make room for a third possible response to the revelation of foundational violence alongside the reactive defense of sacrifice and the renunciation of violence: impotent self-hatred” (115). David Humbert’s thorough, sensitive analysis of character, image, and context in “Eyes Wide Shut: Mimesis and Historical Memory in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining” (117-28) is likewise very enriching. Only doctrinaire Freudians would remain unconvinced by Humbert’s demonstration, one in accord with Girard’s formulations in Violence and the Sacred, of this thesis: “The theme of the double in the film is best understood as associated with [a] repressed history of violence rather than with sexuality” (126). Humbert made me want to watch The Shining again.

Thomas Ryba’s “Cowboy Metaphysics, the Virtuous-Enough Cowboy, and Mimetic Desire in Stephen Frears’ The Hi-Lo Country” (149-67) does something all too rare these days in humanistic inquiry: it celebrates, while detailing the evidence that undergirds, his considered judgment that the Western in question is “a superior work of art… nearly perfectly constructed” and “an object lesson in mimetic theory, one…positively dizzying in the way it portrays the interlocking strands of mimetic triangularity coupling and uncoupling in the imaginary town of Hi-Lo, New Mexico” (150). Ryba’s essay made me want to watch The Hi-Lo Country for the first time.

Joel Hodge studies the Batman and Spiderman movies in “Superheroes, Scapegoats, and Saviors: The Problem of Evil and the Need for Redemption” (61-76). He notes that Girard expressed a “distrust” of the superhero genre, given “its potential to portray a romantic, spontaneous notion of identity” and “its sacrificial resonances”(68). Nonetheless, Hodge proceeds, with generosity and patience, to make a case for the significance of the good cultural work such movies do: “The superhero genre presents the depth of evil and the continued need for savior figures who model goodness and build solidarity in order for the human polis to function, despite its struggles with corruption and evil” (74).  I remain skeptical of such generosity, to the extent that these films are spectacle-saturated fantasies: the steak is the violent action—the nifty weapons, capes, gloves, masks, boots, cables, slick elevators, fast cars; the leaping, the kicking, the impossible mid-air fistfights. What ideas these films purvey, I fear, are mostly salt and pepper on the steak. The lad in the line-up will buy the ticket to see violence, not to learn about it. (Close your eyes and listen to the soundtrack of the closing 45 minutes of any such action flick: the grunts, slaps, sighs, screeches, howls, explosions, sirens and crashes become painfully boring.) Turning to another case, let me confide that my stepson was enamoured of The Matrix and exposed me to it enough that I believe its appeal to teenage hordes in the Western world owes almost everything to its sequences of machine-gun battle, leather coats swishing between pillars while cement walls are riddled with bazillions of bullets. Cool. I was puzzled therefore that, despite its theoretical sophistication (or perhaps because of it), Nidesh Lawtoo’s “The Matrix E-motion: Simulation, Mimesis, Hypermimesis” (89-104) was mostly silent about the film’s investment in such armed spectacles.

Debra E. MacDonald praises Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games trilogy, as a genius and a prophet: “this work of modern genius spread like a contagion” (77); “The Hunger Games is an amplified reflection (or commentary, perhaps) on modern society from the perspective of ancient society, which René Girard has so powerfully explicated. [Her] narrative is prophetic, though not anthropologically original” (84). The affirmative tone of MacDonald’s assessment troubles me. To demonstrate that a text describes sacrificial ritual is not to demonstrate that it critiques sacrificial ritual; even less will any such demonstration show that the text conveys even remotely the radical idea of the gospel that God has nothing to do with violence. I tend to the opinion that The Hunger Games is through and through deliciously pagan. Indeed, my inexpert engagement with The Hunger Games phenomenon inclines me toward at least the possibility of an alternative verdict. It could as easily be argued from a Girardian viewpoint that a whole generation of young people, those who live in one of the most comfortable, privileged, helicopter-parented societies in the history of humankind, are permitted by the “genius” of Collins and her movie-making allies to indulge in adolescent victimary fantasies where a hyperbolically evil “establishment” refines its cruelties toward the hyperbolically tormented good “oppressed.” The trilogy perpetuates the moralizing binaries of myth; it does not ironize them with a conversion narrative or any unsettling allusions to a rabbi whose kingdom is not of this world. I would prefer a Girardian study of The Hunger Games that shows how fall short it falls of the gospel, not one that flatters it for the brilliant techno-sophistication through which it makes sacrificial ritual esthetically pleasing.

As a binge-watching addict of long-arc television drama, I enjoyed Paolo Diego Bubbio’s excellent “The Self in Crisis: Mad Men and Homeland in Girard and Hegel,” an essay committed to the interdividuality thesis—“the self must be conceived not in metaphysical but in functional terms” (182). Likewise I enjoyed “Conversion in Dexter” by Matthew John Paul Tan and Joel Hodge; but again, I found it odd in the latter (final in the volume) essay to witness such earnest investments of energy aiming to prove with circumspect caution that a serial killer with an “inability to forgive” (204) ought not be confused with anything resembling the self-giving of Jesus.

Let me affirm in closing that Mimesis, Movies, and Media does succeed as an experiment testing the power of Girard-like lenses to magnify certain structures in specimens of “popular culture” that would otherwise remain invisible. I recommend the collection; you should buy it or get your library to order a copy, no question. However, Girard’s is not, it seems to me, the kind of theory that licenses equal attention to all artifacts. Girard himself was to all appearances fond of that monstrosity “the canon.” Although none of the movies and texts here discussed is insignificantly obscure, I heard myself internally murmuring that the fact of an artwork’s best-seller popularity is no immunization against its vulnerability to charges of vulgarity. At the risk of posturing as the elitist reactionary, I confess that more than once I asked, why are we so gingerly and delicately bothering with this… thing?

More broadly, in the context of labour expended to squeeze deep meaning from Batman and Spiderman and The Hunger Games and The Matrix, one might ask whether Girardian scholars should hesitate less to call pagan nonsense “pagan nonsense” while sallying forth more prepared to negotiate between the myth/gospel distinction fundamental to mimetic theory and questions of how we might go about determining esthetic value. I believe that the hard-working writers in this volume, while certainly not oblivious to differences between works that reveal rather than reflect metaphysical desire, in Girard’s formulation, nevertheless let that difference grow fuzzy. Most are studious and scrupulous in applying the Girardian criterion (a criterion that seems, even a half-century on, still inexhaustibly significant) of evidence in narrative texts for or against a “novelistic” or Christian conversion. The collection did, however, reinforce my long-held conviction that Girardian scholars do themselves a disservice by ignoring the esthetic theory that has been so carefully developed by one of Girard’s most powerful disciples, Eric Gans, especially in his Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology (1993).

Can we even speak of a “Girardian” esthetic? I don’t think so. A systematic body of esthetic concepts in mimetic theory remains to be developed. I hope that dialogue between those who read lots of Gans and those who read lots of Girard increases: generative anthropology certainly needs more of the compassionate nonviolence in mimetic theory, but mimetic theory certainly needs more of the esthetic theory in generative anthropology. When Eric Gans says that “the figural is the sacrificial,” I think he means partly that when we survey the wondrous cross, we cannot help but be experiencing at once the sacred and the beautiful. In being artful in his dealings with us, the God who has nothing to do with violence is no less loving. But not all that passes for Art will reveal the love of God. As J. M. Coetzee’s heroine Elizabeth Costello says, Film is a simplifying medium. Maybe we should not spend too many hours with eyes glued to The Matrix or The Hunger Games, and (full disclosure) I should probably see a priest to get talked out of my fondness for The Walking Dead.