Bulletin 61 – August 2019

In many ways, Cowdell’s project is a laudable continuation of the work of Raymund Schwager, SJ—a work that was cut short at his sudden death in 2004. As the published correspondence between Schwager and Girard demonstrates, Schwager took the initiative in reaching out to Girard, whose insights Schwager shared and affirmed. As a Catholic theologian and priest, Schwager dared, again and again, in a friendly way to point out to Girard aspects of his theory that needed clarification or correction in the light of the Church’s teaching, if he wanted it to be received well by Christian theologians—something Girard himself did indeed desire, though he resisted the title of theologian for himself and probably did not initially envision a theological readership for his work. Girard was receptive to and grateful for Schwager’s constructive critique, and, as Cowdell shows, Girard modified his theory over time in key areas, without abandoning (and arguably enhancing) its fundamental insights. This gradual process of testing, critique, self-correction, and development was also true to Girard’s own ethos, which valued dialogue and respected the human sciences, but also the revealed truth of the Scriptures, the Church’s tradition, and its teaching authority. Girard clearly believed his mimetic theory to be fundamentally compatible with Christian belief and at its apologetic service.

Like Schwager, Cowdell is eager to defend Girard’s orthodoxy both against his critics (notably Sarah Coakley, John Milbank, and Hans Urs von Balthasar) and through resources in the long Christian tradition (Augustine, Irenaeus, Thomas Aquinas). Like Schwager, too, Cowdell sees a dramatic principle at work in Girard’s theory, which famously employs ancient Greek tragedy as evidence for the sacrificial origins of human culture. Cowdell explicitly builds upon Schwager’s books, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation (1990) and Banished from Eden: Original Sin and Evolutionary Theory in the Drama of Salvation (1997), to construct his own Girardian Theo-dramatics in two ways: first, by using a typology from improvisation theory to characterize Girard’s view of human history; second, by sketching the whole of that human history in five-acts.

Let me first briefly describe the broad outline of Cowdell’s book before engaging selectively with three aspects of its argument. The first three chapters provide an overview of Girard’s mimetic theory as it unfolded in three stages, which Cowdell names “Early Girard,” “Middle Girard,” and “Late Girard.” These are really valuable chapters. I’ve read, written, and heard various “introductions” to Girard that cover in chronological order the key elements of his thought: borrowed desire, the scapegoat mechanism at the origins of human civilization, and the Biblical revelation of that mechanism. What distinguishes Cowdell’s approach, first, is a firm sense of the organic wholeness of Girard’s vision from its first expression in “Early Girard” and thus of strong continuities between and among the different periods of his intellectual career. Second, Cowdell chronicles the development of Girard’s thought in detail, showing when, where, and why Girard made corrections, modifications, clarifications, and additions. The fine-tuning was often (as Cowdell documents) in response to theological considerations. The work Cowdell has done will be especially instructive for persons who have had some interest in “Early” or “Middle” Girard, but who stopped reading him at some point and are, therefore, unaware of the “Late Girard,” who, as Cowdell puts it, made “a conscious effort . . . to shore up his orthodox Christian bona fides” (59).

Chapters Four, Five, and Six form a triad, roughly configured to theological issues raised by Girard’s “social-scientific program” (3). Chapter Four, “Girard among the Theologians,” takes up the question: how can belief in human free will and personal responsibility fit with Girard’s anthropological notions of borrowed desire and interdividuality? Chapter Five, “A Divine-Human Drama,” explores how the Catholic Church’s affirmation of humanity’s natural knowledge of God jibes with Girard’s presentation of primitive religion in its historical relationship to the Judeo-Christian revelation. Evoking Girard’s engagement with Darwinian evolution, Chapter Six, “The Shadow Side of Finitude,” explores the implications of Girard’s notion of hominization, its bearing upon the problem of evil, and the role of violence in human origins and development. Building upon these three chapters, the final two chapters form a pair. Chapter Seven, “Divine Overaccepting,” aligns the apocalypticism of “late Girard” with Christian hope and practiced faith in divine providence. Chapter Eight, “Christ, the Nonviolence of God,” presents Christ as the revealer and mediator of the nonviolent God to a humanity ensnared in violence.

Cowdell covers a lot of ground in this book, as may be surmised from this quick survey. The pages are filled with references to modern theologians—Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Presbyterian, Mennonite, Evangelical. It’s an important book by a learned scholar who writes well. It’s also one that’s difficult to engage due to its ambitious range and project. For my part, I choose to comment briefly in this review on three alliterating points: (1) the typology Cowdell employs to characterize Girard’s work as a Theo-dramatics; and (2) the turning-point in Cowdell’s schematic, five-act drama, and (3) the title of the book, echoed by the title of the final chapter.

An Improvisational Typology: Blocking, Accepting, and Overaccepting

Following the lead of William Cavanaugh and Michael Kirwan, Cowdell borrows a conceptual scheme from improvisation theory in drama. Improvisation as an art form is, by definition, unscripted. It requires performing artists to respond to audience members, to fellow performers, and to situational disturbances in a skilled, spontaneous way that advances the play. “Blocking” or “denial” is a failure to build the offered input of others into one’s response. “Accepting” involves happily embracing or patiently enduring that input, while “overaccepting” implies a virtuoso activity that transforms what has been accepted, “crafting a good outcome out of whatever presents itself” (175). Cowdell gives the example of a pianist whose concert performance is suddenly punctuated by the loud ringing of someone’s cell phone. The virtuoso over-acceptor does not simply stop playing until the ringing has ended (as one kind of an acceptor might do), nor does he simply proceed in denial of the disturbance (as a blocker would); rather, he hears the tune of the phone and works it ad lib into the music he’s playing.

Citing Thomistic “double-agency” theology, which affirms the “centrality of human collaboration within the outworking of God’s purposes” (187), Cowdell describes the all-provident God as an over-acceptor who, as Saint Paul writes, “in everything . . . works for good with those who love him” (Romans 8:28, RSV). Cowdell’s main purpose is to align the image of this all-provident God with Girard’s take on history, which over-accepts the full sweep of an often violent human history in view of the revelation given by Christ crucified and at the eschaton, and which over-accepts “secular modernity as a consequence of the gospel” (178). This major argument works well. In doing so, however, Cowdell also sets up as foils to Girard not only “embittered conservatives and conspiracy theorists of all stripes” (159), but also a number of illustrious figures—Balthasar, Milbank, Nietzsche, Darwin, and Saint Augustine—whom he characterizes in various ways as blockers or accepters. This strategy of Cowdell’s is less successful, sometimes off-putting, and confusing, since there are multiple ways of blocking and accepting and apparent overlaps between the two categories (not to mention the possibility of overlap between some forms of acceptance and over-acceptance!). As the analogies abound and the descriptive definitions multiply, the labels imposed on the individual foils to Girard can seem even arbitrary. Cowdell himself calls the performer who frowns at his audience first a “blocker” and then a “half-hearted accepter,” for example, presumably because of some slight difference in how he frowns (175).

Cowdell usefully refers to post-traumatic-stress-disorder in his discussions of the blocking, accepting, and over-accepting of violence (157–58). Trauma theory now distinguishes PTSD from something else, however: the “moral injury” sustained, for example, by rape victims and war veterans. What has become obvious to therapists is that a moral injury can be sustained, the conscience be violated, even in cases where there is no moral culpability in terms of a person’s freely chosen action. The synderesis, the deepest tier of the conscience, distinguishable from the prudential conscience, simply reacts in protest against a world disordered by violence, even when the violence is socially sanctioned. Girardian méconnaissance can, I think, accommodate this two-tiered understanding of conscience and consciousness. It helps to explain, for example, both the violent Native American rituals used still today to purify warriors returning from battle and to assist their renewed incorporation into the community, on the one hand, and the penitential purgation required of early Christians who left military service, on the other. In the case of this discussion, méconnaissance both mitigates guilt (Luke 23:24: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”) and witnesses to humanity’s fallenness, its sinfulness.

The typology of blocking, accepting, and over-accepting has its definite heuristic value and fascination, but that value and appeal diminish when the scheme is rhetorically over-worked. Thinking about Cowdell’s three terms, I wonder, however, if his improvisational approach might open the way for a fresh comparison of Girard and Kierkegaard, who drew inspiration from the performing arts and who has his own tri-fold categorization of Christians. Kierkegaard’s “spiritless” Christians, whom he also calls Philistines, approximate Cowdell’s “blockers.” Kierkegaard’s “knight of resignation” corresponds closely to what Cowdell describes as an “accepter.” And Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith” arguably matches well with Cowdell’s “over-accepter,” as a title for Girard himself.

A Second “T”: The Turning-Point in Cowdell’s Five-Act Play

Already in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Girard sounds a Kierkegaardian theme when he notes: “All the heroes [in these novels] surrender their most fundamental individual prerogative, that of choosing their own desire” (55). Later, in an interview with James Williams and at his probing, Girard searches for a term fitting to the special mediation of Christ, which is neither an “external mediation” nor an “internal mediation” (as Girard has defined those terms). Here Girard turns explicitly to Kierkegaard, saying, “Maybe the idea of Kierkegaard, the idea of subjectivity as passionate inwardness and choice would be helpful” (Girard Reader 268). (Later, as we know, in Battling to the End (133), Girard, with a gesture toward Augustine, accepts Benoît Chantre’s proposed term, “innermost mediation,” to name the personal relationship to Christ that is also the ground of human freedom.) Given these affirmations by Girard of human choice and freedom, we should not be surprised by his ready acceptance of Schwager’s insistence that the evolutionary account of hominization must include, if it is to be orthodox, at least a brief moment of free human decision prior to the primal murder that is definitive (in Girard’s understanding) of fallen humanity and of its cultural institutions, epitomized in the “city” built by Cain (Genesis 4:17).

In Banished from Eden: Original Sin and Evolutionary Theory, Schwager offers a number of thought experiments “inspired both by theories of evolution and by elements of the Christian understanding of salvation” (94). In these variant reconstructions, the consciousness of the prehominid animal was suddenly illumined during a moment of high intensity—sexual congress, eating, hunting, or intraspecies killing—involving at least one other individual. In that moment of higher consciousness or “emergence” into a hominid state, the animal transcended itself and momentarily sensed its own higher possibility as a mysterious divine calling, before reverting back to its accustomed state, albeit now with a troubling memory of having turned away, shied back, from the realization of a numinous possibility. Schwager quotes with approval the word of Robert Spaemann (d. 2018): “[We can] interpret the meaning of sin as mankind’s sinful [that is, freely chosen] continuation in a naturalness, which becomes precisely unnatural in that it does not transcend itself according to its own endowment” (Banished, 52). Schwager adds: “Everything could have begun with a seemingly harmless slipping away from the original gift-like experience” (Banished, 52).

Cowdell refers not to these pages in Schwager’s book but to related passages in the correspondence between Schwager and Girard, where Girard accepts the placement of “‘the fall’ in a zone of human freedom between the state of animal mimesis, from which humans emerged, and the hell of mimetic entrapment into which free but idolatrous choice led subsequent humanity to ‘fall’” (100). “There’s the possibility of another choice,” writes Girard, “of which there’s no objective trace to be found in a natural and evolutionary analysis, because the continuity with animal nature is all that’s visible” (qtd. 101). Cowdell concludes: “So the choice of mimetic models in freedom is indeed possible for Girard, even though he recognizes that prehistory reveals no trace of this choice ever having been made” (100).

I dwell on this affirmation—by Girard and Cowdell alike—of a free human choice, a sinful choice, made already at the primal scene (as Scripture, not natural science, reveals), because Cowdell’s later sketch of “the five acts . . . called for in a Girardian Theo-dramatic account” (130) is less clear about this. In the first, pre-human stage or act, animal activity, including violent activity, is instinctual and according to nature and, by that definition, good: “Hence, it is not necessary to describe this stage in terms of natural evil” (130). Cowdell associates the second stage with hominization, “the fall,” and the primal murder, but he pointedly avoids the word “sin” in this section and asserts: “Savage innocence has become human violence . . . [but] Girard does not regard even this violence to be evil” (131). Evil does not intrude upon the drama until the third act, according to Cowdell, when the revelation in Jesus Christ of the nonviolent God “undoes humanity’s former méconnaissance” and makes “evil” their “prolongation of false-sacred practices,” in the light of an alternative “way of being human” (131). The fourth act encompasses the present age and all of human history after the Ascension of Jesus, when the false-sacred mechanism continues to function, amassing victims without producing peace. The fifth and final act for Cowdell is the un-theorized eschaton.

This sketch of the whole of human history in the space of three pages is, for me, the most troubling part of Cowdell’s book. The temporal divisions seem right, but the omission (contra “Late Girard”) of any mention of “original sin” in connection with the “fall” causes unease. Cowdell’s sketch posits a sinless “fall” and thousands of years of human existence during which the blindness that Girard calls méconnaissance preserved the perpetrators of violence universally, it seems, from guilt and sin. Cowdell wants to include ancient religion and religious sacrifice, including human sacrifice, within the long history of salvation leading to Christ and to emphasize, with Girard, the positive function of such sacrifices in limiting violence (204). A providential view affirms, to be sure, that “God works all things to the good.” But, as Cowdell hastens to add, “This is not to say that God endorses the violent workings of the archaic sacred” (204). The ritual killing of the innocent victim remains close, too close, to the murder, the lawless genocide, and the warfare it imitates and aims to forestall.

I wonder: Does not the communal will to forestall violence even at the cost of ritual violence attest to an awakening of human conscience against violence itself as evil? Even before Moses, do not the prohibitions that work, however imperfectly, to forestall violence attest to another law, written on the human heart and conscience—the law or “divine spark” that tradition calls synderesis? One can sin, it would seem, against natural law, the law of the Creator, which is also the law of Christ, whose saving grace—Augustine affirms—was always operative in human history. Simone Weil found intimations of Christianity among the Greeks, in Sophocles and Homer—intimations inspiring deeds of piety, hospitality, and compassion. Cowdell also gestures in this direction, but primarily in an apophatic way: the failure of the ancient sacrifices being construed as a “grace” prevenient to the revelation of the nonviolent God.

These are difficult topics, to be sure, and I may be misunderstanding Cowdell, but I don’t think the highly condensed, rapid-fire accounts given here of the second and third acts offer a straight-forward defense of Girard’s theological orthodoxy in the absence of a stronger account of original sin, of its effects, and of grace operative in the people living before Moses and before Christ. Perhaps Scott needs to write another book, with a chapter for each of the five acts, with side-references perhaps to the parts of Teilhard de Chardin’s Mass on the Altar of the World?  Cowdell draws connections in passing between Girard and Teilhard, but the resources of Teilhard’s Mass (and all its Theo-dramatic potential) remain untapped.

A Third T: The Nonviolent God of Cowdell’s Title

Cowdell’s central concern is the image of God that emerges from Girard’s life-long work, the image of the nonviolent God that stands in sharp contrast to the “false-sacred” idols of past and present and the violence they serve to perpetuate, but which also works even these idols to the good. This nonviolent God empowers, again and again, the human challenge in thought, word, and deed to what Cowdell calls “the cultural nexus of violence, scapegoating, and a purely human sacred” (5). For Cowdell, as for Girard, Christ crucified—the Logos of divine love—revealed this nonviolent God to a violent world through the kenosis of Incarnation, suffering, and death. At the same time, the Incarnate Word also revealed humankind to itself both in its enslavement to mechanisms of violence and in its capacity to choose a different, non-rivalrous model for its imitation. This salutary theme is the hallmark of Cowdell’s book.

Cowdell rightly indicates that this seemingly novel title for God actually resonates with patristic sources. Accepting a philosophical understanding of God as eternal, immutable, and incorruptible, alongside a Hebraic view of God as the God of Sabbath rest, Augustine rejected the dualism of the Manichees and the Marcionites, but also the anthropomorphism of certain descriptions of God in the Old Testament, where the Lord is said, for example, first to be angry and then to repent of his anger. The spiritual exegesis Augustine practiced taught him to see such scandalous verses as evidence of God’s self-emptying accommodation to human understanding and as prompts for the allegorical discovery of the God of love, whom Cowdell calls “the nonviolent God.” Commenting at length on the Book of Joshua, Origen undertook his own refutation of the Marcionites. He upholds the divinely inspired character of this very violent book, but he vehemently denies that the violent conquests recorded there are held up for historical imitation. Rather, he instructs, the text is intended to teach us to extirpate our vices—pride, covetousness, envy, lust, and wrath—and to do so without quarter, precisely so that we have the spiritual strength patiently to endure torture, to love our enemies, and to suffer martyrdom as Christ did, refusing violence. Coming from Origen, whose father was martyred for the faith and who himself suffered two years of imprisonment and torture during the reign of Decius, the homilies on Joshua provide an unforgettable view of the Jesus of the Gospels, whom Cowdell calls “the nonviolence of God.”

Cowdell prefers an evolutionary Theo-drama to the transformational/ascetical theology proposed by Kevin Mongrain and Brian Robinette as akin to Girard’s. Reading Augustine and Origen, I wonder if the two theologies might be melded. The virtuous life is, by definition, the active life. From the Psychomachia of Prudentius to the medieval morality plays, the symbolism of spiritual warfare enacted on the stage has put violence to an anti-violent use, often with considerable over-accepting on the part of the performers. Following Girard, Cowdell argues that the nonviolent God has done something similar with human violence from the very foundations of the world.

Despite the broad range of disciplines represented by the contributors—also anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political science, and biology—the focus is tight: mimetic theory’s contribution to understanding the origins of human culture through its twin theses of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism and the resulting argument for the centrality of religion to the development of all other cultural forms. This focus brings mimetic theory into contact with evolutionary thinking and raises tensions that run through the volume between explanatory approaches: gradual vs. punctuated means of change, peaceful vs. violent processes, individual/cognitive vs. relational/social factors. The contributors all approach their topics in a spirit of exploration that brings out mimetic theory’s capacity, despite its emphasis on punctuated, violent, relational causes, to frame a productive dialogue between perspectives (rather than perpetuate rivalries). At the same time, the volume as a whole points to the possibility of incorporating work in this area into an overall theory of “strong emergence” at the systemic level (xxiii), that is, one that does not presume any recognizably individual selfhood and conscious thought process behind the rise of society and culture but rather sees selfhood as emerging from relational systems.

Running alongside the negotiation between interpretive models of origin is the attempt to substantiate mimetic theory by empirical evidence, given that, like evolutionary theory, it cannot be tested experimentally. What’s needed is a complex conversation between disciplines, each with its vocabulary, paradigms, and methods, toward which the editors hope this volume will be “an interrogative and pathfinding foray” (xviii).

The excellent introduction ends with an overview of each contribution, arranged in five sections: questions of methodology and interpretation between mimetic and evolutionary theory; how the thesis of mimetic desire fits with current work in psychology and biology; how the thesis of the centrality of sacrificial violence fits with other work on the origins of culture; mimetic interpretation of archeological data from Çatalhöyük and another, even older Turkish site, Göbekli Tepe (source of the cover photo); and how mimetic theory fits with other approaches to the origin of religion. I’ll review them instead according to how the contributors bring their expertise to the conversation.

Several contributors perform the great service of placing mimetic theory in wider landscapes of research. Scott Garrels, William Hurlbut, and Melvin Konner each update their contributions to the 2011 collection Mimesis and Science (stemming from conferences in 2007 and 2008 sponsored by the Templeton Foundation and Imitatio). Taken together, Garrels on imitation and Hurlbut on desire detail how current work in psychology and neurobiology provides evidence and opportunity for mimetic theory as an integrating paradigm. Konner, an anthropologist with a gift for original synthesis on broad topics for a general audience, reviews the literature on violence in the social and behavioral sciences for the past several decades in order to show the value of Girard’s contribution.

Antonello and Paul Dumouchel each work out aspects of the theoretical meeting between Darwin and Girard on the plain of human origins. Dumouchel, with his usual lucidity, argues for a similarity between mimetic theory and a “population thinking” interpretation of Darwinian natural selection that makes them consistent with each other as “non-agential” explanations. Antonello, meanwhile, surveying a wide range of scholarship, suggests how mimetic theory can solve several puzzles that arise in the standard, cognitivist interpretation of archeological and anthropological data.

Dialogue between the cognitivist and Girardian paradigms also frames the two essays on the origin of religion. Warren S. Brown, James Van Slyke, and Garrels make a strong case for mimetic theory’s account of religion “as a situated cultural solution to an inter-individual and societal problem” compatible with theories in cognitive science that see higher human capacities as self-organizing in response to social and environmental conditions, as opposed to approaches in neuroscience and “cognitive science of religion” that see religiousness as an outcome, even byproduct, of individual neurocognitive developments. Gifford energizes the dialogue by bringing out strong resonances between Girard and the influential French and Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson’s final, 1932 book, Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Bergson’s two sources, or types, static and dynamic, map well onto the ambiguity in religion that becomes acute in Girard’s distinction between the archaic, violent sacred and its undoing in Christianity and other major world religions, whose dynamism Bergson links to the openness and creativity seen most purely in mysticism.

William H. Durham, David P. Barash, and Zoey Reeve each set up encounters between mimetic theory and a more specific explanatory thesis in their fields. Biological anthropologist Durham finds an overlap between Girardian theory and his own model of coevolution between genetic and cultural systems of inheritance. For evolutionary biologist and psychologist Barash, mimetic theory is mostly consistent with his understanding of violence as “retaliation, revenge, and (especially) redirected aggression.” For political scientist Reeve, the scapegoat mechanism complements “parochial altruism” as the other side, as it were, of what forms in-group cohesion (a connection also explored, along with the comparison to Bergson’s two sources, and under the guidance of Simone Weil, by Wolfgang Palaver in his contribution to Can We Survive Our Origins?).

Giuseppe Fornari’s “Mediatory Theory of Hominization” is in a class of its own, densely integrating mimetic theory with a fascinating phenomenological reconstruction of originary scenes. It promises, among much else, to account for a wider range of evidence and to flesh out the emergence of cultural representations. His Ancient Mediations and Christianity: From Classical Greece to the Death of God, due out in two volumes from Michigan State University Press in spring 2020, will no doubt carry this story further.

The section on Çatalhöyük and Göbekli Tepe, complete with pictures and diagrams, gives a window into both the deep past and ongoing research. In 2006, Girard was invited to join a meeting, funded by the Templeton Foundation, that brought together major thinkers from several fields to discuss “Spirituality and Religious Ritual in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study.” Nine-thousand-year-old Çatalhöyük is one of the oldest known human settlements. Its large size, up to 8,000 people, and dense concentration of wall paintings, sculptures, and other artwork have made it central to the interpretation of other sites, both earlier and later. According to Ian Hodder, professor of archeology at Stanford University and longtime leader of the excavations at Çatalhöyük, “While most of the discussants presented initial thoughts and asked preliminary questions, Girard rather took the group aback by presenting a fully worked through and thorough analysis of the symbolism from the site.” His article here is a version of that paper, masterfully pitched to draw an audience unfamiliar with the site into his interpretive process, with notes added by the editors. Short version: the evidence supports his model of sacrificial ritual emerging from spontaneous scapegoating and preceding features of settlement like animal domestication, while also suggesting that it “bend” to accommodate Walter Burkert’s theory of the importance of ritual animal hunting as a source of sacrifice.

Hodder’s reminiscence comes from the preface to Violence and the Sacred in the Ancient Near East: Conversations at Çatalhöyük (Cambridge University Press, 2019), a collection he edited based on a further series of meetings, sponsored by Imitatio, between mimetic theorists and the site’s archeological team, including visits to the site itself. One of the organizers of those meetings, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, contributes to How We Became Human an initial look at those conversations while applying his methodological understanding of mimetic theory through the notion of tangled hierarchies, which aligns it with the concept of emergent, self-organizing systems as opposed to cognitivist approaches.

Göbekli Tepe, 3,000 years older and even more mysterious than Çatalhöyük, is generally thought to be some kind of temple site, with little evidence of habitation. This alone, as Antonello and Gifford point out in their overview, supports the Girardian view that religion precedes settlement, reversing the dominant anthropological narrative. Evidence of the rituals practiced there seems thus far to fit with Girard’s interpretation of Çatalhöyük, though much no doubt remains to be done.

The thought of these two Neolithic sites as actual, non-virtual places for the meeting of minds from different disciplines and from both inside and outside the community of mimetic theorists to consider how we became human—like the meetings that produced this volume and its companion—points a way forward to understanding not only our deep past but how to face each other peacefully in the present. Let us hope the publication of this work will, to borrow the language of self-organizing systems, be an attractor for further, adventurous collaboration and support.