Bulletin 67 – March 2021

A typical argument that seeks to explain how religion becomes implicated in violence assigns blame for religious violence to religion. Drawing on Girard’s mimetic theory, Palaver takes a different approach. He argues that mimetic processes are at the root of all violence; as a consequence, discussions of religion’s role in violence follow, rather than precede, explorations of the causes of violence. Concurring with Girard that society and religion are built on a mechanism of scapegoating and that collective rituals of sacrificial violence are recorded in cultural myths, Palaver shows that Girard’s theory provides unparalleled critical insights into violence. As he demonstrates that Girard offers an explanation of features of the human condition that lead to violence, thereby addressing gaps and shortcomings in other theories, Palaver establishes Girard also as an essential interlocutor in discussions of how this violence is related to religion. 

Transforming the Sacred into Saintliness’s essential argument, developed with notable acuity, is this: If we are unable to distinguish between two religious terms that are often viewed as interchangeable—the “sacred” and the “holy”—we will find that understanding the relationship between “religion” and “violence” always eludes us. Palaver establishes the salience of this argument in several ways. 

Early in the book, Palaver develops a concept of religion that serves as a foundation for his overarching treatment of Girard’s views of the sacred and the holy. He rightly homes in on defining and justifying a normative rather than solely descriptive definition of religion, knowing that Girard relies for his own scholarship on just such a normative concept of religion. Moreover, the normative definition of religion at which Palaver arrives does not privilege Christianity. As a consequence, Palaver is able to show that mimetic theory can account for the possibility of the holy not only in Christianity but in other religions. 

As Palaver tracks the holy through the Girardian corpus, Palaver explains in especially insightful ways how the Swiss Jesuit and Innsbruck-based theologian Raymund Schwager contributed to Girard’s efforts to distinguish the sacred from the holy. There already is a consensus among Girard scholars that Schwager played a critical role in the development of mimetic theory and that knowledge of the Girard/Schwager relationship, as illuminated in their correspondence (published in multiple languages in recent years), is decisive for an informed perspective on mimetic theory. Palaver not only confirms the consensus view but also offers a nuanced and insightful elaboration of it. His discussion of Schwager is especially salient because it answers a key question: If the sacred/holy distinction is fundamental to Girard, why is this distinction unclear in Girard’s early work? Palaver’s analysis of difficulties with translation and his illuminating insights concerning Schwager’s influence on categorical distinctions Girard wanted to make reinforce Palaver’s claim that we can accurately perceive the relationship between religion and violence only if we are able to delineate the “sacred” from the “holy.” 

Significantly, even as Transforming the Sacred into Saintliness illuminates distinctions between the sacred and the holy in Girard’s works that have gone unrecognized up to now, the book also elucidates afresh the entire Girardian corpus, thereby strengthening the capacity of mimetic theory to speak of religion and violence in ways that make Palaver’s book essential reading not only by every Girardian scholar but also for anyone studying religion and its relation to violence. Palaver’s discussion of Girard’s reflections on the book of Job lays a foundation for delineating the holy from the sacred, advancing the book’s argument with a number of constructive moves. Drawing on Girard as well as on secondary literature, Palaver demonstrates what he calls “the biblical difference.” “The sacred” attests to a god who is the projection of a community’s collective violence, born of their human condition and lived out in their social and political institutions. “The holy” points to a transformation in a revolution that led to the “Axial religions” in which a God who sides with victims is revealed, as happens so memorably in Job, opening up on the other side of violence a responsibility for the other that creates an ethical alternative to the lynch mob that acts out the violence of the sacred. 

Woven into Palaver’s commentary on Job are additional observations that launch Palaver’s argument forward. His critique of Rudolf Otto’s discussion of Job is an illuminating contribution to the Joban literature in its own right. Palaver follows the thread of “the biblical difference” backward, referencing how, for Girard, Greek tragedy does not expose the sacred in ways that enable us to side with the victim but instead leaves us with the mob. So also does Palaver follow Girard’s argument forward, discussing how the holy emerges in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ teachings. Palaver counters all readings of “the biblical difference” that espouse Christian exceptionalism. He shows that such readings are complicit with the worldviews of persecutors and also are distorted readings of Girard. Palaver succeeds in that effort by bringing into the discussion the work of Jewish thinkers Abraham Joshua Heschel and Emmanuel Levinas. 

In the most technically complex section of Transforming the Sacred into Saintliness, Palaver traces the thread of the holy through the Girardian corpus, as it becomes increasingly visible in Girard’s later work, while making note of important developments in theories of religion in France in the twentieth century. Durkheim, Simone Weil, Henri Bergson, Levinas, and Jacques Maritain come under Palaver’s purview. As he does so, it is as if Palaver is reminiscing about the conversation at a dinner he once hosted. Previously, scholars have been aware only of snippets of the conversation that transpired on that occasion because Girard preserved in his writings about the sacred and the holy only his own contributions to it. With the assistance of Palaver, all voices are amplified and afforded sustained attention. As a consequence, a new perspective on the conversation comes into view. Most significantly, Girard’s thoughts about the sacred and the holy, deployed with reference to observations on the sacred and the holy offered by these other great thinkers, show forth anew, enhanced in depth and breadth. Weil’s influence on Girard is shown to be especially important. Although Palaver notes that her rejection of the Hebrew Bible is criticized by Levinas and Girard, he explains how Girard mutes features of her thought that conflict with his theory while retaining its most salient aspects as they contribute to Girard’s developing notion of the holy. 

Palaver demonstrates powerfully that Girard’s distinction between the sacred and the holy can only be understood against the background of developments in France. Placing the Dreyfus Affair at their center and highlighting the roles of Lazare and Péguy, Palaver not only draws the reader into the historical setting that shaped Girard’s theory of the holy but also bolsters his case for going beyond Girard to fill in the contours of “saintliness.” Benoît Chantre previously established a basis for this effort in his conversations with Girard in Battling to the End; however, Palaver draws out Péguy’s significance in ways not previously appreciated. Explaining how Péguy influenced Bergson, he weaves this discussion into commentary on Bergson, Levinas, Hölderlin, Weil, and Maritain. He also documents Girard’s comments on Péguy and the Dreyfus Affair and links these observations to commentary on Péguy in Battling to the End. Securely tethering “saintliness” to the holy, Palaver makes a fundamental contribution to scholarship on the holy in mimetic theory and opens the door to scholarship by others on the same topic. Palaver’s success in this effort makes me wish that “groundbreaking” had not become a tired description for original scholarly work because Transforming the Sacred into Saintliness truly does break new ground. 

If Girard were still with us, I can imagine that he would be deeply touched to see how Palaver’s reading of his response to the Dreyfus Affair establishes “saintliness” as an essential term in the lexicon of mimetic theory. After all, as cited and translated by Cynthia Haven in Evolution of Desire (p. 15) from Anspach’s edited volume René Girard, Girard once stated, “I was raised in the double religion of Dreyfusism and Catholicism (on my mother’s side), although I didn’t learn about Péguy until much later.” Palaver has written the book on Girard’s “double religion”!

A last example of the salutary impact Transforming the Sacred into Saintliness will have on Girard scholarship is visible in Palaver’s discussion of “intimate mediation,” an alternative to mimeticism that devolves into violence. According to Girard, intimate mediation is discovered through encounters with an “innermost God” associated with a kenotic concept of a nonviolent God and identified in the imitation of Christ. Girard discusses intimate mediation most in one of his last works: Battling to the End. This book has had a mixed reception, in part due to readings that argue Girard is resigned to the violent propensities of humans overwhelming human potential for responsible and loving relationships. In Battling to the End, Girard appears to some readers (including me) to promote disengagement and withdrawal from the world, at odds with the prophetic ethic of engagement with nonviolence Girard previously located and upheld in biblical narratives such as Job. In Transforming the Sacred into Saintliness, Palaver opens Battling to the End to new interpretations, building on the line of thought he already has developed. Palaver establishes that, for Girard, the holy is not rooted in God’s renunciation of the world but in God’s renunciation of worldly power and its divinization of violence. Having traced the thread of the holy through the entire Girardian corpus, Palaver is able to show that Girard is not advancing a novel claim in his last work but is building on views he first articulated early in his career in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Girard is promoting a “creative renunciation,” as articulated by Weil, that draws humans away from self-centeredness not in order that they may leave the world but rather in order that they may experience it anew, transformed as they are by their encounters with the holy. Palaver’s interpretation of the holy in Battling to the End, supported by the chapters that precede it, promises to have a strong influence on future studies of this controversial work. 

In Transforming the Sacred into Saintliness, Palaver attests with consummate skill to mimetic theory’s compelling description of human violence and to Girard’s singular account of the transformation of the sacred into a holy that is grounded in the revelation of a nonviolent God. Only a master of the Girardian corpus who also is a skilled and knowledgeable student of other twentieth century thinkers of significance to Girard could hope to achieve what Palaver so admirably does in Transforming the Sacred into Saintliness: a fully realized account of Girard’s theory of the holy that will have a marked impact on Girardian scholarship. The book will be received as a major work of Girardian interpretation of vital significance not only to the future of mimetic theory as undertaken by Girardian scholars but also for scholarship on religion and violence across the disciplines, as some of Girard’s most crucial insights, brought into focus for the first time by Palaver, are shown to constructively challenge, illuminate, and advance that work. 

It is instructive to consider why Bartlett organizes the book around “stories.” What is meant by story here?  The descriptive titles of each of the seven chapters give a hint: “Oppression to Justice,” “Violence to Forgiveness,” “The Land and its Loss,” “Wrath to Compassion,” “Victim to Vindication,” “The Temple and its Deconstruction,” and “History to its End.” Each of these themes “express movement ‘from’ something established and ingrained ‘to’ something unexpected and new” (10). “Story” is the textual vehicle that recollects, understands, and shares such movements in both social and psychological history. Story understood in this way is conversion, confession, testimony. 

As mentioned, Rene Girard’s work and its emphasis on the disclosive power of narratives is a key inspiration. Girard never had a fully formed semiotic theory, but he did have a theory of linguistic origins. On Girard’s telling, the victim of a primordial scapegoating act becomes an object of shared fascination and focus, a transcendental symbol born of violence and mis-recognition (but also of social solidarity) that anchors the linguistic nexus moving forward. The resulting web of meaning founded in that first sign gives birth to the “world” of shared human experience, a world founded in violence and lies. (Perhaps not coincidentally the Greek word sêma, the root of semiotics, can be translated as either “sign” or “grave marker.”) Bartlett claims the Bible, properly interpreted through the lens of the gospel, induces a “semiotic shift,” i.e. “a shift in the way the world is figured and shaped at the most basic level, the level at which signs that give and convey meaning are generated” (11). Jesus as “word” thus becomes a new foundation for a “new generation of meaning.” Each of the stories in Bartlett’s study-guide seeks to undermine the received understanding of a violent God opposing human violence with a more powerful version of the same and to replace it with a loving God interceding peacefully within the economy of human violence. Well-known Old Testament stories and symbols are thus reconfigured and given new meanings. 

A particularly effective example happens in the fourth story. Bartlett catalogues examples of the symbol “cup of wrath” and its connection to “staggering” in the prophets and psalms. Read through the lens of such a symbol, God at first seems to be a purveyor of violence. But Bartlett makes the convincing case that these images describe the situation of humanity being handed over to and inebriated by violence. The sudden insight that human beings are the mis-recognized authors of such Biblical violence gives the gospel stories of Jesus’ cup an astonishing power, saturated as it is with the prefigured “cup of wrath.”

Not every part of Seven Stories hits the mark. The least effective is the “Method” cycle of three lessons that serves as an interpretive introduction. Bartlett tells us in his introduction that it is “very important” and “not to be put off,” a way of “preparing the ground,” so as to allow “the full thrill of the amazing new perspective.” Although there are some helpful parts—Bartlett gives a helpfully succinct history of atonement theory—some of the other material contained in this preparatory chapter would seem to demand a fairly high level of sophistication for a solo reader or group leader. The explanations didn’t strike me as sufficiently clear to those uninitiated in historic-critical or Girardian exegesis. For instance, the introduction to the Girardian theory begins with a rather unhelpful detour through structuralism, a path that adds complication more than illumination. But this is a quibble, since the chapters that follow are so well conceived. 

Bartlett’s focus on stories parallels René Girard’s early focus on the novel and his assertion that “all novelistic conclusions are conversions” (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 295). The most “novelistic” stories are those in which we move from being agents of our own frustration toward an awareness of the second-hand nature of our desires, and thereby adopt a new mind and a new pattern of living. In the Girardian hermeneutic, this means becoming cognizant of our mediators and renouncing desire for the object of rivalry. Novelistic narrative then has the same from-to structure that Bartlett attributes to story:

“[The] hero renounces slavery. Every level of his existence is inverted, all the effects of metaphysical desire are replaced by contrary effects. Deception gives way to truth, anguish to remembrance, agitation to repose, hatred to love, humiliation to humility, mediated desire to autonomy, deviated transcendency to vertical transcendency.” (DDN 294)

There is a significant difference in emphasis between Girard and Bartlett. Whereas a Girardian conversion involves a reconsideration of an object’s desirability upon a change of mediation, Bartlett shows how semiotic dislocation can introduce a change to an entire network of interlinked meanings over time. Despite the difference in emphasis, these are complementary, and even overlapping, accounts of the transformation of meaning. 

Bartlett has articulated some of the theoretic underpinnings in his recent book, Theology Beyond Metaphysics: Transformative Semiotics of Rene Girard (Cascade Books, 2020)—a volume that fruitfully combines mimetic theory with semiotic anthropology [editor: to be reviewed in a forthcoming issue of the Bulletin]. I found a study of Seven Stories to be a perfect entrée into that more theoretical work. Study guides like Seven Stories, rather than just offering polished conclusions, allow a diligent reader the chance to experience the world-altering effect of transformative insight. Story in Bartlett’s sense has the same from-to structure as desire and desire is mimetic. Each of these seven shifts is a move closer to the desire of Jesus. To appropriate these stories into one’s soul is akin to renouncing the mediation of the psycho-economy of violence and accepting the mediation of Jesus, the one who saves and liberates.

Psychopolitics, in fact, has been around since the 1970s, as we learn herein of Oughourlian’s mentor, the ground-breaking psychiatrist Ernest Hacker, who created a chair in psychopolitics at the University of Southern California. Its stated aim was to “shift the focus from policy to psychology in world affairs.” “Inasmuch,” Oughourlian summarizes, “as they are directed by human beings, states are themselves subject to the laws of psychology” (3). This leads to a comprehensive, that is to say a properly anthropological, foundation for political science. A mass of historical information emerges here in a new light, examples of which are drawn from the careers of Mazarin, Talleyrand, George Marshall, and Nelson Mandela. 

The kernel of his argument is formulated by Girard in his forward: “Mimetic rivalry obeys the same laws on both the individual and national levels” (ix). As Oughourlian writes, “Individuals react to one another in exactly the same way as nations do. There is no essential difference, merely a difference of degree” (74). “React” is the key word here: presumed agency emerges as reflexive action in response to another’s. This is a lesson Girard learned from Proust, who in Time Recaptured deftly analyzed the symmetrical patriotisms and recriminations, and mutual accusations of brainwashing, in French and German propaganda during World War I: “In these great quarrels the great ensembles of individuals called nations are behaving to a certain extent like individuals. The logic driving them is perpetually fueled by passion, as we find in the conflict of an amorous quarrel.” Proust’s narrator goes on to suggest analogies with the quarrels between father and son, a cook and her boss, a wife and her husband. Oughourlian’s commentary rightly highlights the religious dimension of such wrangling as a kind of “war of the Gods,” which consists of a “deification of desire”: “Because it is fighting evil, my desire takes on a divine aspect, and thus it is a divine desire…. Thus my god, who is my desire deified, fights your god who (who is your desire deified). My desire is good, yours being the evil one” (25). This is one of many such Molière moments in the text, an instance of the humor that Girard admires in his foreword and that regularly detects similarities just where they are most strenuously denied. As a character quipped in the Pogo cartoons of yore, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Needless to say, the same sort of analysis can be applied to political parties within nations, as we have witnessed on our own shores. This book resonates tellingly with our own political maelstrom, mimetic theory being a compact set of ideas whose time has come, again, and again. We have seen opposing political agendas, however real as to differing goals, being submerged in a swarm of increasingly vitriolic allegations. Hyperbolic polemics have been amplified in our century by the cacophony of internet sites that have effectively displaced traditionally authorized network news sources and forlorn “newspapers of reference.” Sensing that our “virtual world” is displacing the actual one (43, 54), Oughourlian’s analyses may serve as a defining template for current turbulence, as that word derives from Latin “turba,” the crowd.

Oughourlian’s focus is on international relations, where politics, he states, is “totally bankrupt” (40), a situation he dates to the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a result, “there are no precise and credible enemies to be found” (54). The Cold War provided for a clearly delineated, more or less theologized friend/enemy world structure, in terms of the vocabulary provided by Carl Schmitt. In its wake, we do not find ourselves in a more peaceful world but, instead, a turning inward of political rivalries in search of scapegoats for social discontents. The US is experiencing a sacrificial crisis between religion and politics reminiscent of those in Sophoclean tragedy, with the difference that we lack conclusive rituals to resolve it.  In a world in which divine sanctions for violence have been undone by Christian revelation, Oughourlian states “religion gives way to politics” (50). But this statement is reversible: what we experience in the US is politics giving way to religion, to a resacralization of agendas and identities, a phenomenon that we detect in ballot-driven regimes worldwide (readers can fill in the blanks). These “pseudo-monotheisms” (26) rankle against secularism or mere religious pluralism, inventing enemies to tighten circles of allegiance. Oughourlian’s analyses can remind us of Girard’s reading of Julius Caesar in A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare, where he concludes that a true political science cannot be separated from religious anthropology, that sacrificial politics is a pleonasm.

None of this is entirely new. Sophocles has dramatized this “patriotic” pathology in Antigone. In the wake of a civil war that pitted rival brothers for the throne of Thebes, a contention of thematically labeled mimetic doubles, “each slain by his brother’s hand,” Creon seeks to re-establish order by rebranding one brother as the enemy of the state and of all civil order. He describes Polyneices as “consumed with one desire—to burn the gods of his race roof to roots; he thirsted to drink his kinsmen’s blood and sell the rest to slavery” (trans. Robert Fagles). The claim is outrageous; the attacker could not have had such a goal, since his aim is the government, not the total destruction, of his subjects. Creon’s hyperbole seeks to moralize, and in effect theologize the conflict. The twins’ surviving sister cannot assent to refusing burial, and therefore properly human identity, to her sibling. We know how that ends, with Antigone hanging herself and Creon’s son futilely attacking his father and hanging himself, whereupon Creon’s wife kills herself. The play proposes no sequel to this thoroughly King Lear-like denouement, but it is a prequel to our strident disputations. For Sophocles is on board with Oughourlian, as are Shakespeare and Ibsen inter alia, when he states that “politics is not logical but psychological” (5)—and often trends to psychopathology: what starts out as A vs. B devolves to 1+1=1; what appears as difference devolves into identity. 

Ancient Greece was the world’s first democracy, and Sophocles was acutely attuned to its political-religious stresses, which regularly threatened to tear it apart. The United States is the modern world’s first democracy, and a nascent political science of it was not available from its members, but from an outsider, an objective observer: Tocqueville’s reflections remain apposite. This is a position also enjoyed by the somewhat self-exiled Girard, from Avignon to Indiana. Tocqueville foresaw the contention built into our credo, the founding article of faith being “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Jefferson came up with the last phrase in lieu of “property” (from Locke) in his first draft. It is more abstract, not to say vacuous, as a putative object of desire in a world undergoing constant desacralization. Above all it sidesteps the scandalous fact of slavery, of humans as property to be counted among other chattel and commodities of all sorts. Any consideration of American exceptionalism has to take this cornerstone of our prosperity into account. 

The fact that Americans are still quarreling over the consequences of this heritage can be attributed to the “various strategies of denial,” that, as Oughourlian points out, “are what psychopolitics takes as its object of study” (10). If our historical struggle, like Germany’s Historikerstreit over its Nazi past, remains unresolved among us, it is doubtless for reasons alleged by the poet Robert Bly: “It’s possible that the United States has achieved the first consistent culture of denial in the modern world. Denial can be considered as an extension—into all levels of society—of the naïve person’s inability to face the harsh facts of life. This habit of not-seeing, and lying about life, has been attached like a limpet to the American soul” (The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: A Poetry Anthology, 1993). He goes on to say that “Great art and literature are the only models we have left to help us stop lying, to turn and face life.” “To punch a hole in denial” is their epistemic role.  This is the kind of work that Oughourlian assigns to a good therapist: “seeing reality, discovering the real, means rendering conflict null and void, making rivalries empty and dull” (61), and we can ponder this book as a national as well as individual self-help manual. Disillusionment (Cervantine desengaño) is ever the requisite goal. 

Oughourlian describes freedom in terms of a “struggle with oneself,” for which he prescribes a kind of asceticism, and elsewhere metanoia, conversion (with an assist from Peter Sloterdijk). This may be too much to ask in a nation-state where freedom is strategically confused with a zany array of consumer choices and conceived by many as embodied in macho gunslinging. During the pandemic in the US, libraries have been closed but not purveyors of assault rifles, which are only good for hunting human flesh. Though Oughourlian’s analyses first appeared in French ten years ago, they lose none of their freshness as a diagnosis for the relatively young United States, which at present bears too many symptoms of a delayed, contagious adolescence.