Bulletin 83 – February 2025

This is my promised follow-up essay in the Bulletin after addressing the dangers of Constantinianism last August. This time I will focus on the mysterious figure of the katechon that is mentioned in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, as a restrainer against the reign of the man of the lawless one: „And you know what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed when his time comes. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it is removed” (2 Thess. 2:6-7 NRS). The katechon is the restrainer of the lawless one whom the tradition often identified with the Antichrist. He or it prevents the outbreak of total chaos that, according to certain apocalyptic traditions, will precede the second coming of Christ. During the reign of the katechon, lawlessness will not break out, and this will also postpone the return of Jesus. The restrainer was first identified with the Roman Empire and later with other forces of order that were able to contain violence. Today the concept of the katechon is discussed all over the world as a concept of political philosophy or of political theology. In the Western world it became widely known through the work of Carl Schmitt, who from 1936 onwards referred to it frequently. I came across the katechon during my work on Schmitt that I started during my time at Stanford University in 1991/1992 (Palaver 1992). When Raymund Schwager and I organized the first European COV&R conference in Wiesbaden (Germany) in 1994, it was he who convinced me to present a paper on the katechon because he thought this was an unknown topic that should be addressed and will be remembered afterwards. I followed his advice, and it turned out that he was right. The published version of my lecture is still read and discussed (Palaver 1995). The topic was later also taken up by René Girard and people following him. Most prominently also Peter Thiel refers to the katechon frequently.

In the following I will use mimetic theory to explain the concept, address the dangers of a Schmittian understanding of it, and show how it might remain a useful concept if it is understood properly. I take Girard’s distinction between the sacred that stems from the scapegoat mechanism and the holy that is given by the nonviolent God as a starting point (Palaver 2020). From this perspective, the katechon belongs to the world of the sacred. The katechon is a concept of order that contains violence in both senses of the word “contain.” Like the scapegoat mechanism, it uses a certain amount of violence to suppress the total outbreak of a violence of all against all. We have some evidence for these roots of the katechon in the violent sacred. Many myths refer to a power or a person like a katechon that keeps chaos, often described as a dragon or a monster, in check. In Egypt, the god Horus, for example, was called a binder of the dragon (katéchon drákonta).

If the katechon belongs to the world of the old sacred, however, how can it become a key concept in the New Testament that results from the overcoming of the old world of the sacred? My preferred explanation is to read the Second Letter to the Thessalonians as a later reaction to the early Christians who were enthusiastically expecting the immediate return of Jesus Christ and stopped to care for their ordinary life. It is a reaction from an already Constantinian perspective that tries to adjust Christianity to the much more mundane needs of a world that is content with a sacrificial version of Christianity, to refer to a Girardian concept. The French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil claimed that already the Book of Revelation is addressing this “corruption of Christianity” in her interpretation of the image about “the beast that had been wounded by the sword and yet lived” (Rev. 13:14 NRS): “The mortal blow that the Beast received, was it not the crucifixion of Christ? And when the Beast revived, was it not through the adoption of Christianity as the official religion? Perhaps the author of the Apocalypse simply foresaw that event. Christians must have hoped for it and thought about it long before Constantine” (Weil 1970, pp. 304–305). Weil might be wrong about her interpretation of this verse, but she is certainly right about a slow deviation from the message of the Gospels that led toward sacrificial Christianity. Jacob Taubes, a Jewish philosopher of religion who was in dialogue with Carl Schmitt, explicitly saw the katechon as a Constantinian concept: “The Kat-echon, the restrainer that Schmitt contemplates, is already an early sign of how the Christian experience of the End of the World was domesticated and came to an arrangement with the world and its powers” (Taubes 2013, p. 13). There are indeed scholars who clearly claim a late date for the Second Letter to the Thessalonians. According to Maarten J. J. Menken, for instance, the letter “was written some time between the year 80 and the early second century CE” (Menken 1994, p. 65). There are, however, also scholars who insist on an early date of the letter. Klaus Berger and Christiane Nord date it between 50 and 56, quite close to Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians. Such an early date, however, does not mean that it was written by Paul and that it shares his theology. These two authors see it as a “completely independent document” representing a “Jewish-Christian apocalypticism, which places great emphasis on the future revelation of Jesus Christ in glory. The death and resurrection of Jesus play no role, nor does the doctrine of justification. All of this suggests more archaic conditions rather than a late imitation of Paul, which would already be strongly re-apocalypticized” (Berger and Nord, pp. 48–49). We can conclude that it is either a letter written decades after Paul with a strong Constantinian leaning, or it stems from the time of Paul, but comes from a tradition closer to the sacred of early religions. Both possibilities show that it is not part of Saint Paul’s theological writings but only tries to look like them.

This becomes even more obvious as soon as we turn toward Paul’s own writings. Paul is not unaware that societies need forces of order, as we can see in his Letter to the Romans, in which he claims that all authority stems from God and that the governing authorities justly wear the sword as a servant of God (Rom. 13:4). This endorsement of an institution of order, however, is not in expectation of a long or ongoing functioning of it but is related to Paul’s expectation of an immediate return of Jesus, as he also expressed it in his First Letter to the Thessalonians. He remarked regarding time: „Salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers” (Rom. 13:11 NRS). Jacob Taubes underlined Paul’s view of time that results in a short-term view of institutions of order (Taubes 2004, p. 53). Paul’s warning in the First Letter to the Thessalonians that whoever promises „peace and security” (1 Thess. 5:3 NRS) will soon be confronted with destruction is also not compatible with the concept of the katechon that promises exactly that type of security. Girard’s reading of this passage underlines the fact that the old sacred lost all its strength after Jesus exposed its roots (Girard 2010, pp. 117–118).

As soon as we understand that the Second Letter to the Thessalonians is not compatible with Paul’s writing and the core of the Gospels, it becomes clear that it is much closer to the sacred than to the holy. This also explains the katechon’s deep ambivalence because by suppressing lawlessness it also postpones the second coming of Jesus. Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is a perfect example of a katechon who asks Jesus to never return because he disturbs the established order.

Schmitt’s interpretation of the katechon lacks all its ambivalence. It is a Constantinian sacralization of this figure that even leads back to the pre-axial mixture of politics and religion. He put all his faith into the restrainer as he noted in his private notebook: “I believe in the katéchon; he is the only possibility for me to understand history and find its meaning as a Christian” (Schmitt 2015, p. 47). It is also no surprise that Schmitt identified with the Grand Inquisitor because he helped to “de-anarchize Christianity” and make “the effect of Christ innocuous in the social and political arena” (Schmitt 2015, 184). By turning the katechon into a proper and undoubtedly Christian concept, Schmitt loses any distinction between the sacred and the holy. It results in an understanding of Christianity that no longer can distinguish between religion and politics or church and state. Jacob Taubes realized this lack in Schmitt’s political theology when he told him in a letter against the accusation of Spinoza as the destroyer of the unity of religion and politics that it was rather Paul whom Schmitt should blame: “It was not the ‘first liberal Jew’ who discovered this point of rupture, but the Apostle Paul […] He had distinguished inside from outside even for ‘the political.’ Without such a distinction we are at the mercy of throne and powers that, in a ‘monistic’ cosmos, have no sense of a hereafter. One can argue over the boundary between the spiritual and the worldly, and this boundary will constantly be redrawn (an everlasting task of political theology), but if this distinction is neglected, then we breathe our last (Occidental) breath” (Taubes 2013, pp. 29-30).

Taubes is right about the danger he mentioned in this letter to Schmitt. We see that clearly today in Russia, where quite a few Russian thinkers who support Putin are following Schmitt’s interpretation of the katechon (Lewis 2021, pp. 193–214). The Russian Orthodox Church too, supports Putin’s war against Ukraine by a quite similar understanding of the katechon. In March 2024, the World Russian People’s Council, under the chairmanship of Patriarch Kirill, released an edict titled “The Present and Future of the Russian World” that declared the Russian war against Ukraine a “holy war” and referred to Russia as a “katechon” to protect the “world from the onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West that has fallen into Satanism.” As in Schmitt’s understanding, all ambivalence of this figure is missing. It again does not recognize the important distinction between church and state.

Is Peter Thiel’s understanding of the katechon also missing its ambivalence and its sacred roots? Thiel recognizes the ambivalence when he frequently mentions how easily the katechon may turn into the Antichrist. A world in fear of its own self-destruction might long for a katechontic protector that could no longer be distinguished from the world state with which Thiel identifies the Antichrist. In his Paris lecture of 2023, he stated that also the katechon is not enough. More recently Thiel expressed the demand “Don’t immanentize the katechon” by expressing a parallel to Eric Voegelin’s warning that the eschaton must not be immanentized. Voegelin’s insight stems from the many hellish attempts to create heaven on earth. Voegelin, however, is referring to the transcendent realm of the holy that is always divinely given and should not be turned into a human effort. To immanentize eschaton would be an instrumentalization and even weaponization of the holy. To claim that the katechon (rather than the eschaton) should not be immanentized is something completely different and confuses again the distinction between the sacred and the holy.

The katechon is nothing divine or holy but results from the human creation of the sacred. It lacks true transcendence and is only an immanent force of order cloaked in false transcendence as long as the sacred is not completely spent. It needs to be desacralized so that its immanent nature becomes obvious. It is the task of the Church to desacralize the katechon by living as a communion of saints. Despite his attempt to prevent the absolutization of the katechon, Thiel is still too much focused on the katechon. It is his Constantinian temptation that is already visible in his essay “The Straussian Moment” when he longed, regarding the crisis of the world after 9/11, for a Christian political leader: “What then must be done, by the Christian statesman or stateswoman aspiring to be a wise steward for our time?” (Thiel 2007, p. 214). Thiel’s Paris lecture of 2023, too, discusses the katechon in view of Pierre Manent’s political criticism of Girard’s mimetic theory and tends more toward Manent then toward Girard’s stress on saintliness. We should not view Girard’s call for saintliness as a completely apolitical and individualistic approach but understand it as a political stance embodied by the church, as I learned it from Stanley Hauerwas, who claims that “Christianity is mostly a matter of politics—politics as defined by the gospel” (Hauerwas/Willimon 1989, p. 30). 

Understanding the political task of the church with Hauerwas helps to recognize in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics a profound example of what it means to desacralized the katechon and how important it is to distinguish between the task of the church and the task of states or other political institutions of order (Bonhoeffer 2005, pp. 131-133). According to Bonhoeffer, the restrainer is responsible for order and must set limits to evil. The katechon, however, is “not God” and “not without guilt, but God uses it to protect the world from disintegration.” The church has a different task by embodying “the miracle of a new awakening of faith” and by bearing “witness to Jesus Christ as living lord.” This difference between the church and the forces of order does not, however, prevent an alliance between them in the face of imminent chaos. By preaching the risen Jesus Christ, the Church “forces the custodians of power in particular to listen and change their ways” without, however, rejecting them arrogantly by claiming a moral superiority. Bonhoeffer’s interpretation differs significantly from Schmitt and is close to the holy.

Girard was aware of Schmitt’s reading of the katechon and was also not thinking that we can do without a katechon. He distinguished the katechon as a Christian concept from the original scapegoat mechanism from which it has broken free, but admits at the same time that it “still retains a little of the old order, without which nothing would stand in the way of absolute violence” (Girard 2014, 98). This comes close to Schmitt. Girard, however, moved later closer towards Bonhoeffer, closer to the holy. In his book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning he addresses the topic of the katechon again and highlights its ambivalence by stating that it “contains” the apocalypse “in the twofold sense of the word as noted by J.-P. Dupuy: to have within itself and to hold within certain limits” (Girard 2001, p. 186). This goes beyond Schmitt. In the original French edition of this book, he remarks that the delay of the apocalypse is not so much caused by the political forces of order but by people who follow the path of God’s kingdom. The delay “is due again, and perhaps above all, to the behavior of individuals who strive to renounce violence and discourage the spirit of retaliation” (Girard 1999, p. 287). This sentence touches with Bonhoeffer’s view of the church’s task to “prevent the final fall into the abyss” (Bonhoeffer 2005, p. 131). It is strange why Girard’s endorsement of nonviolence is omitted in the English translation because he takes up the same thought in his later book on Clausewitz, in which he distanced himself from Schmitt’s attempt to prevent the escalation to extremes with legal means. For this reason, he again emphasizes how essential Christian love is to delay the apocalypse: “Without this love, the world would have exploded long ago. We should not say that there are no legitimate, healthy political actions. However, politics is in itself powerless to control the rise of negative undifferentiation. It is more than ever up to each one of us to hold back the worst; this is what being in an eschatological time means” (Girard 2010, p. 131). We must connect these words with Girard’s reflections on the relationship between the church and the empire. Like Schmitt, he understood that “the empire tended to hold back the rise of violence” (Girard 2010, p. 198). Contrary to Schmitt, however, he recognized the “collapse of the idea of empire” and knew that its attempt to create peace through domination (pax romana, pax sovietica, pax americana) is a “falsehood” that has been “exhausted.” Pope John Paul II’s act of repentance in the year 2000 was, according to Girard, a triumph of the church over itself that gained worldwide significance: “Before our eyes, it succeeded in expelling all imperial ideas, at the very point when its temporal power disappeared” (Girard 2010, p. 201).

The futility of empires has been forgotten in recent years. To revitalize this concept politically today is dangerous and may result in a catastrophe. We should instead strengthen attempts to create a world in which sisters and brothers live together in a framework of a universal polyhedron.

References

Berger, Klaus, and Christiane Nord, eds. Das Neue Testament und früchristliche Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 2001.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Ethics. Translated by Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West and Douglas W. Stott. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005.

Girard, René. Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1999.

________. Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre. Translated by Mary Baker Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 2010.

________. The One by Whom Scandal Comes. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014.

Hauerwas, Stanley, and William H. Willimon. Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989.

Lewis, David G. Russia’s New Authoritarianism: Putin and the Politics of Order. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021.

Menken, Maarten J. J. 2 Thessalonians. London: Routledge, 1994.

Palaver, Wolfgang. “A Girardian Reading of Schmitt’s Political Theology.” Telos, no. 93 (1992): 43-68.

________. “Hobbes and the Katéchon: The Secularization of Sacrificial Christianity.” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 2 (1995): 57-74.

________. Transforming the Sacred into Saintliness: Reflecting on Violence and Religion with René Girard. Elements in Religion and Violence. Edited by James R. Lewis and Margo Kitts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Schmitt, Carl. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. Translated by G. L. Ulmen. New York: Telos Press, Ltd., 2006.

________. Glossarium. Aufzeichnungen aus den Jahren 1947 bis 1958. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2015.

Taubes, Jacob. The Political Theology of Paul. Translated by Dana Hollander. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004.

________. To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections. Translated by Keith Tribe. Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

Thiel, Peter. “The Straussian Moment.” In Politics & Apocalypse, edited by Robert Hamerton-Kelly, 189-218. East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 2007.

Weil, Simone. First and Last Notebooks. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Lear lastly addresses his youngest child, Cordelia, with the same question. Having witnessed the hypocrisy and rivalry between her older sisters, Cordelia responds to her father in a straightforward honest way with three words: “Nothing my lord.” Cordelia’s response infuriates her father, the king, and Lear banishes her from his kingdom without her share.  Cordelia is the first scapegoat, but the scapegoating does not end with Cordelia. Lear’s close friend, Kent, is next: He steps in between King Lear and Cordelia to calm King Lear and have him change his mind, only to be violently refuted and be exiled as well. In this first act of Branagh’s adaptation, we see mimetic doubling between the two elder sisters and two cases of the scapegoat mechanism.   

Having shown us both the mimetic rivalry and the scapegoat mechanism, Branagh cuts to the first scene of the second act to show us the second doubling.  The doubling is between the two rival sons of Gloucester, the brothers Edmund and Edgar, whose mirroring rivalry turns into doubling. There is a slight difference in being favored by their father between the brothers which creates envy. Edgar is the natural son while Edmund is the bastard son. Edmund highlights this difference for his reason to rival his brother to death:

…Lag of a brother?
Why bastard? Wherefore base?…
Why brand us?
With base? With baseness? With Bastardy? Base? Base?
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land,
Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow. I prosper.

The usage and repetition of the words “bastard,” “base,” “brand,” “baseness,” “bastardy,” and again “base” not only establishes the double nature of the two brothers, but also Edmund’s contempt towards his father and brother. Branagh leaves the last lines of Edmund’s soliloquy to fulfill the elimination of one double by the other. With the creation of the second pair of doubles, Shakespeare, the master mimetic playwright, uses the first set of doubles, the daughters of King Lear, to lust after and desire Edmund.  What keeps the sisters at peace with one another is the fact that their father is alive and is their common enemy. Girard points out “As long as Lear is around, if only as a scapegoat, they remain united, if not with him and in him, then against him.”

Having established two sets of doubles who rival one another, Branagh surprises us by having the actor playing Cordelia portray the Fool as well, thereby creating a set of theatrical doubles rather than mimetic doubles between the two characters cast with one actor. This choice, though a possible surprise for the 2024 audience, is not an original theatrical choice, as it was used in performances as early as 1606. The rational for this theatrical doubling is twofold: both Cordelia and the Fool speak the truth to the king, and  in doing so love him unconditionally till death separates them. The Fool accompanies Kent into banishment, and like him, and like Cordelia, is a scapegoat, but the theatrical doubling here draws attention to the role they both play in the changing of Lear’s heart.

The usage of doubles in literature and art is not new, but Girard is the first literary critic to point out that doubles are never good news. Going back to his analysis of doubles in the Bible or Greek tragedies, he shows that doubles must either be separated by death or an act of mercy. In King Lear, at the end when Lear meets Cordelia, he has a dramatic conversion, where he recognizes his foolishness and blindness of scapegoating Cordelia and begs for forgiveness. Lear’s conversion, however, is too late, as Edmund and his army arrive, take over, and execute Cordelia. Without showing how Cordelia was killed by being hung, Branagh’s production ends with the dead Cordelia in her father’s arms, where Lear himself exhales his last breath.

An extraordinary two-hour production, without showing excessive violence, as most contemporary productions tend to, Branagh’s adaptation of King Lear remained true to both Shakespeare and to Girard by showing what the mimetic staging could yield and look like. Branagh’s adaptation managed to show us that, like A Midsummers Night’s Dream and Shakespeare’s other masterpieces, King Lear contains all the mimetic dynamics that make it not only a highly mimetic play but one that could be used as a blueprint for understanding the Bard’s other plays.

“The system works under informal rules that say that once the result is known, the loser must make a speech recognizing the loss and congratulating the winner. And the winner must make a speech acknowledging the voters of the opposing party and promising to be the President of the whole country, of all the people. The first months after a presidential election were traditionally known as the honeymoon period. The current crisis stems from the fact that the stage of dualist antagonism too often persists beyond the moment of the election and does not give way to the moment of renewed unity.”

Confrontation seems indispensable; it does not frighten Americans—on the contrary, their culture rests on the idea that imposing a framework on vengeance, not banishing it from the outset, is the most effective way to regulate violence. The trial is a veritable workshop or experimental lab in which pieces of evidence are presented in vivo and publicly put to the test. Lawyers play a central role. As Daniel Schimmel observes, “one of the most important aspects is the hostile questioning of witnesses, what is called cross-examination, meaning that the witness is interrogated by the attorney of the adverse party. And the adverse party’s attorney will try to undermine the witness’s credibility by confronting the witness with documents or by bringing out inconsistencies with the witness’s previous testimony, since witnesses are called to testify twice.

“The objective in an American trial is to make the jury determine that ‘my version’ of the facts is more credible than the adversary’s version. It’s a sort of workshop for the production of truth,” Schimmel concludes, “where every actor—the judge, the lawyers, the witnesses, the adverse parties—are all playing a role in the sense that they must persuade the jurors to look at them with confidence.” Here we are poles apart from French culture, which posits that only a symbolic authority with a monopoly on legitimate violence that is located above the parties can make order reign.

The English word for “trial” [unlike the French word procès, “process”] harks back to the ritual ordeals found in practically every human civilization. We shall ask how the American trial is structured around vengeance. What makes possible that peculiar alchemy that converts vengeance into renewed social peace? If it depends on confidence in—and indeed devotion to—the rules of the game, is that not precisely what is in danger today?

While the vertical axis joins heaven and earth, the horizontal joins human beings to one another. From the vertical, Serres derives the hard sciences; from the horizontal, the human sciences. Religion does both, and Serres examines in chapter 2 how Christianity opens alternatives to violent forms of sociality and potentially converts other forms of binding. He begins with a reading of the story of Peter’s denial of Jesus that tacitly follows Girard’s in The Scapegoat and complements its analysis of the mimetic dynamics by seeing it as shifting our understanding of evil from individual guilt to society: the web of relations, even in a small group gathered around a fire, that could ensnare the saint-to-be.

A reflection on attending the televised funeral of Léopold Senghor launches the contrast between false, especially electronically mediated, forms of communion and true communion revealed through biblical revelation and the Christian doctrines of Incarnation, Trinity, and Resurrection. Again Serres builds implicitly on Girard’s treatment of topics such as the transitions from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to the prohibition of killing, but with added connections, such as, in this case, to the significance of eating without killing in the Eucharist. A discussion of “belonging,” the title of a late essay by Girard, sets up a sequence on non-exclusive “nonbelonging,” with the Holy Family as model of moving from familial obligation to free choice through love. Love is Serres’s inevitable word for positive binding, made rich and even, in a good way, strange by his expansive, synthetic context.

The final chapter comes round to focus explicitly on Girard’s theory as the key to understanding human evil, that is, evil as human and social and the product of exclusion. This basic insight underscores that deliverance must come from outside ourselves. It is an ambivalent final note but one that also suggests seeing in all of the forms of binding Serres has explored on a human level, including religion and science in the broadest senses, also a map of the movement of grace.

Serres and Girard make a wonderfully complementary pair. It strikes me here that the Atonement, the usual focus of theological interest among Girardians, is the one major doctrine concerning the life of Christ that Serres does not dwell on—though it might be seen in the cruciform shape of vertical and horizontal binding. By following the light of the other great doctrines, however, Serres expands the Girardian unveiling. If Girard tended toward pessimism and focused more on the demonic aspects of human life that he did so much to help us understand, Serres is more of an optimist, interested in our angelic dimension (so beautifully depicted in his Angels: A Modern Myth). If the apocalyptic is for Girard primarily the unleashing of violence that comes with its unveiling, Serres is more attuned to its new possibilities of communion. In this final, lyrical statement, he gives us the binocular vision we need.

From Catharsis to Contagion: A Hyper-Contemporary Mimesis

In the second volume, The Affective Hypothesis, Lawtoo shifts attention from the paradigm of catharsis, inherited from Greek tragedy and Freud, to the phenomenon of mimetic contagion. Through a rigorous engagement with Plato, Aristotle, Girard, and many others, the author develops the concept of hyper-mimesis to describe the multiplication and diffusion of imitative models in digital culture. Lawtoo particularly analyzes the role of digital media, demonstrating how they amplify mimetic dynamics in unprecedented ways, making violence less controllable and more fragmented.

An emblematic example is his analysis of the film Vice (2015), used by Lawtoo to illustrate how contemporary media transform the representation of violence into a participatory simulation. Bruce Willis, playing the character Julian Michaels, invites viewers into a lawless world, “a utopian paradise where you can have or do anything you want” (vol. I, The Catharsis Hypothesis, p. xv). The pathos of violent simulation, seemingly confined to the virtual world, threatens to spill over, influencing emotions and actions in the real world, or, as Lawtoo puts it “bleed into the real world” (vol. II, The Affective Hypothesis, p. 244).

A Genealogical and Interdisciplinary Approach

One of the distinctive features of Lawtoo’s work is his ability to weave together genealogy and interdisciplinarity. In the two volumes, he traces a trajectory from Plato and Aristotle to Nietzsche, Freud, Girard, and contemporary neuroscience, demonstrating how the concepts of catharsis and contagion have traversed centuries of philosophical, psychological, and scientific thought, becoming part and parcel of Western culture. This genealogical perspective is not an end in itself but becomes a tool for analyzing contemporary challenges.

For instance, Lawtoo shows how Aristotle’s idea of catharsis was reinterpreted by Freud and then expanded by Girard. However, he emphasizes that in contemporary digital culture, the representation of violence no longer functions as a form of catharsis but as a mechanism for amplifying emotional contagion. In this sense, Lawtoo’s contribution extends and revises classical mimetic theory, engaging with discoveries in neuroscience about mirror neurons and empathy, with and beyond Girardians’ acquisitions. 

The Role of the Mimetic Unconscious

One of Lawtoo’s most significant innovations is the development of the concept of mimetic unconscious, which differs from Freud’s Oedipal unconscious in its collective and performative nature. While the Oedipal unconscious is rooted in familial conflict, the mimetic unconscious develops through social interaction and identification with others. It is not merely a reflection of preexisting desires but a matrix that generates affects and actions in response to external stimuli.

This perspective allows Lawtoo to address contemporary phenomena such as racism, misogyny, and political radicalization not as isolated events but as collective dynamics fueled by mimetic mechanisms. In particular, he highlights the role of digital media in creating virtual communities that amplify affective contagion, making violence an increasingly global phenomenon.

Mimesis and Neuroscience: With and Beyond Mimetic Theory

Another noteworthy aspect of Lawtoo’s contribution is the dialogue between philosophy and neuroscience. By integrating the theory of mirror neurons, he demonstrates that mimesis is not only a cultural phenomenon but also has deep biological roots. This interdisciplinary approach strengthens his critique of Girard, showing that mimesis is not limited to the repetition of desires or behaviors but involves neurological mechanisms that influence how we perceive and respond to others.

The discovery of mirror neurons confirms that mimesis is inscribed in our physiology, making it even more urgent to understand its implications in contemporary cultural and social contexts. This insight opens new avenues for mimetic studies, suggesting that a deeper understanding of the biology of mimesis could provide tools to address complex phenomena such as media violence and populism.

Conclusions: A Diptych for the Future of Mimetic Theory

With The Catharsis Hypothesis and The Affective Hypothesis, Nidesh Lawtoo makes an essential contribution by actually opening the field of mimetic studies, demonstrating that critical theory can and must evolve to address the challenges of the present. His constructive critique of Girard, accompanied by a dialogue with neuroscience, classical philosophy, and media studies, makes these volumes indispensable for anyone interested in violence, digital culture, and mimetic theory.

Indeed, Lawtoo’s contributions to the field of mimetic studies go beyond these two inputs: he is leading a comprehensive research project that has already produced a number of other results—most of which are listed and presented on the Homo Mimeticus website—by revisiting the centrality of the affective, performative, and behavioral side of imitation in disciplines as diverse as literary theory, performance studies, musicology, political theory, film studies, and continental philosophy.

We might say that Lawtoo’s aim, both in these two books and in the Homo Mimeticus project, is not so much to dilute Girard’s take on desire, violence, and the sacred but to focus our attention on the notion of mimesis, in a broader sense, while adopting much from Girard’s ways: for instance his dialogical manners and his intuitive understanding of the relevance of adopting a multiplicity of perspectives (for instance, here are listed quite a few video-interviews with mimeticists of international stature).

Inasmuch as they represent a synthesis of such an extensive and dedicated approach, these two volumes not only deepen our understanding of mimetic dynamics but also offer a more flexible and inclusive theoretical model capable of embracing the complexity of our times. Indeed, recognizing the transformative potential of mimesis means not only understanding the past but also imagining new possibilities for the future.

Woodward observes that many of our churches have taken their lead from the wider culture—becoming obsessed with celebrities, putting pastors on pedestals—and domineering leadership that results has almost inevitably led to rivalry, chaos, and scapegoating in the congregation. It has been a poor witness to the world. Woodward has argued consequently that the powers and principalities can and ought to be disclosed and understood in mimetic terms as negative influences or hidden models that leaders have to confront and unmask in order to better imitate Christ—to resist “the temptations common to fallen leadership.” Mimetic theory, Woodward continues, ties together the imitation-based conceptual framework of the book, because “through Girard we learn that, ultimately, we will either imitate the Powers or Christ. There is no neutral ground. And our ultimate model will determine the nature of our incarnational leadership.” 

Woodward’s discussion, based on his doctoral dissertation, is certainly wide-ranging. On the powers and principalities, he surveys an impressive amount of scholarship, ranging from that of Lesslie Newbigin, Marva Dawn, Clinton Arnold, Rudolf Bultmann, and Hendrik Berkhof to Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and C. B. Caird. On missional leadership, Woodward takes in the work of Craig Van Gelder and Alan Roxburgh, Dwight Zscheile, Alan Hirsch, and Michael Frost. On mimetic theory, he considers the work of James Alison, Grant Kaplan, Wolfgang Palaver, Scott Cowdell, and Michael Kirwan. He provides a fresh review of most of the key mimetic ideas, covering in particular Girard’s deconstruction of Satan, and he also defends Girard from some of the usual critiques levelled at mimetic theory. 

Some of the most pertinent sections of the book are the case studies of the rise and fall of Mars Hill Church and its pastor Mark Driscoll, and Bill Hybels and Willow Creek Community Church. The best biographical vignettes are those of William Stringfellow and Oscar Romero. For Stringfellow, biography was “inherently theological” since “we are each one of us parables.” Stringfellow had refused at a young age to become a priest and appeared to commit his life to refuting the idea that serious commitment to the Christian faith required ordination—maybe “his first encounter of religion as a principality and power,” but certainly not the last. 

In the story of Oscar Romero, the martyred archbishop and saint of San Salvador, Woodward illustrates what he describes as a model of kenotic spirituality and leadership. “The scandal of leadership,” Woodward writes, “can go in one of two directions: by falling to the Powers via the mimetic cycle, we can scandalize those who look to us as leaders, or we can scandalously imitate Christ. In other words we can avoid becoming a negative scandal by following the scandalous way of Jesus in our approach to leadership.” Following a close mimetic reading of Philippians, especially the Ode to Christ in verses 2:5-11—where Christ “emptied himself” and became “obedient to the point of death”—Woodward points to Romero as another model of “revolutionary humble obedience.”

In Romero’s refusal to exploit his status as archbishop and his identification with the poor of San Salvador, Woodward recounts the life of a leader who regularly “emptied himself,” just as St Paul himself said he had to “die daily” (1 Cor 15:31). Woodward insists that for us too, “if we want to move from the domain of death to the domain of life, we must adopt a new mindset, which will require us first realizing that if we try to construct our identity in competition with others, we will lose it. We will live as fragmented anxious people. However, if we die to this way of constructing a sense of self and give ourselves to God and others, we will find that our sense of self becomes integrated—we can become our true selves in God.” 

Girard himself, of course, has made this fundamental point about Jesus’s own example—that, unlike most gurus who are self-referential, claiming to have no model, Jesus points to the Father. As St. John writes, “the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because what the Father does the Son also does” (5:19). Woodward points out, quoting Cowdell, that for us in turn our new self is a gift that emerges through a process “of conversion away from the desires of others toward the desire of Christ—the ultimate other—so the self is created by the influence of his self.” 

The insights in The Scandal of Leadership, then, have been developed through the work of many others, but their presentation here with an emphasis, James Alison writes, on “avoiding the dysfunction and destructive patterns of church life,” will likely reach new readers, perhaps even some who have earlier bypassed Girard in a different context. As a modified dissertation, The Scandal of Leadership does bear some of the more challenging hallmarks of academic writing, including a lengthy literature review at the start and a fair amount of rhetorical scaffolding. As Woodward admits in his preface, he has taken an “academic approach” here. But he hopes to publish in future “a couple of popular-level books” to bring the important message of this work to even wider audiences. 

Haven writes that this experience “marks Girard’s transition from being a clever up-and-coming lit critic to something more profound” (6). In this she is following Girard’s own thinking, most clearly expressed in his book on Dostoyevsky, that “genius” is attained (both achieved and bestowed) via the process of conversion. Literary genius consists in seeing through one’s own lies. In the case of the novelists that Girard read, this conversion found its literary expression in the imagery and symbols of Christianity. In Girard’s life it found literal expression in the sense of going to confession for the first time in years, having his children baptized and renewing his wedding vows with his wife, Martha. His writing about the novelists’ conversion was part of the process that allowed something analogous to occur in him. Now, it is the reader’s turn. Our reading of his writings, our writings about his writings are meant to have similar impact on us. Girard came to himself, he discovered himself lost in a dark wood, and what he did with that discovery was to try to express it in such a way that we, his readers, might open ourselves to undergoing a similar experience. As Haven expresses it elsewhere, “René’s ideas are like a bomb, but it doesn’t explode outward, it explodes inward in us.”   

Thus, the way Girard became Girard is to be recapitulated by us insofar as we, each one of us, are to become ourselves. In Girard’s words from The Scapegoat: “We must question ourselves if we are to understand the enormity of the mystery. Each person must ask what his relationship is to the scapegoat. I am not aware of my own, and I am persuaded that the same holds true for my readers. We only have legitimate enmities. And yet the entire universe swarms with scapegoats” (41). I have to free myself or let myself be freed from the snares and delusions of mimetic conflict. 

There are two important, if rather obvious conclusions to be drawn from these considerations. The first is that it is difficult. We really are blind most of the time, and most blind to our own blindness. Our defences are difficult for us to crack. We need some outside help. Girard makes us aware that the Bible can teach us something about these matters, if we are prepared to receive its lessons. The story of David and Bathsheba serves a sort of master class. David sees her, wants her, takes her. The mimetic forces driving him are not so difficult to guess at, but it does not end there. Uriah, called back from the front, shows his solidarity with his men and his integrity as soldier when he refuses to go home to wife’s amorous embraces. This drives David to extremes. He has him killed. The prophet Nathan shows his wisdom in not confronting David directly with his misdeeds. That would only bring defensiveness and anger from the king as well as possible death to the prophet. Instead, the prophet presents the king with a case for his judgment: A rich man with many herds chooses to steal the single ewe-lamb of his impoverished neighbor rather than sacrifice one of his own for a guest. David is outraged and wants to have the man who did this executed. Nathan then reveals: “That man is you.” Many of Jesus’s parables work in a similar way. They get in under our defences and then explode inward.

The second point is that this process of examining ourselves is on-going in the sense of never ending. Each stage of life has its own forms of mimetic entrapment. Each one of us plays David at some point and Nathan at another. Getting through the various challenges of renouncing our sinfulness does not guarantee that we will not fall for the traps that surround the prophet. Nathan has his own set of challenges. We overcome one form of rivalry only to confront another, subtly different but substantially the same. 

Haven provides us with useful historical precedents for the kind of experience that Girard had. These include Descartes, Pascal, and Weil. Each of these thinkers had profound, inexpressible, interior experiences, which they sought to give expression to in their writings. Haven sees Girard as having “recorded his experience not in science, poetry, or mathematics, but in erudite French prose; … He pored over ancient texts and studied anthropology, sociology, history, trying to explain what he had understood very quickly, over the very condensed period in those months of 1958 and 1959” (14-15). 

Girard’s explicit claim is that turning to the Gospel of Christ “is the conversion that is demanded by a great work of art” (17). The implicit claim is that this kind of conversion is demanded not only to create the great work of art but also to apprehend it in its greatness. And even that is just the beginning.