Bulletin 84 – May 2025

Although King professes only to treat a limited number of feminist and womanist theologians, she nonetheless explores a variety of theological opinions about when and how atonement theories and sacrificial language can be applied. Of particular note are those who highlight how sin can be recast from a specific act to a passive response, in some cases a passive response to injustice. For someone caught in an abusive domestic relationship, a theology that demands sacrifice—understood in such a manner as to require acceptance and continued abuse as a form of “taking up the cross”—is, in no uncertain terms, death-dealing. One does not need to be a feminist theologian to recognize how non-redemptive such an interpretation would be, but it is theologians like Delores Williams who have highlighted the problems of this interpretation for those closest to the margins. After treating these positions, King affirms them in the broad sense while pointing toward the need to account for how “forgiveness, healing, and transformation can occur” (67). For King, the Cross, understood correctly, functions as an agent for such redemptive action in the here and now.

Chapters 3 and 4 take up Girard most directly, as King judiciously summarizes the logic of Girard’s non-sacrificial reading of the Gospels expounded in Things Hidden (see Book II, ch. 2, “A Non-Sacrificial Reading of the Gospel Text”). She then lays out, through the now-published epistolary exchange between Girard and Raymund Schwager, how Schwager pushed Girard to reconsider his non-sacrificial reading and replace it with a self-sacrificial reading. Through a consideration of Solomon’s judgment regarding rival claims of motherhood, Girard comes to see the true mother’s renunciation of her rights to the child under contestation as sacrificial, in the sense of being self-sacrificial—it “represents a form of sacrifice characterized by selflessness and love” (100). King summarizes the apex of the exchange on sacrifice as follows: “The death of Christ could be understood as salvific because it transformed and reversed the scapegoating mechanism from within. This reversal set free those who had been innocently scapegoated throughout history” (104). This interpretation of the Cross forecloses the bad understanding of sacrifice brought to the surface by the feminist theologians surveyed earlier in the book.

In the final chapter, King advances a theology of atonement by asking, among other  pertinent questions, what is the purpose behind God willing Christ’s death (126)? Doing so enables King to show how Girard, along with certain feminists, “encourages a theological exploration that distinguishes between the sacrificial acts that genuinely reflect God’s redemptive love and those that perpetuate violence and exclusion” (127). King recovers the Augustinian gratia sanans, “healing grace,” as a type of grace that captures the healing vector of redemption. She concludes by citing an essay by the great German Jesuit, Karl Rahner, which distinguishes between following and imitating Christ. Here King teases out how, for Rahner, Jesus’ taking up the cross is part of the divine victory over sin and death (144). One could add Bernard Lonergan’s account of the cross transforming evil through love, and, I suspect, deepen King’s point.

This reviewer had very few quibbles. One might have hoped for more examples, perhaps from literature or film, to demonstrate more concretely just what is at stake in questions of redemption. King references previous conversations but does not really treat previous mimetic attempts to deal with this problem. Here one recalls the strong work by Mark Heim (Saved from Sacrifice) and Mathias Moosbrugger (Die Rehabilitierung des Opfers) as well as the volume edited by Michael Kirwan and Sheelah Treflé Hidden, Mimesis and Atonement, which includes Duncan Morrow’s gripping chapter about atonement theory and the cycle of violence in Northern Ireland. Schwager himself benefitted from the work of Michel Corbin, a French medievalist and scholar of Anselm, and reviewed Corbin’s edition of Anselm’s work. King takes up James Alison’s early work but does not engage his “An Atonement Update” in the 2007 Undergoing God or his fine essay, “Traversing Hostility” in Mimesis and Atonement. It is not clear how much any of these works would have advanced King’s particular argument, but at this point an assessment of the landscape regarding mimetic theory and atonement theology would be helpful. While we await such a work, one can hope that King’s Reclaiming Sacrifice generates the rich conversation that it initiates and that it surely deserves.

All the major topics of mimetic theory are here, with an emphasis in the earlier interviews on literary theory and in the later ones on current events, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11. There is a short interview, presented as a monologue, on opera (with brief mention of Mozart’s Cosí Fan Tutte, the topic of a new book due out this fall from Michigan State University Press). 

Another benefit of interviews is how quickly they can move between topics, thus showing the overall coherence of Girard’s ideas. A 1987 interview with Thomas F. Berronneau, fascinating for anyone interested in Girard’s engagement with the heyday of post-structuralism, also veers illuminatingly into the place of faith. The important, comprehensive 1992 interview by Rebecca Adams, known for a brief section included in The Girard Reader (edited by James G. Williams) about mimetic desire being “intrinsically good,” is given here in its entirety.

For me, the gems are two interviews conducted by Girard’s Stanford colleague Robert Pogue Harrison in 2005 for lucky listeners of Stanford’s radio station, KZSU. They cover the ground of mimetic theory, touching on a wide range of literary and biblical examples, but have the feel of two friends talking. I’m looking forward to using them with students.

Nadine Dormoy, like Girard, taught French in an American university. The interviews in The World of René Girard, first published in French in 2018, were conducted over the course of a week in 1988, shortly before Girard published his book on Shakespeare. They move from his childhood in Avignon to the contemporary scene in Europe and the U.S., with a thorough presentation of his ideas woven through answers to questions that zig-zag across all of Girard’s areas of interest. A reader minimally acquainted with mimetic theory will find a congenial way to deepen their grasp, while those already familiar are likely to find new nuggets pertaining to their particular areas of interest, such as comments on other important authors not much mentioned by Girard elsewhere. I found myself making my own index at the back for future reference.

Girard’s dialogic approach included his genius as a reader of texts. The opening pages here give an intriguing window into his formative reading experiences. Dormoy’s questions about his work on Shakespeare lead him to put it more into the context of wider, early modern literary history than he does in his Shakespeare book. Moving away from literature, a chapter on “Socio-economic Emergences” includes discussion of work that had recently been published in French by Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Paul Dumouchel, among others. Topics related to religion come up throughout.

Discussing Nietzsche, Girard makes comments about deciding on policy that also pertain to the importance of dialogue in intellectual work: “It is very difficult not to do violence to truth in language. We must always take into account the fact that there is a counterpart to everything we say. This does not mean one should avoid all taking of positions. When it comes to choosing, and to choose the lesser evil, one must know that there is no non-sacrificial policy” (82). The conversation then turns to alternatives to sacrifice.

Girard: “What Christianity says is that we must imitate each other in accordance with the rules of the Kingdom. Do to others not what they do to you, but what you would like them to do for you.”

Dormoy: “According to you, the mimetic nature of man does not render him incapable of acting according to the rules of the Kingdom?”

Girard: “Of course, and besides, it happens all the time. We have real friendships, with which we feel safe, and in relation to which there is no appropriation. He who has no friends of this quality is very unhappy.”

Dormoy: “You have nevertheless shown that the need to share everything between friends can turn into rivalry.”

Girard: “It is true that the perfect friendship is not always easy….”

Girard here anticipates what he would say to Adams four years later about the goodness of mimetic desire. References to Girard’s friendships and their importance in his intellectual life are scattered throughout both of these books. Here, again, is why interviews worked so well for Girard and why they are a gift for readers. His well-honed desire for friendly conversation as a means of discovery comes through.

Nevertheless, Jacobus felt that “Girard’s theory was missing something.” He felt that imitation, of itself, does not explain the escalation inherent in human aggression. If proto-humans simply imitated each other, they would not develop more and more deadly weapons. Other animals do not develop weapons. If humans were limited to mimesis, even intense mimesis, then they would pick up a stick in imitation of the first person who somehow managed to wield a stick as a weapon, and soon all of us would have sticks, but the stick does not in any way imply a knife, or a gun, or a bomb. These are escalations, and the escalation demands an explanation. Jacobus does see Girard as wrestling with this question in Battling to the End (2009), when Girard writes that “humans cannot control reciprocity because they imitate one another too much and their resemblance to one another increases and accelerates” (18-19). This may be true, but imitation and resemblance do not, in themselves, imply increase and acceleration. Jacobus agrees completely that we humans do escalate to extremes, but questions whether mimesis can account for it. Rather than mimicking each other, antagonists escalate, and the escalation is based on uncertainty of what the other will do. The uncertainty of violence is an uncertainty concerning the opponent’s object, “the weapons of combat” (57).

Jacobus then moves to an examination of the question of whether non-human animals use objects as weapons. I will not reproduce his arguments here, but he makes a very convincing case that all claims made for non-human animals using objects as weapons fail to hold up under scrutiny. “After watching hours of chimpanzee combat, it became clear that all their combat devolves into empty-handed attacks and biting. Objects play no practical role in chimp combat” (61). Whereas Girard and Gans say that the human violence is apocalyptic because it is “more mimetic,” Jacobus claims that “only the wildcard of the weapon can make mimesis dangerous so that it escalates to apocalyptic proportions.” This leads directly to his conclusion: “We’re [the human species] the only ones who use reciprocal, object-based aggression, or ROBA” (62). This reciprocal, object-based aggression is absent in the non-human world, universal in the human world, and exclusive to the human world. It is the mark of hominization. 

Jacobus then explores the way in which ROBA is connected to art. He approaches this connection by describing the way in which he developed a grammar for fight moves that allowed him to move between the different “languages” of the Hong Kong Punch, the American Punch, etc. This was a movement language, so that each movement became a sentence and could be subject to feedback and correction. This allowed him to understand not just Hong Kong style and American style, but (in well-made films) to understand the character delivering the punch as well. John Wayne’s way of fighting, his style, expresses who is: he punches hard but plays fair. A different character fights in a different way. Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones is not a John Wayne character. 

With this insight, it became possible for Jacobus to, in effect, reverse engineer a scene. “Movement language” allowed him to make movement into language and make it into “the correct language” for the project he was working on (104). Thus, the question arose: “What’s the relationship between spoken/written language and movement language?” (104). One immediate link: We can and do defer violence using language and other modes of human culture. We see here the clear influence of Gans’s Generative Anthropology on Jacobus. Just has he went through a lengthy argument to show that chimps do not use weapons, now he pursues a lengthy argument to show that chimps do not use language. The upshot of his discussion is that “animal behavior (communication, procreation, and combat) is for survival in the environment. Human behavior (language, kinship, and violence) caries an infinitely deep exchange value” (117). The acknowledgment of the human uniqueness of violence as well as the other modes of exchange that defer it can allow us to survive and thrive. 

The conclusion of why ROBA is connected to language and to art is because all three are modes of exchange. ROBA can be exchanged for deferential forms like language, kinship, religion, and culture. These latter deferential forms can be also exchanged for ROBA. Interestingly, “the ROBA hypothesis is agnostic as to the origins of ROBA and, more generally, the exchange nature of all human behavior” (183). The order does not matter; ROBA and deferral are just “different modes of exchange” (159). This also means that there is no way to know whether a specific culture form will be exchanged for ROBA, i.e., for violence or vice versa.  

In this work Jacobus is carrying out an argument against the dominant view in the social and natural sciences that “tend to use a ‘component features approach’ whereby all human traits are traced back to primates: language descends from animal communication, human reason from animal cognition, human tools from animal tools, human kinship from animal reproduction, etc.” (143). He argues against it because “no animal exhibits any trace of ROBA” (143). There are fundamental differences at work here, and the reductionist view that dominates much of the research leaves these fundamental differences inaccessible. Many people who would like to understand human violence feel obligated to study primate aggression, but Jacobus argues that his ROBA theory demonstrates that human violence is fundamentally different from animal aggression. He also argues against the view that aggression is an “evolutionary stowaway” surviving from some earlier strata of our development and our deferral of violence as some later development. Rather, he sees the human capacity as consisting in our ability to exchange ROBA for deferral. Thus, once “the potential for ROBA exists, the potential for culture exists” (139). Further, since “our crisis of apocalyptic violence is unique to us, it is also a unique opportunity to go beyond mere survival” (140).

I conclude by noting that this review is a conscious attempt to present the argument that Jacobus is making, and so it fails to do justice to his manner of presentation beyond noting that it is a blend of story-telling and argument. But that blend is the real strength of the book. Jacobus has a very interesting story to tell, and he tells it well. This is a very enjoyable book to read and to learn from. I highly recommend it.