Confessing Evangelical

John H July 12th, 2010

As the comments to my previous post demonstrate, the parable of the good Samaritan can be read in a number of ways: Jesus as the Samaritan or the victim by the side of the road, us as the victim and/or the Samaritan and/or the innkeeper, and so on.

These multiple readings are by no means contradictory or exclusive of one another. Indeed, they are themselves a key part of its teaching. However, they can begin to appear slightly chaotic, with the links between them apparently arbitrary: we are both the victim by the road and (in imitating Jesus) the good Samaritan, because. Rather like a physicist confronted with a multiplicity of “fundamental” particles, this makes me want to look for a unifying principle beneath these different interpretations.

And so to our old friend René Girard, and the two dynamics he sees as driving human behaviour: mimetic desire (our desires are learned from those around us) and the scapegoat mechanism (human societies establish their unity by expelling an arbitrarily-chosen victim). How can these principles help us read the parable?

First, as most interpreters seem to agree, the priest and the Levite do not walk past the victim out of malice or heartlessness, but because touching a dead body (as it might very well be) would have made them ritually unclean. Concepts of cleanness vs uncleanness are an expression both of mimesis and the scapegoat mechanism: societies reinforce their unity by defining themselves over against an unclean “other”, and the desires of individuals within those societies are formed by those models of cleanness and uncleanness. For the priest and Levite to help the victim would not only have made them personally unclean, but would have undermined a unifying principle of their society.

The exclusionary mechanism is made even more explicit with the arrival of the Samaritan. Here is the very embodiment of the unclean other. Yet he is the one who breaks down the division of clean and unclean by helping the victim.

He does this by simultaneously showing his indifference to the exclusionary mechanism and (by so doing) taking upon himself his appointed role within it as the unclean other. After all, for an unclean Samaritan to touch a dead body was no more than he deserved, and only confirmed his status in the eyes of the “in-group”. But the Samaritan shows himself indifferent to this, and by acting as if the division did not exist he abolishes it.

So the Samaritan is doing more than just helping one victim: he is establishing a new way of being human, one in which we live as if the scapegoat mechanism, the exclusionary divisions between clean and unclean by which we shore up our societies, did not exist. By doing so we both confirm the abolition of that mechanism and place ourselves at its mercy by exposing ourselves to the scapegoating vengeance of those whose sense of belonging still depends on such divisions: the unclean making ourselves unclean, as the Samaritan would by touching a dead body.

This in turn draws together the different interpretations of the parable. Jesus is the Samaritan who destroys the exclusionary division of clean/unclean by both ignoring it and becoming its victim. It is then in a very precise (and neither arbitrary nor moralistic) imitation of him that we also become the Samaritan by treating any remaining vestiges of the scapegoating mechanism in the same way.

The new way of being human that is established by the Samaritan – one entirely without any scapegoating or exclusion or defining of ourselves “over against” some “other” – is to be found first of all at the inn, at which Jews, Samaritans and all others are accepted and included without distinction. In other words: the church.

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John H June 17th, 2010

I’ve posted quite a lot in recent months on René Girard and James Alison and the concept of “mimetic desire”, but if the core of what Girard and Alison are saying on this subject can be condensed to a sentence, it is this:

We desire according to the desire of the other.

That is, humans are desiring beings. Where other animals have instinct, we have desire – and that desire arises in imitation of those around us, including the complex social and cultural patterns of behaviour and belief into which we are each born.

The question is then, which “other” are our desires going to imitate? The “social other” that surrounds us, the other of mimetic rivalry and violence? Or “Another Other”, one who is entirely outside those human patterns of mimesis, who has no rivalry or violence towards us – who, on the contrary, becomes the wholly-innocent victim of our rivalry and violence?

This then brings us to the subject of prayer. Prayer is about desire: about being honest with God about what our desires are, but in doing so coming to be shaped increasingly by his desires. To illustrate this, I want to develop some thoughts sketched out by James Alison in the closing section of his essay Prayer: a case study in mimetic anthropology, on the subject of the Lord’s Prayer.

As Fr Alison observes, the Lord’s Prayer “is all about desire”. It starts with God’s desire, then moves on to the expression and reorientation of our own desire. I’ve summarised this in the following diagram:

This shows the first half of the prayer as being concerned with God’s desire: for the hallowing of his name, the coming of his kingdom, the doing of his will. In the second, we move on to our own desires – starting with our most basic and immediate desire, the desire for “our daily bread”.

However, we then move on to two final petitions that I have shown in columns, to highlight the parallels between them. These petitions have much the same focus: embracing our “new self”, the self that is formed by the regard of “Another Other” in forgiveness and freedom from fear; and letting go of our “old self”, the self that is formed by our regard for the “social other”, of hanging on grimly to the “debts” owed by others and being bound by Satan’s patterns of mimetic rivalry. This is shown in more detail in the following diagram:

So the Lord’s Prayer itself is an expression of “mimetic anthropology” expounded by Girard but clearly understood by many before him, supremely by Jesus. To pray it is to have our desires, and thus ourselves, reshaped by “our Father in heaven”.

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John H May 9th, 2010

Returning to the subject of the atonement, James Alison has written a very interesting essay on this topic that may help answer the questions I was raising in my post last month about the “horizontal” and “vertical” aspects of the atonement.

The first point Alison makes is that we talk too much about “theories” of atonement. Having presented a (slightly caricatured – probably deliberately so) version of the “conventional” account of the atonement, he writes:

[T]he principal problem with this conventional account is that it is a theory, and atonement, in the first place, was a liturgy.

Atonement-as-theory turns it into “an idea that can be grasped“, whereas atonement-as-liturgy emphasises it as “something that happens at you“.

To demonstrate this, Alison goes back to the ancient Jewish liturgy of atonement as practised in the First Temple. He sets this out at some length (and in a frustratingly non-linear manner!), but in summary the process was as follows:

• The rite involved two goats: “a goat which was the Lord, and a goat which was Azazel (the ‘devil’)”.
• The high priest would sacrifice a bull or calf in expiation for his own sins, and then “don the white robe, which was the robe of an angel”. “From that point he would cease to be a human being and would become the angel, one of whose names was ‘the Son of God’.”
• He would then go into the Holy of Holies with the first goat (the “goat which was the Lord”), and sacrifice it to the LORD. He would sprinkle the goat’s blood on the Mercy Seat and around the Holy of Holies, “to remove all the impurities that had accrued in what was meant to be a microcosm of creation”.
• The high priest would then emerge out of the Temple Veil, wearing a robe made of the same material as the Veil, and proceed to sprinkle the rest of the temple with the blood of “the goat which was the Lord”.
• Finally, the high priest would place the accumulated sins of the people on the head of Azazel, the “scapegoat”, which would then be driven away, taking the people’s sins with it.

What’s essential to note is the direction in which this ceremony operates. We tend to think of sacrifice in what Alison describes as “Aztec” terms: a human priest “sacrificing something so as to placate some deity”. In contrast:

The rite of atonement was about the Lord himself, the Creator, emerging from the Holy of Holies so as to set the people free from their impurities and sins and transgression. In other words, the whole rite was exactly the reverse of what we typically imagine a priestly rite to be about.

In particular, when the priest came out through the Veil, it was not as a human being acting towards God:

for the Temple understanding the high priest at this stage was God, and it was God’s blood that was being sprinkled. This was a divine movement to set people free. This was not – as in our understanding – a priest satisfying a divinity. The reason why the priest had to engage in a prior expiation was because he was about to become a sign of something quite else: acting outwards. The movement is not inwards towards the Holy of Holies; the movement is outwards from the Holy of Holies.

To my mind, this helps us see a way to reconcile Alison’s account of the atonement with the more conventional “substitutionary atonement” which Alison might otherwise seem to reject (and it’s still not entirely clear to me whether he rejects the caricature or the thing itself). Because Alison is right: an understanding of substitutionary atonement which sees it as the placating of an angry deity by a human priest (albeit, in the case of Jesus on the Cross, a human priest who is also God) does indeed owe more to our “Aztec imagination” than to what the Bible tells us.

But Alison is not the first to make this point: as I mentioned in a previous post, John Stott also criticises these crude accounts in his book The Cross of Christ. The term that Stott uses to describe the atonement is “self-satisfaction by self-substitution”: in other words, the atonement is not an angry Father being placated by his loving Son in a “plan B” cobbled together after the fall of humanity, but is principally a drama taking place within the Godhead in which a loving and just God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, both satisfies and demonstrates his holiness, justice and love in a single act.

So in the imagery of the Old Testament liturgy of atonement, Jesus’ death on the Cross is not the sacrifice of a priest towards the Holy of Holies. It is the sacrifice of God (“the goat which is the Lord”) by God (the priest wearing the white robe of the angel of the Lord) within the Holy of Holies – followed by God’s emergence through of the Temple Veil (now torn in two forever) to sprinkle his temple (that is, us – 1 Corinthians 3:16) with his own blood.

As Alison points out later in his essay, this of course takes us immediately to the Lord’s Supper:

What the Eucharist is for us is the high priest emerging out of the Holy of Holies, giving us his body and blood, as our way into the Holy of Holies.

While Alison expresses this in Roman Catholic terminology (“transubstantiation”), what he says is equally true for the Lutheran understanding of the Real Presence:

this is not our memorial supper; this is, in fact, the heavenly banquet where someone else is the protagonist and we are called into it. We are being called “through the Veil”, into the participation. We are given the signs; which is why the body and blood are not something that hide the divinity but make it manifest. They are signs reaching out to us of what God is actually doing for us.

So this gives us a way to reconcile Girard’s version of “Christus Victor” with a form of substitutionary atonement. On the outside, what appears to be happening is a simple lynching, and Girard is quite right that this has to be seen in terms of mimetic contagion and the single-victim mechanism – that, in human terms, this is not in the slightest a sacrificial movement from humanity towards God.

But how is it that Jesus is able to expose and destroy this mechanism? What gives him (in Alison’s phrase) “the intelligence of the victim”, the resentment-free knowledge that this is what his life had been heading towards all along? The answer is that he knew he was acting as the high priest of Israel, who would enter the Holy of Holies and make atonement by his own blood, before emerging through the Veil and “coming towards us as one who is offering forgiveness from the victim”. But what happens in the Holy of Holies bears no resemblance at all to a “sacrifice” in either the Girardian sense (an arbitrary victim lynched by a crowd) or the “Aztec” sense (a human placating of an angry god).

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John H May 2nd, 2010

The implication of my previous post is that sometimes what we think is a heartening display of unity within the church may actually be an example of a sinful, satanic unanimity “over against” some other than we are excluding.

It seems to me that this may be what lies behind 1 Corinthians 5, where Paul calls on the church to expel the man who “is living with his father’s wife”. We normally read this as being about “extreme”, “scandalous” sexual sin, and the question is then how bad someone’s behaviour has to get before we are required to follow the course of action commanded by Paul: “Drive out the wicked person from among you”.

However, there is a clear hint in this passage that something else is going on here. Take Paul’s summary of the situation:

A man is living with his father’s wife.

Our Girardian antennae immediately start to twitch at this clear example of mimetic desire – the son finding his stepmother attractive because his father does – leading to mimetic rivalry as the son moves in to take over from dad.

This in turn should have us on the alert for two things: a victim, and a satanic unanimity over against that victim. Well, it appears we have at least one “victim” in this incident: the wronged father. We probably have another victim in the stepmother: one wonders how much choice this first-century woman, presumably somewhat younger than her husband, had in the matter.

As for the satanic unanimity, we find this in verse 2:

And you are arrogant! Should you not rather have mourned, so that he who has done this would have been removed from among you?

In other words, the Corinthian church, instead of siding with the victim in the face of his/her/their victimiser, has entered into unanimity with the victimiser over against the victim.

This helps us make sense of Paul’s instruction to the church, that when they are next assembled:

…you are to hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.

What does it mean to “hand this man over to Satan”, and particularly with the aim that “his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord”? It means to expose the reality of what has been happening: to rip apart the veil of “spiritual freedom” that has covered over the sinful unanimity of the church with this victimiser, and enable him to see the reality of his own actions and motives: their roots in mimetic desire and rivalry. The hope being that he will then recover “the intelligence of the victim” and thus be restored to faith in the divine Victim, Jesus.

In other words, the problem is that the Corinthians have allowed themselves to retain some of “the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil” – that is, of satanic desire and victimisation – rather than becoming the “unleavened bread” of those who know that “our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed”, and thus all such forms of satanic victimisation have been exposed and overthrown.

This is then how we are also to read the general principle which Paul states at the end of the chapter:

But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother or sister who is sexually immoral or greedy, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber. Do not even eat with such a one.

Paul is not telling us to go around identifying the “impure” people within our congregations and to shun them, drawing a line between “of-course-we’re-all-sinners” and “but-you’re-too-sinful-so-go-away”. Rather, we are to recognise that in each of those patterns of behaviour there is a victim, even it we don’t know who they are, and whatever else happens we are not to fall into the trap of forming a satanic unanimity on the side of the victimiser over the victim.

Of course, this leaves us with the tragic irony of a text whose original purpose was to break the satanic unanimity of church and victimiser over against the victim (and aren’t the paedophile scandals in the Roman Catholic Church a modern-day example of this?) being used so often in the church’s history to create (or at least justify) a victimising unanimity of church against some “other” who is perceived as failing to live up to expectations in terms of sexual morality.

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John H May 2nd, 2010

Returning to René Girard’s I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard makes the following observation concerning the divisive effect that Jesus has in the gospels:

The Gospels themselves draw our attention to the loss of mythic unanimity everywhere Jesus comes and intervenes. John in particular points out on numerous occasions how the witnesses become divided after Jesus speaks, and far from unifying them, his message precipitates disharmony and division. In the Crucifixion especially, this division plays a primary role. Without it there would not be a Gospel revelation; the single victim mechanism would not be truthfully represented. It would be, as in the myths, transformed and concealed as just and legitimate action. (p.153)

It seems to me this is what Jesus probably had in mind when he spoke of coming “not to bring peace, but a sword”, setting “a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law” (Matthew 10:34,35): a breaking of human unanimity, which is almost inevitably a unanimity over against somebody else; that is, a satanic unanimity based on mimetic rivalry and the single-victim mechanism.

Perhaps this also explains why the church has, despite Jesus’ prayer for its unity, tended to end up as a “fragmented gaggle”, “disagreeing about every single ****ing thing” (as Thomas put it in a strongly-worded post recently – scroll to bottom of page to see the post in question). Jesus is determined not to allow the unity in the Holy Spirit which he intends for his church to be replaced by a satanic unanimity.

It’s not easy to tell the difference between a true unity and a sinful unanimity – but the essential point is that sinful unanimity is the unanimity of the group over against some excluded “other”, whereas Jesus’ prayer for the church is that “they may be one, as we [that is, Jesus and the Father] are one”: one in a perfect unity that is entirely without rivalry, that is not “over against” anything else (see previous post).

In my next post I’ll look at a possible case study of the difference between unity and unanimity.

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John H April 30th, 2010

As I mentioned in a previous post, René Girard regards Satan as a symbolic figure representing the mimetic contagion that arises from rivalrous desire. This is reminiscent of Jacques Ellul’s treatment of the “powers and principalities”.

Both Girard and Ellul thus set themselves at odds with the more traditional view of Satan as some sort of “personal being”, in particular as a “fallen angel”. That said, I there is a lot to be gained from their perspectives even within the context of a more traditional view (e.g. seeing mimetic contagion as a means, or even the principal means, by which Satan pursues his aims among humanity).

However, in this post I want to pursue Girard’s perspective a little further, rather than mapping it immediately back onto a more “orthodox” position. This is because Girard (via James Alison) has some interesting things to say about personhood itself.

James Alison’s book The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes sets out a “theological anthropology” based closely on the work of Girard. In particular Alison argues (like Girard) that the origins of “humanness” lie in mimetic desire itself. What’s more, it is not simply that human desire as such is wrong: the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus tell us otherwise. What is wrong is the distortion of human desire into rivalry and conflict, but desire itself – the mimetic desire that is formed by the model of another’s desire – is the essence of personhood. (Please note that I’m condensing here about 25 pages or so of argument, so please forgive any oversimplifications or distortions.)

The implication of this is that human personhood only exists in the context of relationship: we are “interdividual” rather than “individual” (The Joy of Being Wrong, p.50). As Alison puts it:

The basic unit for understanding what it is to be human is not an introspection, but a mimetic “rapport” between two [persons]. (p.51)

Within this “rapport” there is a “constant interchange of desire between the self and the other, and the other is of course a self in constant movement by what is other than it”. Alison suggests that this then provides a model for understanding the Trinity:

The … Father loves his image, his likeness, one who is exactly like Him in all things except being unoriginated. The Son … is the exact image and likeness of the Father, able therefore to receive the Father and, as a perfect likeness, completely reciprocate that giving. (p.51)

In doing so, the Son is a “perfect imitator of the Father”, in an imitation with “no sort of rivalry”. This perfect, simultaneous giving and receiving of love constitutes a “rapport interdividuel” that is so perfect in its imitation of the unoriginated love of the Father and the Son that it is itself a person: the Holy Spirit.

So personhood does not consist in being an “absolute subject”, but in being a “subsistent relation”. In the case of the Holy Spirit, it is the perfect, non-rivalrous, loving mimesis of the Father and the Son that itself constitutes the subsistent relation, the person, of the Spirit.

Those of us for whom reading C.S. Lewis’ account of the Trinity in Mere Christianity was a formative experience will find some of this very familiar (as, I’m guessing, will those more high-minded people who have read St Augustine on this subject!). But I just want to push this out a little further: not to go off into flights of fancy, but into thoughts that I hope can be “mapped back” onto orthodoxy without difficulty.

If the Holy Spirit is a person who is constituted by the perfect, non-rivalrous, imitative desire of the Father and the Son, then this leads me to wonder if we can see Satan as being the corrupted, almost parodic, analogue of this: the person who is constituted by the rivalrous, violent, mimetic desire among human beings. And maybe the fear that this means we are talking about a “symbolic”, “impersonal” Satan arises from our misunderstanding of what personhood itself is.

This also then fits in well with the notion (promoted by both Girard and Alison) that the Holy Spirit as “Paraclete” is our “counsel for the defence”, in contrast to Satan (the “accuser”) as “counsel for the prosecution”. If Satan is indeed a mimetically-rivalrous parody of the Holy Spirit then these “mirror” roles for each would seem highly appropriate.

I haven’t made any attempt to reconcile this idea with the (somewhat limited) biblical data about Satan and his origins, but it does seem to me that this relational understanding of personhood provides a possible way of seeing how Satan can be both “personal” and in some way a synonym for supposedly “impersonal” forces. It would also enable us to see the “personal”/”satanic” explanations for certain phenomena in the Gospels and the “impersonal”/”scientific” explanations we prefer today as being two sides of the same coin rather than in opposition to one another.

Anyway, I’ve waded out far enough into this deep water: your thoughts are welcome in the comments, as usual.

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John H April 29th, 2010

Returning to René Girard on the atonement (see previous post), one criticism made of Girard (and of his disciples, such as James Alison) is that they emphasise the “horizontal” aspects of the atonement to the exclusion of the “vertical”, Godward aspects.

Girard is explicit about this in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, where he writes:

Medieval and modern theories of atonement all look in the direction of God for the causes of the Crucifixion: God’s honour, God’s justice, even God’s anger, must be satisfied. These theories don’t succeed because they don’t seriously look at the direction where the answer must lie: sinful humanity, human relations, mimetic contagion, which is the same thing as Satan. They speak much of original sin, but they fail to make the idea concrete. That is why they give the impression of being arbitrary and unjust to human beings, even if they are theologically sound.

I’m not entirely clear what Girard is saying here. Is he saying that “vertical” theories of atonement (such as penal substitutionary atonement) are to be rejected in favour of his horizontal, “mimetic” approach? Or is it that a mimetic approach to the atonement is necessary in order to give a more concrete understanding of “original sin” and thus rescue the vertical aspects of atonement from the impression of being “arbitrary and unjust”?

Alison makes a similarly opaque remark somewhere about “crudely substitutionary versions of the atonement”, where it is unclear whether he means that substitutionary atonement is inherently “crude”, or whether he is just taking issue with the crude expressions of penal substitutionary atonement that undoubtedly are all too common (and which John Stott also criticises in his staunchly substitutionary The Cross of Christ).

Personally I’m deeply reluctant to lose the vertical aspects of the atonement, the confession that Christ died as a propitiation for our sins. However, I’m equally reluctant to reject the very profound insights of Girard on this issue. What is needed is some way to reconcile the two more effectively.

This is one of those “I don’t know, do you?” blog posts. I think some hints of where an answer might be found can be seen in the final paragraphs of this post at Whosoever Desires (a very Girardian blog name!), while others can be found in the observation someone made on my Facebook page that “the atonement exposes the Satanic mimetic economy, but it also establishes a different mimetic economy in its place”.  But if anyone has any other ideas, or suggestions for further reading: please let me know in the comments.

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John H April 28th, 2010

I love this brief summary by James Alison (in his book The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes) of the concept of “mimetic desire”:

In a nutshell, Girard has discovered that human beings desire not lineally, as most thought presupposes (i.e., a subject desires an object – Tarzan, he love Jane), nor even, as Hegel, interpreted by Kojève, thought, by desiring the desire of another (i.e., what I really want is that you should want me – Tarzan, he want Jane to love Tarzan). Rather we desire according to the desire of the other (Visiting Hollywood Director fancies Jane, and Tarzan, suddenly, he find Jane fascinating). All desire is triangular, and is suggested by a mediator or model.

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John H April 27th, 2010

Chapter 11 of René Girard’s I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (see previous posts 1 | 2 | 3) is titled “The Triumph of the Cross”, and in it Girard sets out a fascinating reinterpretation of the “Christus Victor” view of the atonement.

Girard starts with St Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 2:8:

If the princes of the world had known [the wisdom of God] they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. (p.148)

This statement formed the basis for “a thesis that played a great role in the first centuries of Christianity, that of Satan duped by the Cross“:

The thesis interprets the Cross as a kind of divine trap, a ruse of God that is even stronger and cleverer than Satan’s ruses. Certain Fathers amplified this idea into a strange metaphor that contributed to its distrust in the West. Christ is compared to the bait that the fisher put on the hook to catch a hungry fish, and that fish is Satan. (p.149)

This interpretation of the Cross fell under suspicion in the West as “magical thought” that “attributes to God a role that is unworthy”, one of using deception and trickery to overcome Satan. The result has been to reduce the importance of the devil in Western theology. As Girard continues:

His disappearance is troublesome to the extent that Satan is the same thing as mimetic contagion, which alone can clarify the true meaning and validity of the patristic metaphor of Satan duped by the Cross. (p.149)

(Note that Girard is basing his argument here on his understanding of “Satan” as a symbolic figure who is to be identified with mimetic contagion. However, I think his argument works even if one thinks instead of mimetic contagion being the principal means by which a more traditionally-considered Satan operates.)

The essential point of mimetic contagion is that those undergoing it are unaware of its operation, and are convinced of the actual guilt of the “single victim” whose expulsion restores their unanimity. This is true both of mythical-ritual societies and of modern “scientific” systems: all the “powers and principalities”, the “princes of this world”. These are the same forces that crucified Jesus, and they did so because:

they expected the results of this event to be favourable to their interests. They were hoping that the victim mechanism would function as usual, protected from any suspicions, and that they would thus rid themselves of Jesus and his message. (p.148)

By the time the princes of this world understood what had happened in the crucifixion – that the mimetic contagion and “single-victim mechanism” had been unmasked and disarmed from within by Jesus – it was too late: “Jesus had been crucified, and the Gospels had been written”. Had the princes understood this was to be the outcome of Jesus’ crucifixion, then “they would not have crucified the Lord of glory”.

Girard continues:

The Greek Fathers had it right in saying that with the Cross Satan is the mystifier caught in the trap of his own mystification. The single victim mechanism was his personal property, his very own thing, the instrument of self-expulsion that put the world at his feet. But in the Cross this mechanism escapes once and for all from the control Satan exercised over it, and as a result the world looks completely different. (p.151)

This perspective on the Cross avoids the charge of “unworthiness” (or the implication that Satan had some legitimate claim on sinful humanity) that turned the Western church against some versions of “Christus victor”:

The idea of Satan duped at the Cross is therefore not magical at all and in no way offends the dignity of God. The trick that traps Satan does not involve the least bit of either violence or dishonesty on God’s part. It is not really a ruse or a trick; it is rather the inability of the prince of this world to understand the divine love. (p.152)

So however much Satan may rail that he has been deceived (like Gollum wailing about “nasty, tricksy hobbitses”), in fact all that has happened is that he has been undone by his own deception, his own mechanisms by which he had kept humanity captive.

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John H April 24th, 2010

In my previous post I observed that, for René Girard, mimetic desire (that is, the desire that we learn by imitation) is “both what makes us human … and what makes us sinful”.

This raises the question of what non-sinful mimetic desire could look like: that is, desire that does not immediately lead to rivalry and ultimately to violence. And here is the answer:

Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise.” (John 5:19)

Jesus’ sinlessness consists in the fact that his desire comes from imitation of the Father rather than imitation of the sinful human beings around him. And as Girard argues, when Jesus calls us to imitate him, he is not calling us to an ascetic way of life. Rather:

What Jesus invites us to imitate is his own desire, the spirit that directs him toward the goal on which his intention is fixed: to resemble God the Father as much as possible. (I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, p.13)

This is what we were created for: to imitate God the Father and Creator of us all. I don’t think it’s going too far to suggest that this is what is being spoken of in Genesis 1:26,27:

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

The meaning of the “image of God” (and the extent to which we have retained it following the fall) has been much argued-over by Christians. I wonder if Girard gives us a useful way of looking at it: at being concerned with the imitation of God; with mimetic desire in which what is mimicked is the non-rivalrous love of God, rather than the rivalrous desires of sinful human beings.

When we read “image of God” in those terms, we can see how it is both completely shattered by the fall, and something which we can still ascribe to human beings today. It is completely shattered in that we lose all ability for non-rivalrous desire, for desire that does not lead to conflict and violence. But it is still the case that mimetic desire, in making our desires something we learn from our neighbour rather than by instinct alone, is the basis for human culture and for what distinguishes us from other animals. So in that sense it is still possible to speak of us as bearing God’s image and likeness.

Jesus restores this original image in us and gives us the capacity to resume the imitation of God to which we were called at creation:

Contrary to what we ourselves claim, he does not claim to “be himself”; he does not flatter himself that he obeys only his own desire. His goal is to become the perfect image of God. Therefore he commits all his powers to imitating his Father. In inviting us to imitate him, he invites us to imitate his own imitation.

This capacity to “imitate Jesus’ own imitation” is what Paul calls “the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator” (Colossians 3:10). The Christian life thus becomes a constant struggle between the “new self”, with its desire to imitate Jesus’ imitation of the Father, and the “old self”, which continues to desire in imitation of, and rivalry to, our neighbours.

• Theology
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