René Girard’s mimetic theory offers a fundamental aid to understanding the nexus between violence, the sacred and the origin of different human cultures. It also paves the way for a challenge: how to found a way of living together without identifying a common enemy?
Last update: 2025-01-21 14:27:49
The anthropological theory developed by René Girard (known as the mimetic theory) offers a powerful explanation of the links between violence, the sacred and the origin of different human cultures. Its relevance today lies in the fact that it forces one to become aware of the part played by a sacrificial logic in the construction of human communities and it challenges believers to bear witness to a God Who is not, in any way, involved with violence. I will now try to demonstrate how it paves the way for a radical demystification of violence.
Before briefly presenting the main themes Girard developed, I think it is useful to emphasise the originality of his intellectual and spiritual journey.[1] As he himself has stated on several occasions, his return to religion cannot be dissociated from his intellectual journey. To a certain extent, it may be argued that it is a natural consequence of his first discoveries. It was through his study of literature (the great nineteenth-century novels and then the Greek tragedies and those written by Shakespeare, in particular) that Girard developed his theory of human desire and violence, before extending his research to myths and rituals, archaic religion and, finally, the Bible.
Mimetic Desire
Aristotle had already understood the importance of that anthropological fact of our propensity for imitation: ‘Man distinguishes himself from the other animals insofar as he is more inclined to imitate’. Another important discovery, which came much later (Freud), revealed the role of desire in psychic processes.
Girard’s concept of mimetic desire combines these two ideas. It can be summarized in the formula ‘man always desires according to the Other’s desire’. For this reason, human desire is radically different from animal needs and instincts, even if these are equally part of human nature: in man there exists a particular intensity of desire that is tied to its mimetic character. ‘Once their natural needs have been satisfied, men desire intensely but, not being guided by any instinct, they do not know exactly what. They do not have a desire of their own. What is proper to desire is its quality of not being one’s own’.[2] According to Girard, the fundamental structure of human desire is triangular. It is this relational nature that gives desire its colour, its truly human intensity. ‘Appetite for food and sex are not yet desire. They are a biological matter that becomes desire through the imitation of a model’[3]. In every desire there is a subject, an object and a mediator, namely, the person who shows the subject what he must desire. Girard takes the example of children who fight with each other for the same toy to illustrate the fact that mimetic desire does not lie in a clear-cut relationship between a subject and an object but in the imitation of someone else’s desire. It is the convergence of desires that constitutes the (real or imaginary) object of desire.
The relationship between mimetic desire and violence lies at the heart of the mimetic theory.[4] To summarize, mimetic desire generates rivalry which, in its turn, is the main source of violence. It must be added, however, that imitation does not lead only to violence. The ability to imitate and the propensity for imitation are what allow human beings to learn and to reproduce models of behaviour that are appropriate for social living. Thus admiration is generally a very positive form of imitation. The fact nevertheless remains that the models that guide and shape desire are always capable of becoming obstacles or rivals and all the more so if they take the form of real individuals and if they share the same level of social standing as the person doing the desiring. Furthermore, rivalry stimulates mimetic desire, which fact can lead to a frenzy that tends to spill over into violence.
Violence At the Heart of The Social Order
When the mimetic violence within a group is exacerbated, it puts the group’s stability and its very survival at risk. Girard’s theory is that the first human groups emerged from the animal condition through an intensification of mimicry, that they therefore had to deal with the dynamics of self-destruction without being able to use the buffer provided in our societies by the institution of the judiciary and that the sacred and culture appeared, first of all, as practical responses to this challenge. The invention of the sacred, which is one and the same as the process of hominization, is the result of the sacralisation of phenomena permitting the cathartic expulsion of violence at the expense of a “scapegoat” that was unanimously expelled from the group. Here, sacralisation means the twofold fact of marginalising a reality that the whole group perceives as both different and the vehicle of a rupture in the common meaning of the word and of according it a particular status. In this sense, the sacred by definition implies mystery and incomprehension. Right from its very origins then, human culture has been an attempt to contain violence: not a conscious taming founded on a rational control of the passions but, rather, an obscure pact made with a murderous desire and one that is fundamentally ignorant of that same desire. Through his interpretation of a great number of myths and archaic rituals but also a re-reading of the Greek tragedies and the great works of world literature, Girard shows at the same time the universality of this elementary mechanism and the diversity of the cultural forms it produces.
In Violence and the Sacred (1972), Girard demonstrates that sacrificial rites are mimes: attempts to reproduce bloody events that have permitted the group to have the mysteriously gratifying experience of unanimity. The essence of the sacrifice lies in the substitution of the expiatory victims with ritual victims, human beings and then animals that are put to death with the aim of reproducing the polarization of the feelings existing within the group. As for myths, they are the memory traces of those events, the result of long processes of a working through directed (more or less consciously) at hiding, justifying and rationalizing such events’ brute violence. One of the most important themes in Girard’s work is that of incomprehension. The stories that men tell each other, the symbols and the institutions (i.e. the whole edifice of human culture) are all connected to a murderous foundation and they preserve its trace and logic although they hide its brutal reality. Institutions are always, in some way, the heirs of a sacrifice and it is not by chance that they are accorded a sacred nature. The example of justice is emblematic.
The Immolated Lamb
The Gospel, too, appears to tell the same story of a salvific sacrifice. The pattern is inverted, however, as the story is told from the point of view of the Lamb, the innocent victim. The whole Bible can be read in this perspective; as a progressive revelation/denunciation of violence and its rooting in mimetic desire (envy and jealousy). The discovery of an inherent violence in man becomes increasingly precise, whilst God is correspondingly exonerated. From this point of view, the prophets’ condemnation of sacrifices constitutes a decisive watershed. Christ’s Passion marks the completion of this process: God takes the place of the innocent victim in order to make manifest the scandal of a human order founded on violence. As James Alison (one of Girard’s followers in the theological field) has demonstrated,[5] God’s absolute non-violence is emphasised particularly clearly in the accounts of the Risen Christ’s appearances, where He shows that He is free of any kind of resentment or desire for revenge.
Christ also shows the road to a conversion of mimetic desire, designating Himself as the perfect model the imitation of which allows one to escape the trap of mimetic desire. The perfect model because of the perfection of his message but also because he totally submits his own desire to His Father’s will (‘Let your will be done, not mine’). In other words, according to Girard’s schema of desire, Christ presents himself as the mediator of a desire that is without envy or rivalry because it is subordinate to the desire of the Father, that absolutely Other Who cannot be a rival for us.[6]
The interpretation of Christ’s passion as an inversion of the sacrificial schema lies at the heart of Girard’s reading of the Gospels. This discovery had led Girard, in his first works on Christianity, to reject use of the word ‘sacrifice’ to talk about the Passion and he openly criticized the Letter to the Hebrews on this point. Influenced by the theologian, Raymund Schwager, Girard subsequently changed his position, as he acknowledges in an afterword to one of Schwager’s books. Not without specifically stating, however, that if Christ’s death – and, more precisely, any gift of the self – can be called a sacrifice, it is on condition that the meaning of the word is radically transformed: ‘The gap between sacrifice thus defined and the archaic form of sacrifice is so great that one cannot imagine a greater one’.[7] Girard illustrates such duality through the episode of Solomon’s judgement, which presents two possible meanings of the term sacrifice: that of a peace-making murder and that of a life-bringing gift.
An Autonomous Force
The mimetic theory allows a better understanding of violence’s mechanisms i.e. the causes and effects of its outbreak. One may certainly object that there exists a predatory violence that brings men nearer to animals: it shows itself when human beings steal, sack and kill under hunger’s influence. But the essence of human violence, that which is typically human in it, belongs to another level. Whether it is the direct effect of rivalry or the result of a more or less complex process of expulsion, containment or deviation, violence remains fundamentally mimetic in nature. That means that it is contagious, explosive and difficult to control. It also means that one should never take its different forms of self-justification too seriously. Violence is never simply a means that can be used to serve an end. It is an autonomous force that inevitably evades the control of the person who lets him/herself be infected by it. In order to understand the dynamic of a violent or potentially violent conflict, one should consider it a situation of mimetic rivalry right from the start, rather than trying to weigh up the actors’ rational motives. Besides, the most typical form of human violence is the one that turns brothers into enemies, as many historical examples demonstrate.
War between states poses as being rational by codifying recourse to violence in a law of war. This classification has never resisted the onslaughts of mimetic violence, however. Girard’s last work, Achever Clausewitz (2007, published in English as Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre) shows how modern warfare’s great theoretician had understood this fact. For Clausewitz, the essence of war is the duel, a reciprocal form of violence that almost necessarily leads to a ‘rise to extremes’. The 1914-1918 War illustrates this reality very well. The conflict’s initial causes (which the historians are still debating) were rapidly obscured by reciprocal hatred, whilst the rivals’ motives and behaviour became indistinguishable, spurred on as they were by the same destructive fury. If the historical forms of war between nations have been in decline for a few decades, the same cannot be said for civil wars, mass massacres and terrorism. We are regularly assailed by waves of homicidal hatred that are difficult to explain objectively. Girard helps us to become aware of the unpredictable, recurring and uncontrollable nature of collective violence, a cyclical process that feeds off its own effects.
In so-called civilised societies, violence is channelled and regulated in various ways. Apart from the channel of the judicial system, one method is to inculcate behavioural norms involving a rigorous control of physical aggressiveness very early on or, again, to extend the areas of social activity that permit a lawful and regulated expression of violence, such as economic activity or sport. Despite these palisades, we risk being carried away at any moment by the explosive force of the mimetic processes. If violence is so difficult to master, it is partly because it produces its own form of narrative, its own lie, and this helps to mask it and fuel it. It is the essence of the myths, but also of nationalist talk and of all the ideologies that aim at reinforcing unity and the identity of a human group, whatever its size and nature may be. Nowadays as in the past, the simplest way of defining oneself is to designate a real or imaginary enemy or to stigmatize a form of deviance.
By way of illustration, let us remember the extent to which modern wars have contributed to creating European nations, making it possible to establish, inter alia, mechanisms promoting collective solidarity. History is rich in lynching episodes and witch-hunts, moreover. These are easy solutions that allow a community in crisis to re-find its unity. It is clear that the rise of extremist parties in a Europe that finds itself obliged to reckon with unemployment and economic stagnation is part of the same phenomenon. The evil is far more extensive and insidious than we might think, however. When all is said and done, it is fearfully banal. Think, first of all, of the cases of harassment at work or in schools but also of many other situations in which it suits us, in all conscience, to strengthen our ties and create a sort of conviviality at the expense of scapegoats or “lightning conductors” who, albeit physically absent and therefore not directly exposed to our sarcasm, are no less its victims for all that. If we are honest, the stability of the groups to which we belong, the force of their collective existence, often rests on the hidden “mainstay” of an individual who is ritually derided or criticised, a figure who stands for “that which we are not”. Suffice it to remember the banal experience of a meal amongst friends during which hatred and scorn for someone were the preferred option for creating communion.
‘My Own Peace I give You’
Ordinary violence remains contained in our societies, nevertheless. In the majority of cases, the lynching has become purely verbal. Without forgetting the effect of the palisades mentioned earlier, Girard observes that, thanks to Christianity, we have become more aware of and, to a certain extent, forewarned about the processes of victimization. We instinctively know that we must not turn a scapegoat into a real victim. Indeed, we see the figure of the Crucified Christ behind every victim of violence, even if we are not aware of such fact. Nietzsche was not mistaken when he denounced pity as being one of the pernicious consequences of Christianity. The importance that victims enjoy in the public space reflects a delegitimization of violence. But that is not yet making us capable of inventing ways of being together that are not founded on exclusion and thus violence. If it is true, as Girard demonstrates, that man has learned to build societies through the reassuring experience of a murderous unanimity, it comes as no surprise that violence is a part of us.
At this point we have to ask ourselves what the following words of Jesus Christ really mean: ‘Peace I bequeath to you, my own peace I give you, a peace the world cannot give, this is my gift to you’ (Jn 14:27). In the Girardian perspective, these words clearly assume a very precise meaning. The world’s peace is the peace that is built at a third party’s expense through an insidious pact with violence. Building true peace cannot mean anything other than seeking to build a way of being together that can do without an enemy and scapegoat or, to put it another way, creating a community ‘whose unity is not the result of being opposed to others’.[8]
The bond between violence and the sacred is continually being renewed, despite Christ’s coming. In secular France, war memorials have sometimes taken the place of sanctuaries. It is not by chance that people spoke of the sacred union (l’union sacrée) during the First World War and that the road used by the reinforcements on their way to fight at Verdun was called the Sacred way (La voie sacrée). These facts reveal the permanence of a more archaic sense of the sacred within societies that believe themselves to be modern.
One would also need, however, to talk about the persisting ambiguity in the meaning of sacrifice within Christianity itself and the useless forms of suffering we impose on others and ourselves, believing that, in this way, we are pleasing God. The repudiation of violence and of everything that leads to it lies at the heart of the Christian message. Realizing this forces us to ask ourselves how much sacrificial violence remains in our conception of religious life and in our images of God. Sacrifice remains the crucial point where what is worst rubs shoulders with what is best. It is only too evident that this ambivalence continues to contaminate our image of God. In this respect, I would like to quote the words of a famous Christmas carol: ‘Midnight! Christians, this is the solemn hour when God-made-man came down to us, to remove the original stain and stem His Father’s anger’. Are we able to think of God as ‘the unambivalent source of goodness’[9] who is totally for us and utterly without any sadism or spirit of revenge?