We have up to this far outlined the two axes on which Girard’s mimetic anthropology oscillates. The first axis is that human desire is mimetic by all means, but human beings will
77 Ibid., 14
always try to deny that they are copyists of other people’s desires who become for them both models and rivals. The second axis is that rivalry is always connected with desire. Grasping at glory, human beings will always make their models into rivals and the same rivalry intensifies their desire for what is legitimately another person’s desire. Consequently, war ensues when this other person tries to resist the attempt by the other to appropriate his/her desire as his/her own.
What desire does is that it begets the “self” and brings the “self” into existence. Therefore the self is a product of other people’s desires, those who preceded the self. Unfortunately, desires wounded by mimetic acquisitiveness and rivalry created by human sin will always produce wounded ‘selves’ who are participating in the larger community of victim-creators. They share in the universal complicity of victim-creators.
What Girard articulates very well about these two axes is that the formation of the self and the formation of humanity take the same process, they are other oriented. For Girard at the genesis of this process of coming into being of the self and humanity is violence. Moreover, “the violent distorted other” will always form “a violent distorted self.” Girard sees in Jesus’ words,
“You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires” (Jn 8:43-44), the truth is that the opponents of Jesus are formed by Satan whom they imitate. Therefore Satan forms, liars, murderers and violent “selves.” Jesus’ opponents cannot accept the truth because they are constituted by their father, the devil, whom they try to deny as their father. In the same vein Alison states:
In this way, we can say that every human being is, in fact, constituted by and with an in-built relationality to the other which formed him or her. This other constituted the very possibility of human desire. We can also say that owing to the way in which we are in fact constituted, that desire is rivalistic and builds identity, to a greater or lesser extent, by denial of the alterity, and the anteriority, of the other desire. That is to say, human desire, as we know it, works by grasping and appropriating being rather than receiving it. In this sense, we are always already locked into
the other which forms us in a relationship of acquisitive mimesis, that is, a relationship of violence which spring from, and leads to death.78
The question then is: are we completely damned since we cannot escape the influence of the distorted other; the model, the community and other social bodies?
It is here that we find Alison’s work, The Joy of Being Wrong, a very important resource because in that work he recognizes the role played by everyone in creating victims of violence.
Human relationships founded on violent mimetic contagion will always beget violence. The transformation of the self can be a reality only if we recognize ourselves to be wrong and hence transform our relationships with the other who is the genesis of all our desires. Alison postulates an anthropology of grace since through grace God relates to human beings lovingly, freely without any need of a payback check and generously because this relation is completely undeserved and unexpected. Alison argues that “the great anthropological transformation, therefore, is of the way in which we move from being constituted by an anterior desire which moves us into deadlock, by grasping and appropriating our sense of being, to being constituted by a self-giving other that can be received only as a constantly and perpetually self-giving, as gratuitous, and therefore never grasped, never appropriated, but only received and shared.”79 In this regard we are completely incapable of stopping violence in our world without God’s generous intervention in his Son who must become our constitutive alterity without whom we are bound to continue existing by the norms set by the wounded other; the one through whom scandals must occur, the father of lies, and murderer from the beginning.
78 James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, 44
79 Ibid., 45
This anthropology makes us aware of the gift given undeservedly, freely and in ungrasping manner, such a gift will always demand our response, at least our disposition to be able to receive it. God has done and revealed gratuitousness in presenting to humanity a new
‘Other’ who springs out from a completely non-rivalrous relationship. This other has lived in our midst and we have seen his glory as a self-giving and forgiving victim. “This self-giving victim, from outside human mimetic rivalry, revealed precisely that the death-locked lie of mimetic rivalry flowing from culture’s hidden victims is not the original mode of desire, but a distortion of it.”80 The original mode of desire is the self-emptying reciprocal love between the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit.
Although Girard does not emphasize the Trinity here because the idea of a trinitarian God seems to be a return to mythological polytheism, a problem which dissatisfied the modern world, we shall make it our central theme as it proclaims a relational God, who is a pure relation of love. Unfortunately, in that fear of the modern critique, Girard may have taken lightly the contribution of the roles of Father and the Holy Spirit that makes Jesus a scapegoat different from all other scapegoats. Jesus is a scapegoat who says of himself, ‘My Father is at work until now, so I am at work… I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge; and my judgment is just, because I seek to do not my own will but the will of him who sent me’ (Jn 5:17, 30). The consequence of losing sight of the Trinity is that we can easily fall into a trap of Christomonism where the event of salvation is only understood in the context of substitution of sinners for Jesus, relegating to periphery the involvement of the Spirit and the Father in the work of Jesus. We will come back to this point because it is essential for the second chapter as we come to appreciate the contribution of Hans Urs von Balthasar who sees the death of Jesus more than just a
substitution but also a sacrifice and a representation or solidarity with the victims of sin (with violence as one of its manifestation) in their death and perdition. In this way the work of Christ is given an ontological character drawn from his relationship with the Father in the Spirit.
Satan is the father of the distortion of the original mode of desire as opposed to Jesus, the self-giving other. The self-giving ‘Other’ is the constitutive element of the human “self” because he is God’s own self-communication. Michael Kirwan paraphrases this in relation to Karl Rahner’s anthropology as he argues that:
It is this reality which Karl Rahner seeks to express in his description of the human being as ‘the event of the absolute, free and forgiving self-communication of God.’ This formula conveys the truth of humanity’s openness to transcendence in our intellectual and affective strivings toward the infinite, so that God has already communicated God’s self as an inner constitutive element of every human being… meaning that we always already exist in the context of our intimate relationship to God. There never has been a state of pure nature, a neutral zone.81
Both Kirwan and Alison recognize in Rahner’s formulation a brilliant correction of the distortion that looked at nature separated from grace. However, Alison argues that it is the self-giving other the opposite of the father of lies and social other which formed us who can transform us into the self he is, a self-giving, forgiving and non-rivalrous other. This is so, because this other has done so concretely in space and time. It is here that Alison finds Rahner’s formulation unfulfilling.
The transcendental relation to God would easily take for granted how a human being stands before God while relegating to the periphery how he/she stands in front of world catastrophe like Auschwitz, Rwanda genocide and Darfurian bloodbaths.
Alison argues that “the transformation of our ‘self’ via our constitutive alterity happens not through some universal transcendence, but exactly through the givenness of certain particular historical actions and signs, moving us to produce and reproduce just such historical acts and
81 Michael Kirwan, Girard and Theology, (New York, T&T Clark, 2009), 53
signs.”82 It is in this vein of thinking that we find Johann Baptist Metz and others who think that it is not enough to postulate that human desire for transcendence is simply a desire for God without paying attention to its distortion. Kirwan, quoting William Blake, declares that “man must and will have some Religion; if he has not the religion of Jesus, he will have the Religion of Satan; deprived of God, humans do not simply diminish or shrink into robotic existence, or an animal spontaneity. They turn instead towards false messiahs and false transcendences, in search of the nouminosity which will transform the emptiness within – with catastrophic results.”83 Here lies the search of a new consideration which responds to human characteristics in the concrete circumstances of world history. It is here that the mimetic theory plays a very important role.
Since by nature we imitate others, we shall always need a model. However we need a non-grasping and loving one who unveils the lie of imitating acquisitively and rivalry.
Alison argues that mimetic anthropology helps us to:
Acknowledge that this desire, good in itself, may be misdirected and distorted. If our desire focuses on an object other than God, and if we desire in a grasping manner, rather than reciprocating God’s gratuitous love, then that desire is being lived as idolatry, a complete missing the point…. By contrast, Rahnerian transcendental anthropology effectively pre-pardons idolatry without transforming the idolater, without giving him/her a chance of a real restructuring of the heart.84
A mimetic anthropology is a continuous struggle and a discovery of human beings as they are inserted in the world such that it will not fail to take notice of the ugly face of being in the world, that is all forms of violence that take our world hostage. Alison instead proposes wisdom anthropology or anthropology of conversion because at the heart of it is the discovery of a completely different other who puts a stop to violent mimetic contagion. In other words, he
82 James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, 44
83 Michael Kirwan, Girard and Theology, 56
formulates an anthropology of revelation, with Jesus the revealer on one hand, and his disciples making a discovery of this new loving other, on the other. Jesus is the other who revealed a new perspective of otherness and introduced to his disciples the possibility of living in imitation of this other whose desire is not acquisitive and rivalry in nature. Jesus in his death leading to the resurrection revealed to his disciples the image of God as a victim of violence. This image of God as a victim of violence repels anyone who wants to appropriate and manipulate it because the image of God as a victim of human violence threatens the stability and security of the human
‘self.’
2.3.1 Complicity in creating victims
It is wisdom anthropology because the beauty of the otherness of this “other” is only revealed at the point when he is being driven out, lynched and executed on the Cross. It is important because “if God is the human victim, this means that access to God is available not only in the particular racial or cultural group (Jews and disciples) that made the discovery possible, but universally true wherever the human ‘self’ is formed by victimization, at individual and group levels. That means everywhere.”85 This anthropology is really appropriate for understanding the human being in a violent world. For Alison this realization can only rightly be termed as “subversion from within” or conversion. “Mimetic anthropology is par excellence an anthropology of conversion. The transformation of a moi-du-désir (self of desire) via a transformation of alterity has to do precisely with the changing of heart implied in the word cor-vertere… to live on the interface between the old other which formed us and the new other
85 James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, 58
which seeks to form us anew, is intrinsically related to conversion.”86 This conversion of heart can only be achieved through the recognition of our universal complicity in violence and its contagion. Therefore “the conversion works as we recognize our complicity in creating victims, cease to regard ourselves as a victim, and begin to see ourselves as co-victimizers.”87 The realization that “all have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23) is a powerful reversal of mimetic snowballing that comes with our denial of being victimizers.
This invites us to a new paradigm which dissuades us from holding on to our claims of being the innocent and victimized. It calls to our memory the story of the woman caught in the act of committing adultery and in her presence we can hear the words of Jesus resound again in our ears: “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” (Jn. 8:7).
The realization that we have all sinned smiles at us, arousing in us the Angels of mercy and the Angels of light whispering to our ears, “you cannot cast the first stone.” Susan Ashton in her song, Better Angels of Our Nature has this captured so poetically. “He fell to his knees and he cried out for mercy, heart-felt confessionals to an angry mob, but vengeance was theirs as they bellowed for justice, ‘death to the man who has sinned against God.’ I joined in the chant feeling so high and mighty, pointing the finger from up on my throne, until I looked in his tears and I caught my reflection, and knew that I could not cast the first stone.”88 The better Angels of our nature have been shown by Jesus that it is through compassion, mercy and love that we can challenge the angry mob to come to the realization that they are not without sin.
86 Ibid., 62
87 Ibid., 62
Taking up the new other in conversion definitely renders us vulnerable to even more victimization; offering the left cheek once struck on the right, we are actually destined to the Cross. Let us conclude the anthropology of conversion in Alison’s own words:
This is a first step toward learning how to create concrete acts of solidarity with our own and other’s victims, even though, as we will discover, this increases the likelihood of ourselves being victimized. In the concrete circumstances of humanity, what the new unity of humanity looks like is the beginning of the gathering of penitent persecutors around the body of the self-giving victim, whose forgiveness made their new perception possible, and the creating of acts of worship of the victim, both in celebration and in acts of fraternal service.89
Anthropology of conversion first and foremost opens us to the reality that we are accomplices in violence or sin. It invites us to mercy and solidarity with the victims of violence and sin because in their sin and humiliation our own being co-victimizers and sinners reflect back to us as in a mirror. Once this form of wisdom is attained we can no longer exalt ourselves but humble ourselves by acknowledging that we are also in need of God’s mercy.