René Girard's Anthropology of the Cross
Can social science vindicate religion, or should we respect the Cartesian Bargain instituted 400 years ago?
It’s almost impossible to understand religion today, but that’s not the fault of religion. We fail to understand religion because we fail to understand the logic of public reason.
The modern public sphere—this strange and new place where individuals are free to deliberate over the truth of competing ideas—only emerged because, in the seventeenth century, we all agreed to sequester our religious convictions in the private sphere. More than 400 years after the Cartesian Bargain imposed a blanket ban on the data of revelation, is it really any wonder that religion invariably sounds like make-believe?
The genius of René Girard was that he understood the rules of the modern game. He rarely aimed to justify his Catholic faith in religious terms, or to persuade in religious terms, because he knew that modern culture blocks that way.
Girard approached Christianity through anthropology. Could we understand the Christian revelation by simply looking at the data pertaining to the Christ phenomenon? Using only the logical tools of modern, educated man—strictly within the rules of the Cartesian bargain—how far can we go to grasp, and communicate publicly, the logic of Christianity?
In particular, Girard is at his finest on the topic of the Passion—the roughly 7 days between Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem and his Crucifixion.
So what exactly happened, and what is a modern mind to make of it?
The Crucifixion as a Trap Set for Evil
First, something I learned from Girard, which has always stuck with me, is that the Crucifixion was a "trap" set for Satan. Christ understood his enemies, he understood the human psychology and sociology of fallenness so fully, that he spoke and acted in specific ways that would tempt Evil into self-destruction.
For many modern people, the Passion is just a sad story about a prophet who is killed; the prophet is a nice man, even a sage perhaps, who is unjustly killed, but the prophet is obviously the loser. Not so, says Girard. The Passion is a symphony of violence but Christ is its conductor.
Paul writes to the Corinthians: "If the princes of this world had known [the wisdom of God] they would not have crucified the Lord of glory" (1 Cor. 2:8).” They thought it would be just another "single victim mechanism," Girard’s term of art for the process whereby a community resolves its contradictions by unanimously killing one particular innocent. They'd kill Jesus, and it would be good for the rulers and good for the mob. According to Girard, this mechanism was the primary mechanism for stabilizing potentially explosive social conflicts across pre-Christian society.
Origen and many of the Greek Fathers compared Jesus to the bait that a fisherman puts on a hook to catch a fish. The fish is Satan.
So you’re probably wondering, how did it work? How was the trap laid? Well, first you have to understand that, usually, after scapegoating a victim, everyone united in the crime is aligned on a disingenuous narrative. Myths emerge. Indeed, according to Girard, this is the essence of Myth: When societies scapegoat victims, Girard observed that they also spin out positive stories about the victim. The hated victim is deified upon the victim’s death, as a kind of organic, emergent ideology covering up the shared guilt. In a macabre paradox, the victim who was hated when alive is suddenly loved when dead because the killing heals the community.
Knowing that the princes of this world had every bit of confidence in their primary mechanisms of control (such as scapegoating single victims), what if God allowed himself to be scapegoated? It would short-circuit their whole system.
The princes of this world “did not understand that the victim mechanism they unleashed against Jesus would result in truthful accounts.” In the four accounts of the Passion, for the first time ever, the deceptive system of mimetic contagion would publicly auto-demystify.
Christ in the Gethsemane Garden (1901) by Arkhip Kuindzhi
The Game of Truth
For true statements to have an effect on the culture, there is a subtle strategic landscape they must traverse. Just as we today struggle to understand pre-modern religion, for religious claims break certain rules of the contemporary public sphere, Christianity seems to be it’s own kind of truth game. An entirely different conception of public speech.
We find ample textual evidence of this, if we look closely at the Gospel narratives.
I’ve spoken many times about the concept of parrhesia, of which Diogenes was one of antiquity’s greatest practitioners. Parrhesia means “frank speech,” but specifically a kind of militant and costly speech that brings punishment to the speaker. In The Courage of Truth, Foucault studies the conditions for this unique form of speech to function.
In the gospel of Mark, Jesus is described as speaking parrhesiastically (παρρησίᾳ), specifically in a moment where Peter is urging him to be more cautious with his speech. Jesus basically says no, getting in trouble is the point!
As Girard analyzes in Things Hidden, it is Christ’s words that the mob cannot tolerate, and his words are simply the revelation that everyone had been living a lie—that their social stability was purchased with perpetually covered-up murder.
Christ’s revelation is arguably not even spiritual. He is revealing an empirical reality, an anthropological fact, which it is in the nature of human society to deny. That is why he was killed.
Thus, without trying to reduce religious experience to a naive positivism, we must nonetheless appreciate the degree to which the logic of Christianity is far more empirical than virtually anyone gives it credit for. It is as if Christ is an inexplicably sophisticated social scientist; his surprising ability to predict and manipulate the movements of evil, at this early time, is a very unique kind of miracle, which modern positivism cannot dismiss as easily as it dismisses the other miracles claimed on his behalf.
If you do not believe Christ was God, Girard begins to put the onus on you: How exactly would a carpenter from Galilee have such a rigorous model of human behavior such that he could not only play all of these fools like a fiddle, but even call his shots in advance, as it seems he did according to multiple reports? That’s a difficult question!