The Catholic anthropologist René Girard’s mimetic theory changed the landscape of both the social sciences and Christian theology and has only proven increasingly prophetic with every passing year.
Fr. Elias Carr takes readers through the basics and history of mimetic theory in his new book I Came to Cast Fire (Word on Fire Publishing). The following is an excerpt from the chapter titled “The Big Question.”
What makes human beings different from other forms of life? Thanks to advances in science, we appreciate more and more the complex and wonderful history of life in the universe. We can only speculate, at this point, about the likelihood of life on other planets based on our knowledge of the conditions that are necessary for life to arise, survive, and thrive. Our only example of life in the universe, however, remains the Earth; the rest is science fiction. Our Pale Blue Dot—the title of the popular astronomer Carl Sagan’s book—teems with life. With plants and animals, we share this “common home,” as Pope Francis puts it in his encyclical Laudato Si’, and yet we are decisively different from the rest of them. How? What is distinctively human?
While answers abound, culture seems a good place to start because humans are the only ones who express themselves in culture. What is culture? While in common daily language we associate “culture” with the artifacts of civilization—language, literature, art, government, economics, and so forth—the term really comes from a most human act, cult, which means “worship.” The act of worshiping creates culture, not the other way around. It also creates politics and religion. We try, mostly unsuccessfully, to distinguish religion, culture, and politics, but they are really the same thing. “Culture” derives from cult (worship). “Politics” comes from polis (πόλις), the Greek word that is commonly rendered as “city” but really refers to the citizens who constitute a worshiping community. “Religion” (religio) first referred to a set of rituals and symbols that expressed the identity of its society. Only later, in the Enlightenment, did religion come to mean what it does today: a worldview or a belief system, both of which are very distant from its original communal meaning.
How did worship arise? This question has occupied many serious thinkers from the beginning of human history. Human cultures tell myths about their origins that explain the divine, natural, and social worlds. These myths likewise explain the origins of practices such as ritual, sacrifice, and taboos. With the turn to scientific explanations for the origins of things, new theories arose, explaining worship in terms of its useful functions, such as promoting social peace and good order, rather than accepting myths at face value. Girard’s proposal should be seen as a continuation of this line of explanation. At the same time, however, Girard does not exclude the possibility of—indeed, he even argues for—explanations that transcend rationalistic or atheistic accounts of religion.
For example, Karl Marx argued that culture and religion (and, more broadly, ideas in general) are the products of the economic organization of a society (slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, etc.). Marx argued that human communities pass through distinct stages of economic organization that would lead to a paradisal condition free from coercion. Religion was the “opium of the masses.” Consider the importance of opium as an escapist drug in the nineteenth century, over which wars were fought between the British and Chinese empires—because it provided relief from the misery of modernization.
Marx and his associate Friedrich Engels were atheists. Although they rationalized their atheism with their theories, it seems that their atheism—as it does with many—comes from their revulsion to the evil, cruelty, and injustice they witnessed. If there was a God, let alone a good God, how could he let these things exist? If there is no God, what, if any, limits are there in one’s quest to eradicate suffering, evil, and injustice from the world? What followed in the wake of their cry was the establishment of communist societies, some of which exist to this day, and cultural Marxism, which poisons much of the rest of the world with its extension of class struggle to new domains such as race, gender, and ethnicity. While the social ills they wished to alleviate were no doubt real, their therapies often ended up killing the patient.
By contrast, Girard argues that religion explains human origins. He proposes scenarios by which protohumans might have become human—that is, a culture-making animal. This transition from protohuman to human takes place through a coevolutionary process of biology and culture—that is, the reciprocal interaction between nature and culture. “Nature” refers to the world that we experience around us as given (which today seems to be shrinking), whereas “culture” refers to the world that we experience as something we collectively and individually have made. At times, the distinction can be blurry. For example, if people are forced to dwell on a floodplain because they cannot afford to live elsewhere, is a flood strictly a natural disaster, or the result of both nature (given) and culture (made by humans)?
To discover a universal pattern to reconstruct his scenario of humanization, Girard appeals to two kinds of evidence. First, he extensively consults written sources, especially myths. He supplements these with nonliterary sources from anthropology (the study of human origins) and its subdisciplines, archaeology (the study of material evidence) and ethnology (the comparative study of human groups). He also consults ethology (the study of animal behavior) to uncover whether behavioral patterns in animals might have been adapted to meet the requirements of homo sapiens. He places all this evidence within an evolutionary framework, which tries to explain how living beings adapt to their environment to survive and thrive. Considering the evidence, Girard concludes that humanity is a child of religion, which emerges from the scapegoat mechanism. Put simply for the moment, the scapegoat mechanism provided a solution to the problem of unbounded violence that arose from humanity’s mimetic (imitative) desire. This was not something devised by human ingenuity or reason; rather, the first human beings stumbled into it. Since ethologists have found evidence of such behavior in primates, perhaps it has prehuman antecedents. Whatever the case, the scapegoat mechanism and its consequences, ritual and religion, protected the young species from unlimited violence, the unintended byproduct of mimesis (imitation).
In I Came to Cast Fire, Fr. Elias Carr takes readers through the basics of mimetic theory and how it plays out through history—from the violent origins of religion and culture to the radical revelation that unfolds in Christ—weaving in compelling personal anecdotes along the way.
