These days René Girard seems to be everywhere. It’s more than fair to say that this twentieth-century anthropologist, literary critic, and scholar of religion is enjoying a resurgence of popularity. Two recent treatments of his life and legacy, Fr. Elias Carr’s book I Came to Cast Fire (Word on Fire, 2024) and the documentary Things Hidden (Glass Darkly Films, 2024), propose to expound his thought and to help explain its resonance for our moment.
In trying to understand their answers, we might pause to ask more fully: Why has the thought of this modest, soft-spoken Roman Catholic intellectual risen so quickly to prominence in the past several years? Girard at first glance seems like an unlikely candidate to explain us to ourselves in our own moment. Born in France in 1923, Girard studied to be an archivist in Paris, earned his PhD as a historian, moved to America, and began his teaching career with a course on French literature. He then moved into the study of anthropology and sociology with an emphasis on world religion and, ultimately, Christianity. So why does his multivalent thought seem to have such tremendous explanatory power? Why does Bishop Robert Barron rank Girard as second only to the Church Fathers in importance for understanding the signs of the times?
Perhaps it is because the apocalypse is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed—and this twist on a well-known assertion usually attributed to science fiction novelist William Gibson1 could well describe the position taken up by René Girard at the end of his intellectual life. Luke Burgis, author of the book Wanting on mimetic desire in Girard’s thought and contemporary life, says in his introduction to I Came to Cast Fire that the Girardian apocalypse is not primarily the spectacle of radical destruction we associate with that word. Rather, Burgis says, Girard’s apocalypse is “the final culmination in the great unveiling of who God is and who we are.” As in Scripture, this apocalypse is first a revelation, a fulfillment. If it is an end, it is even more a beginning.
If we find ourselves eager to discover this revelation of self and God, that in itself is no wonder. Many today feel erased by constant pressure to identify as first and foremost a member of some group, cohort, or tribe. In this erasure, what is distinctive and unique in our own souls and stories gets blurred over in favor of someone else’s master narrative. Christ came to overturn this dynamic, though its overturning is no more than a side effect of his far more central and powerful flipping of the script of violent sacrifice. By giving himself freely, out of love, Christ destroys not only the power of the crowd to determine the meaning of his acts but also the power of evil to accuse, blame, and shame.
If a truly significant end (or beginning) to a new story really presented itself, would minds strapped into this carousel of recriminations even notice?
In turn, we are free to the extent that we can give ourselves for the sake of the highest good in freedom, as Christ did. What the world mistakes for freedom is often not even liberty but instead negative mimesis, or a slavery to desires that are not truly our own. Girard points out that very often, when we believe we are being most autonomous, we are in fact copying other people who appear to us to exist more fully than we do. We look at these others, take in what we assume to be their reality (but may be just a fabrication based on their appearance), and create false versions of them that we make into idols for ourselves. We then fall into imitation of these idols, an abject state which Girard labeled “deviated transcendence.”
In these moments of false transcendence, we may be driven not at all by truth but by a desire to seem to others like the kind of person who in turn could and should be thus copied. We then act accordingly, not to what our conscience asks, but only to what gains others’ approval. Only by realizing this compromised condition and accepting the humbling truth about ourselves can we throw off the “romantic lie” of our supposed autonomy and begin to live more as who we were genuinely made to be.
Yet by no means does this upheaval solve all of our problems. The person who has undergone a legitimate conversion and who is now consistent in being guided by truth does not thereby find release from suffering. Instead, he or she is only too likely to be further misunderstood by a society still enslaved to negative mimesis. And in that wider social context, petty envies still rule the roost. Society remains a theater of corruptions and vices, superficialities and diversions, accusations and counter-accusations ranging from minor to monstrous. Even though individuals may have pried themselves free from negative mimesis, whole peoples and societies still remain trapped in it. Thus trapped, groups cast blame, create scapegoats, and continue to engage in violence to try to purge themselves of the perceived cause(s) of their suffering. We might well wonder: If a truly significant end (or beginning) to a new story really presented itself, would minds strapped into this carousel of recriminations even notice?
This panoply of folly, this perpetual chapter of faults, can tend to rob people of any sense that aspirations to virtue and peace remain realistic, meaningful, or possible. The persistence of this aching absence, this sense of futility, seems to be part (though not all) of what Girard meant by saying at the end of his career, “History has a meaning, and its meaning is terrifying.” No doubt, he also had in mind humanity’s new access to technologies that—in its despair—the powerful few could use to destroy the mimesis-haunted many. How can anyone live out a call to intellectual and moral integrity in the face of such spiritual and physical terrors? In short, for what may we hope in this world on the way to the next?
Both I Came to Cast Fire and Things Hidden share the answer, central to Girard’s thought, that hope is to be found only in each individual soul’s imitation of Christ and in the ever deeper saturation of culture with the authentic virtues of mercy, charity, humility, and the non-exploitative, non-competitive just treatment of all. The poisoned alternative is the creation of an anti-Christic dystopia, in which human authority arrogates to itself the power to anoint sacred victims, punish perceived victimizers, and create new regimes of violence—regimes which, though they may be sterile, non-generative, and ultimately powerless to protect the innocent now that the sacrifice of the cross has unmasked them, will nevertheless lay false claim to the crown and mantle of Christ.2
It should be admitted at once that this is a wholeheartedly Christian reading of Girard and that not all scholars of his thought agree with it. As Things Hidden points out, some scholars believe Girard’s thought is best understood at an arm’s length from his treatments of the Gospel. Yet others—Fr. Carr among them—see Christian truth as key to Girard’s legacy, even as the source of his ideas’ greatest coherence. Things Hidden closely investigates the non-Christian reaction to Girard, a reaction with deep roots in the secularity of the French intellectual milieu, and takes an implicit position with its choice of final word from the scholar himself. Toward the end of his life, Girard increased the frequency and urgency of his calls for renewed commitment to the facticity and veracity of the Christian creed. Girard saw the widespread cultural instantiation of nonviolent imitation of Christ as a matter of survival, the only way to avoid the polarization of humanity and its consequent self-destruction: “We must love each other or die.”
Without losing any of the momentum of its keynote—winsome affection for a man of personal integrity and brilliant intellect—Things Hidden emphasizes the opprobrium and loss of reputation that Girard initially endured in France because of his commitment to discussing Christianity from the standpoint of a believer. It is subtly made clear through the structure of the documentary’s narrative, though at no point hammered home, that the dismissal and rejection Girard endured at the hands of his own people parallels the dismissal and rejection of Christ himself. If no prophet finds welcome in his own country, then Girard’s trajectory registers as prophetic.
For what may we hope in this world on the way to the next?
Fr. Carr’s book expands and elaborates the position that the Gospel is central to Girard’s thought, even where Girard seems to be discussing human behaviors that are far from or untouched by the Gospel. This centrality should not be missed, even when Girard turns to describe in detail the dynamics of godforsakenness. Things Hidden also acknowledges this centrality while holding open a respectful doorway to engagement with those who for sincere reasons cannot yet believe in the fullness of Christ’s revelation.
Both Things Hidden and I Came to Cast Fire make clear that Girard’s legacy gives the lie to all out-of-hand dismissals of Christianity as anti-intellectual. The character of his thought holds fast to Christ as the center of all truth and extends perception in all directions from there, feeling free to explore among many disciplines. In particular, Carr’s treatment of this aspect of Girard’s thought should appeal widely to systematic thinkers (Catholic and otherwise). Fr. Carr’s vivid, concrete prose breaks down Girard’s dense, allusive, sometimes unsettling essayistic language into a framework of univocal and straightforward assertions. Carr’s treatment is at once accessible enough for the educated non-specialist and robust enough to suggest new directions for the academic thinker.
Carr is also clear that Girard’s concepts of mimesis, scapegoating, and the katechon or restraining force of violence should be taken primarily as descriptive of fallen human behavior both before and after Christ, rather than as direct commentary on the inherent effects of the human desire for God. Christ came to set us free from such behavior, but we do not always take him at his word. Human attempts to create sacred order through violence can therefore be reframed as a feature of wounded nature, not of grace.
Although his thought deals with both the limits of human wisdom and the dangers of idolatry, Girard is not a theologian or philosopher. Therefore, what he has to say about the sphere of human activity should not be thought of as competing with or contradicting the insights of those disciplines. Instead, it is a complement—one that helpfully enlightens us as to why, if all that Catholics believe about the powers of human reason and the light of God’s redeeming love is true, humans nevertheless continue to fall back into the old destructive patterns that may seem to us the only way to secure our interests.
Girard’s conceptual framework can also serve to put a decisive stop to vague chatter about a supposed equivalence among human systems of religion. For Girard, the Christian dispensation has a distinctive character that reveals and fulfills what all other faiths only begin to reach for, pursue, or hint toward. Christianity also uniquely generates culture in that it unveils and delegitimizes the mechanisms of so-called sacred violence. Where Christians fail to honor this, when they lapse into the behavior characteristic of pre-Christic ways, they do so because they fail to recognize the nature of Christ’s sacrifice: not a satisfaction of vengeance but a free gift of self given in order to put an end to all vengeance.
In his conclusion, Fr. Carr takes a turn toward personal witness, confessing that Girard’s thought revivified his own priestly love for God. To the contemporary reader, Carr throws out a bold challenge:
Read Girard and discover Jesus anew. . . . The fire he casts does not destroy us; it purifies us of our fears of not getting what we want. Be free, therefore, because victory is assured. It belongs to him alone, and we are his.
Once more: freedom is not to be found in following the whims that flit across our screens (and therefore across what mental space we have left to ourselves). In Christ alone is our hope, and in the fire of the Holy Spirit he came to cast on the earth. That fire continues to make its warmth and light felt in individual lives, like Girard’s—and, once you have found freedom, perhaps also yours.
1 “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet” (Gibson’s original phrasing) is usually taken to mean that the heavy incursion of cutting-edge technology into human life is already a daily reality in some milieux while it continues to be rejected, resisted, or for other reasons not adopted in others. Whether technological “advance” actually constitutes progress, or whether an obsession with the latest upgrades tends to be itself a mimetic phenomenon, are valid questions I nevertheless don’t propose to take up here.
2 I’m especially indebted to a podcast conversation between Luke Burgis and Jonathan Pageau for some elements of this summary of Girard’s thought, which are also reflected to some extent in Fr. Carr’s book.