Toward the end of his life René Girard had grown dark and pessimistic, assuming that in spite of his life’s work exposing violence, pointing out the key role of the scapegoating mechanism, indicating the saving role of Christianity, he nonetheless concluded that humanity was set upon its own violent destruction. In sum, he concluded that Christianity had failed, and that the coming apocalypse could not be diverted. His final book, Battling to the End, contains in the title Girard’s assumption that violence and battle were unstoppable. In this book, which is a conversation with his primary interlocutor, Benoît Chantre, Chantre urges him to a more optimistic understanding in regard to Christ’s historical breaking in to human history, viewing the crisis itself, individual and world-historical, as indicating the answer. It is the logic of law leading to grace, or circumcision indicating baptism, with the second category suspending the violence of the first, but in which the form (law or religion) is preserved. The law and religious practices (sacrificial religion, according to Girard) implode, and Christ intervenes at the very point of crisis of law and religion (the crucifixion), so at that point where humanity would silence and destroy God, is the crisis from which he speaks. It is this logic that I am attempting to trace, how it is that human failure and crisis, indicates the resolution of intimate mediation through Christ.
The way in which we become selves is through a process of inculturation and socialization, so that we learn to talk or simply to be human by imitation and mediation of others. We imitate our parents or siblings and, in this sense, we receive ourselves from others. Their talk, their walk, becomes our own, though this otherness imbues alienation. In René Girard’s picture of hominization or individuation, the process is one of external mediation, in which we follow a model, to internal mediation in which we would become the model, which leads to rivalry. Girard is building upon the Freudian Oedipus Complex, in which the child imitates the father, but then would be the father, with the difference that Freud attaches this to sex while Girard views it as a fundamental pursuit of life. Jacques Lacan shifts the Freudian register out of biology into language, and views the dynamics of the subject, conscious and unconscious, as functioning like a language (I describe this here and here). All are describing a basic drive toward life or being, and it may be that no one of them is entirely right or wrong, as there must be a biological, a sexual, and a linguistic component to being human, which involves the basic drive to be – to be human, to have life, or to attain being, but each also ends in crisis (rivalry, death drive, murder, an apocalyptic end).
From Mediation Through the Other to Intimate Mediation
What the biblical picture adds to being human, is the possibility of the spiritual, the divine, or the eternal, which need not be a departure from biology, sexuality, and language, but just as these might be layered, so too the realm of the spirit. Human spirituality is the final point of integration, holding the other realms in place so as to serve this final phase of maturity (chronologically, but also their driving telos). Even apart from a specific religious notion, to become fully human points to a final integration, in which one is not simply driven by biology, sex, and culture.
This passage, in the description of Chantre (deploying the language of Girard) is from external, to internal, to intimate mediation. It is a passage from nature to grace, or the progression from external mediation into a rivalry in which “enemy brothers duel each other.” Collapse into rivalry and murder is the point of Christ’s intervention: “Only an intimate mediation, the return to faith in a unique Mediator—the one whose Incarnation, for better or worse, has put divinity within reach—can save the religious structure and with it the long process of hominization.”[1] There is a return to a vertical transcendence, not of the unreachable, imperturbable model, but through the presence of Christ in history there is “a growing presence of faith at the heart of the Law: God is no longer the external mediator par excellence, the one who dominates human history, but an intimate mediator, acting and revealing Himself at the heart of history.”[2] Intimate mediation is not through an external model or rival, but through closure of the alienating gap, which can be equated with faith.
Given the logic of mediation, intimate mediation could be seen as the guiding telos of the entire process (of hominization and integration). Being incorporated into the body of Christ, or receiving the Word which is Christ, closes the separation between the model and potential rival or between the self and the law (or language). This is not an impersonal word, but one that is embodied: as “the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one” (I Jn 2:14). Inscription in the Word is not a mere mark on the flesh, but a subsumption of the flesh under the Word: “Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Col 3:16).
The living Word within brings about a different subject, a true circumcision: “in Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead” (Col 2:11–12). It is not a circumcision in which “there are still traces of bloody sacrifice” but it is on the order of baptism, in which there is immersion in the Word, and passage beyond sacrifice. There is a logic in the passage from circumcision to baptism on the order of the logic of passage through external mediation to intimate mediation. The failure of the one, points beyond itself in the way that law points beyond itself. There is a displacement of the law of the flesh, a necessity indicated in this law. “This is the reason why in Saint Paul’s mind baptism must compete in effectiveness with circumcision.”[3] Baptism accomplishes what circumcision could not but in which it is indicated, a circumcision of the heart.
Faith as Trusting the Mediating Voice Behind the Law
Paul understood why Law gives rise to covetousness and murder only after he was a Christian, but was blind to the work of the Law as long as he was serving it. “Only that faith which is capable of hearing The One Who Speaks in the Law makes it possible to avoid the perpetual ups and downs of mediation, for the emergence of this intimate model, ‘hidden since the foundation of the world,’ deals a fatal blow to the circle of sin.”[4] From within his total devotion to the Law, on the Road to Damascus, Paul hears the voice which all of his effort was dedicated to silencing. In the midst of sacrificing Christians, he encounters the one who would end sacrifice. He is in the midst of transgressing the Law, and would sacrifice the one who embodies the Law, and it is in the midst of this failure that he hears the voice which will give rise to faith. Paul will come to understand his blindness and that of his fellow Jews, as a misrecognition induced by the Law, which does not rely on faith, “they did not pursue it by faith, but as though it were by works” (Rom 9:32). “Lacking faith, the ‘Jews of the flesh’ have had nothing but ‘works,’ that is to say a formalism, a terrified obsession with the Law.”[5] Law was not to be its own foundation, but was a supplement to faith. Paul indicates they have not even attained the law – they “did not arrive at that law” (Rom 9:31). The Law marked that which came before and after it, and they missed this mediating role for the law.
In Romans 4, drawing on the father of the Jews and the father of faith (Abraham, who was called by God from those the Jews would call Gentiles), Paul associates faith with that which precedes Judaism and the Law. The key element of faith is trust in God’s promise to provide life (through a son) in the face of shame and death. Abraham is not able to provide himself life, through a child, so his is resurrection faith (death acceptance) as opposed to death resistance, (Rom 4:24-25).[6] The shame of enduring childlessness in the face of his and Sarah’s being “as good as dead” describes both Abraham’s incapacity and his recognition of this incapacity to propagate his name (his life), and this circumstance is precisely the failure faith addresses.
Paul purposefully references the events prior to the giving of the covenant of circumcision so as to convince the Jewish Christians of the priority of faith over the Law. “For we say, ‘Faith was credited to Abraham as righteousness’” (Rom 4:9). It was credited “Not while circumcised, but while uncircumcised” (4.10). Paul’s argument, as to the secondary nature of the Law, is that it is not itself the promise but is a seal or sign (4:11). To presume life and righteousness are in the Law (as Romans 7 is sometimes misconstrued) is to believe the lie Paul is refuting. Life comes from God, and is not simply a product of the natural course of things.
Refusing the One Behind the Law for the Law Itself
The Jews stumble over the stumbling stone: “What shall we say then? That Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, attained righteousness, even the righteousness which is by faith; but Israel, pursuing a law of righteousness, did not arrive at that law. Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as though it were by works. They stumbled over the stumbling stone” (Rom 9:30–32). They are obsessed with the working of the Law, as if the Law could do the work of faith. The “Jews of the flesh” like all people of the flesh are in servitude to a model, a law, which is not an end in itself. They have tripped over the one who is the foundation of the Law: “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame” (9:33). The Law rendered them deaf to the one who speaks in the Law. They have made a fetish of the Law, confusing it with the messianic voice. Their “mindless repetition of the letter, this blind ritualism . . . has made them deaf to the prophets” and this same blind zeal “has made them reject the just one.”[7] Their rejection of Christ is of the same order as all people who have lynched, stoned, and crucified the innocent in the name of their law. They have trusted their own power of mediation through the scapegoat mechanism.
“The fetishism of the Law is then inscribed in the wake of sacrifices; it is logical that those who retain only the letter of the Law should exclude or sacrifice those who remind them of its sprit.”[8] Silencing the voice behind the Law in the name of the Law, is to reify the letter which kills and destroys the spirit which gives life. This is the very definition of sin, whether found in Judaism, nationalism, paganism, or simply legalism. The sinner refuses the voice behind the Law, as it requires faith. “This God who speaks in the Law is not a God looking down on the world (an external mediator who might always become an internal mediator, provoking sin), but an intimate mediator, a God who is only fully transcendent because he resides in the heart of everyone.”[9] This “intimate mediator” mediates an immanent transcendence which surpasses the natural self, mediated through models, family, culture, law and language. Humans were made for transcendence, for God, for participating in the divine.
The Final Crisis: The Stages of Mediation Fulfilled in the Last Law of Christ
Paul, Girard, and Freud picture the self as split against the self in a death dealing mediation. Chantre describes the “last law” as providing resolution to mediation under the Law, through the Law of Christ: “According to Saint Paul, it is thus the Incarnation of Christ that operates the unveiling of misrecognition, ridding us of the primacy of works and liberating humanity. The Christ, last prophet, Law made man, sharing the mortal condition without being afflicted by the ‘law of the flesh,’ is at once the last law and the last victim.”[10] In this last law, there “is a shift from one form of imitation to another, from the imitation of an exterior to that of an interior model, from ‘external’ to ‘intimate’ mediation” and this “assumes the gradual rise of messianic transcendence at the heart of world history. This ultimate transcendence (‘authentic transcendence,’ Girard would say) and this ultimate model only appears ‘at the end.’”[11] But whether Girard continues to hold this as a real possibility is questionable in this final work of Girard, with Chantre.[12]
Chantre urged Girard toward this “last law” which Girard’s own work had indicated, but Girard had turned dark, concluding that humanity is heading toward inevitable apocalyptic violence. Chantre points toward a brighter hope in “intimate mediation” through which the Jews of the flesh will have become Jews of the spirit and the “non-Jews according the flesh” will have become “non-Jews according to the Spirit.” All, Jews and Gentiles, will have set aside the law of the flesh, and the “scapegoat mechanism will have drawn its final breath.”[13] The goal of humanity will have been completed, “and man divinized at last; the skeptic (or the enlightened unbeliever) will wonder if man himself has disappeared with the gods.”[14]
This is the solution Paul pictures as inaugurated by Christ in the midst of history. Paul sees a Trinitarian solution to the crisis of the individual and the historical crisis: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (Rom 8:2). The intimate mediation of faith resolves the problem of mediation as this mediation is participation in a Trinitarian reality, which displaces the law of the mind, the law of the flesh, and the body of death, or the Trinitarian absence (the Freudian ego/superego/id or the Lacanian imaginary/symbolic/real). Absence, in this light, was not an abandonment, but in the words of Chantre, it brings on the “exacerbated crisis,” whether of the modern world, or the individual under the law, “which calls for another type of trust, or – in Pauline terms – the irruption of faith at the heart of the Law.”[15] The natural mediation and crisis prepares for the supernatural mediation, life in the Spirit in which the voice behind the Law is heard, the Word from which the self is received. However this might work in world-historical terms, this is the center of the Christian hope, toward which every crisis, world-historical or individual, points.
[1] Benoît Chantre, The Time Has Grown Short: René Girard, or the Last Law (p. 52). Michigan State University Press. Kindle Edition.
[2] Chantre, 67.
[3] Chantre, 78.
[4] Chantre, 68.
[5] Chantre, 71.
[6] Per my analysis in The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation: An Analysis of the Meaning of the Death of Christ in Light of the Psychoanalytical Reading of Paul (London: T&T Clark, 2015) 130-133.
[7] Chantre, 71.
[8] Chantre, 72.
[9] Chantre, 73.
[10] Chantre, 66.
[11] Chantre, x.
[12] The final work is Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre.
[13] Chantre, 85.
[14] Chantre, 85.
[15] Chantre, 13.