Among the several recoveries of Paul found in Girard and spelled out by one of his premiere French interpreters, Benoît Chantre, is recognition that Paul is picturing salvation in anthropological terms. That is, Paul is describing the human predicament, whether religious, psychological, or social, as a manmade and human problem. In Girardian terms, people are mad with religion, with sacrifice, with violence, and the compulsion to repeat, portrayed in sacrificial religion is the human sickness Christ addresses. They may have contracted the disease, in any of its infinite manifestations (religious, social, or psychological, all of which are mixed and merge), but it consists of the desire to obtain the being of the Other (to be God). The admired model becomes the envied obstacle-cause of desire, but for both Paul and Girard, going to the end of the sickness is on a continuum with the cure.
Paul’s personal/religious break(down) on the Road to Damascus is contiguous with his recognition of the Messiah, as failure of a false transcendence, a false God, a false sense of law, is on a continuum with the truth. When his world falls apart, the significance of the Messiah stands out in full relief. It is not that “original sin” is moral, but as Paul shows (in Romans 7:7), it pertains to covetousness, or in Girardian terms it is mimetic rivalry (the same thing). The law is not impotent because its maxims are inadequate but the law is impotent because it creates covetous rivalry, as in the biblical story of the fall. Adam and Eve are jealous of God, their model, and as with any model, rivalry ensues. They would imitate him, in his containing and dispensing laws, and they would be him (knowing good and evil). Given the opportunity, adamah (human kind) would kill God. Their problem pertains to misoriented desire, misrecognition and deception. They would be like God, knowing good and evil, and they imagine this is the mode to life and the means to avoid death.
Paul concentrates his explanation of the human predicament, as it pertains to the law, but this law is not just the the Jewish law, but the universal “law of the flesh,” which Paul explains in regard to both the Jewish Law and the law given to the first couple. As Chantre puts it, “the essential function of the law necessitated a decisive confirmation and a decisive transformation.”[1] The confirmation traces the pattern of the universal fall, in which the object cause of desire becomes the obstacle. “For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness” (Rom 7:7–8). The prohibition or obstacle gives rise to what it forbids, murder and sacrificial religion. Cain’s sacrifice is reproduced in sacrificial religion, culminating in the sacrifice of Christ.
Christ exposes the nature of this scapegoating sacrifice in his passion and death but this is not simply exposure of false religion but, according to Chantre, it is the revelation of a new sort of “immanent transcendence.” “It causes the advent of a completely different type of transcendence—the transcendence of parousia, the growing ‘presence’ of another transcendence, which this time is at the heart of human history.”[2] The gap or distance in the law prompts an escalated desire to possess the law or to be interpolated into the law (to be possessed or a possessor of the law). Paul’s questioning of the law in Romans 7 describes a failed interpellation from which the law is enacted as an outside force. The woman consorting with her lover, in Romans 7:1-3, only understands herself over and against the law, while she may imagine her relationship to her lover in some way pre-exists her relationship to the law. As Slavoj Žižek asks, “Is not this hysterical distance towards interpellation . . . the very form of ideological misrecognition? Is not this apparent failure of interpellation . . . the ultimate proof of its success . . . that is to say, of the fact that the ‘effect-of-subject’ really took place” (The Indivisible Remainder, 166). For Žižek, there is only the failed subject in regard to the law, and this failure constitutes the subject. The distance between the subject and the law is the enactment of the only possibility of the law and the failure is the power of the law to create subjects.
According to Chantre, “The subject, raised in the Law and guided by it, suddenly enters into rivalry with the commandment.”[3] Transgression is the attempt to obtain what stands behind the prohibition. There must be life in the law, according to the serpent, and God is holding out. The reification of the law (the tree of the knowledge of good and evil), or the law of the flesh, keeps one eating the deadly fruit to obtain life by taking and grasping the law. “Veneration of the Law has become an obsession with the Law and the benevolent God has become a jealous God who opposes my own will, blocking my way. We are no longer dealing with a transcendent God but with a God made from human hands, an idol.”[4] This idol demands death as the means to life.
In Pauline and Girardian terms, this failure is the beginning, and not the end of subjectivity as it prompts the turn to authentic subjectivity. The move is from an external desire and rivalry, an external mediation to an intimate mediation, which brings with it an ultimate collapse. One begins to act, possessed by desire: “So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me” (Ro 7:17–18). This demon that inhabits me, is a “deviated transcendence” that “pushes me to do what I don’t want to do, that ‘disorients’ my desire, which was originally a desire for God, by offering mirages of a jealous divinity.”[5] This “deviated transcendence” is the counterfeit image of the Law, in which God is a jealous rival in the pursuit of self-divinization.
This “ontological sickness” brings on “all manner of covetousness” and ultimately experience of the law of sin and death. “When the external mediator becomes internal and when admiration is transformed into rivalry, when the model become too close is suddenly fetishized, the subject, obeying the law of desire, enters into a mimetic crisis that is one and the same as sin.”[6] The desire for God’s law becomes the desire to become God’s law, which brings on the split and collapse of the subject. “I do what I do not want to do” . . . “for sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me” (Rom 7:15,11).
Paul is split between the law of his mind (reason) and the law of the flesh. He is caught up in the movement described by Girard, between “games of external and internal mediation, admiration and rivalry, ‘mimetic models’ and ‘rational models.’”[7] The back and forth speaks of a compulsion to repeat, in which the self is at stake. “I would gain myself through repetition.” “For we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate” (Rom 7:14–15). The practice repeats itself as “the sinner always believes he can extricate himself from sin through a reiterated veneration of the Law: ‘So the law is holy and the commandment is holy and just and good.’”[8] More veneration repeats and tightens the circle as the grab for God’s transcendence grounds one in the flesh.
The law gives rise to sin, and sin is the failure of the subject, but this failure precedes the remedy. Mimetic desire, or covetousness of the law, takes a particular course, pointing to Christ. It might be described as a process of maturing, in which the father as model becomes obstacle and rival giving rise to murderous desire. There is a collapse of an outward structure that constitutes an inward desire and structure, in which one becomes both father and child, law and subject, so that the social structure becomes a deadly psychological structure. “The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me” (Ro 7:10–11). The law, meant to be a barrier to mimetic rivalry, provokes it, mediating what it forbids.
This external mediation is taken up within, the law of the flesh, in which the model is a rival, producing the war within and without. “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Ro 7:24–25). The law is a dead end that leads to Christ, but this dead end must somehow be pursued to appreciate the alternative. It poses the choice between a renunciation of the violent attempt to obtain the law, or a complete renunciation of violence and entry into an alternative Kingdom. It is not attachment to the law, but to Christ, through faith, that enacts true subjectivity.
Those who “were made dead to the law through the body of Christ” no longer serve the letter of the law as they have dispelled the fantasy of this failed interpellation. Imitating Christ closes the gap. There is no distance, no failure of interpellation, as the law of Christ incorporates into his body. “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.”[9] There is a turn from the external models, mimetic rivalry to a different order of transcendence – and immanent transcendence in which we identify directly with Christ. “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (Rom 8:1–2).
The passage is from being captive to a deadly law which has been at work throughout history in religion and society and in the human psyche, to freedom in Christ. “Thus faith does not suppress the Law; it ‘frees us from it,’ says Saint Paul, ‘delivers’ us by suppressing a proximity that too often risks degenerating into promiscuity, which is to say into ritualism and into transgression.”[10] The point at which man failed, in the flesh, Christ enters in. Christ fulfills, completes, and takes the place of the Law. The misorientation to the Law seemed to promise the Father through the Law, but Christ delivers God where the Law could not.
The passage is from out of violent sacrificial religion into imitating Christ, the model with whom we have a direct identity. The Law mediates, not the Father, but sin, and the emptiness of sin points to the fulness of Christ. Law will lose its “alienated” character of an external force brutally imposing itself on the Subject the moment the Subject renounces its desire for completeness within the self (the law of the flesh). There is passage through destitution, death, and rebirth: “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:3–4). Christ has destroyed the cycle of punishment and veneration of the law, as the law of the flesh is set aside for the law of the Spirit. Paul, due to the law, was persecuting and killing Christians, but now the law has been nailed to the cross. God has reconciled us to Himself through Christ, accomplishing what the law could not (2 Co 5:18–19).
There is now a new law at work, which still involves imitation and repetition, but repetition is no longer the deadly spiral of oscillation. The law of the flesh has been replaced by the law of the Spirit of Christ: “For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you” (Rom 8:6–9). The law creates hostility and jealousy, as it creates the impossible pursuit of God through the law. This fleshly law distances and alienates, and this is its work, while the Spirit is God dwelling in the flesh. The intimate transcendence displaces the distancing hostility. “If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness” (Rom 8:10). Mimetic desire, rivalry, and murder, are exposed and resolved: “the Resurrection resolves the enigma of the founding murder; the Passion, the event of the death and resurrection of the victim, is the ultimate variation on the religious structure.”[11] The work of Christ does not ignore this religious structure but intervenes and delivers from it, and this is resurrection power. Life in the resurrected body of Christ directly answers the deception of life in the Law.
Religion, society, the self, fall apart but this failure is on a continuum with the coming of the Kingdom. The crucifixion or collapse of everything is followed by resurrection of the victim. The innocent victim, Christ, brings an end to scapegoating and sacred violence: “the Passion is a dynamic repetition of the religious structure, which is itself defined as a first repetition, the sacrificial victim repeating the scapegoat victim and reactivating the first trauma for cathartic ends (or as a vaccine against violence). This third form of repetition deepens awareness of the origin, working back to violent foundations.”[12] The violent foundations of culture and religion are exposed, bringing the human kingdom to a close with the coming the Kingdom of Christ.
[1] Benoît Chantre, The Time Has Grown Short: René Girard, or the Last Law (p. 55). Michigan State University Press. Kindle Edition.
[2] Chantre, 47-48.
[3] Chantre, 59.
[4] Chantre, 59-60.
[5] Chantre, 60-61.
[6] Chantre, 61.
[7] Chantre, 63.
[8] Chantre, 64.
[9] Chantre, 52.
[10] Chantre.66.
[11] Chantre, 53.
[12] Chantre, 53.