Mimetic Theory and Original Sin: René Girard, James Alison, and Raymund Schwager

The considerable attention to the theme of original sin in post-Vatican II theology bears witness both to its perceived importance and to a sense of crisis as to how it should be articulated. There are two broad areas of concern. Firstly, attempts to reconcile the primal history of Genesis 1-3 (the story of a transgression which precipitates the fall of humanity from a state of original bliss) and evolutionary theory anxiously acknowledge a perceived divergence between faith/religion and reason/science. At stake is the intellectual credibility of Christian faith in the face of scientific modernity. To use a term that will be discussed below, we appear to be at a ‘Galileo’ moment. The second challenge is related: an allegedly foundational component of Christian faith no longer has emotional hold, even for believers. Here is a question of affective rather than intellectual coherence. As David Ford points out, a successful metaphor of salvation must have ‘gripping power’ in order to do justice to the specificity and urgency of what is at stake. He cites the theatre director, Peter Brook: ‘For an idea to stick, it is not enough to state it: it must be burnt into our memories.’1 The doctrine of original sin, by contrast, seems to have no traction on the contemporary imagination. William T. Cavanaugh and James K.A. Smith offer an interesting way of negotiating the two challenges. They urge us to move ‘beyond Galileo to Chalcedon’, by which they mean that theology is facing a dead-end if it sees the problem of original sin as an analogy of the Galileo crisis. This denotes an urgent anxiety to reconcile what science tells us about human origins and what our tradition asserts; if we fail in this task, the credibility of the Christian faith is imperilled. To cite Charles Taylor, we find ourselves ‘cross-pressured’. The problem is that, framed in these terms, there can only be one outcome: tradition will give way to scientific rationality, and the doctrine will have to go. The alternative, according to Cavanaugh and Smith, is to think of this as a ‘Chalcedonian opportunity’, in which we creatively keep the tension in place rather than dissolve it. Just as the Chalcedonian fathers found a way of asserting both the divinity and humanity of Christ, so we need to ‘embrace the cross pressure as an impetus for genuine, yet faithful, theological development’.2 A shift ‘from Galileo to Chalcedon’ means the explicit adoption of the Council of Chalcedon as the model and template for creative theology in the contemporary ‘cross-pressured’ world. More generally, and with respect to the doctrine of original sin, it serves as a call to make Christology the guiding principle of our discussion, rather than the anthropological sciences. Such an emphasis is found in theologians inspired by the mimetic theory of René Girard (1923-2015), specifically James Alison and Raymund Schwager.3 Each seeks to secure the credibility of the doctrine in the light of evolutionary accounts of human origins. Just as importantly, they point to how the doctrine can have ‘gripping power’ once again, provided it is articulated in a way that is emphatically Christological. Theologians may differ in their response to the modern ‘turn’ to anthropology, but according to Alison, they mostly fall short of the important task: how to move from their theoretical starting point to the practicalities of Christian living.4 Medieval and modern theories of redemption all look in the direction of God for the causes of the Crucifixion: God's honour, God's justice, even God's anger, must be satisfied. These theories don't succeed because they don't seriously look in the direction where the answer must lie: sinful humanity, human relations, mimetic contagion, which is the same thing as Satan. They speak much of original sin, but they fail to make the idea concrete. That is why they give an impression of being arbitrary and unjust to human beings, even if they are theologically sound.5 His dismissal of ‘all’ (sic) soteriologies, past and present, is the kind of sweeping judgement that makes Girard at times a frustrating read, even for sympathetic interlocutors. As Rowan Williams has asserted, ‘[i]n the English-speaking intellectual world, René Girard's work continues to inspire and exasperate in equal measure’.6 One source of this exasperation for theologians is his ambiguous relation to their discipline. Girard wrote as a committed Christian, and drew explicitly upon theological concepts and terminology; and yet he consistently refused the label ‘theologian’.7 To speak of a ‘Girardian’ understanding of original sin requires a careful examination, therefore, not just of his own work, but that of scholars who have attempted to incorporate his anthropological insights into a formal theological framework. Girard asserts that soteriology has been defective because it looks in the wrong direction for an explanation as to why things have gone wrong. Theologians considering the human catastrophe have spent much of their time apportioning ultimate responsibility—or blame—to God, or to Satan, when in fact its source needs to be located unambiguously in dysfunctional human relations. As a result, talk of original sin has remained at the level of abstraction, and too many accounts of salvation seem to be arbitrary and unjust towards humanity. They may be ‘theologically sound’; but that is not enough. There is work to be done, therefore, not just on a formal theoretical level but in making the doctrine accessible, convincing, and useful for the tasks of practical Christian living. And as Cavanaugh and Smith would add, this will not be achievable unless grounded in a creative Christological imagination. This article will consider the contribution of René Girard's theological interlocutors, Alison and Schwager (parts 3 and 4, respectively). As a prelude, however, part 2 will report on the status of Girardian theory as anthropology, and within the human sciences more generally. Clearly, if the Girardian/mimetic account of hominisation is judged to be untenable, then any attempt to incorporate it into a theology, however creative and ‘theologically sound’, will fall short of what is needed. We have noted Rowan Williams's assertion that René Girard's work ‘continues to inspire and exasperate in almost equal measure’. This is not simply about Girard's style of thinking, but a description of the kind of theory that is being offered. Williams compares it to the history of Darwinism: ‘a “big picture”, inspiring and exasperating, gradually fleshed out by work in unexpectedly relevant fields’.8 A paradigm constructed before the supporting evidence is in; except that, as with any narration of human origins, the necessary evidence is hard, even impossible to find. For Williams, it is more accurate to say that we have a ‘heuristic myth’ or a ‘novelistic’ version of human origins, to be valued as a narrative which ‘makes sense of where we are’.9 This is not to evade altogether the question of evidence. In the context of the two volumes of essays that he is introducing, which ask ‘how we became human’ and if we can ‘survive our origins’, Williams wonders whether we have in fact underestimated the degree of confirmation already available to us. The things we know already ‘tell strongly in favour of something very like Girard's account as an empirically credible story of cultural origins’.10 If the Darwinian analogy holds, then what we ‘so badly need’ is careful work on the frontiers between Girardian theory and other currents of critical thought, including biology, neuroscience, and anthropology. Paul Dumouchel considers the state of the question of Girardian-Darwinian approaches to hominisation.11 He divides current research into two groups: paleo-archaeological and paleontological research on the evolution of the genus homo; and evolutionary explanations of the difference between chimpanzees and modern humans. Neither fully addresses the question of hominisation, since ‘how we became human/who we are’ will depend on an understanding of ‘who we are’. Mimetic theory, says Dumouchel, offers a wider lens that takes in necessarily related questions about the origins of culture, or the distinction between good and evil. Once framed in a more ambitious way, i.e., according to mimetic theory, the questions in fact become more specific. According to Dumouchel, the question of hominisation is a secondary one for Girard, in any case; Girard's primary interest is in the social mechanism which generates culture, and by implication hominisation.12 Proto-humans emerge from a violent crisis, with the victim at its centre becoming ‘an object of intense, watchful, and probably anxious attention’: the first non-instinctual symbol.13 In fact, the main advantage of the explanation put forward by mimetic theory is precisely that it comes as part of a package, one that intimately relates the origins of symbolic thought with the origin of religion (or the sacred), rituals, myths, rules, moral distinctions, and indeed all basic institutions. That is its greatest strength, because all these things are common to us and to us only.15 Pierpaolo Antonello considers evolution from the perspective of the emergence of human consciousness.16 He begins with Genesis, and the serpent's ‘gift’ to Eve (of self-knowledge, and the ability to discriminate between good and evil). A connection is made, therefore, between self-awareness and moral outlook. This link argues against biological reductionism; in addition, there appears to be a convergence of mimetic theory with an increased awareness in scientific literature of the intersubjective constitution of the human mind, through internal mirroring mechanisms, empathetic attunement, and so on. To these new understandings, mimetic theory brings important reminders about mimetic processes: that ‘imitation’ is mostly unintentional and unwitting, and that mimetic dynamics rely on a lack of self-reflexivity—méconnaisance—in group behaviour. As in the Genesis figuration, the sacred is intrinsically ‘deceptive’.17 Antonello goes on to consider the place of sacrifice in the construction of human cognition, and the presence in Vedic and Judaeo-Christian traditions of different levels of consciousness. Here, ‘awakening’ denotes a transition from primary level consciousness (shared by human and non-human animals) and higher-order consciousness (which, along with language capacity, is peculiar to humans). In short, Antonello is able to discern from the sacrificial matrix found in ancient texts a cluster of behavioural and cognitive elements, which may have contributed to the development of proto-consciousness and conscience. Pre-eminent among these are: the strong, attention-grabbing emotional response elicited by ritual sacrifice; the cognitive and mnemonic reinforcements of repetition and ritualisation; and the emergence of symbolism and the mythical mind. Ecstatic practices (which, according to Girard are re-enactments of the primordial mimetic frenzy) ‘challenged and stretched the limits of normal, pragmatically oriented consciousness’.18 Similarly, ‘sacrificial creations of subjectivity’, in the form of codified development of ‘rites of passage’, elicit in the neophyte, through a symbolic resurrection, a ‘new subjectivity’, an emotional and cognitive self which is a proto-form of personal ‘selfhood’. It is the paradox of mimetic theory (and confirmation of its elegance), however, that the same sacrificially-inflected mechanisms which shape the development and complexification of human consciousness are also responsible for the historical abandonment of ritualistic sacrifice. Over time, empathetic and self-reflective responses to violence move groups away from their violent origins. Paul Dumouchel sees the ‘ambitious’ nature of mimetic theory as an advantage, which enables it to overcome the limitations of existing research into human origins. It comes as ‘part of a package’ which enables us to connect up the things that humans, and only humans, have in common: symbolic thought, religion/the sacred, rituals, myths, rules, and moral distinctions. This is the same sacrificial matrix which, for Antonello, generates proto-consciousness and conscience. There have been other significant developments in support of mimetic theory, during the nearly fifty years since Girard put forward his theory of hominisation. In archaeology, new research into the explanation for decapitated skeletons and other features of the settlement in neolithic Çatalhöyük (southern Anatolia) seems to corroborate the scapegoating hypothesis.19 In neuroscience, mimetic theorists have shared the excitement around the alleged discovery by Giacomo Rizzolatti and of in the and a development which has to that even be the the forward in human on and on research into development and as as and of these developments is as Williams very like Girard's can be as ‘an empirically credible story of cultural He the of the Darwinian of a which can our thinking, even in of its the of this the anthropological of mimetic theory, a since its first The first part of James The of is to the construction of a which is by a Alison to the story of original sin, which has with an account of the we are by how we are to be from it. 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