Transcript: Rene Girard's Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Book Brief
Episode available on Apple and Spotify.
“Everyone repeats that [a] king is a kind of ‘living god’ but no one says that the divinity is a kind of dead king… Skepticism concerning religion [retains a] theological perspective. If one examines psychoanalysis and Marxism closely it becomes evident that this theology is indispensable for them. It is indispensable for all modes of contemporary thought, which will collapse whenever what we have said concerning the king and the god is finally understood.” – Rene Girard (57).
General Remarks (00:00:51)
Girard’s Fundamental Theory (00:03:10)
The Priority of Religion for Girard (00:13:10)
General Remarks (00:00:51)
This is the book brief episode of the Religious Studies Podcast. And that was Girard trying to do his best Hegel impression. In that intro quote, Girard is saying: if you actually understood what I’m telling you, the world would end. So I guess we will just have to see about that. In any event, I am super excited for this. Girard is an extremely novel thinker and helps you think about things in completely new ways. So hopefully I can show you a little bit of that today.
This is the book brief episode, where all I will try to do is convey the main arguments of the book and motivate it for the reader. I will have three deep dive episodes coming out in the next few weeks where I’ll spend much more time explaining Girard in depth. Those episodes will also be where I discuss my criticisms of Girard and what I think some of the consequences are of his theory. Deep Dive Part 1 will be an elaboration of today’s discussion. Part 2 will be his interpretation of Jesus. And Part 3 will be looking at how Girard see’s today’s society, given his theory. So if I’m doing this right, by the end of today you’ll be able to say: ok I know Girard’s basic arguments but I have a 100 questions. And then hopefully I can answer a few of those for you in the deep dives.
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is a compilation of both some writings of Girard’s from the 1970s and the transcript of a conversation between him and two psychoanalysts. The main goal of the book was to further develop his core theory laid out in his groundbreaking Violence and the Sacred, which was published in 1972. And if you’re wondering about the title of this book. That is a quote from Jesus in Matthew, but he is citing Psalm 78, which can be translated as “I will utter dark sayings of old”, which would have been a much cooler title in my opinion.
Girard’s general theory (00:03:10)
Today, I’m going to give a 30 second version, a 90 second version, and then a 5 minute version of Girard’s theory. Do NOT time me. I’m doing this because Girard is saying some pretty radical stuff, and there are also several layers to his general theory. So saying it all a few different ways with varying amounts of detail should help us understand it all a little bit better. And of course in Deep Dive part 1 I’ll spend an hour talking about all of this, if that’s what you’re interested in.
So here’s the 30 second version, which has 3 parts:
A) The extent to which we can imitate one another is a unique and powerful biological capability of humans. But if unchecked, it would just lead to our destruction
B) Religion is an unintentional, unconscious social lie that helps keep that destructive capability in check
C) Jesus knew the truth of A and B, and told us, and that changed the world
And here is the 90 second version, which has five steps, each of which is its own argument
1) Human Being’s ability to imitate sets us apart from other animals. But along with this capability comes desire, which tends to lead to more and more violence
2) We overcame this by chance, with the invention of the collective murder of a scapegoat
3) This is using violence to end violence, though, so ultimately, for this act to actually work, we must hide this fact from ourselves, which we do with religion (myths, rituals, and the sacred)
4) Because we only create a community after religion is established, religion is the foundation of all civilization, culture, and even consciousness as we know it.
5) Jesus of Nazareth and the Gospel stories show the truth of steps 1-4, which is why he is the Messiah. But this also means that, because of Jesus, the illusion of religion is no longer operative today. And that means civilization is not as grounded as it used to be.
So there’s the 5 steps, and here I’ll point out that, in most cases, people are fine with his psychology (step 1), and of course are fine when he says religion is a myth (step 2 and 3). But they don’t really take seriously what he talks about Jesus (step 5). So after I walk through steps 1-3 in this section, I’ll end today’s discussion by briefly highlighting steps 4 and 5 in the last section. And of course, I’ll spend much more time on all of this in Deep Dive Part 1.
So here’s the 5 minute version, starting from the beginning. The basic idea is, in a very primitive, hunter-gatherer-type stage of homo sapiens, we got real good at imitation. And this helped us develop skills and get smart, but along with it came something else uniquely human: desire. But crucially, that meant that it was solely determined by/was the result of imitation, which means we do not have essential/fundamental desires. We desire through imitation; we only desire what others desire. And that’s a very important step for Girard. So I can’t really spend much time today defending this jump, but If you’ve ever seen kids play with toys, it’s not too hard to imagine this. In any event, when it comes to desire outside of the playroom, we can very quickly reach a stalemate where two people are desiring the same thing with no obvious means of resolving the issue. And when the stakes are high enough, humans will try to overcome any obstacle in their way. And when the obstacle is another person, that other becomes their rival. Their obsession then shifts from the object of their desire to their rival who is preventing them from satisfying that desire. And so, the rivals, originally both wanting the same object now both turn their focus to each other and become obsessed with the other, with trying to overcome the other. And oddly, because of this they now begin to resemble each other, as they both become consumed by this shared obsession, this shared infatuation with the destruction of the other.
So in this state, without some external, objective principle or standard by which to judge things or on which to act, there is just violence, or the specter of violence, which is just a state of tension and unknowing. And in this state, which can happen even today, eventually the frenzy of the crowd coalesces on one individual, a scapegoat. But in this movement, as all the energy gets unified and directed at a single object, the crowd finds itself aligned. An undifferentiated mass of people become differentiated. Through their antagonism, they now have a principal on which they agree. Of course this is at the expense of a scapegoat, who finds himself on the outside looking in. And though nothing about him has changed, he is blamed and killed on behalf of the groups’ prior discord.
So this is where religion comes in. The crowd, unable to fully explain why they all now are unified, why they no longer are in conflict, retroactively justify their murder of the scapegoat. Surely they must have been fully justified in killing this person, for all their troubles went away. This must be an act of the superhuman. (INSERT QUOTE) And so they create a myth explaining this event, which is not true but hides from them the fact that they are a community now because they killed someone without reason. And later, they will also establish rituals to commemorate the act. And these rituals in effect continue the unification of the community: each member is one in acting out the rituals of the community as all the others do. Now there is a set of practices people can imitate that reinforce the community and abolish difference within the community.
But of course, it is all built on a lie, and so, as the power of the community-defining event fades, as the power of the myth on which that event was based fades, and the rituals themselves fade, the community slowly dissolves into a crowd again, waiting again for some objective principle on which to unify and some external standard by which to guide their thoughts and actions.
So that was a very abstract and a quick and dirty version of the steps from imitation to violence to the scapegoat to religion to civilization. So let’s put a bit of meat on the bones of at least the first step by using his idea that imitation always leads to rivalry which always leads to violence. And we’ll do that with the movie I am Legend.
In the movie version of the story, the director chooses to show as rivals Will Smith’s character, the protagonist human, and the leader of the zombies. He also chooses to make them mirror images of each other. Will Smith’s character has his german shepard and the zombie leader has his pit bulls. Will Smith uses a trap to capture a zombie and the zombie leader copies this trap to capture Will Smith. In the final scene, they are face to face on opposite sides of a glass barrier, both losing their lives together, both consumed by their rivalry.
The director is trying to tell us that there ultimately isn’t any difference between the human and the zombie. Earlier, Smith mistakes a heroic act on the part of the zombie leader for pure animal instinct. In reality, the zombie leader risked getting zapped by sunlight to try to retrieve his captured bride. But Smith, in his arrogance, can only assume this zombie must be running out of food to do such an irrational thing like risking sun exposure.
Will Smith, in his obsession with curing the virus, mistakenly differentiates himself from the other, does not take the other as an equal but only an obstacle. He understands himself to be human and the zombie subhuman, but he is wrong. He is no different than the zombie. And indeed later, he gets trapped by the zombie king in his own “heroic” moment when he tries to “save” a mannequin. Surely from the zombie’s perspective, Smith is not a rational being. For why would he risk his life for a mannequin?
The Priority of Religion for Girard (00:13:10)
If you liked that, as I said before, we’ll review some more movies in deep dive part 1. And just wait until the deep dive part 2 where we walk through his reading of the bible. Girard can actually explain why Jesus is going around calling Pharisees white-washed tombs.
But I want to end today’s episode by emphasizing steps 4 and 5 from earlier. It is crucial to Girard’s argument that religion precedes culture, that it is not simply an aspect of culture. And it is equally important for Girard that we understand that Jesus in effect ended all religion and, because of step 4, all civilization.
Regarding 4, religion precedes culture because it is only through the killing of the scapegoat and the illusion of myth that we then have any sort of principle on which a community can be founded. Without the power of the sacrifice to unify us and differentiate us from others (and the power of the myth to hide that fact from us) we do not have community. So I’ll spend a lot of time in deep dive part three discussing what the implications of that are for us today, as we find ourselves in a world without the sacred.
Related to that, with respect to step 5, because Girard is arguing that Jesus and the Gospels expose religion for what it is (by passing through it straight to the scapegoat mechanism), Jesus truly did try to bring the apocalypse, the end of the age, the end of the kingdom of Satan and advent of the kingdom of heaven. And I’ll discuss this in Deep Dive Part 2.
I’ll also spend more time explaining the pull quote in Deep Dive Part 1. but that is what Girard is getting at with that quote. If you truly grasped what Girard means when he talks about desire, about humanity, you would see that only Jesus can save us. And indeed, he already has.