René Girard, James Williams, And The Genesis Of Violence -- By: Bruce D. Chilton

Journal: Bulletin for Biblical Research
Volume: BBR 03:1 (NA 1993)
Article: René Girard, James Williams, And The Genesis Of Violence
Author: Bruce D. Chilton


René Girard, James Williams, And The Genesis Of Violence

Bruce D. Chilton

Bard College

Annandale, New York 12504

Renè Girard, Sacrifice, And Scripture

René Girard has developed a bold synthesis which relates sacrifice, the place of desire in human society, and the revelatory value of the Bible. His thesis has occasioned controversy on both sides of the Atlantic and may constitute the most comprehensive analysis of religion and culture since the work of Sigmund Freud.1 Girard commences his analysis with a discussion of desire, which he understands to be flawed from the outset. The seed of destruction within desire is that it is “mimetic”: one imitates a model whose passions can never be one’s own, and therefore the model is at one and the same time a rival. Girard’s first book was devoted to Deceit, Desire and the Novel.2 In it he sketched the “romantic lie” which leads to mimetic desire by reviewing the works of novelists such as Stendhal and Proust. Girard counter poised the lie of romanticism with the “novelistic truth” which renounces mimetic desire and in so doing discovers a new possibility in relationship with others.

Girard’s interest in the “double” who is both model and rival was further explored in a work on Dostoyevski.3 But his distinctive contribution to the study of religion came a decade later, in 1972, when he related his understanding of desire to the institution (or

rather, as we shall see, the fact) of sacrifice.4 In Girard’s analysis, mimetic desire is a threat to the very existence of human society because its natural conclusion is the displacement (that is, the destruction) of the other who is both model and rival. The desire to have what the other has (even to the point of wishing to be what the other is), a basic, human passion, is the root of violence: it is both ineluctable and incompatible with the existence of human culture.

Sacrifice is the symptom of communal violence and—at the same time—the means by which society attempts to conceal and avert violence. The violence of society is imputed to a person or animal who is the sacrificial victim. The ritual act of killing that victim, which is then deified in view of the killing’s apparently beneficial effect upon society, both restrains and assuages the communal violence which is at its root. The Bible, particularly the New Testament, is held to be especially revelatory both in laying bare the truth that sacrificial vict...

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