The J’accuse of René Girard: The audacious ideas of a great thinker

Interview in Il Foglio March 20, 2007, Roma, by Giulio Meotti

{Girard explains his reaction to the expulsion of religion from history.

Intellectuals are castrators of meaning: “After language, they are in the process of deconstructing man.” Micro-eugenics, a human sacrifice. "Sexuality is the problem, not the solution.” The audacious ideas of a great thinker.}

Translated from Italian by Francis R Hittinger IV (frussellh@gmail.com)

Despite his 84 years, René Girard has lost nothing of the fiber of a radical thinker, virtually to the end. He is working on a new paper on Karl von Clausewitz. The author of such masterpieces of contemporary thought as "Violence and the Sacred" and "The Scapegoat," elected to the forty “immortals” of the Académie française, René Girard, together with Claude Levi-Strauss, is the greatest living anthropologist. In this interview at Il Foglio, Girard returns to that which he defined “the great anthropological question of our time.” He begins by asking: “Can there be a realistic anthropology prior to deconstruction? In other words: is it permitted and still possible to assert a universal truth on mankind? Contemporary anthropology, structuralist and postmodern, denies this access to the truth. Current thought is the castration of meaning. Such attempts to put man under discussion are perilous.”

This is the origin, according to Girard, of the “skandalon” of religion in the epoch of neo-secularization. “Since the enlightenment, religion has been understood as pure nonsense. August Comte had a rigorous theory on the origin of the truth, and his nineteenth century intellectualism recalls much that is in vogue today. As he said there are three phases: the religious, which is the most childish; the philosophical, and finally the scientific, the closest to the truth. Today in public discourse one aims to define the “untruth” of religion, as something necessary rather for the survival of the human species. No one asks what the function of religion may be, one speaks only of faith: ‘I have faith.’ But then what? The revolutionary theory of Charles Darwin hoped to have demonstrated the uselessness of a fifteen thousand year old ancient institution like religion. This attempted today in the form of genetic chaos enunciated by Neo-Darwinism. Take the scientist Richard Dawkins, for example, an extremely virulent thinker who sees religion as something delinquent.”

Religion has a function that goes beyond faith and the veracity of the monotheistic gift: “The prohibition of human sacrifices. The modern world has decided that the prohibition is the nonsense. Religion has returned to being understood as the costume of the good savage, a primitive state of ignorance under the stars. To the contrary, religion is necessary to suppress violence. Man is a species unique in the world: the only one that threatens its own survival through violence. Animals, during sexual jealousy, do not kill each other off. Human beings do. Animals do not understand vendetta, the destruction of the sacrificial victim linked to the mimetic nature of the applauding multitudes.” Today the only accepted definition of violence is violence as pure aggression. “Thus one wants to render it innocent. To the contrary, human violence is desire and imitation. Post-modernism does not manage to talk about violence: it puts it between parentheses and simply ignores its origin. And with it ignores the most important truth: that reality is somewhere accessible.”

Rene Girard comes from French radicalism. “I've stuffed my head with the clownish jokes, the mediocre simplicity, and stupidity of the avant-garde. I know full well how much the postmodern negation of reality can lead to the discrediting of the moral question of man. The avant-garde that was once relegated to the artistic arena now extends to the scientific one that reasons about the origin of man. In a certain sense, science has become a new mythology, man who creates life. So, I welcomed with great relief the definition of Joseph Ratzinger of "biological reductionism," the new form of deconstruction, the biological myth. I situate myself also in the distinction of the ex-cardinal, between science and scientism.”

The only big difference between man and animal species is the religious dimension. “This is the essence of human existence, it is the origin of the prohibition of sacrifices and of violence. Where religion has been dissolved, there has begun a process of decay. Micro-eugenics is the new form of human sacrifice. We no longer protect life from violence, instead we crush life with violence, to try to appropriate for ourselves the mystery of life to our own benefit. But we will go wrong. Eugenics is the apex of a type of thought begun two centuries ago and that constitutes the gravest danger for the human species. Mankind is the species that can always destroy itself. For this reason it created religion.”

Today there are three areas in which man is in danger: nuclear, terrorism, and genetic manipulation. “The twentieth century was the century of classic nihilism. The twenty-first will be the century of intriguing nihilism. C.S. Lewis was right when he spoke of the ‘abolition of man.’ Michel Foucault added that the abolition of man is becoming a philosophical concept. Today one cannot anymore speak of man. When Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of god, in reality he was announcing the death of man. Eugenics is the denial of human rationality. If man is considered as mere and raw material belonging in a laboratory, a malleable and manipulable object, one may proceed to do anything to him. One ends with destroying the fundamental rationality of the human being. Man cannot be reorganized.”

According to Girard, today we are losing sight also of another anthropological function, that of marriage. "A pre-Christian institution and valued by Christianity. Marriage is the indispensable organization of life, linked to the human wish for immortality. Creating a family is as if man were pursuing the imitation of eternal life. There have been places and civilizations in which homosexuality was tolerated, but no society has put it on the same juridical plane as the family. We have a man and a woman, namely always polarity. In the most recent American elections of 2006, the true victory was that of natural marriage in the referendums.”

The metaphysical boredom of Europe

Europe is immersed in what the Arabist of the Sorbonne Rémi Brague calls metaphysical boredom. “It is a beautiful definition, even if it seems to me that the superiority of the Christian message becomes every day more visible. The more it is assailed, the greater sparkles the truth of Christianity. Being the denial of mythology, Christianity shines in the moment in which our world is filling up with new sacrificial mythologies.

“I have always understood the skandalon of Christian revelation in a radical way. In Christianity, instead of taking on the point of view of the crowd, that of the innocent victim is taken. It deals with a reversal of the archaic pattern. And of a breakdown of violence.”

Girard speaks of the obsession with sexuality. “In the gospels there is nothing sexual and this fact has been completely romanticized by contemporary gnostics. Gnosticism has always excluded categories of persons and turns them into enemies. Christianity is the complete opposite of mythology and gnosticism. Today there moves forward a form of neo-paganism. The greatest error of postmodern philosophy is to have thought that it could freely transform man into a machine of pleasure. From here devolves the dehumanization, beginning from the false desire to prolong life by sacrificing greater goods.”

Postmodern philosophy is based on the assumption that history is finished. "From here is born a culture uprooted from its primitive form and exclusively put into the context of the present. Here also originates the hatred for a strong culture that affirms a universal truth. Today it is believed that sexuality is the solution to everything; rather, it is the problem, its origin. We are continually enticed by a seductive ideology of fascination. Deconstruction does not behold sexuality as something within human folly. Accordingly our madness lies in wanting to make sexuality banal and frivolous. I hope that Christians do not follow this direction. Violence and sexuality are inseparable. And this is because it deals with the most beautiful and vile thing that we have.”

A divorce between humanity and syntax, reality and language is underway. "We are losing every contact between language and the limits of being. Today we believe only in language. We love fairy tales more than in any other epoch. Christianity is a linguistic truth, logos. Thomas Aquinas was the great promulgator of this linguistic rationalism. The great success of Anglo-American Christianity and thus of the United States owes itself not by chance to the extraordinary translations of the Bible. In Catholicism today there is altogether too much sociology. The church is too often compromised with the allures of the time and modernism. In a certain sense the problems began with the Second Vatican Council, but go back to the preceding loss of Christian eschatology. The Church has not reflected enough on this transformation. How can we justify the total elimination of eschatology even in the liturgy?”

Girard repeats that humanity has never been as in much danger as it is today. "It is the great lesson of the formulation of Karol Wojtyla: ‘Culture of death.’ It is his most beautiful linguistic intuition. And it makes a match with the other definition of Joseph Ratzinger of the ‘dictatorship of relativism.’ The nihilism of our time calls itself deconstruction, in America also called ‘ deconstruction theory.’ Nihilism is transformed into a respectable philosophical theory. It all becomes frivolous, a play on words, a joke. We have begun with the deconstruction of language and we have ended with the deconstruction of the human being in the laboratory." Together with the lack of respect for human life, the deconstruction of the body is the other challenge of which Girard speaks. "It is proposed by the same people that on the one hand want to infinitely prolong life and on the other tell us that the world is overpopulated."

The literary critic George Steiner writes that even atheism is metaphysical. “Certainly, Steiner always has wonderful ideas. G. K. Chesterton said that the modern world is full of crazed Christian ideas. The enlightenment, too, therefore was a product of Christianity. Take a figure like Voltaire, an example of a naughty enlightenment figure who contributed to the de-Christianization of France. Nevertheless, Voltaire always defended the victims and was a great Christian, even without knowing it. For this reason I say that the nefarious interpreters of Christian doctrine are worse than the outsiders.”

“Christianity continues to suggest to us a fascinating and persuasive explanation of human evil. But we are losing the apocalyptic dimension of Christianity. People will realize that no society can survive without religion. Christian romanticism forgot that this religion before all else defused sacrificial violence. Today Christianity is much more realistic than the optimism of science that creates man only to kill him. The apocalypse is not the anger of God, but the madness of man upon himself. The apocalypse is not behind us, but in front of us. The apocalypse was not written for God, but for man. The Christian fundamentalists at present in America are apocalyptic in a mistaken sense; they think that God will punish man, not that man will punish himself. Today we need to have an apocalyptic view so as not to forget this violence originating in man.”

Islam lacks something important, the cross. The speech of Ratzinger at Regensburg, according to Girard, was decisive. “The challenge of Ratzinger launched against relativism is of benefit not only for Catholics, but for secularists. And I hope that Ratzinger may be a hope for Europe. He is a Pope very similar but also very different from JP II. Wojtyla was unstoppable, he always wanted to be seen and heard. Benedict XVI wants instead to reconcile people, he is very great teacher of reflection and modesty. The Christian religion, the greatest revolution in human history, uniquely reminds us of the correct use of reason. It is a challenge that plays on the concept of guilt. For a long time Europe decided that the Germans had to be the scapegoat. It was impossible, too, merely to set Nazism and Communism near each other. The death of god and the Enlightenment end of religious meaning decreed that it was necessary to maintain on its feet an ‘anti-God,’ an anti-divinity, Communism. I am in agreement with the thesis of Ernst Nolte on the affinity between Nazism and Communism. Every totalitarian regime began with the suppression of religious freedom. Today this anti-Genesis lives again in a part of science.” This is the meaning of the definition, from which he profits, of Henri de Lubac: ‘Atheistic humanism.’ “I was honored by his friendship. When I had been accused of not being a Christian, de Lubac told me that everything that I was writing was right and there wasn’t anything heretical in it. The great demographic crisis of Europe is one of the various signs of this paralysis. The ideology of our time is hostility to life as such. Modern culture deems that mythology, old and new, is in favor of life, while religion would be against it. It is the exact opposite. The new Dionysianism has a violent and mortal face. Thomas Mann was one of the first to understand it. Today a type of existential nausea rules, which is the heir of the romantic spleen.”

We are such ethno-centrists that we think that only others are in the right in the assertion of the superiority of their religions. “Islam maintains a relation with death that convinces me of the extraneousness of this religion to the ancient myths. The mystical relation of Islam with death makes it more mysterious. Islam is a religion of sacrifice. The Christian instead does not die to be imitated. We have to remember the words of Christ to Paul: ‘Why do you persecute me?’ In Christianity, which destroys every mythology, there is a constant dialectic between the victim and the persecutor; in Islam this does not exist. Islam eliminates the problem of the victim. In this sense, there has always been a conflict between Christianity and Islam. In Islam the most important thing is missing: a cross. Like Christianity, Islam re-enables the innocent victim, but it does it in a militant way. The cross contrarily puts an end to violent and archaic myths. The cross is the symbol of the inversion of violence, the resistance to lynching. Today the cross is opposed to the Dionysian sacrifice of the new myths. Christianity, in contrast with Islam, has prohibited sacrifice.”

Rene Girard has always chosen not to say agreeable and easy things. “I have been, also here in America, very ostracized. Today I could care less what they think of me. We don't have to surrender ourselves to fascination, there is just so much to learn from the past. I reread often the story of Joseph in the Old Testament because it is the most beautiful exemplification of Christianity. I have been married since 1951, I have nine grandchildren and three children. My wife is protestant, and she has never converted to Catholicism.”

Here goes one of the many seraphic laughs of this serious and upright man. "I have a son in business, a painter daughter, and a lawyer son. What I love about America is its great paradox, to have in itself the most efficacious protections against the worst aspects of itself—protections that Europe ignores. Here I have known true independence. I am surrounded by life. Nevertheless, I can't manage any less to think that this is the time of silence, a pregnant silence of meanings.”