There was a kind of grandeur about René Girard—a creator of grand theories, a thinker of grand thoughts. Born in France, he spent most of his career in the United States, before slipping away this month, age 91, at his home in California. But to read him, even to meet him, was to feel as though you’d been taken out of time, catapulted back into the presence of one of the capacious minds of the past.
Tall, with thick, expressive eyebrows and a great tousle of hair, René was like a figure out of the 1800s who had somehow been born a hundred years late, striding through the second half of the twentieth century without any concern that large claims about the human condition had fallen out of fashion. Without any concern that the great run of theorists, from Hegel to Freud, had dwindled away to almost nothing. Without any concern that the thought of late modernity had taken a hard, antifoundationalist turn into a kind of skeptical cynicism.
Girard followed his insights, step by step, into one last grand theory, one last grand set of thoughts. His sheer existence sometimes seemed an indictment of our suspicious, small-minded time. Living the life of the mind, René Girard was a great man in an age that had few such men.
I have to plead special circumstances: René Girard has influenced me more than any other thinker I’ve ever met, and I find his accounts of culture generally persuasive. For that matter, I found him personally charming beyond measure. The first time we threw a dinner party for him, my wife decided, in some fit of hubris, to make difficult soufflés for the Frenchman’s visit. After dinner, he bent down from his great height, kissed her hand, and announced with a Maurice Chevalier twinkle, “It was superb, just as my mother would have made.” I think my wife—and everyone else there—would have followed him out the door, if he had only asked.
After finishing an undergraduate history degree in Paris, Girard came to the United States in 1947 to do graduate work at Indiana University on the history of French-American relations. It was only a one-year fellowship, but he was invited by the university to stay and finish his doctorate, on condition that he teach a course in French literature. The topic caught his imagination, and a series of provocative essays on Gallic authors led to a successful academic career in comparative literature at Duke, Bryn Mawr, Johns Hopkins, SUNY Buffalo, and Stanford.
His first book, published in 1961, was a French study of novelistic forms, translated into English five years later with the title Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. It’s hard to remember all the swirls and eddies of intellectual politics in those days, but, in Paris, the book was the beneficiary of a laudatory review by the influential Marxist critic Lucien Goldmann. It was, in French circles, the kind of review that makes a young critic’s career—even if Goldmann praised the book mostly because Girard seemed to provide a way to read literature as a critique of bourgeois life, without the un-Marxist Freudian psychologizing that dominated literary criticism at the time.
The Marxists were right, at least, about Girard’s rejection of Freud, even if they missed the religious impulse that Girard would later insist he was unpacking in all his work, ever since a breakthrough insight he had back in 1959. Reading figures from Flaubert to Dostoyevsky, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel points out that a series of triangular relations appears over and over in Western literature, especially in the competition of rivals over a love interest.
Our greatest literary artists tell us, in other words, that we learn what we want at least in part from what other people want. Freud had argued that human desire comes prepackaged in certain shapes: the Oedipal complex, the death wish, penis envy, and so on. But Girard insisted that literature teaches instead that desire is mimetic: If we want the mother, it’s because the father wants her. If we want an unattainable love interest, it’s because others have that interest. Our desires aren’t packaged into predetermined forms; they’re created in imitation of the desires of others. We catch desire like a disease.
From there, it was a small step into anthropology and the publication of Girard’s second book, Violence and the Sacred, in 1972. The contagion of desire spreads through a culture, multiplying the number of antagonistic rivals, until only violence can resolve the situation. A careful reading of mythology, which Girard undertook in his 1982 study The Scapegoat, suggests that the sacrificial rituals of archaic religion are always born from, and reenact, primal murders—culture-founding deaths in which someone is singled out as both the blameworthy cause of and the sacrificial solution to the crisis of escalating cultural violence.
In 1978, Girard published Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, a strangely constructed book that addressed for the first time the Christianity that would become central to his later work. His early writing on literary structures had pulled him into anthropology, and that led him, in turn, to an investigation of the curious problem the Bible poses for cultural anthropologists.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand the biblical problem, as Girard perceived it, is to start with the ancient nonbiblical religions. Violent sacrifice—what Girard calls the “scapegoat mechanism”—is woven into all the ancient myths of cultural foundation. It’s there, for example, in the primal murders reenacted with the human sacrifices the Carthaginians offered to their god Baal, and the children burned to death by the Ammonites for their god Moloch. This theme of sacred violence is written in the myths of ancient Rome, a city founded when Romulus murders his brother Remus, just as it appears in the deaths that follow in the wake of Oedipus in the mythological history of Thebes.
Add it all up, and the role of scapegoating violence in archaic religion seems clear enough: All cultures fear the breakdown of society into universal violence, an escalation of the cycles of revenge into all-out civil war. And against such culture-destroying violence, the ancient myths offer the solution of a different violence, a culture-preserving violence: not the war of all against all, but the war of all against one—a sacrificial violence in which a single sacred figure is identified as the source of the cultural contagion and murdered or expelled. Those who remain, with the relief and fellowship that follow peace, come to see that figure as the founder of a new culture.
The Bible, however, regularly suggests the innocence of the people accused of causing cultural contagion—identifying the object of the scapegoat mechanism as simply a victim of murder. In other words, if mythology demands that we see sacred violence as the solution to cultural breakdown, then the Bible is not mythological but antimythological. If the root of religion is a stabilizing of society through sacrifice, then Christianity is not a religion but an antireligion.
As Girard increasingly came to see, Judeo-Christian insights into the scapegoat mechanism of myth suggest that biblical faith lies beyond the power of anthropological analysis to explain. Noting anthropologists’ efforts, over the last hundred years, to fold the Bible into some general category of archaic religion, he would mock as intellectually inexcusable “the inability of the greatest minds in the modern world to grasp the difference between the Christian crib at Christmas-time and the bestial monstrosities of mythological births.”
To some extent, Girard fell out of critical favor in his later years, mostly because of his turn to theology. He would write—provocatively and presciently—about how the idea of victimhood, stripped of its Christianity, could itself become a device of cultural violence, with people mimetically competing for the status of victim. And in some of his last writings, he would suggest that through such dechristianized devices, the historical and intellectual triumphs of Christianity could themselves help bring about the apocalypse that is, he argued, a theme inextricably woven into the New Testament.
In 2005, Girard was elected to the Académie Française, and shortly after I received a letter from him, in his terrible handwriting. He had been put in a side room, dressed in the uniform of an embroidered frock coat, while awaiting his induction. And, exploring the room, he discovered stationery in the drawer of a writing desk.
So, he wrote, he asked himself who would appreciate a note on académie letterhead—and he settled on me. It was sweet and unexpected, somehow both comic and grand. It was a gesture of the kind that René alone, of all the people I’ve ever known, was capable. A gesture, I’ve always thought, a century out of its time.
Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
