Mimetic desire and truth

Truth and mendacity are two important concerns in Girard's mimetic theory, particularly when it comes to the sacrificial mechanism that in ancient times only worked when the truth of the victim was not known. I have completed a five-part series called "Mimetic Desire and Truth" that explores some of the basic ways that mimetic desire can be constructive and help us discern the truth, not as individuals but as a society but also ways that rivalrous desire obscures the truth. You can get a page with links to each post on the above link or you can go to the first post and continue on from there.

Among other posts is a look at the Salem Witch Trials, a Girardian scenario if there ever was one, through the point of view of a judge who repented of his judgments in Bewitched, Bothered, and Repentant.

The Communal Good Shepherd looks at the Parable of the Good Shepherd and the Lost Sheep. The Good Shepherd in the Desert looks back to the desert journey of the Israelites with the help of a Christological take.

Cast out by the Outcasts looks at the dynamics of the Ten Lepers who were healed by Jesus and what helps and what hinders gratitude.

Mary & Mimetic Desire

Those of you who attended the first T&P meeting in Chicago might remember that I presented a paper called Living by the Breath of God. This was and is something of a manifesto for developing Christian spirituality with an in the truth of mimetic desire. I decided to post this paper on my blog for those who wish to review it or read it for the first time. In retrospect, I see that it has set the direction for my continuing thoughts over the past years.

The Feast of St. Mary the Virgin was on August 15 and I posted my reflections on Our Lady and the tradition of the Assumption in Mary's Blessedness, Everybody's Blessedness.  In this article, I refer to Drasko Dizdar's magnificent book Sheer Grace which I strongly recommend for a deep Girardian exploration of the Eucharist and the Church Year.

Two days later, I got to preach on Jesus' hard saying about bringing a sword (or Division) instead of Peace. This from the Prince of Peace of all people" This raises the question whose sword he was talking about  which I discuss in Human Swords, God's Peace.

Since I have now posted quite a few articles on mimetic desire, and since the concept is unfamiliar to many, I have had to constantly add cross-references, I have put all these articles together on a page called Mimetic Desire and Mimetic Rivalry that will expand with new entries. This will be handy for a review or to help any newbie get oriented as to what this is all about.

Speaking of mimetic desire, I have just started what I expect to be a series of posts called Mimetic Desire and Truth. The first post in the series is available here. Stay tuned for more!

The main page of the blog for those who wish to go there is here.

The more I explore mimetic desire and the more implications I see for its applicability for the Christian life and the human life in this time that continues to become more turbulent, the more important I think it is to spread the word about it through our own reflections and making the reflections of our friends and colleagues known to others. I know that time is finite for all of us, but telling people we know when we have a chance, sharing links on Facebook & sending tweets and retweets on Twitter can all help spread the word.

Transfigured Mirror Neurons

I start with Mary & Martha who were featured in the Gospel reading a couple of weeks ago. My reflections are posted in Mary and Martha at the Feet of Jesus.

 Then I finally got around to writing a post briefly introducing mirror neurons for those who haven't heard the rumors from the scientific world about them in Mirroring Desires.

Some follow-up reflections exploring a few more ramifications of mimetic desire are posted in Connecting our Desires.

With the Feast of the Transfiguration coming up Tuesday August 6, I posted these thoughts in Transfiguration of the Material World.

If you want, you can go straight to the main page of Imaginary Visions of True Peace.

Ever wanted to have Christmas in July? Well, here is a chance. Thanks to a friend of the abbey, we have just posted an eBook version of my collection of Christmas stories called Born in the Darkest Time of Year. Kindle & Nook formats are available for $4.00 per copy. (my publisher hasn't bothered to do these formats.) You can order paperback hard copy of any of my books from the Abbey's website. PayPal is accepted. If you don't have an account with PayPal & don't want to make one, you can check out just using a credit card.

Mimetic Desert Monastics, Apostles, & Other Creatures

Tomorrow, I start out for this year's COV&R Conference at Cedar Falls, IA. For those who are going, and I hope there are many of you, be sure to be there in time for the panel discussion of Wolfgang Palaver's new book René Girard's Mimetic Theory as it will be discussed by a MOST distinguished panel.

It has been a while since I gave you an update on my blog Imaginary Visions of True Peace so I have some updating to do.

Dispossessing a Town Possessed is based on a sermon on this most Girardian of NT texts.

I didn't preach for Saints Peter & Paul but I re-worked an earlier article on the feast called Peter & Paul: The Church's Quest for Mimetic Unity

Being a native-born US citizen, I thought I would share a few thoughts on our national holiday called On Being Interdependent on Independence Day.

This brings me back to the COV&R conference coming up. I will be presenting a paper Desert Monastics as Hidden Models. Those of you who are coming can hear it live & discuss it. For those who aren't coming or  are going to one of many other good presentations can read it on my blog.

St. Benedict's day is coming up. I will miss being at the abbey, but it turns out that James Alison is celebrating the anniversary of his ordination on the day & I will be preaching. My sermon is An Extraordinarily Ordinary Saint.

On a sadder note, I will pass on the news for those who may not have heard: Bob Hammerton-Kelly suffered a severe stroke last week. Yesterday, when it became clear he wasn't coming back, the family took him off to life support and played a Mozart aria while he passed on.

Hope to see you in Iowa.

Racism & Contemplation

How do racism and contemplation mix? The answer is that they don't mix very well. Taking time to be with God in a contemplative way should open our hearts to all people of all races.

I have posted on my blog Imaginary Visions of True Peace my own comments on the 2013 Theology & Peace Conference in Recovering Racists

An earlier post called Will and Desire offers a contemplative thought.

Another blog post called Unwinding the Judgment of Solomon comments on the first two novels in a series in progress of great significance for mimetic theory as the author Neal Shusterman paints a harrowing dystopia of a severely sacrificial society, a future American we pray will not happen.

Back to contemplation: starting today, the abbey has now made available an e-book version of "The Indwelling God,"an introduction to contemplative prayer. I have distributed some hard copies of this pamphlet but those of you who prefer an electronic version can get it in that form for $1.00. Coupled with this essay is the article "Resting in God's Desire" that makes a good companion piece as it brings in mimetic desire and how contemplation can help us live constructively with it. This e-book is available on the abbey's website. PayPal is accepted.

Theology & Peace 2013: Platonic Soul or Black Body?

The 2013 Theology & Peace conference, "Lynching, Scapegoating and Actual Innocence,"  just concluded in Chapel Hill N.C. Our reflections were led by two black theologians and one white. It was a life-changing experience for the racially mixed group which attended. Here is a first response after our return.

 

Ah, dear God, no! Suddenly those images appear in my head.

Drifting into view between moments of sleep and awaking. Not a dream but a daylight nightmare. Hateful historical postcards from the heartland.

Ah, my white soul, my massacring white soul. Where can I go to get away from you?

In the old spiritualized, immaterial, Greek sense that soul of course is colorless. But as Kelly Douglas Brown showed us so convincingly this theory actually became a cover story, a philosophical fiction playing out in the real world with terrible consequences of white privilege and violence. The Greek soul belongs to a heavenly, higher, perfect realm of “light”.  A white body bespeaks something closer, “nearer” to this heavenly space. While something black, the color of the earth, must be lower, inferior, perhaps not even having a soul at all, just a body. A black body.

Ah, my platonized Christianity, what horror!

Up there, as Julia Robinson showed us in so many mind-rending slides, swinging between the bright sky and the dark earth is the black body, beaten, tortured, monstrous, surrounded by a host of onlookers, white in their white-souled innocence. A holocaust offering of sheer meat for a platonic god who is also a sacrifice-demanding wrathful deity. For, after all, this god needed the death of his very own son as a displacement for universal divine wrath, so why not demand the death of these expendable black bodies for instances of human wrath? It was ever the one and same cultural frame.  

Meanwhile, all the other black bodies know in their hearts and memories it could have been them as the selected victim.

Oh, body and soul, where will we go to find freedom?

Where indeed! Black theology allied to Girardian theory shows us that the God of Jesus has always been with the black body suspended lynched and crucified on a tree. That’s the point, and it always was the point, and now the whole post-platonic community of Jesus is beginning to understand this, white and black. White because Jesus reveals the victim and undoes all the violence fastened upon him or her, and now the meaning of Christianity is not to get to an ethereal otherworld, but to transform the violent material existence of this one. Black because as James Cone wrote “’Calvary’…was (always) redemption from the terror of the lynching tree.” “Oh see my Jesus hanging high” Black Christians sang, and they knew that Jesus’ death already transformed their body terrors, and by extension those of all other human victims.

Lynchings are now faith, in the strange paradoxical, subversive language of the gospel, and they are faith for black and white alike. They are a faith which leaps beyond the dangling monster on the tree into a radical future of life. Because Jesus was the first monster: for the temple authorities—“He has blasphemed”; for the emperor—“There is no king but Caesar”; for the ungovernable crowd—“Crucify him!” But for the God who raised him from the dead he was the beloved Servant and Lord of creation, of a new creation without violence, without victims.

The Black body knew this truth, despite Anselm, despite Calvin, and before Girard. This for me was the great discovery of our conference. From now on Theology & Peace cannot go forward without the active participation and leadership of people of color. (This was already evident in the splendid election of Julia Robinson to our board!) The black body experience has become an icon and pathway for the transformative post-platonic Christian faith that we long to build.


Tony Bartlett

Made In God's Image

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How Can We Come From Violent Origins if We're Made in the Image of the Nonviolent God?


Grace and peace, dear readers. My name is Lindsey Lopez, and I'd like to thank Dr. Anthony Bartlett of Theology and Peace for letting me guest post on this blog.

As a Christian pacifist, I find Rene Girard's anthropology to be a crucial key to my Biblical hermeneutic. Before encountering Girard, reconciling the violence of scripture with my conviction that God is Love was a difficult, painful task that shook my faith and left me feeling dishonest. Did I have a right to circumvent the nastier parts of Scripture in order to hang on to what was beautiful? Could I affirm some of it without affirming it all? Was I being a bad Christian to downplay the violence? But how could I be true to myself and my core convictions if I gave the violent passage of scripture equal value with the loving ones? Girard's anthropology, exposing the depths of human violence and identifying violence itself as the foundation of human civilization, and further showing how the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ exposes and breaks down these structures of violence, was a Godsend. It allowed me to better understand the violence of scripture when I realized that the original human understanding of the divine was born through violence. The violence of scripture reflects the early human understanding of God. While it shows the story of a people who put their faith in the violence of God toward others, the Bible also shows the slow weaning away from violence of this same people, first through the Hebrew Scriptures and ultimately through the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ. Girard provied with me to have a model for understanding the narrative of Scripture as a trajectory of human evolution from violent toward nonviolent as it grows in relationship with God. To be able to understand salvation not as a means of escape from God's wrath but as a means of transformation out of our violent selves into the peace and love of Christ has made me a more faithful and enthusiastic believer and disciple. And yet, as I bound my theology together with this anthropology, something still didn't fit.


Girardian anthropology posits that the definitive moment for human evolution, that marked the transition from the animal to human, was a murder, and hat from that murder and the refusal to see it for the violence that it was came human civilization. (For a succinct explanation of how the founding murder came about and how civilization and religion were based upon it, I recommend James G. Williams' intro to Girard's I See Satan Fall Like Lightning.) And as I said, this anthropology appeals to me because it explains how steeped we are in violence, while Girard's analysis of the passion and resurrection of Christ shows howhrist leads us out of this violence. But reconciling humanity's violent origins with the nonviolence of God led me to a paradox. I wondered, “If humans are made in the image of God, and God is absolutely nonviolent, what does it mean that the defining act of human consciousness was an act of violence?”


I think this concern came about subconsciously because I was trying too hard to reconcile evolution with Genesis. Even though I understand that humans evolved from other primates who evolved from more primitive life forms, part of me still pictures humanity beginning in a celestial garden as a single pair made in the perfect image of God.The language of the “fall” implies a state of perfection or innocence from which we descended, and that image jars with the picture of distinctively human consciousness evolving from a murder.


It finally struck me, as I was listening to the Beyond the Box podcast of Virtually Christian with Dr. Anthony Bartlett, that my thinking was entirely backwards! Being made in God's image need not mean being made perfect before falling and being redeemed. Virtually Christian, which explains how humanity is continuing to evolve in heart and mind from our violent natures into the peace of Christ, and also The Joy of Being Wrong by James Alison, which explains how we cannot understand original sin except retrospectively from the vantage point of seeing the mess we are coming out of in the light of Jesus, helped me reach this understanding. There was no pristine humanity before Jesus from which we “fell”; rather, we are created to “rise” to Jesus. We are created with the potential to form and understand meaning and to be transformed by the meaning of Jesus. In fact, if Girard says that human consciousness was formed by an act of violence, but the absolutely nonviolent Jesus is the truly human one, then we're not done evolving... we're not fully human yet... we're still in the process of becoming, being transformed. We're evolving because of Christ into his body. This is how God is forming us in God's own image, and God's not finished with us yet... In the light of Christ we look back at all the violence we were and are still involved in and see that we are sinners, but we can only see this because we're on the way out.


As I think about it, I realize that this perspective actually does help me reconcile scripture with evolution. There is so much in the creation story of Genesis that aligns with Girardian anthropology, if I don't get caught up with the little hiccup of the idea of Adam and Eve being formed with fully human bodies out of dust. It's a story of rivalristic desire suggested into the human consciousness by a third party. Eve is tempted by the serpent to try to become more “like God;” Adam then takes a cue from Eve, and this creates a foundation of distrust and acquisitive desire that seeps into Cain when he murders his brother in a jealous rage. In pre-scientific terms, Genesis illustrates the fundamental human condition of mimetic rivalry. Furthermore, scripture itself illuminates an evolution, not of the body but of the heart. We can trace the trajectory of our addiction to and entrapment within violence from Cain's murder of Abel to Lamach's 70-fold vengeance and beyond, but then we see God slowly reshaping the heart toward peace, through the sparing of Isaac to the prophets and finally to the passion of Christ and the nonviolent church that followed. Evidence of physical evolution can be upheld, rather than contradicted, by scripture if we see through the trajectory of the story that God molds not only bodies but also hearts and minds over an enormous period of time.