Come and See the Violence Inherent in the System

On the First Things site there is an interview with French-born American resident Rene Girard.

 

Girard is an historian, philosopher and literary critic. He taught at a number of American Universities, and was a professor at Johns Hopkins and Stanford.

 

Here’s a quote from the interview:

 

‘In a way, Christianity is the end of archaic religions because it reveals that the victim is innocent. When you understand Christianity correctly in its closeness and distance from archaic religion it is the same structure, the scapegoat phenomenon, that Jesus is victim of. Yet the text is intended to destroy your belief in scapegoat phenomenon instead of using it in order to have sacrifices. The relationship is very central and rational with all archaic religions in the past that may go back tens of thousands of years … I think the question and the paradox of the scapegoat (it is there when you don’t see it, and not there when you see it) is going to be understood better and will play a role in apologetics that it has never played. The view of Christianity is not paradoxical enough. I think that when you read Kierkegaard carefully he is not very far from several of the things that the scapegoat theory can formulate more rationally. Therefore, it can be a tool of apologetics that hasn’t been discovered yet.’

 

I first came across Girard’s ideas in the writing of Roger Scruton. I was immediately interested, because Girard seems to want to deal seriously with the reality of violence – to get at the truth of violence, so to speak. This is important to me, because I think that when the desire for violence is not acknowledged, it will out somehow, someway. There will be hidden, desperate, and murky  violence under the cover of a rhetoric of peace.