Book Review: "Violence and the Sacred" by René Girard (1972)

How to explain René Girard?  A French-American writer who became Catholic early in his career, a literary critic, anthropologist, and biblical critic, besides being a professor of various French subjects (literature, history, etc.), who believes he has discovered theories that explain all of our culture, from the origins of religion to the coming Apocalypse.  He is an interesting man, that is for sure.  Did I mention that his theories are always being tweaked in various articles and interviews?  Yes, he is an interesting thinker.

Narrowing the focus to this work, La Violence et le sacré (Violence and the Sacred), Girard purports to explain the origin of all religion (and thus all ritualistic activities in general) through one element: violence, specifically collective violence.  In a nutshell, his theory states that when people are lacking in differences among each other (for instance, lack of social stratification or disrespect for any familial boundaries), they will enter into horrific conflict amongst themselves, spreading violence like a plague.  The only way out, as every society discovers, is to choose one person, often somewhat of an outsider, declare him to be the scapegoat and the cause of all the conflict, and kill him collectively.  From this original murder in each society grows ritual and religion, the goal of which is to recollect and "re-present" both this original conflict and the solution to it through collective murder.

In arguing for this theory, Girard draws on many sources: Greek tragedy (especially Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Euripides' The Bacchae), numerous accounts of "primitive" societies and their rituals, Sigmund Freud (especially his discussions of the Oedipal complex and Totem and Taboo), the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and many other less prominent sources (such as Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough and the work of Jacques Derrida).  On top of this, one cannot fail to mention the somewhat assumed theory of mimetic desire, formulated by Girard in his earlier book, Mesonge romantique et vérité romanesque (literally Romantic Lie and Novelistic Truth, but titled in English translations Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure) (1961).*

The book is decently lengthy and includes discussions of many anthropological themes and works that may make an unprepared reader lost...not to mention the fact that Girard's writing style often involves piling up examples and jumping between them rather than following rigid, straightforward analysis and sequential logic.  Having some introduction to the various main works and anthropological theories he discusses is incredibly useful, as is having some introduction at least to Girard's theory of mimetic desire.  Without that background, I think I may have become very lost in this book.

Is the book worth reading?  It's a fascinating theory, though I will not in the least say I ascribe to it as the great theory of everything, especially all religion.  (I'm a bit more partial to Rudolf Otto's Das Heilige (literally, The Holy, translated as The Idea of the Holy) in that regard, though I won't tie myself completely to his thought.)  What makes the work most fascinating, I think, is knowing where Girard goes from here: his later works openly declare that Christianity breaks this mold by revealing the scapegoat mechanism (which normal religion and ritual conceal), doing away with violence forever and rendering all scapegoat-based religion and ritual ineffective. 

I would not recommend reading this book without some background in Girard's sources as well as without taking the effort of learning more of his theories, especially his theories on Christianity.  Without his later theories, I think there is a big risk of thinking he is dooming Christianity along with other religions to just this inevitable violence in man, thus seemingly disregarding any possibility of true divinity.  (I don't even fully understand how he works Christianity into his theories as he does, since I'm still researching him.)  Thus, reading this work is not a beach-reading type of exercise: it takes pre-education and post-education to make the most of it, and maybe even to understand it in the first place.  At the moment, I can't recommend it as a book for any Christian to read, since I don't even know if his theories as regards Christianity even really hold up: this is a book of heavy thinking, a book not to be taken lightly, and (at least from what I know so far) a book not for the weak in faith who are prone to "all religion is myth" arguments.  In conclusion: read with work, and read with caution.



* In a nutshell, mimetic desire means that all desire is learned by imitating what someone else desires: that "someone else" is called the model, but, when someone comes into conflict with their model over an object (which especially occurs when societal differences are lacking between them), the model becomes an obstacle.

Nota Bene: I have to thank Fr. Michael Kirwan, S.J.'s Discovering Girard (Lanham, MD: Cowley Publications, 2005) for introducing me to Girard and for giving me the basis of my knowledge of his theories.

Book Review: "Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book" by Walker Percy (1983)

Most of us are familiar with the idea of "self-help books." These are often wildly popular nowadays. Sometimes, they are more scientific, sometimes they are a bit more "mystical" (I'm thinking in particular of Rhonda Byrne's The Secret). The existence of these books cannot be debated, and neither can their popularity, but one question remains: why are they so prevalent and popular?

The answer to this question is one of the main themes of Walker Percy's serious parody of self-help books: Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. The title itself is in some sense an answer to the question: modern (post-modern? Definitely post-religious) man is hungry for these "self-help" books because he feels lost in the cosmos, unable to find his place…in reality, unable to find himself, to understand himself. The different chapters or "questions" (the book is somewhat forced into a "20-question quiz" similar to those in self-help books, to add to the parody aspect) either discuss different signs of man's loss of self or the failure of different ways man tries to find himself.

The book, though nominally and somewhat effectively a parody of self-help books, is much more difficult than such books. Percy, a Catholic writer from the American South, is at least influenced by Christian existentialism, if he is not fully a Christian existentialist, and he is a semiotician. Thus there is a 40-page sidebar giving a compact and dense summary of semiotics (science of signs), and many different writers are mentioned and discussed: Soren Kierkegaard, Carl Sagan, Sigmund Freud, and even Catholic science fiction novelist Walter M. Miller, Jr.

What is the message of the book? Modern "post-religious" man is, precisely due to his lack of religion, lost to himself. From the dense semiotic discussion (which, I must confess, I could not completely follow), Percy concludes that man is the only creature who has a "world" and interacts it with "triadically," and from this he realizes that he cannot understand himself, he cannot truly conceive of the self, and thus he is lost. (I apologize for the confusion of this line: as I said, some of it is my own confusion.) Man, alone of all creatures, has self-consciousness, and through this he realizes that he cannot know himself, so he tries to find himself.

An idea from a didactic science fiction tale near the end of the work seems to summarize his views well: C1, C2, and C3 consciousnesses. A C1 consciousness is "preternatural," it just wonders at the world without being self-conscious. A C2 consciousness is "fallen," in a sense: he is self-conscious, and he realizes he cannot know himself, but he tries to solve this issue himself. A C3 consciousness is "redeemed": he is self-conscious, realizes he cannot know himself, yet realizes his need for help, asks for help, and receives it. Percy seems to say that post-religious man is C2, while a faithful Christian is C3, the greatest consciousness. (This idea is fairly low-profile in the text, because Percy's not trying to beat Christianity into his readers, though he was a faithful and open Catholic.)

Percy's technique in imparting this idea is via a parody, but a serious one, of self-help books. It's structured around a 20-question quiz, complete with thought exercises, multiple-choice questions, didactic tales, etc. Sometimes the format can seem a bit forced, but overall it fits pretty well. Percy references many authors, as mentioned above, and his discussions can get dense (especially discussions of semiotics). As a heavy word of caution, though, to be able to hit modern man hard, Percy resorts to blatant discussions that can often be lurid, especially in terms of sexuality.

How effective is the book? As a Christian already, I can't evaluate its effects on me: I can't really tell if it can help push someone from being a C2 to a C3. I know it could be harmful in its luridity, but the audience it's written to is, in general, already immune to this danger. Is it too dense? The most dense section is the introduction to semiotics, which Percy says you are free to skip. Does the form work? Fairly well, though a bit forced. In the end, the book may be useful to those who are lost in the cosmos (though I can't truly guess if it's useful), and it's possible that it could give a Christian methods to deal with such C2 consciousnesses. Is it truly useful?

In the end, I can't say because I am not the target audience. Is it worthwhile reading? The introduction to semotics is interesting, and its connection to Christianity is thought-provoking, but it's dense and oftentimes a bit too lurid.

As assistance to a philosophically-minded Christian or as a possible tool for the conversion of a "post-religious" man, it may be useful, but this work of Percy's is in no way good material for uplifting a Christian's soul.