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.
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