René Girard, Conversion and its Consequences (Part III)

Rene Girard’s first book, the fruit of his thinking and research in the 1950s was published in 1960. It was called Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Writing it resulted in not just a fascinating study of the genesis of  great writing but it also transformed his own life forever.

He describes his attitude and disposition as he started work on that book. It was “very much in the pure demystification mode: cynical, destructive, very much in the spirit of the atheistic intellectuals of the time. I was engaged in debunking.” He realised  that at the heart of his negative attitude was just one manifestation of his theory of imitative desire, mimesis. He was following the crowd. 

In writing Deceit, Desire and the Novel he explores what he takes to be the mind, the thought process and even the souls of great novelists. Among whom, as explicit models of his theory, are Marcel Proust, Dostoevsky and Cervantes.

He argues that with a number of great writers their first conception of their novels was very different from what it ultimately became. “The author’s first draft is an attempt at self-justification, which can assume two main forms. It may focus on a wicked hero, who is really the writer’s scapegoat, his mimetic rival, the one whom he desires to debunk, whose wickedness will be demonstrated by the end of the novel. It may also focus on a ‘good’ hero, a knight in shining armour, with whom the writer identifies, and this hero will be vindicated by the end of the novel.”

But Girard then puts the writer to the test and argues that If the writer has a potential for greatness, after writing his first draft, as he rereads it, he sees the trashiness of it all. His project fails. The self-justification the novelist had intended in his distinction between good and evil will not stand self-examination. The novelist comes to realise that he has been the puppet of his own devil. He and his enemy are truly indistinguishable. The novelist of genius thus becomes able to describe the wickedness of the other from within himself, whereas before it was completely artificial. 

“This experience is shattering to the vanity and pride of the writer. It is an existential downfall. Very often this downfall is written symbolically, as illness or death, in the conclusion. In the case of Proust and Dostoyevsky it is explicitly presented as a change in outlook. Or to take Don Quixote, on his deathbed he sees finally his own mimetic madness, which is also illness and death. And this existential downfall is the event that makes a great work of art possible.”

In this imagining of the writer’s mind, Girard sees the following happening: once the writer experiences this collapse and a new perspective, he can go back to the beginning and rewrite the work from the point of view of this downfall. It is no longer self-justification. It is not necessarily self-indictment, but the characters he creates are no longer ‘Manichean’ good guys or bad guys.

“So the career of the great novelist is dependent upon a conversion, and even if it is not made completely explicit, there are symbolic allusions to it at the end of the novel. These allusions are at least implicitly religious. 

“When I realized this, I had reached a decisive point in the writing of my first book, above all in my engagement with Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky’s Christian symbolism was important for me. Demons (The Possessed), presents Stepan Verkhovensky, whose deathbed conversion is particularly moving, but there is also the end of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. The old Verkhovensky discovers that he was a fool all the time and turns to the Gospel of Christ. This is the existential conversion that is demanded by a great work of art.

“When I wrote the last chapter of my first book, I had had a vague idea of what I would do, but as the chapter took form I realized I was undergoing my own version of the experience I was describing. I was particularly attracted to the Christian elements, for example, Stepan Verkhovensky’s final journey… So I began to read the Gospels and the rest of the Bible. And I became a Christian.”

Girard, however, later reflecting back on that conversion, realised that it was no more than what he called “an intellectual-literary conversion”, something deeply satisfying, even enjoyable. But he realised that his initial conversion did not imply any change of life. The change in his life came when he found out that he had a cancerous spot in the middle of his forehead. A biopsy revealed a cancerous growth. “From that time on I was pretty scared.  For all I knew, I had melanoma, the worst form of skin cancer.” 

It turned out to be a false scare but it brought him to a point where his intellectual conversion, which was a very comfortable experience, self-indulgent even, was totally changed. “I could not but view the cancer and the period of intense anxiety as a warning and a kind of expiation, and now this conversion was transformed into something really serious in which the aesthetic gave way to the religious.”

This was an agonising time. But for him it was significant that it coincided with the liturgical period of Lent in 1959. He was aware of this although he had never been a practising Catholic. He was now thirty-five years old. Then on the Wednesday before Easter, his doctor gave him the “all clear”. That Wednesday is traditionally the end of  the lenten period of penance, the beginning of the holiest part of Holy Week.

After that experience, he went to confession and had his children baptized. His wife and he were remarried by a priest. So on Holy Thursday he went to Mass and received  the Eucharist. “I felt that God liberated me just in time for me to have a real Easter experience, a death and resurrection experience.”

He later reflected that the prior conversion was too easy. “It entailed no demands or commitments which I perceived at the time, but it prepared the way. So with the definitive conversion I was both emotionally and mentally prepared to accept God’s grace and believe.”

In his interview with James Williams, the editor of A Girard Reader, a collection of key extracts from his books, he describes himself as just “an ordinary Christian”.

In that interview he revealed some things about what being a Christian meant to him and what he saw as some essential commitments for any true Christian. Williams asked him about his dispositions towards non-Christians and a pluralistic society? He was asked “Do you favour converting all non-Christians to Christianity?”

Girard simply recalls what Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” and that he told his disciples to go into the world and make converts. He also said: “If we give that up, are we still Christian? The idea that if we respect other religions more than our own and act only according to politically correct principles, peace will break out all over the world is fantasy and delusion. I think the Christians who do not want to share their faith do not really believe. The fear of religious tyranny – meaning the forced imposition of our Faith on others – is an  anachronism. It is a false issue which puts political correctness ahead of the truth and the only way of telling it (the truth) is by connecting with people”

On a  question related to the mission Christ gave his disciples, Williams also asked should one’s Christian faith enter into one’s approach to other religions and cultures? Or is it necessary to “bracket out” one’s faith in order to do scholarly work or to be a thinker?

To this he answered, “I don’t think you can bracket out a faith which is responsible for the best in the modern world. That is totally artificial. I don’t think you can bracket out any idea or ideal that you really hold – or that holds you. If you bracket out something that is central to your life, you become a shadow of yourself and your intelligence is not effective.”

Asked about those who advocate the suspension of their own belief in their approach to other religions he said, “No, that is a Stoic term, and you can practice that if you believe in Stoicism. But it has nothing to do with being a Christian or with real Christianity.

“If you believe that Christianity is truth, including societal truth, you are not going to reach truth by bracketing it out. You can see the result of this method all around us, in the current academic debacle for instance. The biblical scholars who are still talking in terms of bracketing truth out are still thinking in nineteenth-century terms. They are on their way to a goal which the deconstructors reached long ago. If we must have nihilism, let us not dilute it with water and let us drink it full strength, with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the deconstructors. In order to reach the end of the present crisis we must … not interminably repeat attempts which already failed a hundred years ago, like ‘the quest for the historical Jesus.’ Mine is a search for the anthropology of the Cross, which turns out to rehabilitate orthodox theology.”

The interviewer then raised the question of freedom and totalitarianism. Girard responded by drawing attention to what he saw as the two forms of totalitarianism. One tries to destroy the concern for victims openly and directly. Its proponents basically attempt to kill as many victims for as little reason as possible. To him this was effectively a process of mass scapegoating.

Then he went on to point out that today there is in place a process of insidious totalitarianism. In this it is hard not to think that he was foreseeing the bizarre way in which political correctness has degenerated in all the excesses of “woke” culture. 

“Communism in many of its forms was insidious, but it will probably be replaced by ideologies still more insidious which outflank the Gospel on the left, presenting themselves as better than the Gospel…. Some of these people see themselves as super-Christians, but they are heirs of the predecessors of Marx who thought they could achieve a new humanism. Feuerbach, for example. But they laid the groundwork for a disrespect of truth. I think it would be helpful to study Feuerbach, who was a primary agent of the transformation of Christianity into Marxism.”

On the question of death, dying and assisted suicide he had this to say:

“The experience of death is going to get more and more painful, contrary to what many people believe, … euthanasia will make it more rather than less painful because it will put the emphasis on personal decision in a way which was blissfully alien to the whole problem of dying in former times. It will make death even more subjectively intolerable, for people will feel responsible for their own deaths and morally obligated to rid their relatives of their unwanted presence. Euthanasia will further intensify all the problems its advocates think it will solve.”

Rene Girard firmly believed that Christianity had all the answers to the existential problems which confront us in this world and we are presented with choices which our mimetic desires suggest to us.

“One should always look to the Gospels…. What are the prescriptions of the Kingdom of God? Basically, give up a dispute when mimetic rivalry is taking over. Provide help to victims and refuse all violence. I find the allegory of the sheep and goats in Matthew 25 to be a key text; it’s all there. When we identify with the person in need or who has been victimized, we encounter the Son of Man, Jesus. What the mimetic theory as such facilitates is the understanding that these ethical prescriptions or principles are against the mimetic spirit of the mob. The Gospels show that faith emerges when individuals come out of the mob.

“All the excesses of the modern world are distortions of Christian truth. The fact that there is a new type of individual in Christianity is the most important thing in the world. The Christian person is new and would have been viewed by traditional cultures as subversive. The only difference is that our narcissistic culture is a deviation and a caricature of the Christian person, not its fulfilment.”