St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology

René Girard and Mimetic Theory

Paul Gifford

First published: 1 June 2023

https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/ReneGirardandMimeticTheory

Citation
Gifford, Paul. 2023. 'René Girard and Mimetic Theory', St Andrews Encyclopaedia
of Theology. Edited by Brendan N. Wolfe et al. https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/
ReneGirardandMimeticTheory Accessed: 12 June 2024

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Copyright © Paul Gifford CC BY-NC

ISSN 2753-3492
René Girard and Mimetic Theory
Paul Gifford

René Girard is not a theologian; he is best described as fundamental anthropologist and

culture theorist. His versatile system of hermeneutical and heuristic thinking is known to its
author as ‘the Mimetic Theory’.

Girardian ‘mimesis’ denotes, in a myriad of particular forms, a structure of reciprocal

imitation, actual or potential (‘I hold out my hand, you hold out yours’; ‘do unto others as
you would have them do to you’; ‘Thy Kingdom come […]/ On earth as it is in Heaven’).

Human mimesis, only recently understood in its neurological basis, is increasingly

recognized as enabling what social scientists call ‘group intelligence’. Its structures and
processes have deep and ancient roots in pre-human nature, something of interest to the
evolutionary sciences; while the New Testament gives mimetic processes pride of place
in exploring the nature of discipleship and in understanding spiritual transformation and
growth. It also recognizes an ultimate form of loving mimesis operating in the heart of the
trinitarian God.

From his own private conversion and return to Catholic faith in 1959, the most fundamental
vocation of his theory, in Girard’s own eyes, was the elucidation of the deepest and darkest
places of the collective religious psyche. His ‘triple audacity’ consists in applying the
perspectives and tools of Mimetic Theory to elucidating three of the most central of human
enigmas: the origins of religion; the beginnings of culture; and the process of hominization
itself. He sees humanity as ‘born out of the religious dimension of things’; containing (in
both senses: ‘limiting’, but also ‘retaining within itself’) its own temptation to self-destructive
violence through the self-organizing mechanism of emissary victimage (‘scapegoating’), a
mechanism subsequently ritualized as ‘sacrifice’.

Mimetic theory offers a logic or ‘grammar’ of sacred violence from which

‘primitive’ (archaic-sacral, first-form) religion is seen to emerge; and which, unknown to its
actors, still conditions the most diverse and far-flung phenomena of culture and society;
even – perhaps especially – in modern, radically secularized times.

Mimetic theory as practised by René Girard comes to assume theology as its native
complement: both in elucidating the singularity and world-changing significance of Judaeo-
Christian revelation as recorded in the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian gospels; and
in renewing the great theological drama of salvation, which it shows transcending and
transforming Darwinian survival. This is most strikingly the case in the Passion of Christ,

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in which is re-enacted transformatively the archetypical proto-drama of Girardian ‘founding
murder’.

Keywords: Culture, Anthropology, Sacred violence, Founding murder, Origins of religion,

Scriptural revelation, Myth, Apocalypse, Darwin and theology, Atonement theory, Mimetism

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Table of contents
1 An anthropologist among theologians

1.1 Context of recognition

1.2 Early reception

1.3 Crisis and clarification

2 Elements of Mimetic Theory

2.1 Mimesis: meanings and dimensions

2.2 ‘Mimeticism’: the dynamics of rivalrous desire

2.3 Related concepts: the sacred, the scapegoat, sacrifice, misrecognition, myth,
apocalypse

3 ‘Founding murder’: the generative logic of religion and culture

3.1 Decipherment

3.2 The Girardian scenario

3.3 Sacrifice: founding ritual, ritual foundation

3.4 ‘The invisibility of the founding murder’

3.5 The genesis of culture and social order

3.6 Completing Darwin: genesis ‘from below’

4 Girard and the Hebrew scriptures: survival opened up to salvation

4.1 Girardian biblicism

4.2 Genesis ‘from above’

4.3 Mythology and scripture

4.4 Sacrifice reviewed, renewed

4.5 Figurae Christi

5 The Gospels: founding murder identified, transformed, transcended

5.1 Founding murder identified

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 5.2 The Passion: founding murder re-enacted

5.3 ‘Replay’ signifies transformative reversal

5.4 ‘Founding murder’ overturned: discerning the resurrection anthropologically

5.5 Is the Cross a ‘sacrifice’?

5.6 Satan and deliverance from evil

6 Girard’s legacy: the potentials of Mimetic Theory

6.1 Sacred violence and reconciliation

6.2 Apocalypse Now: can we survive our origins?

6.3 The problem of further acceptance

6.4 The Bible: anthropological readings and revelation

6.5 Towards an apologetics for the coming times

7 Conclusion

8 A note on the bibliography

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1 An anthropologist among theologians
1.1 Context of recognition
Girard came to the notice of theologians after his major work of synthesis Things Hidden
since the Foundation of the World (published in French in 1978; translated into English
in 1987). Their attention was caught, in sharp admiration and indignant objection, by the
title quotation borrowed from Psalm 78, via Matthew’s gospel (13:35). This appeared to
herald an ambitious – but contestable – attempt to extend to the Hebrew Bible, and thence
to the New Testament, the bold and striking theory of the origins of culture and religion first
explored in Girard’s 1972 book, Violence and the Sacred.

Breaking away from his training as an archivist and medieval historian in wartime
Paris, Girard had developed the first statement of his Mimetic Theory after studying a
handful of major novelists of European literary tradition (Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert,
Proust, Dostoyevsky). These literary masters, better than any theory, illustrated hitherto
unrecognized and distinctly dynamic patterns of interwoven desire, imitation and rivalry;
but also, more secretly, the dynamics of ‘novelistic’ (or more generally, of artistic)
representation. Further transgressing the boundaries of disciplinary specialism, Girard
pursued these insights into the domain of Greek tragedy, and thence into the field of
prehistoric ritual practice and world mythologies. Finally, he pushed deep into the domains
of ethnology and fundamental anthropology. All these transdisciplinary forays were
intensively and rigorously researched, albeit in autodidactic mode, without prior disciplinary
training.

Who could have conceived this audaciously trans-disciplinary enterprise? Who

was René Girard? In 1966, Girard co-organized at Johns Hopkins University an
international symposium under the title ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of
Man’ (Goldmann, Paul de Man, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan all attended – see
EC: 31–32). His own developing theory, it transpired, was already diverging markedly from
the invited luminaries of ‘French Theory’ – with their self-referentiality, their linguistics-
inspired formalism, their enclosure of all things cultural within the knowing Mind – the
emergence of which Girard sought to decipher generatively, in its real and actual belonging
to nature and culture, world and time. ‘Mimetic desire is a realist theory which shows why
human beings are incapable of realism’ (VMR: 207).

Largely unknown also was the ‘conversion’ which triggered his return to the Catholic
faith and an obedience lost in adolescence. Few of Girard’s first readers knew of this
event, which was contemporary with the first formulation of his mimetic theory. In his first
published work of 1961, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, exegesis of the ‘positive’ form of
mimetic desire is already referred, discreetly, to the Imitatio Christi (the imitation of Christ).
Girard declares his conversion to have been a particular outworking in himself of the same

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process whereby the ‘Romantic lie’ of autonomous desire, deemed capable of organizing
its own world, is repudiated retroactively and repents, opening up the desiring authorial
subject to a higher wisdom, indeed to divine grace, mediated through the creative ascesis
of fictional auto-representation (see GR: 283–288). ‘It is not because I am Christian that
I think as I do; it is because of my research that I became a Christian [...] Conversion is a
form of intelligence, of understanding’ (EC: 44–45; see also WTB: 129–132).

1.2 Early reception

Despite the mutually supportive compatibility he always intuited – but grasped and
proclaimed only progressively, as his thought developed – between Mimetic Theory and
Christian faith, Girard always insists that his theory is a scientific construct, independently
valid; ‘mine is a search for the anthropology of the Cross, which turns out to rehabilitate
orthodox theology’ (GR: 288).

Inevitably, ambiguities were generated by this paradox in process. They compounded

the challenges of reception already adumbrated: cultural unfamiliarity, transgression
of disciplinary frontiers, a seemingly towering – but perhaps imperialistic – intellectual
ambition. For many English-speaking theologians, the list of preliminary ‘problems with
Girard’ was based on atavistic mistrust of overarching theories; but also due to significant
elements of unease in coping with the style and human-sciences-rootedness of post-
structuralist thinking generally. These problems were exacerbated in Things Hidden by
the effects of tardy, and sometimes inaccurate or clumsy, translation. Such preliminary
challenges could be disqualifying. Girard’s first readers were often stunned, intimidated,
even scandalized, by a theory that offers – seemingly, with incredible self-confidence – to
clarify decisively, at a stroke, no less than three immemorially standing enigmas of human
origins: the origin of natural religion; the constitution of culturally ordered societies; and the
major mystery of hominization itself.

His earlier work, Violence and the Sacred (1972), also suggested to many that Girard was
committed to ‘using’ the scriptures of Revelation in support of a reductionist general theory
of religion, seeking to ‘fit in’ Judaeo-Christian singularity (this was in fact the reverse of his
actual intention and practice).

John Milbank thus saw Girard’s account of ritual, particularly of ‘sacrifice’, as recapitulating
the subversive emergence of the discipline itself of social science-based anthropology.
Situated exclusively in this line of descent, Girard represents for Milbank a latter-day
avatar of Julius Wellhausen, William Robertson Smith, Auguste Comte, Sir James Frazer,
Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert; hence, a long prefigured threat to the
singularity and the raison d’etre of Christian theology itself. The champion of ‘radical
orthodoxy’ brings to bear on Girard a pre-rehearsed and systematic suspicion. Sometimes
Milbank’s rapid-fire critique is fed by exuberant erudition invoking the descriptive ethnology

6
of sacrifice (this approach tends to obscure the novelty of the Girardian procedure
as a quasi-algebraic ‘resolution’ of the data, tending towards an underlying logic of
genesis). Sometimes, echoing earlier anti-Girardian reviews and essays of the 1970s
and 1980s, his critique is more strategic, and turns around perceptions of ‘premature
universalism’, ‘negativity’ and ‘gnosticism’ (many biblical scholars and anthropologists
have, following Milbank, contested at least some of Girard’s empirical illustrations and
rejected the universalizing scope of his theory). Milbank argues that ‘there is a temptation
to be resisted, namely sacrificially to concede to science a right to explain, in order to
receive back from science “a demonstration of Christicity”’ (1996: 51). In energetically
resisting temptation, this early theological response barely registers Girard’s thoroughly
game-changing hermeneutical perspective at all; it includes only one solitary aside of
appreciative tenor, acknowledging ‘much [...] in [Girardian] Christology that is profound and
correct’ (1996: 51).

Sarah Coakley, from the outset of her inaugural lecture (2009) for the Norris Hulse
Chair at Cambridge, also denounces Girard as a fashionable French Freudian who has
seemingly never encountered the doctrine of man made ‘in the image of God’. This
leads him, she feels, to indulge in ‘ontological negativity’, misrepresenting human desire,
and, mesmerized by pagan violence and its darker subtexts, to misconstrue entirely the
Christian notion of ‘sacrifice’. In her Gifford lectures of 2012, she sees Girard additionally
as a counter-model of how Darwin should be accommodated by Christian theology
(Coakley 2012; see discussion by King 2016). Coakley’s spirited double critique resonates
with forms of suspicion which undoubtedly fed widespread ongoing resistance to Girard
among English-speaking theologians. Understanding such objections without sharing
them, a leading theologian allied to Girard names these succinctly: ‘monism of violence,
the reduction of the religious dimension to an unveiling, lack of a theology of creation, the
goodness of creation. Etc’ (Schwager, RG-RS: 160).

A second script of reception was however being written as early as 1980 (see Balthasar
1980). The influential Swiss Jesuit, Hans Urs von Balthasar, surveyor of ‘true’ and ‘false’
gnosis in modern thought, discerned, in his own terms of ‘theo-drama’, the immense
relevance of mimetic theory. ‘Girard is surely the most dramatic project to be undertaken
today in the field of soteriology and in theology generally’ (Balthasar 1994: 299). ‘Girard’s
valid insight’ [‘die Wahrheit Girards’], he wrote to his biographer in 1981, could be
integrated into his own project for a theology of the Cross (cit. Kaplan 2016: 3). Balthasar
too, however, has a serious reservation regarding Girard, arguing that the Christian
anthropologist, in this work of first synthesis, ‘fails to offer an account of the Passion that
properly discerns the place of divine initiative’ (Balthasar 1994: 313).

Rowan Williams gave Girard’s singular hidden things their most attentive welcome
(Williams 2007). He reads with precision: rivalry is the obverse of cooperative imitation;

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ritual realizes the paradoxical function of transforming into social collaboration the
conflictual disintegration of the community; sacrifice effects a double transference, first
reviling, then sacralizing, the sacrificial victim. It points to a ‘founding murder’ as the origin
of social unity and ultimately, of centralized social power; while myth engages a dreamlike
elision, obscuring and reworking the memory of the real-life event. The relevance of this
diagnosis of human psycho-social functioning is seen as obvious in a time of expanded
global imitations and nuclear rivalry; cogent again for understanding and renegotiating
the violence that is recognized in the foundational story of Christianity; and is recurrently
resurgent also in the history of the church.

Williams deftly negotiates the problematic interface of anthropology and theology; ‘nothing
in his account seems to prohibit an analysis of Christian ritual—the mass in particular,
of course—as itself a demystifying mystery, an anti-sacrificial sacrifice’ (Williams 2007:
179). Yet Girard is oddly silent, suggests Williams, about the history of eucharistic doctrine,
‘which could provide some far-reaching confirmations of his thesis’ (2007: 179; see
Sacrifice and the Eucharist). ‘These are questions of theology, in one sense I should say
that they require a consideration of resurrection such as Girard does not offer’ (2007: 179;
original emphasis). The time of hospitable, non-rivalrous engagement, consciously playing
out at the interface of anthropology and theology, had arrived.

1.3 Crisis and clarification

In the turbulent aftermath of Things Hidden, Girard was preparing to answer an invitation
from the French Catholic bishops to discuss his ‘anti-sacrificial’ reading of the New
Testament and of Christian emergence, in particular his perceived denigration of the
epistle to the Hebrews. ‘Then there were voices going in the other direction’ (Gifford
2020: 137); the bishops thought better of it and stood down the meeting. Girard has since
acknowledged a direct responsibility of his own in this near-rebuke by the magisterium
of his church (BE: 35). He admits being bedazzled by his own searchlight, recognized
in retrospect as sheltering certain modernist and anti-Christian preventions. The word
sacrifice – he will later point out – is used to designate archaic rituals and altruistic self-
giving, two diametrically opposed things (see also WTB: 3–4; Adams 1993: 28–29).

The main voice speaking for him was that of Fr. Raymund Schwager SJ, Professor
of Dogmatic and Ecumenical Theology at Innsbruck University (on the ‘Innsbruck
Connection’, see Kirwan 2009: 33–36). Schwager’s own parallel work on ‘divine’ violence
and collective scapegoating in the Bible quickly made him Girard’s declared chief
theological interlocutor; it linked him also to Schwager’s fellow Jesuit, Balthasar. The
latter’s biographer tells us that Girard studied very carefully the Swiss theologian’s
reactions in Theodrama IV. He offers a subtle and perceptive account of their gently
transformative imprint (see Mongrain 2012: 94–100). A retrospective self-examination of

8
2001 by Girard himself gives us the inside track on the same process of crisis and change,
thereby offering a luminous statement of his distilled core thinking (see ‘Mimetic Theory
and Theology’ OSC: 33–45).

The publication of the Schwager-Girard correspondence (1974–1991) has recently

confirmed the central role of this friendship of ‘intellectual and spiritual communion’ (RG-
RS: 78) in retuning the delicate paradox of faith-led science, and so easing the reception
of Mimetic Theory into the Christian mainstream (RG-RS; see also Serres 2009: 15–29).

His mid-career interaction with theologians, encountered personally and in the works of
theology he now read and studied, elicited from Girard a series of reviews and revisions,
deepening, refining, and extending his first synthesis. These are spelled out, in somewhat
dispersed order, in the second phase of his writings centred on the Judaeo-Christian
scriptures: The Scapegoat; Job, Victim of his People; Evolution and Conversion; I See
Satan Fall Like Lightning; his short work on sacrifice in the Hindu Vedanta scriptures
(Le Sacrifice); his major application of Mimetic Theory to Shakespeare (Shakespeare.
A Theatre of Envy); and his final book on warfare, apocalypse and the modern world,
Battling to the End.

The mature Girard is best identified from a major interview of 1992 with Rachel Adams
(see: Adams 1993). Before the American Academy of Religion, Girard makes an assured,
vigorous and elegant response to all early criticisms of any substance. He defends his
project as a working hypothesis that, increasingly, works (cf. EC: 56–68). As he became a
celebrated public intellectual (in the US and in Continental Europe), his developing thought
was, indeed, expressed mainly in collaborative dialogues: interviews, symposia, articles,
contributions, and co-authored works. This ‘dialogism’ (already clear in TH) stood in stark
contrast to the domineering monologues often associated with ‘French Theory’. Mimetic
Theory required collaborative and diversified development; its enormous potential could
not be left in the hands of any one sovereign path finder.

Fullest personal recognition came with his election in 2005 to the thirty-seventh Chair of
the Académie française, previously (at one remove) held by Cardinal Jean Daniélou (one
of the key figures of Vatican II). In his reception speech, leading French philosopher Michel
Serres described Girard as author of ‘the most fruitful hypothesis of the century’ (TP:
92); as true prophet of a tragic era of human violence; as champion of the holy against
the sacred; and as ‘a new Darwin of culture’ (TP: 88; and see Serres 2009: 13). This
latter salute is preferentially remembered by Girardians in a later formulation, of unknown
origin, but commonly attributed to Serres, as ‘the Darwin of the human sciences’.
Girard is thereby envisioned as author of a post-Darwinian theory capable in principle
of embracing all the human sciences, in much the same way as Darwin’s theory today
conceptually frames all the life-sciences. The new Darwin himself fought distinctly shy of

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such prophecies of his mega-eminence; a reticence which, though it does not necessarily
invalidate the prophecy, does refer it to the larger verdict of history.

2 Elements of Mimetic Theory

2.1 Mimesis: meanings and dimensions
Introductions in English to the Mimetic Theory (and to mimetic theory in general) are
not difficult to find. Most helpful to theologians are primers by Kirwan (2004), Fleming
(2004), Palaver (2013), and Gifford (2020). Additionally, the Girard Reader (GR 1996) is
invaluable. More advanced students should consult the Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic
Theory and Religion (PH 2017). All students of his work will wish to follow the ongoing
critical series devoted to Girard’s Mimetic Theory, and to mimetic theory generally,
undertaken in the US by Michigan State University Press; and, more recently in the
UK, by Bloomsbury Press; both offering precious assistance in navigating the maze of
multidisciplinary applications.

Mimesis (Greek: imitation) is largely depreciated in Western tradition for its frequent
identification (since Aristotle) with mimicry or parody. ‘Imitation’ then connotes derived
behaviour, second-hand or second-rate invention (cf. ‘mere imitation’). Girard’s deliberate
recourse to the unfamiliar Greek word highlights a far-reaching rediscovery. The concept is
renewed by the disclosure of its relational context; hence its potential for reciprocity (‘I hold
out my hand, you hold out yours’). ‘Mimesis’, in this newly generalizing and foundational
sense, is what makes personal relations work and societies cohere; it describes a deep-
laid propensity for conscious and, especially, pre-conscious attunement. It is the reality that
founds and enables everything that social scientists (and animal behaviourists) call ‘group
intelligence’.

In this first, elementary, sense, imitation informs everything we do. We communicate

messages and meanings (‘Do you copy that, Red Leader’?). We learn by reproducing or
replicating interiorized models of syntax, norms of behaviour, laws of nature, moral and
spiritual patterns. We follow models of desire proposed by advertising or by the fashion
industry. We invest according to market trends (‘New York sneezes and London catches
cold’).

Girardian mimesis engages philosophers and theologians because it runs like a signature
pattern through animal nature, before blossoming within the mind-made field of human
culture and society. The octopus enacts it, assuming the camouflage of shapes and
colours which make it indistinguishable from the sea floor to which it subsides; likewise
the mysteriously gyrating harmony of great flights of birds at sunset; or the flickering
togetherness of shoals of fish, manœuvring instinctively to confuse predators.

10
It is now known that mimesis is hardwired into humans biologically by the development
of ‘mirror neurons’ in the frontal cortex (see Garrels 2011; PH: 431–438). Studies in
infant psychology have shown how this faculty is entirely central to human development
(Meltzoff 1988: 319–331). The internet reproduces many of the ‘viral’ and ‘copycat’
features associated with mimesis in humans; it reproduces, that is – and it turbocharges
technologically – the innate human (psycho-social) ‘internet’ of reciprocal other-awareness
and connectivity. The human potential itself for ‘mimeticism’ is replicated in machines
endowed with something approaching intelligent desire (see Cowdell 2021).

An ambitious two-volume study, Perspectives on Imitation (2005), by empirical scientists,

Hurley and Chater, validates all these founding intuitions (but barely referencing or quoting
Girard). It traces the extension of the concept of imitation ‘from neuro-science to social
science’. In a foreseeable future, an equally voluminous study may come to track the
progress of mimesis ‘from social science to theology’. Human spiritual development
engages mimesis even more centrally and positively. Humans are said to be ‘made in the
image of God’; discipleship for Christians (which admits related forms in other faiths) is
an ‘imitation’ of Christ; and becoming like God means entering the reciprocal exchange of
mutually regenerative Love, primordially and ultimately illustrated in the life of the Trinity.
This still-to-be-written study will undoubtedly reference Girard; and will, in doing so, come
to terms with the unsuspected potential and the inevitable ambiguities at the heart of all
human thinking.

To borrow an expression from the French poet Paul Claudel, mimetic theory embraces in
principle and by vocation, ‘the immense octave of Creation’ (1966: 142).

2.2 ‘Mimeticism’: the dynamics of rivalrous desire

Girard’s initial and best-known development of the idea is however more specifically
human, and more apparently negative. It begins with mimetic desire. Always-already
embedded in some social desire-field, human beings cannot but interiorize (‘imitate’)
and reproduce (‘copy’) the desires of fellow humans. This makes the latter our models
in desire; which in turn creates empathetic, collaborative, and morally positive virtualities
(‘good’ mimesis). This potential tends to prevail where the model is ‘external’ to our
personal or social space. But, equally and with increasing likelihood as my [or ‘our’] sphere
of existence and yours [or ‘theirs’] overlap and interpenetrate, another, more negative,
mode of mimesis emerges and predominates. My model in desire is also now the obstacle
to the realization or fulfilment of that same desire: two hands reach out, in the same space,
for the same desired objects or goods (you are for me, and soon reciprocally so, a model-
obstacle).

This is ‘bad’ mimesis. It reprises and complexifies the Augustinian idea of ‘concupiscence’;
Girard here sees mimesis as locked into a negative and self-sacralizing dynamic of rivalry,

11
something which the biblical myth of temptation and fall acknowledges, albeit obliquely
(see section 4.2). For these conflictually knotted figures of desire, Girard uses the terms;
‘acquisitive’, ‘appropriative’, or ‘conflictual’ mimesis (often, but not always, designated
generically by the term mimeticism); and – obedient to the implicit suggestions of Genesis
– he speaks of this type as giving rise to ‘false’ or ‘deviated’ transcendence. In its final
section, Things Hidden follows an entire psychopathology of ‘mad stuff’ that results when
our deepest (metaphysical) desire becomes an ontological sickness.

Girard will ultimately refer the occasions of offence or provocation thus set up to the gospel
notion of the ‘stumbling block’ (Greek: skandalon, skandalizein). Thus Peter, rebuking
Jesus for his self-sacrificial vision of Messiahship, provokes in turn the rebuke: ‘Get thee
behind me, Satan’ (Mark 8:33). The disciple has discovered his model as obstacle; in
turn, this rivalry of desire and design is denounced as the ultimate stumbling block by his
Master (see EC: 215–216, 223–224; PH: 485–492).

Mimetic rivalry leads to conflict; which in turn generates violence. Girard shows how
conflicting desires, if and as the scandal of the model-obstacle is assumed in reciprocity,
tend to intensify and draw in others; there is an incremental dynamism, a charge of
contagious fascination, which is seen to play out in the process of sacralization (i.e. the
collective pyscho-social generation of ‘the sacred’). We recognize in this form of reciprocity
the ‘tit-for-tat’ of mimetic retaliation; hence also the point and pertinence of the law of
retribution only at par (lex talionis); and the novelty of the Beatitudes, set to undo just this
dynamism of mutual contagion, provocation, and negative sacralization (‘demonizing’, as
we still say, the adversary). Failing which, violence will be let loose in all its mythico-sacral
potency, in a self-organizing crescendo towards paroxysm (‘runaway dynamic’).

The limited stake represented by the object of desire yields in this process to something
more infinitist and metaphyiscally gaping. Humans exact revenge, destroy and kill, as
animals do not: beyond need, with the self-sacralizing infinitism of desire, now covered
(i.e. both vindicated and concealed) by the shining justification of sacred cause. The secret
spring of this turbocharged dynamic of human antagonism is said by Girard to be pure
and ultimate self-assertion: ‘metaphysical desire’ (to be disentangled from the ‘ontological
negativity’ initially mis-ascribed by some theologians to Girard himself). The anthropologist
of mimesis refers always to the psycho-social origins of the human world: within these
parameters, he tends to treat the violent virtualities of human desire as analogous to dark
matter in the physical cosmos; or else, when transposed into theological perspective and
language, as an anthropological metonymy for ‘original sin’ (see PH: 185–191).

2.3 Related concepts: the sacred, the scapegoat, sacrifice,

misrecognition, myth, apocalypse

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The notion of mimetic desire relates to other key concepts. These are best studied in their
deployment; but the most hard-working, complex and encompassing concepts among
them are listed here to facilitate earlier recognition and ready understanding. They include:
the ‘mimetic crisis’; the ‘scapegoat’ (‘emissary victim’); the ‘victimage mechanism’ (so-
called to express a pre-conscious, pre-representational automatism); the ‘founding
murder’; and the ‘double transference’ (linked to the ‘double bind’ – see section 6.4).

The ‘sacred’ is the mysterium tremendum (‘awesome mystery’) generated by the singular
psycho-social alchemy of collective scapegoat murder, with its sense of transcendence,
vectored by a collective unanimity; its bonding-and-binding effects; and its potent reversal
of extreme peril into a mysterious collective quasi-salvation. It provides the elementary
basis of first-form religion (termed ‘archaic-sacral’, ‘primitive’, or ‘natural’): vox populi, vox
dei (‘the voice of the people is the voice of the god’) (see Gifford 2020: 1–20; PH: 257–
266; Palaver 2020).

‘Sacrifice’, in its original and primitive form, is the ritual repetition of scapegoat murder, and
the cult of its potent but undeciphered psycho-social alchemy. Hence the pattern of eternal
recurrence imprinted deep into ancient mythologies of origin. That pattern supposes the
self-comforting misrecognition (French: méconnaissance) by the community of its own
action and role in the events narrated.

‘Myth’, in Girard, is the collective identity story rewritten in dreamlike (edited, censored,
rearranged) remembrance. It is, semi-transparently, a disguised and involuntary
confession of mimetic violence.

‘Apocalypse’, anthropologically examined, is both the perilous fascination of terminal

paroxysm; and the dream of deliverance sought against it, in an ultimately unveiled
awakening. In the Gospels, this anthropocentric sense encounters the distinctly different
idea of a self-communication and auto-unveiling of God (see PH: 363–369, 383–388, 403–
410).

These conceptual glimpses suggest in merest outline the possibility of a ‘grand narrative’
linking up Girard’s ‘three audacities’. While seeking to consolidate and develop his
theory, Girard nevertheless always mistrusted undue or premature systematicity. He is no
Hegelian system-builder (see Dumouchel 2017: 463–464). Rather, he excels as a uniquely
wide-ranging polymath specializing in the very French genre of the explication de texte
(textual commentary, unfolding meaning and elucidating the meaning-making process as a
function of artistic form).

The major axis of Girard’s own mimetic theorizing (as distinct from that of his immensely
diverse following) is established by the defining reciprocity between his notion of founding
murder and his anthropology of the Cross.

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3 ‘Founding murder’: the generative logic of
religion and culture
The Girardian scenario of origins is a structuralist ‘resolution’ of evidence derived from
world mythologies and religions. Girard is re-reading, in sharply critical hermeneutical
debate with Nietzsche and Freud, the primary scientific evidence established by the
anthropology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With Things Hidden, the
Darwinian dimension of his analysis moves to the fore (see PH: 11–19).

3.1 Decipherment
Girard reflects that through all great works of religious anthropology between 1850 and
the First World War there runs a popular cliché regarding the many religions of mankind:
all of them are ‘more or less alike’ (GR: 248–249). Nietzsche destabilizes this banal,
positivistic insight. Dionysus versus the Crucified is ‘a wager that cannot be sustained
without some form of the sacred, and it has to be that violent sacred which Nietzsche calls
Dionysus’ (GR: 254). Cross questioned, Nietzsche is seen to let slip the secret of his own
sacral counter-construct; and to do so precisely in the ultimate and iconic declaration of
modern atheism:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers,
comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned
has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there
for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have
to invent? (The Gay Science, aphorism 125; cited in GR: 257; see also GR: 243–261; EC:
220–221; PH: 158–168)

Freud too, just a few years after the publication of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, thought
he had discovered that all the religious rituals of mankind are rooted in the collective
murder of some real victim whom men call God. The expression itself, ‘founding murder’,
is taken over by Girard from Freud, who provided in Totem and Taboo the first sketch of a
scientific myth of human beginnings. This hypothesized scenario, representing the murder
of the imagined father of Darwin’s ‘primitive horde’, is presented as the founding event (i.e.
the single and unique occurrence) at the origin of the supposed earliest proto-community.

Freud’s psychology, though co-resonant with something real, remains cognitively impotent.
Girard retains from it only the paradoxical ambiguity of sacrifice: an act of violence that
is transgressive and criminal, but also purifying and legitimate. Freud allowed him to
see sacrifice as a commemoration; and put him on the track of a single solution bringing
together the origin of the gods and the origin of human societies.

3.2 The Girardian scenario

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Reworking Freud’s ‘originary scene’, Girard discovers that founding murder is the art of
‘violence contained’; contained, that is, by a selective, exemplary and therapeutic dose of
violence (in much the same way as, in medicine, antidotes are derived, pharmacologically
speaking, from poisons). At the threshold of ‘hominization’ (i.e. the point of evolution
where the species homo sapiens becomes fully formed biologically and established in that
form), a characteristic scenario must regularly have been played out, no doubt in a myriad
variations, developing over tens of thousands (even perhaps hundreds of thousands)
of years (the latest scientific timelines indicate c. 70,000–30,000 BCE as the period of
the decisive emergence of language, ritual and culture; while homo sapiens is usually
seen to be biologically constituted from c. 200,000 BCE). The community undergoes a
paroxysm of violence (the ‘mimetic crisis’); this is defused in extremis by a self-organizing
mechanism (the ‘victimage mechanism’) which inaugurated, historically speaking, and still
(residually, secretly) undergirds all social life, and everything we call ‘culture’. It constitutes,
in natural process, the emergence of culturally active, self-fashioning humanity.

Where the adversaries within a conflicted social group or community originally wanted
diverse things – to appropriate the same woman, to seize food or territory or power, to
exact retributive justice, etc. – they end up polarized, quite irrationally, upon a single
adversary, arbitrarily designated to the common fury by some rage-modelling leader.
The collective blood-rage is, at this point, deflected outwards and discharged against
a single, arbitrarily chosen – and consequently quite ‘innocent’ – victim. The crisis is,
seemingly, resolved by a scapegoat murder. The scapegoat acts de facto as a sort of
lightning conductor and/or as a disjunctor switch, breaking the circuit and preventing the
perilous electricity of rivalrous desire from consuming the human house. Killing the victim
also sets up the first equation of collective identity-bonding: a very disturbing equation,
albeit strangely familiar to us from the long echoes of resonance it finds in all periods and
places of human history. All are one, against and by virtue of, the rejected, demonized,
scapegoated, adversarial Other.

Then something quite remarkable happens. Girard asks us to imagine the victim lying
inert before the hushed group of hominids or primitive men. They appear simultaneously
and contradictorily as (1) the guilty origin of the crisis – they must have been guilty or we
would not have killed them, nor would we have peace through their death; and (2) as the
beneficent provider of the miracle of renewed peace and social harmony.

This moment of conflicting persuasions and surpassing awe is the beginning of a process
of sacralization (see section 2.3); the dead victim will come to be seen as the potent
bearer of a power of life and death, and then as the power capable of reversing the current
of life-energies from negative to positive: such terrible Wrath, such amazing Beneficence!
Here is a new type of collective attention, centred on the Victim, henceforth become the

15
generative focus of a new process of ‘transcendental’ signification; that is, of properly
human meaning-making (TH: 99–104).

The first perception will suggest in retrospect, as the Event continues to be deciphered
collectively, that the sacrificial victim must surely have willed their own death; the second,
once the corpse has been disposed of, will come to suggest that this exceptional and
departed Visitor must indeed have been a divinity in disguise.

The collective or crowd-generated ‘sacred’, in other words, issues from our own violence
misrepresented, misinterpreted, mythically hypostasized (TH: 42–43). ‘Myth’ itself,
considered in its generating point of origin, is an unconsciously falsified account of
the victimary process, tending to conceal the real guilt of the sacrificers; while in fact
transferring blame, implicitly and illegitimately, to the victim; and then convincing the
community that this episode of crisis was a blessing in disguise, hence also a legitimate
sacred action brought about by the god himself (TH: 148).

There is, in short, a ‘double transference’ processing any and all violence experienced in
common: a blame-transfer followed by a self-administered dose of ritual-symbolic therapy,
thanks to which the Victim becomes the attributed divine Origin of all the prohibitions and
rituals instituted to prevent a recurrence of the same social crisis.

3.3 Sacrifice: founding ritual, ritual foundation

The word ‘sacrifice’ – sacri-fice – literally means making sacred, producing the sacred.
What sacrifices the victim is the blow delivered by the sacrificer, the violence that kills
this victim, annihilating it and placing it above everything else by making it in some sense
immortal. (TH: 226)

The original spontaneous murder is already implicitly a sacrifice: the victim is, obscurely
but in fact, done to death that the community may not perish. But it is not yet a sacrifice
in the classic sense consecrated by organized religions: an act of commemorative
communion, assembling men around the victim-god. It is not yet a concerted and
foundational act of ritual murder (see Sacrifice and the Old Testament).

The modern sciences of field-anthropology and ethnology have discovered (with ever-
increasing undeniability) that human blood sacrifice features prominently in the prehistory
and early civilizational history of many diverse cultures and peoples: from the Aztecs and
the Mayans to the Celts, from the Phoenicians to the tribes and religious communities of
Africa, India, and China (see e.g. PH: 61–68). It is also widely acknowledged that ‘sacrifice’
– in a thousand arborescent varieties and developing forms – was the most original and
constitutive practice of all the world’s religions (the objection that Girard does not deal
with all extant forms of sacrifice is certainly correct; but it is rarely, save perhaps in respect
of the phylum ‘offerings’ [see Smart 1980: 176], as weighty as objectors assume. Girard

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claims to be giving us not a descriptive phenomenology – still less an exhaustive typology
of sacrifice – but a logic of genesis. As a disciple of Darwin, he is ever-conscious that
‘cultural’ forms develop with much the same exuberant diversity as ‘natural’ life forms; yet
this diversity, though not exhaustively catalogued by Darwin, is not seen to invalidate the
generative logic of ‘natural selection’).

The appropriate question then is: what, generatively speaking, and in principle, is
‘sacrifice’ and how is it foundational?

It is, says Girard, at the heart of the common life, a re-enactment or replay of the originally
spontaneous and unreflecting primal murder. The ritual slaughter of a surrogate victim
consecrates this memory totemically; it repeats the salvational spell and makes it binding,
at the lowest possible economic cost to the community. This single victim will stand in for
the community, will become its emissary and mediator: calling down the god(s), taking
the ‘hit’, and procuring a renewed divine blessing on the community. Thus, it replicates
as exactly as possible the original scapegoat murder, driven by the arrière-pensée
(‘undeclared or unconscious intention’) of recreating its cathartic, reconciling, identity-
bonding outcome.

The victim is chosen, often from a purpose-specific reserve (as in the known case of the
Aztecs), from among the socially marginalised, the weak or the vulnerable, e.g. children,
the sick, the handicapped, prisoners of war). This rite is triggered by the incipient signs of
returning mimetic crisis; these are actually laid out – prepared and, indeed, solicited – by
the institution of ‘carnaval’, which significantly frames the sacrifice. The sacrificial climax
of the festival exorcises and resolves (TH: 23–30) once more this staged renascence of
violent contagion and conflict within the social group; but this time ritually – which is to say,
repeatably.

The rite’s collective, strongly participatory, and essentially theatrical character, comes
over time to be ceremonially regulated and aesthetically enhanced, delivering a no doubt
spellbinding potency of emotional charge. We have a good idea of this from the much later
homologies of theme and structure it finds in Greek tragedy (see PH: 151–158). Such
inventions enact the same underlying logic of the violent control of violence by symbolic
and ritual means; as, in rationalized forms and contexts, they still do today.

3.4 ‘The invisibility of the founding murder’

That functional logic remains ‘underlying’ because the true nature of the forces in play is
hidden from the operating subjects. Girard speaks powerfully, here in dialogue with the
alternative ‘formalist’ theory of myth which he finds and rejects in Lévi-Strauss, of ‘the
invisibility of the founding murder’ (TH: 105–120; see also PH: 85–93).

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Violence is, visibly, contained, but at an invisible cost. The act of founding murder ritually
re-enacted cuts short the overt ascendency of violence within the community; yet, at the
same time, the ritual secretly interiorizes violence itself within the group. Its example, its
practice, its auto-justifications are diffused throughout the whole sphere of the group’s
systems, works and ways; the more effectively so, since that founding act is articulated
and officialized in the form of a tribal mythology which covers up ‘our’ own violent role in
the victimary-sacrificial process; to say nothing of the violence generating the mimetic
crisis itself.

Sacred violence thus becomes ‘naturalized’. As humans we are in it and of it before

we know anything about it. ‘We’ will not, of our own seeing, notice as such any victims
‘we’ make. This is what all sacred causes – ‘holy’ crusades, pogroms, authoritarian
repressions, self-sacralizing terrorist campaigns, or, more simply, the practice of slavery
throughout history – unendingly suggest. Humankind is secretly confined and defined by
the violence which we humans have, sacrificially, contained.

3.5 The genesis of culture and social order

At that price, the victimary mechanism becomes an ever more fruitfully generative
principle, building up culturally and institutionally the communities organized around it.
Archaic-sacral religious cults developing from the victimage mechanism allow us, indeed,
to decipher the ‘software’ programming of the psychic space we collectively inhabit – to
reconstruct, that is, the generative logic at work in the world-changing emergence and
advent of human ‘culture’ (see EC: 64–74).

The cryptic automatism of the victimary ritual provides the opportunity, the focus, and the
trigger required for the further development of the principal vectors of culture: symbolicity
and language, first of all (see section 6.3); then the earliest prohibitions; leading over
time, to the moral codes, laws, and institutions which enabled societies to function by
controlling their objects of desire, and therefore also the risk of conflictual mimesis; then
the development of more complex sacrificial rites and structures, guaranteeing a binding
cohesion internally, but also enabling social hierarchy and extending political control;
operative also externally, in managing collective Other-relations, both for the avoidance
of risk, for the keeping of the peace and the acquisition of commercial advantage (see
PH: 53–59). Some inventions, like prohibitions (interdicts, taboos) develop a first logic
present in the victimage mechanism, the need to limit, prevent and avoid violent conflict
(i.e. ‘bad mimesis’). Others, like ritual sacrifice, stem from the second, equally potent, logic
present within it: that of developing a transfiguring benefit or blessing of peace, unity, and
collaboration (i.e. ‘good mimesis’).

Finally, expressing both logics, are the mythical stories which are bonding in an identitarian
sense. These are often stories of real historical foundation, albeit falsified in dreamlike

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unknowing, so as to edit out the truth of what is in fact a foundational act of murder. Thus,
the myth of Romulus and his brother Remus is the story of the fratricide which founded
Rome, albeit rewritten to edit out all blame attached to the Founder of the City (TH: 146).
Similar foundation stories are strikingly prevalent throughout world’s religious mythologies.
Girard shows, with an impressive range of examples taken from different cultures and
parts of the world, that these mythical identity narratives are unfailingly told in a way which
edits out, or covers up, with a sort of artless artfulness, ‘our’ own participation in ‘founding
murder’ (TH: 104–125; S: 525–599). He also shows how the disguised process of editing
out can become readable again if we refer to the ‘persecution narrative’, a form of writing
intermediate between myth and history, as practised in medieval anti-Semitic writings (S:
1–11). The intermediate case then opens up the more overwritten and ‘buried’ cases of
scapegoating decipherable in Aztec and Greek mythology.

Our species thus survives the crisis of its own becoming human thanks to an organizing
principle of symbolico-ritual sacrifice; while, at the same time, protecting its own self-
image and safeguarding its energies of self-belief, enterprise, dominance (and other
forms of Darwinian advantage) with liberal administrations of self-deceiving whitewash
(méconnaissance or ‘misrecognition’).

3.6 Completing Darwin: genesis ‘from below’

This Girardian model of violent human origins readily inspires the sort of immediate
recoil associated with tabloid headlines conveying dramatically bad news (‘“Founding
Murder!”– Grisly discovery of missing person H. Sapiens’). Yet on more mature inspection,
it represents a modelling hypothesis which we might have anticipated if Darwin’s theory of
the ‘descent of man’ is broadly correct. As an early and deeply admiring reader of Darwin’s
Origin of Species (Gifford 2020: 123–130), Girard himself came progressively to assume
Darwin’s theory as a prelude to his own notion of founding murder, which he sees as both
confirming and completing Darwin.

Darwin already presents pre-human nature as a self-organizing, super-sacrifical system.

Yet he leaves homo sapiens out of the picture, except in the notorious fact of his animal
‘descent’. Girard integrates humankind as such into Darwin’s big picture. He grafts on to
it a model addressing the novelty of man and explaining how, with homo sapiens, a new
type of self-organization comes into play which fundamentally changes the evolutionary
deal or game.

What Girard also explains is how mimetically turbocharged humans ‘made it’, in the
first place, across a performance threshold at which their very superiority, exercised
in internecine violence, threatened to wipe out their own species. In animal societies,
violence is adequately contained by auto-regulating mechanisms such as dominance
structures and trial fights. With the enlarged human brain came the crescendo towards a

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paroxysm of mimetically self-renewing rivalries. The time of the hominid/human hunter-
gatherers is known to have been more violent in terms of numbers of intra-specific killings
per head of population than any period in history (see Pinker 2011: 47–56); Girard, more
fundamentally than Pinker, explains why.

He then shows by what mechanisms – and what magic – these perils could be disarmed,
and those violent energies re-channelled into new possibilities of cultural invention
and self-management; and he discerns the generative logic by which the principal
elements of organized archaic-sacral culture came into being, thus providing the ongoing
matrix within which human specificity could develop in self-fashioning mode. Girard’s
account of founding murder discerns with some brilliance all these strategically important
connections. In doing so, it goes a good way towards relieving the general ignorance
which Girard diagnoses in natural scientists and philosophers about the process of
hominization itself. As he asserted, ‘we have absolutely no idea what early cultural
practices consist of, how they interlock with “natural” processes, and how they act on the
latter to create more and more humanized forms’ (TH: 88).

It is clear enough that the categories ethologists are concerned with are also very much
those involved in Girardian founding murder: rival fights, mobbing, redirected activity,
victimary and transferred aggression, appeasement ceremonies, triumph rites, etc.
Discussing the role of ‘functional change’ in evolution, Austrian naturalist Konrad Lorenz
even describes behaviour patterns which, if we did not know their animal context, might
very innocently be read as describing Girardian founding murder in humans. Lorenz
describes, for instance,

the ingenious feat of transforming, by the comparatively simple means of redirection and
ritualization, a behaviour pattern which, not only in its prototype, but in its present form,
is partly motivated by aggression into a means of appeasement and further into a love
ceremony which forms a strong tie between those who participate in it. This means neither
more nor less than transforming the mutually repelling effect of aggression into its opposite.
(Lorenz 2002: 168; cf. TH: 98; see section 6.3)

Yet Girard shows additionally that archaic-sacral religion turns out to have been the
transformative and providential (see WTB: 97; EC: 216–217) new matrix of human cultural
and societal invention, the real primary school teacher (‘institutrice’) of our prehistoric
ancestors, and the fundamental crucible of developing human specificity. Natural first-form
religion is seen as the aboriginally containing force, but also as the operative magic spell
that checks, converts and re-channels the destructive energies of the competitive struggle
for life as observed by Darwin.

This paradox, though it may threaten many long-held assumptions about ourselves, may
well take us some way towards a healthy and cogent resolution of the enigma – and, even,

20
‘in the fulness of time’, the mystery – of hominization (see also PH: 11–20; Antonello and
Gifford 2015b; OSC: 85–91).

4 Girard and the Hebrew scriptures: survival

opened up to salvation
The latter half of Girard’s published output, from Things Hidden, is principally devoted to
re-introducing the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels into the intellectual mainstream.

4.1 Girardian biblicism

Secularized post-Enlightenment culture assumes that ‘religion’ is either supernatural
and God-given or man-made and self-referentially mythical. In contrast, Girard follows a
‘third way’ pioneered by French-Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson (The Two Sources of
Religion and Morality, 1932, see 1977). An adequate understanding of ‘religion’ will invoke
both hypotheses and their interaction. Despite some late Muslim dialogues and a single
excursion into sacrifice in the Hindu Vedanta scriptures (Girard 2003; see also EC: 43–
44), Girard’s steadfast focus is on the Hebrew scriptures and the Gospels. In this one very
particular developmental line (or phylum) of religious experience, thought and practice,
he discovers a prodigious engagement with the very violent logic of archaic sacrality: in
fact, a rewriting of that primordial ‘programming’ of group intelligence operating to highly
ambiguous effect in emergent, culturally developing humankind. His leading thread is a
fascination for the emergence of novelty, textually discerned and deciphered. ‘Revelation’
can then be recognized differentially, as a recasting of the common ‘syntax’ or ‘grammar’
of the archaic sacred; while showing how the Darwinian logic of survival, together with the
archaic sacralities it has never ceased to generate, became ongoingly transformed and
transformative – a genuine work of salvation.

4.2 Genesis ‘from above’

The account of Creation and Fall in Genesis offers a locus classicus for observing the
inaugural emergence of this novelty (the fullest Girardian reading is ‘La Creation et la
Chute’; Oughourlian 2007: 75–130).

The Bible’s Edenic prologue is built around the very formula of the Girardian ‘mimetic
triangle’: the structural figure which describes the dynamic interrelations between two
subjects whose hands reach out in rivalry for the same Object. This schema is present
in the biblical story; but for the first time in the history of human thinking, the triangle is
powerfully relativized. Some 200,000 years after homo sapiens first appeared on Earth,
there is now a prior Subject: the Creator God. Within the prior order of creation, it is human
mimetic rivalry with God that is being staged, and which is being presented now as the fact

21
and the fault of mimetically suggestible, blame-shifting, mis-sacralizing humankind (see
RG-RS: 177).

Adam, challenged by the Lord God, diverts the blame for their common rivalry-and-
disobedience onto Eve, who in turn deflects blame onto the Serpent. Where will the
buck stop? (The English word buck denotes a token in games of chance; it is connected,
etymologically, to the French expression for ‘scapegoat’ – le bouc émissaire [cf. VS:
312–315]). These successive suggestions of deflected blame point back to the human
propensity for moral obliquity and evasiveness; ‘injured innocence’ is here recognized as
part of the human ‘default setting’.

Eve has interiorized (‘copied’) the desire of the seducing Serpent. In doing so, the
mother of humanity enters into mimetic rivalry with God. ‘Deviated transcendence is the
caricature of vertical transcendance’ (DDN: 78). If human desire has a true Object, then
the deviant variety, born of ambiguously-sighted first acquaintance, exclusion, prohibition,
and religious rivalry is a mimetic fantasm and a form of scandalizing model-obstacle
behaviour – in biblical language: ‘idolatry’. More exactly: emergent humanity enters into
rivalry with the archaic representation the Serpent has of God – namely, as Power-Holder
and Sacralizer of the human moral and social order, the repressive Kill-Joy of human
inventiveness, aspiration and autonomy.

The initiating serpent is intimate to ourselves; and is represented, very plausibly, as

denizen of the archaic shadow-zone or shudder-zone within us. This unknown ‘Other’
within is perhaps the mythic projection of our own, older (i.e. evolutionary and animal)
otherness. If so, we understand the serpent’s further promotion into a theological symbol:
‘the serpent, in whom Christian tradition has recognized the Evil One, the Devil, the
Prince of this world, is the mimetic principle inasmuch as it perverts human relations and
creates rivalry’ (Oughourlian 1982: 40; see section 5.6). That voice speaks out of the self-
sacralizing and henceforth transgressive logic of the archaic sacred.

‘Ye shall be as gods’. The plural ‘gods’, and the cautionary adverb of quasi-similitude may
connote the environing context of Canaanite polytheism; that rival sacrality of orgies and
child sacrifice, of blood lust, and of the erotic thrill of manipulating the power of life and
death.

The story of the Fall warns humankind of its propensity to spoil and destroy, from within
our freedom, the good Creator’s good work in creation. A mimetic analysis suggests
that it does so a touch obsessively, by way of a reactive insistence stiffened by a pre-
encountered scandal, even to the point of shifting all the blame for the world’s ‘evil’,
uncompromisingly onto human shoulders. In the process, it projects heavenwards a
residually wrathful and punitive image of God (RG-RS: 181–182; Adams 1993: 20; see

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also the reversal of exclusionary perspective manifest in John 1:11 where the inside track
story is not God expelling humans, but humans expelling God).

Notwithstanding this subplot, the Genesis narrative steps, momentously, outside the
world of the archaic sacred. It recognizes and refers to it; it represents and critiques it.
The disciplines of theology and mimetically-based evolutionary anthropology, despite
their distinct starting points and perspectives of interpretation, in fact offer dialogically
interrelated and mutually supportive accounts.

4.3 Mythology and scripture

The beginnings of the Jewish Bible (the Christian Old Testament) confront us with a
horizon of ancient, pre-Christian religious-cultural practice entirely recognizable from
surrounding mythologies. Echoes of disorder run through all the major stories of Genesis
and Exodus: temptation and fall; the tower of Babel; Sodom and Gomorrah; the ten
plagues of Egypt. Noah’s flood itself, which has distinct parallels in Babylonian (the epic
of Gilgamesh) and even in Greek myth (the story of Deucalion), is perhaps, in part, a
metaphor for mimetic crisis (plague and flood often have this undeclared exchange-value
in world mythologies). As echo-located by many scattered traces, the generative matrix of
the archaic sacred is an entirely recognizable context of emergence.

Far from letting such things threaten his theory, Girard goes out of his way to underline
them: these shared beginnings serve, precisely, to measure an original and far more
remarkable pattern of textual and historical emergence, which asserts itself increasingly as
the scriptural story unfolds.

Cain, though he founds a culture (the Canaanite culture), is not presented as justified in
killing his brother – unlike Romulus, founder of Rome. His ‘spurned’ sacrifice is human
resentment born of sibling rivalry. God cares and questions: where is his murdered brother,
whose blood ‘cries out from the ground’? It cries, not for vengeance, but for a deferral or
displacement of retaliation, thereby acknowledging explicitly something that archaic-sacral
ritual asserts implicitly. A limit must be set to the corrupting contagion of violence; such
is the ‘mark of Cain’. Here is a prohibition on violent human reprisal pointing towards the
development of the Law itself, with its more radical commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ (TH:
144–149; cf. PH: 53–60).

Subversive rewriting also fashions the Bible’s equivalent of the Oedipus story. If he had
been presented in the mythological framework of the archaic sacred, Joseph would have
been depicted as a hubristic and patricidal power-plotter, justly punished by his righteous
brothers (his dreams in fact suggest how the alternative version would have started;
and the possibility of a fully ‘sacrificial’ account is further hinted at in the biblical story by
Joseph’s bloodied coat, presented to the father to explain his ‘disappearance’). Moreover,

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the scapegoating pattern is not only made visible, but it is visibly reprised (i.e. thematized)
in the story by Joseph’s own treatment of Benjamin. The scapegoat victim is vindicated as
such; a non-violent restoration of the common bond is secured (EC: 200–203; SFL: 106–
115).

The tangled threads of the archaic sacred are here being partially unravelled; responsibility
for violence is being tentatively laid at the right address; archaic sacrifices cannot any
more serve as a universal mythico-symbolic expedient for patching up potentially violent
religious, political and socio-economic crises (TH: 144–154).

4.4 Sacrifice reviewed, renewed

Girard suggests that ritual is the place where tradition and innovation meet. The Akedah,
the ‘binding’ of Isaac by Abraham (Gen 22), is the fountainhead of this process. This
narrative of the sacred call of religious duty ‘announces the renunciation of human
sacrifice and the passage towards animal sacrifice’ (WTB: 46; EC: 202–203).

A call that is sacred binds both victim and sacrificer to do the tribal god’s received or
supposed will. Yet there is an emerging Hebraic novelty: Abraham is the agent of the
divine purpose, through whom passes God’s Promise of blessing for all of humankind.
In order to transmit that blessing he must have a descendancy – that long-delayed and
much expected son, the very one who is apparently demanded as sacrificial victim. Sacred
violence is being presented in its most sharply problematic profile.

Can God really desire or countenance the sacrificial killing of the bearer of the divine
Promise? The central paradox is resolved, albeit incompletely. God, it turns out, provides
the ‘proper’ scapegoat victim for sacrifice, the ram caught by its horns in the thicket.
Abraham’s faith was being ‘tried’ and ‘tested’. Abraham, more than Isaac, is unbound (the
English word ‘scapegoat’ derives from the phrase, ‘escape goat’). ‘The extraordinary thing
about the biblical text is that it begins by presenting an Abraham who is still following the
system of human sacrifice shows the obedience first; it shows that from that obedience,
truthful change is possible’ (WTB: 46; and see Palaver 2017: 103–109).

The episode of Leviticus 16, where the scapegoat makes his first nominal appearance,
advances this argument. When, on the annual Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), the
scapegoat Azazel is symbolically charged with bearing away the sins of the whole
people, he illustrates the logic of archaic sacrifice exactly; while introducing this perfecting
amendment – that the other goat then offered to Yahweh becomes a pure offering, freed
from the taint borne off by the scapegoat.

Primitive sacrificial practice has again been revised, reinterpreted (as it is again, more
fundamentally, in the inward sacrifice of praise). It can then be religiously displaced, and in
part replaced; ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’ (Hos 6:6). In the famous ‘judgment’ of Solomon

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(1 Kgs 3:16–28), a favourite passage of Girard’s, the notion of sacrifice even declares a
secret dimension of loving self-sacrifice (TH: 237–243; OSC: 42–45; EC: 214–216).

Yet Girard reminds us that Leviticus 16 does not yet understand ‘scapegoating’ as it
would come to be understood in the European sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, i.e.
it does not yet see in emissary victimization an illegitimate and self-serving manipulation.
The ancient Hebrew ritual is still embedded in – at some level, still complicit with and
committed to – the practice of blame-transfer (i.e. it is, residually, still a transactional and
quasi-magical solution applied to the problem of human guilt and its standing before God;
see also PH: 48–50). Then, ‘the three great pillars of primitive religion – myth, sacrifice
and prohibitions – are subverted by the thought of the Prophets’ (TH: 155; and see Baillie
1997: 167–184). They also show, in a more ultimate sense, how the Hebrew scriptures
wrestle with the interlinked horizontal and vertical dimensions of sacred violence.

4.5 Figurae Christi

Girard follows medieval Catholic exegesis in recognising in the Hebrew scriptures a series
of precursor figures anticipating the Christ (known as the figurae Christi) (EC: 207–211).
All, like Abraham, Joseph (section 4.4) and Jonah (GR: 24–25, 197), are variations on
the theme of victimhood, The ‘cursing’ Psalms, then the Book of Job, give voice to the
Victim. The latter text stages, in dialogue with the victim himself, the entire ambivalence
of the archaic sacred. Ultimately, it wrests the deity out of the process of persecution to
envision him instead as the God of the oppressed and the downtrodden. The Victim, for
the first time, can say: ‘I know that my redeemer liveth’ (Job 19:25). God, is glimpsed
here, paradigmatically, and for the first time, as likely to prefer a man who speaks the
truth to one who blames the sufferer for his sufferings in order to safeguard his own moral
reputation.

Girard discerns, beneath the fabulating and still mythic data of the storyline, that Job is the
‘Victim of his people’. In other words, the God with whom Job wrestles is not just that of a
peculiar Hebrew tradition of retributive justice (articulated by the so-called ‘friends of Job’);
he is, in part still, the sacralized projection of the ‘God’ of the archaic sacred (or ‘primitive
religion’), i.e. a monstrous Double, required, engendered, and consecrated by man’s
ancient, devious, and universal game of exorcizing violently his own violent shadow. This
fearsome deity, born of the social psyche, constitutes, in evolutionary terms, the inherited
default setting of man ‘the sacralising animal’ (JVP).

Isaiah’s mysterious Suffering Servant (Isa 52; 53) represents the pure embodiment of the
victim-figure as saviour: rejected scapegoat of all, discharging the community of all its sins,
and all its violence; strikingly recapitulative in his complete innocence, his otherness in
relation to all the ills offloaded onto him. He thus thematizes (for the first time: explicitly

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and comprehensively) the covert operation of blame-transfer and the vicarious suffering
associated with founding murder.

In all these texts, the ferment of subversive novelty, challenging, reworking and replacing
elements of the archaic sacred, is in principle clear. Yet not even in the conception of the
Suffering Servant – described, in this text’s single apparent lapse into archaism, as the
expiatory victim of God (see TH: 157) – can the process be said to have been carried
through to its logical term. The sacrificial Temple survives; and with it the legal prohibitions,
the mythical stories, and the theocratic state.

Above all, a monstrous Double survives, the God of the archaic sacrificial system, the
wrathful, retributive, and often bloodthirsty Jehovah of Hebrew tribal imagining; and,
given the subsistently generative action in us all of the ‘founding murder’, our own abiding
temptation also. ‘In the Old Testament we never arrive at a conception of the deity that is
entirely foreign to violence […] Yahweh is still the God to whom vengeance belongs. The
notion of divine retribution is still alive’ (TH: 157–158; see also Schwager 1988: 45–52).

5 The Gospels: founding murder identified,

transformed, transcended
From Herod’s massacre of the innocents (Matt 2:16–18) to the Lament over Jerusalem
(Luke 19:41–44), the horizons of sacred violence familiar to Israel reappear in the
Gospels. The encounters of Jesus with actual cases of violence, individual and collective,
call forth some of Girard’s most insightful commentaries: the Gerasene demoniac (Matt
8:28–34; Mark 5:1–20; Luke 8:26–39; see S: 165–183); the death by beheading of John
the Baptist (Mark 6:14–29; see S: 125–148); the near-stoning of the woman taken in
adultery (John 8:2–11; see GR: 249; SFL: 54–61); the parable of the corrupt vineyard
tenants (Matt 21:33–41; Luke 20:9–18). All display, as do the Beatitudes, the theme of
sacred violence, by which the Kingdom proclamation is linked in a single weave to the
Passion.

5.1 Founding murder identified

The ‘key’ to understanding both Kingdom blessedness and the necessity of the Cross lies,
in Girard’s very original submission, in the clear and explicit intelligence shown by Jesus of
the dark phenomenon of ‘founding murder’ (TH: 158–167).

In Matthew, Jesus charges the religious authorities with erecting whitewashed memorial
tombs to the prophets whom their ancestors have expelled and murdered:

Fill up the measure of your ancestors […] so that upon you may come all the righteous
blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, […] whom

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 you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Truly I tell you, all this will come upon
this generation. (Matt 23:27–36)

Jesus here foresees his own death, and he places it in direct line of descent from the
murders committed by the leaders of theocratic Israel against all the righteous, starting,
significantly, from Cain’s victim, Abel. The latter is not a canonical prophet of Israel.
Abel is being cited here, as in Genesis, as victim of a more universal killing, committed
before ever Israel was gathered; he is a representative figure of humankind’s foundational
murder.

In Luke, the universal dimension of the drama of concealed sacral violence is highlighted
by the charge that the experts in the Law have ‘taken away the key to knowledge’ (Luke
11:52): they have removed, that is, the crucial element of understanding which makes for
true recognition of the relationship between God and man. John’s parallel text (John 8:43–
44) ‘goes further than the others in disentangling the founding mechanisms; it excises all
the definitions and specifications that might bring about a mythic interpretation […] Satan
denotes the founding mechanism itself – the principle of all human community’ (TH: 162;
see section 4.7). The charge being made by Jesus against the Jewish religious leaders
is they are blocking the coming of God’s Kingdom; and they are doing so – not because
they are Jews (on ‘Anti-Semitism in the Gospels’, see GR: 211–221) – but because they
see, judge and react in the logic of the archaic sacred. Opening up the oldest grave of
human ‘misrecognition’ seals Jesus’ fate. This is, exactly speaking, intolerable. Jesus must
be done away with; albeit under legitimizing headings of transferred blame – ‘irreligion’,
‘blasphemy’, ‘danger to national security’.

5.2 The Passion: founding murder re-enacted

Girard is then able to show how every aspect of the Passion itself represents a deliberate,
exemplary – almost pedagogic – replay of the scenario of ‘founding murder’. High Priest
Caiaphas gives the exact, recapitulative formula of the victimary mechanism in action:
‘it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation
destroyed’ (John 11:50). He of course fears the clouds of apocalypse gathering once
more above Israel (cf. Luke 13:1); this is precisely the pattern declared, so Jesus has
told the chief priests and elders, throughout Israel’s history. Tragic irony: killing one more
prophet, this one the Messiah of God, will not save the nation from the apocalypse of
destruction which already, very perceptibly, looms. The parable of the corrupt vineyard
tenants (Matt 21:33–43; Mark 12:1–12; Luke 20:9–19) becomes luminously clear when
read as a warning of this eventuality (see GR: 195, 212–213, 216–217).

The death warrant is signed by the Procurator of the occupying power; albeit with a
significant complication. Within the due process of Roman law, Pilate finds it expedient
to reactivate a more primitive reality. In the endgame played out in what Christians have

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come to call ‘Holy Week’, Jesus is condemned to death by popular acclamation. The
aspect of collective lynching is, in the last resort, decisive; its persuasion so potent that
it reverses the acclamation of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. In an ultimate test of
potency, its runaway dynamic overtakes and takes over, in their denial and flight, the
pledged, practised, and forewarned loyalty of the disciples of Jesus. What is founding in
humanity is here declared to be something to which all humans, in times of supreme crisis,
regress.

The originary scene of mimetic rage and deflected responsibility is played out between
Pilate and crowd. Which scapegoat is it to be? The choice is between the malodorous
goat Barrabas (Barrabas of the blood-stained sword, of the sacralized national cause,
nobly covering a practice of greed, robbery, and murder; truly, a figure of violent archaic
sacrality); and Jesus, innocent Lamb of God. A single emissary Victim is designated by
rage-modelling leaders planted within the crowd; a fever of bloodlust sweeps over all. They
need to be safe in the storm, they need to be innocent – to deflect guilt, avoid pain and
catastrophe; at the Trouble-Maker’s expense.

The contagion of victimary rage is evidenced again in the derision and cursing of
bystanders. Even the cursing thief on his cross is a mimetic echo of the ‘all-against
one’. The same can be said of the mock obeisance of the soldiers, and the subsequent
scourging (TH: 167–170). Death by crucifixion is the signature act of founding murder,
something required by the sacral bond itself. It represents an institutionalised politico-
legal development of the very first bonding-and-binding rite: archaic blood-sacrifice.
And to what effect? Order is secured. Political enemies Herod and Pilate are reconciled
against the scapegoat. No general violence ensues. The looming cataclysm is seemingly
averted. Up to a point, the archaic blood sacrifice thus reprised can even be said, in
classic foundational manner, to work.

5.3 ‘Replay’ signifies transformative reversal

The scenario played out in the Gospels does not, however, simply repeat one more time
the founding murder (this reading, not uncommonly made by Girard’s early critics, is a
spectacular misreading). The new, reworked figure of sense is ‘abyssally different’ (TH:
217) from the original. The same scenario is turned upside down and run backwards
in order that it be recognized, disarmed, undone, and defeated. What exactly does the
inverting and the converting? For Girard, it is the ungainsayable innocence or goodness
of this Victim. This is what causes the default mechanism of unanimous condemnation,
hence also, in consequence, the entire machine of archaic-sacral mystification and cover-
up to malfunction.

At the apex point of the mimetic crisis there is not, apart from fleetingly, a flawless
unanimity. Pilate, in his rational and equitable moment, has already seen through the

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charges laid against his victim (Matt 27:23–24; Mark 15:14; Luke 23:4; John 19:6b).
His wife intervenes urgently, but vainly, attempting to protect this Innocent from capital
execution (Matt 27:19; see S: 106–107). In Luke, the penitent thief answers the cursing
thief: ‘this man has done nothing wrong’ (Luke 23:41); and in Mark, the executing
centurion’s verdict is that this was a just man, in the image of God (Mark 15:39). Then,
the inverse or antithetical sense of this victimary scenario is consecrated – not post
factum by public opinion – but in advance, by the Victim himself, steadfast in purpose,
assured of his vindication by God and by history. The Last Supper deliberately reprises the
Jewish Passover meal; but also, behind that very deliberate allusion and the continuity it
establishes with Jewish tradition, way back upstream in time, it re-enacts and rewrites the
festive meal that originally precedes the archaic sacrifice itself; and, even before that, it
rewrites the Dionysian diasparagmos (‘tearing asunder’).

Girard thus sees the Cross as a victory for the Victim, who declares himself, paradoxically,
the actively directing Subject, even of this death, which is designed to harrow and
disintegrate the human subject in a grim pedagogy of warning. Jesus consents to enter
into the scenario of founding murder, as Victim; and on behalf of all victims. To display that
process at work in his people and in humankind as such; and to reveal to all humans its
nothingness in relation the ultimate reality of the Love divine. In other words, this strange
project aims to rework the deepest and darkest springs of perverted proto-sacrality and of
sacralized violence in the human heart, and to change its very mainspring of Desire. Thus,
to ‘convert’ those in whom this darkness operates (which is to say: all human beings) to
the reality of the Kingdom-that-comes.

Here is an antipodal pedagogy, a strange counter-therapy of Love. The post-Resurrection

experiences of encounter will confirm the pioneering and paradoxical confidence of this
unique Scapegoat Victim.

5.4 ‘Founding murder’ overturned: discerning the

resurrection anthropologically
Girard, as anthropologist, cannot and will not speak about this Event theologically.
He looks to his theologian colleagues to explore the theological implications and
consequences. Their response, from Balthasar onwards, has not infrequently been: but
why this hermeneutical deficit, this theological defection?

Yet Girard understands pertinently the full Christian meaning of the Resurrection, albeit as
anthropologically articulated. The Resurrection is that which surprises all the actors; and
which throws into reverse gear and eventually overthrows the process of self-mystifying
sacralization. So that not only does the scapegoat’s condemnation not ‘stick’, not only
is the scapegoaters’ hatred exposed for what it is (‘they hated me without a cause’, Ps
35:19), but the entire enfolded-enfolding logic of emissary victimization and scapegoat

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violence, diffused throughout all human cultures, is, for the first time, pierced through, and
fully laid bare.

Reality returns; truth bounces back. In these observed ‘differences’, the anthropologist
glimpses a new revelation of the status and nature of ‘God’:

It is no longer men who create gods, but God who has come to take the place of the victim
[...] Here, the victim is divine before becoming sacred. The divine precedes the sacred
[i.e. does not proceed from it]. The rights of God are re-established. (BE: 104; original
emphasis)

Moreover, the transformative ‘replay’ enacted discloses its link to that even more
foundational beginning proclaimed in John’s Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word’ (1:1;
cf. 17:5). For, in order to designate the logic of founding murder in which humanity as
a whole is aboriginally embedded, and to be raised after doing so, the One who bears
witness to the truth must, in all rigour, have transcended that logic and stand in that truth;
he must have been enacting a higher identity, a prior calling.

Girard here situates himself antipodally to the liberal reductionism of Bultmann (whose
conviction is that the resurrection is, all told, an interpretative event in the mind of the
disciples). What the French anthropologist observes in the post-Resurrection encounters
of the Gospels is an ‘objective Event’, which calls into being a new insight, supposing
a veritable conversion of heart and mind, a penny-dropping access to the innermost
meaning of the gospel proclamation, the kerygma (GR: 280–301). ‘In some way, it is
because Christ enters into the matrix of false resurrections that he is truly risen’ (BE: xvi).
Only Someone who shares that other Identity, that other, prior Beginning, can designate
the evolutionary archetype and transform human misrecognition; only such a One can
break its hold over humankind in principle.

So constitutive is the mythical blindness of humans (‘they know not what they do’, Luke
23:34), and so truly ‘foundational’, that God-from-God can only be glimpsed differentially,
in the very act of being rejected by his own (see ‘Near is/And difficult to grasp the God’;
in BE: 120–130; WTB: 98). The unveiling of the hidden truth about humankind will be,
in historical culture-time, world-changing. It is out of this knowledge that humankind
‘will learn, slowly, very slowly […] to slip underneath the persecutory representation of
violence’ (S: 108). Where the world’s religious mythologies were universally complicit in
the mystifying cover-up of humankind’s enfoldment within a sanctioned archaic-sacral
violence, the gospels represent the archaic-sacral mystification machine working at full tilt
and, for the first time, failing to carry the verdict of God or of history.

In its represented failure to do so, they enable their followers to deconstruct the
very mechanisms of religious authority, political power, mystified sacred rage, social

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advantage, and doublethink that allow ‘the system’ as such to function ‘below the
line’, subterraneously. Hence, ‘this extraordinary work of the gospels: persecutory
representation abrogated, broken, revoked’ (S: 103). The Gospels, on this reading, declare
the very thing that, historically, has made – and still makes – ‘archaic religion’ archaic.

5.5 Is the Cross a ‘sacrifice’?

The church fathers, Girard considers, were certainly aware of the action of unmasking he
advances. Yet, being unable to express this insight in terms of generative scapegoating,
they instead understood the violence of the Cross as a supreme one-off transactional
event brought about by God for unfathomable, or else all-too-human, reasons (GR: 282;
cf. RG-RS: 92; and see Galvin 1989).

R. Schwager, pursuing this key insight of Girard’s onto the slippery terrain of atonement
theory, supplies with all requisite subtlety and rigour the necessary theological
complement. Jesus himself promised his hearers the forgiveness of their sins through
the message of the coming reign of God (‘eschatological soteriology’). He did not, in
his earthly ministry, proclaim a special expiatory doctrine of redemption. Certainly, he
addresses the world’s evil ‘staurologically’ (through the cross), but only as and when
constrained to do so by the hardness of human hearts, rejecting this primary offer of
salvation. Even then, he seeks and effects a conversion of the heart within this same
eschatological framing. The Cross is misconstrued when seen as a self-standing expiatory
Transaction (Schwager 1985: 112–113; see also TH: 213; PH: 179–184).

Recalled to its prior framing, Christ’s death – Schwager suggests – is ultimately ‘sacrificial’
in a very different sense from what Girard describes as sacrifice in the context of primitive
societies. It can be correctly be called a sacrifice if this is understood to mean an offering
which includes the following elements: (1) obedience to the Father as willingness to be
persecuted even to the point of death; (2) the identification with all persons who find
themselves in similar situations and who are victims of evil; (3) intercession for his brothers
and sisters before God, an intercession which is essentially linked to that obedience which
led to his being rejected and being killed. This free offering (sacrifice) calls to conversion,
and within the history of salvation the Holy Spirit who makes the conversion possible, flows
from this self-offering (Schwager 1985: 115; see also GR: 280; OSC: 40–45; PH: 201–
208).

Archaic sacrifice thus receives a novel (inverse and antipodal) form, imprinting into the
old word (freighted still, dramatically, with its first meaning) a new meaning and concept.
These novelties are the ‘work’ of the Cross; which thereby declares its own necessity.
Only so can the very spring and principle of blood sacrifice, enfolded deep into all human
works and systems – and, even before that, permitted a place within a free, self-organizing
creation – be reworked into a triumph of Love. Only so does the mimetic creature have

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an adequate model of mimesis; and the new gathering, the ecclesial community of God-
with-us, come to a new and adequate foundation. The radical and elegant simplicity of
this divine invention inclines the later Girard towards the so-called ‘mousetrap theory’ of
atonement first mooted by St Paul (1 Cor 2:7–8; see RG-RS: 6; GR: 206–207).

It also justifies Schwager’s tribute to Girard:

Girard’s magnificent attempt to bring the human sciences again into contact with the biblical
writings does not demand ‘too high a price’, as some maintain, but a real contribution is
made to distinguishing the uniqueness of Christ’s ‘sacrificial death’ from other sacrifices.
The new analyses help us grasp the internal dramatic logic which lies behind the gospel
narratives. They contribute to resolving the apparent contradiction between the Kingdom
message and the doctrine of redemption through the Cross; and they urgently point to
the greater danger of projecting the darkness of one’s own heart onto other people and
ultimately onto God. (Schwager 1985: 122)

5.6 Satan and deliverance from evil

Girard’s last work of religious commentary takes its title from a strangely unfamiliar
saying from Luke’s gospel (10:18), I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999; 2001 in English
translation). Jesus, welcoming back the seventy disciples sent out on a mission of
Kingdom proclamation and healing, learns of their power to reproduce – this is Spirit-
empowered mimesis – his own miracles of healing and exorcism, gives voice to his
exultant realization that the grace of overcoming evil has passed from himself, bringer and
bearer of the Kingdom, to those who follow him.

Jesus sees the ‘Prince of this world’ falling in a lightning bolt of apocalyptic devastation
from a turbulent and violent heaven; but thereby also falling to earth, undone in the very
act of his ascendancy, stripped of his sacralized prestige, and broken in his power over
God’s creation. That, he manifestly foresees, is how the epiphany of the truth of the loving-
kindness and mercy of God will shine through and gain traction in a world of evolutionary
survival (as we would today call it) and sacred violence.

This potent and prophetic image presages the entire theme of Christus Victor (Christ
the Victor, which refers to the conquest of sin and death). Starting with the very idea of
the Cross itself: from the greatest peril, will be crafted the supreme opportunity; from the
poison itself, the antidote will be drawn. The Christ himself must take the ‘hit’ of man’s
ersatz transcendence – the apocalypse of human wrath masquerading as divinity, invoking
divine sanction and inspiration, i.e. projected onto God. He must proclaim the ‘things
hidden since the foundation of the world’.

This insight into the otherwise enigmatic vocation of Jesus to die by crucifixion in
Jerusalem is the key to Girard’s account of evil: that is, of Satan. His conviction of a
single authentic transcendence at work in the gospels, allied to his background in post-

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structuralist deconstruction (which commonly speaks of the ‘subject of the system’) incline
him to view Satan as an impersonal principle, rather than a literal ‘Prince’ (cf. analogous
New Testament expressions: ‘powers of this world’, ‘celestial powers’, ‘principalities and
powers’, etc.; see SFL: 95–100). Satan signifies the Accuser: ‘Satan’s power is his ability
to make false accusations so convincing that they become the unassailable truth of entire
communities’ (GR: 201). ‘To call this process “Satan”, which is what the gospels really do,
is highly appropriate’ (GR: 201); not least because it captures the snowballing dynamic
of interlinked mimetic rivalries or ‘scandals’ (GR: 198–210). ‘Satan’ here represents a
principle of false transcendence: false in the sense that it is not genuinely supernatural, but
very real in the sense that the power of social and political institutions is rooted in pagan
religion (GR: 202). This also means that the false principle of transcendence commonly
imitates the truth; so that – without the Cross – it is diabolically difficult to distinguish the
one from the other.

John’s Gospel records (8:44) a naked clash between the two rival forms of transcendence
and the authority they bestow. Jesus, accused of blasphemy, responds by calling his
accusers offspring of Satan, ‘a liar and the father of lies’ (GR: 204). He can do so because
‘men are forever rooted and re-rooted in the foundational violence that allows them to
remove scandals vicariously’ [i.e. by sacrificial scapegoating]. ‘The order and disorder
of human cultures are from the same source which is not directly divine; and this is
unique to the gospels; so unique that to my [Girard’s] knowledge it has never been really
understood’ (GR: 202).

If Jesus sees Satan falling like lightning to earth, desacralized and unmasked by his own
thunderbolt, it is that he has also discerned how Satan can be made to cast out Satan (cf.
Mark 3:23). The unmasking will proceed from the Passion itself; it will recruit the process
itself of sacred violence in order to lay bare its evil and lead us out from this death-dealing
and uninhabitable place. The real secret of Satan’s power is what the Gospels ‘force out
of hiding, merely by their faithful representation of one collective murder, typical of them
all, typical of the process that has dominated human culture since the foundation of the
world’ (GR: 206). This entire theme-set is reprised in SFL.

If the Cross overcomes the very principle of false transcendence in man, which elements
of orthodox Christian soteriology (if any) are left inaccessible to ‘complementary’
theologians? What remains unintelligible to modern man; or falls short of the ‘good news’?

6 Girard’s legacy: the potentials of Mimetic Theory

Two ‘after Girard’ books appeared following the French-American thinker’s death in
November 2015 (see Kaplan 2016; Perret 2018). Both confirm directions of research
already well-established among Girardians. From this consensus, something of Girard’s

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assured legacy emerges; but also the larger promise of things yet-to-be-explored in
development of the Mimetic Theory he leaves behind.

6.1 Sacred violence and reconciliation

Girard offers original insights into the relational dynamics of sacred violence, both inter-
individual and collective-social; its continuity with and difference from animal violence; its
aboriginal implication in ‘religion’. He lays bare the concealed sacrificial logic, writ large in
the ritual murder of the emissary victim; he exposes the poetics of the human fabrication of
the gods, with its binding-and-bonding magic; its false transcendence; its containing codes
and rituals; its self-vindicating myths; its turbocharging Self-sacralizations and its Other-
demonizing fervour (see Ricœur and Williams 1999; Palaver 2020).

Schwager points out that the Old Testament itself contains some 600 references to
human violence; and that, in over 1,000 further cases, it refers to a vengefully violent
God (see Schwager 1987; Galvin 1982: 180–181). R. Daly, SJ reviewing, in a forum of
Girardians, the dossier of violence within institutional Christianity, details thirty-six contexts
of conspicuously violent institutional behaviour. His conclusion asks whether this violence
has not been secretly super-determined by the logic of the ‘monstrous double’, projecting
onto a vertical axis the excess of a self-regenerating inter-human wrath (Daly 2002: 4–33)

American historian Jon Pahl and comparative religionist James Wellman have likewise
questioned a certain strand of Reformation theology which has been made to justify a
culture of ‘innocent domination’ or even ‘innocent violence’: from the Puritan wars against
Native Americans, through the epics of internal and then external US expansion, up
to George Bush’s war on terrorism and the killing of Bin Laden (Antonello and Gifford
2015a: 71–93). What we are seeing, they suggest, is, in situations of stress and hyper-
mobilization, an ever-possible resurgence of the archaic foundations. In modern minds, in
modern cultures, alive and well, there is black economy of archaic sacrifice, putting ‘God
on our side’ (cf. Bob Dylan’s song of 1964).

Yet Girard’s contention is that sacred violence is not, as cognitivist socio-biologists

suppose, simply the opposite of human collaboration and community. Rather, it is the
dark correlative of those virtualities, their apocalyptic shadow side. It follows that, just as
mimetic desire can tip from negative to positive (as in Cross and Resurrection), so human
violence, finding its tipping point (cf. the ‘almost instantaneous conversion’ of TH: 217), can
open the way to reconnecting with that Other – divine – enterprise of reconciliation (cf. 2
Cor 5:18–19).

Mimetic Theory provides a simple, concrete, but almost infinitely flexible – and therefore
always pertinent – ‘grid’ for identifying problem-contexts and scanning their active
components. It also suggests a counter-dynamic of transformation (simple in principle,

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fruitful in practice and variously applicable), namely the transformation (metamorphosis,
conversion) of bad (negative, hate-generating) into good (positive, generous, loving)
mimesis (see Gifford 2020: 101). The Northern Ireland conflict and the Good Friday
Agreement provide a case study, explicating the verdict of Duncan Morrow, ex-Director
of Northern Ireland’s Community Relations Council: ‘a good part of the way has been
illuminated by René Girard’ (Antonello and Gifford 2015a: 186; see also PH: 395–402,
493–500, 501–508; Kaptein 1993).

6.2 Apocalypse Now: can we survive our origins?

The coming of the Prince of Peace does not immediately bring about an era of universal
love, forgiveness and reconciliation (cf. Luke 12:51 ff.). Girard interprets Luke’s ‘divisive’
effect on a historical scale. Two momentous metamorphoses are set running. The Gospel
liberates the potential of the human creature and his morally ambiguous Promethean
energies; so that human cultural and scientific development has followed a spectacularly
accelerating upward curve. At the same time, by undercutting archaic religion and its
sacrificial system, the Gospel increasingly deprives homo religious (as he strangely
remains) of his aboriginal failsafe mechanism against catastrophe (see PH: 335–342). As
Prometheans unloosed, we fear for our survival; but as a species still caught in the travail
of conversion and birthing, we have a scant notion of, or care for the salvation prepared by
our Heavenly Father, let alone trust or hope in that salvation (see EC: 234–238).

The result is that apocalypse in its archaic definition, beloved of tabloid newspapers
(‘paroxysmal and terminal catastrophe’) looms large in the many self-generated, end-
of-the-world scenarios that haunt us: nuclear war; the ecological crisis; the clash of
civilizations; wars between haves and have-nots; rivalries of regional superpower blocks
vying for the limited resources of an ever more globalized world. As Girard states,

Our impression of moving into a trap we have set for ourselves will become more acute.
The whole of humanity is already confronted with an ineluctable dilemma: human beings
must become reconciled without the aid of [archaic] sacrificial intermediaries or resign
themselves to the imminent extinction of humanity. (TH: 136; see also: PH: 353–386, 403–
420; Antonello and Gifford 2015a)

Girard’s last work Battling to the End (2007) disentangles the exacerbated tensions
proper to the era of henceforth unlimited warfare, and the seeming fatality of humankind’s
extermination by its own uncontained dynamic of sacred violence. These developments
emphasize the relevance of the mini-apocalypses of the Synoptic Gospels; and they point
to the Christian counter-motif of an unveiling of the ultimate Kingdom-that-comes:

The apocalyptic spirit [...] can make sense of the trend towards the worst only from within
the framework of a very profound hope. However, that hope cannot do without eschatology.

35
 Identifying the dangerous emergence of the principle of reciprocity and showing it at work in
history should be the rule of all apologetics. (BE: 113)

Many Girardians have entered into this ongoing and vital debate centred on the notion
of ‘apocalypse’. Still-to-be published are the awaited Paris-based ecumenical seminars
(2017; 2019) on the Book of Revelation by James Alison.

6.3 The problem of further acceptance

Girard’s legacy is however ‘subject to further acceptance’ (Kaplan 2016). Why is his work
still sometimes dismissed as a special case for amateurs and enthusiasts? What is it –
Girard himself asks – that holds his working hypothesis back from serious mainstream
consideration? Girard frequently questions his own ability to present a complex big picture
cogently or to deliver, without gaps, a systematized and totally consistent overview of the
vast themes envisaged (EC: 160). He recognizes, too, what is intrinsically complex in his
mode of thinking:
(1) the ‘tricky’ ambivalence of the ‘double bind’ i.e. the mimetic structure of desire
which involves a single principle having two possible realizations, producing two
opposite series of effects within the same or different fields of evaluation (EC: 5–6;
and see DBB). My model is also my obstacle; founding murder is at once savage
and salutary; violence is ‘contained’ but also ‘contains us’; in the Cross itself is
inscribed the paradoxical structure of ‘sacrifice’ (etc).
(2) the problems of demonstrating a logic of generation and of genesis. Myths do
not thematize founding murder. It is precisely in order to avoid doing so that they
conceal and deny it. ‘It is the most difficult thing to make people aware of this
generative centre [...] It’s the sort of thing you either see or do not see. It’s like a
flash of lightning; you either get it or you don’t. Ordinary reasoning just loops back
on its own premises’ (GR: 267).
(3) the further difficulty of grasping imaginatively the single ‘one long argument’ that
Girard pursues, Darwin-like, given that the timeframe of the action represented is
tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of years. This clearly means that here must
always be missing links and evidential gaps.
On occasion, Girard also protests against a poverty of understanding or even normal
goodwill on the part of deficient readers. He sees himself as counter-cultural thinker
expounding a ‘religious’ hypothesis in an anti-religious (and/or insecurely religious) age.
His message, moreover, is such as to trigger a priori a mobilized impatience of dismissal;
perhaps turbocharged, all-unnoticed, by an inability to question basic assumptions (EC:
170) or a ‘denial’ of the pre-conscious and unwelcome realities explored (GR: 268–269).

His predominant response, however, involves the big picture that others fail to see. A
fundamental heuristic method and an epistemological priority are in play here. Counter-

36
culturally, Girard adheres to the priority of truth as sense-making operational coherence.
The hermeneutical models he follows are: the detective quest in which the clues add up;
and the jigsaw puzzle, which functions well when all the successive pieces fit in with the
big picture, as it emerges and self-authenticates.

Girardians have applied themselves to bridging the culture-bound epistemological and

hermeneutical credibility gap. Sometimes philosophically (in the admirable rethinking
of Paul Dumouchel), sometimes (like Jean-Pierre Dupuy) by recourse to game theory
harnessed to self-organizing systems; sometimes more practically (like Pierpaolo
Antonello), by seeking out an entire series of lateral confirmations from the latest research
findings of neighbouring human sciences: ethology, ethnology, linguistics, sociology,
psychology and archaeology (for new light on this last, very promising connection, see
Gifford 2020: 52–57; PH: 69–78).

Two examples of this latter type:

(1) The threshold of becoming human is traditionally referred to the invention of
language (more properly, to the advent of symbolic thought and utterance). What
is newly established here is that the condition of any functioning symbolicity is
a closed set of common experiences, giving a centred totality of reference. The
killing of the scapegoat victim and its sacred aftermath would entirely fit the bill
(EC: 103–104).
(2) It has been observed quite recently that our nearest evolutionary relatives the
chimpanzees, are also among the most violent of animals: forming raiding parties;
practising mobbings, ambushes, killings of members of their own or similar
species, particularly of a different ‘tribes’ or smaller monkeys; even to the point
of cannibalism. This ‘shocking new insight’ on our closest relatives and talented
fellow mimetics provides confirmatory evidence pre-tracing the ‘inside/outside’
logic of scapegoat selection; and, of course, confirming the high probability of
founding murder in humans (EC: 105).
The most thought-provoking hermeneutical insight is suggested by the reception of
Darwin himself. In 1848 (the year before the Origin of Species was first published),
palaeontologists discovered the fossilized ‘Gibraltar skull’, in a form midway between
an ape and a human. It went misunderstood and totally ignored until twenty or more
years later when Darwin’s ‘one long argument’ began to gain traction and take hold in the
Victorian imagination. It then became, as it remains today, ‘real evidence’ (EC: 167).

6.4 The Bible: anthropological readings and revelation

On the concept of revelation, in Girard, and theologically, see Ranieri 2017: 173–178.
Girard’s position is contained in germ in the practice of Simone Weil, invoked on the cover
of his most developed last work of scriptural commentary (French edition, 1999 [see

37
bibliography]); the gospels, before becoming theology (i.e. a science of God) are, first all,
anthropology (i.e. an understanding of man). On Simone Weil and Girard, see also Palaver
2020.

Established biblical scholars have not, of course, always welcomed Giradian perspectives
and the scriptural commentaries they engender (especially by less experienced PhD
students). The intrinsic tension between specialist exegesis and theory-led readings of
‘sacred texts’ is, however, becoming better understood and less conflictually managed.
Girard himself often disarms specialist dissent by concrete illustration. The notoriously
enigmatic gesture of Jesus in the episode of the woman taken in adultery (John 8:2–11)
is elucidated by invoking the structurally pertinent reverse case of Apollonius of Tiana.
Jesus looks down and doodles, writing in the sand so as not to challenge the turbocharged
sacred rage of the Accusers by immediate eyeballing defiance and counter-condemnation.
This is a tactic of delay and deflection (SFL: 49–61).

Among Girardians, James Williams develops a methodical Girardian reading of the

whole of the Old Testament (Williams 1991). Swartley and colleagues elucidate points
of Girardian contention or reticence: the epistle to the Hebrews, for instance, is read
as a transitional text; the theme of ‘imitation’ is followed through the New Testament in
its positive (theological) dimension, so often identified but only very gingerly treated by
Girard: namely, human discipleship as imitation; and Jesus’s own imitation of his Heavenly
Father within the life of the Trinity (Swartley 2000). R. Hamerton-Kelley develops Girardian
harmonics around the theology of Saint Paul (1992), while Anthony Bartlett probes the
violent grammar of Christian atonement theories (Bartlett 2001).

Michael Hardin, meanwhile, tackles the important topic of ‘American Protestant Reception
of Mimetic Theory: 1986–2015’ (2017: 225–232). The work of Sandor Goodhart enables
faithful Jews to test, contest and enrich the Girardian legacy (particularly in respect of
some overconfident universalizing of Christian perspectives) (see e.g. PH: 241–248).
Michael Kirwan SJ has begun to open a Girardian dialogue with Islamic colleagues
(Kirwan and Achtbar 2019).

Following Schwager (1985; 1987; 1988; 1999), high-level Catholic and Protestant studies
by, notably, James Alison (in a courageous series of illuminating works: 1996; 1998;
2001; 2006; see also Edwards 2014: 121–130); Mark Heim (2006; in a single theological
blockbuster; and see also PH: 179–184); Miroslav Volf (1996) – all constantly invoke
Girardian readings, understandings and procedures in order to challenge culture-bound
theology and renew outdated Christian practice. Popular versions of Girardian exegeses of
scripture and culture are broadcast, meanwhile, on North American airwaves (see Hardin
2015; Cayley 2019).

38
Strategic underlying questions have begun to surface. Where does the immediately
perceptible co-resonance with theology come from? Do theologians not start from the
other end of the same lived process of existential revelation-through-anthropogenesis,
having capitalized in varying ways on its deliverances about the ultimate Actor/Author?
The drama of salvation is intelligible as read from either end. May not anthropological
and theological approaches call each to the other; and both be more fully blessed in
their complementarity? Is not the ‘Son of God’ also the ‘Son of Man’? Is not the Girardian
hermeneutic a harbinger of Christic ‘mediation’ – indeed of the ‘Incarnation’ itself?
All these elements of an answer belong to the era of geological time known as ‘the
Anthropocene’ (reminding us just how novel and significant are the presence and action on
the Earth of humankind).

The opening up of ‘the Scriptures concerning himself’ offered by the risen Jesus to the
disciples on the Emmaus road (Luke 24:19–35) suggests further questions. How do
the two accounts (Girard’s and Luke’s) of the ‘inside-track story’ of divine revelation
differ? How far do they converge? What do specialist biblical scholarship and theological
‘hindsight’ add: both in particular cases (in scholars such as the high-level Giradian
theologians mentioned above); and in collective disciplinary practice?

How do the hermeneutical assets of theology become fossilized, its tools blunted; thereby
deflecting renewed understanding of the scriptures? How does Girardian anthropology
re-sharpen them? Girard suggests: by opening up the gospels ‘to their own generative
centre and witness’ (GR: 282; see also PH: 127–150). When, where, and why is the baton
of interpretation to be handed over?

6.5 Towards an apologetics for the coming times

Girard inherits (from Pascal, notably) a giant-slaying role in respect of the atheistic
establishment of his time: from Nieztsche, Freud, and Frazer, via Lévi-Strauss and Derrida
(see ‘Against relativism’ OSC: 1–48; EC: 136–158) to neo-Darwinians various, including
‘new atheists’ Richard Dawkins (see EC: 99–100), Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris,
and Daniel Dennet (see PH: 423–430). This is just one aspect of his larger mission to
recover Christian truth from the marshy embrace of ‘mythology’, and from all its positivistic
and deconstructionist counter-reductions (see OSC: 103–126). In respect of ritual, Girard
answers Frazer decisively: ‘because it reproduces the founding event of all rituals the
Passion is connected with every ritual on the entire planet’ (TH: 167).

Mimetic Theory is already widely seen as an ally made-to-measure in theology’s

formidable twin callings, valid both for the pursuit of faith’s own quest for understanding,
and for the outreach required of it, if it is to challenge culturally naturalized disbelief and

39
bring our own post-modernity back into lively imaginative contact with the possibility of
believing. Kaplan pertinently invokes Karl Rahner:

to awaken explicit faith, the apologist must present the contents of Christianity not as
an extraneous element foreign to the hearer’s personal experience but rather as an
interpretation of what they have already encountered through the inner workings of grace
in the depths of their consciousness. The primary task of the apologist, then, is to exhibit
how the whole system of Christian teaching is the one complete answer to the primordial
question that man is to himself. (cit. Kaplan 2016: 10)

The entire range of doctrinal theology – from creation and kenosis to incarnation, via
original sin and redemption to the Trinity and the Last things – is henceforth, if we follow
Kaplan, opened up; stimulated in its energies of challenge; programmed to find a new
intelligibility and coherence; re-affirmed in pertinence and rejuvenated in its persuasive
appeal. Alison, in particular, takes us where Girard himself feared to tread, asking with
consequent radicality, which ecclesiology and ecclesial practices result from a Girardian
reading of Cross and Resurrection (see Alison 1996; 2001; 2006; 2011 etc; and see
Kaplan 2014).

7 Conclusion
The Mimetic Theory bequeaths to ‘those who come after’ the same theology-compatible
structure and form as appears in Girard’s personal itinerary: in its account of mimetic
desire; in its anthropology of human origins; above all in its anthropology of the Cross,
which espouses effortlessly the shape and intentional movement of the doctrines of
redemption, reconciliation and new creation; and has the potential to recover a post-
Darwinian coherence between natural theology and revelation itself.

I think the power and the truth of Christianity is that it completes the great forms of
monotheism [...] by witnessing to the God who reveals himself to be the arch-scapegoat in
order to liberate humankind (GR: 263; cf. EC: 216–217).

The immediate future lies where Girard, from 1991, placed it: in the hands of the Girardian
Associations. The (standing) Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R), with its
review Contagion, is devoted to ‘Exploring, Critiquing and Developing Girard’s Mimetic
Theory’ (https://violenceandreligion.com; and see Williams 2012); and the more socio-
politically oriented Girardian Association ‘Imitatio’ which, financed by the Thiel Foundation,
funds publications, symposia and international initiatives promoting Girard’s ideas (see:
https://imitatio.org). This site offers many brief video clips in which Girard himself expounds
his ideas.

8 A note on the bibliography

40
For a comprehensive bibliography, particularly of Girard’s prolific output of scattered
shorter texts, see Dietmar Regensburger: ‘Bibliography of Literature on the Mimetic Theory
of René Girard’, published, by successive volumes, in the Bulletin of the Colloquium
on Violence and Religion and normally available at https://violenceandreligion.com/
bibliography/.

The texts in the section below, ‘Works by René Girard’, are cited in the article by acronym
for reasons of economy and clarity. The acronyms are included in square brackets below
next to the titles of the works, along with publication details of both the English and French
editions of Girard’s works.

Attributions
Copyright Paul Gifford (CC BY-NC)

41
Bibliography
• Further reading
◦ Appleby, R. Scott. 2000. The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and
Reconciliation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
◦ Cowdell, Scott. 2013. René Girard and Secular Modernity: Christ, Culture and
Crisis. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
◦ Gans, Eric. 1991. Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation. Savage,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
◦ McKenna, A. J. 1992. Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida and
Deconstruction. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
◦ Schweiker, W. 1989. ‘Sacrifice, Interpretation and the Sacred: The Importance of
Gadamer and Girard for Religious Studies’, Journal of the American Academy of
Religion 55, no. 4: 788–810.
◦ Wallace, M. 1989. ‘Postmodern Biblicism: The Challenge of René Girard for
Contemporary Theology’, Modern Theology 5: 309–325.
• Works cited
◦ Works by René Girard

▪ Girard, René. 1965. Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary
Structure [DDN] (Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque). Translated by
Y. Freccero. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. French edition
published 1961. Paris: Grasset.
▪ Girard, René. 1977. Violence and the Sacred [VS] (La violence et le sacré).
Translated by P. Gregory. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
French edition published 1972. Paris: Grasset.
▪ Girard, René. 1978. To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis
and Anthropology [DBB]. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
▪ Girard, René. 1986. The Scapegoat [S] (Le bouc émissaire). Translated by
Y. Freccero. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. French edition
published 1982. Paris: Grasset.
▪ Girard, René. 1987. Job: The Victim of His People [JVP] (La route antique des
hommes pervers). Translated by Y. Freccero. Stanford: Stanford University
Press. French edition published 1985. Paris: Grasset.
▪ Girard, René. 1996. The Girard Reader [GR]. Edited by James G. Williams.
New York: Crossroads.
▪ Girard, René. 2001. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning [SFL] (Je vois Satan
tomber comme l’éclair). Translated by J. G. Williams. London: Gracewing.
French edition published 1999. Paris: Grasset.

42
 ▪ Girard, René. 2002. La voix méconnue du réel [VMR]. Paris: Grasset.
▪ Girard, René. 2003. Things Hidden from the Foundation of the World [TH] (Des
choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde). Translated by S. Bann and M.
Metteer. London: Continuum. French edition published 1978. Paris: Grasset.
▪ Girard, René. 2007. Le Tragique et la Pitié: Discours de la réception de René
Girard a l’Académie Française et réponse de Michel Serres [TP]. Paris:
Editions le Pommier.
▪ Girard, René. 2010. Battling to the End [BE] (Achever Clausewitz. Entretiens
avec Benoît Chantre de René Girard). Translated by Mary Baker. East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press. French edition published 2007.
Paris: Carnets Nord.
▪ Girard, René. 2011. Sacrifice [SFC] (Le sacrifice). Translated by Matthew
Patillo and David Dawson. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
French edition published 2003. Paris: Grasset.
▪ Girard, René. 2014a. The One by whom Scandal Comes [OSC] (Celui par
qui le scandale arrive. Entretiens avec Maria Stella Barberi). Translated by
Malcolm B. De Bevoise. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. French
edition published 2001. Paris: Desclee de Brouwer.
▪ Girard, René. 2014b. When these Things Begin. Conversations with Michel
Treguer [WTB] (Quand ces choses commenceront. Entretiens avec Michel
Treguer). Translated by Trevor Cribben Merrill. East Lansing: Michigan State
University Press. French edition published 1994. Paris: Arléa
▪ Girard, René. 2018. René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence
1976–1991 [RG-RS]. Translated by Chris Fleming and Sheelah Treflé Hidden.
London: Bloomsbury.
▪ Girard, René, João Cezar de Castro Rocha, and Pierpaolo Antonello.
2007. Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture [EC].
Edinburgh: T&T Clark.
◦ See also the Girardian Standard Manual, normally referenced by
acronym:
▪ Alison, J., and W. Palaver (eds). 2017. The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic
Theory and Religion [PH]. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Contains 70
articles by Girardians: Part 1 Violent Origins; Part 2 From Rites to Writing;
Part 3 Theological Anthropology; Part 4 Secularisation and Modernity; Part 5
Apocalypse, Post-Modernity and the Return of Religion.
◦ Critical and general works

▪ Adams, Rebecca. 1993. ‘Violence, Difference, Sacrifice. A Conversation with

René Girard’, Religion and Literature 5, no. 2: 9–93.

43
▪ Alison, J. 1996. Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination.
New York: Crossroads.
▪ Alison, J. 1998. The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes.
New York: Crossroads.
▪ Alison, J. 2001. Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay.
London: Dartman, Longman & Todd.
▪ Alison, J. 2006. Undergoing God: Dispatches from the Scene of a Break-in.
New York: Continuum.
▪ Alison, J. 2011. Broken Hearts and New Creation: Intimations of a Great
Reversal. New York: Continuum.
▪ Antonello, Pierpaolo, and Paul Gifford (eds). 2015a. Can We Survive Our
Origins: Readings in René Girard’s Theory of Violence and the Sacred. East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
▪ Antonello, Pierpaolo, and Paul Gifford (eds). 2015b. How We Became Human:
Mimetic Theory and the Science of Evolutionary Origins. East Lansing, MI:
Michigan State University Press.
▪ Baillie, Gil. 1997. Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crosroads. New York:
Crossroads.
▪ Balthasar, Hans Urs von. 1980. ‘Die neue Theorie von Jesus als dem
Sundenbock’, Communio 9: 184–185.
▪ Balthasar, Hans Urs von. 1994. Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory IV:
‘The Action’. San Fransisco: Ignatius Press.
▪ Bartlett, Anthony. 2001. Cross Purposes: The Violent Grammar of Christian
Atonement. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press.
▪ Bergson, Henri. 1977. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Translated
by R. Ashley Audra and Cloudsley Brereton. Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press. First published in French in 1932.
▪ Cayley, David (ed.). 2019. The Ideas of René Girard: An Anthropology of
Violence and Religion. Toronto: Amazon, for CBC Radio.
▪ Coakley, Sarah. 2012. Sacrifice Regained: Reconsidering the Rationality
of Religious Belief. An Inaugural Lecture by the Norris Hulse Professor of
Divinity Given in the University of Cambridge, 13 October, 2009. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
▪ Collins, B. 2017. ‘The Eastern Revolution: From the Vedas to Buddhism’, in
The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory. Edited by J. Alison and W. Palaver.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 110–118.
▪ Cowdell, Sott. 2021. ‘Conference Report COV&R 2021, “Artificial Intelligence”’,
Bulletin 69

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▪ Cowdell, Scott, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge (eds). 2012. Violence, Desire
and the Sacred: Girard’s Mimetic Theory Across the Disciplines. London:
Bloomsbury.
▪ Claudel, Paul. 1966. Cinq grandes odes. Paris: Gallimard ‘Poesies’.
▪ Daly, Robert J. 2002. ‘Violence and Institution in Christianity’, Contagion: 4–33.
▪ Daly, Robert J. 2010. Sacrifice Unveiled: The True Meaning of Christian
Sacrifice. New York: T&T Clark.
▪ Daly, Robert J. 2017. ‘Biblical Interpretation: A New Hermeneutic?’, in The
Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory. Edited by J. Alison and W. Palaver.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 135–141.
▪ Dumouchel, P. (ed.). 1988. Violence and Truth: On the Work of René Girard.
London: Athlone.
▪ Dumouchel, P. 2017. ‘A Theory of Everything?’, in The Palgrave Handbook
of Mimetic Theory. Edited by J. Alison and W. Palaver. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 463–470.
▪ Edwards, John. 2014. ‘From a “Revealed” Psychology to Theological Inquiry:
James Alison’s Theological Appropriation of Girard’, Contagion 21: 121–130.
▪ Fleming, Chris. 2004. René Girard: Violence and Mimesis. Key Contemporary
Thinkers. Cambridge: Polity Press.
▪ Garrels, Scott (ed.). 2011. Mimesis and Science: Empirical Research on
Imitation and the Mimetic Theory of Culture and Religion. East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press.
▪ Galvin, J. P. 1982. ‘Jesus as Scapegoat? Violence and the Sacred in the
Theology of Raymund Schwager’, The Thomist 46: 173–194.
▪ Galvin, J. P. 1989. ‘The Marvellous Exchange: Raymund Schwager’s
Interpretation of the History of Soteriology’, The Thomist: 657–691.
▪ Gifford, Paul. 2020. Towards Reconciliation: Understanding Violence and the
Sacred After René Girard. Cambridge: Lutterworth/James Clarke.
▪ Hamerton-Kelly, R. 1992. Sacred Violence: Paul’s Hermeneutic of the Cross.
Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
▪ Hardin, Michael. 2015. Reading the Bible with René Girard. Conversations with
Steven E. Berry. Lancaster, PA: JDL Press.
▪ Hardin, Michael. 2017. ‘American Protestant Reception of Mimetic Theory:
1986-2015’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory. Edited by J. Alison
and W. Palaver. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 225–232.
▪ Heim, S. 2006. Mark Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross. Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
▪ Hurley, Susan, and Nick Chater (eds). 2005. Perspectives on Imitation: From
Neuroscience to Social Science. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press.

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▪ Kaplan, Grant. 2014. ‘Renewing the Tradition: The Theological Project of
James Alison’, America Magazine: 25–27.
▪ Kaplan, Grant. 2016. René Girard and Unlikely Apologist: Mimetic Theory and
Fundamental Theology. Indiana: Notre Dame Press.
▪ King, Chelsea Jordan. 2016. ‘Girard Reclaimed: Finding Common Ground
Between Sarah Coakley and René Girard on Sacrifice’, Contagion: Journal of
Violence, Mimesis and Culture 23, no. 1: 63–74.
▪ Kaptein, Roel. 1993. On the Way of Freedom. Blackrock: Columba.
▪ Kirwan, SJ., Michael. 2004. Discovering Girard. London: Darton Longman
Todd.
▪ Kirwan, SJ., Michael. 2009. Girard and Theology. London/New York: T&T Clark
Continuum.
▪ Kirwan, SJ., Michael, and Ahmed Achtbar (eds). 2019. Mimetic Theory and
Islam: The Wound Where the Light Enters. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
▪ Lorenz, Konrad. 2002. On Aggression. Translated by Marjorie Kerr Wilson.
London/New York: Routledge Classics.
▪ Meltzoff, Andrew N. 1988. ‘The Human Infant as Homo Imitans’, in Social
Learning: Psychological and Biological Perspectives. Edited by T. R. Zentall
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▪ Milbank, John. 1996. ‘Stories of Sacrifice’, Modern Theology 12, no. 1: 27–56.
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for Reading René Girard Through the Lenses of Hans Urs von Balthasar and
John Cassian’, Modern Theology 28, no. 1: 81–111.
▪ Oughourlian, Jean-Michel. 1982. Un Mime Nommé Désir. Paris: Grasset.
English translation: 1991. The Puppet of Desire: The Psychology of Hysteria,
Possession and Hypnosis. Translated by Eugene Webb. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
▪ Oughourlian, Jean-Michel. 2007. Genèse du désir. Paris: Carnets Nord.
English translation: 2007. The Genesis of Desire. Translated by Eugene Webb.
East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
▪ Palaver, Wolfgang. 2013. René Girard’s Mimetic Theory. East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press.
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Out of the Archaic Sacred’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory.
Edited by J. Alison and W. Palaver. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 103–110.
▪ Palaver, Wolfgang. 2020. From the Sacred to Saintliness. Cambridge:
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▪ Perret, Bernard. 2018. Penser la foi chrétienne après René Girard. Paris:
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▪ Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of
Violence in History and Its Causes. London: Allen Lane.
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Macmillan, 173–178.
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▪ Schwager, Raymund. 1985. ‘Christ’s Death and the Prophetic Critique of
Sacrifice’, Semeia 33: 109–123.
▪ Schwager, Raymund. 1987. Must There Be Scapegoats? Violence and
Redemption in the Bible. San Francisco: Harper and Row.
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and Truth: On the Work of René Girard. Edited by P. Dumouchel. London:
Athlone.
▪ Schwager, Raymund. 1999. Jesus in the Drama of Salvation. Towards a
Biblical Doctrine of Redemption. Translated by J. G. Williams and Paul
Haddon. New York: Crossroads.
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in For René Girard, Essays in Friendship and in Truth. Studies in Violence,
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Ryba, and James Williams. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
▪ Smart, Ninian. 1980. ‘René Girard, Violence and the Sacred’, Religious Studies
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▪ Volf, Miroslav. 1996. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of
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▪ Williams, James. 1991. The Bible, Violence and the Sacred: Liberation from
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▪ Williams, James. 2012. ‘Girardians’: The Colloquium on Violence and Religion,
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▪ Williams, Rowan. 2007. Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern
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