Is Rene Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World a Gnostic Theology?

© 2008 Richard A. Cohen

Judaism appeals to a humanity devoid of myths – not because the marvelous is

repugnant to its narrow soul but because myth, albeit sublime, introduces into the soul
that troubled element, that impure element of magic and sorcery and that drunkenness
of the Sacred and war, which prolong the animal within the civilized.
Emmanuel Levinas, “Being a Westerner,” Difficult Freedom2

The True problem for us Westerners is not so much to refuse violence as to question
ourselves about a struggle against violence which, without blanching in non-resistance
to evil, could avoid the institution of violence out of this very struggle.
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence 3

When war is undertaken in obedience to God who would rebuke or humble or crush the
pride of man, it must be allowed to be a righteous war.
Augustine of Hippo, Against Faustus, Book 22:75

Violence and Violence More or Less

We are seeking knowledge. Girard makes the same claim. All of his work, of which he insists on
its scientific status, is built upon and is the expression of a great intellectual discovery: the “founding
mechanism,”4 of the mimetic thesis. It is actually more than a thesis, and more than a premise. The
arche and anchor of all his writings, it is proposed as the founding idea (called “mechanism” because it is
a function) of all signification, of all that is meaningful, the condition for the possibility of significance,
beginning, not surprisingly, with the constitution of that most ancient significance, the sacred. The
mimetic mechanism is the omnipresent substructure producing and subtending all superstructures, the
founding and pervasive condition and constitution of civilization tout court. Surely, if this be so, Girard
has made the discovery of a lifetime, the discovery of a century, indeed, a discovery of a kind and
profundity and import that all but a handful of scholars and scientists have ever made in all of history, a
great and consequential contribution to knowledge.

How more precisely does the mechanism work? Girard first used it to explain the emergence of
the sacred, so let us look there. The explanation involves an unmasking, a truth revealed against that
truth’s self-concealment: showing that the sacred cannot be the closeness to the divine it would have
us believe it is, that it is not merely a dispensation of peace and harmony, but rather a system of
violence, controlled violence, to be sure, which succeeds because and insofar as it sublimates a wilder
uncontrolled violence. Thus the sacred as such would arise in and through the process of deflecting and
re-channeling violence – this is precisely the work of the mimetic mechanism. The mechanism can be
weaker or stronger, which is to say, more or less violent itself. When the repressive violence is relatively
superficial, which is to say, when the transfiguration or sublimation of violence is light, thin or relatively
weak, the process and result is the “sacred,” which retains much of the original violence, and as such
requires scapegoating: sacrifice of a “sacred” victim. When the sublimation is heavier, thicker or
stronger, the repression more severe, and the permitted violence accordingly lighter or less violent, the
process and the result is an ethical rather than a sacred mimesis: love of neighbor, works of charity,
moral responsibility, results tamer, gentler, sweeter in comparison to the sacred. Regardless of which
route is taken, which is to say, regardless of how severe the secondary violence is, however, the
mechanism is always the same. First there is original violence (which, let us notice right away, is simply
posited as a given), a violence which in one way or another is so strong that is must “have out,” must
express itself, is violent (tautology). Second, “civilization,” broadly speaking, emerges as sublimation of
the original unregulated violence: raw violence controlled and released through tamed violence,
disallowed violence released through permitted violence, whose first manifestation is the sacred
(scapegoating), and whose last is the ethical (moral judgment). The mimetic mechanism is precisely a
double instauration through repression and release, the constitution at one stroke of impermissible and
permissible violence, with the latter couched or “hidden” in a counter-language of peace (be it “sacred”
or “ethical”).

It is always the same account of the real and always the same recipe to deal with it: in place of
an original, primordial, savage or chaotic violence, call it what you will, a violence which Girard simply
posits just as political contract theorists’ posited an untenable “state of nature,” and in this case very
much like Hobbes’ “war of all against all,” the very possibility and the ongoing continuity of organized
and (relatively) peaceful social organizations, such as the family, tribe, community, business, fiefdom,
state, etc., depend upon the imposition of a secondary, regulated and “officially” authorized regulation
and release of violence against some designated “permissible” sacrificial victim, in the case of “the
sacred.” In the case of the ethical the mechanism remains the same but the permitted release of
violence takes on a different signification, such as shunning evildoers, punishing lawbreakers or
sanctioning unjust regimes. In contrast to wild nature and its constant expenditure without reserve, the
sacred, the ethical, indeed civilization itself, are restraints, as many theorists have understood, but
restraints, so Girard has taught u, which work precisely because and insofar as they are at the same time
ways of violence, ways of letting off steam. Bottle up violence - it will explode. Permit its release - social
structures will be maintained. Thus Girard – like Freud revealing the eroticism of infancy and childhood -
has awakened us to the violence which even the sacred, and even the ethical, would otherwise rather
hide.

The sacred, the ethical, and indeed all civilization, are thus understood as mechanisms of
displacement, of repression, redirection, realignment, release, and above all reinterpretation of
primordial violence. They are one and all violence diverted. While the sacred, the ethical and
civilization would hide their constitutive violence, and are constituted precisely in and as this cover up –
one does not simply harm, hurt, violate, torture; one ritually sacrifices the sacred victim, one rightfully
punishes the evil doer - Girard unmasks their violence. In this one idea, this two-faced mechanism –
peace found through war – and its various manifestations, lays the whole of Girard’s worldview.

Simple, neat, with an almost intuitive logic – a sort of principle of the conservation of violence -
this founding mechanism is discovered again and again. It is not only ubiquitous, however; it is also
sufficient, sufficient as an explanatory principle. Everything is grist for this mill, with no remainder. This
continually operative mechanism with its “double concealment,” 5 the suppression of an original violence
through a self-masking secondary violence, a secondary violence hidden in the legitimacy of the sacred,
of ethics, of civilization – it is this which has, until Girard, been “hidden since the foundation of the
world.” We shall see that actually it was hidden only until the epiphany of Christ Jesus two thousand
years ago, but we, we readers of Girard, have learned it from Girard. “Violence,” Girard has written, “is
the heart and secret soul of the sacred.” 6 And the constitution of sacred is not only the first, it remains
the paradigm of all subsequent meaning constitution, what I have called (taking my cue from Freud)
“civilization.” Peace is but hidden war, rules of war against unruly war. There is only violence, only
violence diverted: more or less violence.

But questions come to mind. There is something too comforting about any simple all-embracing
explanation. Everything falls into place, to be sure, but what does not is explained away. One
understands everything, apparently, but is there really no remainder? The convinced readily form
societies of the like-minded, but does that encourage thinking for oneself, let alone critical thinking?
The all-embracing nostrum has its attractions for layperson, no doubt, and for scholars, too, apparently,
given all the intellectual cliques which abound in academia. Laymen are seduced by the open sesame,
the skeleton key, the Archimedean point to illuminating an increasingly complex and confusing world.
As if we did not have enough of such people with their all-purpose explanation: it’s all market economy;
it’s all class struggle; it’s all genetic conditioning; it’s all the stars; it’s all self-interest, and on and on.
And are not scholars seduced in the same way? All is explained; all is understood; the loose ends are
tied; one has always the final word. And then too one can look down on the fools who remain in the
dark, the uninitiated, outsiders to the truth, the ones who never can understand deconstruction,
structuralism, postmodernism, phenomenology, Hegel, Marx, what have you. It permits a cheap
superiority, a certain type of sophistication, cynicism, Rauchfoucault redux: to be nobody’s fool, taken in
by no one and nothing, especially the world’s civilities, niceties, good intentions, formalities, all but
vanities, the wolf is caught beneath the world’s universal sheepishness.

What Science?

Anthropology and Fieldwork and Literary Studies

Girard’s thesis was first advanced in book form in 1972 in his most celebrated and commented
upon work, Violence and the Sacred. It was further elaborated six years later in 1978 in his Things
Hidden since the Foundation of the World, the primary topic of the present paper. In Things Hidden
since the Foundation of the World Girard defends his thesis by working through lengthy exegeses of
selections taken from sacred texts, specifically the Old Testament and the New Testament (as he calls
these Scriptures7). He will insist on the scientific character of his thought. He does not call his textual
studies “exegeses,” which is what they most resemble, but rather names his method with the neologism
“Fundamental Anthropology.”8 To be sure, Girard’s own training is neither in Religious Studies nor in
Anthropology. Girard’s training is in Literary Criticism. I point this out not because a person’s training is
necessarily determinative, or because a scholar cannot master or engage in more than one discipline,
but rather because the central thesis of the present paper is to challenge precisely the scientific status of
Girard’s work. The fact that Girard constantly harps on how very scientific he is, on how very scientific
his work is, instead of reassuring us arouses our suspicions and casts doubt. But this is just a first
impression, a suspicion. More important, as we shall see, and as this paper shows, close examination of
the actual accomplishments, the work produced, and of Girard’s manner of arriving at and supporting
his theses, will show that in fact his work is in no way scientific, not in any sense of science, empirical,
transcendental, hermeneutic, or even Hegelian. We shall see that the true nature of Girard’s entire
outlook and its epistemological grounding are something else altogether, bearing a very different label,
singing to a completely different tune, as it were, but one which thankfully has not been as hidden as
Girard would have us believe is the foundation of the world, and one, in any event, which the present
paper will bring to light.

In the introduction to a collection of his essays entitled “To double business bound”: Essays on
Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, published the same year as Things Hidden since the Foundation
of the World, Girard writes: “My own theory of mimetic desire comes from literary texts.” In his earlier
more celebrated book, Violence and Metaphysics, where the mimetic thesis was first introduced, Girard
made a very different claim: “Fieldwork and subsequent theoretical speculation lead us back to the
hypothesis of substitution as the basis for the practice of sacrifice.” 9 To be sure, his later literary
approach – serving both of his books of 1978 -does not by itself entail that his method is now criticism,
and the reliance on literary texts rather than fieldwork is also found in William James’s Varieties of
Religious Experience,10 it does inform us that unlike his earlier work, and unlike the work of many
anthropologists, and unlike the work of most scientists, Girard’s theses in these later books are not
based on new field work or empirical research but rather, one must suppose, on more “theoretical
speculation” upon his earlier fieldwork, or, more likely, on “theoretical reflection,” as he once called it,
upon the literary texts he has selected to interpret. In any event, the two books of 1978 are products of
interpreting writings, texts, literature. More particularly, of course, Things Hidden since the Foundation
of the World present Girard’s readings, commentaries, exegeses of texts selected from the Old
Testament and the New Testament, readings which are immediately recognizable as Christian
theological glosses, glosses derived, furthermore, from more primary sources, as we shall see, which are
left unnamed and unanalyzed. In any event, in these two later books, Girard make clear that if or insofar
as he is a scientist – as he insists – then he is an armchair scientist. To be sure Girard quickly adds to his
admission that his mimetic theory comes from analyzing literary texts: “this theory was not elaborated
in a vacuum.”11 No doubt it was not. But the question of wherein, or whereupon it was elaborated
remains unanswered.

Transcendental Deduction

Making an answer the latter question more difficult is the unhappy fact that Girard also gives an
entirely different justification for his mimetic thesis. Again I cite from Things Hidden Since the
Foundation of the World: “This [the mimetic thesis] is the only hypothesis that enables us to account for
the revelation in the Gospel of what violence does to us and the accompanying power of that revelation
to deconstruct the whole range of cultural texts, without exception.” In contrast to an empirical
justification, based in fieldwork and reflection, and in contrast to the usual literary critical study, here
Girard is presenting his thesis as if it were the result of a transcendental deduction. But the two
approaches or grounds are not compatible: either his thesis can be and is supported by fieldwork,
empirical research, and reflection thereupon, or it is the only or the best a priori explanatory principle
not of raw data but of an already given perspective, outlook or worldview which otherwise, on its own,
i.e., without such a deduction, cannot make sense. In this case the given worldview is what Girard is
calling “the revelation in the Gospel.” We shall see that what is revealed is Girard’s own mimetic thesis.
But regarding the ground of this thesis, it is here that Girard equivocates: fieldwork or deduction?
Again our suspicions are aroused, and in any event this equivocation leaves more questions unanswered
than answered. But the issue goes from bad to worse.

Hermeneutic Integrity

Regarding the validity, veracity or credibility of the biblical exegeses upon which the outlook
presented in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World entirely stands or falls, Girard makes a
further supportive claim that not only rings hollow, but that also sounds not a little ridiculous: “Our
perspective,” he declares, “is rooted in the Gospels themselves.” 12 You don’t say! For any student of
the phenomenon of fundamentalist religion, from the Bible thumping of Baptist preachers to the Koran
of Saladist Imams, such a declaration – Sola Scriptura! – sounds not only naïve and ridiculous but
outright dangerous. Every religious fanatic and her brother make the very same claim. To be sure it has
a benign side, as expressed in Schleiermacher’s beautiful image of the one text seen from many angles,
an image with great wisdom to it. And no doubt each reading should sincerely believe itself to be text
based. But it has its dark side too, where instead of the plurality of readings it is used to authorize only
one, one reading, one interpretation, one exegesis, called “literal,” which is then taken for the only
reading, God’s very own – and it is precisely this that we will find in Girard. 13 His reading is the only
reading, the only reading truly “rooted in the Gospels themselves.”

Total Comprehensiveness

But Girard’s legitimation claims continue, taking up yet another rationale for their validity. His
scriptural exegesis turn out not only to be “rooted in the Gospels themselves,” but also to be the only
hermeneutically comprehensive interpretation, such that it is through them “that the true nature of
violence is deduced with implacable logic.” 14 It is a hermeneutic logic: “a simpler, more direct and more
coherent reading, enabling us to integrate all the gospel themes into a seamless totality.” 15 Shades of
Hegel, again Girard’s words: “Although the logic of violence provisionally has the last word, the logic of
non-violence is superior, since it comprehends the other logic in addition to itself – which the logic of
violence is incapable of doing.”16 According to this last epistemic pitch, Girard’s readings must be true
because they are not only faithful to the true meaning of the Gospel but also because in any event they
are the most comprehensive, the most all-inclusive reading, “the last word” without residue. 17

But multiplying justifications does not strengthen any one of them. Furthermore, thus far, in an
introduction, such claims are empty promises. The proof lies in the pudding. To answer questions about
Girard’s method, to discern his actual method, in other words, can only be determined by close
examination of his exegetical treatment of the selected biblical texts he interprets in “Book Two” of
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, in what is its longest subsection, “The Judeo-Christian
Scriptures.” These exegeses not only take up the majority of Girard’s attention, they are central to the
book. For it is their result, the mimetic thesis they uncover and the significance given to it, that is
central to Girard’s thought as a whole. In addition to their length, their centrality is underscored by
Girard himself who takes the title of his book from the first chapter of “Book Two.

Violence and Exegetical Violation

Perhaps a preparatory even cautionary word is necessary. What is certain to immediately strike
the attention of educated readers of Girard’s exegeses is that they are so typically Christian. One
searches for science, for critical hermeneutics. One searches for literary criticism. All in vain. One finds
blatant theology. Perhaps even more striking, in the face of this, is that Girard appears to be completely
oblivious to it. Can he really be so parochial, one wonders, so enthused, perhaps, to be so entirely
unaware of his own biases? Has Girard had no training or done no reading in the vast literature of the
academic study of religion? It beggars belief. In any event, there is no critical distance in Girard’s
exegeses. They are Christian readings, Christian theological readings, and yet they are presented by
Girard as truth simpliciter. We will reserve for later to say precisely which Christian theological outlook
they represent. For now, let us finally turn to them, first in their outline, and then in their details, to
see what I am talking about.

What Girard discovers in the biblical texts - always in the name of science, though precisely
which sort of science remains unclear - are three narrative strata of meaning, three strata of meaning
ordered as a progressive movement away from violence. The oldest and worst- most brutal, least
peaceful, least sublimated - form of violence is found in the pagan layer, manifest as sacred or
mythological violence, which for Girard is discernible in the Old Testament. Then, overcoming such
primitive violence, there is the later and less violent – but still violent - properly Jewish narrative
stratum: prophetic or ethical violence. And finally, third, there is the narrative stratum which alone is
able to overcome violence absolutely, not to be found in the Old Testament: the Christian revelation of
holiness and peace found in the New Testament through the transfiguring figure of Jesus Christ. A
remarkable journey from bad to better to best or really, more precisely, from really bad (original
violence), to bad (pagan violence) to less bad (ethical violence) to perfect (Christian non-violence), a
journey with only two dimensions: this world, the lower world, which is always only violence, and the
other world, the higher world, the salvation brought by Jesus, a world of absolute non-violence. But it is
also a familiar journey, familiar to Christians: from paganism to Judaism to saving Christianity. Again one
wonders if and how Girard can be unaware that his exegeses, whatever their ultimate theological frame,
rehash an orthodox supersessionist and exclusivist Christian theology. They retell a Christian story that
some Christians tell themselves about pagans and Jews and Christians, to be sure. But at the same time
it is a story radically different than the stories pagans and Jews tell themselves, a story that many
Christians, too, along with all believing Jews or Muslims find at variance with the meaning of the same
Sacred Scriptures, and, for that matter, a story at variance with what Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists and
Confucians, and so many others, have to say about things sacred, ethical and holy.

Nevertheless, we will not be put off. We want first to understand. In consideration of our own,
the readers’ and Girard’s own claimed commitment to science, that is to say, our commitment to
objectivity, hermeneutic sympathy, and critical thinking, coupled with an acknowledgement of the
undeniable fact of Girard’s impressive academic career, his several distinguished professorships at
several prestigious universities, his extensive publications with university presses, his large following in
the academy (not to mention outside it as well), including, apparently, almost everyone – besides myself
- attending the present conference ,and not forgetting also the many honors academic and otherwise
which Girard has been awarded and graciously accepted, so that despite the obvious theological
perspective indicated in outline above, for which only Christianity can save humanity from its violence,
assuming, temporarily or permanently, as we shall see, that the Christian theological special pleading of
this perspective comes as mere coincidence, as a product of science and not belief, happily no doubt for
Girard’s Catholic faith, and surprisingly, in contrast, for all non-Christians, in the following we are going
to look as best we can with fresh eyes, to look closely, in any event, at Girard’s exegeses, keeping in
mind our questions regarding his method and their evidence, that is to say, our questions regarding
their legitimacy and hence also the legitimation of Girard’s basic mimetic thesis.

The first step, in the first subsection of chapter one of “Book Two,” a subsection entitled
“Similarities between the Biblical Myths and World Mythology”: Girard uncovers the “sacred violence”
of the mythic world. The mythic world is a vast world found outside the Old Testament, to be sure, but
by showing the similarities joining that extra-biblical world to the Bible, Girard’s founding mimetic thesis
thereby obtains a global import and status despite his present and seemingly limited focus on the
biblical scriptures alone. So, too, in relating the Bible to world mythology, his approach resembles that
of the comparative academic study of religion.

Thus Girard begins by commenting on several particularly violent biblical stories – Cain’s murder
of Abel, Jacob’s wrestling with an angel, the persecution of Joseph by his brothers, etc. – to show that
they are, despite being in the Old Testament, instances, variations, versions of the same mimetic
mechanism which can be found easily enough, apparently, in non-biblical sacred myths around the
world. Assimilating the Bible to the earlier and contemporary Middle-Eastern culture, and to world
culture, has certainly been a mainstay of Higher Criticism from its beginnings. No problem here. But
has Girard shown anything beyond this? That is to say, has he established the mimetic thesis, or rather,
as it seems, has he not selected biblical stories with his thesis already in hand as criteria of selection?
That Cain kills Abel can mean many things, and for hundreds of biblical exegetes it has meant hundreds
of different things. That it is an instance of “sacred violence,” this is one meaning, Girard’s. But does it
establish a single ground stratum of significance in the Old Testament, i.e. the mythical as sacred
violence? Not by itself. Does it establish the universality of the mimetic thesis? Not by itself. Does it,
more modestly, fortify the ubiquity of the mimetic thesis? Yes, that it does, but whether it does so by
discovery or imposition, that is by no means as certain. What we can conclude is that it is possible to
find, as Girard does find, “sacred violence” in Old Testament stories. But surely no one doubted that
the Hebrew Bible is replete with brutality and violence? 18 Cain kills Abel, according to some exegetes
Noah is castrated by his son, and to top it all, God himself drowns all humanity (except for Noah and his
family) only ten generations after having created Adam! It is not a book for the faint at heart. No news
there. That these stories can only be interpreted by means of the mimetic thesis, this is in no way
established. Furthermore, the evidence of a hundred alternative exegeses, which I shall not here
rehearse, point to the contrary.
But Girard continues. He finds a second more sophisticated type of mimetic violence in the Old
Testament as well, one which unlike the first is meant to be specific to the Old Testament. Girard’s
exegeses are found in subsection two of the first chapter of “Book Two” of Things Hidden Since the
Foundation of the World, a subjection entitled “The Distinctiveness of the Biblical Myths.” Here Girard
invokes what he describes as the “well-known” “ethical dimension of the Bible,” 19 to indicate the new
and revolutionary non-mythical stratum of the Old Testament. Such is not simply another or different
stratum; it represents a step “forward,” a step farther away from violence. Girard here points to the
story of Joseph’s reconciliation with his brothers in Egypt, but for the full force of this new level of
meaning he invokes the Hebrew prophets. I will risk providing my own example, one that Girard would
probably not invoke, but one that fits his thesis, namely, Isaiah’s “suffering servant.” The point Girard
wants to make is that violence against a scapegoat is no longer legitimized by the sacred tout court,
violence for violence, as in the first pagan stratum, but rather, in what seems like a reversal, primitive
violence is delegitimized in the name of the moral innocence of the victim. 20 Because the sacred for
Girard is directly associated with violence, such “rehabilitating the victim has a desacralizing effect.” 21
It is precisely in such desacralization that Girard finds “the radical singularity of the Bible vis-à-vis the
mythological systems of the entire planet.”22 Ethical violence replaces sacred violence. Such is the
specific teaching of the Hebrew Bible, its great contribution.

One might think, at this juncture, that Girard will now appreciatively acknowledge Levinas’s
thesis regarding “adult religion,” that a convergence of their thought comes to light. For Levinas, in its
shift “from the sacred to the holy,” Judaism – and by extension all “adult religion” - represents a shift
from onto-theological childishness, ever mired in the mythological, to the adult religion of ethical
responsibilities, the call to the high obligation to fulfill the imperatives of morality and justice. Recall the
first epigram above, from Levinas’s Difficult Freedom: “Judaism appeals to a humanity devoid of myths –
not because the marvelous is repugnant to its narrow soul but because myth, albeit sublime, introduces
into the soul that troubled element, that impure element of magic and sorcery and that drunkenness of
the Sacred and war, which prolong the animal within the civilized.” But one would be very wrong. What
Levinas understands to be the height of religion, the highest impact of the holy, i.e., the ethical, is for
Girard but an inadequate stage, a stratum of signification permeated by violence, promulgating violence,
insurmountably violent, a stratum which therefore must be and is overcome, indeed superseded by –
and exclusively by - the saving grace of Jesus Christ. Far from convergence, far from mutual
appreciation, Girard’s vision represents everything in religion which Levinas’s philosophy aims to
overcome. And Levinas’s conception, again far from convergence and far from appreciation, represents
what for Girard, as we shall shortly see, is not only an error, and not only a provisional stage, but the
“demonic” itself!

So, let us return to Girard. The Old Testament: two levels of meaning, two steps, both violent,
both illustrating the ubiquity of mimetic violence. First, the mimetic mythological sacredness found the
world over, by which a victim must be sacrificed to propitiate the gods (or God), sacred violence
substituted for primitive violence. Step two, a variation of this structure, in a sense more advanced:
violence is farther detoured, prophetic ethics, not simply the substitution of sacred violence for
primitive violence, but the substitution of ethical judgment for primitive and sacred violence. Placing
the victim under the protective sign of ethics, violence is filtered through questions of good and evil,
moral guilt or innocence, justice and injustice. An eloquent biblical expression, Micah 6:8: “Oh man,
what is good, and what does God seek from you: only the performance of justice, the love of kindness,
and walking humbly with your God.”23

The sublimation of violence through ethics, however, is incomplete and inadequate in two
senses. First, because ethics must needs retain violence, albeit using good violence against evil, albeit
just violence against unjust, it never really renounces violence. In this it actually resembles pagan
violence. Second, however, because as it turns out there is a third stage, one which represents the
completely elimination of violence, from the latter standpoint the Jewish “solution” is rendered wholly
inadequate, exposed for the failure that its violence represents. What is the third level, then? It is not
found in the Old Testament, except insofar as the Old Testament heralds the New Testament. For it is to
be found only in the New Testament, and remains the exclusive provenance of Christianity, its
dispensation. The truly revolutionary overturning, the thoroughgoing decommissioning of the violence
of even the mimetic mechanism, so Girard would have us believe, and thus also the concomitant
possibility of a genuine non-violent spirituality occurs only in and through the rise of Christianity – or
really only by means of the spiritual breakthrough which Christianity, the figure of Jesus Christ more
particularly, represents on earth. We are all saved, if we are to be saved, by Jesus Christ. What is
Girard’s argument? What is his evidence? Where is the science in this?

The exegeses, having turned from the Old Testament to the New, begin with the final subsection
of chapter one of “Book Two,” entitled “The Gospel Revelation of the Founding Murder.” They continue
with their Christian message of total and exclusive peace through Jesus Christ Savior, through all the rest
of the chapters of “Book Two,” that is to say, chapter two on “A Non-Sacrificial Reading of the Gospel
Text,” chapter three on “The Sacrificial Reading and Historical Christianity,” and chapter four on “The
Logos of Heraclitus and the Logos of John.” Christ – who by now is surprised? - is the true Logos, the
saving Logos.

Arriving at these exegeses, and the theses they propound, we encounter full force what turns
out to be barely disguised at all in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World – it is a Christian
book, a missionizing book, an evangelizing book, and not a scientific book in any sense. We have
already encountered two Christian dogmas: original sin, which Girard takes in its Augustinian excess as
the doctrine of the fallenness of the world as a whole. The world is a cesspool. The world is violence
from beginning to end, from primitive violence, to pagan violence, to ethical violence. Which leads to
his second Christian dogma: only Christ Savior can save us from sin, from violence. Third, looking back at
Judaism, Girard endorses the dogma of Christian triumphal supersessionism – Christianity alone provides
the true Peace which is the real fulfillment of what Judaism would but cannot provide. Let us be clear,
Girard is not only claiming to have discovered such notions by means of his scientific exegesis, he is also
claiming that they are truth, indeed, the saving truth. Girard is speaking, then, as a faithful Christian.
We will shortly make clear exactly what sort of Christianity to which he is faithful.

Of the New Testament revelation, or rather, after it, that is to say, after one is made cognizant
and one adopts the significance of the singularly non-sacrificial crucifixion of Jesus Christ, Girard will
proclaim, “no further sacralization [i.e., sacred violence] is possible.” Henceforth, if only one grasps and
embraces the Christian revelation, the exceptional and saving revelation Girard’s book is proclaiming,
“[n]o more myths can be produced to cover up the fact of persecution. The Gospels make all forms of
‘mythologizing’ impossible since, by revealing the founding mechanism, they stop it from functioning.” 24
What on earth, one wonders, is Girard talking about? Mythologizing has ended? In the spiritual
kingdom, perhaps, and only according to Christian doctrine, but not in the real world, where
mythologizing and violence continue unabated. To be sure, the Christian, and Girard therefore, awaits
the awakening of all and everyone to the saving message of the life brought by the death of Jesus Christ.
Stop, stop, where is the science? What is the evidence? Girard can have his cult or not, but what about
academic qualifications, critical thinking, scientific standards, epistemic criteria, and the like? Have they
simply been jettisoned?

Let us calm down. Let us take a different angle, instead of simply gawking at intellectual bullying
and parochialism of Girard’s book. Let us pose our problem differently. Let us ask, along with Girard,
what is really wrong, what insufficient, what violent rather than peaceful, with the “new inspiration,” 25as
Girard calls it, of the ethical-prophetic stratum of the Old Testament, with its “undeniable tendency,” to
again use Girard’s own words, “to take the side of the victim on moral grounds, and to spring to the
victim’s defense”26? How can springing to the innocent victim’s defense stand in the way of genuine
peace? And if it does stand in the way, so that it is somehow preferable to adhere in some way to Christ
Savior rather than spring to the innocent victim’s defense, so we are also inquiring, can genuine peace
genuinely be peace, or if it is genuinely peace, is peace superior to goodness? How must Girard –
representing his brand of Christianity - represent Judaism and ethics, if Christ alone is peace and if peace
is the highest value of all, above goodness, the only saving grace, as it were?
Satanic Judaism

Earlier I said that for Girard Judaism is “demonic.” Now we shall see why. The problem with
prophetic or ethical recasting of violence, indeed, its failure, lies in its “ambiguity.” On the one hand it
sublimates violence, submitting it to ethical judgment, but on the other, the sublimation is incomplete in
the sense that it too uses violence. This should come as no surprise but such is the very nature of the
mimetic mechanism: it is a redirection rather than an elimination of violence. Only Christ can do the
latter. Thus, of the God of the Old Testament and the Judaism built upon it, Girard will declare: “there is
still some ambiguity regarding the role of Yahweh,” an “ambiguity in the role of Yahweh” which
“corresponds to the general conception of the deity in the Old Testament.” 27 The God of the Old
Testament, rising no higher than the ethical, is unable to escape or overcome violence. Jesus Christ
Savior, in contrast, who is “himself the same thing as the Father,” 28 so Girard reminds us on the evidence
of what is “repeated several times in John” (and thereby once again, and once again heedlessly,
imposing Christian dogma), a God of absolutely pure non-violence. As such it is Christ, “who is the same
thing as the Father,” who is alone the “true God” or - and please pay special attention to Girard’s exact
formulation (we will later return to it) - “a God who is alien to all violence.” 29 Christ is not only the
Prince of Peace; he is the King of Peace, the one and only King.

“[O]nly the texts of the Gospels,” Girard writes in the course of segueing from the Old
Testament to the New, “manage to achieve what the Old Testament leaves incomplete. These texts
therefore serve as an extension of the Judaic bible, bring to completion an enterprise that the Judaic
bible did not take far enough, as Christian tradition has always maintained.” 30 One could hardly
articulate more arrogantly the old Christian supersessionist dogma (“as Christian tradition has always
maintained”), with its not especially latent anti-Semitism, more clearly or directly, without sinking into
an even more time-worn vulgarity. Oh those blind Jews! Those stiff-necked stubborn Jews! Oh that
angry Jehovah! Oh that justice without mercy! Christendom, the “new Israel,” the completion, the
fulfillment, through Christ Messiah, salvation at last. But, alas, Girard does move on to the vulgar
versions: the Jews are not only blind and stubborn; they are perfidious, and worse. It turns out that
Judaism has a special place in Girard’s Christianity, “as Christian tradition has always maintained,” let us
add): the Satanic. How and why is this so?

The answers lie in Girard’s “explanation” – do we really still have to ask if his work is scientific? -
of the fact that Jesus and his disciples, and Paul as well, all start out as Jews within a Jewish context.
They are neither pagan nor Hindu. It is specifically from out of Judaism, from Jews, Jewish practices,
Jewish beliefs, Jewish scriptures, and so on, that Christianity emerges to offer its new and unique
message: “a God who is alien to all violence.” Given Girard’s theological outlook, this proximity to
Judaism cannot be accidental or arbitrary. Judaism must have a special standing, must somehow also be
exceptional as a religion, even if it is not the true religion Christianity is. What is the significance of its
closeness, its unique proximity, to Christianity?

The answer is most strange, an answer with terrible consequences for Judaism. Judaism alone
is essentially – and hence until the end of time – the penultimate religion. Let us understand exactly
what Girard means by this. Judaism is not closest to Christianity in the sense that Christianity stands on
the shoulders of Judaism in order to see farther or to rise to a higher height. No, this cannot be so
because Yahweh and Judaism remain violent, whereas Christ and Christianity are non-violent. Rather
Judaism is closest in the sense that Judaism most resembles true religion without being in any sense true
religion. And what this means, as Girard makes explicit, is that in the great drama of salvation Judaism
represents, and will always until the end of time represent the most tempting failure of religion. Though
it is a complete failure, though it is unable to overcome violence, at the same time its ethical sublimation
of violence represents the most seductive, the most distracting, and hence the most dangerous obstacle
to any genuine – which is to say Christian – overcoming of violence. Judaism, then, is in fact nothing
less than satanic because as the greatest sublimation of violence, it is the most hidden form of violence,
and as such, given the Christian way out, it is most insidious, most invidious, the greatest seduction – in
a word, satanic! Were it not for the Christian revelation, one can say, Judaism would have forever
blocked the very possibility of true religion. Only Christian Peace trumps Jewish Goodness. So too the
contrary: More than anything in the world, Jewish Goodness thwarts Christian Peace.

And thus we now can understand the true and dark sense of Girard’s apparent words of praise:
“In order for the Gospels to have the universal significance Christians claim for them, it is necessary for
there to be nothing on earth that is superior to the Jewish religion and the sect of the Pharisees. This
absolute degree of representativeness is part and parcel of the status of the Jews as the chosen people,
which is never disavowed by the New Testament.” 31 The arrogance of the Jews, their conceit and
perfidy, is the final step, the final darkness, before true salvation brought by Christ Messiah. Such is
Girard’s science: Only the Jews could have denied and killed, and continue, every day, to deny and kill
Christ! The anti-Semitic consequences are all too obvious, and historically they have been all too real. 32

Let us conclude this section by remarking that nothing in Girard’s book, certainly nothing in his
exegeses, or in any of his books, for that matter, indicates that his knowledge of Judaism extends any
further than traditional Christian readings of it, that is to say, nothing beyond the self-told story of
drama of the “Hebrews” within the Christian faith. Conversely, Girard is oblivious to how Jews
understand Judaism, or how Jews understand Christianity, for that matter, just as he is oblivious, so it
seems, to how independent scholars in the academic discipline of religious studies understand Judaism
and Christianity, or religion more broadly. What Girard does have is his all-purpose and all-explanatory
mimetic thesis, and the Christian theological faith within which this thesis makes sense for him.

Gnostic and Noxious Christianity

Several times I have indicated that Girard’s theology is of a specific sort. Now is the time to say
what sort. This is important, more important than it at first sight might seem, because the whole of
Girard’s outlook, including the significance he give to the mimetic thesis, his Christian fidelity, and his
anti-Semitic polemic, is both a function of this theology and completely typical of it. And that theology,
to answer the question in the title of this paper, is through and through Christian Gnosticism.

Let us return to Girard’s exegeses. The ambiguous Jewish God, the God who is a mixture of
violence and non-violence, is not, as Girard has informed us, “the true God, who is unshakeable.” 33
Notice, then, the opposition not of non-God and God, but of False God and True God. Girard
distinguishes “the powers of the heavens” which “will be shaken” – according to the expression of Luke
21:26 - from “the true God, who is unshakable.” Yahweh and Christ, this is a gnostic distinction. But not
only a distinction, it is also and most importantly an evaluation: Yahweh versus Christ, Christ versus
Yahweh, a battle of the dark God and the God of light, or in the present case, the God of violence contra
the God of peace. When he turns in his biblical exegesis to the Gospels, in the third subsection of book
one of Things Hidden since the Beginning of the World, the gnostic character of Girard’s interpretation
comes to the fore, and it is at this juncture that he also introduces the terms “satanic” and “demonic.”
The following citation - and let us add: the naiveté of the following citation – is indicative:

The powers of the heavens have nothing to do either with Jesus or with anything truly Christian.
They are powers that have governed humanity since the world began. … They may be
presented as human, as angelic or as demonic and satanic; they may be called ‘dominions’, or
the ‘sovereigns of this world’. When Paul states that not God but one of his angels promulgated
 the Jewish law, he means that the Jewish law is still bound up with these powers, which are
men.34

Let us note how truly extraordinary what Girard is saying. The laws of Moses, and therefore the Ten
Commandments, do not come from the true God. Judaism, therefore, in its attachment to the Mosaic
laws, is neither a representative nor a veritable expression of the will of “the true God, who is
unshakable.” Judaism, rather, and precisely, is beholden to intermediary powers, “the powers of the
heavens.” Indeed, as we have seen, Judaism is the greatest religion of merely intermediary powers,
powers which intervene and block the path to the true pacific God of Christianity. Not only is Judaism,
the penultimate religion, then, and as such an obstacle to true religion, i.e., Christianity, it is a religion
which lacks contact with the true God. Its God, then, is no God but idolatry. Worship of the God of
Judaism, then, is idol worship. Worship of the God of Israel insofar as Judaism is the highest expression
of violent religion, is not simply any idol worship; it is satanic worship, worship of the “power” of
violence.35

Judaism, then, as I have indicated, by refining violence ethically paradoxically becomes worse
rather than better than the pagan sacred. Indeed, achieving the highest form the sublimation of
violence can take, nothing poses a greater obstacle to the success of the Christian revelation than
Judaism. Herein lies the grounds for the special and deep Christian animus toward Judaism, an
antipathy coming neither by accident nor aberration but from the very heart of Christian teaching. “The
Gospels,” so Girard affirms, “are always telling us that Christ must triumph over these powers, in other
words that he must desacralize them.”36 But make no mistake, the enemy is not simply the pagan, the
heathen, but far more dangerous than these, it is Judaism, which is to say, ethics itself. The entire
apparatus of mimetic violence must be decommissioned; such is an essential part of the mission of
Christianity, to bring absolute peace, violence must be combatted and eliminated.

The logic to which Girard’s exegeses pay homage is narrow, to be sure, but within its confines it
is also – as with all narrow-minded logic - impeccable. First premise: only the Christian God is the true
God, the God of Peace. Second premise: the God of Judaism is the greatest obstacle blocking access to
the true God. Conclusion: the God of Judaism – which is to say, Judaism – must be eliminated. What is
certain is that prior to the triumph of Christ, that is to say, prior to the elimination of Judaism, whether
by the murder of Jews, through their intermarriage, or their conversion (forced or voluntary) to
Christianity, or some combination of these three, the Jews are presently the minions of Satan.
 It may seem to the reader an exaggeration or mere rhetorical flourish to invoke the terms
“Satan” and the “satanic” as I have done. But in fact in introducing these terms I am still following
Girard’s exegeses. Satan is another name, so Girard informs us, for the root and ubiquitous mimetic
mechanism: “Satan denotes the founding mechanism itself – the principle of all human community.” 37
“Satan is the name for the mimetic process seen as a whole.” 38 This “makes Satan [the mimetic
mechanism] the true adversary of Jesus.”39 And thus the Jews and Judaism, as high priests of the
mimetic mechanism, are cast as the “true adversary of Jesus.” And if the minions of Satan do not
convert to Christianity voluntarily, or inter-marry and disappear on their own, and, importantly, given
that ethics itself is a weapon against the Christian revelation, what could possibly stand in the way, or,
more precisely, would it not be spiritually mistaken not to force their conversation, or, failing in that,
what could possibly be “wrong” with eliminating the Jews and Judaism in one way or another, including
torture, plunder, starvation, exclusion, and finally outright murder? Would these not in fact become
spiritual imperatives? Imperative to murder justified by true Peace!

Nor does Girard confine his anti-Jewish polemic to the exegeses in Things Hidden since the
Foundation of the World. In an essay in the collection we have already mentioned, To double business
bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, published the same year as Things Hidden
since the Foundation of the World, Girard reiterates and reinforces the same horrifying logic as above,
but now couched in the guise of historical explanation.

The evil powers of the Jews constitute permanent beliefs of the Christian community; these
beliefs may remain dormant for a while in periods of relative social harmony but they will be
quickly reactivated in times of crisis, when the problems of the community become
unmanageable and even indefinable. Whenever the tensions become acute, the society will
turn toward the Jews. We acknowledge the fact when we say that the Jews are the favorite
scapegoats of Christian society.40

Problems in Christendom – blame the Jews! Not a word of blame or reproach from Girard. After all,
ethics is a Jewish deception. No wonder the Jews are “the favorite scapegoats of Christian society.”
They are everyone’s perfect scapegoat, because by persecuting the Jews one decommissions the very
ethics one abrogates. Preemptive license for everything! A very clever arrangement, used quite to the
advantage of the Nazis – but Girard wants to keep it for Christianity as well. It rather seems to us the
most pagan of all paganism, the quintessentially pagan, and indeed more pagan than any extant
paganism. In any event, Girard raises no critical questions and invokes no other Christian theology. Pity
the Jews, best they should kill themselves.

Because his work is theological rather than scientific, and because the theology is so pernicious,
indeed heinous, murderous, a new question presses itself upon our inquiry: What sort of Christian
theology is this to which Girard is so doggedly faithful in full view of the horror of it? Is it really possible
for Girard to be a good Christian, a Christian in good standing, and endorse and propagate such
murderous hatred toward the Jews? Do we need to invoke the Holocaust, the real murder of more than
six million Jews, men, women, a million children, Girard’s fellow Europeans, less than half a century
before the publication of his books? The mind reels. How is this possible?

We have said that Girard’s theology is Gnostic. According to the gnostic reading of Christianity,
there is a radical hiatus between the dark violence of pre-Christian religion, pagan or ethical, and the
glad tidings of Christian love and peace, a hiatus that no pre-Christian or non-Christian religion can
bridge or overcome. In Girard’s words:

Violence is the enslavement of a pervasive lie; it imposes upon men a falsified vision not only of
God but also of everything else. And this is indeed why it is a closed kingdom. Escaping from
violence is escaping from this kingdom into another kingdom, whose existence the majority of
people do not even suspect. This is the Kingdom of love, which is also the domain of the true
God, the Father of Jesus, of whom the prisoners of violence cannot even conceive. 41

Jews “cannot even conceive” Christian love. Do they lack a special faculty? Have they been blinded by
Satan? Girard does not even try to explain. These are the givens of an already constituted and ongoing
cosmic drama, into which Girard himself has somehow been granted knowledge – and this too, this
access is not explained either.

But with these above citation, the cat is out of the bag. What the Gospels teach is a special
knowledge, a gnosis, “whose existence the majority of people do not even suspect” because they do not
even suspect what Girard knows and teaches, namely, the “things hidden since the foundation of the
world”: mimetic mechanism, saving Christ, etc.. Things are indeed dire. The world without Girard’s
teachings has but “a falsified vision not only of God but also of everything else.” What saves the world,
of course, is the saving knowledge brought by and through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ –
and, as it happens, this is the knowledge taught by Professor Rene Girard. Girard, then, far from a mere
scientist, making hypotheses and testing them, and far from being a mere biblical exegete, proposing
one more reading of a multi-layered text, is actually the true Apostle of Christ, the mouthpiece of a
secret knowledge available only to Christian believers, to those who have seen the light, are initiated
into the transcendent truth, and are thus enabled to see through the world of violence (mimetic
mechanism) to the otherwise hidden but true loving God of Peace.

Girard’s claims, then, represent gnostic knowledge in two ways. First, their veracity can neither
be confirmed nor disconfirmed by objective means. It is rather a matter of radical initiation, total
conversion, complete existential transformation, indeed, transfiguration: a leap from a world of
darkness to another world of light, from more or less violence to absolute non-violence. The claims only
make sense, in other words, to those who have been “born again.” Girard’s claims are divine
revelations. Second, and related, such knowledge is gnostic because it is not gained through the labors
of research, study, learning, scientific inquiry, character development or by any means dependent on
human effort or will. The knowledge comes from the other world, the world of peace. Only by means of
a radical inexplicable rupture of the this-worldly “falsified vision not only of God but also of everything
else,” can one have any idea of what Girard is talking about. Accordingly, Girard tells of the “two
kingdoms which cannot communicate with one another, since they are separated by a real abyss.” 42
Nothing in this world indicates the other. Nothing in this world gets one from this world to the other.
One can only be saved from this world by the other, and that saving comes, as we have seen, from Christ
and Christ alone, and, ever so graciously, through the writings of Professor Rene Girard.

To break the iron grip of the kingdom of darkness, in which “Satan denotes the founding
mechanism itself – the principle of all human community,” 43 requires – in orthodox gnostic fashion - “a
complete change of emphasis and a spiritual metamorphosis without precedent,” so we are told by
Girard. And that complete change, that unprecedented spiritual metamorphosis, this gigantic shift
comes- we are no longer surprised by Girard’s Christian faith - only with Christ Jesus:

Jesus is the last and greatest of the prophets, the one who sums them up and goes further than
all of them. … With him there takes place a shift that is both tiny and gigantic – a shift that
follows on directly from the Old Testament but constitutes a decisive break as well. This is the
complete elimination of the sacrificial for the first time – the end of divine violence and the
explicit revelation of all that has gone before. It calls for a complete change of emphasis and a
spiritual metamorphosis without precedent in the whole history of mankind. 44
Girard here as elsewhere does not even bother to say that these claims represent Christian belief. They
are that, to be sure, but more they are what he believes, as well as what he would have his readers
believe is the truth revealed by his biblical exegeses. Second, according to his assertions and
commitments, it follows too that Girard must be one of those who know, one of the illuminated ones,
one of those for whom now “the vanity and stupidity of violence have never been more obvious.” 45
Girard has seen the light. And through him, through the light of an illuminated Christian faith: “For the
first time, people are capable of escaping from the misunderstanding and ignorance that have
surrounded mankind throughout its history.” 46 Girard brings to his readers “the peace Jesus offers
them,” a peace “that passes human understanding,” “a peace which is not derived from violence.” 47
The mimetic mechanism is revealed and its violence, however refined, exposed and overcome as failure.
Girard is saved, and he would save his readers.

But like each Christian theology, the gnostic one rails against all others. In particular Girard is
perturbed by exegetical readings of the Gospels- despite their overwhelming popularity - according to
which Jesus is interpreted as sacrificial lamb. The reasons for his ire should be obvious: if Jesus is a
sacrifice, then mimetic violence would be reproduced and endorsed rather than defused and overcome.
“To say that Jesus dies, not as a sacrifice, but in order that there may be no more sacrifices, is to
recognize in him the Word of God.”48 Girard’s Christ is far higher, as the gnostic divine must be. For
Girard, “only the Christ has ever succeeded in equaling God in the perfection of his love,” which is to say,
only Christ is pure peace, with no admixture of violence, no pollution from demonic “intermediaries.”
When Girard says that “Jesus is both God and Man,” 49 he is not at all referring to a paradoxical meeting
of the finite and the infinite, the merely human and the exalted divine, which is in fact the normative
Christian version of the core paradox of monotheism per se. Not at all. Rather, in true gnostic fashion
for Girard it means that Jesus alone is truly Man in the sense that finitude is completely erased,
completely transfigured into perfection, because Jesus Christ – and he alone - is the true God. Does this
sound mysterious? It is. Only for the initiated can it make sense. Nothing in this dark world, no process,
no progress, no works of self-perfection, no love of neighbor, no charity, no justice, whether individual
or social, can make any significant difference. The world as such is condemned to violence. Only the
absolute alien God of Gnosticism – Jesus Christ who is one with the Father - can intervene and save.
Such grace is by nature inexplicable.

Girard – where has his “fundamental anthropology” gone to? - can and does then “explain” why
Jesus must be… born of a virgin. What? Can he not see that he is engaged in Christian apologetics? To
be sure, we are no longer surprised. And in any event, it is the gnostic logic of two kingdoms separated
by an abyss that demand the absolute unadulterated transcendence of the true God, that alienates God
from creation, and therefore that must resort to such spiritual gymnastics as “virgin birth” (which, after
all, requires no more or less faith than demanded to believe in the purity of the “divine Incarnation” it is
designed to protect). So, Girard will conveniently provide exegeses to justify Jesus of virgin born. For
this he first invokes the prologue to John for whom “everything that is born of the world and of the
‘flesh’ … is tainted by violence and ends up by reverting to violence.” So, following an inexorable logic,
Girard continues:

Saying that Christ is God, born of God, and saying that he has been conceived without sin is
stating over again that he is completely alien to the world of violence within which humankind
has been imprisoned ever since the foundation of the world: that is to say, ever since Adam. 50

Miraculously and immaculately conceived Jesus is untainted by the sins of the flesh, untainted by
“original sin,” and as such, and of course only as such, he can serve as emissary of pure non-violence in
an otherwise and necessarily violent world. Jesus Christ is the portal - classic gnostic theology. By now
it should be clear to what extent the problems of and with Girard’s thought are the problems of and
with gnostic theology.

On Gnosticism

The central logical and ontological problem of gnosticism derives from its need to speak
positively, to speak of salvation, specifically, of an absolutely alien transcendent God. Because
gnosticism more than any other religious perspective, by absolutely denigrating this world, removes any
possible resources to make a positive bridge, it is obvious to all but the initiated that whatever positive
claims it makes are based in an equally extreme spiritual arrogance. To obviate its spiritual arrogance, it
garbs its claims in an awe-inspiring rhetoric. But, again, excluding those who are mesmerized by its
rhetoric, gnosticism amounts to no more than verbal smoke and mirrors, no different than the sort so
effectively and amusingly made fun of in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and her cohorts see Mr. Diggs
behind the magnifications of his imposture as the Great Oz. 51 Instead of posing outright as a wizard,
Girard would instead have us believe he is a scientist (whether natural, transcendental, hermeneutic, or
Hegelian, well, these are details) – which is no doubt a far more convincing guise in our day than that of
a wizard. Still, for all that Girard is no more or less than spokesperson for an absolutely alien
transcendent yet saving God Christ Jesus, i.e., the classic gnostic God.

From this side, from this-worldly significations, as it were, the conceptual problem is that the
mimetic mechanism explains too much. Like many a simplistic explanatory model, Girard’s mimetic
mechanism totalizes the reality it diagnoses. That is to say, what it explains it explains, and what it
cannot explain it discards by means of the same explanation. So, it sees what it wants to see and
sweeps the rest under the rug. In this way it is self-validating, but closed. To say that Girard is blinded
by his own illumination may sound paradoxical, but this is precisely the problem. His filter, as it were,
has been mistaken for the real, or as one says today: the map has been mistaken for reality.

Coherence is certainly a requirement of scientific truth. All truths must be consistent with one
another. The very idea of an “anomaly” makes sense because it represents a challenge, stimulation to
further research and inquiry which aim to integrate it with all other true propositions, or realign the
latter with the former. But when coherence is purchased at the price of narrow-mindedness, the result
is no longer scientific. A mad or delusional system can be internally consistent – one thinks of Judge
Daniel Paul Schreber.52 Coherence is only a condition, but not a sufficient condition of scientific
knowledge. When coherence by itself turns into a sufficient condition, the result is not science but
ideology. And when challenging such coherence is demonized as satanic, the ideology is a theology.

The fact that some violence can be correctly explained by means of the mimetic mechanism is a
fine thing, a tribute to its worth as scientific knowledge, but it does not imply or even suggest that that
all violence can be so explained. Its validity, in other words, is limited. Not all violence, not all
suppression of violence, and not all peace, is mimetic. As Freud is reputed to have said: “Sometimes a
cigar is just a cigar.” But even if and when a cigar is not just a cigar, neither is it always or only reducible
to Freud’s oedipal analysis. Not all peace is violence mimetically diverted. And the world as a whole,
even more emphatically, is not explainable by the single thesis of the mimetic mechanism, nor, as we
shall shortly see, is it explainable by any intellectual perspective. To think otherwise is to think
ideologically or theologically, but not scientifically.

The logic of gnosticism is not especially sophisticated. It is made up by three claims, variously
glossed. (1) The world is absolutely impure, completely alienated from the divine. (2) The true God is
absolutely pure, completely transcending the world. (3) Uniquely an Intervener, fill in the blank, let us
say “Christ Jesus,” unique emissary of true God, is able mysteriously-miraculously-graciously to save-
purify-rescue persons from the lower world to the higher. It becomes only slightly more sophisticated
when one reads the double “violence” of the mimetic mechanism as the “impure” and absolute non-
violence as the “pure.” There you have Girard in a nutshell. It is gnostic nonsense, nonsense from a
scientific, rational or common sense point of view, a view based on evidence and reasoning, or one
could as well say it is gnostic revelation for the initiated, in either case it is just as surely Girard’s
nonsense or Girard’s revelation.

For many years the standard scholarly work on gnosticism has been Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic
Religion.53 First published in Germany in 193454 (2nd enlarged edition 1954), it appeared in English
translation in 1958. Girard could hardly have been unaware of it. Near its start in a subsection entitled
“Abstract of Main Gnostic Tenets,” Jonas lays out in clear form the theses of gnosticism as they are
manifest variously in theology, cosmology, anthropology, eschatology and morality in turn. The book
then presents actual historical forms gnosticism had taken, of which the two most relevant to our
concern for Girard, are Marcionism and Manichaeism, which were the two earliest and most influential
Christian systems of gnosticism. Both, despite their initial popularity, ended up being declared heresies
by what became mainstream Catholic Christianity, and heresies they remain today.

For purposes of edification, then, below are two citations from Jonas’s abstract of main gnostic
tenets, citations taken from the first two, i.e., theological and cosmological, which have been selected
because they are closest to what we have seen at work in Girard. The italicized words are Jonas’s.

1. Theology: “The cardinal feature of Gnostic thought is the radical dualism that governs the
relation of God and world, and correspondingly that of man and world. The deity is absolutely
transmundane, its nature alien to that of the universe, which it neither created nor governs and
to which it is the complete antithesis: to the divine realm of light, self-contained and remote, the
cosmos is opposed as the realm of darkness. … The transcendent God Himself is hidden from all
creatures and is unknowable by natural concepts. Knowledge of Him requires supernatural
revelation and illumination and even then can hardly be expressed otherwise than in negative
terms.”55

It is the same absolutized theological dualism which governs Girard’s exegeses: this world, on the one
side, constituted by and as violence, violence permitted and forbidden according to the “double
concealment”56 effected by mimesis, “hidden since the foundation of the world,” and on the other side
(literally), the supernatural revelation of Christ Jesus, taught to us by Girard, from which perspective the
world is revealed for the complete violence it is, and the alternative of absolute peace becomes viable.

The comparison with Marcion is also instructive. Marcion, like Girard, also distinguished the Creator
God of the Old Testament, the God of Mosaic justice, who is to be rejected along with his equally
corrupted Creation, from the Revealed alien and pure God of the New Testament, the God of Mercy.
Like Girard, too, it is a matter of true salvation beyond the ethical, or as Marcion puts it, the “just god is
that ‘of the Law,’ the good god that ‘of the Gospel’.” 57 For both Girard and Marcion the purity of the
true God is that of absolute peace. His peace, absolute, is absolutely otherwise and separate from the
ubiquitous and inescapable violence of Yahweh’s creation. Likewise, for Marcion, the saving significance
of Jesus Christ is not sacrifice, either vicarious or moral, but the revelation of a new and other-worldly
gnosis, a saving “knowledge” without which humanity would remain ignorant and mired in violence.
Adding only the dialectic of his mimetic mechanism to “explain” the world’s violence, Girard’s worldview
is a replication of Marcion’s.

2. Cosmology: “Everything which intervenes between here and the beyond serves to separate man
from God, not merely by spatial distance but through active demonic force.” 58

In Girard’s gnostic vision the “active demonic force” that rules the world, entrapping humanity by
masking violence, is of course precisely the seductive mimetic mechanism, either as sacrificial
scapegoating or as Jewish prophetic ethics. For Marcionism, as Jonas explains, the lower demonic
deities, named “Archons,” i.e., Girard’s “intermediaries,” serve the primary function of maintaining the
corruption of the world by preventing humans from recognizing the true God. As such they are
“demonic.” “The universe, the domain of the Archons,” Jonas writes, “is like a vast prison whose
innermost dungeon is the earth, the scene of man’s life.” 59 The Mosaic law to which Jews adhere and
portions of which Jews hold authoritative for all humanity (the so-called “Noachide laws”), is for
Marcion as for Girard no more than a subtler spiritual enslavement than outright paganism. For this
reason, beyond the obvious rejection of paganism, Marcion also rejected the Creator God, Yahweh,
going so far, in consequence, as to excise the Old Testament from Sacred Scripture. Girard does not go
so far, but he does not have to because his exegesis of the Old Testament has already reduced it to a
cautionary tale, a propaedeutic to the Gospels and the saving grace of Christ Jesus. The result, in any
event, is the same: the Old Testament and the entirety of the Mosaic moral and juridical constructions it
sustains are but occultation and obstruction – jettisoned from true religion.
Spleen

If only Girard were informing us, dispassionately, as a scholar, as does Jonas, all would be fine.
We could learn, and on our own, as it were, as adults, we could decide upon the existential significance
of such learning for our lives, if any. Such is the way of critical thinking. But Girard is preaching. His
books are the writings of an advocate, a partisan, indeed, of one of the faithful, elect, saved, illuminated,
a Christian gnostic. Accordingly, we cannot avoid asking what his writings are doing in the academy
hiding under a threadbare pretense to science, to be sure, when their proper home is the seminary or
pulpit. In the concluding section of the present paper I turn to Immanuel Kant for a final expose, to
show the fundamental and insuperable conceptual error of all gnosticism, and hence of Girard’s
gnosticism as well. To Kant goes the eternal honor of having tracked this error to its root and given it its
philosophical name: “dogmatic metaphysics.” Having shown its failure, and having shown that and
precisely why it is insurmountable, no matter what additional “fieldwork” or research be thrown into the
mix, Kant also showed why it remains perennially attractive, and hence he gave us fair warning against a
latter day dogmatic metaphysician such as Girard. It is a warning Girard obviously did not heed, but we
do.

Before turning to the conceptual root of Girard’s failure, however, I want first to draw attention
to some stylistic symptoms of it, specifically an acerbic rhetoric, spleen, if you will, which rears its head
all throughout Girard’s writings. I present not as an argument, but rather as supplementary supporting
evidence of the deeper failure of Girard’s pretense to science. That Girard’s work is not scientific is
fairly obvious to the scholar. That he himself cannot even maintain his own pretense, this too, I believe,
shows itself in his work. I point to Girard’s spleen as a compensatory rhetoric, a distracting and
threatening “sound and fury,” for what in truth is a sorry absence of compelling evidence or convincing
argument. That Girard is frustrated is both obvious and irrelevant to his research results. The issue is
not psychological. Rather, I am arguing that Girard’s science is a hoax, frustrated, a pretense, that is to
say, that it is not science at all. Girard’s rhetoric of spleen, then, is not meant to be proof of this, but it is
suggestive all the same.

For instance, Girard frequently resorts to ad hominem abuse. Those who disagree with his
theses have not simply made errors, or not seen far enough, or just presented alternative views of
interest. No, they must be accused and attacked for their “blindness,” “ignorance,” “incomprehension,”
“unconsciousness,” “misunderstanding,” and obscurantist “fabrication” (vituperative terms taken just
from Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World ). Constantly putting up with a confederacy of
dunces and/or a host of enemies must be quite exasperating. Honest disagreement, alternative
readings, competing hypotheses, collegial debate, these do not figure in Girard’s world.

Who is Girard denunciating? Foremost, unsurprisingly, are the non-gnostic biblical

commentators, the majority of whom are also Christian believers. Even if Girard and Hobbes are
mistaken that humans are wolves to one another, it seems that theologians are wolves to theologians!
Pagans and Jews, as we have seen, receive their fair share of abuse. All of them blind, ignorant. With
the Jews matters are even worse: they are satanic. Finally, let us not forget scholars, scholars, that is to
say, who are not gnostic dogmatic theologians like Girard. The vast majority of scholars, by Girard’s
reckoning – and he does not hesitate to say it - are wrongheaded and mistaken, blind to the true
meaning of Scriptures. For scholars to disagree is fine, indeed admirable. For one scholar to disagree
with many others, this too can be fine, and may well indicate a genuinely original insight. But why does
Girard feel the need to impugn everyone else’s integrity? Why must they all be idiots or scoundrels or
constitutionally “incapable” of grasping his truth? These questions disturb us.

A few more examples of spleen will suffice. On the response to his biblical exegeses, Girard
remarks: “you will be amazed by the universal inability to recognize meanings that are for us by now so
obvious.”60 They are blind, we can see. They are lost, we are saved. He complains of “the
misunderstanding from time immemorial of the founding murder.” 61 But why complain? Has Girard
momentarily forgotten that according to his own thesis from “time immemorial” until the arrival of
Christ Jesus such misunderstanding was not only universal, it was inevitable?

Elsewhere, responding to an alternative non-gnostic reading of the Gospels, he writes: “it is

manifestly absurd. It is wholly generated by our inability to recognize the founding violence and the
primordial role that the misunderstanding of this violence has played throughout human history – a
misunderstanding that this reading perpetuates.” 62 So, let us say it, the entire non-Christian world, the
entire world unfamiliar with the New Testament, that is to say, not to leave out all of humanity prior to
the arrival of Jesus, and hence necessarily unfamiliar with his saving grace, and also the entire non-
gnostic Christian world, which is to say, again, the vast majority of Christians themselves, must we
believe that they are all “manifestly absurd” in their “inability” to grasp the mimetic mechanism? Again,
blaming others for what is absolutely out of their hands, Girard forgets that but a select few souls have
been saved.
 Another tirade, indeed, my favorite: “There is no more telling feature,” Girard writes, “than the
inability of the greatest minds in the modern world to grasp the difference between the Christian crib at
Christmas-time and the bestial monstrosities of mythological births.” 63 Girard wants to underline his pet
distinction between the saving Jesus and the sacrificial Jesus, but does he have to impugn “the greatest
minds in the modern world” for not taking his side? Is he be surprised that “the greatest minds of the
modern world” (apart from Girard no doubt), are not born again Christian gnostics? To say it again: by
his own account the foundation of the world was hidden to all humankind – hidden to Moses, Solomon,
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Buddha, et al. - until a mere two thousand
years ago. And today, is it so obvious that persons who remain unaware of Girard’s revelation lack the
ability for it? Why this attack on “the greatest minds”? Does having a great mind make one more
susceptible to saving grace? This would be news indeed, and certainly both counter-intuitive and
counter-factual.

A final example and we are done: “A great many modern theologians,” Girard writes, “succumb
to the terrorism of modern thought and condemn without a hearing something they are not capable of
experiencing even as ‘poetry’ anymore.”64 “Terrorism of modern thought”! The word “modern” is a
giveaway. Girard’s view is medieval. And the “without a hearing”: as if modern thinkers choose or not
to receive or not a transcendent “knowledge” available and revealed only by Christ Jesus’ unearned
unmerited gift of grace? For my part, not being a theologian, I shall not be terrorized – by Girard.

Danger Alert

To be sure, Girard gives lectures and writes books. He is indeed an academic. But does that
make him harmless? Do not books and lectures have consequences? The dangers of gnostic fanaticism
have historically been all too real. People have been tortured, have had their worldly goods stolen, have
been imprisoned, maimed, violated, and have also been murdered in the name of gnostic beliefs. “We
do these things for their eternal salvation,” is the hallmark of the fanatical theologian’s rationalization.

Gnoticism, even dressed out in the “mimetic mechanism,” has consequences for ethics and
politics. For instance, if the world is an irreparable cesspool of violence, and if ethics itself is the worst
violator, to boot, then why bother trying to improve the world, perform good deeds, defend victims of
injustice, protect the environment, and the like? If the only way out is salvation through the grace of
Christ Jesus, then why should born again saved Christians tolerate Jews, Muslims, Hindus, do-gooders,
statespersons, museums, higher education, and whoever and whatever else obviously only stands in the
way of the true divine path? The entire redemptive enterprise of religion, the teachers and schools it
supports, the hospitals and hospices, the charities, food kitchens, shelters for the homeless, and the like,
all these are for naught, and worse, they are the work of Satan! And beyond religions, any moral care
for others, all of ethical responsibility, the entire labor of justice, all these are for naught, and worse, are
satanic! Providing food, clothing, shelter, education for “the widow, the orphan, the stranger” –
satanic! Human rights, equal protection, equal opportunity, legal redress, due process, democracy -
satanic! Indeed, nothing is of more and nothing of less value whatsoever in this world of filth. So
Girard’s pietistic gnosticism and the actual nihilism it would hide, are not at all harmless. Indeed, what
could be more debilitating and demoralizing?

The alleged peace of gnosticism is really only the fantasy of total victory in war: the elimination
of all otherness, exterminating all others who disagree, erasing all other worldviews, and cleansing the
memory of their heritage. For the gnostic otherness can only be that of the enemy, the infidel, the
ignorant and the demonic. It is the terrorist peace of fanaticism, blind loyalty to a part of the real as the
whole of the real, and damnation to the rest. Girard’s dogma is anything but harmless, and neither is its
pretense to science harmless: as a false representation of science it is an insult to knowledge and truth.
Matters are only made worse by the fact that the closed world of gnosticism has always already
armored itself against any criticism, whether scientific, based in the truth, or ethical, based in the good.

Precursors

Girard did not invent gnosticism, nor is he the world’s only gnostic. His contribution to
gnosticism is to have characterized the dark lower world – our world - by means of the mimetic thesis.
In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World Girard rediscovers his mimetic thesis through biblical
sources. Despite what he writes there, however, we are not convinced that he learned the thesis from
Christ Jesus. In the present subsection we turn to other more likely sources for the mimetic
mechanism, predecessors in modern Western thought. Whether Girard actually learned it from these
precursors or not, is not our concern. Our concern is simply to call to mind some resemblances, to make
some comparisons, certainly not all, and thereby to situate Girard’s thesis (not his full blown gnosticism,
which has Indian, Persian, and early Christian medieval roots), within its proper intellectual heritage and
home. Thus we turn to Freud, Hobbes and Spinoza, not one a gnostic or a supporter of gnosticism.
 As early as 1907, in an article entitled “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices,” Freud noted
that “the formation of a religion … seems to be based on the suppression, the renunciation, of certain
instinctual impulses.”65 Actually, from his early work Totem and Taboo to his late work Moses and
Monotheism Freud proposes to understand monotheism – Judaism and Christianity, and presumably
Islam - as originating in a primal violence, in patricide more specifically. Thus in Moses and Monotheism
he proposes, contra any extant text, that Moses had actually been murdered. Further, he proposes that
the murder of Moses was a repetition of earlier constitutive murders, as the crucifixion of Jesus was a
repetition of the same. “The murder of Moses was … a repetition and, later on, the supposed judicial
murder of Christ”66 was also a repetition. In the primeval murder of the father, such is Freud’s thesis,
lays the violence constitutive of religion, primitive and so-called advanced religion, and more broadly of
civilization as such. Less sanguine than Girard, and more genuinely scientific, Freud believes that the
price of civilization, a price worth paying, is to live its discontents, i.e., the repression of primitive
violence, the channeling, that is to say, of polymorphous libidinal energy. He even believes that the
illusions of the religious forms of this repression might be eventually overcome by scientific knowledge.
So, it is fair to say that it was Freud, only a few decades before Girard, who first laid out the double
structure of the mimetic thesis, even to the point of explaining the origin of religion by means of it,
though of course Freud, a genuine scientist, despite the enormous explanatory importance he gives to
the mechanism, does not situate it within a Christian or any gnostic framework.

Let us go back several centuries, prior to psychoanalysis, to a political philosopher. Thomas

Hobbes, in Leviathan, published in 1651, proposed his famous thesis of a “state of nature” characterized
as a war of all against all, a pre-civilized state in which humans were wolves to one another (homo
homini lupus). Here too we will find a mimetic thesis. The savage original violence of the “state of
nature” was – through the “social contract” - channeled and held in check by a now delegated violence,
a violence given over to what Hobbes thereby justifies as the absolutely sovereign State. Henceforth
only State violence is permitted, and all else is “illegal.” Why? To produce peace, the peace violently
enforced by the continual suppression of the more original and wild violence of the war of all against all.
It was left for Spinoza to express the operative rationale of such a channeling of violence. Proposition
Seven of Part Four of Spinoza’s Ethics: “An emotion cannot be checked or destroyed except by a
contrary emotion which is stronger than the emotion which is to be checked.” 67 Original violence can
only be tamed by a stronger violence, but stronger, according to Hobbes, means more concentrated,
more organized, the violence of the sovereign state. Peace is repression of violence by more violence,
to be sure, but the “more violence” is the mimetically rechanneled violence of the “legal” versus the
“illegal,” the permitted versus the outlawed, “reasons of State” versus no matter what.

Perhaps mention should also be made at this juncture of Rousseau, for whom the violence of
the State, of civilization, seems in some sense to be even worse than life in the “state of nature.” It does
not matter, really, whether one fantasizes the “state of nature” as violent and the State as producing
peace, or the State as violent and the “state of nature” as peaceful. The difference is the no difference
from a structural point of view, a reversal and not a difference, insofar as in both cases it is by the same
mimetic mechanism that violence is understood. It is always violence repressing violence, whose
necessity Spinoza understood, violence legitimizing and masking its violence while remaining violent all
the same. Returning to Girard’s version, Nietzsche put the matter rather neatly: the priest must make
sick in order to cure, and his cure ensures precisely that the sick shall remain sick! 68

What Kant Knew: The Bane of Dogmatic Speculation

It is time, finally, to identify with Kant’s help Girard’s basic conceptual failure. It is time to see
why what he claims to accomplish cannot in principle be accomplished, and to see also why, despite it
inevitable and insuperable illegitimacy, it remains a perennial temptation of reason itself. In his justly
celebrated Critique of Pure Reason Kant identified and explained a genus of illicit intellectual
constructions, illicit from the point of view of the science it would claim to be, and of which Girard’s
gnosticism is a clear species, and gave it the name “dogmatic speculation.”

We will turn to it in a moment. First, however, to mark the seriousness of Kant’s critique relative to
Girard’s thought, I want to show Girard squirming, if I may use this term, a term I think perfectly apt,
under its critical impact. In an interview of 1978, confronted with the unscientific merely speculative
character of his thought, instead of facing up to the validity of such a criticism, or to its root cause,
Girard would defer to the future, and pass off to others, what he glosses over as if it were merely a
temporary difficulty and miscommunication.

My hypothesis, too, is dismissed as speculative, of course, but other people will come who will
further refine it and prove more successful than I am in demonstrating its efficacy. There will be
 scientific studies of mimetic conflict among animals and men. Some day the evidence will become
so overwhelming that the dogmatic slumber of the specialists will be interrupted. 69

We notice again the resort to rhetoric, the attack on “specialists,” those sleepyheads, blinded by their
expertise. The acknowledgement of Kant is unmistakable, if not made fully explicit. The term Girard
chooses here to attack his critics, accusing them of “dogmatic slumber,” is precisely that from which
Kant claimed he had awoken when he realized the full value of the Enlightenment from the point of
view opened up by his own Critical Philosophy. So now Girard, hoping to turn the tables, incapable of a
genuine response, alien to real science, would have us believe that it is the enlightened who are asleep!
Such medievalism, shame!

So, let us make Kant’s argument explicit. Two sorts of knowing each seeks its own sort of
knowledge, each following its own legitimate scientific aim. “Understanding” (Verstand) seeks to know
the efficient causes of spatial-temporal objects, which is to say, it seeks to know the causes of objects
that are caused. Such is empirical science, physics, chemistry, biology, and the like. “Reason”
(Vernunft), in contrast, is that which seeks the cause of the entire spatial-temporal complex, that is to
say, it aims to know reality as a whole, the totality of what is, including, therefore, all that empirical
knowledge knows. Both endeavors make perfect sense, are perfectly reasonable, and each in its own
way constitutes science: knowing the real.

For better or worse, however, these two kinds of knowing cannot be satisfied at the same time. This
is because their aims are at odds with one another. The satisfaction of one is the dissatisfaction of the
other, because each undermines the other. For instance, when Reason makes a claim about all of
reality, and thereby claims to grasp reality as a whole, Understanding steps in and demands to know the
cause of that alleged whole of reality. Thus Understanding punctures the claim of Reason to speak for
the whole. But Reason is no less dissatisfied with Understanding, because when Understanding goes on
and one with its causal explanation, explained an effect by its cause, and that cause as the effect of a
prior cause, and so on and so on, Reason steps in, puts it foot down, as it were, and demands an account
of the Whole of which these causes Understanding itself admits are only a part. To know the whole, one
must give up empirical research. To pursue empirical research, one must give up on knowing the whole.
There is no way out. Science demands both. Science, to remain science, must admit its own limitations.
Knowledge, while fully and truly knowledge, is humbled. Such, so Kant has shown, is true
enlightenment. To make assertions about the Whole, regardless of empirical science’s demand for
causes, is to engage in “dogmatic speculation.” It is “speculative” because no one stands outside the
Whole to say what it is as a Whole. It is “dogmatic” because it makes assertions about the Whole
regardless of their unscientific character, regardless, that is to say, of the impossibility in principle of
proving such assertions. Girard, of course, wants to have his cake and to eat it too: to proclaim that the
Whole is Violence, to assert that such a claim is scientific, and then, putting icing on his cake, to invoke
the transcendent Christ Jesus as the legitimation of the Truth of his claim about the Whole. Foul!
Dogmatic speculation! Pure, simple, shameless dogmatic speculation!

“A transcendental hypothesis,” Kant wrote in his Critique of Pure Reason , “in which a mere idea of
reason is used in explanation of natural existences, would really be no explanation; so to proceed would
be to explain something, which in terms of known empirical principles we do not understand
sufficiently, by something which we do not understand at all.” 70

It is all too easy to make speculative claims, and then to assert them dogmatically. Asserting them
dogmatically in fact follows from their speculative status, because they can have no scientific ground in
principle. Dogmatic speculative claims explain everything and nothing, because they are beyond the
bounds of genuine knowledge. So one can as easily assert that “all is market economy” as assert that
“all is class struggle,” because it is impossible, scientifically, to assert anything about the Whole. And
such dogmatic speculative assertions are a dime a dozen: “all is survival of the fittest” “all is self-
interest”: “all is will to power”; “all is ontological difference,” and so on. The list of such assertions, their
gurus and their cults is a long one, from antiquity to the present.

What is their appeal? Kant already said it: Reason wants to know the Whole; such is the nature of
Reason, its legitimate aim, even if Reason cannot know the Whole. A truly scientific or knowing point of
view, true reasonableness, then, requires humility. Genuine enlightenment, solid knowledge, demands
humility. But for those who are impatient or arrogant or perhaps lacking in intelligence, the nostrums of
dogmatic speculation provide satisfaction, even at the price of irrationality. After all, everything can be
explained in terms of market economy, or self-interest, or class struggle, even if such explanations are
each actually only partial. Universality is not the same as comprehensiveness. At Tea Party gathering
who is surprised that tampering with market economy is the root cause of all the world’s problems? At
meetings of the Heidegger Society who is surprised that the ontological difference or the question of
being and their eclipse lie behind the present epochal dark shadow of technology? Who is surprised,
then, that at meetings of the Girard society all things are explained and explainable in terms of the
mimetic mechanism? None of this, not one bit of it, including the fact that each dogmatism has all the
answers, alters the fact that dogmatic speculation and every elaboration constructed out of dogmatic
speculation, is not and can never be science.

When Ecclesiastes famously teaches that “All is vanity,” there is perhaps a deeper meaning than an
upbraiding of vanity, or even of despair for meaning. We must recall that this collection of sayings,
attributed to Solomon, was put together as a response to Greek philosophy, 71 that it is the response of
Hebraic wisdom to Greek wisdom. In this spirit, I would like to suggest that it’s famous “All is vanity” be
read as an attack on the “All.” So that it is suggesting not that all is vain, life is meaningless, or anything
of that sort, but rather than to speak of the all, even to say that everything is meaningless, to conceive
of reality under the sign of the all, to believe along with Greek wisdom that humans are able to explain
the world in its totality, such that “All is water,” say, despite being a part of that very totality - that that
is vanity. True knowledge requires humility, Kant demonstrates it, Solomon already knew it – Girard
needs to learn it.72
1
An abbreviated earlier form of the present paper was given as an invited plenary address on June 20, 2008, at the
Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R) conference – with Rene Girard in attendance - on “Catastrophe and
Conversion: Political Thinking for the New Millennium,” sponsored by the University of California at Riverside among
others. I thank Professor Robert Doran for the invitation and for his usual attentive hospitality and good will. He is, of
course, in no way responsible for the contents of this paper, of which he had no advance notice. I have hesitated to publish
this article for several reasons, the most important of which is that I do not think Girard’s thought is really worthy of
comment. Nevertheless, on Amazon.com, the book is still described as follows: “An astonishing work of cultural criticism,
this book is widely recognized as a brilliant and devastating challenge to conventional views of literature, anthropology,
religion, and psychoanalysis. In its scope and interest it can be compared with Freud's Totem and Taboo, the subtext Girard
refutes with polemic daring, vast erudition, and a persuasiveness that leaves the reader compelled to respond, one way or
another.” Well, as readers will see, I am responding the “other” way. And not in any way, let me add, because I felt
“compelled.” The truth is I had no idea I would be addressing an adulatory Girard conference, and no idea before accepting
the invitation that I would so completely disagree, to put it mildly, with Girard. In any event, I present this paper here on
the web for others to take from it what they will.
2
Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom, trans. S. Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 273, 49. I have
discussed Levinas’s “biblical humanism,” relative to Spinoza and Nietzsche, among others, in my translator’s introduction,
entitled “Humanism, Religion, Myth, Criticism, Exegesis,” to Emmanuel Levinas, New Talmudic Readings, trans. R. A.
Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 1-46.
3
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
1998), 177.
4
Rene Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. S. Bann and M. Metteer (New York: Norton, 1989),
170. Henceforth TH.
5
TH, 165.
6
Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. P. Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1977), 31. Henceforth VS.
7
In the academic discipline of Religious Studies these names, which suggest to many people, especially to Christians, a
progressive succession, the “New” superseding the “Old,” are no longer used. I will follow Girard’s usage, mostly for the
sake of consistency, but I am also keeping in mind that the Hebrew Bible is indeed much older, more ancient, than the New
Testament, and keeping away from any sense – a sense which Girard fully accepts, as we shall see – that their chronology
suggests that spiritually or really in any way that the New has supplanted the Old.
8
“Fundamental Anthropology” is the title of the first “book” within TH. The second “book,” which is the subject-matter of
the present inquiry, is entitled “The Judaeo-Christian Scriptures.” In this term perhaps Girard has Heidegger’s
“fundamental ontology” in mind by way of comparison and contrast?
9
VS, 3.
10
There are too many differences between James’ work and Girard’s to enumerate, one being that James is a pluralist and
open to alternative religious forms and traditions, but one similarity is that both – James despite himself perhaps – rely on
Christianity not only for the vast majority of their source texts but also and more tellingly for their very idea of what
constitutes religion.
11
Rene Girard, “To double business bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1978), vii. Notice, too, that once again the term “anthropology” appears to bolster Girard’s literary
studies.
12
TH, 181.
13
It is ironic that Christian fundamentalism, with its one correct “literal” reading, is the reverse of Jewish fundamentalism,
which relies on tens, hundreds, even thousands of commentaries, each with its own legitimate holy reading of the
Scriptures. Indeed, lacking these multiple readings, which are explicitly in theory numbered in the millions, i.e., which are
innumerable, for Jewish fundamentalism the Torah remains incomplete! And that is the point: the infinite Torah of God is
always in the process of being completed, through human interpretation. For further elaboration, see my book, Ethics,
Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation After Levinas (Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press, 2001), especially its
core chapter, Chapter 7, “Humanism and the Rights of Exegesis,” 216-265.
14
TH, 199.
15
TH, 182.
16
TH, 212.
17
It is interesting how radically different is Kant’s liberal appreciation for the role of Scriptures in the founding of churches.
It is through the multiplicity of readings of what he finds to be their basically moral message that Kant sees their virtue, and
the superiority and greater longevity of churches founded on sacred scriptures over those which rely on tradition or
historical facts alone. See, Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason, Book Three, Division One,
Section Five.
18
It is not a contest, of course, but certainly one of the most gruesome acts of violence in the Hebrew Bible is done by the
tribesmen of Benjamin: the night long gang rape of a concubine, who upon dragging herself back to her master’s house at
dawn is murdered by him and cut into pieces: “He sliced her body limb by limb, into twelve pieces, and sent her parts
throughout all the borders of Israel,” an action which sparked the Israelite tribes to a subsequent mass slaughter of the
tribe of Benjamin (Judges 19:16-20:48).

In terms of violence and the sacred one wonders why Girard does not comment on the replacement of the first born
Israelite males as priests (related to the earlier plague of the death of the firstborn Egyptians) by the tribe of Levi after the
sin of the Golden Calf, and the mass slaughter of Israelites culpable of that sin. “God spoke to Moses, saying ‘Behold! I
have taken the Levites from among the Children of Israel, in place of every firstborn, the first issue of every womb among
the Children of Israel, and the Levites shall be Mine. For every firstborn is Mine: On the day I struck down every firstborn
in the land of Egypt I sanctified every firstborn in Israel for Myself.’” (Numbers, 11-13; see also Deuteronomy 8:7). In
addition to its multiple “double concealments,”, this narrative is appropriate, too, given the stress Spinoza placed upon it
in the Theological-Political Treatise (chapter 17) to explain the downfall of sovereign Israel.
19
TH, 147.
20
I have highlighted that this instance is my own and not Girard’s because for Girard, and we will see the “reasons” for this
momentarily, the “suffering servant” of Isaiah is exclusively Jesus Christ. Girard is oblivious, like all too many Christians,
that for Jews the suffering servant is the Jewish people, what Levinas, among others, calls “the passion of Israel.”
21
TH, 153.
22
TH, 154.
23
Of course this is famously quoted by Franz Rosenzweig as the concluding sentence of The Star of Redemption (1921).
24
TH, 174.
25
TH, 155.
26
TH, 146,
27
TH, 157. I am always amused by this naming of the God of the Hebrew Bible, “Yahweh,” – current today in academic
Religious Studies circles. Is it meant to be more scientific than the old-fashioned “Jehovah”? Is Girard thereby more
sensitive? Is he more sensitive despite calling the Hebrew Bible the “Old Testament”? In truth, the “correct” pronunciation
of the four letter name of God is simply unknown to us. I may be mistaken, but I see no indication that Girard knows
Hebrew; surely nothing in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World indicates it.
28
TH, 184.
29
TH, 183. Or:“a God who is foreign to all forms of violence,” TH, 182.
30
TH, 158.
31
TH, 175.
32
See, e.g., Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern
Antisemitism (New York: Harper & Row, 1966; original publication date, 1943); or Joel Carmichael, The Satanizing of the
Jews: Origin and Development of Mystical Anti-Semitism New York: Fromm, 1992).
33
TH, 190.
34
TH, 190.
35
That Girard knows next to nothing about Judaism, even biblical Judaism, is all too obvious for those who do
know. His Judaism is the ugly caricature invented by a certain Christian theology. For an alternative and
genuinely rabbinic reading of the meaning of “sacrifice” in Judaism, see the recent paper, “The Bible, the
Talmud and the Sacrifice, which George Hansel recently (December, 2012) gave at a colloqium on Girard in
Paris, without once mentioning Girard or invoking his mimetic thesis. .

36
TH, 191.
37
TH, 162.
38
TH, 162.
39
TH, 162.
40
Girard, “To double business bound”, 192.
41
TH, 197.
42
TH, 199.
43
TH, 162.
44
TH, 200.
45
TH, 203.
46
TH, 201.
47
TH, 203.
48
TH, 210.
49
TH, 216.
50
TH, 223.
51
The Wizard of Oz’s “real name” – real fictional name - is Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman
Henkel Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs, in Frank Baum's 1939 novel, Dorothy And the Wizard in Oz.
Having been exposed as the fraud that he is, in his defense the Great Oz/Mr. Diggs tells Dorothy: "It
was a dreadfully long name to weigh down a poor innocent child, and one of the hardest lessons I ever
learned was to remember my own name. When I grew up I just called myself O.Z., because the other
initials were P-I-N-H-E-A-D; and that spelled 'pinhead,' which was a reflection on my intelligence."
52
Daniel Paul Schreber, Daniel Paul, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness , trans. Ida Macalpine & Richard A. Hunter (New
York: New York Review of Books, 2000); original publication 1903.
53
Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 2nd enlarged ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1963); for the five main tenets of Gnosticism, see,
42-47. (Henceforth GR.)
54
One can easily imagine additional significations Jonas’s account of gnosticism would have taken on in the context of
1934 Nazi Germany.
55
GR, 42-43.
56
TH, 165.
57
GR, 142.
58
GR, 43.
59
GR, 43.
60
TH, 179.
61
TH, 204.
62
TH, 203.
63
TH, 222.
64
TH, 223.
65
Sigmund Freud, “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907), in The Freud Reader, ed. P. Gay (New York:
Norton, 1989), 434. Of course one could find even better citations in Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1912), or his later even
more meta-theoretical writings such as The Future of an Illusion (1927), Civilization and its Discontents (1930) and, most
especially, Moses and Monotheism (1937, 1939).
66
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. K. Jones (New York: Random House, no date), 129.
67
Baruch Spinoza ,Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1992), 158.
68
See, e.g., Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, section 21.
69
Girard, “To double business bound”, 217.
70
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, N. K. Smith (New York: St Martin’s, 1965), 614-615 (A772, B800).
71
Ecclesiastes, said to be written by King Solomon, is a text compiling aphorisms and sayings in the spirit of the “wisest of
men,” i.e., Solomon, but most likely the text as we have it was edited and canonized in the time of and in response to
ancient Greek philosophy.
72
At the Girard conference, after this paper was given, during the delivery of which a pin drop could have been heard
throughout the large auditorium, Girard rose from his seat, stood up before the assembled multitude of his followers, and
said: “I am ashamed; I am ashamed… ashamed at such a paper, one understands everything in it, I have heard it so many
times before.”