Author: staceymeeker

1. What

“Help me find words to explain,” writes Augustine in his highly personalized Confessions(1961:22). The line, part of an opening appeal for forgiveness from God, acknowledges that “even those who are most gifted with speech cannot find words to describe you” (23). The stance of explicit supplication might find a few rare modern equivalents; the appeal for help to describe one’s own person does not. Augustine was not a Romantic.

Witness now the opening of Rousseau’s Confessions, over a millennium later:

I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent and which will never find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself. Myself alone! I know the feelings of my heart, and I know men. I am not like any of those I have seen; I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. (1931:1)

Rousseau was a Romantic. It is obvious. But why? How can we say this–or, better, how is it that we “already recognise” that? In the lines above, a new theologically and anthropologically significant structure underpins what is a relatively new and significant “confessional” poetics. If bare recognition is equated with knowing, we can say already that we “know” Romanticism, and thus in a limited sense, know in advance “what” it is. And as the gap between the two confessions is mainly a temporal one, our understanding of Romanticism concerns also its temporal identity, when it came into being.

But can we say what sort of thing Romanticism itself is? Because it is at once something definite and yet it does not have sharp boundaries, we say unabashedly that Romanticism is a field. Hasker argues an analogy between the “fields” studied by physical science with extra-scientific, philosophical “fields.” On the one hand, a field is generated by material configurations such as the alignment of iron molecules in a magnet; on the other, crucially, “once generated, the field exerts a causality of its own, on the magnet itself as well as on other objects in the vicinity” (Emergent Self 190). In an earlier account, Hasker makes the important point that while the field is generated by an object, “it is also clear that the field is distinct from the object, as is shown by the fact that the object is sharply localized whereas the field spreads out for an indefinite distance in all directions” (Metaphysics 73). Romanticism is a field insofar as: (1) it is intransigent to strict localization; its boundaries are indefinite; (2) is itself the effect of certain historical shifts and axiological effects; and (3) is “causally” efficacious–once generated, it exerts its own characteristic influence on whatever lies within its ambit.

Our aim, therefore, is to spell out in concrete terms how certain textually realized axiological effects can–at different points–also be properly “causal.” The field concerns an image or figure, the Romantic. We have said that the figure is both effect and cause. The figure is discernible from at least six well-known features of Romanticism. We can simply list these. They are what allow us to recognize it in the passages cited above. Romanticism is: (1) embodied in a corporeal agonistics of authentic experience and the suffering which frequently accompanies and legitimates it; (2) it bears a displaced theology of creative genius; (3) its politics, in the sense proposed by Gardner (6), is oppositional defiance; (4) its alterity structure is of self-proclaimed marginality; (5) its normative epistemological component valorizes novelty (with surprise, revolution, and youth being tributary structures often found); (6) its dramaturgy a distanced time or place. These six features are the manifest poetics of Romanticism; we will call its points of articulation. That is, they are the signs by which Romanticism is stabilized, articulated, defined, and experienced.

The Romantic figure would appear to be new, and has therefore a time, dating perhaps from around 1770. Romanticism consists in the refiguring of the anthropologically significant individual by such things as the rise of modern bourgeois society, the shift from functional to nominal monarchies, and a generalized secularization and democratization of the body politic (cf. Gans 164-87). This produces characteristic effects. On the one hand, the autonomous secular individual is prized like a work of art for its uniqueness (a sacred value). On the other, individuality is ascribed to all, which democratization produces a terrifying mimetic crisis of that very “flattened” self. Beyond the ordering that emerges from particular instances, then, while the linkage would appear to have no general priority; yet all such manifestations, however ordered, are related to the above-described historical changes in the role of kingship and the sacred on the one hand, and abstractions of exchange and value on the other.

Romanticism has a series of relationships beyond its traditionally assigned limits. For instance, there are the disciplines that many see as somehow self-foundational. On the contrary, Romanticism partly guided their forms of expression, and to the extent that this is not understood, they remain Romanticized fields today: studies of the self (psychology), the social (sociology), or even an imagined supposedly rational locus of exchange itself (economics) (on psychology, cf. Girard, Things Hidden 377; Webb 100-102, 154). These fields are all dependent on those pre-existing forms of the self that Romanticism articulated long ago, and they all are partly derivative of it. Doubtless, in the name of social science (or whatever), we could pass many idle hours analyzing the little problems and characteristic knottings in the genesis of these and other such fields. But what matters is very simple: they are all of them partly Romantic in what they presuppose; all we have space for in this essay is an occasional indication of key aspects of their foundation as we proceed.

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2. Romantic Branchings

Romanticism manifests itself in many places, some of them only partly understood. But if we are interested in Romanticism, we must follow the trail of many others who have pursued it to its own distinctive lair, the place it carved out for itself for self-expression and articulation. This is the domain of what might still best be called literature. The very fact it exists overtly means that there has always been a literature-about-literature from the moment of Romanticism’s inception. Needless to say, not all of it is of equal value.

By literature–a term we use without rigid predetermination–we mean something quite close to what is commonly understood. That is, literature is a self-consciously imaginative mode of representation that depicts a certain ethics, morality, and esthetics. It is there that we find the emergent genres that allow the display of contradictory positions without necessary resolution. In it we find imagined ethico-moral scenes which “play out” issues of value. This value is derived both from what it depicts, how it depicts it, and what is assumed about depiction as such. In this respect, we must include not just works of art themselves, but also, the theories (of abstraction, of realism, of art etc.) that inform them. “Literature,” in all these domains, is scenic, and the scenes are always scenes of value (of ethics, morality, esthetics) (cf. Fleming and O’Carroll 2002/2003).

Later in our essay we will see that the reflexive access literature enables to Romanticism is no coincidence. For now, though, we will content ourselves with the starting point that literature supplies for our inquiries into Romanticism. It is there, from the earliest times, that we find not just the genesis of Romanticism, but the things that have defined our relationship to it over the succeeding centuries. We have cited Rousseau, of course. His Confessions are a kind of philosophy. But if so, equally, they are a literary genre; as “confessions,” they display a Romantic poetics (real feeling and emotion, personal truth, defiant marginality, etc.).

At the same time as Rousseau was writing, the early Goethe was similarly already devising Romantic selves and scenes. It is worth looking briefly at Goethe, while admitting that he inhabits a composite scene–with figures “behind” him (other artists), “around” him (theories explaining what art should do in the apparently new situation), and perhaps even “inside” him (characters, scenarios, modes of expression that predate this historical juncture). Goethe offers a way of seeing the emergence, and complexity, of Romantic self-articulation.

Goethe’s early world-weary figure calls for a calming of the schmerzen suffered in his travels (“Wandrers Nachtlied” 1, p. 49); at this stage of the great writer’s career, we find repeated solace in the depths of nature, be it the healing calmness that “still mit Nebelglanz/Lösest endlich auch einmal/Meine Seele ganz” of the moon’s light (52) or the “Glück!” and “Lust!” of spring (“Mailied” 7). Guiding all of this, even if it appears now naïve, stands the relationship of the artist to the night generally: in “Künstlers Abendlied,” the forces and rhythms of nature–of spring and night–are allied in a song paying homage to the artistic process itself. In literature, in the ordinary sense of the word, we find all the features of Romanticism displayed. In it too, we see the uneasy cohabitation of the inspired artist (a new sacral center) and the fact that this very artist claims distinction from all the other unique souls around by the artifice of being adrift, a wanderer, the perennial outsider.

But–and here we stay with the example of Goethe for a moment–we find in literature-as-representation more than a catalogue of descriptors of Romantic movements. Goethe quickly became the leading exponent of Sturm und Drang, and then, of course, turned away from it. In other words, we find in Goethe, not just an articulation of early Romanticism, but also, one of the key things that defines it as a problem still today: the attempt to refuse it. There is, already, in this early work the evanescence that characterizes later Romanticism–the need to reject, return to earlier texts, modify, render different. Realizing the instability of the self posited by Sturm und Drang, Goethe advocates a turn to classicism. Because of his importance, it was influential intellectually, but made no difference to a society that had yet to make full sense of itself Romantically (and this is why Goethe, the ur-Romantic, is not always himself seen as a Romantic). Romanticism is generally seen as something that comes afterwards, in England, France, and of course, in the German states themselves. There, Romanticism manifested itself in the Nachtseite, as critics call it, in E.T.A. Hoffmann, of course, but most memorably in the strangely beautiful work of Novalis. Be it the search for the elusive “blue flower” depicted in his final work or the tragic biographical dimensions of his lost beloved, and his entire morbid quest for the “other side” of life, we find in Novalis the onset of fully-fledged, self-aware Romanticism. Introducing the following account of Romanticism by Novalis, Michael Hamburger (1970:76) remarks that Novalis sought a “poeticisation” of “philosophy” and vice versa. In this “poeticisation,” though, we find links to a deeper cultural formation: the reworking of the sacred and the human, the relationship between grace and nature. For Novalis,

The world must be romanticized. Only in that way can one understand its original significance. Romanticization is nothing other than qualitative potentialization . . . By giving a lofty sense to what is vulgar, a mysterious aspect to what is commonplace, the dignity of the unknown to what is familiar, an infinite extension to what is finite, I romanticize them. (Novalis, cited by Hamburger:76)

When Goethe turned away from what he had a large hand in creating, he did so largely alone. So we find in the poetics of Romanticism a characteristic three-way split: those who endorse it overtly and declare as Romantics (like Novalis), those who seek to exceed it and in so doing are also Romantics (like Schiller), and those who dourly turn away to write bizarre poems about the metamorphosis of plants (like Goethe). The latter oppositional tactics are co-incident with the rise of Romanticism. As the editor of the poems cited above remarks, Goethe sought to turn against it before it was even named:

The odd historical position of Goethe is that he had, in important senses, repudiated romanticism in advance, before it had properly got under way–certainly before it was ever called “romanticism.” Later, when the label became current, he defined das Romantische, in a much-quoted saying, as a disease (das Kranke). (Luke 1964:xxi)

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Yet calling Romanticism “the sickness” does not dispel it, even from one’s own work, let alone from those that followed the tendency up to and including Nietzsche (cf. Fleming, 2004:15). The purgation is, rather, a characteristic Romantic move; indeed, the resources for the imagined turn away did not yet properly exist, and Goethe’s classicism itself became a dominant form of Romanticism as it unfolded in the nineteenth century (as the need for distanced settings in time and place became ways of supplying the epistemological need for novelty on the one hand and a mode of opposition to the everyday and commonplace present on the other).

If a few like Goethe were shocked by the transformation of the Romantic self, very few appeared to understand the scale of the change. For despite its location in the arts, Romanticism was not just an art movement–it denotes a schism in value. Like the drift of landmasses, a grinding of continental plates of significance has been taking place for almost five hundred years. If the first two hundred years of this are largely inaudible, this is because the change was gradual, and for the most part inexpressible in general analytic terms of the day. To this day, it remains difficult to articulate, albeit less so to recognize.

3. How

Romanticism emerged as an apparent breach in value because of profound and gradual anthro-poetical changes in Western culture. These exhibit and articulate the breach; such exhibition results from the emergence of new genres of representation (new forms of poetry, the novel, especially the Bildungsroman, etc.). The lair is well known, as we have said. The histories are told repeatedly, but need repeating, albeit in a new way: we frame them in terms of a poetics characterizing the new social situation that prevailed after 1750. It is not enough to describe textual poetics in isolation; these must be rejoined to the anthropological dimensions that allow them to make sense to us retrospectively.

In the Sacred Wood, T.S. Eliot writes that “The only cure for Romanticism is to analyse it” (1950:31). We hear Goethe, a full century before him, speak in analogous terms–of pathology, etiology, and remedy. We write as beneficiaries of scholarship in at least three enabling fields. The first is the massive literature of and about Romanticism itself: the critique, the artists, the commentary. From such work, we can now describe the poetics of Romanticism and see how they permeate fields well beyond the arts, and well beyond the nineteenth century. It is well known that the Romantics did not all identify themselves to be such. This could lead one to suppose we will shortly be proposing yet another arbitrary definition of the same. Yet contrary to the widespread view that Romanticism is a loose genre, or that it can be construed as any one of a number of things, we say that at least one version of Romanticism can be precisely defined and described.

An heuristic pledge: our account verifies its poetics by restoring them to a fuller axiology than has hitherto been thought possible. This leads us to the second area in which profound research has taken place. From the works of a number of writers, notably John Milbank and Stephen L. Gardner, we arrive at a new understanding of axiology itself. As we will see later, axiology exists as a shriveled remnant of a once vibrant field of interconnection. At most now, when acknowledged at all, it is seen as a pairing of ethics and aesthetics into a theory of narrowly construed value. Milbank, by contrast, restores the axiological join by building on his work which reveals the “secular” as a theological construct in Theology and Social Theory. This allows Milbank to conduct re-readings of texts we thought we knew intimately (witness Milbank’s astonishing account of “Longinus,” a major source of inspiration for Enlightenment and Romantic writers alike) (see especially, Milbank: 1998:269ff.). He finds that the sundering of content and form, of beauty and sublimity, ascribed to Longinus by modern commentators needs to be revised in light of a more careful reading of the text itself. Milbank proceeds by restoring ethical as well as “historical” contexts. In our case, these remind us that Romanticism is a definable moral, ethical, and esthetic formation. Its characteristic distancing, relegating, oppositional poses–be it the revolutionary or the tramp, the Guru or the genius–are still with us, and the supposedly meta-level “critical” pose of relegation is revealed as something of a sham. Third, the ground of the analysis is further reinforced by originary anthropology. The works of René Girard and Eric Gans are central to this process (we focus mainly on the latter, and then, for reasons of space, mainly on the work most closely relevant to establishing this terrain,The Origin of Language). This then is how we intend to proceed.

4. Not

Few have a problem grasping the idea that the (Romantic) self is significant, even sacrosanct. But there is some resistance to the idea that, in a secular context, this value is in tension with mass democratic society. Imagine, then, a truly equal society–a vision enshrined in the very conception of Romantic modernity. It seems profoundly and self-evidently good, yet even as a vision, it provokes some unforeseen consequences. Stephen Gardner’s book, Myths of Freedom, explores, in a Girardian vein, how the very possibility of equality provokes a mimetic crisis for which a restricted vision of freedom first appeared as a potentially stabilizing solution. Yet, far from proving a force for stability, freedom developed a metaphysical quality which drives ever more radical forms of discontent and critique. An index of the incoherence of such critiques is the way the word freedom can be used: freedom from oppression of course, but also, freedom from want, freedom from anger and anxiety, freedom from despair; also freedom “to” (wealth, self-expression etc.). Gardner is not, of course, calling for a system of deliberate inequality or oppression. Rather

“rational freedom” I suggest is finally mythical–blind to the full extent of the problem of modernity. Modern freedom, with its obsession of autonomy, self-sufficiency, independence, plays into the hands of that very madness, even when it is “rationalized” . . . Freedom famishes rather than dispels the impulse to seek one’s gods in other men. (13)

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For Gardner, such philosophies of freedom reach an apotheosis in the Romantic idiom:

Most critics of modernity, as well as critics of these critics, see modernity as a “dialectic of enlightenment”–which is to say, in terms of the imperialism of calculative reason, technological will, mastery of nature, the iron cage of bureaucratic rationality, mass society, repression, commodity fetishism, and the like, all versus “freedom” in one guise or another–spontaneity, autonomy, authenticity, originality, creativity, will-to-power, self-activity. . . All of these operate at bottom within the terms of romanticism, broadly understood. (xii)

The Romantic act of declaring against can only proclaim itself positively if it uses high-sounding metaphysical terms like “freedom” and “justice.”

Declaring oneself against is a pervasive modern quasi-politics whose poetics has appurtenances with Romanticism, and whose radical posturing does nothing to evade an entanglement with the Other it proclaims to denounce or evade. Both Gans and Girard have shown this in quite detailed analyses of Romantic literary classics. One of the authors of the present work has summarized the structure as follows:

For (Girard’s) Dostoevsky, the heroism so typical of romanticism is merely the symptom of a more slavish servitude expressed as self-possessed “pride.” Pride, in this sense, is evinced by those pervasive forms of “negative imitation”: the pursuit of individual distinction by doing what others don’t do. The most obvious paradox of negative imitation is that it is still thoroughly entangled with the Other–the acquisition of putative “difference” demands a meticulous observation of others (and perhaps even their approval) so that the romantic subject can distinguish himself or herself from them. Thus, fierce individualism leaves the mimetic relation unscathed. (Fleming, 2004:15)

The stance reflects the ambivalent structure of individuality-in-general: at once sacred-unique and flattened-banal, the Romantic subject is an always a convenient locus or pretext for the enactment of a mimetic crisis. Even declaring against requires tacit approval, an antagonism staged in terms identical to one’s purported rivals.

Because its “politics” constitutes a defined element of Romantic structural poetics, it allows for the ready identification of Romanticism when enacted (rather than being itself any kind of profound critique or ontology). Romantic against-ness was not abolished by the onset of modernity or even postmodernity. It is still very common. For instance, two quite popular writers, Hardt and Negri, write beneath the heading “Being-Against: Nomadism, Desertion, Exodus” in their book, Empire:

To us it seems completely obvious that those who are exploited will resist and–given the necessary conditions–rebel. . . . If there is no longer a place that can be recognized as outside, we must be against in every place. This being-against becomes the essential key to every active political position in the world, every desire that is effective–perhaps of democracy itself. . . . Whereas in the disciplinary era sabotage was the fundamental notion of resistance, in the era of imperial control it may be desertion. Whereas being-against in modernity often meant a direct and/or dialectical opposition of forces, in postmodernity being-against might well be most effective in an oblique or diagonal stance. (2000:210-12)

Or not. We have dealt with the substantive thesis of this book in a previous issue of this journal and have no wish to address the problems in its conception of the field (Fleming and O’Carroll 2003/2004). But if we set aside the absurdities of their argument, we have yet to explain the attractiveness of this writing, of its apparent political force. At stake in the politics is the stance the writers take. We would also say this: its rhetorical force is actual; it is its putative politics that is merely apparent.

Modern Romantic “declaring against” faces the problem that writers in the nineteenth century faced: the turn against can only proclaim itself positively if it empties terms like “freedom” and “justice” of local meanings. It does this by imbuing them with metaphysical qualities. Gardner himself does not explore what he means by Romanticism in any detail. There is no need to. Like us, he founds his analysis of freedom not in the claims of systems or writers about it, but in the work of Girard. He reasons it this way:

Anthropology is neither an ethics nor a politics, but, he seems to suggest, more fundamental than either, because it addresses man on the level of the primitive origin and ultimate unraveling as “order” in the most basic sense. . . . More simple, it is a deconstruction of the social mechanism of envy, violence, and pride . . . Although his anthropology implies a certain reconciliation to liberal modernity, it also indicates just how far history is beyond the panaceas of politics–or philosophy–that is, beyond human control. (13-14)

We are very used to tracing these questions in the distinct theatres in which they seem to occur–freedom and justice are proper to philosophy and politics, defiance and alienation to psychology and sociology, forms of expression to the arts and so on.

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But the above distinctions are themselves Romantic divisions. The tendency to such “discipline”-based division is probably co-incident with the rise of Romanticism, even if it is not our purpose to establish so large a claim. Rather, all we seek to point out is that a broader sundering of axiology made coherent analysis of Romanticism–or whatever one chose to call it–difficult for almost a century. How could it be analyzed when confronted with the naturalized and apparently self-evidentiary notion of the individual that emerged in all these domains? How could it be analyzed when the contexts that informed it belonged in one discipline, the attitudes that drove it in another, the methods for its analysis in yet another, the texts that revealed its defining structures in yet another? If this seems like a plea for interdisciplinarity, it is no such thing (or at least not in the usual sense). What it does rather is show where the appeal for a generic interdisciplinarity comes from in the first place: a sense of thwarted possibility, or potential merely glimmered. Interdisciplinarity proved as naïve as the grids it succeeded, as many of the supposedly interdisciplinary fields yielded to an uncontroversial common denominator of cultural relativism. For even if one could get the materials together, how could one analyze it when one wing of sundered axiology repeatedly announced–from Rousseau to the early Romantics to Nietzsche–rather like a one-winged and one-legged budgerigar that it now ruled the roost and everyone else should listen to its unique singing? Michel Serres catches the exquisite irony of this pathetic scene:

The eighteenth century. . . sought to remove all rationality from anything that was not science: it’s science’s bid to take over the totality of reason. Those areas suddenly bereft of reason include religion, of course, literature and the humanities, as well as history and the past: they are consigned to the irrational. And the nineteenth century Sturm und Drang will confirm this momentous decision by confining all literary moments to myths and dreams. In this regard, the history of science, epistemology, scientists and even the man in the street went along with this idea, which is the source of the usual historical diagram: reason later, unreason before. What can we call this, except prejudice? (51)

The irony in the fact that Goethe, one of the most widely knowledgeable artists, had much to do with this transformation from within the artistic realm must be studied elsewhere. To be sure, there were good reasons for this turn on the part of these early Romantic artists (in this respect, Tobin Siebers shows very well in the Romantic Fantastic a propos the Romantic recourse to the supernatural both the reasons for the turn, and the problems of exclusion that arise from it). Yet what matters is that these artists actually embraced the new collapsed axiological status within which they found themselves, preferring the role of mad seers to that of see-ers who comment on the madness. The problem thereafter was that the poetics of Romanticism can readily be traced in esthetic texts and theory, but even the best writers could not escape the remnant space in which they found themselves.

5. Esthetics Sundered: Failed Attempts at “What” and “When”

What then are the poetics of Romanticism according to those who are best situated to study them? There are many excellent studies. They all yield insights into the poetics of the figure of Romanticism. This figure is present from Rousseau onwards. From Coleridge’s reveries of Xanadu to the dying heroines of Romantic operatic melodrama (Puccini’s Mimi or Verdi’s Violetta): all these are recognizable, notwithstanding the distinctiveness of the voices, even of the critiques. They share in the sense of outsideness, the uniqueness of spirit, the exultation in their personal pain the sheer extent of which supposedly lends their life its genius–and is imagined as supplying our life with its meaning, albeit on a lesser scale (we, the merely mortal circle of readers, the crowd that supplies validation). In their contempt for us, they tell us of the heights of human experience, of alienation, of suffering, of almost vengeful vindication. Literary criticism in particular has revealed the varieties of writing that supply these heroes and heroines, the genres which best support them and the highest moments of those genres (the works of the English Romantic poets, for instance, not their playwrights) as well as the fields of resonance (e.g., German Romantic music, Sturm und Drang, Goethe’s Faust plays, French realism, and later, German expressionism in all the visual arts, including film). Sundered esthetics, even in these highly literary accounts, always seeks to restore links. This was true even in the time of “new criticism” which, for all its rhetoric of the text-as-object, always sought to situate texts before trying to describe what they did.

But “new criticism” was a mere recasting of what Serres says about early Romanticism. That is, it sought something positive in the fact it was to be quarantined in its field of effectivity, and like the earlier one-legged budgerigar, it too squawked loud and long about its novelty. It was neither novel, nor did it respect the absurd limits it appeared to set itself (in fact, setting them allowed them to be broken repeatedly, a kind of politically correct lip service that once uttered, allowed commentary to make all sorts of observations).(1) Always seeking the join, it imagined itself as having found it when, in its most truly Christian moment, it sought self-abolition by dissolving itself into the new field of cultural studies. There, it imagined, politics and esthetics might be reconnected. The imagining was temporary. The failure of this project, evident even before it properly got going, was caused by a number of things, notably an epistemological uncertainty about the grounds of cultural analysis (what was culture, how was it to be discussed, what were its methods?) and a series of new no-go areas, things not to be discussed (how did esthetics get prohibited, for instance?).

Yet in the moment before cultural studies erupted, a number of interesting projects occurred within the umbra of esthetics. In addition, some commentators simply disregarded prevailing Romantic-modern norms and generated careful analyses of the poetics of Romanticism, among other things. The three writers we wish to consider are not, in any sense, iconoclasts. On the contrary, they work with traditions of one sort or another. It is just that they do not fit the “cultural studies” version of culture on the one hand, or the entirely residual version of esthetics on the other. For this reason, they each supply interesting starting points for an anthropoetics of Romanticism in the form of a preliminary reopening of the field of axiology in the full sense. Yet they are each trapped in an ethical roundabout from which there is, apparently, no escape.

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The first seeking an exit is the reception esthetician, Hans Robert Jauss. Jauss often touches on the relationship between the rise of a particular esthetics, notably what he calls the esthetics of genius (Romanticism), the arts in which it is practiced and the audience for which it is created. This in turn leads him to wonder about the relations between such esthetics and other social fields:

declarations concerning poietic capacity in the technical sphere remained rare . . . But they had always been expressed in poetry and art, which is also shown by the new concept through which the creative self-understandings that frees itself from creation according to models was able to express itself: genius as the quintessence of competencies that set poietic capacity above creation according to patterns and learnable rules was named and characterized in the aesthetic sphere before it was attributed to the scientific discoverer and technical inventor and subsequently also to the major political and military figure. (50).

Jauss’ attempt to ground his analysis in a regimen that combined sociology, esthetics, and pietistic hermeneutics was suggestive but ultimately inadequate. Its value lay in calling attention to circularity of definition, resulting on the one hand from impoverished post-Kantian esthetics (which we will look at briefly in the next section) and on the other, from a sociological rather than anthropological view of the scene on which the Romantic hermeneutic–and poetic of genius–was enacted.

The circularity he seeks to short-circuit with the Schleiermachian hermeneutic circle of understanding is a generic problem. It has come into view even for those who confine themselves to the polite version of literature, as in this attempt to say what Romanticism is or was:

One way is to return to the authors we have always known to be Romantic, and then generalize a concept out from what we find: following this route, Thomas MacFarland identifies more than fifteen “hallmarks” of Romanticism. The method is circular obviously, because you must presuppose what is “Romantic” to make the selection of works from which to deduce an idea of “Romantic”; but this circularity is intrinsic to the pursuit. (Perry 3)

The latter claim is wrong, but we will leave it for now as a statement of the problem: that is, the writer, Seamus Perry helpfully identifies this sort of conundrum (an oscillation between an empirical and a conceptual account of the issue). He is also right to point to the fact that

The single most important fact about the word [Romanticism], as it appears to the literary history of the British Isles, is that it is a posthumous invention: the Romantics did not know that was what they were. (4)

And of course, they still don’t.

These definitional roundabouts, be it the reductio of the Perry-style commentator or even the inadequately grounded fusion of poetics and society under a hermeneutic that freely admitted circularity, are broached from a different direction by the eccentric yet anthropologically inclined systematizer of myth, Northrop Frye. Frye returned frequently to the topic of Romanticism after Fearful Symmetry, his famous study of Blake, a figure, like Rousseau, whose most famous work (notably “Songs of Innocence”) appeared before the French Revolution. We have not space to consider this important writer in any detail here, but we do wish to look at a later paper published on Romanticism from a talk he gave in 1962. Once again, like Perry, he broaches the definitional issue:

Romanticism is not a general historical term like “medieval”: it appears to have another center of gravity in the creative arts. We speak most naturally of Romantic literature, painting, and music. We do, it is true, speak of Romantic philosophy, but what seems to us most clearly Romantic in that are such things as the existential ethic of Fichte or the analogical constructs of Schelling; both of them, in different ways, examples of philosophy produced by an essentially literary mind. (1963:1-2)

Frye’s thesis on Romanticism, like the works of Jauss, entails a contrast with much earlier modes of thought. Where Jauss contrasted idioms of reception from an earlier society and culture, Frye identifies a shift “in the spatial projection of reality . . . [leading] to a different localizing of the various levels of that reality” (5). This leads Romantic poets to situate God “within” whereas earlier poets, even including Milton, situated God “up there” (8). This, of course, needs scrutiny in a historical-theological sense, in line with the work, for instance, of John Milbank, who examines the change from an Augustinian conception of earth and heaven to a medieval nominalist conception of self, soul, and place (see Milbank 1993:418-22).

Yet Frye is correct to orient his analysis towards esthetics on the one hand and a quasi-cosmography on the other. This is no closed roundabout, if one is brave enough to take the exit. On the contrary: we are beckoned; an axiology grounded in a moral universe comes into partial view. Its other aspects–the ethical/anthropological, the spiritual, the emotional and the erotic–are all already implied. Witness this:

The metaphorical structure of Romantic poetry tends to move inside and downward instead of outside and upward, hence the creative world is deep within, and so is heaven or the place or the presence of God. (16)

It might sound tenuous, but it is profoundly intuitive and correct, even if we can verify none of it yet. It is very easy to jeer at terms like “downward” and “upward,” directionality without place, notions without discipline. Yet Frye understood very well that formalized anti-Romantic movements failed to outflank that which they sought to deride, that they had “no resources for becoming anything more than a post-Romantic movement” (24). He himself had little more in the way of resources; yet his intuitions, his close reading of what he looked at in terms of what it must anthropologically and structurally means: all this led him to avoid falling into what he described, a rarity indeed.

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6. Towards a Restoration

To give an intuition of what a full axiology might look like before we can deploy it, we begin again with the work of John Milbank. Milbank is a theologian, and the reason esthetics only emerges as a partial field in his work is simple enough: it is not what preoccupies him (his is a thesis, as we mentioned earlier, about the relationship of secularity and the sacred in Western culture). We cannot trace Milbank’s thesis in this essay. Suffice to say that for Milbank, there are a number of key turning points in the history of Christendom traceable in the works of a number of writers (Augustine, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Kant, Derrida, and Deleuze). In his work, the shift after Aquinas is the most important, but the work of Kant is also very important to an understanding of the Romantic-modern conception of secular and sacred. In passing, Milbank makes observations on esthetics that, while sketchy, are indicative of what an axiological analysis of Romanticism might one day look like.

Milbank does work on Kant that one wishes Lyotard had done on his way to the very idea of postmodernity. That is to say, unlike Lyotard, Milbank actually establishes the relationship in Kant of judgement in general and esthetic judgement. He does this in a number of places, the most important of which is “The Soul of Reciprocity” (377-84). Milbank here articulates what Lyotard merely takes for granted: that the Third Critique deals not merely with esthetic judgement, but with judgement as such (and that, therefore, esthetic judgement plays a major role in Kant’s conception of judgement in general) (383). Like Lyotard, Milbank finds that Kant’s attempt to find bounds to judgement fails, but he does not therefore seek to pour everything into that failure and call it “postmodern.” Milbank seeks, on the contrary, to understand this failure at the point where Kant distinguishes the sublime from the beautiful. This, Milbank insists is where Kant goes wrong:

For Kant, the sublime concerns time before space, since anything spatially immense can be superseded, but we can never synthesise an infinite time series. But this upsets the idea that the sublime lies simply beyond the furthest margin. For since time is truly endless and ungraspable, it seems that we should always await the next instance of the unfolding of temporal moments before reaching a final verdict on anything. Therefore the sublime limit is encountered not at the edge, but within the midst, threatening all conceptuality. (383)

The next step for Milbank is to show that the foundational Kantian esthetic (and we should recall that Kant did, in many respects, found what we think of today as esthetics) is based on an untenable distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that this is an arbitrary distinction:

Even in the case of theoretical reason, one must deduce that there is somehow involved a prior, freely judged selection of a “beautiful” . . . range of phenomena . . . and from this inference it follows . . . that the “frame” (like a picture frame) or boundary around a beautiful object rendering it discrete and surveyable as will be recalled) is actually none other than the brink on the edge of the sublime abyss. Thus what defines the beautiful is that boundary-fading-to-the-infinite of the sublime, which in time might endlessly further re-define . . . such that the experience of the aesthetic sublime is always at a place of purely conventional stoppage. (383-84)

The argument, heir to Derridean and other recent traditions, re-opens the need to examine judgement in general in relation to esthetic judgement (first quarantine station) and then, to look at the way the merely beautiful–the entire field of arts in other words–is reduced to a defined theatre (second quarantine station). Finally, in this essay, and in another extraordinary analysis of “Longinus,” Milbank alludes to the fact that esthetics is not merely a result of the way something is wrought, but crucially related to what is depicted. The recourse to Longinus is apt, and it is to Milbank’s credit that he rescues this text from the readings of Enlightenment and Romantic esthetics that understand it as dividing the two fields (the beautiful and the sublime) absolutely from one another, and thence, of dividing what is depicted from how it is done (third quarantine station).

Milbank shows us the genesis of a certain view of esthetics, and we have already seen the widespread view that the figuration of Romanticism is something of only esthetic interest. But what do those who claim to know this mean? In most of the treatments–including the most exhaustive–of the Romantic figure, be it Byron or the stance of his narrative voice, be it Coleridge and the taciturn ancient mariner, we find the literary treated as the self-evident domain of which and in which may be included Romanticism as a tradition or a genre.

How very convenient. In this picture, literature, as Serres correctly observed, lies on the side of “myth” and “the past.” By designating Romanticism as esthetic, it too is quarantined to the myth and to the past.

We contend to the contrary that the two formations are not to be so quarantined, that to do so is manifestly wrong. In addition, we suspect that the two formations are themselves inter-related: that is, the Romantic is the precondition for the full emergence of the literary as one-legged budgerigar, while also, the budgerigar and behind it, the hidden true formation of esthetics, yielded the immense treasury of genres and modalities needed for the constitution of Romantic and then modern subjectivity. In this picture, all the so-called sciences of the self are derivative of the subject that the Romantic-literary supplied, especially, but not only, the self (psychology), the society (sociology, politics, etc.), and the naïve rational subject (economics).

Books that explore the origins of Romanticism would do well to ask the more basic questions concerning what is reputed to be its lair: what is esthetics, what is literature, what is the literary?

7. What is Literature?

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“Literature” animates that ambivalent Romantic artifact, the individual. We said we would return to the question of literature itself. The reasons by now should be clear: “Literature” in the grand sense of the term did not (and maybe does not) exist without Romanticism. This is not condemnation. To the contrary, Literature is probably the best name for the representational schema that emerges from the schism in value: the schism itself leads to a distinction between morality and ethics, and these two and esthetics, followed by a host of further derivative sunderings (form and content, high and low culture, and so on). The edifice that anchored an entire culture was disintegrating. “Literature” is the representational locus of the slow motion axiological tectonics we still hear shrieking today in the endless putative refutations of intertwined value formations in texts. As we said earlier, Literature includes not just creative and imaginative writing, but also, writing about that writing (commentary), and some of the writing about the meaning of that writing (literary theory, philosophy of literature, etc.). After Romanticism, Literature is one of the sense-making systems of the world.

Hence our interest in the one winged budgerigar. Its song has long been overlaid with shrill ones of modern formalistic wonder and provocation, of postmodern abandonment of the very possibility of formal wonder (not to mention the admission of formerly low culture to the ruins of the birdcage in which it continues to sit). The schisms that underpin the rise of the Romantic field lead directly to the rise of literature and all its successors. In this respect, it is not enough for us to simply repeat our contention that the axiological trinity broke up. We need now to see how this partition works in order to see the pivotal role literature-in-general played and continues to play in generating worlds and selves to inhabit them. Romanticism, the ambivalent individual self, comes into view as a possibility only after the self can display a unique spirit vis-à-vis the universe (replete moral philosopher), a unique intentionality vis-à-vis society (replete ethical judge) and a unique expressivity vis-à-vis an audience (replete site of esthetic production and reception). But this cannot happen if God, society, and decorum are aligned with each other. The slow rupture of this alignment began as a loosening so that the one became three, and as the separation progressed, the site of expressivity gained voice as a site of self-evidence. By this, we mean that literature appears, from the very outset of Romanticism, as a site of display to be sure, but also, one that operates as a self-evidencing structure of esthetics. It did so by effecting the illusion of a break from ethics and morality (and by corollary, the most important corollary, these two themselves appeared as distinct domains of inquiry).

Literature as it is now understood implies a strut that was not there before Romanticism. From about 1750, literature became a self-evidently distinguishable and replete formation: that was the point. It is true that, at first, the splints and mirrors of morality and ethics continued to hold it in place in the universe and in the social world. But the one-winged beast offered its song to that world and universe in ways that presupposed nothing more than one individual genius, one pen and paper, and one circle of adoring admirers to confirm the illusion.

The best evidence of the changes are to be found in the opening pages of prose fiction works in the lead-up to fully fledged Romanticism. In Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, for instance, there are protective devices designed to reassure the reader that the narrator–and the novelist–is not a scoundrel. By the early 1800s, however, these devices have fallen away, and even worthy novelists like Jane Austen can simply mark the text Pride and Prejudice: a Novel (1985:49). The shift is well enough known. But we need to be careful in interpreting it. Its significance lies not in the fanciful domain (fairy tales and other such tracts exist well before this time) and not in the realm of artificing per se (this we can find in antiquity), nor even in the rise of prose fiction forms (another rather older domain). Rather, it lies in the fact that the narrative is not principally told to instruct morally or ethically, nor even to escape, but for reasons ofserious enjoyment. The stodgy-sounding formulation sounds familiar to us (an echo of Victorian literary theory perhaps). But what the retrospective glance obscures is the fact that the serious enjoyment was now able to be undertaken for its own sake.

The question, “what is literature?” is hardly new. Our response situates it coevally with Romanticism. Posed genetically, the etymological dimensions of the network of words encircling literature–esthetics, literature, literary–offer illustrative support to our claims. Esthetics is only used as a word since the 1750s, modified slightly by Kant where issues of the sublime and the beautiful, as we have just seen, are considered. It referred originally to the senses, and to knowledges available to the senses, but it was always significant as a modern coinage, and it is to Kant that we owe its modern significance (Williams 1976:31). Literature, another apparently old word, referred for most of its English life to literacy. In the mid-eighteenth century, the word refers to the “practice and profession of writing” (185); again it is only in the nineteenth century (surprise! surprise!) that we find the term literature and its modern sense of imaginative works of poetry, prose, and drama (187). A similar pattern is observable in the evolution of the word literary, originally a synonym for literacy (185).

These observations are only suggestive. They indicate conventional conceptions at particular points in time, no more (and no less). So we are not suggesting that there was no literature prior to 1750. On the contrary, we contend that the axiological situation prior to this time was this: beauty, truth, and morality were still able to be aligned with each other, all of them rendered coherent by an overarching and organizing framework of grace and nature. It is true that the clarity of this alignment was already fading by the time of the Renaissance and maybe, if we look closely for consequences in Milbank’s work, even earlier. Indeed, contrary to the view that Romanticism simply burst incommensurably onto the scene as some sort of entirely new paradigm in–say–1789, we contend that it emerged gradually, the explosive appearance reflecting the cumulative convergence of the new literary demanded by the new subjectivity, comprising as Gans rather amusingly puts it, “new wine in old bottles.” Such would be our hypothesis: there is an origin, and these moments are describable as is the point when it is fully fledged, what arose from it is what is described in the various analyses of Romantic poetics; it did not arise in one stroke although it seemed to do so.

To locate this origin, we need an approach able to describe both the progressive genesis we now hypothesise, as well as its defining features. As what we describe–a radical axiology–is itself, in our view, foundational of the supposedly already-founded studies of self, society, and homo economicus, we need a yet more originary form of analysis than any of these, and it is to this kind of inquiry we now turn.

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Of sundered esthetics (the one-winged budgerigar, say, of literature and literary theory), of an ethics cut off from its grounds (be they theological or anthropological), and of Romanticism, that half-understood formation grasped mainly through its figuration in the doleful Romantic who yet reaches out for approbation, we have seen a range of explanations, suggestive but for the most part insufficient even on their own terms. Yet when presented together, especially in the section above, we see how we approach the possibility of a new mode of inhabiting what we have until now merely sought to describe. An approach that combines a ground of analysis and a sound orientation towards the poetics of the figure of the Romantic is now available, and we write of it beneath the heading of the title of this journal.

8. Anthropoetics

In an excellent survey essay, Richard van Oort traces three ways of examining fiction. He calls them the logical, the phenomenological, and the anthropological approaches. The logico-semantic, epitomized by some ingenious excursionary work by John Searle, asks how it is that fictional works “can mean without referring” (439). The phenomenological approach, exemplified by the work of Roman Ingarden, an antecedent to reception theory, posits a theory of fictional meaning based on a distinction between primary and derived intentional objects in communication in general and literary texts in particular (448). Searle, for van Oort, is unable to hold apart the two domains of reference and slides into the paradox he seeks merely to present: “to transcend this basic ontology is to abdicate the very structure of reality itself” (447). Ingarden on the other hand defers some of this difficulty by substituting for it the equally irresolvable paradox of intersubjectivity (451-52). As van Oort says,

for both Searle and Ingarden the problem of fiction is characterizable as a logical-semantic paradox. For Searle, fiction is a form of pretense whereby an author partakes of a language game in which sincerity is not expected. . . . Ingarden’s model . . . ultimately . . . makes the same claim: fictional sentences are quasi-judgements which arrest the logical passage from (conceptual) meaning to (worldly) reality. (455)

So fiction–and thence literature–defies the approaches taken by Ingarden and Searle. These explanations fail because of their grounds of analysis. To attempt to explain fiction logically-semantically as Searle does is to fall into the hall of mirrors itself. To seek to stabilize its fields of meaning from within an already presupposed literary framework as Ingarden does should lead to a reframing of the literary itself. But Ingarden (like Jauss and Iser after him) baulks at the task, although Jauss is clearly more aware of what is at stake (witness his attempts to engage then “East” German attacks on the supposed idealism in the Western tradition of reception theory).

What is needed is an anthropological account of the poetics of literature. We believe this need is best fulfilled by generative anthropology, which itself can be situated with frameworks partially mapped out by René Girard. Van Oort argues the case in relation to fiction in the following way. Eric Gans has long sought to develop an account of the origin of language; he has done so according to the principle of parsimonious hypothesis (458). This principle, reified from works since the time of William of Ockham, affords an originary hypothesis because it posits a scene for the origin of language. Working with the Girardian notion of mimesis, Gans goes on to offer a twist of his own: the two hands reaching for the appetitively attractive object resolve violence by deferring it via language. Then, the sign

emerges when both subject and model, in aborting their appropriative gestures, become aware that they are now, not appropriating the object, but in fact designating it. The sign allows mimesis to continue, not as an appropriative gesture, but precisely as a representation of the object. From the (horizontal) appetitive relation between the subject and the object is born the vertical relation of the sign and the referent. (460)

If course the sign itself has material existence, but as van Oort very rightly says, the designated object “becomes an intended object, irrevocably divorced from the original appropriative gesture” (460). This is how the model addresses the roundabouts arrived at by the other two models: it explains the paradox of the sign. Indeed, as he goes on to show, the sign, once objectified, “can itself become an object of reflection” (461).

The origin of language and the origin of literature–or fiction for that matter–are thus not so far apart as one might imagine. Readers of this journal, we hope, can accept the abbreviated version we have just given of Gans’s work on the hypothesis and the origin of language (we have written on it ourselves in a previous issue). But we must now move a little more slowly, to trace the way the esthetic sign works, to trace, that is, the coeval onset of Romanticism and the literary in terms of a genuine anthropology.

9. Gans

In Gans’s work, the axiological dyad of ethics and esthetics is grounded in an anthropological conception of the sacred. Whether it be sociological, anthropological, or even theological, the crucial move is to grasp ethics and esthetics as grounded by this third formation, grounded and triangulated, as in an inverted equilateral, the two spires of ethics and esthetics seem, in the West, to thrust apart from each other and their point of genesis. Appearances are deceptive. The hall of those who see division–whether as three unrelated fields, or who imagine that the secular has somehow shaken the structure off by deformalising Kant’s formalisation or by breaking ethics off from morality–is more a citadel of academics than a population of fools, however naïve the position ultimately proves to be.

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For us, on the contrary, the easier task is to reveal the obscured points of this gigantic inverted equilateral, and to link it to the field of Romanticism and the literary. Gans has offered a tantalizing sketch of how this might work in Originary Thinking. This work, as well as a number of essays (notably the important sketch of the history we are about to outline in “Aesthetics and Cultural Criticism”) allows us to transcend the circularities of representation not just in the originary scene of language and the human, but also, in the subsequent scene of esthetics. In particular, it allows us to move past the roundabout of empirical versus conceptual definitions of Romanticism that we have seen already. Or as Gans puts it, these two inter-relate like this:

Instead of seeking a sociological explanation for an anthropological phenomenon, we define the latter in terms of the minimal conditions for its appearance. Only after “interpretation” has been understood in the most general possible sense doe we examine its specific historical manifestations. This is not an antihistorical position; on the contrary. The best way to respect history is to situate historically known behaviours with respect to the hypothetical beginning of history. (1998:67)

In other words, empirically known texts, events, and so on do not themselves supply the originary hypotheses. These have to be applied in a provisional and heuristic way. This applies as well to the beginning of a particular esthetic as it does to the beginning of language and the horizon of the human.

In all these situations, we need to “re-imagine” or hypothesise the genesis of original human constructions, be they language as such or esthetics. Gans does this by positing a “scene” of origin, minimally conceived, in which a particular structure, known to us afterwards, first emerges. In the field we are examining, it can be as well applied to esthetic as non-esthetic texts, to plays as well as to other forms of art. Commenting on the work of reception theorist Wolfgang Iser, Gans remarks that

[his] apparently irenic passage does not lack for indications of either the violence of mimetic conflict or the necessity of its deferral: interdiction, transgressive ecstasy, fracture, otherness, duality, and the slightly sinister “stabilization.” What we are “barred from” is the sacred center of the stage, the locus of sacrifice that we cannot usurp without provoking collective violence. But as Iser’s exposition shows, the aesthetic is not limited to a usurpatory wish-fulfillment. What truly produces “stabilization”–the deferral of violence that culture obtains by means of representation–is that we continue to speak to ourselves through the unreal possibility of staging. Our very humanity originates in the scenic center where we must stand in order to become users of language but that we can only ever occupy on the fictional stage of our imagination. (2000:55)

The anthropological approach to known poetics works by hypothesising, after the fact, the necessary minimal conditions for its emergence as a form. This supplies not only a basis for historical schema, but also, a structural poetics adequate to these schemata.

In such a framework, the usual scholarly divisions of literary or esthetic periodisations are unlikely to hold. The usual reason for this is that they are not sufficiently literary to offer a genuine poetics. A sound poetics should be a good device for identifying wider axiological shifts. But poetics itself has been subordinated to other ends. Thus, terms like “Elizabethan” or “Jacobean” do not mean anything in our inquiry: they reflect sociological structures superimposed onto underlying poetics of artworks of that time. Even terms like “Medieval” or “Baroque,” which seem to refer not just to monarchs or particular countries, are of limited value in this sort of inquiry. In broad brush terms, there are just three major structures of poetics: one where the sacred, ethical, and esthetic are not just indivisible, but are actually indistinguishable. This is ritual culture in the sense described by Girard. Gans says he will discuss five categories of ethic-esthetic configuration, but that these fall into “two broad groups,” both of which necessarily are distinct from Girardian ritual culture (Gans 1993:127). Gans does not, of course, stop at this broad classification. But he does offer reasoning for the limited number of esthetic systems in the world:

Insofar as the ethical systems through which human culture has evolved give rise to new forms of resentment, they require new means to accomplish its deferral; in particular, they require new esthetics. The five esthetics . . . fall into two broad groups: traditional–classical and neo-classical; and modern–romantic, modernist and postmodernist. This list is not indefinitely extensible. Finer divisions would obscure similarities in art’s relationship to its audience that cut across specific esthetic traditions. The limited number of esthetics reflects the limited number of genuinely new ethical systems in human history. (1993:127)

Some of these labels seem recognizable. But we need to be careful with the associations we make. Neo-classical axiology refers not to seventeenth century esthetics indicated by a narrowly focused movement in architecture, although it does happen to include that period. Rather, it refers to the diverse revivified classicism of Aquinas, Dante, and Michelangelo as well (hence the name: neo-classical).

Gans sketches the onset of the Romantic esthetic in terms of a transition from traditional to what he calls pre-Romanticism. The neo-classical structure is such because Christianity transformed the classical esthetic by requiring dramatic significance to emerge from the locus of the scene, and crucial to this significance is the idea that there is no a priori distinction in the worthiness of those occupying the centre (151). The stage was sometimes literal. But as we have remarked above, the theorisation of the scene is a powerful innovation of Gans. And once deployed, it reveals the full axiology, not just its esthetic dimension:

The Incarnation explicitly articulates theology with anthropology; our common possession of an individual scene of representation is the sign of our common origin and the locus of our communion with the trinitary God. The new “inwardness,” the awareness of the divinely guaranteed internal scene of representation must be incorporated into esthetic form. The center of the scene of representation contains henceforth its own self-consciousness. This is not the immanent self-consciousness of the romantic era, but it is a precursor of it. (151)

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Gans paints a picture of neo-classical axiology as moving slowly through a logic already present there from the moment of Christian conversion of Rome in the fourth century. This picture is one we will confirm by a cursory examination of Christian logics themselves (below). The French Revolution is, for most commentators, the official inauguration of Romanticism, yet as we have already indicated, we believe the progression was slower than this, and

By the time the French Revolution put a brutal end to the early modern era, the neoclassical esthetic had already all but dissolved into the preromantic. Preromanticism is new wine in old bottles. (161)

We very much concur.

10. Romanticism

Romanticism is the first modern formation. It subsists still, and does so the more powerfully because so many are unaware of how it works. Romanticism’s major innovations were many. The one that lingers most strongly, perhaps as strongly now as in the halcyon days of Romanticism, is the attribution of meaning to an agonistically defined version of individual suffering. It differs profoundly from the earlier value located in Christ’s suffering because it arrogates that value to the everyday individual’s sense of exclusion (and to this extent is derivative of the earlier sense-making system). But it does so however absurd or trivial that suffering may be and, in the postmodern era, however value-less the event that led to the suffering taking place (so victim-status can be claimed as well by a mountaineer victim who falls off, as a mudslide victim, as a victim of terrorist attack). Some victims are, of course, “real” enough (and suffering now is still suffering). But the infusion of suffering-as-sense is historical, and many are those who make meaning of the sufferings of Romantic figuration. Nor has it gone away. Subsisting still, we need to understand its genesis. Where did this figure, who finds ethical, esthetic, and moral value in his or her own status as excluded, as suffering emerge from, and why? Or: in Girardian terms, how is it that the self-styled peripheral suffering-victim is now–apparently paradoxically–celebrated as central?

Gans calls Rousseau the “father” of Romanticism (1998:75). Rousseau stands on the wrong side of the Revolution, but the claim is not exceptional (and we have made it ourselves). Gans’s innovation is to insist on a transition to Romanticism via, as we have seen, “preromanticism.” This approach refuses the hard-line incommensurability approach of most modern thought which, for all of its deconstructive claims, remains fond of the idea of the (Romantic) notion of the rupture. The fact that something definitely comes into being, and has a definite origin, and can be defined in terms of when it is and is not the full version, does not presuppose a theory of rupture. Romanticism came slowly into being, and it subsists still. And Rousseau is a useful place to start looking for the sacred displacement from Christ into the self, the seat of soul and genius vis-à-vis the crowds, the social. Gans cites Rousseau as heralding the new:

The Rousseau figure of expulsion is the origin of romanticism’s turn to the self as the true center of the scene. Seen from the romantic standpoint, neoclassicism is only an epilogue to classicism. Its need for a guarantee of centrality is reinterpreted in hindsight as an appeal to the only real source of originary intuition, the as yet peripheral self. The public scene will henceforth appear as a mere extension of the individual’s internal scene of representation. From a ritual center it has been degraded to a locus of intersubjective exchange–a marketplace. (163)

Gans’s boldness lies not in identifying the marketplace as the “source” of an esthetic superstructure. This would be a misreading; it is in fact, a variation on a Marxist error, itself a Romantic formation whose chief distinction lies in declaring on the side of the individual’s other–the social, which, en bloc, is duly construed in victimary-resentful terms. On the contrary, Gans reveals an axiology in which esthetic, ethical, and economic structures are read anthropologically (something we noted in an earlier essay that Friedrich Engels came close to doing, but never quite achieved).

The anthropological engine driving Romanticism is a new form of resentment. Gans puts it this way:

The Romantic lifestyle, with the predictable exception of the few radicals, suicides, and the like who took its precepts too literally, is in fact a preparation for life and career in market society. This is the constitutive hypocrisy of romanticism. (166)

To make sense of these cryptic lines, we do well to recall the Girardian notion of the scapegoat. In a traditional society, the scapegoat is one who, resembling everyone else, is selected by rules, which from outside appear entirely arbitrary, then despised, and ultimately ritually destroyed by the many in order to manage mimetic crises. In the Romantic social order, the scapegoat becomes the hero.

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The bizarre outcome is with us still. Victimage is, in modern society, a system of meaning, a way of gaining acceptance. Yet the victim has changed. Rousseau traces himself as heroically different, but does so by emphasizing the ethical rather than esthetic corner of the equilateral. A predecessor of Kant, Rousseau sought to discount all “elite” esthetics by subordinating them to the social (a move that cultural studies scholars would make almost exactly two centuries later). But between Rousseau and the present lay the period of the one-winged budgerigar, cheeping loudly from its perch that art was for art’s sake, that the artist was an unknowable and indefinable genius unconnected to any ethical or moral order. Not that some of the early Romantic heroes and heroines didn’t deserve meritorious assessment of the moral value of their suffering. Jane Eyre is dubbed “an Autobiography” (1966:31). Its heroine has sufferings worthy of any current chatshow: she is a quasi-orphan (47-48), she sees her best friend die (114), is almost married to a man already married (319), nearly perishes in the cold (362), and finally only reconciles herself to Rochester once he has proven his suffering worthy to hers: in a fire that destroys his home, he is nearly blinded trying to save his wife (453), and in the desolation of remote woods, she can at last accept him as a worthy mate (470). Beyond the pain such events might cause, meaning is generated in a way familiar to audiences today: that is, by a catalogue of misfortunes. But Jane’s suffering is also moral in an older sense. That is, the things that she stands for are related to the things she suffers; thence, her triumph is not just one over arbitrary misfortune, but is a full moral, ethical, and esthetic axiology. In the same (writerly) household, Emily Bronte generated Wuthering Heights, whose its characters, Catherine and Heathcliff, are not so morally endowed. Theirs is the genius of champion-victim of being utterly misunderstood, a status of suffering raised to the degree that it has its own value; its counterweight is the apotheosis of Romantic writing: the figures of madness and genius.

The legacy of this is plain enough. Gans contends that there are modern and even postmodern axiologies. Maybe so. If there are, they consist in the fact that this suffering has been democratized (modernism) and ironised and theorized (postmodernism). Yet a certain meaningful agonistic structure–the masochistic rivalry described by Girard perhaps–remains the same: the race is for victim status. It has, as Gans points out, made its sense in the marketplace, and now one can actually find lawyers whose entire business consists in no-fault claims of compensation for damages caused by past events, whether real or imaginary. Gans reads these as an effect of the market-as-axiology. For the most part, we agree. We also believe, however, that the Christian structure that propelled us from classicism through neo-classicism to Romanticism has greater force than his account makes evident. While it is a non-contradictory element in relation to Gans’s outline, we believe it makes a stronger kind of sense of the axiological formations themselves.

12. The Self-Machine

The Romantic figure–be it the ancestral tall dark stranger of the eighteenth century Romance, Wordsworth’s cipher on the moors collecting leeches, the brooding Dracula in his spatially displaced castle–stands defiant in the popular imagination. It is Beethoven defying the prince with his “democratizing genius,” Wollstonecraft with her “Vindications” or the many manifesto writers (including those declaring on the side of the social, like Fourier and Cabet). We have seen how the Romantic is the apotheosis of the literary, itself a product of a crisis of folding of classical and neo-classical formations.

Romanticism is a literary formation. We say again: this opens up axiological workings still going on today, still not understood. There is no question then of a problem of definition. There is certainly no circularity of term and definition. The Romantic idiom can be defined by using its perennially recurring literary “figure” to guide us. This affords the poetics, which, once grounded in an anthropological account of the West, makes good—and frightening—sense of the present.

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This issue marks the tenth anniversary of Anthropoetics and the beginning of its second decade. Particularly appropriate to the occasion is a collective dialogue about GA by the Vancouver group Sparagmos! which includes three Anthropoetics contributors, Andrew Bartlett (X, 1), Chris Morrissey (IX, 1), and Richard van Oort, who has been with us since issue I, 1. The fourth member is Pablo Bandera, son of Cesareo Bandera, author of The Sacred Game (Penn SUP, 1994) and Mimesis conflictiva (Madrid, 1975).

The Australian team of Fleming & O’Carroll, after taking up the ethics of GA in Anthropoetics VIII, 2 and anti-Americanism in IX, 2, further demonstrate their breadth of knowledge and interests with a stimulating exploratory article on the anthropology of Romanticism.

This issue also contains two Girardian studies based on the Bible. Eugene Webb, who has been interested in Girard’s work for many years, suggests a nuanced view of the sacrificial passages of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and Gabriel Andrade, a COV&R stalwart, takes up the central anthropological category of kinship, with specific reference to Jesus’ de-emphasis on kinship relations in the Gospels.

About Our Contributors

Eugene Webb is Professor emeritus of Comparative Religion and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. He has published books on Samuel Beckett, on religion and modern literature, and on Eric Voegelin. His most recent book was The Self Between: From Freud to the New Social Psychology of France (1993). He is currently working on a book on religious thought and the psychology of worldviews.

Chris Fleming is Lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. His research interests include theatre and performance, the philosophy of science, and anthropology. His book, René Girard: Violence and Mimesis was published in 2004 by Polity Press.

John O’Carroll is Lecturer in the School of Social Science and Liberal Studies, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst NSW, Australia. His research interests lie in the area of the philosophy of communication, postcolonial theory, and Western epistemologies of landscapes (especially in Australia and the South Pacific). He has also taught at the University of the South Pacific (Fiji Laucala campus).

Gabriel Andrade is a student/professor at Universidad del Zulia, Maracaibo, Venezuela. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology and a Masters’ Degree in Philosophy. He is currently a Doctorate student at Universidad del Zulia, researching the history and dynamics of courtship and marriage in Latin America.

The Sparagmos! Group is based in Vancouver, B. C. The members:

• Pablo Bandera, aside from being Cesareo’s son, is a theoretical physicist and aerospace engineer, currently Manager of Product Development for fSONA Systems Corp.
• Andrew Bartlett teaches in the English Department at Kwantlen University College in Langley, just outside Vancouver.
• C. S. Morrissey (PGP email: Key ID 0x6DD0285F), a certified member of the Institute for Advanced Physics, teaches Ancient Greek at Simon Fraser University.
• Richard van Oort, a founding member of the Anthropoetics editorial board, teaches in the English department at the University of British Columbia.

Introduction

One of the most challenging questions asked of Jesus is to be found in Matthew 22: 23-30, Mark 12: 18-24 and Luke 20: 27-35. The Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection, address Jesus, telling him the story of a widow who, because of the Levirate law, ends up marrying seven brothers sequentially. “In the resurrection, whose wife shall she be of the seven? for they all had her” (Matthew. 22: 28). The Sadducees wish to embarrass Jesus by driving him to a logical jam, attempting to show the impossibility of resurrection. But, Jesus answers: “Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” (Matthew. 22-30).

Jesus manages to overcome the challenge of the Sadducees and affirms his prescription of love. The Sadducees only think in terms of mimetic rivalry: if the Kingdom of God exists, it is threatened by the brothers’ jealousy over their wife. Jesus’ answer is a way, once again, to proclaim a Kingdom free of mimetic rivalry: brothers who shared a wife will not be rivals, because there are no husbands and wives in the resurrection: only angels all participating of God’s love.

This is a most important passage for mimetic theorists and Girardians. It further proves Jesus’ program of love, placing emphasis on the need to avoid mimetic rivalry. But, the passage is also significant for another important reason: it is one among many passages that display a reaction against traditional concepts of kinship.

The New Testament as a whole may be compared to the most widely read Greek tragedy before the rise of psychoanalysis: Antigone. The Greek heroine is sentenced by her uncle Creon, tyrant of Thebes, after having performed the funerary rites upon the corpse of Polyneices, her brother killed in battle. The conflict between Antigone and Creon has traditionally been interpreted as the struggle between kinship and State: tradition and modernity. Yet, Antigone’s role as a representative of kinship and Creon’s role as a representative of the State are very ambivalent. In Judith Butler’s words (2000: 6), “opposing Antigone to Creon as the encounter between the forces of kinship and those of state power fails to take into account the ways in which Antigone has already departed from kinship . . . how her language, paradoxically, most closely approximates Creon’s, the language of sovereign authority and action, and how Creon himself assumes his sovereignty only by virtue of the kinship line that enables that succession.”

Neither Antigone nor Creon has a definite stand on kinship. They defend kinship relations and duties as much as they ignore them. This same attitude is to be found in the Bible. Kinship is a major concern in the Old Testament. To a certain extent, Ancient Judaism was a kinship-based religion, and throughout all of the Hebrew Bible, kinship is a privileged institution. In the New Testament, kinship no longer enjoys the same prominence; a vast number of passages react against it. Yet, the very first passages of the New Testament (Matthew 1) are a complex genealogy of Jesus. How are we to account for such ambivalence?

Part of the answer may be provided by mimetic theory. Kinship is one of the most important institutions of Culture. If Girard is right, all cultural institutions have their origin in sacrifice. Thus, kinship is, like religion, language and every other major institution, founded upon an originary murder, whose dynamics are kept hidden. Inasmuch as the gospels unveil this murder, cultural institutions no longer work as they used to. Once the truth about the origin of the world is found out, kinship relations are no longer sustainable.

Jesus has come to bring the sword and not peace. His message is profoundly apocalyptical, for in a world where once the truth is known, sacrifice no longer works, and the cultural institutions it supports come tumbling down. Perhaps one of Jesus’ most disturbing words are to be found in what is known as the “Little Apocalypse” in Mark 13. There, he announces the terrible violence that the world will bear. One of the most eerie announcements is: “And brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents, and have them put to death” (Mark 13: 12).

For Raymund Schwager, this passage was of capital importance for his biblical hermeneutics: “At the end of time, conflicts among human beings will become so severe that even the most intimate family relationships will be incapable of healing the rifts, or even of covering them up. To be sure, deadly persecutions within families are not mentioned in general but only in connection with the gospel. But this could very well become the occasion for special enmities, precisely because it uncovers the hidden truth among family members as well as among others” (2000: 149). Even the core of society, the family, will be threatened by the gospels’ revelatory power. Kinship will no longer function, for it is based upon a sacrificial violence that the gospels have made ever more difficult.

There is not, however, a complete withdrawal from kinship institutions in the Bible, not even in the New Testament. As far as kinship is concerned, the New Testament is, to use Gil Bailie’s (1995) words, a “text in travail.” The gospels’ non-sacrificial program certainly is consistent with much of the New Testament’s approaches to kinship. Yet, the New Testament seems to draw the wise conclusion that, even if kinship is sacrificial, we can not reject it altogether. It is certainly one of the “powers and principalities” of this world, but as Paul wisely advised, to reject these powers altogether is a rather foolish thing to do. In what follows, we shall approach how kinship is a sacrificial institution, how the Old Testament made of kinship a central tenet, and how the New Testament displays some significant transformations regarding this issue.

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What is kinship and how does it arise?

For the time being, we shall ignore the intriguing and profound views of David Schneider (1984), an eminent anthropologist who has denied the existence of kinship. Even if his views are worthy of consideration, let us assume a priori that there is such a thing as kinship, and that it has occupied a most important place in the configuration of virtually all cultures.

Kinship may be broadly defined as a system of special relationships among a certain people. This definition, of course, is far from being satisfactory, for individuals may relate to each other and not be relatives. For decades, anthropologists believed that biology is the determinant factor of kinship: two individuals are relatives inasmuch as they share a biological nexus. But, it became increasingly evident that many of the so called ‘relatives’ do not necessarily have a biological connection. Thus, it is a cultural institution, and it is usually (but by no means always) based upon biological facts. Brian Schwimmer (2003) defines it as a system of relationships “constructed from a set of categories, groups, relationships and behaviours based upon culturally determined beliefs and values concerning human biology and reproduction.”

Schwimmer summarizes kinship’s universal features as follows:

• A lengthy infant maturation period that requires a major commitment from one and usually both parents to nurture and educate dependent children.


• The presence of a marital bond that creates an enduring and socially regulated sexual and domestic relationship between two or more people,


• A division of labour based on gender


• A prohibition of intercourse and marriage between close kin, which regulates a widely articulated network of relationships between individuals related by marriage.

Virtually all cultures have instituted strong parent-child relationships, husband-wife bonds, man-woman division, and special relationships, cultural roles, and statuses, according to one’s biological connection with other individuals. In a word, all cultures know of some form of kinship relationship, for the incest taboo is universal, regulating sexual relationships and establishing differences among people according to their kinship status.

The incest taboo may be considered the core of kinship systems. Inasmuch as restrictions on sexual partners come up, Culture creates a system of differentiated relationships that assigns a specific place to each individual, according to his position in the larger system. The incest taboo gives rise to the first great kinship differentiation among individuals: there is a group of people one is forbidden to have intercourse with (relatives), and a group of people one is permitted to have intercourse with (non-relatives).

The incest taboo is a universal institution; thus, kinship is also universal. Yet, this universality is by no means a biological fact. Even if it is a universal feature, it is a cultural feature that regulates biological behaviour. In other words, man is biologically incestuous, but Culture regulates his behaviour, imposing incest regulations and thus creating the cultural concept of kinship.

That is, at least, the view of Claude Levi-Strauss (1967), the guru of kinship studies during the last few decades. Levi-Strauss, a thinker who for the most part is unconcerned with the question of origins, does attribute the origin of Culture to the incest taboo: man became man inasmuch as he regulated his sexual conduct, imposing incest restrictions and differentiating individuals into different kinship classes. Incest taboo and kinship constitute the core of the transition from Nature to Culture, a recurrent cultural theme, according to Levi-Strauss.

Levi-Strauss has gone great lengths explaining how this transition may have occurred. Yet, he has failed (he has not even bothered) to explain why such transition took place. He takes for granted that, all of a sudden, kinship appeared, but he is absolutely not interested in the circumstances that may have forced the appearance of kinship. Perhaps, Girard is right when he denounces that “Levi-Strauss has revived once again this absurd idea [of ‘social contract’ origins], blithely suggesting that one fine day prehuman groupings decided (after some kind of constitutional referendum, no doubt) that cultural differentiations, language, and other cultural institutions would be nice things to have” (1987a: 125).

There must have been an important reason for the appearance of cultural differentiations, kinship being one of the most important. That, according to Girard, must have been the threat of violence. Kinship is a system of cultural differentiation, and differentiation is a reaction and prevention against the threat of undifferentiated mimetic violence. Girard agrees with Levi-Strauss that the incest taboo may have been the first of kinship institutions, but refuses to accept the idea that it is the origin of Culture as such. Before the incest taboo, there must have been a concern and an event that forced human groupings to separate individuals into kinship classes. These, of course, were undifferentiated violence and the victim mechanism.

“If we compare alimentary prohibitions with the incest prohibitions,” Girard writes, “we observe that they function in exactly the same manner. In both cases, in fact, prohibition falls not on rare, distant, or inaccessible objects, but on those that are nearest and most abundant, since the groups has a monopoly on their production” (1987b: 75). In order to avoid violence, men were forbidden to have access to their closest females: their mothers and sisters. This is due to the fact that “the most available and accessible objects are prohibited because they are most likely to provoke mimetic rivalries among members of the group” (1987b: 76). Thus, the fear of violence pressured the first and foremost distinction of kinship systems: the separation of individuals allowed and forbidden with whom to have sexual intercourse.

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But, not only does kinship prevent against mimetic violence. The origin of its development is the basic mechanism that controls violence: victimage. Kinship is, after all, a system of differences. And differential systems have their origin in the victimage mechanism. As the originary victim is murdered by the horde, the psycho-social dynamics of scapegoating create a space of peace. There had never been a moment such as this one. The impact of the victimage scene is so great, that Culture will arise as a system of differences taking the victim as its referent. In Girard’s words, “because the victim, in so far as it seems to emerge from the community and the community seems to emerge from it, for the first time there can be something like an outside and an inside, a before and after, a community and the sacred” (1987b: 102).

Group solidarity and identity, a very special feature of kinship systems, arises from the victimage mechanism. Inasmuch as they have participated in the same murder, for the first time individuals develop a strong conscience of the nexus that binds them. If, before the victimage mechanism, they had certain conscience that they shared a biological nexus, now this nexus is even more strengthened by a cultural sacrificial force. Kinship perpetuates the solidarity and difference that, once generated by the victimage mechanism, is needed in order to sustain Culture.

It should not be surprising, then, that sacrifice and kinship have a very special relationship. In Violence and the Sacred (1977), Girard has provided some interesting ethnological examples of how this relationship is culturally articulated. Among the Tupinamba of Brazil, for instance, the word tobajara has a double meaning: ritual enemy for a cannibalistic feast, and brother-in-law. The difference between a man and his brother-in-law is, ultimately, the difference between scapegoat and scapegoater, victim and community. The brother-in-law is the perfect surrogate victim: he is both an insider and an outsider, well suited for the transfer mechanism.

Another example provided by Girard is that of the Tsimshian and the Niga. At weddings, the kinship grouping of both the bride and groom simulate battles that only end up with the death (real or simulated) of a slave. His death symbolizes the kinship alliance between the newly wed and their relatives.

Out of all the examples provided by Girard, the Oedipus myth is perhaps the clearest expression of the relationship between kinship and the victimage mechanism. Oedipus’ crimes constitute a serious threat to kinship: inasmuch as he is incestuous, he has destroyed all the differentiations needed to sustain a kinship system. Only his violent expulsion will re-establish kinship. The crisis of differences, metaphorically expressed through the plague, will cease after the community projects its violence upon Oedipus. Kinship will be once again born only with the death or expulsion of a scapegoat.

We may well add other examples not provided by Girard, further evidencing this relationship. Robertson Smith’s (2002 [1889]) work on ancient Semite sacrificial ritual has become a classic of the anthropology of sacrifice. According to Smith, Semite sacrifice was originally a great festive meal where kinship groups (i.e. clans) strengthened their nexus by eating the flesh of their totemic animal, from which they claimed descent.

Godfrey Lienhardt’s classical ethnographic study, Divinity and Experience (1988), is a detailed account of the sacrificial rites of the Dinka, an East African people. In one case, sacrifices are offered honouring specific individuals or groups. After the sacrificial victim is killed, its parts are distributed among the members of the community. Each part of the dead victim is assigned to a special category of relatives. Thus, kin classes are separated according to the differentiation of the sacrificial victim.

E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1940) and Meyer Fortes (1945) were well known for their “descent theory.” During their work with the Nuer and the Tallensi, respectively, they theorized about the system of “segmentary lineages,” which provided the basis of organization for many kinship systems. In these societies, kinship groups fuse into larger units depends on the situation of blood feuds. In a conflict, a kinship group sides with another, depending on the proximity of ancestors, thus forming a larger kinship unit. This fusion only takes place inasmuch as both groups share a common enemy. In such a manner, kinship solidarities are strengthened through a common enemy as much as a common ancestor. This same pattern was also noticed by the great 14^thcentury social thinker Ibn-Khaldun (1969), who claimed that war strengthens the asabiyah (solidarity) of a tribe made up of cousins.

It has been noted by anthropologists that kinship is the fundamental institution of all non-Western cultures. Many societies speak no other language than kinship: politics is expressed in terms of kinship, economy functions according to kinship relations, legal systems are dependent on kinship relations, and most religions have a special relationship with kinship. It seems to be a universal institution. Indeed, it is. But, its universality must be explained in terms of its relationship with the victimage mechanism. If, as Girard claims, Culture is only possible with the victimage mechanism, then kinship, a universal institution, must have its origins in scapegoating.

Anthropologists are well aware that Western societies are the least concerned with kinship. In Sir Henry Maine’s (1987 [1861]) terms, the great Western achievement has been the transition from kinship to territoriality, from status to contract. Yet, once again, most anthropologists have not provided a satisfactory account of the reasons for such a transition. If we follow our line of argument, it should not be difficult to realize that, if Western society is the least concerned with kinship, it is because it is also the one society where sacrifice and scapegoating works the least.

Girard has gone to great lengths to demonstrate how the Bible, especially the Gospels, is responsible for Western society’s distance from sacrifice and scapegoating. However, he has said virtually nothing about how the Bible, doing away with sacrifice, has also promoted a detachment from traditional kinship institutions. We now turn to the way in which the Bible has contributed to this process.

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A brief view of kinship in the Old Testament

In the sphere of kinship, the Old Testament and Ancient Judaism present great similarities with the rest of ancient religions. Ancient Israel’s social organization is typical of many ancient societies: the society is differentiated among twelve “tribes,” each claiming a common ancestor. Apart from their common monotheistic faith, the Hebrews appealed to kinship in order to hold together their national identity: they all descend from Jacob. Kinship is the core of most of their daily activities, their political organization and territorial distribution. Throughout the Book of Joshua, each territory of the Promised Land is to be occupied by each of the twelve tribes, according to their ancestors. Monotheism supposed a detachment from tribal conceptions of God, but religious worship was still determined by kinship: the Levites are granted the priestly and sacrificial privileges. To a great extent, Hebrew religious organization was not unlike the Hindu caste system: each kin group is assigned a special status and role in religious and social life.

In a society where individuals were granted roles and statuses based upon their kinship positions, the record of genealogies had to be rigorously kept. Anthropologists and historians know well that extensive genealogies are usually flawed, but Ancient Israel kept a relatively accurate record, due to the appearance of written tradition. Thus, the record of genealogy is a major concern in the Old Testament. For almost every major character that appears in the Bible, his/her genealogy (both ancestors and descendants) is elaborated: the descendants of Cain (Genesis 4: 17-22), the descendants of the sons of Noah (Genesis 5: 1-32), the descendants of Levi (Exodus 6: 16-25). I Chronicles 1:1-9: 44 offers the most complete genealogy to be found in the Bible, from Adam to King Saul and his descendants.

There is no such thing as a “meritocracy” in the Old Testament. Individual achievements are secondary to the achievements of the kinship group. A harsh system of social exclusion is revealed as most individuals are denied ritual privileges because of their poor genealogical record. Some of these unfair stories are to be found in Ezra 2: 59-63 and Nehemiah 7: 63-64.

As far as social organization is concerned, the individual is still subordinate to the kinship group. Bastards and their descendants up to ten generations are denied access to ritual congregations (Deuteronomy 23:2). Theologically, the individual is also subject to the deeds of his ancestors. God will punish not only sinners, but their descendants as well (Exodus 20: 5, 34: 7; Numbers 14: 18, Deuteronomy 5: 9). There are, however, some exceptions. Deuteronomy contradicts itself, proclaiming in 24: 16 that children shall not pay for the guilt of their parents. Theological individualism is also proclaimed in II Kings 14: 6, where a man is to suffer punishment for his own sins, and not for those of his parents.

Kinship, being a cultural system, must impose differentiations among groups of individuals. Apart from incest regulations (Leviticus 18: 7-23, 20: 11-21), separating those allowed and those forbidden as sexual partners, the Old Testament also differentiates among the descendants of a man through primogeniture, an institution of great importance in ancient Israel. It was certainly the motif for mimetic rivalry, as the case of Esau and Jacob shows (Genesis 25: 25-34, 27: 1-40). Regardless of a man’s preference among his sons’ mothers, the law of primogeniture must be followed (Deuteronomy 21: 15-17). Once again, individuals are privileged and condemned, not according to their deeds, but according to their position in the kinship system.

Another most important differentiation of kinship is that between man and woman. In kinship-based societies, social organization is structured by descent groups, and to keep track of one’s genealogy, genders must be clearly separated. Levi-Strauss has accurately mentioned that virtually all societies build binary oppositions and systems of differentiation on gender. Ancient Israel was no exception. Thus, cross-dressing is censured (Deuteronomy 22: 5) as abominable to God. Most likely, in most cultures transgressors of this law would be put to death, as Girard has brilliantly showed was the case for Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae.

It is well known that jealousy and resentment among brothers, in great part due to the preference of the parents and God (through primogeniture and other institutions, such as sacrifice), is a recurrent theme in the Old Testament. Thus, to a certain extent, kinship accelerates mimetic rivalries among brothers. Apart from Jacob and Esau, we find the stories of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4: 3-8), Abimelech and the assassination of his seventy brothers (Judges 8: 29-9: 6), Absalom and Ammon (II Samuel 13:22-29), Solomon and Adonijah (I Kings 1:1-4; 2:23-25), Jehoram and his brothers (II Chronicles 21:1-4).

For centuries, the Hebrews lacked a centralized state. And, when the tribes were politically united during the kingdoms of David and Solomon, the social organization continued to be based upon kinship. The safeguard of Hebrew society was religion, for it kept Israel’s identity throughout the series of calamities they had to endure. But, being a kinship-based society, it also had to be safeguarded by a strong traditional family structure. The collapse of traditional family values would have been disastrous for the Hebrews, and with all certainty, they would have disappeared as people.

All great ancient non-Western civilizations have emphasized some form of filial piety in their religious, political, social, and judicial systems. Confucianism’s cardinal value, hsiao, has shaped Chinese life ever since. Filial piety is the basis of Chinese religious and social life: the due respect that children must show to their parents conditions most other Chinese institutions. One of the institutions that the Romans felt most proud of was the patria potestas in their legal system: a son is subject to his father’s dominion until the latter’s death, and must obey him at all times. Pietas, respect for ancestors, became an important tenet of Roman religious life; and Islam also places great emphasis on filial piety (Koran 31: 14).

Ancient Israel was probably in contact with ancestor worshipers. Monotheism, Israel’s most distinguished institution, would never allow for ancestor worship. But, for a people so concerned with the Law, order in a kinship-based society must be safeguarded by a well-structured hierarchy within the family. Thus, even if ancestor worship was rejected, paternal authority and filial piety and respect still occupied a most important place among Hebrews (Exodus 20: 12; Leviticus 20: 9; Deuteronomy 27:16, 21: 18-21; Proverbs 13: 24). Not unlike the Oedipus myth, transgressors of this institution are to be severely punished.

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National identity was a major concern for ancient Israel. Their national frenzy may appear quite xenophobic to modern eyes, but it was precisely the concern with national identity that allowed them to hold on to monotheism and resist their polytheistic surroundings. Endogamy played a major role in the preservation of national identity. The books of Ezra (10: 1-44) and Nehemiah (13: 23-31) place great emphasis on the need for religious and ethnic endogamy. Concepts of romantic individualistic love are suppressed in favour of national identity.

Ezra and Nehemiah placed great emphasis on endogamy because in prior centuries ethnic exogamy had brought disastrous results to Israel. In some instances, foreign wives are trusted and the relationships are harmonious, as is the case with Ruth. Solomon married hundreds of wives from other nations. Exogamy, Levi-Strauss claims, has a sociological motif. Marrying-out is a way to form alliances with foreign peoples. Thus, Solomon, being a great strategist, came to realize that the best way to keep friendly relations with neighbours was through marriage. Being a cultural institution, then, exogamy is a manner of controlling violence. But, as it is often the case with the Bible, it is proven that conventional cultural solutions to violence are only temporary: strategic exogamy becomes problematic as the marital alliance between Israel and Judah is no longer operative (II Kings 8: 16-24). Furthermore, Solomon’s kinship alliance with pagans (I Kings 11: 1-13) introduces idolatrous and sacrificial practices (I Kings 11: 8); once again, kinship and sacrifice are inseparable.

Apart from endogamy and exogamy, the Hebrews had two institutions that shaped their marriage system: the levirate and parallel cousin marriage. The Levirate rule (Deuteronomy 25: 5-10) held that if a man dies without sons, his brother must take the widow as his wife, and their offspring shall bear the name of the deceased brother. This institution may be seen as a way to look after defenceless widows, but it also displays the great genealogical concern of the Hebrews: not only was it important to know one’s ancestors, one of a man’s greatest honours is to have numerous descendants, as God’s covenant with Abraham shows. If a man refuses to continue his deceased brother’s seed and provide him with descendants, he is subject to censure or even divine wrath, as is the case with Onan (Genesis 38: 3-10). Once again, it should not come as a surprise that the victims of sacred violence are transgressors of laws that concern kinship, for this institution is one of the central pillars of Culture.

Patrilateral parallel cousin marriage, the marriage of a man to his father’s brother’s daughter, was also widely practiced among the Hebrews. If a man has no sons, he will make sure his daughters are married to their parallel cousins. Given the fact that both descent and inheritance were patrilineal, parallel cousin marriage ensured that a man’s descent and property would stay within the lineage. Thus, his seed would continue.

The New Testament’s transformations

Mencius, the great Chinese philosopher, once said that “it is the way of animals to have neither father nor brother” (quotes by Weber, 1951: 236). He was right. “Father,” “brother” and all kinship categories are cultural constructs, usually based (but by no means always) upon biological facts. Thus, kinship is a cultural reality, and only human beings have Culture. Not to have father or brother is not to have Culture, to become an animal. Yet, Jesus proclaims that “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10: 37), or even more shockingly, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14: 26).

If Mencius were right, Jesus, by asking his disciples to abandon their relatives, is asking them to become animals. In a way, he is. He is asking his followers to transcend Culture, not to enter the domain of the animal kingdom as Mencius may have thought, but to enter the domain of God’s Kingdom. There will simply be no kinship institutions in God’s Kingdom, “for in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” (Matthew 22:30).

This Kingdom may appear rather cold to human sensibility. Marriage is a beautiful institution, and to think that in eternity there will be no such thing is a scary thought. Yet, this is precisely what Jesus attempts to show: the Kingdom of God is very different from any worldly kingdom. Whereas, for example, the Koranic images of Paradise are very lively, sensual and human, Jesus’ images are very alien to human institutions. Human kingdoms and their institutions are based upon surrogate violence; God’s Kingdom is based upon love. With love, cultural institutions, such as kinship, will no longer be needed. In a Kingdom totally alien to violence, violence-controlling institutions are unnecessary.

We may well argue that kinship is not only a cultural institution that controls violence. It is also a guarantor of love: frequently, relatives love each other much more profoundly than friends or other non-relatives. Jesus is well aware of this, and that is the reason why he never disregards kinship altogether; he is more interested in the transformation of kinship than in its total elimination.

Thus, Jesus is concerned with marriage and its indissolubility (Mark 10: 2-9, Matthew 19: 3-9), and he favours some continuation with Old Testament kinship institutions. As prescribed in Exodus 20: 14, Leviticus 20: 10 and Deuteronomy 5: 18 and 22: 22, Jesus censures adultery (Mark 10: 11-12). Yet, for Jesus, adultery is more of a spiritual sin than a transgression of a kinship law: “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shall not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Matthew 5:27-28). Furthermore, even in the case of adultery, Jesus begins to show that kinship and marriage laws are only secondary in importance; love and forgiveness is his primal concern. When the Scribes are about to stone an adulterous woman to death, Jesus challenges whoever is without sin to do so. Whereas Moses’ Law commanded stoning to death, Jesus forgives the woman (John 8: 3-11).

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It is perhaps in the apocalyptical sayings where Jesus most prominently announces the demise of traditional kinship. “For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household” (Matthew 10: 35-36). We have no need to interpret Jesus’ apocalyptic message; Girard and Girardians have extensively done so; it suffices to say that Jesus announces terrible things to come because, the truth about humanity and God being revealed, human beings will no longer be able to get along through scapegoating.

The announcement of conflict is ever more terrifying if it takes place within the family. Ever since Aristotle, philosophers and sociologists alike have rightly viewed the family as the microcosm of society. Kinship is a system of social relationships; thus, it is largely based upon scapegoating. Families stay together inasmuch as they have a common potential enemy (hence tobajara: brother-in-law and ritual enemy). The gospel’s revelation will affect even the core of society: families. Not even relatives will get along. Formerly, to do so, they needed scapegoating; now that it will no longer work, brother will turn against brother.

Jesus asks his followers to inaugurate a new community of love, free of kinship categories. Kinship presupposes violence. When Jesus asks his followers to abandon their relatives (Matthew 10: 37; Luke 9: 59-62, 14: 26), he is not asking them to abandon the people as such. He is asking them to abandon the social bond based upon scapegoating violence and form a new community based upon the love of God’s Kingdom.

By no means does Jesus pretend a total destruction of kinship; we may reasonably say that he would have agreed with Mencius: to have no relatives is the way of animals. What Jesus is hoping for is a new form of kinship: one based, not upon scapegoating violence, but upon love, a spiritual kinship. Thus, when “someone told Jesus: ‘Your mother and brothers are outside asking for you’. But, he answered: ‘Who is my mother and who are my brothers?’ And, pointing with his hand to his disciples, he said: ‘These are my mother and my brothers. Because, he who does God’s will, that is my brother, my sister, and my mother’” (Mark 3: 32-35). Jesus’ relatives are those who do God’s will, that is, those who love. One’s kinship will be purely based upon love, not on cultural categories based upon violence.

Furthermore, Jesus uses the language of kinship to articulate his religious message. He expresses his relationship with God as that of a father and his son. Jesus’ concept of “father” transcends biological and sociological facts altogether. The Pharisees, devoted to Mosaic Law and the Deuteronomic condemnation of illegitimacy, hope to embarrass Jesus by asking him “where is thy father?”; Jesus answers: “You do not know me, nor my father. If you knew me, you would know my father” (John 8: 19). Some scholars have interpreted this as Jesus’ embarrassment over his hypothetical illegitimacy: since he does not have a clear biological and sociological father, he recurs to a spiritual father. Jesus’ illegitimacy is unimportant. What is important is the fact that he confronts the Pharisees’ understanding of “father,” namely, biological and sociological, and puts forward a new spiritual understanding of “father” and kinship in general.

Apart from the gospels, the New Testament also shows some continuity with Old Testament kinship institutions. Jesus’ genealogical track is thoroughly kept in Matthew 1: 11-17 and Luke 3: 23-28. Paul censures homosexuality (I Timothy 1: 9-10; I Corinthians 6:9-10; Romans 1: 26-27), as does the Old Testament (Leviticus 18:22, 20: 13). Leaving translation controversies aside, homosexuality is seen as a major threat–above all, to kinship: it makes reproduction and perpetuation of genealogies difficult.Paul also places some emphasis on other traditional concepts of kinship. Obedience of children is recommended (Ephesians 6: 1-4), and he prescribes the traditional gender separation and recommends women’s subjection to men (Ephesians 5: 22-24; I Timothy 2: 11-11-12).

Contemporary feminists may well be scandalized by his words, yet it is Paul himself who, somewhere else, proclaims: “There is no longer any difference between Jews and gentiles, free men and slaves; there is no difference between men and women. For you are all one in Jesus Christ” (Galatians 3: 28). An apostle that so proclaimed “righteousness by faith” and not by the Law, could not avoid doing away with many of the traditional concerns with kinship derived from legal institutions. As an apostle to the Gentiles, he comes to appreciate the uselessness of genealogy: there is no need to prove one’s origins in order to follow Christ. Thus, he warns against genealogical records (I Timothy 1: 4; Titus 3: 9).

Paul may have censured homosexuality because he may have considered it a threat to marriage, one of kinship’s core institutions. Yet, marriage does not seem to be a prime concern for Paul. “He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord, but he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife” (I Corinthians 7: 32-33). Marriage is a worldly institution and God is not concerned with it. Kinship concepts are alien to God’s Kingdom. Yet, Paul knows well that we can not reject altogether the “powers and principalities,” human institutions. Thus, even if non-marriage is better for the service of the Lord, marriage is allowed: “Nevertheless he that standeth stedfast in his heart, having no necessity, but hath power over his own will, and hath so decreed in his heart that he will keep his virgin, doeth well. So then he that giveth her in marriage doeth well; but he that giveth her not in marriage doeth better” (I Corinthians 7: 37-38).

Even if it is a worldly institution unconcerned with God’s Kingdom, Paul well knows that marriage may be a safeguard of love. Thus, even if it is better not to have sex (I Corinthians 7: 1); in order to avoid fornication and loveless sex, marriage, as well as benevolence between spouses, are encouraged: “Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband” (I Corinthians 7: 3-4).

To sum up: both Jesus and Paul present an ambivalent attitude towards kinship. For some cases, Old Testament institutions are thoroughly followed and defended. Yet, for a number of important cases, both Jesus and Paul depart from traditional kinship concepts and reinforce a transformation of kinship categories. As a result, Christianity inaugurates a new understanding of kinship, based, not upon biological facts and sociological constructions, but to spiritual relationships among the new relatives. If, as it has been noted by many anthropologists, for most cultures “blood is thicker than water,” Christianity has put forward the innovation that “faith is thicker than blood.”

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Christianity, a modernizing religion

One of Girard’s most emblematic and celebrated quotes is found in The Scapegoat:“The invention of science is not the reason that there are no longer witch-hunts, but the fact that there are no longer witch-hunts is the reason that science has been invented. The scientific spirit, like the spirit of enterprise in an economy, is a by-product of the profound action of the gospel text” (1986: 204-205). In a word, the gospels and Christianity are to account for the formation of modernity.

No sociologist or historian of modernity would dare deny this fact. Regardless of whether modernity is a good or a bad thing, Christianity has had its great share of influence in the formation of the modern world. This influence is too great to be approached in a short essay. Thus, in track with our main theme, we shall briefly explore how Christianity’s transformation of kinship contributed to the rise of the modern world. If, as I have attempted to show, the New Testament’s transformation of kinship is a logical consequence of the gospels’ revelation of the scapegoating mechanism, then this revelation is the ultimate origin of the great transformations in the kinship systems of the modern world.

Probably since Max Weber (1951), historians and sociologists have all agreed that the Western kinship and family systems have been a determining factor in the formation of the modern world. Modernity is a rather broad concept, but sociologically speaking, we could follow Alan Macfarlane (2000) when he tells us that modernity’s main feature is the “separation of spheres.” In modern society, no area of social life is dominant over the rest. Whereas in Communism the economic sphere is dominant, or in Islam the religious one, in modernity all spheres are accordingly separated, thus creating a balance.

In most traditional societies, kinship is not separated from the rest of social life. Basically all institutions are expressed in the language of kinship, and economic, political, social and religious relations are modeled after the kinship structure. Thus, in order for modernity to appear, kinship had to be withdrawn from the other social spheres, mainly by reduction: kinship relations would be kept to a minimum so as not to interfere with other spheres.

When and how did this transformation occur? Historians do not seem to agree. Most of them hold the view that it must have occurred after the fall of the Roman Empire, by way of the German tribes’ influence. As opposed to both Romans and Jews, the German tribes brought a reduced system of kinship. Descent was no longer patrilineal, as in the Roman and Jewish case, but bilateral; that is, an individual belonged both to his/her father’s or mother’s kinship group. In such a manner, since a man belonged to both groups, he could not keep constant relations with both sets of relatives and could not choose between one and the other, thus limiting his kinship relations altogether.

This fact is undeniable, and its influence upon the Western kinship and family system is probably a reality. Christians living in the modern world must acknowledge the fact that their pagan origins are largely accountable for the transformation of kinship and its impact upon modern society. Yet, that is only part of the story. Only recently has a group of scholars explored the role Christianity played in the transformation of the Western kinship system.

Jack Goody (1983) is perhaps the leading scholar who has defended the view that Christianity is largely accountable for the modern kinship system. According to his materialistic explanation, as the Church became the prominent institution of the Middle Ages, it began to accumulate wealth, both for mercantilist and humanitarian purposes. This wealth had to be taken from land owners. But, instead of articulating the inept solution of Communism (violent confiscation), it limited potential heirs, so that if a man died without successors, the Church would take over his property. This limitation of heirs was achieved by instituting a series of kinship reforms that reduced the number of a man’s kindred and weakened the strength of kinship groups. Such reforms included bilateral descent, the ban on cousin marriage, polygyny and adoption, among others.

Goody claims that these reforms had precedents neither in the Bible nor in the Roman Civil Codes; they were a sudden innovation of the Medieval Church, probably for materialistic reasons. Thus, for Goody, Christianity’s transformation of the kinship system was largely despite the content of the Scriptures. I hope to have demonstrated that Christianity’s transformation of kinship was not despite, but rather, due to the contents of Scripture.

The great achievement of Western kinship has been, so sociologists and historians tell us, its minimization. A concept of spiritual kinship, as it is formed in the New Testament, logically enforces such minimization. If faith is thicker than blood, then kinship groups lose their strength, and this allows room for the development of other spheres of social life. If man’s relation with a transcendental God becomes ever greater, his relationships with “cousins” will diminish.

Girard has reproached modern individualism for its due share in the romantic conception of desire. Yet, Christianity may be held accountable for the rise of individualism, as Louis Dumont (1992) and others have sufficiently showed. Our politically correct bias has made us think of individualism in extremely negative terms, but it is in great part due to individualism that we live in a modern democratic world. Tocqueville (2001), the man who first used the word “individualism,” believed it was an essential trait of democratic societies, with its ups and downs.

Christianity’s role in the formation of individualism is multi-sided. We cannot explore every side of this influence in a short essay, but we could well argue that, even on the grounds of Girard’s work and mimetic theory, Christianity is individualistic. Whereas Caiphas would prefer the death of a single man to the destruction of a whole nation, the gospels defend that single man’s fate against the benefit to the group. Any religious system that comes to the aid and defence of victims winds up endorsing individualism: victims are usually a minority, individuals persecuted by crowds.

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Thus, if Christianity is indeed an individualistic religion, then kinship will be thoroughly minimized, for individualistic societies, being concerned only with individuals, considerably reduce the size and prominence of kinship groups. If, as Jesus proclaims, he has no biological or sociological brothers, but spiritual brothers; that is to say, if he does not share a special bond with only some individuals, but rather with all victims and all those who decide to follow him and endorse the Kingdom of God, then he does not have tens of relatives, but rather thousands or millions of relatives, for victims and spiritual followers are much numerous than “cousins.” To have a million relatives is, from a sociological point of view, to have none, or only a few.

Notions of spiritual kinship, then, reduce the size and prominence of sociological notions of kinship. And this is what Christianity has done, perhaps both consciously and unconsciously. It has done so consciously, inasmuch as the preaching of the Kingdom of God presupposes an existence that has nothing to do with human institutions. It has also done so unconsciously, for it is unlikely that the first Christians had the intentions of reducing the size and prominence of kinship groups for the benefit of the separation of spheres and the advent of modernity. Our individualistic modern world, which sometimes may seem frighteningly lonely, is a logical consequence of Christianity. If, indeed, it turns out to be lonely, it is in part due to the great acceleration of the secularization begun by Christianity. Yet, Christianity, if properly understood, offers relief. A God that never abandons victims, even at the toughest times, can be as comforting as a “nation of cousins” (to use Ibn-Khaldun’s terms). Tocqueville, who was well aware of the loneliness of individualism, rightly observed that, among Americans, Christianity is the best alternative to combat loneliness.

No human can live without social relations and kinship. He would end up being a god (a scapegoat, we should add) or a beast, as Aristotle once commented. Kinship is necessary, both biologically and sociologically. Biologically, of course, it assures the continuation of the species and the nurture and protection of fragile human infants. Sociologically, it reproduces structures, provides the basis for learning, and offers comfort for social animals.

Moderns know this well, and that is why kinship has not and will not disappear in modern times. Yet, for the comfort and greatness of a modern society, kinship must be held to its minimum. Otherwise, it would swing back into traditional society. This is precisely the attitude found in the New Testament: kinship is necessary, but it is better to minimize it. Even if it is originally sacrificial, humans cannot do away with it altogether. To do so, would be not only foolish, but insane. This was the tragic fate of Gnosticism: by rejecting worldly institutions such as kinship, it ends up being a religion doomed to failure and disappearance. We shall, to conclude, paraphrase Paul’s words in I Corinthians 7: 33-40: better not to get involved with kinship institutions, but since that is impossible, keep it within limits.

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Sparagmos! is a Vancouver-based reading and discussion group that meets regularly to discuss the mimetic theory of René Girard and the generative anthropology of Eric Gans.

Sparagmos! reads all kinds of books together, including novels; Dostoevsky’s The Devilswas a recent project. Interested locals are invited to contact the group through the GA List about joining the Vancouver meetings. Andrew Bartlett, with great hospitality and style, has been hosting the meetings at his home for some years now.

The dialogue below is compiled and edited from a recent exchange concerning the originary scene. In it, various Sparagmos! members are grappling with the details and merits of both Girard’s and Gans’s hypotheses concerning hominization.

The dialogue begins with Pablo who, from the perspective of the Girardian hypothesis, starts to ask the local GA expert, Richard, questions about the Gansian hominization hypothesis.

Pablo: Both Girard and Gans agree that the central object/victim must be arbitrary. How can a truly arbitrary object be an object of appetitive desire?

Richard: How can the words “roast beef” both be arbitrary (you need to learn their meaning from someone else) and refer to real roast beef? What enables humans to distinguish arbitrary signs from non-arbitrary objects?

Suppose I put a juicy piece of roast beef in front of my dog, then point at it and say, “roast beef.” My words do not “mediate” the object for the dog. If he pays any attention to them at all, it will only be as another index that contributes to the central focus of his attention, which is that delicious smelling piece of beef.

The point of the sign’s (or victim’s) arbitrariness is not that there exists no previous motivation for attending to objects. It is that the new mode of attention inaugurated by the originary symbolic sign transcends the previously existing appetitive relation. “Transcends”: not in the sense that it means we have become angels instead of animals–far from it. But that we can no longer attend to the object independently of the mimetic awareness that the other model/mediator/rival is attending to it as well. Psychologists call this “theory of mind,” the ability to see things from someone else’s perspective. (It appears to develop in children around age 2–in other words, when they begin to acquire language.) I see it as the basis of symbolic thought, grounded in the originary scene of collective representation.

Why, if animals are also mimetic, do only humans superimpose on the mimetic relation the mimesis of signs, the scene of representation? But the question implies a teleology from mimesis to language which does not exist, which is why only a punctual originary hypothesis can explain this difference. Mimesis leads us to attend to objects by watching–“imitating”–others. Throw a piece of bread off the wharf and immediately seagulls swarm the morsel. Mimesis works. What makes human mimesis different? The difference is difference itself: i.e., the arbitrariness of the relation between imitated gesture and the object it “points” to (cf. my dog and the roast beef). In the originary scene, this gesture has to be motivated appetitively, just as in the case of all other animals. If it isn’t, then we are attributing to the scene a transcendental motivation that does not yet exist. But the end result of the originary scene–if it is truly originary–is not just another swarming around an appetitive object, but the designation of it as something other–the appetitive mimetic gesture becomes a gesture of designation, separating sign from object, periphery from center, human community from sacrificial other.

By the way, I included the victim in my account of Gans as a pedagogical concession. The violence of the originary scene–the sparagmos–is in the first place an act of designating the object as central, which is to say, as different from the human periphery. This is the originary transcendental separation between (peripheral) human and (central) god. It is an unverifiable empirical matter whether this object is a conspecific or (as seems more likely) a nonconspecific game animal. What is important is the separation between center and periphery. The ensuing sparagmos is the “honor” paid to the god for having “created” this originary separation between sacred center and profane periphery.

Pablo: You say, “In the originary scene, this gesture has to be motivated appetitively, just as in the case of all other animals. If it isn’t, then we are attributing to the scene a transcendental motivation that does not yet exist.” Isn’t mimetic violence just as natural to animals as appetite? I’ve been careful not to use the term “mimetic desire” in the context of this pre-human mimetic crisis, precisely to avoid this false injection of humanity into a pre-human scene. But mimetic violence can (and usually does) ultimately lead to an all-against-one gesture of the group against the victim–or in Gansian terms, the periphery against the center.

Chris: Do animals really scapegoat this way, i.e., with a scapegoat as the inevitable end result of “mimetic violence”? Doesn’t designation have to happen before there is a scapegoat (pace Girard, who reverses this order)? In other words, isn’t scapegoating a human phenomenon?

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Mimetic animals use pecking-order hierarchies to preserve the species; hyper-mimetic proto-humans, however, unable to be constrained by the animal hierarchy straightjacket, would have died off from bashing each other’s skulls in: but they suddenly evolved language instead, when their hyper-mimesis allowed them to stumble into suddenly representing an appetitive object that their mimetic crisis had originally been fighting over by means of escalating imitation.

What makes imitation become representation? Isn’t it the shift of attention from the mimetic rival back to the appetitive object (now being designated thanks to the logical outcome of the hyper-mimetic crisis)? In other words, isn’t Gans on to something with that “counterintuitive result” of his from Signs of Paradox, Chapter Two?

Pablo: Chris, I remember getting stuck on this point, too–talking about “mimesis” in a pre-human context. But the difficult thing is precisely the fact that we do indeed observe mimetic escalations of violence in the animal kingdom, especially among the “higher” animals like primates. As you go up the evolutionary ladder you generally find an increasing capacity for imitation. One can imagine that the hominids we’ve been talking about, situated on the highest pre-human rung of the ladder, must have been extremely mimetic. But, as you imply, this cannot be “mimetic desire” in the human sense yet. When we see mimetic violence growing in a group of chimpanzees it cannot be that they are caught in any existential predicament like Girard’s double-bind or Gans’s esthetic paradox. I think what these higher animals are actually imitating in this situation is each other’s emotions (that is, the basic animal emotions of fear, anger, etc.). This is mimesis in its most basic form–direct imitation of emotion. Fear inspires fear, anger inspires anger, and then violence inspires violence. It is only among humans that desire enters the scene, and basic mimesis becomes “mimetic desire.”

So, in short, animals do not “scapegoat” in the human sense. That is, they do not think of their victim as a scapegoat. This would require not merely language or designation, but the quality of transcendence that makes recognition of the Other, and therefore language, possible. But they do kill just the same, collectively, as the result of a basic mimetic crisis. My point to Richard was that this violence is just as natural to higher animals as any appetite.

I wanted to pick up on a question that Richard asked, but for some reason got lost in the discussion. He asked what it was in Girard’s “originary scene,” involving the victim rather than an appetitive object, that made the members of the group remember that moment? Or in other words, what was it that allowed the originary moment to have a lasting (i.e. permanent) effect?

Gans addresses this on page 34 of Science and Faith:

Without the peaceful division and distribution of the central appetitive object, the peace bestowed by the aborted gesture would have endured but little, and its memory even less; the survival of the system of representation inaugurated in the originary scene required that it lead to an appetitive satisfaction greater, or at any rate more secure, than that which had previously been available.

This seems to imply that after the originary event–after the pre-human animal crosses the threshold into humanity–it is actually possible to revert back to animality if the originary event is forgotten. In fact, it may be that humanity was born more than once in the history of the world before it finally “stuck” due to the particular events that immediately followed it. Do I have this right?

If this is correct then, of course, I have a problem with it. As we were discussing before, the crossing over into humanity involves the acquisition of the quality of transcendence. In Gans’s words, it involves the recognition of a “transcendental ontology.” It seems to me that this threshold is irreversible; once you acquire the quality of transcendent thought you can’t just give it up or forget it. From that point on you see things differently, whether you remember the originary event or not. The notion of becoming human and then spontaneously losing your humanity again is disturbing.

I also have a related question, referring to the second part of that Science and Faith Gans quote. The crucial moment in the originary scene, the aborted gesture, is the result of escalating mimetic interaction, culminating in extreme resentment (the first actual sensation of resentment). Can we really say that the subsequent peaceful satisfaction of the usual appetite is more memorable than the originary event itself? It is certainly more “stable,” but I think Gans’s point is that this action is more memorable, or makes the originary event more memorable. I’m not sure why this is necessarily so.

Moreover, distributing the food to each member of the group certainly results in more appetitive satisfaction than nobody getting any of it. But it results in less satisfaction than getting all of it, which is really what each animal was trying to accomplish before the originary event. So, again, from each animal’s point of view, why should this distribution of food, which results in less appetitive satisfaction than each animal was hoping for, make the originary event more memorable?

Chris: No, I don’t see the Science and Faith passage opening up the possibility of “reverting back”. It’s simply stating the necessary connection of the peace of the sparagmos to the invention of the first sign.

What interests me is whether the originary scene only happened once, or whether or not it had to occur multiple times in prehistory among different communities. This question applies to both Girard’s and Gans’s hypothesis.

Pablo: The problem is that, according to Gans, the peace of the sparagmos comes after the first sign… after the animal becomes human. If this peace is in fact necessary to remain human, than this implies that without this peace the humanizing effect of the first sign would not last–i.e., the human would revert back to animality.

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Richard: Yeah, I agree with Chris that what makes the originary event “originary” is whether it is remembered or not. If it isn’t, then it isn’t originary. The aborted gesture wasn’t a sign and the “sparagmos” was just the usual business of animals competing for a piece of the appetitive object.

It is of course possible–indeed likely–that there were countless times when this envelope was pushed, when mimetic interaction tended toward “something like” the originary event. But the whole point of the originary hypothesis is that this “something like” cannot be substituted as an explanation for the origin of symbolic culture. The definition of the latter is that it is conscious, that is, memorable to its participants in a way radically different from the instinctual mechanisms of animals. This is why Gans objects to the “gradualism” of evolutionary theory when it comes to explaining culture. Evolutionism does not explain culture so much as explain it away by reducing it to noncultural precursors, which is to say, to events that are non-originary or non-symbolic.

All this is apart from the question of monogenesis or polygenesis. It is logically possible that different hominid groups in different geographical regions invent/discovered language. But, as Gans observes, this is not very parsimonious. It is far more likely that the originary event–which is itself a highly unlikely and anomalous occurrence–occurred just once among one group of (proto-) humans. One can then assume that language/culture spread by diffusion. Once culture originates it can be learned by imitation. This is presumably the point of religious ritual, which produces a type of membership that transcends the kinship relations of animal social groups.

Pablo: What exactly is the “originary event?” The aborted gesture as first sign or the sparagmos that comes afterward? From everything we’ve discussed so far, I understood that it is the aborted gesture that is the critical moment when the threshold from animality to humanity is crossed. The sparagmos comes afterward, and helps to explain the characteristic violence and distribution of food we see in myth and ritual. Now it sounds like we’re saying that if the sparagmos doesn’t happen then the originary sign wasn’t actually a sign in the first place, which doesn’t make sense. Either it was the first sign or it wasn’t. What happens afterward can’t change that.

Maybe what you guys are trying to get through my thick skull is that the originary event is remembered by future generations only if the sparagmos occurs. In other words, the original group of proto-humans that experienced the event remain human afterward, and because it is remembered via the sparagmos this experience is taught to other proto-humans. Is that it?

If so, this brings up another related question (sorry)… Is it really possible for proto-humans (who, by definition, are still only animals) to “learn” to be human? Can you really teach an animal to be human? Is it the fact that these proto-humans we’re talking about are “hyper-mimetic” that makes this learning possible? If so–if these proto-humans are on the edge of humanity, so to speak–then I’m not sure we need something as drastic as an originary mimetic crisis to make them cross the threshold.

Richard: The aborted gesture is the difference. If the gesture is recognized as a symbol (= Gans’s “mimetic paradox”), then the originary event occurs. If it isn’t so recognized, then no originary event. Hence, no humanity.

The sparagmos is the aftermath of the sign: the release of the tension of the originary mimetic/symbolic paradox on the central object. When I referred to the “sparagmos” of animals competing over an appetitive object, I was speaking rather loosely (mea culpa). There is no sparagmos–i.e., no sacrificial crisis–for animals. Just the usual wolf-pack scramble for a piece of the appetitive object.

As to how the originary event is remembered, this is the nub of the issue. In order for the scene to be remembered as a scene with a periphery and center, the fundamental structure of the sign must have been understood, which is to say, consciously performed and remembered (which is why Gans insists that it precedes the sparagmos–something I probably didn’t emphasize sufficiently during our last meeting). Henceforth the object is not merely a piece of meat, which I attend to because my body has evolved biologically to attend to such things. I now attend to it as an object of desire, which is to say, because it is situated at the center of the scene of representation. The object also partakes of the signifying structure of the sign; it is the imaginary “referent” of the sign, and as such it transcends its appetitive reality. I now do not merely want the object to fulfill an appetitive need. I desire it for its imagined significance at the center.

Gans’s point is that scene cannot be remembered without the “placeholder” of the sign, which, in any case, is all that is left of the scene by which to remember it. The sign is “minimal,” in that all it requires is the utterance of the word. But in the elementary case of ostensive culture, the sign is not merely a word independent of its worldly object (that comes only with declarative culture): it is a word together with its object, the ritual reproduction of the originary scene. The original participants of the originary scene discovered this relationship between sign and object by a “revelation”–at least that is how it would have appeared to them. Newcomers to the postoriginary world would have to learn this relationship, not by revelation, but by participating in the ritual reproduction of that original revelation. That’s why Gans objects to polygenesis–it would be like asking God for another thunderbolt. “Aw shucks, come on. Just give me one more proof, please.” No way.

Latecomers to the scene are drawn to it by mimesis: they are instructed in how to defer resentment by the “rites of passage” of postoriginary repetitions, which is to say, by the culture they did not invent but inherited from their forefathers, beginning with those participants in the originary event, who made the most revelatory discovery of all: the virtual membership (the “city of God”) that is humanity.

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Pablo: I think Richard and Chris are finally getting through to me. The idea that the “peaceful distribution of the appetitive object” follows logically from the originary sign does indeed make sense. It effectively confirms the significance of the originary event in the minds of the new humans, and therefore prolongs the memory of it. In this sense it is analogous to the peace that follows the killing of the victim in Girard’s originary scene.

I was basically confusing the “peaceful distribution” that Gans talks about in Science and Faith with the sparagmos that he talks about in Signs of Paradox. Now, I should probably just go back and re-read Signs of Paradox, but maybe one of you can remind me of how these two things fit together. Gans says that the aborted gesture is necessarily followed by the peaceful distribution of the object, without which it would not last in the memory of the group. The sparagmos, by contrast, is a violent release of mimetic tension that also follows the aborted gesture, and results in the violent tearing apart of the object. How do both of these coexist in the originary scene?

To follow up on what Richard says… The notion of pre-human animals “learning” culture from those hominids that actually experienced the originary event seems troubling to me. I can certainly understand why one would say that these animals must learn this culture mimetically, since that is the only mode of psychological interaction available to an animal. But the fact is that no matter how many times you repeat a gesture in front of a chimpanzee, it will never be understood as a representative sign by the chimp. An animal cannot “learn” to be human. So it’s not obvious to me how the animals that were not part of the originary scene managed to become human as well.

As I said previously, it may be that the “hyper-mimetic” nature of these hominids allows them to cross over into humanity by mere imitation more easily than other animals. But if it was so easy for them to cross this threshold in the first place, why was something as dramatic and special as the originary event even necessary?

Incidentally, this question applies to Girard as well as Gans.

Richard: I’m glad I haven’t made things more confusing Pablo.

As to your more recent query, I think you may be trying to ask too much of the originary event, the function of which is epistemological, not empirical. That is, you seem to be saying that if one can’t teach chimpanzees to go through something similar (for example, in the primatologist’s laboratory), then the originary hypothesis is “falsified.” Two points:

1. The hypothesis is neither definitively confirmed nor definitively falsified by such experiments. Even if you could teach a chimpanzee to understand symbolic signs, this will not confirm the truth of the hypothesis. Incidentally, things aren’t as clear-cut as you seem to assume. Under very artificial laboratory conditions, it appears that chimpanzees are able to acquire a rudimentary understanding of symbolic signs. (I would cite Sue Rumbaugh’s experiments with the bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee Kanzi, the results of which are very perceptively analyzed by Terrence Deacon in his book The Symbolic Species [1997].) What these “successful” experiments show is that there is no innate genetic reason preventing chimpanzees from acquiring language. In a sense, this provides corroboration (but not proof) of the originary hypothesis, because it proves that the deciding factor is not biological. The nonbiological origin of language is something assumed by the originary hypothesis; the latter is a memorable event and cannot be explained either as a genetic mutation (Chomsky) or as a gradually evolved extension of preexisting animal systems of communication (again, Deacon is instructive here).


2. Relatedly, you have misgivings about my suggestion that “latecomers” to the originary scene of culture must learn to participate in it by imitating their (cultural) precursors. But is this so objectionable? Is it not more implausible to expect that each newcomer must–in isolation from the original participants–go through the originary event all over again? What ritual repetition does is to reproduce the structure of the originary event in each “new” individual. What is “originary” about ritual is that it refers to the originary event itself.

The language-training experiments with chimpanzees are instructive in this regard. As I suggested, under special conditions it is in fact possible to impart a rudimentary symbolic “culture” to chimpanzees. But in their natural habitat, no chimpanzee ever comes close. Why? Clearly, the infrastructure provided by the experimenters, which requires extremely tedious “ritual” repetitions of indexical sign/object relations, reproduces something like an “originary event” for the chimpanzees. Deacon even suggests that the moment of “recognition” for the chimpanzee occurs as an “insight” rather than as a repetition of previous sign/object relations (which are indexically learned). In other words, the realization that the relationship is symbolic rather than indexical is something that must be “discovered” by each chimp. And this discovery occurs only after laborious ritualized training. I would suggest that the function of what Gans calls “elementary” culture is analogous with the chimp experiments: a long period of co-evolution between elementary culture and human brain structure, lasting perhaps millions of years, in which the human brain evolved to become predisposed to acquire symbolic culture. The reason why children acquire language so effortlessly is the consequence of this long period of co-evolution.

It is also extremely significant that so-called “wolf” children–i.e., those who receive no exposure to language before their brain matures–never acquire a normal capacity for language. In other words, despite the fact that we are–thanks to millennia of co-evolution–biologically predisposed to acquire symbolic culture, that acquisition still depends–in the final analysis–upon a level of interaction that is not biological but anthropological, which is to say, dependent upon our mimetic participation in (a descendant of) the originary scene.

5

I guess what I’m saying is that your objections are too focused on the empiricism of the event. If the prehumans are so predisposed to crossing the “threshold” of symbolic culture, why bother with the originary event at all? Why not just say that gradually more and more prehumans crossed the threshold as they learned to focus their mimetic aggressions on a single victim.

I think that the above “gradualization” of the event of human origin is in fact implied by Girard’s idea that scapegoating is a “mechanism” rather than a conscious, memorable, representable event. Girard indeed sometimes talks as though scapegoating is “innate” in human nature, and here he joins ranks with the sociobiologists. Gans, on the other hand, does no such thing. For him, human violence is radically distinct from animal violence because it assumes the structure of the originary event, which is conceivable only in terms of scene of representation, with a periphery and center and all the other “fundamental anthropological categories,” including linguistic, aesthetic, sacred, and economic exchange.

Pablo: You’re actually responding to a slightly different problem than what I had in mind. I’m not really concerned with “falsifying” either Gans’s or Girard’s theory (my questions apply to both). Both Gans and Girard are of the same mind with regard to the question of whether or not their theories are “theories” in the sense of Karl Popper, and the value of a theory that cannot in principle be falsified. I completely agree with what they (and you) say about this. The fact that we have trouble reproducing an originary event in the lab does not mean that such an event did not occur.

My question is not so much about the specific details of how prehumans actually “learned” culture from their ancestors, but whether or not such a thing is possible at all, from an epistemological perspective. Gans objects to any theory that attributes human-like qualities to what would have been pre-human animals. I’m basically raising the same sort of objection. Precisely because language can only be “learned” by experiencing the originary event (as opposed to genetically or via evolution), how do prehumans that did not experience this event learn language? You say that they learned this by imitating their ancestors’ ritualistic repetition of the event. This makes sense for children or “wolf children,” who are already human, but not so much for prehuman animals. As you say, it may be possible for an animal to spontaneously have an “insight” after many, many years of repetition (I have my doubts about this, but put them aside for now). But the original members of the group that are capable of ritualistic repetition died after only a few years. I realize this is dipping into the empirical side of things, but it’s a basic fact that must be accounted for. How is it possible for a prehuman animal to “learn” culture from a member of the group in only a few years?

Whatever the exact details of the origin of humanity (or language, for you Gansians), I think we can safely say two things about it: (1) It was a single, sudden event, and (2) it involved a relatively small group of proto-human animals (even 50 or 100 animals is a small number on a planetary scale). This small group could only have survived for some relatively small number of years. These basic facts, empirical though they may be, cannot be ignored. Whether the actual originary gesture was a pointing finger or a swinging fist is secondary. Whether the ritualistic repetition of the event involved making noises or some kind of charades is secondary. Whether or not prehuman animals have the psychological capacity to learn transcendent thought, and whether or not their teachers were around long enough to do the job, are critical questions.

Richard: Actually, I did take your originary query in the sense you intended, namely, how did all those prehumans that didn’t actually participate in the originary event become human?

My answer: the originary scene spreads by diffusion, that is, in the same way all symbolic culture spreads: by new individuals participating in the ritual reproduction that “refers” back to the originary event.

You objected: “Precisely because language can only be “learned” by experiencing the originary event (as opposed to genetically or via evolution), how do prehumans that did not experience this event learn language?”

In the post-originary world, one experiences the originary event by reproducing it. That’s what ritual (and even its “minimal” form, language) does. Ritual is a form of representation of the originary event. That’s why I object to Girardians who insist that the scene of victimage doesn’t imply representation. Ritual is always representational: it represents the originary scene.

You also objected: “You say that they learned this by imitating their ancestors’ ritualistic repetition of the event. This makes sense for children or “wolf children,” who are already human, but not so much for prehuman animals.”

Well, actually it “makes sense” for anybody who can make sense of the ritual repetition, including wolf children, chimpanzees, and– god forbid–robots. That is the “anthropological” definition of the human: you are human if you are able (like Data from Star Trek, or R2D2 from Star Wars, or Kanzi in Sue Rumbaugh’s laboratory, or Prehuman X from 3 minutes after the originary event) to participate in the originary event. The human/prehuman divide falls there. If prehuman animals couldn’t “get it,” then they’re not human.

So, permitting ourselves some indulgent empirical speculation, let us suppose that a small group of prehumans (let’s call them group A) are roaming the African savanna 2.5 million years ago. They stumble on a group of hyenas who have made a fresh kill of antelope. They scare off the hyenas with rocks and sticks and screaming and such. Surrounding the kill they approach the bleeding gobs of fur and meat. But then, each sees the others’ appropriative gesture, and each hesitates for a moment. Each individual perceives the other’s gesture in a paradoxical oscillation between the central object and the peripheral aborted gestures of the others. Lo! the aborted gesture of appropriation is transformed into a sign: the deferral of mimetic conflict through representation. After this hesitation, the “division” of the kill follows in the ensuing sparagmos. But this sparagmos is forever haunted by the memory of the sign, which demonstrated to each individual that his relationship to the central appetitive object is mediated by the other’s desire. Henceforth each individual will be unable to appropriate the central object without realizing that he is participating in a social act that is mediated by the other’s desire.

6

Okay. So now suppose that, in a neighboring territory, another group of prehumans (group B) have surrounded and killed a hapless vervet monkey. A fight for the meat ensues, and, as usual, the alpha male (call him Conan) grabs the whole chunk of meat and settles down to his dinner, while the rest of his group stand on the sidelines begging for scraps from the mighty Conan. Conan gives a few females some meat, but he tells the other junior males to “beat it” by sinking his teeth into their begging hands. They bite back, and painfully too, but Conan will not give up his prize. Eventually, tired of the contest, they retreat to lick their wounds, and watch sulkily as the triumphant Conan eats his meal.

Now suppose that group A rape and kidnap a young female from group B. She now becomes part of their group. On their next foraging expedition, they disturb the same group of hyenas around another fresh kill (perhaps it’s time the hyenas moved on?). They scare the cats off, and move in for the meat. But this time the moment of hesitation is prolonged: the central object brings to mind the paradoxical oscillation of the previous night (the originary scene). Each individual lingers a little longer on the aborted gesture of appropriation; the memory of the previous event remains vivid in each individual’s mind. They recall the moment of delay before the sparagmos in which the meat was more equitably divided among themselves, so they delay again, perhaps bowing their heads before the meat, which now seems irresistibly to resist their desires. There is one exception: the new female recalls no such event. But, not being one used to “dominating,” she bows her head too in imitation of her fellows, and she is rewarded by the same prolonged desire to possess the meat that bleeds so invitingly before her alerted senses. Nor does this desire stop there. Once the bowing has ended, the sparagmos ensues. But, to her surprise, the female is treated as an “equal” in this sparagmos. She too gets to rip a piece from the quivering flesh. This is her reward for obeying the god of the meat. Side by side with Maximus (Conan’s equivalent in group A) she partakes of the sacred flesh. And it is precisely because Maximus remembers the miraculous success of the originary event, in which he achieved a portion of the kill without having to fight for it with his rivals, that he is willing, once again, to defer his appetite and bow his head to the meat that quivers before him.

Countless times group A repeats this structure. And, surprisingly perhaps, instead of getting weaker, they get stronger. They now have the advantage in territorial fights with group B. More and more of the members of group B are either destroyed, like the stubborn Conan who would not bow to the new god of group A, or absorbed into their religion, like the first female who gratefully accepted the “equal” piece of meat in her first “rite of passage” into this strange new community that insists on delaying before eating their meat. Group A expands its territory irrepressibly. It is now bound by a network, not of biological kinship relations, but by cultural relations: all those who participate in their “rite of passage” of delayed gratification before the meat are a part of their community.

After approximately 2 millions years of this kind of thing, a full blown symbolic culture has evolved, culminating in the “cultural explosion” of the upper paleolithic: stone tools, cave art, and burial sites are the material signs left behind of this explosion. To paraphrase Neil Armstrong: “One small aborted gesture of appropriation for group A, one giant cultural explosion for humankind.”

Pablo: Excellent story! Basically, you’re saying that, in the originary event, prehumans learn language from the other prehumans on the periphery of the scene. After that, prehumans learn language in the same way from the now humans on the reproduced periphery of the scene. Every time the originary event is reproduced and repeated (or maybe almost every time) new prehumans effectively experience the originary event by experiencing the reenactment of that event.

Now, let me step back from the empirical details again… There is, I think, a basic assumption that, whatever the precise details of the originary event itself, it was a big deal. That is, it was something special and unlikely, otherwise it would have probably happened more than once in more than one place. The aborted gesture wasn’t just any old gesture–it was more than just two animals butting heads–it was the result or culmination of some highly specialized set of conditions that do not normally exist in nature. Remember, we are not just talking about a few animals learning a new trick, even an impressive trick like a new gesture. We’re talking about animals acquiring the capacity for transcendent thought, without which language is impossible.

It therefore seems to me a little strange that, while a successful originary event is so difficult to achieve, the mere reproduction of that event, which is not very special, is equally successful. To put it another way, if you strip away all the elements and parameters of the originary event and reduce it to a single gesture, as important as that gesture is, do you still have the originary event, with all its power? Even if we accept the notion that this type of “learning” can happen over the course of many years, it’s hard to believe that it can happen during the few years that the original humans are alive. Moreover, it must have happened with extreme efficiency (literally almost every time the originary event is reproduced) to have maintained an increasing number of humans from generation to generation.

I don’t mean to belabor the point. Quite honestly, it is this sort of thing that makes a purely naturalistic explanation of the origin of humanity unconvincing to me. Ultimately, the creation of transcendent thought from immanent mechanisms just doesn’t seem logical. It is the same problem as trying to explain the origin of life itself from purely naturalistic means. You can create a plausible “scene” involving a puddle of primordial goo, some lightning, and–voila!–life is born. But this doesn’t really explain anything–it’s just a possible setting for the “scene” of the origin of life. To put it another way, imagine assembling a human body from healthy organs and bones. Each individual body part is intact and used to belong to some living body, and you put it all together so that each piece down to the last capillary is connected with perfect precision. Do you end up with a living person? No; you end up with a pile of well-connected body parts and nothing more. It takes something beyond the natural mechanisms available to us to create life from scratch. It takes something above life to create life. In the same way, I think it takes something transcendent to create transcendent thought–something above humanity to create humanity.

Andrew: This implication of the supernatural makes me nervous.

7

Pablo: I’m afraid it’s unavoidable. Anyway, the existence of the supernatural doesn’t eliminate or invalidate the natural.

I ask the question, “If you strip away all the elements and parameters of the originary event and reduce it to a single gesture, as important as that gesture is, do you still have the originary event, with all its power?” You may very well answer “Yes, Pablo. The critical event in the originary scene is the aborted gesture. It was difficult for this gesture to occur accidentally in nature, but once it did then the deliberate reproduction of it was straightforward.”

What bothers me about this is the notion that a single gesture, so easily reproduced and independent of any special context or specific scenario, could be responsible for the creation of transcendent thought. Basically, if it’s that easy to turn an animal into a human (once you know the trick), you would think we’d be able to do it in a laboratory.

Richard: Essentially what you are arguing is that, given the tremendous difference between symbolic culture and all other presymbolic systems of social organization, it’s impossible to believe that this difference can be reduced to one miserly little “aborted gesture of appropriation.” If the originary event really is the origin of “transcendence” then let’s not hold back, let’s talk about transcendence in terms that are suitably transcendent.

I sympathize with your skeptical transcendentalism, but the minimalism of the originary scene is the prerequisite of any fundamental anthropology that wishes to avoid the designation “myth of origin.” If you start loading the scene up with all kinds of figures (e.g., Girard’s human victim), you no longer have a minimal anthropology. What you have is a ritual/mythical reproduction that runs quite counter to the minimalism of the originary thinking.

But I don’t think that the aborted gesture as a symbolic sign can be reduced to the notion of a simple trick that any bright hominid could come up with. The point of course is that the symbolic sign is not a “trick” (like a chimp reaching for a banana with a long stick), but a condition of highly unstable mimetic scene: the minimal mimetic triangle or originary scene of representation. I therefore disagree with you when you say that you can “strip” this scene down to the aborted gesture without losing anything. The aborted gesture exists as a sign only within the context of the scene as a whole. That’s why the indexical signs produced by nonhuman primates don’t count as language.

Of course the reason why chimps don’t produce symbolic culture is that mimetic conflict never presented the kind of absolute problem that it presented for our hominid ancestors. As Gans says, the human may be most easily defined as that species for which internal conflict, rather than external conflict with the environment, presents the biggest problem. You only have to look at the dismal situation of chimps today to see the truth of this. Chimps are endangered because of us, not because of themselves.

The other point is that you seem to be confusing the originary scene with the reproduction of that scene. You seem to be assuming that if the probability of the originary event is low, it follows that the probability of its reproduction is equally low. But that doesn’t follow.

An analogy: Think of one of those mind-bending puzzles that asks you to see the hidden figure in a picture.

Chris: “Magic eye” puzzles! Oh, I hate those!

Richard: Why?

Chris: I can never see the hidden figure!

Richard: Okay, you just can’t see it. Then suddenly (be patient, Chris) you see it. After that, it’s impossible to miss. Now you “reproduce” the original “insight” time and again without difficulty. Perhaps you even show someone who can’t see it how to see it. Indeed, perhaps that’s how you learnt to see it in the first place, i.e., by someone else showing you how to find it.

Now extrapolate back to the originary event. Before the event, the object was just another piece of meat. During the event, the meat becomes the paradoxical object of the originary sign, the first figure is an infinite series of such figures. Voila! the generative scene of origin. The first “originary” moment provides the crucial difference.

Andrew: This is great. I feel like this dialogue is helping us see the hidden figure on the originary scene…

Chris: Pablo, the thing to remember concerning your objection–“if it’s that easy to turn an animal into a human (once you know the trick), you would think we’d be able to do it in a laboratory”–is that the origin of language is a “little bang”. That is how Gans describes it (see https://anthropoetics.org/journal/ap-vol-5/ap0501/gans/).

Pablo: The “little bang” analogy makes sense to me. My point is that the humanizing event, originary or reproduced, must be a “bang” for each and every hominid that experiences it. It sounds like, for every subsequent repetition of the originary event, Gans keeps the “little” but takes out the “bang.”

Richard: I see what you’re saying Pablo. From the point of view of those participating in the postoriginary ritual reproductions of the event, these reproductions cannot be considered as mere supplements. On the contrary, they are indispensable to the act of sacralization. From an internal viewpoint, there is no difference between the originary event and its repetition. Each repetition is originary, at least to those doing the reproduction (which hence would not be considered a “reproduction” at all).

8

But Gans is speaking from the theoretical or epistemological viewpoint of generative anthropology. From the point of view of the latter, the minimal difference takes place at the very beginning, in the aborted mimetic gesture of the originary scene.

Remember also that–anthropologically speaking–the key to the success of the originary event is not individual but collective. Once the collective scene (which requires at least two individuals) is established in the crucial originary event, introducing subsequent “newcomers” into this now-existing collective scene is an event of a quite different order.

The analogy would be to the “rites of passage” that mark an individual’s life: birth, adulthood, marriage, death. These are “little bangs” for the individual, but they assume the existence of the collective originary scene. Individuals don’t invent culture. It preexists their existence. The exception, of course, is the originary event, in which at least two individuals invented, or more accurately, discovered the “deferral of violence through representation.” Once this “virtual” scene has been discovered, it becomes a question of “teaching” it to others.

But I agree that in the immediate postoriginary era, subsequent ritual reenactments of the originary event would be rather spectacular. The best way to persuade others as to the efficacy of the originary event is to “overengineer” it. Ritual always takes place as an overengineering of the originary.

Chris: So does this mean that the children of the first humans do not become human themselves until they are taught how to be human?

Richard: Yes, insofar as participating in the ritual scene is a form of “teaching.”

Chris: In other words, are you saying that ontogeny doesn’t recapitulate phylogeny until the kids learn how to be human from their parents’ rituals?

Richard: Depends which children you are looking at. Children of modern Homo sapiens“recapitulate” phylogeny, in the sense that their ontogenetic development assumes the existence of a huge amount of coevolutionary or “phylogenetic” prehistory (roughly, from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens, or about 2 million years.) But the children of the first humans don’t have any human evolution to recapitulate. The only thing they can “recapitulate” is the originary event. So that’s what they do.

Chris: This doesn’t seem right to me. Don’t human kids have the capacity to form abstract ideas even before they learn about some communal sparagmos feast?

Richard: Depends what you mean by “abstract ideas.” All “higher” animals are capable of cognitive categorization. Monkeys have an “idea” of kinds of predator (e.g., leopard, snake, or eagle). And they can even emit calls that associate the call (= indexical sign) with the “idea” or category of a particular predator. But some ideas are not a question of “abstraction” from “natural kinds”: e.g., “anthropological” categories like the self, desire, morality, etc. These are learned only by participating in a human culture, which finds its historical origin in the originary scene.

Chris: How can someone be taught about a “virtual” scene if they do not already have the capacity to abstract ideas on such a scene?

Richard: The difference is between the idea as a form of cognitive abstraction or categorization and the idea as a signified or symbolic category. Anthropological ideas (the self, the moral, the good, the beautiful) exist only as “abstractions” from the originary scene. For example, the idea of the beautiful is not a category that can be derived solely from theories of sexual selection: e.g., male cognition is “selected for” admiring young females, etc. I don’t doubt that there are deep-rooted genetic factors that play a role in anthropological categories like (female) beauty: a philosopher might say these are necessary but not sufficient conditions for the anthropological idea of beauty. The sufficient condition is symbolic abstraction, which requires the minimal mimetic configuration of the originary scene. As Deacon’s data and research confirms, symbolic abstraction is not something that can be genetically assimilated. Modern human ontogeny is evolutionarily selected for a predisposition toward symbolic abstraction, but without the “virtual” infrastructure of culture, the kernel of which is the originary scene, the child will not acquire symbolic “behavior.”

A thought experiment: Imagine the entire human species is suddenly wiped out by a virus. One human baby survives. She is rescued by some chimpanzees who raise her as one of their own. (Yes, this is “Planet of the Apes” for philosophers.) Though she is genetically predisposed for symbolic cognition, her new situation never encourages her to develop this capacity. As her brain matures through childhood and adolescence, all those brain cells that would normally be recruited for associating a signifier with a signified during language acquisition would be recruited for chimpanzee behaviors, which is to say for non-anthropologically specific categories (e.g., indexical alarm calls, grooming behaviors, assessing the landscape, tool use etc.). No doubt she would prove exceptional at certain tasks (e.g., tool making), and rather poor at others (e.g., smelling predators). But the point is that she would never acquire symbolic culture because there is no existing infrastructure for her to “learn” it.

Pablo: Chris, it sounds like you’re thinking along similar lines as I am with respect to the originary scene (although you guys have indeed corrected my thinking on a few things). In response to your question, I think Richard may point to the fact (so to speak) that human kids are biologically conditioned to “learn” culture after millions of years of repetition of the originary scene, but ultimately the roots of that conditioning go back to that scene (sorry to put words in your mouth, Richard). But I think your last question, Chris, really gets to the heart of the matter: “How can someone be taught about a ‘virtual’ scene if they do not already have the capacity to abstract ideas on such a scene?” This is a better rephrasing of my original simple question, “Is it really possible to ‘teach’ an animal to be human?”

9

The sticking point is that this “learning” must be done in a conscious way (this is an important requirement for Gans). I, too, have trouble with the notion of a pre-human animal recognizing a deliberate gesture as an abstract representation. In the case of the originary event itself it may be possible due to the particularly dramatic and unlikely accumulation of parameters that make it such a special event in the first place. But to obtain the same effect in subsequent reproductions of the event seems strange.

This ultimately goes back to the concept of “transcendence” as the defining human characteristic, from which language comes. This may be the main divide between Girard and Gans–Gans situates the origin of the human in the origin of language, which must be a consciously recognized event. Girard situates the origin of the human in the origin of transcendent thought, which is the first recognition of the Other as Other, and this most likely occurred as the result of an unconscious mechanism.

I was hoping to get your thoughts on a couple questions that are still on the table…

Gans says that the aborted gesture is necessarily followed by the peaceful distribution of the object, without which it would not last in the memory of the group. The sparagmos, by contrast, is a violent release of mimetic tension that also follows the aborted gesture, and results in the violent tearing apart of the object. How do both of these coexist in the originary scene?

The second question is more technical. Gans says that in order to make the originary event last in the memory of the group, it had to have directly led to something that resulted in more appetitive satisfaction than “that which had previously been available.” Presumably, the peaceful distribution of the appetitive object fulfilled this function by providing every member of the group with some of the object, rather than no one getting any of it. But isn’t it true that each member of the group was originally hoping and trying to get all of it, rather than just some of it? The thought of getting none of it probably never entered anyone’s brain. Each animal was going after the object–the whole object, with no intention of sharing. So, by comparison, getting only a piece of it would be less satisfying, not more. Doesn’t this contradict Gans’s requirement?

Andrew: Well, time’s up. Maybe all your questions weren’t answered, but we certainly addressed more than none. If you find this communal ritual strangely satisfying–despite the fact that you got less rather than more–let us meet again soon for our next Sparagmos!

This Sparagmos! dialogue was compiled and edited by Christopher Morrissey.

Sparagmos! is a Vancouver-based reading and discussion group that meets regularly to discuss the mimetic theory of René Girard and the generative anthropology of Eric Gans.

Interested readers should contact Andrew Bartlett (Andrew.Bartlett@kwantlen.ca) about participating. Andrew has been organizing and hosting the Sparagmos! meetings in Vancouver, BC.

René Girard is well known for his critique of the imagery of sacrifice. As he reads religious symbolism and the rituals that present and enact it, these constitute ways of simultaneously commemorating and masking the real collective violence and victimization that gave rise to human society. His Violence and the Sacred argued forcefully for the universality of this fundamental cultural force: “All religious rituals spring from the surrogate victim, and all the great institutions of mankind, both secular and religious, spring from ritual. . . . It could hardly be otherwise, for the working basis of human thought, the process of ‘symbolization,’ is rooted in the surrogate victim” (306). As a counterforce to the general pattern of religion, Girard went on to argue in later studies, the prophetic tradition in Israel, culminating in the story of Jesus of Nazareth, gradually disclosed these secrets “hidden since the foundation of the world” (Matt. 13:35, the epigraph of Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World). This revelation, however, was more than its recipients could bear, and they soon buried it again under a “sacrificial reading” that interpreted Jesus’ death not as the unmasking and exploding of the victimizing mechanism but as itself the ultimate satisfaction (and confirmation) of its exigency. In Things Hidden Girard identifies the Epistle to the Hebrews in particular as the fountainhead of this sacrificial misreading of Christianity.

I would like in this essay to explore from the point of view of the comparative study of religious symbolism the theme of sacrifice in Hebrews and to suggest some ways in which Girard’s analysis of that theme might benefit from the broader perspective that the history of religions can provide. In particular I will try to show that the epistle’s symbolism and the experience of spiritual transformation it represents may be understood more deeply and more favorably than Girard may have realized, through a comparison with Hinduism and Buddhism.

I realize of course that this comparison may in itself look problematic from a Girardian point of view, since Girard has spoken critically of those religions too. Near the end of Things Hidden, Girard makes the important observation that no merely intellectual process of thinking can win victory over mimetic desire and the urge to victimize; rather that requires a kind of “conversion experience,” which “always retains the form of the great religious experiences”; then he adds that “[t]his kind of experience can be found in the great oriental religions. But there the aim is to allow the individual to escape completely from the world and its cycles of violence by an absolute renunciation of all worldly concerns, a kind of living death” (400). Hinduism and Buddhism are most probably the “great oriental religions” he had in mind. I hope to show, however, that it may be possible to discover in these something greater, and also more congenial to Girard’s own thought, than the cultivation of “a kind of living death.” I will argue, that is, that both the Epistle to the Hebrews and these Asian traditions may share more with, and offer more to, Girard than he has realized.

For the sake of brevity and because I have already done so at length elsewhere, I will not try to present a full exposition of Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, mimetic rivalry, and the sacrificial crisis with its trajectory toward identifying, and sacrificing, some victim as a scapegoat.(1) I will simply summarize a few points pertinent to my initial focus on Girard’s critique of sacrifice and of Hebrews.

In Girard’s interpretation, the secret “hidden since the foundation of the world” referred to in Matt. 13:35 (and Luke 11:50-51)–and alluded to, of course, in his book’s title–was the founding role played in all human enterprises by the mécanisme victimaire (victimizing mechanism) of scapegoating, which is itself an outgrowth of mimetic desire. Mimetic desire is a deeply rooted tendency in human beings to imitate the desires of others. This eventually leads to mimetic rivalry and mimetic conflict–not only because to desire what another desires, in a world of finite resources, will inevitably lead to conflict over the same objects of desire, but also because even in a world of unlimited fungibility it would still be precisely our rival’s object we would desire and not even a perfect equivalent would satisfy us. The victimizing mechanism is both a further development in this process and also, in most societies that have developed historically, the solution to the crises it generates. To explain the logic of Girard’s idea very simply:

• Since mimetic desire is a fundamental trait of human beings, people will inevitably fall into mimetic rivalries and these will spread like wildfire, especially where no system of traditional restraints and boundaries has been developed or where such a system has broken down.


• When these circumstances (lack of an effective system of restraints) prevail, the mimetic conflict will multiply until it threatens to destroy the entire society in a paroxysm of violence.


• At this point the victimizing mechanism will be triggered by the same mechanism that started the trouble to begin with, namely mimesis. Some individual (perhaps someone with a limp, or with noticeable racial differences, or with non-conformist ideas) may attract the attention of several others who will gang up on him, and others will also be drawn to join them by the mimesis of their violence.


• Those drawn by mimesis into such shared hostility to a common victim will experience among themselves, in place of their earlier rivalry, a new unanimity and fellowship.


• But the peace that proceeds from this is inherently fragile: new rivalries may develop and threaten the group–until once again they seek a new common scapegoat.


• Or, as the ancient Israelites did, they may forswear intra-group violence and restrain themselves from mimetic rivalry by adherence to a Law deemed transcendent. And they may reinforce their loyalty to that system of restraint by instituting ritualized commemorations of the original collective victimization, i.e., ritual sacrifices, to remind them of its originating, life-giving effects while protecting them from having actually to repeat it in all its dangerous reality.


• But such a system of the control of violence is far from perfectly effective, especially because it masks the reality of the whole complex of mimetic desire, rivalry, and victimization. New crises therefore continue to arise and call for new victims.

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This, says Girard, is the reality behind all the imagery of sacrifice in primitive religions and in the Hebrew Bible, except where the prophets gradually moved toward the realization that the God of Israel did not want “the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of he-goats” (Isaiah 1:12).(2) In the imagery of the gospels, the Satan that Jesus resisted and finally conquered is a personification of the victimizing mechanism and the symbol of the insidious force with which it sneaks up on us from behind and takes possession of us in all our endeavors.(3) The principal act of Jesus and of the gospel writers was their exposing of this hidden force. This, for Girard, is the truth that makes us free–or can do so, if we relive in the conversion of our own hearts, the realization the gospels try to share with us.

The power of the victimizing mechanism to resist being exposed and disarmed is exemplified with supreme irony in the development Girard calls “historical Christianity”–the religion that took shape around a sacrificial reading of what had been the anti-sacrificial revelation in the gospels.(4) In this distorted tradition, Jesus came to be interpreted as having cooperated voluntarily with his victimizers in order to offer himself in his crucifixion as a sacrificial victim for the purpose of appeasing an angry God. This conception, says Girard in Things Hidden, “was most completely formulated by the medieval theologians, and it amounted to the statement that the Father himself insisted upon the sacrifice. Efforts to explain this sacrificial pact only result in absurdities: God feels the need to revenge his honour, which has been tainted by the sins of humanity, and so on. Not only does God require a new victim, but he requires the victim who is most precious and most dear to him, his very son” (182).

Girard identifies the Epistle to the Hebrews as the chief New Testament source of this misreading: “The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews interprets Christ’s death on the basis of the sacrifices under the Old Law. The new bond with God, like the old one, is inaugurated in blood. But as it is perfect, it is no longer the blood of animals[,] which is ‘powerless to remove sins,’ but the blood of Christ” (228). The author, Girard says, “may well say that Christ’s sacrifice is, by contrast with the others, unique, perfect, and definitive. But in reality he can see only continuity with previous sacrifices, if he takes no account of the scapegoat mechanism.” Hebrews, one might say, is to Girard what the Epistle of James was to Luther: the one book of the New Testament that really missed the point.

I think Girard is correct that much traditional reading of Hebrews has fostered a way of reading Christian symbols that has obscured the very important truth Girard has himself done such admirable work in bringing to light. I hope, then, that it will not seem merely retrograde if I suggest that there may be more to this text, and to the theme of sacrifice in Christianity and in other religions, than Girard’s immensely valuable, but rather narrowly focused, anti-sacrificial critique has yet managed to take into account.

Girard’s interpretation of Hebrews attributes to it two key ideas that might be analyzed logically as:

• The true, fully effective sacrifice = Jesus’ crucifixion.


• The function of the crucifixion = appeasement of God.

I will try to show, however, that on a more careful reading Hebrews can be seen to be saying something quite different:

• The true, fully effective sacrifice is not Jesus’ crucifixion but something else that I will try to clarify below (although his willingness to face death on the cross was an expression and sign of that something else).


• The crucifixion did have a redemptive function, but that function was not sacrificial in the sense Girard focuses on and had nothing to do with appeasing God.

Girard is correct that Hebrews is not especially concerned with exposing the scapegoat mechanism in the manner Girard himself does, but neither is it concerned with affirming or hiding it; in fact, its explicit critique of the sacrifices of the Temple system as ineffective constitute an explicit repudiation of the idea that the slaying of victims can be in any way salvific.

Let me begin my own analysis by looking at a few passages from Hebrews that I think an interpretation of the theme of sacrifice needs to consider. I will not attempt an interpretation of Hebrews as a whole, and I will ignore the final 13^th chapter entirely, since it does not appear to have been a part of the original document, which was something more like a sermon or “homiletical midrash” than a letter, according to George Wesley Buchanan in the Anchor Bible edition.(5)

Buchanan’s commentary on Hebrews also presupposes, by the way, the sort of sacrificial reading Girard criticizes, as do the editors of the New Oxford Annotated Bible (Revised Standard Version). This way of reading Hebrews has become pervasively conventional, and Girard is quite right to criticize it. My own reading presupposes Girard’s critique of sacrifice; far from wanting to oppose or correct it, I wish to complement it with a recovery of what I think is a deeper, genuinely “anti-sacrificial” (in Girard’s sense) reading intended by the epistle’s author–or at least implied in what his epistle says. I hope also, through some comparison of this early(6) Christian text with Hindu and Buddhist themes, to show that there can be further meanings in religious images of sacrifice than only those that mask and act out the mécanisme victimaire.

I use purposely the phrases “there can be further meanings” and “at least implied,” because there is no way to prove with certainty what some ancient author meant or “had in mind,” especially one so lost in anonymity as the author of Hebrews. But a good way to approach the question of what this text might have meant for its author or at least to an intelligent Jewish-Christian reader of the mid-first century, is to separate out and set aside meanings that would seem incoherent or that are based on later ways of thinking that have lost touch with the original milieu of meaning.

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One example of what has to be set aside as such an anachronistic reading is the now conventional notion of what it means to speak of Jesus as “son of God” or “Christ”: that he was some kind of divine figure. For first century Jews like the author of this text and his readers,(7) references to someone as “son of God” or as “the anointed one” (the precise meaning of “messiah” or “Christ”) would not in themselves have involved the idea that the person referred to was divine. The term “son of God” had a long Biblical history. Its most important use was to refer to the calling of Israel as a people, as when God tells Moses to say to Pharaoh, “Thus says the Lord, Israel is my first-born son, and I say to you, ‘Let my son go that he may serve me” (Exodus 4:22), or when God says in Hosea 11:1: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”(8) To say in the first century Jewish milieu that Jesus was “son of God” was to say that he truly fulfilled the calling of Israel to live in sonship to God. When Hebrews speaks of him as a “pioneer. . .leading many sons to glory” (2:10),(9) it is clear that the focus is on the idea of the first true Israelite leading others to fulfill the same calling, i.e., the calling of Israel to sonship.

“Anointing” was an image used to refer to the idea that God called and empowered some individual for an important work. In so far as it might refer to one called and empowered to fulfill the calling of Israel as a whole to heed God’s will in a filial manner and help others to fulfill it, the titles “son of God” and “messiah” or “christ” could even overlap in meaning. In first century Palestine “anointed” was most commonly used to refer to someone called to drive out the Romans and restore an Israelite state like the one attributed to David and Solomon. But like “son of God,” the symbolism of being “anointed” had a long history of more diverse use behind it. In the Hebrew Bible it was used to refer to a wide range of figures, mainly kings–including Saul, David, Zerubbabel, and even Cyrus of Persia (Isaiah 45:1)–and important priests, such as Aaron (Exodus 29:7). We know it was used in the first century B.C.E. community that left the Dead Sea scrolls to refer to expected leaders of both the kingly and the priestly type, spoken of in the scrolls as messiahs “of Israel” and “of Aaron” respectively. In most New Testament documents, “anointed” was used mainly to identify Jesus as a kingly figure fulfilling the prophecy that someday Yahweh would rule in Zion, but in Hebrews it is Jesus’ role as high priest that is emphasized, a role that is underscored by associating him with Melchizedek, whose superior priesthood even Abraham recognized and deferred to (Hebrews 7:4).

Although he says Jesus “reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature” (Hebrews 1:3; literally: “being the radiance of his glory and the representation of his reality” [tes hypostaseos autou(10)]), the author of the epistle emphasizes that he was fully human: “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same nature [shared in the same things], that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage” (2:14-15). Only a human being could die a human death, but also, only a human being “who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (4:15) could conquer, as representative of all humanity, the power of sin and death.

This is the central idea of Hebrews: that Jesus, fulfilling the calling of Israel to divine sonship, raised humanity itself into sonship in his own person by conquering sin and breaking the power of Satan over all human beings. Satan’s power was in Biblical tradition the power to tempt and lead astray. But it was also the power of death. Hebrews is quite explicit in linking the tendency of humans to sin (i.e., to fail to fulfill their calling to sonship) to their fear of death.(11) They have been enslaved by the fear of death, and Jesus’ death has delivered them from that slavery so that now they are free to respond to the calling to sonship as he did.

How did Jesus free them from this? How did he break the power of Satan over them once and for all? Here is the crux of the text. Hebrews does not spell out the answer to this obvious question, probably because the author expected the answer would be obvious to his readers. But it is no longer so obvious as it once was. To a western Christian reader today, as to Girard himself, there is one very obvious answer: Jesus did it by dying on the cross as a propitiatory sacrifice, that is, by offering his “blood” to appease the anger of the God who inflicts death as a punishment. The reason this is so obvious now is that Anselm of Canterbury answered the question in this way in the 11^thcentury in his Cur Deus Homo? (Why Did God Become Man?).(12) But would this have been obvious (or even credible) to the epistle’s first century audience, a millennium before Anselm and three centuries before Augustine developed the ideas of Original Sin and inherited guilt that Anselm could interpret as an offense against God’s honor? This propitiatory-sacrificial reading is clearly incoherent with numerous elements of the text. For example, the one who is described in 2:14-15 as having “the power of death” is not an offended God but “ton diabolon,” the devil. And God is described repeatedly in the text as not wanting the kinds of sacrifice that involved killing offerings. Girard says in the quotation above from Things Hidden (182), that “[e]fforts to explain this sacrificial pact only result in absurdities.” Might it not be possible that this western medieval reading of Hebrews would have seemed just as absurd to its author and first century audience as it does to Girard?

To an early Christian there would have been another obvious way to interpret the idea that Jesus’ death freed human beings from enslavement by the fear of death, a way that is clearly attested as current in the first century Christian milieu: that Jesus’ death was the prelude to his resurrection. To someone who believed in Jesus’ resurrection, it would have shown in the most dramatic and convincing way that the conquest of death was no longer merely a dream or hope for the future, but had actually become, in the life of one concrete human being, a reality. And as such it was also a token of future resurrection for others. Paul alludes to this idea again and again in his own epistles, so it should not be surprising to find it in Hebrews as well.

That Hebrews does not represent Jesus as seeking crucifixion in order to make his own death a propitiatory sacrifice should be evident from 5:7: “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard for his godly fear [literally, devoutness (eulabeias)].” This is hardly coherent with the idea of a conscious pact with God to die as a propitiation, but it is perfectly coherent with the idea that in fulfillment of his prayers he was raised from death and that their belief in this could be interpreted as delivering the epistle’s author and audience from enslavement by the fear of their own deaths.

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But what then was Jesus’ sacrifice if it was not his death on the cross? For Hebrews does represent Jesus as offering a sacrifice: “he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (9:26) And this new covenant with God is even said to be inaugurated in blood: “But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent . . . he entered once for all into the Holy Place, taking not the blood of goats and calves but his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption” (9:11-12)

Is this physical blood, like that of the goats and calves, or metaphorical blood? If it is physical blood, then certainly Girard is right to say that the author of the epistle “can see only continuity with previous sacrifices.” But if Jesus’ blood here is a metaphor for some other sort of sacrifice, then the picture is quite different. Which kind of meaning does the text suggest, and what sort of sacrifice?

It will help to clarify the question further if we consider where the sacrifice is supposed to take place. It is certainly not in the Temple in Jerusalem like the Levitical sacrifices, but is it on Golgotha? Several passages in Hebrews make clear that its locus is not there either. The passage just quoted from 9:11-12 says that passing “through the greater and more perfect tent” he “entered once for all into the Holy Place. . . .” Where might that be?

The “tent” is a reference to the structure of the Jerusalem Temple, which was spoken of as divided into two “tents”: “the Holy” and “the Holy of Holies.”(13) The “Holy Place” of 9:12 would correspond to the part of the Temple called “the Holy,” where the sacrificial offerings were prepared for the altar which stood in front of the first tent. The Levitical priests who prepared offerings there, Hebrews tells us, “serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly sanctuary” (8:5). Jesus, on the other hand, offered his “blood” in the true, heavenly “Holy Place,” and having done that, has now passed in his resurrection life into the true Holy of Holies, “into the inner shrine behind the curtain” (6:19), “not into a sanctuary made with hands, a copy of the true one, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf” (9:24).

So Jesus’ sacrifice took place not in a physical place but a metaphorical place. The “blood” he offered in this metaphorical place, was perforce metaphorical blood. But what “heavenly” (spiritual or psychological) reality might that metaphor represent?

To get an initial sense of what Jesus’ sacrifice might have involved, let us consider further the way the text contrasts it with those of the Temple tradition: “When Christ came into the world, he said ‘Sacrifices and offerings thou hast not desired . . . in burnt offerings and sin offerings thou hast taken no pleasure. Then I said, “Lo, I have come to do thy will, O God,’ as it is written of me in the roll of the book”(10:5; the quotation within the quotation is Psalm 40:6-8). Hebrews then goes on to say that God, .” . . abolishes the first in order to establish the second. And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (10:9-10) “The first” clearly refers to the traditional animal sacrifices; “the second,” just as clearly, is “to do thy will.”

These passages make it abundantly clear that the “blood” of Jesus’ sacrifice, like the Holy Place where it is offered, is a metaphor: the sacrifices that involved physical blood have been abolished; the new, fully adequate sacrifice, “the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all,” is the perfect fulfillment of God’s will. What might that mean, and why might “blood” be an appropriate metaphor for it? The text does not spell it out, but again the answer was probably sufficiently evident to the original author and his intended audience not to require that. Perhaps the author is referring to what was probably already Jesus’ well known dictum about the two great commandments cited, for example, in Matthew 22:37-39: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”(14) This certainly describes the calling of Israel, the calling to sonship to God, that was fulfilled, from the early Christian point of view for the first time in a fully adequate way by Jesus.

As fine a formulation of God’s will as these two commandments are, however, they remain by themselves a bit abstract, and it may not be immediately clear just how fulfilling them could appropriately be imaged as a kind of sacrifice, even if one demanding only metaphorical blood. To get a better sense of how the imagery of sacrifice operates here it may help to turn to a consideration of some parallel ideas and images in “the great oriental religions” to which we saw Girard refer.

It is noteworthy in this connection that Bede Griffiths, a Catholic monk who spent more than two decades in India practicing a life of contemplative prayer and writing about it in a way that draws on both Christian and Hindu symbols, opens his book, The Cosmic Revelation: The Hindu Way to God, with an allusion to the Hebrews: “We are going to reflect on what I call the Vedic Revelation; and I use the word revelation intentionally because I think we have to recognize today that God has revealed Himself in other ways than through the Bible. God has been speaking to man, ‘in many and various ways,’ as it says in the Letter to the Hebrews, from the beginning of time” (7). Griffiths develops further this idea of a “cosmic revelation” beyond the confines of Israel and Christianity by invoking the same imagery of Melchizedek as does Hebrews: .” . . the Messiah is said to be ‘a priest forever of the order of Melchizedek’–not the order of Aaron, of the Jewish priesthood, but of Melchizedek, this ‘pagan’ priesthood. . . . That is why, when I enter a Hindu temple, I feel that I am entering a holy place. . . .” (30).

Griffiths’ point of departure for understanding “the Hindu way to God” is the Vedic fire sacrifice. He explains its symbolism as representing a circulation of gifts: gifts from the divine to humans and the return of those gifts to the divine. The fire symbolizes the transcendent source of life and spirit: .” . . the whole Vedic religion is centered on the fire sacrifice. The god of fire is Agni, and worship was paid to the sun as the source of fire. But the sun is the source of light to the mind as well as to the body” (22). The symbolism of fire in this rite compresses a large range of meanings: the fire is vitality, it is consciousness, it is energy; it is not only the divine energy descending into incarnate life, but it is also the energy of the liturgical offering, and as such it is simultaneously worldly and divine, immanent and transcendent:

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Agni, as we have said, is the god of fire. The fire is centred in the sun. . . . The fire comes down from heaven and is buried in the earth and when you take twigs or a flint and rub them together, the fire, Agni, leaps up. This is the god of fire who has come down from heaven to consume the sacrifice. But this fire is also a spiritual fire. . . . Agni, the fire, is the All-knowing One. It is a physical fire, yet they call it the fire of knowledge, of wisdom, and he is the All-knowing One. He is the mediator between God and man. He takes the sacrifice, consumes the sacrifice, and carries it back to heaven, and you ask him to direct your sacrifice. (23)

What sacrifice in this interpretation symbolizes essentially is the recognition that all life comes from a transcendent source and ultimately belongs to that transcendent source. The failure to recognize that concretely, to relinquish one’s claim to possession, and to thankfully allow all gifts to belong to the one source is the essence of sin: “In the Vedas it is very clear that everything comes down from above, from heaven. We receive everything from above and everything must be returned. A sacrifice is the return to God, and sin is the opposite, the appropriation of something to one’s self. . . . I am not my own possession; I am a gift–my being is a gift from God. I have got to return that gift. Sacrifice is this return” (49).

Likening the Vedic sacrifice to the Christian eucharist, Griffiths says:

So it reads: ‘Who in all his work, sees Brahman, he in truth goes to Brahman; Brahman is his worship, Brahman is his offering, offered by Brahman, in the fire of Brahman.’ Now that really is a Eucharistic action. In the Eucharist God is worshiped. You offer what you are doing to God. At the same time it is God Himself who makes the offering and who is being offered. God is both priest and victim. And it is offered in the fire of God. . . . So every action should be a Eucharistic action, that is the goal, to be united with Christ in His offering, so that one’s total life is offered to God. The offering is God Himself, He is offering Himself in us, in the fire of His own love, that is by the power of His own grace, resulting in a totally transformed human life. That is to make one’s whole life a sacrifice. (99)

To get a more concrete sense of the particular sacrifice and transformation pointed to in Hebrews, it may help to consider further some of the symbols of the Vedic religion and then compare them with those of Buddhism. There are many deities in Hindu religion, but in the tradition of the Vedas, Upanishads, and Bhagavad Gita, they are all symbols and embodiments of what Griffiths terms “the One Being” which the Rig-Veda says “the wise call by many names” (Griffiths 18). In Hinduism there are three major symbols that encompass all of the divine in its various forms: Brahman, Atman, and Purusha. Brahman is the One Being, considered as the radically transcendent source of all that is, but also as that which can become immanent in the forms of Atman and Purusha. Atman is usually translated as “self.” It is the spirit of the One Being present within consciousness and animating consciousness. Purusha is usually translated as “person.” To the extent that the presence of Brahman becomes embodied as true Atman, one might say, the result is a true person or “purusha.” Whether one says Atman is the center or animating principle of one person or of many persons will depend on the angle from which one considers it; as Griffiths puts it, “Each of us is a little Purusha, and there is one great Purusha who embraces us all” (74).

The symbolism of the possible unity or multiplicity of Purusha also connects with the symbolism of sacrifice: .” . . creation comes from the sacrifice of Purusha. At the beginning of time Purusha is sacrificed and his limbs are scattered all over the world. In the ritual sacrifice Purusha is gathered together and becomes one again” (75).

“Aha!” one might hear a strict Girardian say, “Here is an obvious instance of the imagery of sacrifice masking a primordial collective murder.” Well, that may be true–but it does not imply that there can be no more meaning to the symbol than that alone, as I hope will be clear from the comparison Griffiths proceeds to with some similar Christian symbols: “This has a profound relationship to the conception of Adam and the Son of Man. As St. Augustine said, ‘Adam at his fall, was scattered over all the earth.’ Man was once one, one with nature, one with himself, one with God. And then when he fell he was scattered and divided. The atonement means that God comes into this divided universe and gathers those scattered pieces together and in his sacrifice reunites mankind. He brings all these persons together in his Person. Another wonderful text of St. Augustine says, ‘In the end there will be unus Christus amans seipsum–One Christ, loving himself in all his members’” (75).

The Hindu symbolism is complicated by the fact that the symbols Brahman, Atman, and Purusha can have levels of meaning. For example, there is “the Atman in man which is the Spirit of God in man; but Atman can also be the ‘spirit of man’” (105). Similarly, Purusha can refer to the “Supreme Person,” but each one of us can also be said to be “a purusha.” (The ambiguity is similar to that with which St. Paul uses the word “Christ” to refer sometimes to Jesus as an individual and sometimes to what sounds more like a cosmic person embracing all of the redeemed humans who live “in Christ.”)

It is this ambiguity in the Indian tradition–the idea of Purusha and Atman as also human and individual–that seems to have given rise to the core Buddhist teaching of “anatman,” or “no-self.” For Buddhism (very much as in Girard and Oughourlian, as will be explained below) the human self is not an enduring, substantial reality but an accidental configuration of memory and desire. If, from the Buddhist point of view, one believes that one has an individual, substantial “atman” or “self,” then that belief is an illusion that enslaves one to illusory desires–desires that seek to preserve and augment that illusory, insubstantial self. The whole purpose of Buddhism is to assist the individual held in this bondage to discover, through meditative practice leading to inward realization and transformation, the truth of “anatman”: that there is no such self. Although Buddhists, having dropped the theistic language of Hindu religion, do not use the symbolism of sacrifice, the Buddhist radical relinquishing of the individual atman through realization of anatman could also be called a kind of sacrifice of the self.

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There have been patterns of thought in Indian tradition (especially in Jain) that have emphasized the idea of atman as individual in a way to which the Buddhist critique is appropriate, but the two traditions are not inherently in conflict over this point, as can be seen from a Vedic verse Griffiths quotes: “When by the real nature of the Atman he sees as by a lamp the real nature of Brahman, then having known the one eternal God, who is beyond all natures, he is freed from bondage” (82). Griffiths says that the insight this verse expresses is “not merely a speculative theory but a fact of experience.” The same is certainly true for the Buddhist realization of anatman. Both refer to psychological reality that must be known experientially.

If the symbols of Hinduism and Buddhism are expressions of potentially universal human experience, then they may also serve as analogies for the experience the author of Hebrews refers to as Jesus’ sacrifice. Sin, the force within us that causes us to center in the false self of our mimetic desires rather than in the love of God and of our neighbors, is the ultimate obstacle to the sonship to which Israel understood itself to be called. In psychological terms sin may be described as equivalent to what Buddhism calls the “craving” that binds us to the false atman or illusory self. It was by his conquest of sin and the shift of the center of his being from the false self to its true center in God that Jesus fulfilled, for Israel and for mankind, God’s call to sonship. In psychological terms this shift of the center of personhood may be considered equivalent to putting to death, or “sacrificing,” the false self.

It is appropriate in this connection to mention also a pertinent Girardian symbol, the moi-du-désir or “desire-self” that Jean-Michel Oughourlian explores extensively in The Puppet of Desire. This, like the Buddhist idea of the atman, is an accidental configuration of memory and desire–of memories, that is, that collect around and give an illusory sense of permanence to constantly shifting patterns of desire. As Oughourlian explains his specifically psychological development of Girardian theory:

I have always thought that what one customarily calls the I or self in psychology is an unstable, constantly changing, and ultimately evanescent structure. I think . . . that only desire brings this self into existence. Because desire is the only psychological motion, it alone, it seems to me, is capable of producing the self and breathing life into it. The first hypothesis that I would like to formulate in this regard is this: desire gives rise to the self and, by its movement, animates it. The second hypothesis . . . is that desire is mimetic. This postulate, which was advanced by René Girard as early as 1961, seems to me capable of serving as the foundation for a new, pure psychology–that is, one unencumbered by any sort of biologism. . . . These two hypotheses make it necessary to revise earlier psychologies, since these are psychologies either of the subject or of the object. They demand that one renounce the mythical claim to a self that would be a permanent structure in a monadic subject. (11-12)

The idea of the atman that the Buddhist doctrine of anatman opposes is precisely such a “mythical claim to a self that would be a permanent structure in a monadic subject.” The very valuable Girardian addition to the Buddhist insight is the idea of the force of unconscious mimesis and the role of the mediator of desire as a model for the patterns of desire that spring up and grip us.

Perhaps it may be helpful if I explain this idea a little further. Girard initially developed his concept of mimetic desire and the role of the mediator of desire in a study of the novel, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Deceit, Desire, and The Novel), the 1961 work that Oughourlian refers to. It has frequently been observed by literary scholars that a (if not the) principal focus of the novel as a genre has been the conflict between appearance and reality, both in society and in the life of the individual. What Girard found in this study of the novel from Cervantes to Dostoyevsky and Proust was that the great novelists he examined showed that most of what appear to us to be “our” desires are really imitated from what we perceive to be the desires of others in our milieu. More particularly, we seek out models of desire (what Girard calls “mediators”) in order to learn what is worth desiring.

Why do we do this? The reality Girard thinks the great novelists discovered and disclose to us is that each person who comes into the world begins with a feeling of radical lack or emptiness, of weakness and vulnerability. Beginning as helpless infants utterly dependent on powerful others, we feel acutely our lack of power. We also have a strong inner drive to seek to become like those powerful others so as to acquire their power for ourselves. We think of the mediator as free from the lack of power we feel. When we notice that the mediator has desires, we assume that these must be for things the mediator perceives as having the potential to augment his or her “being” (i.e., power). That is why we want them for ourselves: we want to “be.” This is why Girard also calls mimetic desire “metaphysical desire”: mimetic desire is only superficially a desire to have what the other has or wants; on a deeper level it is a desire to possess not the other’s objects but his “being,” to be what he is.

All of this normally takes place below the threshold of our awareness–though it is not exactly unconscious either. Rather our consciousness is virtually “possessed” by our fascination with the mediator, the prestigious other we strive to imitate.(15) The great novelists, however, raise this into awareness and give us the opportunity to reflect on it and, ideally, to break free from it. This is the “novelistic truth” Girard’s title refers to, and the “romantic lying” is our tendency in our ordinary lives to avoid noticing that truth.

“A basic contention of this essay,” Girard said at the beginning of that work, “is that the great writers apprehend intuitively and concretely, through the medium of their art, if not formally, the system in which they were first imprisoned together with their contemporaries” (3). Something else they can be said to have apprehended intuitively and concretely, to put the matter in Buddhist language, is that life in that self-generated prison is characterized by dukkha, the Buddhist term often translated as “suffering” but more accurately translated as “unsatisfactoriness.” Mimetic desire is unsatisfactory for some very fundamental reasons:

• As desire, it is really illusory. That is, we do not really want what we think we want or for the reasons we think we want it. We want it because we think (mistakenly) that the reason our mediator of desire wants it is that he actually knows what will enhance his being and make it invulnerable. (This is the “romantic lie.”)


• Even if we could acquire the object of desire, it would not bring us satisfaction, because the “being,” the power and invulnerability, we really long for and of which the object is only a symbol, will always remain out of reach. We are finite and can never achieve the divine super-sufficiency or plenitude of being that we attribute to our mediators. (This is the “novelistic truth”)

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To win freedom from self-imprisonment in this system of illusion requires that one both understand its real structure and be willing to relinquish its illusory comforts–in particular the comforting belief that if only one could make just a little more progress in acquiring the mediator’s objects or becoming what the mediator is, or if only one could defeat the rival (which is really only a negative version of the mediator), or kill the scapegoat (another negative version of the mediator), then one would enjoy the plenitude of being one longs for.

The core of the Girardian idea, as of the Buddhist, is that the desire-self, though a tenaciously powerful force in one’s psychic life, is ultimately insubstantial and that seeing through it can lead to liberation from the power of the illusions it generates. Jesus’ breaking free in this way from the whole complex of mimetic desire and its conflictual and victimizing mechanisms is the heart of Girard’s own christology. Although the word might surprise a strict Girardian, Jesus’ seeing through and letting go of the desire-self could also appropriately be described as a kind of sacrifice.

The excursus into “the great oriental religions,” then, has not been a mere detour. One might even say that Girard is closer to these than he seems to have noticed.

If the imagery of sacrifice in Hebrews is interpreted in the light of these considerations, the sacrifice talked about there shows two aspects: (1) it refers to something that might be imaged as the “bloody” sacrifice or putting to death of what Buddhism calls the atman and Girardian psychology the desire-self; and (2) it refers to the consecration of the true person, the “body” of 10:5 to a life that finds its true center in God: “but a body hast thou prepared for me.” The image of Jesus’ “own blood” (9:12), that is, represents what dies in the sacrifice; the image of his “body” represents the person who is consecrated. It also refers to the continuing life of that consecrated person, which Hebrews speaks of in 8:2 as that of “a minister in the sanctuary and the true tent, which is set up not by man but by the Lord.” Jesus’ willingness to undergo crucifixion rather than abandon his prophetic calling was an expression and sign of his complete consecration of his life to God’s service. His sacrifice in its full meaning was not his crucifixion alone but his self-emptying throughout his life: both his sacrifice of all false selfhood, of the desire-self, and his self-giving to God. The “offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (10:10) was the total consecration of his living personhood, of his whole life, to heeding and fulfilling the calling of Israel to sonship. This was a ministry which constituted Jesus’ life in this world before his crucifixion and continues still, from the point of view of the author of Hebrews, in the heavenly sanctuary.

Of course if one were to approach this idea from the point of view of the sort of mythifying later christology that sometimes interpreted Jesus as a pre-existent divine person who took on a human body and walked around in it omnipotent and omniscient but without a really human mind and psychology, then it would be inconceivable that Jesus could actually experience the pull of a desire-self, the gravitational force of a false center. After all, he would just be God, and how could the infinite source of all that is experience temptation or be deceived by a false self-understanding? From this point of view, Jesus’ fidelity would simply be an expression of his divine nature, not the kind of costly, even painful, self conquest to which the image of shedding blood would be appropriate. With no desire-self, there would be nothing to sacrifice or blood to shed except the physical blood of his physical body on the cross. If one were to view the whole picture in this way, it would seem natural and virtually inevitable to interpret Jesus’ sacrifice in the conventional way that Girard rightly finds absurd. But this is not the vision expressed in Hebrews, with its emphasis that Jesus was truly human and was “in every respect . . . tempted as we are, yet without sin” (4:15). Nor is it what eventually came to be defined in the councils of the fourth and fifth centuries as orthodoxy: the Council of Chalcedon in 451 echoed the epistle’s phrasing when it described the second hypostasis as “complete in manhood” and “in every way like us, except for sin.”(16)

This leaves only the question of what light this analysis of Jesus’ sacrifice in “the Holy Place” might throw on what it could mean to speak of him as also a manifestation of God, one who “reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature” (Hebrews 1:3). Any modern New Testament scholar would object to the anachronism of reading back into this very early document the doctrine of the Trinity, which was not formulated until the fourth century. But it is not anachronistic to recognize that the seeds that developed into the Trinitarian idea are in the New Testament already in references to Jesus as in some manner manifesting divine presence and to the Holy Spirit as indwelling both him and those who faithfully follow him. The symbol “son of God,” as was mentioned earlier, carried no connotations of divinity, but “spirit of God” did. How might the idea of the Holy Spirit relate to the picture developed so far of Jesus’ sacrifice as a self-emptying and self-dedication? In particular, how might it relate to the psychological and spiritual structure of the person, the true self, who is left after the death of the desire-self?

In Buddhism, too, the question arises as to what remains when the atman is seen through and transcended. The answer there is “Bodhi,” enlightenment. One who has actually realized anatman, “no self,” does not cease to exist but becomes an enlightened one, a Buddha. Sometimes Buddhists also speak of what is left in enlightenment as Buddha-mind or Buddha-nature and of the compassion or love for all living things that characterizes the Bodhisattva life or nirvana. Contrary to conventional western misunderstandings, it is not the case that in nirvana there is simply nothing left. The word “nirvana” or “nibbana” means literally to be “blown out” or to be “cooled by blowing.” What is cooled is the fire of craving, and what is extinguished is the desire-self, the atman–but it was never real anyway. What is left is Bodhi, Buddha-nature, Buddha-mind. Buddhism is not therefore a nihilism or annihilationism; it does not, pace Girard, cultivate “a kind of living death.” One who becomes enlightened is freed from the power of karma and the wheel of rebirth, symbols that refer to the power of the illusory atman, the desire-self, to endlessly regenerate itself in the psychology of the person who succumbs to its lure. Freedom from that is true life, the freedom to live with a clear mind and a compassionate heart.

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Buddhism is explicit about this new life or animating principle that would be left after the realization of anatman. The Epistle to the Hebrews may spell it out less explicitly, but it does seem to have a parallel to Buddha-mind or Buddha-nature in its symbolism of the Holy Spirit. In many places in the New Testament the Holy Spirit is spoken of as indwelling Jesus and guiding and impelling him in his work, and also as giving new life to his followers in fulfillment of the prophecy that the Law that was formerly written on tablets of stone would one day be written on the hearts of God’s people (Jeremiah 31:33). In Hebrews the Holy Spirit is mentioned explicitly only once, but in that one verse it is indicated as the animating principle of Jesus’ sacrifice and of the new life that sacrifice opens to his followers: “. . . how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify your conscience . . .” (9:14).

This may be the only reference in Hebrews to the Spirit, but it has implications that gradually unfold as the author goes on to describe the consequences of Jesus’ sacrifice for his readers: He exhorts them to hold fast in faith to the new life Jesus’ sacrifice has won for them by freeing them from slavery to the fear of death and by renewing their consciences. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (11:1). Freedom from the fear of death comes from their faith in Jesus’ resurrection and the hope for their own to come. The renewal of their consciences comes from the breaking of that fear’s power to make them cling to the life of the illusory desire-self that must be given up. This means they are called to undergo their own metaphorical but very real deaths: “In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood” (12:4). In the last line of what Buchanan thinks is the original “homiletical midrash” we can even hear a distant echo of the image of the Vedic Agni as the fire that comes down from heaven, is buried in the earth, and leaps up again to consume the sacrifice: “Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe; for our God is a consuming fire” (12:28-29).

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