God in Girard’s anthropology

So it turns out that instead of ordering Girard’s The Scapegoat as an audiobook, I got a CBC Radio 5-part special on Girard (part of a regular feature called Ideas, which has a very interesting list of programs which can be ordered, as audiobooks or as written transcripts). This was a serendipitous mistake, because the series is a very good introduction to Girard’s thought.

The title of the series is The Scapegoat: René Girard’s Anthropology of Violence and Religion, written and produced by David Cayley. My wife’s undergraduate degree is in Anthropology, from BYU. She says that many view this degree as a “high risk” degree in terms of one’s testimony of the Church, which some anecdotal evidence suggests is not a completely unfounded view (I’ve heard something similar about philosophy, at least at the graduate level, though I don’t even have anecdotal evidence regarding philosophy, and I presume the claim applies mostly to analytic philosophy, which doesn’t surprise me because of the tension between faith and reason lying, arguably, at the heart of modernity which of course analytic and Continental philosophy address quite differently—but I’m severely digressing, sorry).

My question in this post is: What are the potential conflicts between anthropology and faith, esp. as it pertains to Girard’s anthropology?

The main tension I see is rooted in the tension between constancy and change. That is, in what sense is God (and his church, and doctrine, and theology, and truth, etc.) dynamic vs. unchangeable (or immutable; I think it’s rather ironic that in these quick scriptural word searches there are many more references in LDS scripture than in the Bible, ironic because LDS believe in an open canon and continuing revelation whereas most Christians don’t…). Girard’s view of the Old Testament seems to be one of cultural progress, and it is this that I think challenges at least a traditional Mormon understanding of scriptural history. Specifically, one problem/tension I see is Girard’s take on the origin of sacrifice. In Moses 5:6, Adam tells the inquiring angel that he offers sacrifices unto the Lord “I know not [why], save the Lord commanded me.” Can we think that God asked Adam to do this, not for some sort of transcendent, metaphysical reason, but (merely) so that society could learn how to overcome mimetic rivalry and crises?

For Girard, sacrifice is something that society comes to use as a means for resolving mimetic rivalry (competition, basically, though Girard’s take on this seems quite intriguing, something we will surely talk about in more depth later; for those who’ve read Derrida’s Gift of Death, this seems intriguingly related to Derrida’s/Patocka’s notion of war, which seems closely related to Levinas’s notion of the Same…). This, however, is only one step in society’s evolutionary attempt at resolving the problem of mimetic rivalry. At first, the scapegoat is viewed as guilty and society is bound together in its focus on this common enemy. Society comes to recognize the euphoria following the sacrifice, and this makes the sacrifice sacred. But society also comes to recognize that the sacrificial victim is not necessarily guilty. This causes a “mimetic crisis” where society has a hard time understanding the difference between sacred and nonsacred violence. It is against this background of mimetic crisis that Girard reads the Hebrew Old Testament. Thus, Girard sees the encounter between Joseph and Judah in Genesis 44 as a key development: Judah’s offering himself in place of Benjamin (v. 33), and Joseph’s subsequent forgiveness of all of his brothers (not just Judah!), transforms society’s traditional understanding of the role of sacrifice. Similarly, Job’s refusal to be a guilty scapegoat for society is taken as evidence that the former view that scapegoats are guilty is being challenged. Similarly, the Prophets’ complaints against sacrifice are taken as an evolutionary step in society away from literal, blood sacrifice, toward a more symbolic kind of sacrifice (like the broken heart and contrite spirit of 3 Nephi 9). Circumcision is also taken as a means of changing the understanding of the purpose of sacrifice (that is, by effectively internalizing the violence; Girard also makes some interesting comments regarding the puzzling incident in Exodus 4:24ff where Moses’ son is circumcised, but I wasn’t very clear on what he was trying to say).

This is, of course, only a very rough sketch of Girard’s view(s) on the origin and evolution of sacrifice, and perhaps a very faulty one at that since I’m basing this only on my listening to two tapes on Girard. My purpose is simply to get us thinking about what will likely be a key issue for us to consider as we take up Girard, viz. to what extent can we view society as evolving, and God interacting with society in an evolutionary way? The problem, of course, is that if God is taken merely as society’s evolving conception of God, there is a strong sense in which this severely challenges a Mormon notion of God who exists independently of or transcendentally above humankind’s evolving conception of him.