René Girard is a captivating figure who defies easy categorisation. He has integrated large swaths of diverse disciplines to argue for the irreducible uniqueness of Christianity.Footnote 1 To his mind, unlike natural religions, which sacralise innocent victims through the application of sundry sacrificial forms, Christianity eschews all violence and lays bare what has been hidden since the foundation of the world: the scapegoat mechanism.Footnote 2 Paradoxically, that mechanism is simultaneously destructive and constructive. When mimetic competition for the same object reaches a fever pitch, it unleashes a violence that threatens society. To quell that violence, the scapegoat mechanism – in its destructive modality – directs society’s violence against an individual or set of individuals under the form of a sacrifice, which results in a cathartic de-escalation.Footnote 3 Through that sacrifice, civilisation is saved, but that which is capable of saving a people once on the verge of total destruction must itself be of a divine magnitude. Constructively, then, the scapegoat, precisely through its victimisation, is sacralised and regarded as a divinity. This serves as the basis for religion, which is at the founding centre of every culture.Footnote 4
Girard argues that Christianity operates according to an entirely different logic. Unlike the myths of natural religions, Christian texts (i.e., the New Testament) tell stories not of divinities who justify the violence of victimisers but of a God who sides with innocent victims. As an anticipation of the New Testament, Old Testament stories speak of God’s condemnation of victimisers’ violence and His nearness to victims.Footnote 5 Christ represents the height of that condemnation and lays bare the subterranean manoeuvrings of the scapegoat mechanism. Yet, Girard is convinced that if Christ can unmask these hidden structures, it is only because violence has no purchase or claim upon him, which is to say that Christ is divine.Footnote 6 But he is also a human being. To reveal the scapegoat mechanism, Christ himself becomes a victim precisely by becoming a man.Footnote 7
Traditionally, Christianity has held that Christ’s victimisation – specifically, his crucifixion, death, but also his resurrection – redeems humanity from sin. In the period of his scholarly activity culminating with the publication in 1978 of Things Hidden, however, Girard complains that to accord such a sacrificial meaning to the crucifixion would be to lose sight of Christianity’s uniqueness and reduce it to one more natural religion among others. It was Christ’s complete rejection of violence – and not his death on the cross – that freed humanity from its bondage to violence.Footnote 8
Remarkably, owing at least in part to his interactions with the Jesuit theologian Raymund Schwager, Girard later abandoned his non-sacrificial reading.Footnote 9 In a 1993 interview with Rebecca Adams, Girard admitted that his treatment of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which he had earlier dismissed as a product of pre-Christian thinking due to its sacrificial motifs, was misguided by a failure to appreciate the notion of a distinctively unique sense of ‘sacrifice’ proper to Christ’s crucifixion. Girard confessed to having ‘scapegoated’ not only the Hebrews but also the very notion of ‘sacrifice’ itself.Footnote 10 In contrast to the murderous sacrifice that exists in the natural sacred, there is a different kind of sacrifice. This alternative sense of sacrifice can be observed, for example, in the case of the two women bringing their claim to the same child before Solomon. The true mother is willing to sacrifice her own child (as well as her own maternity) by giving it up rather than allow the child to be slaughtered. The mother is not in love with death – as occurs in the case of murderous sacrifice – ‘she is in love with life, but she is willing to give up her life in order to save the child’s life. This, says Girard, ‘is the true meaning of Christ’s sacrifice’.Footnote 11
In what follows, I argue that the notion of ‘sacrifice’ was not the only victim to be scapegoated in Girard’s earlier work. In his initial efforts to extricate Christianity from (murderous) sacrificial thinking, Girard distinguishes Christianity from (Greek) philosophy, the last bastion of the sacred. On Girard’s reading, Heidegger’s important treatment of Heraclitean logos lays bare the violence residing at the heart of metaphysics. To think in terms of ‘Being’ (οὐσία, ens, Sein), as Heraclitus and all subsequent metaphysicians do, is to think in terms of a monolithic, totalising framework that obliterates difference through the violent imposition of homogeneity. In contrast, the Christian Logos introduced in the prologue to John’s Gospel is one that harbours no violence but is a victim of (metaphysical) violence. Girard retains this basic view even in his most mature works.Footnote 12
I suggest that the opposition Girard introduces between metaphysics – represented here by the Heraclitean logos – and the Johannine Logos mirrors his earlier claim of opposition between the natural sacred and Christianity vis-à-vis the notion of sacrifice. Yet, just as the strict opposition between the latter pair was abandoned (so much so that even a certain degree of continuity could be admitted), I argue that the same can be done with respect to the supposed opposition between metaphysics and Christianity. Intimations of a renewed or, better yet, redeemed metaphysics can be found in Girard’s discussion of Benedict XVI’s Regensburg address. That address warns of a de-Hellenised rationality in which a techno-scientific conception of rationality is pitted against the Gospels framed exclusively in terms of their Hebraic specificity and which Girard warns has generated the Scylla of rationalism and the Charybdis of fideism.Footnote 13 Unacknowledged in the gradual disappearance of ‘Hellenic reason’ in contemporary discourse is the simultaneous occlusion of metaphysics. What is being concealed, however, is not the metaphysics of antiquity (itself just another form of the natural sacred) nor that of the Enlightenment (itself a rationalised form of violence). Rather, what is disappearing is a metaphysics that emerged as a critical reflection upon that which is disclosed in the Gospels and which ‘demystif[ies] rationalism and fideism’.Footnote 14
To substantiate my claim, I argue that the very christological insights that Girard offers in his account of the Johannine Logos can be further developed to support the redeemed metaphysics that I have in mind. This is not a metaphysics that, as John Milbank has complained in opposition to Girard, is ultimately ‘an endorsement of the universality of Oedipal desire’ that is ‘founded upon “universal reason”… beneath the play of simulacra’.Footnote 15 Rather than an instance of grafting Christianity onto Greek philosophy, I suggest that the incarnation – constituted as it is by an absolute unity (i.e. Jesus Christ) existing in the greatest of diversity (i.e. divinity and humanity) – serves not only as the vehicle of our redemption but also as the aperture through which the very structures of Being itself can be considered anew.
I
In his effort to identify the unique specificity that pertains to Christianity over and against all forms of the natural sacred, Girard has occasion in his Things Hidden to distinguish Christianity from (Greek) philosophy. Despite its lofty and enlightened appeals to rationality, (Greek) philosophy too is guilty of its own form of violence. For Girard, Martin Heidegger’s study of Heraclitus provides an important archeological investigation, as it were, into the sedimented structures of Greek thought that conceal its own form of violence. Heidegger explains that for Heraclitus logos amounts to a kind of ‘gathering’ (Sammlung) involving ‘rank’ (Rang) and ‘dominion’ (Herrschaft).Footnote 16 This ‘gathering’ is not just a neutral or haphazard collection of items but the forceful – violent – exercise of power in Being’s (Sein) effort to keep its inner opposites together in uniformity. This stands in contrast to the Johannine Logos that, in its expulsion, is instead the victim of violence: ‘He came unto his own: and his own received him not’ (John 1:10). For Girard, John’s appeal to the Logos does not amount to a ‘clumsy attempt to imitate philosophy’. Rather, the Johannine Logos represents something radically new which has ‘never been sufficiently distinguished’ from (Greek) philosophy by Christian thinkers.Footnote 17 The upshot of Girard’s investigation is that there are in fact two competing and irreducibly distinct accounts of logos: one philosophical (i.e. Greek) and the other Christian.
The Johannine portrayal of Christ as the incarnate Logos ineluctably places Christianity in close proximity to Greek philosophy. Are the two identical? If not, in what manner are they distinct? Many early church fathers were content to regard Greek logos as a prefiguring of the incarnate Logos. Such an attitude is clearly at work, for example, in Augustine’s Confessions. The seventh book of that text chronicles Augustine’s intellectual conversion, which, as he tells us, was greatly facilitated by his encounter with the works of the Neoplatonists, who speak of the ‘Word’ (verbum). Augustine’s Latin verbum captures the Greek logos not only in name but also, as he says, in meaning. Yet, as Augustine points out, that the Word became flesh, ‘those [books] did not have’.Footnote 18 This is not an unimportant observation, as we shall come to see. Still, that verbum and logos mean the same, and that the same meaning ranges over both the philosophical and biblical use of the term logos is not in dispute for the bishop of Hippo.
What seems to be a point of harmonious congruence between Christianity and Greek thought is, to Girard’s mind, an unfortunate obfuscation of Christianity by an alien (philosophical) paradigm. This obfuscation, we are told, would seem to reach its zenith in the Latin High Middle Ages, when the pursuit of knowledge framed in terms of the Greek (more specifically, Aristotelian) account of ‘science’ (ἐπιστήμη) led to the displacement of all biblical specificity.Footnote 19 ‘It is quite true, historically speaking, that you gradually turn away from the Bible as you move in the direction of philosophy’.Footnote 20 What should have forever been kept neatly distinct – Greek thought and Christianity – was brought together in an unholy union that only worked to conceal (however unwittingly) the violence that the Gospel sought to expose and overcome. Girard complains that the Christian appropriation of Greek logos, such as we have seen in Augustine and in many other philosophically motivated Christian theologians in the Middle Ages, results in either (1) embracing the dubious claim that Greek philosophers were essentially proto-Christian theologians, even if only ‘unconsciously’ so, or (2) conceding that Christianity is just a vain and otiose ‘imitation’ of philosophy.Footnote 21
Heidegger points out that we commonly take the Greek terms logos and legein to mean ‘word’ and ‘to speak’, respectively, as when we say, for instance, that biology is the discourse on life, or that ontology is the discourse on being. Yet, the original meaning of the terms had no such relation to either word or language. Rather, in Greek, logos initially signified a ‘gathering’ or a ‘collecting’. The same meaning attaches to the Latin term ‘legere’ and the German ‘lesen’, which are both commonly taken as having to do with ‘reading’ and ‘discourse’. Like ‘logos’ and ‘legein’, however, ‘legere’ and ‘lesen’ originally signified ‘gathering’, ‘collecting’ or ‘to bring together’ (zusammenbringen).Footnote 22 Heidegger further observes that the ‘gathering’ that pertains to logos is not a random or haphazard collecting, but an ordered arranging.Footnote 23 Here, Heidegger identifies important philosophical and non-philosophical texts (Aristotle’s Physics, 8.1.252a13, and the Odyssey XXIV, 106 are both mentioned) that portray logos in terms of an ordered gathering. This ordering will have important implications for determining the point of distinction between the Greek logos and the Johannine Logos.
For Heidegger, the thinker who especially frames logos in terms of a ‘gathering’ is Heraclitus. Unfortunately, the peculiar character that Heraclitus ascribes to logos, Heidegger alleges, has been obscured and misconstrued by Christianity in its effort to present Christ as the incarnate Logos. To recover Heraclitus’s own thinking on the matter, Heidegger appeals to the first two Heraclitean fragments (22B1 and B2).Footnote 24 The first speaks of logos as remaining ‘uncomprehended’ (ἀξύνετοι), yet it is that according to which all things come to be (γινομένων πάντων κατὰ τὸν λόγον τόνδε).Footnote 25 The second mentions logos as the necessity of commonality or ‘togetherness’ (κοινός) that binds all things together.Footnote 26 What these two fragments indicate is that Heraclitus construes logos as a permanent endurance, the togetherness constituting being and the governance by which everything stands together.Footnote 27 Altogether absent is the sense of logos taken as ‘word’, ‘speech’ or ‘thought’.
As Heidegger reads him, Heraclitus thinks that human beings remain ‘uncomprehending’ because they themselves are unable to ‘bring together’ in the order of thought what logos does in the order of Being.Footnote 28 Human beings are like those who hear but are deaf (Fragment 34). Those who remain ‘uncomprehending’ hear not the logos into which all things are gathered (Fragment 50), but mere words that are productive only of opinion (δόξα). As Heidegger puts it, people hear the logos, but they do not take ‘heed’ (hören). Although people have continuous contact with the logos in their daily lives, opinion places them at odds with it so that it appears strange and unrecognisable (Fragment 72). Being (Sein) remains utterly foreign ‘in that [human beings] turn away from being, because they do not grasp it at all, but think that beings are only beings and nothing more’.Footnote 29 Put another way, one loses sight of Being (Sein) for beings (Seiendes) and takes only one element of the ‘gathered’ to be the logos itself.
In losing sight of Being (Sein), one also loses sight of the internal conflict that constitutes Being. As noted above, the ‘gathering’ (Sammlung) that pertains to Being is not simply a haphazard ‘round up’ (Zusammentreiben) or a ‘piling up’ (Anhaufen) of items. Rather, it is a forced keeping of opposed ‘contraries’ (Gegenstrebige) in ‘togetherness’ (Zusammengehörigkeit) through power and dominion.Footnote 30 The ‘uncomprehending’ affix their attention not to that togetherness, but only upon whatever their opinionatedness happens to alight. They therefore presume to have apprehended Being when they have only really grasped an artificial (and tentative) resolution to the conflict constitutive of Being.Footnote 31 For Heraclitus, Being, precisely as the antagonistic gathering of opposites, enshrines within itself the very violence that, according to Girard, stands at the origin of all human civilisations. Heidegger himself is not oblivious to that violence: ‘The gathering of the highest of opposites is πόλεμος [war], struggle in the above-mentioned sense of setting each other apart’.Footnote 32 Heidegger concludes that, on account of the conflict it houses, Being implicitly involves ‘rank’ and ‘power’, so that what has a greater rank has a greater power.Footnote 33 Not surprisingly, Being does not disclose itself to just anyone, which is why so many remain uncomprehending. Rather, it is only unconcealed before the ‘strong’ (Starken), that is, the metaphysician.Footnote 34
Reflecting on Heidegger’s analysis, Girard notes that ‘The Heraclitean Logos, in Heidegger’s terms, is the Logos of all cultures to the extent that they are, and will always remain, founded upon unanimous violence’.Footnote 35 Despite (Greek) philosophy’s best efforts to distinguish itself from (Greek natural) religion, the two coincide in a self-concealing foundational principle: violence. Philosophy – more specifically, metaphysics – just like religion, has its own scapegoats and, as Girard sees it, becomes ‘the last, final refuge of the sacred’.Footnote 36 Put another way, ‘philosophy is the continuation of myth by more sophisticated means’.Footnote 37 It is not surprising, then, that some postmodern thinkers following in Heidegger’s wake regard metaphysics as essentially violent.Footnote 38 Gianni Vattimo, for instance, celebrates the ‘end of metaphysics’ on account of the fact that the biblical God of love, who has nothing to do with (Greek) metaphysical being, can now resume the throne vacated by the metaphysical god of violence.Footnote 39
We recall, however, that, according to Heidegger, Heraclitus has been woefully misinterpreted by Christian thinkers when they find in his account of logos a prefiguring of Christ. If Christian and Heraclitean accounts of logos are truly divergent, then the question again arises: where does their difference reside? For Heidegger, the difference consists in this: whereas Greek logos is identified with the Being (Sein) of a being (Seinde) through the violent gathering of opposites, the Christian Logos is identified only with one being (Seinde): the Son of God.Footnote 40 The incarnate Logos functions as a mediator between the Father and human beings, but in such a way that Logos derives from the Jewish Septuagint meaning of ‘word’. Thus, the Logos of the New Testament is a derivation of the one who gives the Decalogue (δεκάλογος).Footnote 41 Whereas one discovers an antagonism residing within Greek logos itself, the antagonism is displaced within Christianity in such a way that the (incarnate) Logos stands in an antagonistic relation to humanity by the imposition of tyrannical commands (i.e. the Decalogue). Here, Heidegger continues a tradition that reaches back to Hegel, who ‘turned the God of the Law into the God who crushes, the God of imperious domination’.Footnote 42
What Heidegger’s analysis amounts to is this: violence is preserved within logos whether it be that described by Heraclitus or that found in the Gospels. The former involves the ‘violence of the sacred’ wherein the logos proper to all beings exercises its own domination and tyranny. It is a ‘violence committed by freemen’.Footnote 43 The Johannine Logos, in contrast, insofar as it is reserved solely to God, unleashes violence from without. ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill’ (Matt 5:17).Footnote 44 What Christ’s fulfilment of the law amounts to would seem to be an act of ‘violence visited upon slaves’.Footnote 45 Heidegger thinks, in agreement with Nietzsche, that Christians internalise these commands in what eventually becomes a form of slave morality.
For his part, Girard questions whether the distinction between violence committed among the free and that conducted by a master upon his slave is sufficient to distinguish the Greek logos from the Johannine Logos. To reduce the distinction entirely to a difference within violence itself allows the victimising mechanism that produces violence in the first place to remain hidden. After all, violence in any form is still just violence. Paradoxically, whereas Christian thinkers have tended to reduce Greek logos to an anticipation of the Christian Logos and thereby obscure the former, Heidegger reduces the Christian Logos to the Greek logos and thereby obscures the former. The result is the same: misunderstanding. The reduction of one logos to the other retains a form of sacrificial thinking that perpetuates the cycle of violence and the concealment of the victimising mechanism. For this reason, Girard laments that ‘Heidegger fails to see that any form of violent mastery ends up in slavery because the model-obstacle comes into play, dominating thought in the same way that it dominates concrete relationships between people’.Footnote 46 What properly distinguishes the one from the other is that, whereas the Greek logos is in its very being violent, the Johannine Logos is entirely free from all violence. To the degree that Heidegger identifies the Johannine Logos with violence, he only perpetuates the misperception that it is really identical with the Greek logos. To insist upon a distinction between the two requires showing how the Johannine Logos operates entirely outside the mechanisms of violence.
II
For Girard, the difference between Greek logos and Johannine Logos amounts to the difference between violence and love. Both have the character of abolishing difference.Footnote 47 Violence abolishes difference, as we have seen in the case of Heraclitus, by its tyrannical imposition of a forced uniformity that amounts to conformity and the scapegoating of individuality and difference. Here, one need only think of any of the totalitarian regimes that operated in the first half of the twentieth century that herded its citizens into the anonymous unity of indistinct individuals apt for subjugation. Violence is not unique to totalitarian regimes, for it thrives equally well in democracies.
Love also abolishes difference, Girard claims, but he does not explain exactly how it does so. This is unfortunate because he misses an opportunity to capitalise upon the full implications of the Johannine Logos’ incarnate reality that would help further underscore the unique specificity of Christianity that he seeks to identify. I shall return to this point in what follows. For now, we note that Girard turns to the incompatibility between love and violence to insist upon the fact that the difference between the Greek logos and the Johannine Logos must be an ‘obvious one’.Footnote 48 ‘Seeing the striking difference is mere child’s play, in the sense that only children can see the simple and essential aspect of things’.Footnote 49 The essential difference between the Greek logos and the Johannine Logos is that the latter is expelled; Greek logos exerts violence, but the Johannine Logos suffers it.
Several passages within the prologue to John’s Gospel call attention to the violence that the Logos endures. ‘In him [the Logos] was life … and the darkness did not overtake it [the Logos]’ (John 1:4–5); ‘He was in the world … yet the world did not know him’ (John 1:10); ‘He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him’ (John 1:11). What these passages reveal is that the Johannine Logos, far from being some despot whose mediation of the Father consists in the transmission of tyrannical dictates to humanity, suffers misunderstanding, rejection and expulsion. What is so plainly obvious – the expulsion of the Logos as determinative of its specificity – is entirely overlooked by millennia of commentators.Footnote 50 Yet, if the scapegoat mechanism is productive of culture only insofar as that mechanism remains concealed, then the misrecognition of the Johannine Logos is almost inevitable.Footnote 51 Not only are religious practices, rituals, prohibitions and narratives affected by the concealed violence that operates within cultures, so too is human thought itself shaped by the violence that constitutes its own proper object: Being (logos). Thus, philosophy, despite its self-congratulatory superiority over poetic (mythical) lies,Footnote 52 remains a repository of the sacred.Footnote 53 Since violence is responsible for the very production of these various disciplines, they will never on their own be able to recognise the mechanism that makes them possible in the first place, nor will they be able to ‘isolate the specificity of the Johannine Logos, which is to be an outcast’.Footnote 54
Christ’s parable of the sower highlights this misrecognition well (Matt 13:1–23). While knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven has already been given to the disciples, it has not been given to others. Christ resorts to parables for the others because ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand’ (Matt 13:13; cf. Acts 28:26). Similar to what was the case with the Heraclitean logos, before the incarnate Logos people remained ‘uncomprehending’. There is nevertheless a crucial difference between the two. Whereas, for Heraclitus, the hidden violence operative within Being holding opposites together is what escapes human understanding, which then settles upon opinion; in the case of Christ, human misunderstanding is a consequence of humanity’s having become ‘calloused’ or ‘dull’ (ἐπαχύνθη) in its ‘heart’ (καρδία). The ‘wicked one’ (πονηρὸς) snatches away what was sown in people’s hearts on account of their ‘dullness’. Just like the incarnate Logos itself, the logoi (i.e. that which is sown) of the Logos are expelled by the uncomprehending. But that which renders the heart ‘dull’ or ‘calloused’ so that it is ‘unseeing’ and ‘uncomprehending’ is the wickedness that violence foments.
In expelling the Johannine Logos, understanding relapses into myth and philosophy, which are really just two sides of the same coin.Footnote 55 The Johannine Logos, confused with and reduced to the Greek logos, thereby suffers the violence of the Greek logos. This is not just the bloody violence that transpired upon Calvary but also an act of metaphysical violence. Yet, Girard holds that, in the incarnate Logos’ expulsion, the very mechanism of violence itself that has remained hidden in myths, religions and even philosophies, unwittingly tips its hand. Christ’s passion on the cross is just as much a witness to his non-violence as it is to the violence of the Sanhedrin, Roman authorities, and indeed all earthly powers – perhaps even that of metaphysicians. By allowing himself to be made a victim, Christ dupes, as it were, the logos of violence so that the latter actually consumes itself.Footnote 56 ‘But [Christ’s] expulsion is revealed in a more and more obvious fashion, and by the same process the Logos of violence is revealed as what can only exist by expelling the true Logos and feeding upon it in one way or another’.Footnote 57
III
Clearly, Girard’s Things Hidden seeks to mark the difference between the Greek logos and the Johannine Logos. That difference, moreover, is one that is framed in terms of opposition, with one cancelling out the other. If we are to follow him in his appropriation of Heidegger’s account of Greek logos, then indeed we see that there is inscribed within that logos a structure of violence that can have nothing whatsoever to do with the Johannine Logos. There also cannot be the slightest doubt that the Johannine Logos – the incarnate Christ – was through and through a non-resisting victim of violence, who taught his disciples to turn the other cheek and walk an extra mile when confronted by violence. If violence is responsible for producing the sacred, then, as Girard maintains, Christ’s non-violent endurance of violence manages to desacralise the sacred and reveal it for what it is: a lie that promises peace.Footnote 58
But what exactly is it that Christ reveals through his crucifixion? Is it simply that violence is evil, self-destructive and cunning in its own self-concealment? Or is it, rather, more fundamentally that he is the Son of God, the mediator of the Father, who seeks out the lost? The immediate aftermath of Christ’s crucifixion was enough to convince the centurion, at least, that: ‘Truly this man was God’s Son’ (Matt 27:54). But it is one thing to show that it is better to suffer violence without returning violence; it is another thing entirely to overcome that violence. Is it enough, then, to be made aware of the lie that violence tells in order to be inoculated against or even to overcome violence? Even should an entire civilisation respond with peace rather than violent resistance when assaulted by another nation, the former cannot be said to have vanquished violence once it has been conquered or annihilated. There is a difference, after all, between a fire that burns itself out because it has entirely consumed its host and one that is extinguished so that what was ablaze might be salvaged.
Less salvific than didactic, the crucifixion ‘makes plain the workings of what can now only be seen… as evil’.Footnote 59 By his cross, Christ delivers to humanity a knowledge that it could never attain on its own on account of its ‘enslavement’ to violence, which amounts to a kind of deception – a failure to know what should be known.
Our inability to grasp knowledge that has been waiting there for two millennia confirms theological intuitions that are no less certain for being incapable of setting out explicitly their foundations in reason. These rational foundations can only become intelligible if we proceed beyond the sacrificial version of Christianity, and are guided by the non-sacrificial reading which can emerge when the other one has fallen away.Footnote 60
Liberation is now at hand but only if one makes the ‘decision’ to respond to the knowledge for which Christ is responsible:
For all violence to be destroyed, it would be sufficient for all mankind to decide to abide by this rule [i.e., non-violence]. If all mankind offered the other cheek, no cheek would be struck. But for that to be possible, it would be necessary for each person separately and all people together to commit themselves irrevocably to the common purpose.Footnote 61
The distance between Girard’s interpretation of Christianity and Gnosticism seems to be an uncomfortably short one.Footnote 62 Indeed, Christ seems to become only the occasion of some vital truth necessary for human flourishing in peace, rather than truth itself.Footnote 63 But this is far from what Christ asserts of himself: ‘I am the way and the truth and the life’ (John 14:6). This is a truth, moreover, that is not simply unknown, but one towards which humanity stands in antagonistic opposition. The Johannine Logos is not expelled simply because it is misunderstood. It is expelled because it is hated: ‘If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you’ (John 15:18). We are held bound as slaves to violence with an inescapable fealty. Can we really refuse to offer it the tribute that it so viciously demands?
IV
As noted above, aspects of Girard’s thought developed considerably after his Things Hidden. The relationship between Christianity and the natural sacred that he initially framed in terms of opposition is notably attenuated in his subsequent work. Is there a way to read the Greek (philosophical) logos as somehow continuous with the Johannine Logos in the same way that Girard later comes to understand archaic sacrifice as continuous with Christian sacrifice? I suggest that the outlines of an answer can already be discovered – even if only obliquely – in what we have already seen with Things Hidden’s treatment of the incarnation. Girard points out that ‘Jesus is the only person to achieve humanity in its perfect form, and so to be one with the deity’.Footnote 64 The obvious implication of this claim is that if others fail to attain unity with God, it is because their humanity is not perfect. What renders them imperfect is not some physical defect, malady or unactualised skill. The imperfection in question here is that which results from sin, and it has this consequence: alienation or, what is the same, dis-unity. Should it be the case that humanity is redeemed and thus able to be morally perfect, the consequence would be reconciliation, which is quite literally a return to unity and a more perfect imitatio Dei.
The unity achieved through reconciliation, however, is not the unity of the Heraclitean logos that results from violence. ‘The God who arises with the consenting scapegoat is a perfectly unknown god; he is the one that is the most outside yet also the most inside common humanity. He is the most divine and the most human’.Footnote 65 In Christ, the union of divinity and humanity is such that the ‘gathered’ (as Greek logos would put it) retain their own integral characters so that a positive sense of difference remains inscribed within their very union. In the incarnation, God does not annihilate humanity so that what remains is only a shadow or a marionette that dances upon the stage of human history. Christ truly hungers, thirsts, weeps, suffers and dies, all of which is to say that he is truly human. At the same time, he restores sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf; he cleanses the leper and raises the dead (Matt 11:15); and, most importantly, he forgives sins, which God alone can do (Luke 5:21). Jesus is truly God. All the aforementioned actions are performed, moreover, not after the fashion of a schizophrenic patient who tragically succumbs to a dissociative crisis but by a singular and integrated agent that, in contrast to Greek logos, concretely lives out his identity in and through difference.
The dynamics involved in the incarnation help us to see anew and appreciate all the more the interplay of what Romano Guardini calls ‘opposites’ (Gegensätzes). Identity is not a static presentation but consists of a dynamic tension that obtains between opposites; it arises from a dialectical polarisation that – in contrast to Hegelian dialectics – abjures any (higher) resolution.Footnote 66 For example, the interrelations of act and potency, stasis and dynamism, movement and rest, duration and flow, etc., are, in both their very complementarity and opposition (i.e. differences), essential to and constitutive of the individual concrete realities that saturate our experience. As Guardini puts it, we cannot understand the difference involved in ‘flow’ (Strömen), for example, without simultaneously acknowledging the identity of something ‘permanent’ (Bleibendes) that abides therein.Footnote 67 What is more, it is important to bear in mind that each pole or opposite, though it enters into tension with the other, does not abandon its own ‘inner consistency’ (inner Folgerichtigkeit).Footnote 68 One opposite is not attenuated by or subsumed into the other. Rather, unity (i.e. identity) itself consists in a ‘mutual relation of exclusion and inclusion’ (wechselseitiger Ausschließung und Einschließung). Hence, far from the (violent) conformity of Heraclitean logos or even the synthesis of the master-slave dialectic, polarisations ‘are not a “synthesis” of two moments in a third’.Footnote 69 Each difference is ‘essentially independent’ (wesenhaft eigenständig) in the sense that it remains what it is within its tension with the other.Footnote 70 This is precisely what we find in the incarnation. Divinity and humanity do not mix together so that Christ results as some tertium quid. The two (opposites) retain their integral structures, all while entering into a dynamic tension that is refractory to any artificial (violent) resolution.
In contrast, the Heraclitean logos, as we have seen, forces its opposites into a unity through the dissolution of difference. In Christ, the differences (divinity and humanity) remain.Footnote 71 While it is true that Girard thinks that love also abolishes differences, as noted above, those differences are not those proper to the opposites themselves but are those which divide and engender discord, rather than the communion that love fosters, between and among the gathered. Hence, when seeking reconciliation with another, one might suggest ‘Let us put aside our differences’. Yet the underlying differences sublimated within the unity of Heraclitean logos are destined to resurface in a future discord that Hegel perfectly describes in his master-slave dialectic. Paradoxically, the agonistic structure of Greek logos, in its very contrast to the Johannine Logos, allows for the comm-unity that the latter fosters to stand out in startling relief.
But what does a unity residing within its differences look like? In answer, we might turn to John 17:5. There, Christ, on the cusp of his betrayal and passion, prays to the Father and asks Him to ‘glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed’. Prior to the world and, consequently, prior to its fall, there exists an original unity between the Father and the Son that, now in a postlapsarian context, is further qualified by the task of redemption undertaken by the Son, who has made known the Father’s name (John 17:6) as well as the things spoken of (ῥῆμα) by the Father. As Christ prepares to leave the world in which his disciples will remain, he prepares to return to the presence of the Father (John 17:11). Jesus concludes his prayer:
I ask not only on behalf of these but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their [i.e., the disciples’] word, that they may all be one [ἓν]. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be [one] in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (John 17:20–23)
The task of redemption would seem to be at least in part the restoration of unity, with the unity existing in the Godhead serving as the archetypal model. Christ, the incarnate Logos, and the Father are one, but their unity does not consist of an atomically discrete principle standing in isolation. Rather, what is at issue is another polarity. The unity between the Father and the Son is, once again, a comm-unity involving the mutual complementarity of difference. As Milbank puts it, God ‘is transcendental peace through differential relation’.Footnote 72 This is evident from what is found in the prologue of John’s Gospel, where we are told that ‘the Word was with God and the Word was God’ (John 1:1). Here we find an irresolvable dialectical tension of identity (the Word was God) and difference (the Word was with – and thus other than – the Father). What this means is that the absolute unity of the Godhead is essentially constituted by relational difference: the Father can only be the Father if He generates the Son but is not the Son; the Son can only be the Son if he is generated by the Father but is not the Father; and God cannot be God without being the Father and being the Son. The same can be said with respect to the Holy Spirit in relation to the Father and the Son. The interplay between unity and diversity that constitutes the very structure of the Holy Trinity is (re)presented in Christ’s divinity and humanity. Indeed, it is the unity-in-difference that pertains to the incarnation that gives one a model, not only to appreciate the dynamics involved in the intra-Trinitarian community, but, again, the polarisation constitutive of Being itself.
One’s encounter with Being is just the encounter of numerous irresolvable polarities, whether that be the opposition between act and potency, substance and accident, essence and existence and the like. To consider the dynamic between essence and existence, for example, we see that, whatever one’s take on the nature of their distinction, what is at stake is the opposition between the universal and the necessary (essence), on the one hand, and the particular and concrete (existence), on the other. Both opposites must be maintained in their complete integrity without either one being reduced to the other. The mere consideration of an essence, for example, will never tell us whether anything with that essence actually exists in reality. The reduction of being to essence through the excision of existence collapses the distinction between reality and fiction into a surreal identity.Footnote 73 Similarly, like a song without a melody or light without colour, existence without essence possesses only the identity of a meaningless surd. To be sure, the history of philosophy recounts the efforts of those who have attempted to make precisely these kinds of homogenising reductions – of essence to existence and vice versa – but it also cautions us with the disasters that have ensued as a consequence.
Irresolvable tensions are also interwoven into the transcendental structure of Being. Mediaeval thinkers, for whom philosophy served as a response or a handmaid to the theological exposition of revelation, maintained a (real) identity between being (ens) and the six classical transcendentals: res, ens, unum, bonum, verum and aliquid.Footnote 74 Nevertheless, they insisted that some difference – even if only a rational one – must be introduced, for otherwise being and its passiones would be redundant and nugatory. It might be the case that being and unity enjoy identity, but when one says, ‘Socrates is’, and ‘Socrates is one’, there must be some difference. The ratio entis and the ratio unitatis might coincide with the same reality, but they do so in terms of difference. Further, being (ens) is not only ‘one’ (unum) in the sense that it is undivided from itself, but it is also ‘something’ (aliquid). That is, ‘to be’ is always to be ‘something’. Yet, to be ‘something’ (aliquid) amounts to being an ‘alius quid’, which is to say, ‘another what’.Footnote 75 What this means is that, being (ens), precisely in terms of its constitution as being, expresses within itself both unity and difference held together in tension.
V
My intention in the preceding has not been to call into question Girard’s effort to identify the unique singularity of Christianity over and against natural religions. The peace and love that Christ preaches are both startling and novel in a world where human civilisation and cultural attitudes are almost universally products of violence and leave death in their wakes. It is hardly surprising that the dynamics of violence out of which (Greek) philosophy emerged would leave a wound upon thought itself as well as its object: logos. If the incarnate Logos is to stand apart from the violence embedded within Being, then, as Girard rightly notes, the incarnate Logos must have a different character altogether. While that character involves the recognition that the incarnate Logos is expelled, expulsion is only part of the larger reality of the incarnation. Christ instantiates that which originally obtained between God and humanity and remains within God Himself: a communion of love that simultaneously embraces identity and difference.
To call to the fore the interplay between identity and difference is just to advance a metaphysics, not a metaphysics deduced from an a priori rationality making claims to absolute universality but as a response to a divine self-disclosure that reorients both praxis and thought. Thought is not only reoriented with respect to what is disclosed, but the very horizon itself in which revelation is presented emerges in a new light that is continuous with what is revealed. While the metaphysics of antiquity might have been an agent in the perpetuation of violence that has plagued humanity from the first moment of culture, a redeemed metaphysics allows the simultaneous interplay of opposites within unity. This is the reconciliation that Christ has brought about for humanity and the world – for Being itself – through his incarnate reality. What is presented in the incarnation is discovered – for those with eyes to see – within the very structure of Being itself.
