I Came To Cast Fire introduces readers to the unique work of René Girard

Is Catholicism still acceptable to the technocratic elites of our secular, post-Christian age?

Certainly not the Catholic claim to uniquely know and safeguard absolute truth on faith and morals. Nor in the Catholic Church’s repudiation of the sexual revolution’s claim to universal “rights” of sexual freedom, contraception, or abortion. No, the only safe way to represent one’s Catholic faith in the public square today is to assert one’s sympathy for the victim: the poor, the widow, the oppressed member of a minority class.

Leaving aside the blatant inconsistency in this sentiment—why isn’t the life in the womb a victim worthy of protection?—it’s a curious quality of modernity. As long as the Catholic Church hosts Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, sponsors food and clothing drives, or provides relief to victims of natural disaster, she can be celebrated, even by the areligious.

Why is that?

One compelling answer resides in the thought of French Catholic philosopher René Noël Théophile Girard. I Came To Cast Fire: An Introduction to René Girard, by Fr. Elias Carr, a Canon Regular of St. Augustine, offers an excellent and accessible entrée into this famous, if sometimes enigmatic, anthropologist of Johns Hopkins and Stanford renown.

Girard’s theory, which has influenced such prominent personalities as J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel, offers a grand analysis of human history from ancient pre-history to the present day, defined by three stages. The first of these is what he calls mimesis, in which humans develop desires that are mimetic, or imitative of others’ desires, a process that occurs through observation of other humans, as well as through shared stories. These mimetic desires facilitate rivalries, because individuals cannot help but compete over the objects of those desires: possessions, romantic interests, glory.

As these rivalries accumulate, they grow in intensity, and threaten to destroy the community from the inside. Thus enters the second stage of human development: the scapegoat, who is blamed for the crisis confronting the society. The scapegoat, whether it be a single individual or group, is a minority within the community, one who comes to be viewed as not really part of the community at all, and thus can be demonized, expelled, or destroyed. In Girard’s telling, this was not something societies understood, they simply did it in order to experience a type of catharsis; or they did not, and collapsed due to internecine violence.

Originally, the scapegoat was expelled or killed through nothing more than mob violence akin to a lynching. However, over time, the process was ritualized—think of the complex rites of human sacrifice performed in the ancient Mediterranean, Mesoamerica, Celtic lands, or the Qin dynasty in China—and often transferred from humans to animals or plants. Girard even believes that ancient myths were not purely fanciful tales but embellished stories about real scapegoating events. Whether that’s true, it does seem reasonable that ritual sacrifice, common across just about every people group on the planet, served as a means of controlling communal tensions.

Yet in one part of the ancient world, a different paradigm was taking hold, one in which “the other,” so often victimized as the scapegoat, came to be viewed with empathy. The Torah commanded Israel to demonstrate mercy towards the poor and stranger, novel concepts for societies that viewed such persons with either suspicion or disdain. The Old Testament prophets foregrounded this imperative. This shift reaches its climax in the Incarnation, or Christ event.

In Mary’s Fiat, it is obvious that something different is happening. Whereas the old gods exhibited little regard for human volition, the God of the Hebrews welcomes a peasant girl to offer her “yes” to His redemptive plan. The fruit of that fiat, Jesus, is Himself a victim: misunderstood, persecuted, and expelled, even from his own hometown. Through the Passion, He takes on the role of scapegoat, but unlike the scapegoating stories of the ancient world, He is demonstrably innocent. It is not the scapegoat who is guilty, but the community itself, who unjustly destroyed the life of a righteous man.

Christ transcends the scapegoat paradigm. In the community recognizing its complicity in the death of an innocent man, it experiences not the temporary, self-deceptive catharsis of removing the supposedly evil scapegoat, but feelings of self-criticism and remorse. When the scapegoat overcomes communal violence through resurrection, and offers not vengeance but mercy, it provokes repentance and conversion—the cycle of violence can be broken, replaced by one of contrition, forgiveness, restoration, and communion. Through the liturgy, the Church participates in a new paradigm, one in which they acknowledge their role in the scapegoat’s death and sympathize with the victim. In that, they can be morally and spiritually remade.

Christ radically transforms every society He touches. Indeed, one could argue that many of the missionary martyrs—St. Isaac Jogues among the Mohawk, St. Francisco Blanco among the Japanese, St. Jean-Charles Cornay among the Vietnamese—in their own sacrificial deaths exposed the disgusting evil of the scapegoat model in those societies. Of course, in time, Christendom, and the many civilizations touched by Christendom, slowly threw off the influence of Christianity. The skepticism and anti-supernaturalism of modernity, however, did not end the Christian-originating sympathy for the victim—if anything, it only diversified and intensified it.

This, one might argue, is one of Girard’s most interesting contributions to interpreting modernity. Race, ethnicity, sex, gender: these are the identitarian categories the post-Christian West uses to determine who is most worthy of our sympathy and celebration, what Girard calls a “secular mask of Christian love.” The woke concept of intersectionality is a means of determining who should be classified the greatest victim, a “paradoxical competition of mimetic rivalries,” that determines who is most worthy of social esteem. The modern concern for the victim, writes Fr. Carr, is “the one universal ethic that has created the first planetary culture.”

Indeed, society’s obsession with the victim not only narrows the scope for “acceptable” Catholic faith and practice—it is also employed as a weapon against perceived victimizers, including the Catholic Church, the very institution that taught the world to care about victims in the first place. Thus is the Catholic Church an alleged victimizer in its historic collaboration with European imperialist powers, its censure of homosexuality and transgenderism, and its prohibition of women priests. It is, we’re told, a perpetuator of the patriarchy and cisgender norms. The only tolerable role for the Church is to atone for its sins and care for victims.

Girard saw only two options for modern man: descend into greater degrees of “negative mimesis” between perceived classes of “victims” and “victimizers,” ultimately resulting in a degree of violence far more terrible than that of the pre-scapegoat world, or convert and imitate Christ, one who in His purity, charity, and self-gift overcomes our avarice and pride. “Either imitate Christ or risk annihilation at our own hands,” summarizes Fr. Carr. In that sense, Girard’s exhortation is reminiscent of the ominous warnings found in Revelation: believe or perish.

This is not to downplay the fact that Girard, whose writings were best-sellers in France but who remains little known outside of academia in the United States, is controversial, even within conservative and Catholic circles. Girard calls the natural social process of disorder and order “Satan,” which has led many, such as scholar Daniel J. Mahoney, to assess that Girard’s Satan seems “wholly impersonal.” And, as Mahoney and French Catholic philosopher Pierre Manent have argued, Girard’s dismissiveness of political philosophy is alarming, given some writings seem to suggest that by actively resisting evil, we become evil ourselves.

Despite such concerns, Girard’s thought presents a fascinating means of interpreting our contemporary culture’s obsessions with victimhood and how that intersects with what role the Church is permitted to play in modernity. Girard exposes what he calls the “Romantic Lie,” the modern conceit that man is fully autonomous and original, when in reality he is not only dependent on nature, society, and God, but ancient patterns of thought and behavior that reveal us as not only flawed, but dangerous, absent the redemptive power of Christ. Fr. Carr’s book should be commended for making Girard so accessible to a popular audience.

I Came to Cast Fire: An Introduction to René Girard
by Fr. Elias Carr
Word on Fire, 2024
Hardcover, 144 pages