CAN GIRARDIANS SEE GOD IN THE DARK? A RESPONSE TO CARVER AND REINEKE

Daniel London

Colloquium on Violence and Religion at the American Academy of Religion René Girard and Catherine Keller: Engaging Process Cosmology and Mimetic Theory

Atlanta GA November 21, 2015

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New Testament scholar Leon Morris compared John’s Gospel to “a pool in which a child may

wade and an elephant can swim.”1 Carver’s wading pool invites Girardians unfamiliar with

process philosophy to dip their feet in its wisdom with the hope that collaboration might begin to

unfold an ocean of thought deep and wide enough not only for metaphorical swimming

pachyderms but also deep and wide enough to help us enfold, embrace and thereby de-potentiate

violence through love. Although this might be ambitious and the understanding of process

philosophy by Girardians needs to be deepened in the conversation and vice versa, I have a

sneaking suspicion that the creative ruach elohim hovers over these waters that Carver and

Reineke have begun to stir for us.

In this response, I will offer three areas of possible convergence between mimetic theory

and process theology, areas that these two papers have brought to the foreground for me, which

may hopefully seed our discussion. I offer them as three pairs: “Novelty” and the “Novelistic”;

Creation ex profundis and Creation ex nihilo; and Counter-apocalyptic and the Eschatological

Imagination.

“Novelty” and the “Novelistic”: I appreciate how Carver suggests that the essential

object desired by those caught in mimetic rivalry is “power.” In many ways, I think Girard would

agree; however, he elaborates on the nature of mimetic desire in his first book Mensonge

Romantique et Vérité Romanesque which is French for the “Romantic Lie and the Novelistic

Truth.” In this book, Girard analyzes several novels and attempts to invalidate the idea that

human desire is unmediated, spontaneous and “the creation ex nihilo of a quasi divine ego.” Such 1 Regarding this remark, Paul N. Anderson writes, “Attributed both to Augustine and Pope Gregory the Great, who describe Scripture as ‘a stream in which the elephant may swim and the lamb may wade,’ a recent application of this imagery to the Gospel of John is made by Paul F. Brackman, who said, “Someone has described the remarkable character of this Gospel by saying that it is a book in which a child can wade and an elephant can swim” (“The Gospel according to John,” Interpretation 6, 1952, 63) as cited in Paul N. Anderson, The Riddles of the Fourth Gospel: An Introduction to John (Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 2011), 245. Also, see Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1971), 7.

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an idea, he argues, is in fact the “romantic lie” (mensonge romantique)2 while the “novelistic

truth” (vérité romanesque) reveals the triangular and mimetic nature of desire, wherein all

desires are mediated through a model. Perhaps we can say that for Girard, desire is a creation ex

profundis, with the tehomic depths being the messy, mimetic desires that move us deeply and

often unconsciously.

Girard explains that the (often unconscious) aim of mimetic desire is not so much power

per se as it is “being.” He writes, “Every hero of a novel expects his being to be radically

changed by the act of possession…The object is only a means of reaching the mediator. The

desire is aimed at the mediator’s being.”3 Girard then explains that the subject’s desire for the

mediator’s being stems from a profound self-hatred, explaining, “The wish to be absorbed into

the substance of the Other implies an insuperable revulsion of one’s own substance.”4 “All

heroes of novels,” Girard writes, “hate themselves…It is exactly as the narrator says at the

beginning of Swann’s Way: ‘Everything which was not myself, the earth and the creatures upon

it, seemed to me more precious and more important, endowed with a more real existence.’”5

After hearing Carver’s insights, we might wonder whether this self-hatred emanates from a

failure to see the interconnected reality that would wholeheartedly affirm the precious, important

and real existence of the narrator (or Proust himself) just as much as it would that of the earth

and its creatures. Instead, Girard sees the source of self-hatred in “fearfully high standards for the

2 René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (hereafter DDN), trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1965), 15-16. Towards the end of the book, Girard writes, “The early romantic wanted to prove his spontaneity—his divinity—by desiring more intensely than Others…Nobody today believes in noble spontaneous desires. Even the most naïve recognize the mediator’s shadow behind the frantic passion of early romanticism.” DDN, 270. “We do not each have our own desire, one really our own.” René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Maryknoll NY: Orbis, 2001), 15. 3 Girard, DDN, 53. 4 Girard, DDN, 54. 5 Girard, DDN, 55.

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self,” standards that “the self cannot satisfy,” which stem from “the false promise of

metaphysical autonomy.” 6 “The more deeply [the false promise of metaphysical autonomy] is

engraved in our hearts the more violent is the contrast between this marvelous promise and the

brutal disappointment inflicted by experience.”7 “The [subject] turns passionately toward the

Other, who seems to enjoy the divine inheritance [of metaphysical autonomy].”8 Hence, the

deeper aim of mimetic desire is not so much power over others or to attain “the exact replication

of what we see,” but rather to gain a sense of being, which the subject seems to see in everyone

else but him/herself, a conviction summed up in the words of Dostoyevksy’s Underground Man:

“I am alone and they are together.”9

The problem is that no one actually has what everyone is looking for in everyone else:

metaphysical autonomy. So Carver is absolutely right when she says, “We’re doomed, in

mimetic desire, from the very start, almost inescapably setting ourselves up for disappointment

which…can turn into violence.” However, Carver sees the ultimately disappointing destiny of

mimetic desire in the inevitable failure to perfectly replicate the model and yet also finds hope in

this failure because it allows for “instantiations of novelty, that process-relational boon.” Girard

would see the disappointing destiny of mimetic desire in the ever-elusive metaphysical autonomy

and yet he also finds hope in something novel or “novelistic” that breaks through the stagnant

cycle. Carver writes, “The process perspective offers a hopeful reframing: because…you cannot

perfectly replicate another, that mimesis cannot be achieved without deviation from the model,

without at least the slightest integration of contextual novelty.” For Girard, this “novelty” arrives

6 Girard, DDN, 56. 7 Girard, DDN, 56. 8 Girard, DDN, 58. 9 Girard, DDN, 57.

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with the awareness of the “novelistic truth” (vérité romanesque), which reveals the mimetic

mechanisms that fuel and drive the “evil of trivialization.” This “novelistic” truth along with the

revelation of the subsequent scapegoat mechanism emerge in human awareness as a result of the

continuing work of the Paraclete or divine Advocate for victims, who was clearly embodied in

(but not limited to) that “Jewish…Afro-Asian, fleshly, talkative one”10 known as Jesus of

Nazareth. I wonder where this divine Advocate plays in Carver’s process theology. Is she active

in these instantiations of novelty, thus continuing to create newness out of our messy mimetic

rivalries in an ongoing act of creation ex profundis? If so, how might this perspective on the

emergence of “novelistic truth” through the novelty of failed replication change our

understanding of the continuing work of the divine Advocate?

Creation Ex Nihilo vs. Creation Ex Profundis: According to James Alison (who might

be to Girard what Keller is to Whitehead or Cobb, that is, a leading theological interpreter of

their thought), the continuing work of the ruach elohim is not something distinct from creation.

In his book Raising Abel, Alison explains how creation continues and is indeed fulfilled in the

resurrection of the divine self-giving victim, who reveals the mimetic mechanisms of violence

through subversion, as the victim of that collective violence. For Alison, creation out of a deep

chaos is the mythical way of describing the efficiency of the scapegoat mechanism and the

temporary peace and order generated by it. He writes, “The establishment of order out of chaos is

the work of human violence, and creation is prior to this and not party to it since those who obey

the Creator suffer the consequences of this ordering violence.”11 Based on this assertion, it seems

like Alison might be part of that theological machine that teaches the West to shun the watery

10 Catherine Keller, On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process (Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 2008), 136. 11 James Alison, Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination (New York: Crossroad Herder, 1996), 53.

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depths. It seems like Alison might even be tehomophobic, which is a fairly ironic accusation

considering the homonym of tehomophobic (“homophobic”) and the fact that James Alison is an

openly gay Catholic priest. Apart from that, the Alisonian allegiance to creation ex nihilo and

Keller’s process understanding of creation ex profundis highlights a significant difference

between Mimetic Theory and Process Theology, which seems to revolve around hermeneutics

and the interpretation of our sacred texts.

For Girardians like Alison, texts that describe creation and order out of a deep chaos are

texts that conceal or “cover” a communal lynching with mythological and religious language.

The violent expulsion of a victim turns a mimetic and chaotic frenzy and potential (Hobbesian)

all-against-all situation into an all-against-one situation that restores order and creates culture and

religion, with all of its rituals and prohibitions. With these founding myths, cultures remain

justified in their violence, convinced that “god” approved and even commanded the victim’s

expulsion. So we can understand why Alison would firmly reject a creation ex profundis

because, based on his mimetic hermeneutic, it represents a way of thinking that works to cloak

and justify the violent expulsion of victims. Alison insists that the Jewish and Christian

Scriptures offer another perspective of the divine that subverts the violent and bloodthirsty

portrayals of God. Alison sees a God in Scripture that has nothing to do with the “world’s order,”

this “order out of chaos,” which is essentially the religious way of justifying collective lynching.

Alison links the understanding of creation ex nihilo with the resurrection from the dead and sees

their simultaneous origin not in Genesis 1, but in 2 Maccabees, when the mother of the martyrs

says to her son, “Look at the heavens and the earth, look at all they contain and you will see that

God created it all out of nothing, and humans have the same origin. Do not fear this

executioner…but accept death. In this way through God’s mercy I will receive you back along

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with [your brothers]” (2 Macc 7:28-29). The mother explains that God is not part of the order of

the world (the order out of chaos that expels victims), which was embodied in the regime of

Antiochus IV Epiphanes. God is part of another order that suffers as the victim of this world’s

order out of chaos. Again Alison says, “The establishment of order out of chaos is the work of

human violence, and creation is prior to this and not party to it since those who obey the Creator

[ie. the Maccabean martyrs] suffer the consequences of this ordering violence.”

For Alison, Jesus’s gratuitous self-giving unto death, which was not driven by any fear of

death, reveals even more clearly that “God is entirely beyond [the world’s order], and has

nothing to do with, death; that God has touched our murderous world with love, allowing us to

break out of death; that this is what creation has been about from the beginning, and that Jesus,

who knew all this, was thus the original man who was in on it all from the beginning.”12 So Jesus

was the fleshly embodiment of the Sophia wisdom (or the Johannine Logos) who danced with

the wholly non-violent God in the beginning, at that creation ex nihilo that took place before the

violent creation ex profundis. Alison declares along with the author of 1 John, “God is light and

in him there is no darkness at all,” thus leaving little room for a God who broods over the watery

tehomic darkness of the tohu va bohu or apophatic theology for that matter. If I have portrayed

Alison as a tehomophobic ex-nihilist, I hope I have also conveyed his reasons for resisting a

creation ex profundis and underscored the tension inherent in the territory in which Reineke

pioneers between Alison’s creation ex nihilo and Keller’s creation ex profundis.

Reineke invites Girardians to not necessarily equate tehomic chaos with violence, but

rather to “see evidence for positive mimesis emergent in” a creation out of the depths. She does

this by following Keller’s lead in lifting up tehomophilic texts in Isaiah, the Psalms and Job, in

12 Alison, Raising Abel, 56.

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which God appears to revel and delight in the wild chaos of his creation, which is not party to the

“vagaries of mimetic desire” and is even opposed to the “pretensions of human power.”13

Furthermore, in Job, God appears in a whirlwind, a physical phenomenon that “develop[s] along

the edges of chaotic air currents” and a literary motif reminiscent of the Spirit-breath of God who

brooded over the waters at the beginning of creation.

Reineke’s beautiful meditation on breath, inspired by Keller and MacKendrick, reminds

us that breathing and speech are sensual and physically intimate experiences. In order to reify

this, understand that I am currently vibrating (through my breath) something inside my flesh that

causes something inside your fleshly bodies to vibrate. Speaking and listening are an exchange

of internal bodily vibrations. We are all having a very physically intimate experience right now.

This insight sheds new light on Jesus’s breathing on his disciples in John 20, when he says

“Receive the Holy Spirit (“the beat of life,” “the divine breath”)” reminiscent of God’s breathing

life into Adam. Also, in John 9, I wonder if we have an example of a perhaps tehomophilic Jesus,

who when asked by his disciples a question informed by a theology of retribution and the human

compulsion to scapegoat and blame (“Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born

blind?”), Jesus responds by rejecting this theology and then spitting on the ground to make mud,

thus mimicking (in a fairly messy way) the act of the Creator in Genesis in which Jesus’s saliva

represents the “liquid breath of God” (as many commentators have called it)14 and the ground the

13 In his book Job: The Victim of his People, Girard interprets the God who delights in the Leviathan as a God of persecutors. With all due respect to Girard, Keller’s interpretation of the God in Job who delights in the Leviathan is, in my opinion, much more positive and persuasive than Girard’s. See René Girard, Job: The Victim of his People, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 141-42. 14 James Alexander Findlay, The Fourth Gospel: An Expository Commentary (London: Epworth, 1956), 89; cf. J. D. M. Derrett, “John 9:6 Read with Isaiah 6:10; 20:9,” Evangelical Quarterly 66 (1994), 253. Michaels, Gospel of John, 546. As cited by Daniel Frayer-Griggs, “Spittle, Clay, and Creation in John 9:6 and Some Dead Sea Scrolls” Journal of Biblical Literature 132, no. 3 (2013), 663.

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adamah (or even the tohu va bohu).15 Jesus combines his liquid breath with the tehomic earth to

make a healing ointment that works to not only heal the blind man but also to simultaneously

expose and combat the human compulsion to scapegoat and blame, as James Alison illustrates in

his mimetic interpretation.16 So we see a potential example of a wet and messy creation ex

profundis in the Fourth Gospel that is not associated with mimetic violence but actually works

against it. And working against violence is what the Paraclete or the divine beat of life does by

moving us out of theologies bound by the compulsion to blame and into what Alison calls the

“eschatological imagination,” which may or may not have some correlation to Keller’s “counter-

apocalyptic.”

Eschatological Imagination and the Counter-Apocalyptic: In Keller’s Apocalypse

Now and Then, she writes, “I have wondered whether Revelation voices a darkly lucid and quite

valid intuition into ‘the spiral of violence,’ or whether Western civilization has been acting out of

a self-fulfilling prophecy.”17 With these words, Keller intuits a deeply Girardian and Alisonian

approach to Scripture, which taps into what she calls the text’s “own deconstructive energies.”18

Girardians like Alison similarly see in the Scriptures a story that reveals the scapegoat

mechanism and the divine concern for victims interwoven into the story of religious oppression

and sacred violence. The story that reveals God as a God of victims functions as a subversion of

the violent mechanisms of blame and exclusion altogether and thus counters the reader’s

15 This association of Jesus’s muddy healing with creation was first articulated by Irenaeus (Adversus Haeresus. 5.15.2) and is supported by contemporary sources in the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient Near Eastern texts, which use the imagery of spit, mud and clay in creation. See Daniel Frayer-Griggs, “Spittle, Clay, and Creation in John 9:6 and Some Dead Sea Scrolls” Journal of Biblical Literature 132, no. 3 (2013): 659 – 670. 16 James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (New York: Crossroads, 2001), 3-26. 17 Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 12. 18 Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then, 15.

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temptation to demonize demonizers by inviting the reader to acknowledge the ways in which she

or he remains complicit in violent, exclusion and blame.

The Alisonian invitation to the “eschatological imagination” involves reading the

Scriptures from the perspective of the crucified-and-risen victim, the forgiving victim, the Lamb

with the mortal wound who is the enthroned reader in Revelation. Keller writes,

“If…woundedness seems acute for Christian feminists eyeing John’s sexist Revelation, it

strangely mirrors the wound of the text itself, whose messiah is ‘the Lamb with the marks of

slaughter.’”19 I see exciting points of contact between Alison’s “eschatological imagination” and

Keller’s “counter-apocalyptic” hermeneutic, which could potentially merge into a counter-

apocalyptic eschatological imagination. However, if I understand Keller’s counter-apocalyptic at

all, it would likely challenge and deconstruct all of the binaries I have just set up (novel and

novelistic, creation ex nihilo and creation ex profundis, counter-apocaylptic and eschatological

imagination). And although mimetic theory is brilliant, it can fall into the trap of binary thinking,

a kind of binary thinking that, as we have seen, relegates chaos to violence and unintentionally

subordinates the feminine, which is often associated with the moist, womb-like depths of the

tehom. Could a counter-apocalyptic eschatological imagination push or lure Girardians to

recover the tehomophilia of a non-violent and yet chaotic God who plays with Leviathan and

heals with spit-moistened mud? Could it lure Girardians to see God in the darkness?

Several years ago, I attended a silent retreat at a Camaldolese monastery in Big Sur CA

with a seminary professor (from a relatively conservative institution). At the end of the retreat, I

asked him if he had a chance to peer at the magnificent stars at night, since we were miles away

from any light pollution and our rooms were perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

19 Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then, 25.

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He told me that he did not look at the stars because he had a fear of looking out into giant bodies

of water at night. His fear perplexed me until a Jungian friend of mine explained to me that dark

oceans are a powerful symbol of the divine feminine. Although I do not want to create yet

another binary, I do wonder if tehomophobia is more ubiquitous among men and I wonder if men

like my seminary professor, James Alison and myself ought to be more careful when we project

evil, violence and our fears onto the great wet darkness. “We are trained,” Keller writes, “to fear

the darkness…The darksome deep wears so many denigrated faces: formless monsters, maternal

hysteria, pagan temptation…[and] sexual confusion.”20

If everything that we call chaos or “darkness” is code word for violence then we are in

trouble indeed. According to astrophysicist Nancy Abrams, over 97% of the universe is

something called “dark matter” or “dark energy,” so the entire universe is therefore “an ocean of

dark energy,”21 which brings me back to Carver’s wading pool that might unfold into an ocean.

Can a convergence of process theology and mimetic theory unfold into an ocean deep and wide

enough to help us enfold, embrace and thereby de-potentiate violence through love? In other

words, can process theology invite adherents of mimetic theory to see the wholly non-violent

God in the dark, chaotic and oceanic depths and to see the whole universe enveloped in God’s

dark energy of love, breathing and vibrating new life into our flesh and bones in both sensual and

apophatic ways (ways that we cannot even talk about)? Could such an understanding lead us to

heed Carver’s invitation to “vulnerability” and “relational co-creativity,” knowing that, as Carver

writes, “it is undoubtedly a world that embraces love, and is embraced in kind, that will not only

survive, but also thrive”?

20 Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003), xvi. 21 Matthew Fox, “Thomas Merton’s Call to Discover Our Older Unity” in We Are Already One: Thomas Merton’s Message of Hope: Reflections in Honor of His Centenary (1915- 2015), ed. Gray Henry and Jonathan Montaldo (Louisville KY: Fons Vitae, 2014), 118.