René Girard's Apocalyptic Critique of Historical Reason: Limiting Politics to Make Way for Faith

The ancien régime is the hidden defect of the modern state. ¹

—Karl Marx

Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre is René Girard's most ambitious book since Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, ² and it is bound to be his most provocative, too. ³ That will be partly (but not only) because it is his most expressly Catholic, a defense of Catholicity as the true bearer of the "idea" or "meaning" of Europe, especially as articulated by Benedict XVI in his controversial speech at Regensburg defending the rationality of Christianity (aimed at both Islam and Protestantism). Only after the European devastations and criminal complicities of the last century could this idea fully appear, Girard suggests, or the Catholic Church assume its proper "autonomy" in the political structure of Europe. Girard is convinced that the future of Europe—if it has a future—lies with a regenerate Church. And he is convinced that the future of history—if it has a future—lies with the "idea of Europe," the "identity of humanity," as embodied in the Church. Tragically short of this idea in its own history, it was as if it were for Europe to arrive at it providentially. The calling of Europe, author of two world wars, totalitarian twins, and the Holocaust, is to witness revelation. Thanks to its historic suicide in the mid-twentieth century, paradoxically, it is a light unto the nations within the larger apocalyptic drift of global modernity. In the history of Europe, we are vouchsafed a terrifying glimpse of the future of humanity.

Battling to the End describes an end of history in a rather different sense than that proclaimed in recent decades by American triumphalists. Instead of being taken as a salutary warning against the part-Jacobin, part-Napoleonic revolutionary idea, the collapse of the Soviet Union led some romantic enthusiasts of liberal democracy (including assorted "Trotskyite rascals," to borrow Girard's apt phrase) to conclude that America's moral superiority, borne by military power, could be aggressively used to produce radical progress in other countries—as if liberal democracy could succeed in nation-building with military means where the Reds had failed. War could impart something of the constitutional genius of the city on the hill to cultures that bred the most troublesome regimes in the world, assuming they could breed any regime at all, once the enemy was killed and the good news proclaimed. Intoxicated by their own brand of holy war, evangelical Americanists are hopelessly convinced of its efficacy in achieving political objectives.

There is, though, precious little to show for all the wars that have been fought by America since 1945, if not since the Spanish-American War, once the actual cost (immediate or long-term) has been subtracted. Imperial evangelists are today's "Clausewitzians," but only in a conventional sense of that moniker that Girard sets out to overturn—those who believe that (as the Prussian general and theorist of war Carl von Clausewitz famously said), "war is the continuation of politics by other means"—that war, in other words, accomplishes politics, sustains politics, founds politics, and, conversely, is limited and regulated by it. Historically, this is surely true; but there's the rub according to Girard. As professor of international relations at Boston University and retired army colonel Andrew Bacevich recently pointed out, "Permanent war has become the de facto policy of the United States—even as it has become apparent that war does not provide a plausible antidote to the problems facing the United States." ⁴ The reliance on military means increases, paradoxically, as their political effectiveness radically declines. Somehow there is a fatality in this, the compulsive disorder of a nation in decline. Decadence, Nietzsche said (and who would know better than he did?), was the inability to say no. War has become a reflexive reaction of policy, which neither party appears able to resist, though it seems to produce inconclusive results at best.

Ironically, today's faux Clausewitzeans have lost sight...