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134 Jacques-Jude Lépine teaching and life that I ever received. It was on Montaigne. Only Montaigne. Nothing about mimetic theory, except one three-minute digression in three months. First, I could not understand how and why René was not speaking about “his” topics all the time as I myself was doing. In fact, René was not making any theoretical analysis of Montaigne. He was actually getting into the mind, personality, and life of Montaigne, exactly the way the Seigneur de La Montaigne expected his readers to. Through René, we were learning to enjoy literature without any preconceived framework, whether his own or any other critical or ideological approach. Basically, we were enjoying our time with Montaigne’s own experiences and views on the variegated topics of the Essays. Soon afterwards, as I was settling in at Stanford, I discovered that this enjoyment of literature, along with his humorous asides, is part of René’s enjoyment of life and a trademark of his warm personality. As Montaigne became a kind of friend for me, I started to see René as a wonderful, simple human being and gradually a real friend, behind the huge aura of admiration I had (and still have) for him. It took me several years to realize how intellectually healthy and stimulating was the “Montaigne experiment.” When I began to teach, I discovered how easy and almost natural it is to develop self-serving, self-infatuated ways of teaching. Intellectual laziness and the conformism commanded by the climate of political correctness on U.S. campuses are only a couple of the many reasons encouraging academics to substitute ideological platitudes for the actual exploration of literary or artistic work. As a paradoxical result, René’s capacity to put aside his own approach, to authentically explore another’s work, makes him stand out, in an almost isolated way, within academia. Of course, later I did have the opportunity to watch René extract what would become part of his own theory from texts he was reading. I watched him do that with the works of Shakespeare, for instance. René made no attempt, of course, to bend the text to his own perspective. Rather, as Jean-Pierre Dupuy once remarked in a course, the texts were there to modify mimetic theory and increase its flexibility and subtlety. Rather than being imposed upon the texts, mimetic theory, as Girard understood it, derived from the texts. All this I tried to emulate later in my own teaching, painfully discovering in the process that expertise is not enough for this type of teaching and interpretive work. It also requires a genuine respect for, as well as an interest in, other people, both the author studied and one’s own students. This requires a transformation of enthusiasm into personal maturity above and beyond “teaching skills,” a transformation not unrelated to the maturity that mimetic theory demands. Searching for a Pacifist Theology 135 THE END OF THÉOPHANIE: A MIMETIC INTERPRETATION When, in France, the Théophanie began to crumble, mimetic theory was my conceptual consolation. It provided a powerful insight into why a nonvictimary unanimity, like the one that had presided over the commune for fourteen years, could not last indefinitely. The extraordinary event was not that the commune was falling apart, succumbing to internal divisions and opposing tendencies. Rather, it was the fact that it lasted so long and was so perfect during the time it existed in its cultural environment, namely, late-twentiethcentury France. Mimetic theory explained how and why the simplicity of heart and mind necessary for intense communal life gradually gave way (irreversibly ) to modern subjectivity. Perhaps only monastic communities are successfully able to avoid this process. Other communes that started at the same time as the Théophanie chose a monastic—or almost monastic—orientation, although at the price of individual freedom, a price that the majority of us were not convinced we should pay. I was among those who questioned the price. It seemed to me that the voluntary suppression of one’s own freedom, as occurs in a monastic environment, is only fruitful within the confines of the monastery. For independent adults and their families, something else had to be invented to protect both freedom and unanimity. But we did not discover the form it should take. Or did we? Today, the vast majority of the former members of the Théophanie have preserved their simple ways of life and continue their spiritual practice...

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