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C H A P T E R 5 Hölderlin’s Sorrow THE TWO CIRCLES OF THE GOSPELS Benoît Chantre: When we dig a little deeper into the phenomenon of war as Clausewitz described it, we find that politics is part of violence, not violence part of politics. The institution of war did not elude violence, but tried to slow its escalation. We have seen that this institution no longer exists. Yet should we not keep trying to maintain this resistance? René Girard: Of course, but individual resistance to the escalation to extremes is essentially vain. The only way it might work is if it were collective, if all people stood “hand in hand,” as the song goes. We have to give up this happy automatic escape, which underlies every form of humanism. However, we also still have to keep in mind the possibility of positive imitation because we have seen that imitation is central in the genesis of violence. Nonetheless, the great tragedy of our era of “internal mediation” is that positive models have become invisible. Recognizing imitation and its ambivalence seems to be the only way of feeling that it is still possible to go from reciprocity to relationship, from negative contagion to a form of positive contagion. This is what the imitation of Christ means. However, this transition is not a given, and it is even less conceivable: it is on the level of a specific conversion, of an event. It cannot be denied that the Gospels contain a formidable intuition about mimetism: Christ invites us to 109 110 Hölderlin’s Sorrow work from within mimetism. However, the Spirit takes us where it will. We thus have to reason more and more at a global level, leave behind strictly individual perspectives, and consider things “in big chunks.” From this point of view, the apocalyptic narratives are crucial. They are the only ones that force us to take a radically different point of view. Why have they been concealed to such an extent? The question has never really been asked. They were very present in the first period of Christianity. In the Middle Ages they were read from the point of view of the Last Judgment in a way that was much more naïve than in the time of Saint Paul, but they were still known. Look at the tympanums in cathedrals. We have to maintain the force of the Scriptures because the apocalyptic texts have gradually been forgotten, just when their relevance is more and more obvious. This is incredible. The joyful welcome of the Kingdom, which the texts describe, has been smothered by a double trend: catastrophic darkening on one hand, and indefinite postponement of the Second Coming on the other. The constant, slow distance in relation to the Gospels casts a shadow on what was supposed to be luminous, and delays it. The antiChristianity that we see today thus reveals this in a striking way as the next step in a process that began with the Revelation. The “time of the Gentiles”1 that Luke describes suggests the Judgment has been delayed, and this has gradually imposed a new perspective on the Gospels. It has injected an insidious , growing doubt about the validity of the apocalyptic texts. The “time of the Gentiles” is nonetheless an extraordinary period, that of a civilization that is incommensurable with others and that has given humanity power that it had never had before. Thus, if we exaggerate a little, we can say that that time has gradually confiscated the Revelation and used it to its own ends, to make atomic bombs. This is why I draw attention to these texts in order to advocate a more passionate reading of the Scriptures. I think that there is no complete text without the apocalypse to conclude it: “when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”2 The evangelists insist on this question. This is where the apocalyptic question arises, less perhaps in the apocalypse of John, to which everyone rushes when eschatology is at issue, than in the texts of the three other evangelists, Mark, Matthew and Luke, who always precede it with the story of the Passion. The Synoptic Gospels have a fundamental structure in which human history is inserted into that of God. The second circle of history (and its catastrophic end) is contained in the first circle, which finishes with the Passion. Luke very enigmatically implied that after Jerusalem...

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