Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky

Foreword: René Girard

xiii Foreword: René Girard James G. Williams THE MAN AND THE CONTROVERSY From one perspective René Girard has lived a quiet, uneventful life. But viewed from another angle, it has been a life of daring and courage. One view is that of the professor and family man, married for forty-five years, father of three children, grandfather of seven. For years he has followed the routine of rising at 3:30 A.M., working in his study until noon, and, until retirement in 1995, teaching or seeing students in the afternoon. Yet during the entire period of his career he has defied the intellectual fashions swirling about him. With his first two books, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and this one, Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky,17 he rejected the literary retreat of the 1950s and early 1960s from concern with history, society, and the psyche. However, his first two books did not scandalize the intellectual world. They seemed to stay within a literary context, and they focused on desire, which enjoyed a vogue by the 1960s. In these initial writings he analyzed the work of Cervantes, Stendahl, Flaubert, Proust, and Dostoevsky in terms of “triangular ” or “mimetic” desire: our desires are copied from models or mediators whose objects of desire become our objects of desire. But the model or mediator we imitate can become our rival if we desire precisely the object he is imagined to have. Or other imitators of the same model may compete with us for the same objects. Jealousy and envy are inevitably aroused in this mimetic situation. But to this point Girard was seldom attacked. He was yet fully to develop his inference from the great novels that the role of Christianity, particularly xiv James G. Williams Christ and the Gospels, was and continues to be central to the dynamics of Western culture, and it took him several more years to conceive and formulate his thesis that human culture begins with violence and scapegoating. But in the 1970s the situation changed, and Girard’s professional life became one of renown and notoriety, particularly in France, where the work of intellectuals was widely read and subject to radio and television interviews . Four of Girard’s books were published during this decade, but the two that attracted all the attention were Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Violence and the Sacred, which was generally well received, argues that mimetic desire leads to violence, from which the sacred emerges. Mimetic desire is the human phenomenon of learning to desire, and what to desire, through imitating some other person’s desire. To the extent that anyone desires an object, there is potential for conflict and violence if the desiring person competes with the mediator of desire for the object. Likewise, the probability of conflict and violence is increased if two or more persons under the mimetic influence of the mediator seek to acquire the object. The sacred is a management of violence by a partial and distorted representation of the original violence. The unintended effect of the sacred is social order. It was really the publication of Things Hidden which startled, shocked, and in some instances simply pleased or excited readers in France. In this work he further consolidated the anthropological basis of his theory and extended its psychological implications. But the heart of the book, right at the center of its format and central to its argument, is the thesis that the biblical revelation, the disclosure of “things hidden since the foundation of the world,” is the key to understanding human violence, human history, and human knowledge. What had been hidden in culture and its formation through the sacred was the violence done to victims and camouflaged in prohibition , ritual, and myth. The sacred as violence is demythologized in the tendency of biblical narratives to side with the victim against the persecuting community and in the biblical witness to the God of victims. This exposure of sacred violence and affirmation of the God who sides with victims is fully realized in the Gospel texts, in which Christ is the perfect revelation of the innocent victim. Girard’s interdisciplinary approach and Christian vision affirming the truth of the Bible fly directly in the face of the great currents of antiChristian thought emerging from the nineteenth century, particularly those associated with Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, with which the trendiest intellectuals are...