One God Or a Trinity?

One God Or A Trinity? Michel Serres University ofParis and Stanford University THREE FUNCTIONS Jupiter directs the kings and the priests; Mars commands the armies; Quirinus presides over the work of producers, planting seasons, vintages, and harvests, and he organizes the flow of commerce. These three gods with Latin names, but with precise equivalents among the Hindus, Iranians, Celts, Irish, Gauls ... of Indo-European cultures, symbolize, according to Georges Dumézil, three social functions: the sacred, war, and fortune. That trilogy analyzes, clarifies, and describes, without trying to explain, the ordinary functioning of our societies from the most remotely archaic, prior to classical Athens and Rome, to the most recent. For the Middle Ages, as well as the States General on the eve of the French Revolution, according to Georges Duby, parceled out our communities in exactly the same way: clergy, aristocracy, the third state. A lack of variance to be admired. THE CASE OF TARPEIA Complex and jovial, the first of these functions includes politics and religion, law and cognition, while the other two, which are less complex, are devoted exclusively to violence and the economy. Now, Georges Dumézil dwells only fleetingly on the possible connections among the three divinities. The vestal Tarpeia belongs, for example, to the third function, since her dead body is covered with gold and jewelry. But the study which the author devotes to her fails to note that she was lapidated, a strange omission for such an unforgettable and dramatic ending. 2 Michel Serres And since this lynching remains an act of violence, it would be necessary to consider the relationship between Quirinus and Mars. Can the latter be reduced to the former? Should economics be considered a war continued by other means? A SINGLE GOD OF VIOLENCE AND LOVE In the comparative history of religions Georges Dumézil proposes a pluralistic approach with three gods, one which is openly descriptive, without enigma or mystery and relatively invariable over a very long time, whereas René Girard unveils the coming of a single God through a unique rational and temporal dynamic in which sacrificial violence yields, little by little, to love. To retain the trinity or, by connecting the three functions, to seek a single explanation and rediscover monotheism: that is the question. CULTURAL OR UNIVERSAL DIFFERENCE? The pre-Capitoline trilogy for its part seems to encompass more than violence and the sacred, for Mars appears to represent the former while merely a part of Jupiter represents the latter. However, if one can manage to bring together such diverse institutions as those that constitute the economy and production, indeed even those of war and law, then the rational explanation covers a larger field than that of descriptive analysis: while Dumézil's work is limited, in effect, to the particular, yet certainly enormous, field of Indo-European cultures, that of René Girard points toward the universal. Whether that is a weakness or a strength given the tenor of our times remains to be seen. The comparison between these two comparative histories of religion poses, then, two questions: the reduction of functions among them or their resulting unity: a single God or a Trinity? And the question of Universality. The second is more urgent and relevant to the present time. Do we today live, do we think, in isolated spaces or are we building a Universe? I. UNIVERSAL VIOLENCE CLASSIFICATION AND ENGINE Illuminating and verifiable—although not falsifiable, as is always the case in the human sciences—the tripartite division offers categories, but One God or a Trinity?: without providing a reason for the ordering of species and genres, without giving the principle of classification. We have here, mutatis mutandis, a system and a taxonomy without the evolutionary engine, a Linné without Darwin. This necessary energy that produces disorder followed by movements and ordinances is inexhaustively provided by violence itself, according to René Girard. With regard to human groups, the latter is to Darwin what Georges Dumézil is to Linné, for Girard illustrates the dynamic of evolution and proposes a universal explanation. VIOLENCE AND THE SACRED OR MARS AND JUPITER? Is violence among humans triggered by its own accord, or, on the contrary, is...