A Monadic Prelate without Divine Rival: On Girard's Bifurcated Focus

Introduction

Girard counts as a Durkheimian for viewing religion as the social force that underpins society's cultural institutions. A basic difference, though, should be heeded. No doubt, he argues that the bloody solution of the originary mimetic crisis initiated traditions of sacrificial rituals with mythical justifications that crystallized in society's legal codes, ethical rules, and cultural habits, on which daily events of scapegoating rely. However, if this suggests that religion's basic aim is to be a buttress of the cultural order, it must be noticed that Girard's core conviction points in a different direction with a curious ambiguity, which asks for a seldom effectuated two-pronged analysis. In fact, his crucial concept of méconnaissance postulates a basic awareness that precedes all religious constructs and gainsays their basic logic, even if it provides their fuel. Our analysis of religion should, therefore, follow a two-edged strategy that holds the critique of the cultural institutions to be no less important a role of religion than its serving as their buttress. This study may be called schismanalysis with respect to the etymology that derives religio from the Latin re-legere (re-reading).¹

Girard's 1972 book on the role of violence in religion was indeed widely welcomed for its apparent support of Nietzsche's and Freud's critique of religion as society's tool to curtail people's natural ambitions. Yet the book contained a clear rebuttal of these "masters of suspicion." Thus, the enthusiasm soon faded when his next book appeared to uphold the opposite view by pointing to an underlying thrust that had come to the surface in Judeo-Christian prophetic traditions. But how does this religio work?

The following pages do not pretend to outline in detail the method méconnaissance advocates for religious studies, but rather to give a tentative application of it to an area that Girard wrestled with in his controversy with Nietzsche over the rise of the Western individual. In the process, it will appear that a basic aspect of the Christian tradition was unjustifiably ignored and that Leibniz' version of metaphysics seems to offer an undervalued answer to this topic of the basic question on the origin of evil, the Fall and its redemption.

While reminding the reader that this was a contribution in the 2019 Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R) theme of the conference at Innsbruck titled "On imagining the Other," I shall take my starting point in an episcopal consecration and its ritual.

An episcopal consecration

The new Dutch bishop Smeets was ordained on December 8, 2019. The ceremony was a liturgical gem: spiritually uplifting for both the aging faithful and the agnostic sympathizers for whom rituals retain a nostalgic ring. With Dutch Catholicism and its ministry in steep decline, the cathedral pews filled to the brim and long lines of clerics made the episcopal consecration into a long-awaited feast. Still, its liturgy was not without raising questions. While the choice for the diocesan patron's feast of Mary's Immaculate Conception was fitting and its liturgy was well performed, still it sounded a nasty discord exposing the roots of the Church's demise. A furtive bias showed when a nun, the only woman in the liturgical plot, came to read Eden's story of the Fall. She was followed by a deacon reading the Gospel of the Annunciation. Since public ears have come to grasp the Immaculate Conception as referring to Mary's virginal pregnancy, countering humanity's sinful state after Eve's faux pas, many an eyebrow was raised. Even though the iconography and the liturgy's symbolism stressed Mary's graced state from birth, it was her undoing of Eve's Fall that stood out in people's minds. At the same time, the all-male liturgy proclaimed the usual texts about Christ's sacrificial blood undoing mankind's sin of revolt against the Almighty. The new prelate is given the mandate, as Christ's proxy, to distribute the graces earned on the Cross. Thus the liturgy inadvertently exposed a dogmatic...