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  • Recovering RhetoricRené Girard as Theorhetor
  • Paul L. Lynch (bio)

The revival of religion is almost a matter of rhetoric. The work is difficult, perhaps impossible (perhaps all religions die out with the exhaustion of the language), but it at least reminds us that Our Lord asked us in His work to be not only as gentle as doves, but as wise as serpents.

—Thornton Wilder, Foreword to The Angel That Troubled the Waters, 1928

introduction

In this essay I argue that René Girard's project invites the difficult, perhaps impossible, work of inventing a revived Christian discourse.1 To suggest that Girard has left a rhetorical task may seem strange. Rhetoric, according to conventional wisdom, is the art of making the unpalatable palatable. In the absence of true knowledge, rhetoric may do, but it is always the lesser option, an art for a fallen world. These common conceptions of rhetoric would seem to oppose it to the general orientation of Girard's project, which sought to uncover [End Page 101] things hidden. When he himself referred to rhetoric, Girard tended to characterize the term in the conventional way.2

Yet there can be little doubt that Girard recognized that his conclusions suggested a need for some new form of persuasive communication. The loci of these implicit rhetorical considerations appear throughout his work. In Things Hidden, for example, Girard describes the basic rhetorical challenge of articulating his conclusions: "We must beware of calling [Jesus's] action sacrificial, even if we then have no words or categories to convey its meaning. The very lack of appropriate language indicates that we are dealing with a type of conduct for which there is no precedent in the realm of mythology or philosophy."3 Ultimately, he insists, the love of Jesus, expressed in His sacrifice, "surpasses our understanding and our powers of expression."4 Nevertheless, Girard attempts to characterize God's rhetorical style, but he can do so only in negative terms: "Behaving in a truly divine manner, on an earth still in the clutches of violence, means not dominating humans, not overwhelming them with supernatural power; it means not terrifying and astonishing them."5 (As C. S. Lewis's Screwtape puts it, "He cannot ravish. He can only woo.") If God will not overwhelm, then we might assume that God's only option is persuasion, which means that we will have to restage what Girard calls the "great drama" of salvation. There is no escaping that drama: "if we were to get rid of all the sanctions and all these, so to speak, 'theatrical' and dramatic aspects, we would be eliminating an extremely important part of our lives." Girard adds, "We are beings both aesthetic and ethical at the same time."6 Perhaps that is why "there is a new felt need for religion, in some form."7 Form—at least when fallible beings fashion it—is a rhetorical consideration.

These passages suggest that Girard might have endorsed Wilder's point: The revival of religion is almost a matter of rhetoric, specifically "theorhetoric," which rhetorician Steven Mailloux defines as a rhetoric of "talking to, for, and about God."8 Again, the very idea of "theorhetoric" may seem odd. Insofar as religion is understood as connected to the Transcendent and the True, it would seem to have little to do with the contingent considerations of rhetoric, the art "which seeks to capture in opportune moments that which is appropriate and attempts to suggest that which is possible."9 Nevertheless, my project in this essay is to articulate the appropriate and possible, as suggested by mimetic theory. That is, I want to begin to outline what Aristotle would have called "the available means"10 of a Girardian theorhetoric.

The structure of my argument corresponds to the definition of rhetoric just provided. The first section speaks to the present or "opportune" moment, a moment described as "after truth" in the 2018 conference call for the Colloquium [End Page 102] on Violence and Religion. If we are indeed "after truth," rhetoric may seem the last thing we need. I argue, however, that the distance between truth and rhetoric is not as great as is commonly supposed. I...

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