Politics and Apocalypse

The Evangelical Subversion of Myth

24 Robert Hamerton-Kelly to metaphysical desire; the author portrays the hero in such a way as to exempt himself from the desire he represents, until the moment when he sees himself in his hero and owns his own enslavement to desire. At this point he can begin to break free, and thus sees the hero anew, rewrites him accordingly, and lifts his narrative from mediocrity to greatness. The moment of this insight is the moment of conversion. According to Rossbach, Voegelin did not attain it; like Stavrogin he merely died. MIMETIC THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY So we arrive at a concluding unscientific postscript, having to do with philosophy and theology, reason and revelation, observation and apocalypse. For Girard the philosopher is the author who never repents and so can never end. I recall at this point the saying of that third-century Patristic extremist, Tertullian, to the effect that the Greeks make a virtue of ceaseless seeking, which is silly, because the sensible man stops, contented, when he has found what he has been looking for. Philosophers make a virtue of seeking, and no one more than Voegelin, who was allergic to dogma of any kind. For him the truth is in the honest and endless search for the light whose shadows alone we can see in the cave of this world. For him conversion is the Platonic turning from the shadows on the back wall to the luminescence that causes them, and eventually to the light itself. When asked what the mimetic objection to philosophy is, Girard, in one of the conference sessions, said that the philosopher never includes himself in his analyses but stands outside in the place of the self-sufficient observer. At this point it is only fair to refer again to Lawrence, our professional philosopher , to take note of how elegant and helpful philosophic discourse can be. He compares Girard and the others in the traditional terms of “Jerusalem and Athens,” while nuancing the comparison in light of Strauss’s emotional link to the Jews and Voegelin’s strenuous attempts to penetrate the Bible philosophically . He criticizes Girard for neglect of the category Nature, which he believes would paradoxically help denaturalize the apparent naturalization of sin in Girard’s schema. This is a helpful philosophical criticism, but I think Girard already has answered it in the idea of being and the loss of being through pride that he adumbrates in his earliest work. In terms of the ending of The Demons, the philosopher is Stavrogin, who simply dies, while Stepan Trofimovich, who had been, to be sure, a bad philosopher all his empty, lying life, goes from earth to heaven on the An Introductory Essay 25 wings of apocalyptic angels and his own late-won truth that he had been a liar all his life. So we end with the second epigraph of this essay, which is a summons to the good apocalypse in the midst of the accelerating shudder of the bad: Leave the dead to bury the dead. “Come! Follow me!” —Matthew 8:22/Luke 9:60 NOTES All translations of Greek texts are the author’s own. Hebrew texts follow the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962). 1. Cf. Francis Fukuyama, After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads (New York: Profile, 2006). Fukuyama continues to think within the boundaries of received international relations theory and proposes a policy of “realistic Wilsonianism.” Such a proposal is merely tactical, while what we need is strategic, that is, a new master paradigm to govern tactical positions such as realism, Wilsonianism, and “realistic Wilsonianism.” C.f. George Soros, The Age of Fallibility: The Consequences of the War on Terror (New York: Public Affairs, 2006). Soros, with characteristic insight, sees that millennialist beliefs have shaped the present administration’s thinking in well-known apocalyptic ways. The central misconception due to this inspiration is to have turned terrorism into the apocalyptic “Universal Adversary,” followed closely by the failure, because of faith-based decision making, to correct errors and adjust practice, that is, a failure of prudence. Soros refers to the classic source, Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University, 1970), and to Kevin P. Philips, American Theocracy, The Peril and Politics of Radical Religions, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Viking, 2006). 2. Wolfgang Palaver, René Girards mimetische Theorie: Im Kontext...