-
Mimetic Theory and Christian Theology in the Twenty-first Century
- Michigan State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
260 Giuseppe Fornari Tu se’ lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore; tu se’ solo colui da cu’io tolsi lo bello stilo che m’ha fatto onore. (You are my master and my author; from you alone I took the beautiful style that has brought me honor.)1 I would emphasize the word “autore” (author), which, in my opinion, is to be understood as closely linked to auctoritas, the supreme power possessed by God and bestowed on the Church and the Holy Roman Empire according to Dante’s medieval vision. In its first and ultimate meaning, this is not a power based on the control of violence, that is to say, on the victim, but on the revelation of the victim. This is the authority of Christ, and anyone who is able to see and recognize what victimage means shares this spiritual and cognitive power. Girard was to me an auctoritas in this precise sense. The “bello stilo” (“beautiful style”) to which Dante refers is not at all a style that is beautiful from a purely aesthetic viewpoint, but the objective, spiritual beauty coming from the truth; in Girard’s case, that means the truth of the victim. “Onore” (honor) is the simple recognition of someone telling this truth. In this sense I honor both Dante and Girard. In the second place, a few remarks on Girard’s intellectual influence on me will provide an adequate introduction to a short account of his spiritual influence on me. My education, career, and mentality are completely different from Girard’s, and I am happy about that fact. It means that I have a different approach to the problems that he studied, a more “philosophical” approach, perhaps, in the sense that my approach pays more attention to certain theoretical and cultural aspects that have been insufficiently explored and evaluated by Girard. I am currently developing a critique generally based on this difference. Girard reduces complex ideas to simple (although not simplistic) formulations in order to obtain scientific knowledge, and to my mind, he does so rightly, although he is sometimes called a reductionist on account of this. Girard complains that this reproach is by now a monotonous refrain and is usually due to a refusal to accept the embarrassing and demystifying aspects of mimetic theory, which is undoubtedly true. But at the same time he seems to be unaware that this simplification does not authorize us to discard as meaningless, or even false, what has been excluded from the explanation . The problem is that Girard reacts in turn with typical polemical drive, which is often powerful in his hands but sometimes weakens his reasoning, “The Key of Knowledge” 261 leading him to forget the objective meaning of what is at stake. He claims that mimetic theory “is reductionist with a vengeance,” but the vengeance can sound a little sacrificial, above all when professed by the theorist of the refusal of sacrifice. As a consequence, Girard remains incomplete on some important points of his theory, mainly on the overall evaluation of desire, sacrifice, and human culture, subjects so vast that one single thinker, however great, could not pretend to exhaust them. He never makes any such claim, of course, but the problem is not one of quantity. The point is to arrive at a more satisfactory definition of what is essential. I think that Girard, as a reaction to this qualitative sense of incompleteness, has tried to construct a real Girardian system, to be understood in the same sense as the systems of Hegel or Heidegger. The claim is not at all unjustified, because the phenomena Girard has discovered or stressed are so important and consistently connected that they really do form and constitute a system. But he was perhaps overhasty in drawing some conclusions or did not stress that those were his conclusions. The idea of a system remains of little use if it excludes essential points of reality. In Girard’s adoption of a defensive attitude of this kind, we might sense a sort of rivalry with philosophy. Girard keeps repeating that the end of philosophy has come, that philosophy is a myth, and so on. And no doubt philosophers themselves do their best to bear out the truth of his claims. But from time to time, Girard himself tries to imitate the philosophers in their excessive love of systems. He himself teaches us that rivalry can only inspire bad and...