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C H A P T E R 8 The Pope and the Emperor THE LAST INTERNATIONALE Benoît Chantre: In the realm of contingent wars in which we are immersed, there is thus an essential war: truth’s war against violence. You say that truth has flushed violence out. To use Clausewitz to criticize Hegel, and Hegel to criticize Clausewitz, is to get closer to apocalyptic reason and see that the person whose “successful career” we need to watch is not whom we thought. He is not the “god of war” or the “world spirit” admired at Jena, but a ghostly figure that has for a time been hidden by the empire’s darkness. I am of course thinking of Michel Serres’ magnificent book Rome: The Book of Foundations,1 and of his re-interpretation of Livy, which was in response to your ideas. In Serres’ rereading, Alba the White is crushed by its rival city, Rome the Black; the victim is hidden, stoned to death by mendacious history. What this reading contains in potential form is now becoming real in a special way. You have just mentioned another phantom figure, who sits at the heart of Rome, a representation of the Unique, which the French Revolution concealed, and Napoleon humiliated, and Verdun smothered. It is an insistent and recurring figure, who did not fall under the bullets that probably came from the East and whom you consider to incarnate truth in its war against violence. You do not speak of the pope in your books, and yet you are deeply Catholic, which is something that always bothers the scientific community and people of faith. 195 196 The Pope and the Emperor René Girard: I am very sensitive to your praise of Michel Serres’ book. As for the rest, I am a little tired of shuttling between those who believe in Heaven and those who do not, as if each had to remain in his corner and never talk with the other. All of my books have been written from a Christian perspective. My conversion is what put me on the mimetic path and the discovery of the mimetic principle is what converted me. It is unreasonable to say that my first two books are two halves of a whole (because I was relatively discreet about Christian revelation in them) and that all the others should be tossed out. Yet this attitude is quite common. Even well-meaning readers still fail to follow me in my conviction that Judeo-Christianity and the prophetic tradition are the only things that can explain the world in which we live. There is a mimetic wisdom, which I do not claim to embody, and it is in Christianity that we have to look for it. It doesn’t matter whether we know it or not. The Crucifixion is what highlights the victimary mechanism and explains history. Today, the “signs of the times” are converging and so we can no longer persevere in the madness of mimetic rivalries that we find on the national, ideological and religious level. Christ said that the Kingdom was not of this world. This explains why the first Christians were waiting for the end of the world, as we find in the two Epistles to the Thessalonians. We thus have to accept the idea that history is essentially finite. Only this eschatological perspective can give time back its true value. BC: What role do you attribute to the Church in this revelation? RG: A role that is both essential and relative. The Church is the guardian of a fundamental truth, but at the same time it is an institution and, like all institutions, it is immersed in history and subject to error. The Church was formed, then divided; it spread out and changed. It affirmed itself most in Catholicism, in particular that of the Council of Trent. The Council tried to restore the pope’s power, which had become corrupted after the Babylonian Captivity of the papacy in Avignon and the imbroglios of Florence and Rome. From this point of view, the Jesuits were geniuses. Lord knows whether the miseries that they had to endure were related to the resentment against the papacy in Europe. You are right to raise this topic. The papacy’s gradual emergence in the struggle against the empire shows how the Spirit shapes history in ways unbeknownst to those involved. Hegel aped this idea with his dialectic. The Church has been...

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