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Violence, Desire, and the Sacred
Volume 2
Violence, Desire, and the Sacred
Volume 2

René Girard and Sacrifice in

Life, Love, and Literature

Edited by
Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge
 Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square

New York London
NY 10018 WC1B 3DP
USA UK

www.bloomsbury.com

Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published 2014

© Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, Joel Hodge and Contributors, 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or
any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining

from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or
the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-1-6235-6306-6

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

For René Girard
 Contents

Contributors ix
Foreword, Paul Dumouchel xiii
Introduction xvii

1 Mimesis, Violence, and the Sacred: An Overview of the Thought of René

Girard Chris Fleming 1

Part One Politics

2 Abolition or Transformation? The Political Implications of René Girard’s

Theory of Sacrifice Wolfgang Palaver 17

3 Sacrifice in the Democratic Age: Rivalry and Crisis in Recent Australian

Politics Joel Hodge 31

4 Mimetic Theory and Hermeneutic Communism Paolo Diego Bubbio 45

5 War on Terror: The Escalation to Extremes Sarah Drews Lucas 57

6 Scapegoating the Guilty: Girard and International Criminal

Law Nathan Kensey 67

Part Two Cultural and Textual Analysis

7 The Scapegoating of Cheerleading and Cheerleaders Emma A. Jane 83

8 “Things Hidden”: On Shame, Violence, and Concealment in

Autobiography Rosamund Dalziell 101

9 “That False Paradise”: Desire, Sacrifice, and the American Dream in

Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides Carly Osborn 115

Part Three Theology

10 Hearing the Cry of the Poor: René Girard and St. Augustine on the
Psalms Ann W. Astell 133
viii Contents

11 Sacrifice, Pagan and Christian Robert J. Daly SJ 147

12 Living Faithfully “Where Danger Threatens”: Christian Discernment

According to John Cassian and René Girard Kevin Lenehan 161

Part Four Psychology

13 A Psychologist Venturing Across an Interdisciplinary Bridge to Mimetic

Theory and Its Applications Marie R. Joyce 175

14 Internet Offenders as Girardian Scapegoats Bruce A. Stevens 183

Part Five Applied Mimetic Theory

15 A Girardian Reading of the Evagrian “Eight Kinds of Evil

Thoughts” Draško Dizdar 195

16 Forsaking Our Violent Ways: A Girardian Reflection on the Sermon on

the Mount as a Path to a New Social Order Peter Stork 207

17 Girard’s Interdividual Psychology Applied to Pastoral Leadership in

Churches Bruce Wilson 221

18 Ecclesial Roots of Clergy Sexual Abuse: A Girardian

Reflection Scott Cowdell 233

19 Practical Reflections on Nonviolent Atonement Michael Hardin 247

Glossary of Key Girardian Terms 259

Further Reading 263
Index 271
 Contributors

Ann W. Astell (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is Professor of Theology at

the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. She is the author of six books, including Joan
of Arc and Sacrificial Authorship (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003) and Eating
Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages (Cornell University
Press, 2006). She is also the editor or co-editor of six books, including Sacrifice,
Scripture, and Substitution: Readings in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (University
of Notre Dame Press, 2011).

Paolo Diego Bubbio (PhD, University of Turin, Italy) is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy
in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western
Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Il Sacrificio Intellettuale: René Girard e la Filosofia
della Religione (Intellectual Sacrifice: René Girard and the Philosophy of Religion; Il
Quadrante, 1999) and Il Sacrificio: a Ragione e il suo Altrove (Sacrifice: Reason and Its
Other; Città Nuova, 2004), and the co-editor of two other books.

Scott Cowdell (PhD, University of Queensland) is an Anglican priest, currently

Associate Professor in the Public and Contextual Theology Research Centre (PACT)
at Charles Sturt University, Canberra, Australia, and Canon Theologian of the
Canberra–Goulburn Diocese. He is the author of seven books, most recently Abiding
Faith: Christianity Beyond Certainty, Anxiety, and Violence (Cascade, 2009) and René
Girard and Secular Modernity: Christ, Culture, and Crisis (University of Notre Dame
Press, 2013). He is also Founding President of the Australian Girard Seminar.

Robert J. Daly SJ (Dr Theol, Julius Maximilians Universität, Würzburg) is Professor

Emeritus of Theology at Boston College. Specializing in liturgical theology, his
recent publications include Sacrifice Unveiled: The True Meaning of Christian
Sacrifice (Continuum, 2009).

Rosamund Dalziell (PhD, Australian National University) is an Associate Researcher

in the Public and Contextual Theology Research Centre (PACT) at Charles Sturt
University, Canberra, Australia. Her publications include Shameful Autobiographies:
Shame in Contemporary Australian Autobiographies and Culture (Melbourne
University Press, 1999).

Draško Dizdar (PhD, University of Queensland) is Prior of Emmaus monastic

community in Tasmania, Australia (affiliated with the ecumenical monastero di Bose,
x Contributors

Italy). He has taught at the Australian Catholic University and is currently a theologian
with the Tasmanian Catholic Education Office. His publications include Sheer Grace:
Living the Mystery of God (Paulist, 2008).

Paul Dumouchel (PhD, University of Waterloo, Canada) is Professor of Philosophy

at the Graduate School of Core Ethics and Frontier Sciences, Ritsumeikan University,
Kyoto, Japan. He is co-author, with Jean-Pierre Dupuy, of L’Enfer des choses, René
Girard et la logique de l’économie (Seuil, 1979), and author of Emotions: Essai sur
le corps et le social (Les Empêcheurs de Penser en rond, 1999). He co-edited, with
Jean-Pierre Dupuy, L’auto-organisation de la physique au politique (Seuil, 1983), and
edited Violence and Truth: On the Work of René Girard (Stanford University Press,
1988). His latest books include Le sacrifice inutile: Essai sur la violence politique
(Flammarion, 2011), Economia dell’invidia (Transeuropa, 2011), and The Ambivalence
of Scarcity and Other Essays (Michigan State University Press, 2013).

Chris Fleming (PhD, University of Western Sydney) is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy

in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western
Sydney, Australia, and Founding Vice President of the Australian Girard Seminar. He
is the author of René Girard: Violence and Mimesis (Polity, 2004).

Michael Hardin (MDiv, North Park Theological Seminary, Chicago) is Executive

Director of Preaching Peace in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and a PhD candidate in
theology at Charles Sturt University, Australia, working on René Girard and Karl
Barth. He is the author of The Jesus Driven Life (JDL, 2010) and the co-editor of three
books, including Stricken by God?: Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ
(Eerdmans, 2007).

Joel Hodge (PhD, University of Queensland) is Lecturer in the School of Theology at

the Australian Catholic University (St Patrick’s Campus, Melbourne), and Founding
Treasurer and Secretary of the Australian Girard Seminar. He is the author of Resisting
Violence and Victimisation: Christian Faith and Solidarity in East Timor (Ashgate,
2012) and co-editor of Vatican II: Reception and Implementation in the Australian
Church (Garratt, 2012).

Emma A. Jane (PhD, University of New South Wales) is a Senior Lecturer in Media in
the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Sydney,
Australia. She is a journalist, broadcaster, and author of six books (published under
the name “Emma Tom”), including Bali: Paradise Lost? (Pluto, 2009), and Something
About Mary (Pluto, 2005). Her next book—co-authored with Chris Fleming—is on
conspiracy theories.
 Contributors xi

Marie R. Joyce (PhD, University of Melbourne) is an Honorary Fellow in the School

of Psychology at the Australian Catholic University (St Patrick’s Campus, Melbourne)
and a clinical psychologist in private practice. Since the publication of Rational
Emotive Therapy with Children and Adolescents: Theory, Treatment Strategies and
Preventative Methods (Wiley and Sons, 1984) she has published in psychology, profes-
sional ethics, and interdisciplinary fields.

Nathan Kensey (LLM, Australian National University) is a lawyer in the Office of

International Law at the Attorney-General’s Department, Canberra, and a Tutor and
occasional Lecturer in International Law at the Australian National University.

Kevin Lenehan (PhD, STD, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) is a priest of the Catholic
Diocese of Ballarat (in rural Victoria, Australia), and Lecturer in Systematic Theology
at Catholic Theological College, within the MCD University of Divinity. He is the
author of Standing Responsibly Between Silence and Speech: Revelation and Religion in
the Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and René Girard (Peeters, 2011).

Sarah Drews Lucas (MA[Phil], University of Sydney) is a PhD candidate in the

Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her work is on
models of agency in contemporary feminist philosophy.

Carly Osborn (BA[Hons], University of Adelaide) is a PhD candidate in the

Department of English at the University of Adelaide, Australia, whose dissertation
applies Girardian theory to some late twentieth-century American novels inves-
tigating tragedy and the American Dream. She received the Raymund Schwager
Memorial Award 2012 for best postgraduate paper at the international meeting of the
Colloquium on Violence and Religion.

Wolfgang Palaver (PhD, University of Innsbruck) is Professor of Catholic Social

Thought and Dean of the Faculty of Catholic Theology at the University of Innsbruck,
Austria. He has published books and articles on religion and violence, Thomas
Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, and René Girard. His René Girards mimetische Theorie (2nd
edn, 2004) has just been translated as René Girard’s Mimetic Theory (Michigan State
University Press, 2013).

Bruce A. Stevens (PhD, Boston University) is an Anglican priest, and Associate

Professor in Clinical Psychology at the University of Canberra, Australia. He estab-
lished Canberra Clinical and Forensic Psychology (his group private practice) and has
assessed and treated hundreds of sexual offenders. He has published five books, most
recently Happy Ever After? A Practical Guide to Relationship Counselling for Clinical
Psychologists (Australian Academic Press, 2011), with Malise Arnstein.
xii Contributors

Peter Stork (PhD, Australian Catholic University) is currently Honorary Research

Fellow in the Faculty of Theology and Philosophy, Australian Catholic University,
Canberra, following an international career in management consulting. His publica-
tions include Human Rights in Crisis: A Cultural Critique (VDM, 2007).

Bruce Wilson (MA, University of Sydney) was Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of
Bathurst, in rural New South Wales, Australia, and now works in retirement as a
“psychospiritual guide” for church and other leaders. His publications include The
Human Journey: Christianity and Modern Consciousness (Albatross, 1980), Can God
Survive in Australia? (Albatross, 1983), and Reasons of the Heart (Allen and Unwin,
1998).
 Foreword

How are violence, desire, and the sacred related? Is this just a random association or
does anything really unite these themes? According to René Girard, sacrifice and
scapegoating are the pivotal institutions and mechanisms through which violence,
desire, and the sacred are inextricably linked—but what does this claim mean exactly
and what does it entail? The chapters collected in this volume explore answers to these
questions. They explore in particular the connection between scapegoating and two
different meanings of sacrifice.
That sacrifice embodies the relationship between violence and the sacred is in
many ways obvious. That relationship is evident in the very institution of blood
sacrifice, whether human or animal. To perform a sacrifice in this sense is to kill. It
is also present in sacrifice understood as renunciation, as giving up something that is
dear—to protect, to provide, or to honor someone or something that is deemed more
important. Even when we are not dealing with the ultimate form of renunciation, the
sacrifice of one’s life, violence is never far away. In many instances, either violence is
what makes the renunciation necessary or it is the sacrifice itself that is understood
as a form of self-directed violence. More generally, violent death, whether on the
battlefield, during a rescue operation, or whenever the victim is in any way “on duty”
is spontaneously interpreted or at least described as a sacrifice.
What is not in any way obvious however is the nature of that relationship. How—in
what way?—are violence and the sacred related? Nearly everyone has his or her own
idea on the issue. Strangely enough, in spite of their apparent great diversity, these
opinions usually boil down to whether the relation between violence and the sacred
is to be commended or condemned. The evident relationship between them that is
exemplified in sacrifice is judged as proof either of a profound collusion between
violence and religion or of their radical difference. A major quality of the chapters
in this volume is not only that they avoid this pitfall, but that they provide tools to
deconstruct this false dichotomy. They provide insights into the understanding of a
relationship that is obscure, precisely because it is so obvious.
What is also not evident is the place of desire in between violence and the sacred.
It is rather clear that there is a relationship between desire and violence—frustrated
desire often leads to violence—or between desire and the sacred, which is often
taken to be an expression of our highest desire. But what is the relation between
violence, desire, and the sacred? Does desire play any role in the relation between
violence and the sacred? According to Girard’s mimetic theory, desire is precisely
what builds the consequence from violence to the sacred. This is not because desire
is intrinsically violent nor because the sacred is the true object of our desire, but
because desire is mimetic—because, that is to say, desire is according to the other.
xiv Foreword

We neither autonomously elect the objects of our desires; nor are we determined
by the objects themselves to desire whatever it is that we desire. Unable to desire
by ourselves, we need others to know what we should desire. We look unto them to
discover what or who constitutes a worthwhile object of desire; more precisely we
take their desires as the models of our own. Desire in consequence, because it brings
us to desire the same object others do, inevitably weaves us together into conflictive
relationships.
The profound interdependence between us to which mimetic desire bears witness
should not however be simply viewed as a burden and a limit, for it is not only that
we do not know what to desire without the other, but that we cannot desire without
them. Our dependence on the other is what allows us to have goals, objectives, and
projects—what allows us to be moved by desires and passions, which, according
to Descartes, are the source of all that is good and bad in life.1 Mimesis—and this
is central to Girard’s thought—entails that conflict and co­operation are not polar
opposites, but profoundly linked to each other, that cooperation leads to conflict, and
that conflict fosters cooperation. The interweaving of violence and desire, of conflict
and cooperation, entails that violence is an ever present, fundamental problem that
societies must resolve if they are to survive. Culture itself, according to Girard, is the
fragile, and permanently threatened, solution to that problem.
Of the complex relationship between conflict and cooperation, scapegoating and
sacrifice are both privileged examples: scapegoating not only because it is a form of
elementary cooperation—all against one is a way of being and acting together toward
a common goal—but mainly because it is the original mechanism that gave rise to the
more elaborate forms of cooperation that we call human culture. According to Girard,
spontaneous unanimous scapegoating of a unique victim is the generative mechanism
back to which all major human institutions can be traced. Sacrifice, in the form of
blood sacrifice, re-enacts this in a modified form and commemorates the collective
victimage out of which of human culture arises. Scapegoating was productive then,
for it was not seen as scapegoating, and its ability to generate stable social orders in
turn ensured that it was not perceived for what it was, but as a pious act of sacred
violence.
Scapegoating in the world in which we live has progressively become ineffective,
and to the extent that it has, it has also become more and more visible. It is not that
scapegoating does not take place anymore, or that it cannot, at least temporarily,
divert violence from the heart of the community toward expendable victims, as many
chapters in this volume clearly show, but that it has lost its ability to generate new
cultural forms and to regenerate old ones. The scapegoat or sacrificial mechanism
rests on a basic economy of violence: all against one provides violent reconciliation
at a minimum cost. Its loss of efficiency also means that this economy of violence is
failing. Thus the growing inefficiency of scapegoating and of all sacrificial institutions
opens the possibility of more rather than less violence and victims, for it is the basic
mechanism that until now protected us against our own violence that is breaking
down.
According to Girard, it is Christian revelation, more precisely the passion and death
 Foreword xv

of Christ, that brought about the demise of sacrificial institutions by making visible
the scapegoating process that is at the heart of the sacred. Christ’s death however has
also generally been conceived as a sacrifice. Girard first argued that such a description
was misleading and should be abandoned. He later came to recognize that he had
been mistaken in refusing to view Christ’s death as a sacrifice and added, somewhat
obscurely, that “he [Girard] had been scapegoating sacrifice.” Many of the chapters
in this volume explore the complex of issues related to these different practices and
understandings of sacrifice.
Sacrifice in its traditional form constitutes both an imitation and a celebration
of the original scapegoating, and for that very reason hides the violence that is at
the heart of the sacred. It presents violence as something different from what it is.
Sacrifice transforms the violence that defines it into a noble act, perhaps regret-
table, certainly dangerous, but absolutely necessary, and in this way it redeems the
violence that characterizes it. This transformation of violence into a pious activity
that puts us in contact with the transcendent realm of the sacred is clearly the case
for blood sacrifice. It is however also often present in sacrifice understood under the
category of renunciation, of which the sacrifice of one’s life constitutes the ultimate
horizon. On the other hand, according to Girard, the sacrifice of Christ reveals the
purely human, radically immanent violence that constitutes the sacred. Sacrifice as
an imitation of the scapegoating process that produced the sacred maintains and
strengthens sacrificial institutions. The sacrifice of Christ deconstructs these institu-
tions and undermines their efficiency by revealing the violent scapegoating process
that engenders the sacred for what it is. In both cases, sacrifice stands at the center of
the relation between violence and the sacred, but that relation itself is in the two cases
radically different. The fundamentally different relations between violence, desire,
and the sacred that these two understandings of sacrifice entail is the space which
this volume explores.
In January 2013 I had the privilege of being invited to give a keynote address at
the annual meeting of the Australian Girard Seminar and then the honor of being
asked to write the foreword to this volume. This is the second volume with the title
Violence, Desire, and the Sacred assembled by the Australian Girard Seminar and
as such becomes the second volume in a new series of that same name that makes
accessible to a wider, international public the work of this small but very dynamic
group of scholars. Even though it was only recently founded, the Australian Girard
Seminar, as the chapters in this volume clearly demonstrate, has already made some
essential and very original contributions to the mimetic analysis of the modern world.
Indeed, many of the contributions gathered in this volume address from a mimetic
point of view various contemporary social and political issues, either in the church
itself, in society at large, or in international relations, or question some of our basic
cultural presuppositions, revealing the presence of real—because generally invisible—
scapegoats. It is, I believe, characteristic not only of this volume, but of the work of
the Australian Girard Seminar in general, to give central importance to the social
relevance of mimetic theory for each and every one of us in our daily life. We can
therefore only be grateful to the editors of this volume and to those responsible for this
xvi Foreword

new series for having given us this new vehicle for the publication of Girardian studies
and of mimetic analyses of contemporary life.
Paul Dumouchel
Ritsumeikan University

Note
1 René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, article 212, 58–9, www.earlymodern
texts.com/pdf/descpass.pdf [accessed September 13, 2013].
 Introduction

While seemingly anachronistic in an enlightened and individualistic age, sacrifice

remains pervasive in human culture and consciousness. Perhaps more than any modern
phenomenon, today’s wars have reminded people and nations of the importance and
ostensible necessity of sacrifice, likewise its darker aspects in the reinforcement of
group belonging and national identity at the expense of a hated “other.” Yet the perva-
siveness of sacrifice is not limited to war; it is present in many aspects of our life, as
this volume aims to show: from the everyday activities of our work, family life, and
friendships, through to social dynamics, politics, literature, religion, and pop culture.
René Girard (1923–), of the Académie française, has altered, perhaps more than any
other modern scholar, the way in which sacrifice is understood. His theory of sacrifice,
though debated, has drawn wide acclaim and reorientated the discussion about what
sacrifice is and where it comes from. For Girard, sacrifice represents the violent heart
of human culture and its effort to tame that violence—the homeopathic deployment
of targeted violence needed to first establish human society and culture by holding
socially destructive violence in check. Sacrifice thus represents the human project in
a fundamental way, that is, to survive and thrive in relationship with each other and
in terms of the almost uncontrollable and undefined desires that we have for more, in
fact, for “being” itself. According to Girard, sacrifice is the ultimate means by which we
manage our desires and order our relationships.
In its primitive form, sacrifice unites conflictual and directionless human beings
into a cohesive group. It does this by means of taking a life in exchange for the life of
a group that would otherwise destroy itself in violent rivalry. Sacrifice, in other words,
is founded on scapegoating: in the group uniting against one, yielding an unexpected
and miraculous unity where strife and havoc had formerly threatened disaster.
Sacrifice becomes the quintessential social act, hence the quintessential human act:
Sacrifice is the violence that heals, unites, and reconciles, in opposition to the bad
violence that corrupts, divides, disintegrates, undifferentiates. The view of sacri-
ficial violence as a precious but dangerously unstable substance endowed with
paradoxical properties is crucial to human culture.1
The power of this scapegoating sacrifice, for Girard, gives human groups such a
surprising gift—the gift of order and stability—that they attribute its power to a
supernatural agent. The startling peace and unanimity that emerges from sacrifice
is not imagined to be something the group itself produced because this outcome
seems so unaccountably powerful, giving the group something that it could not
achieve for itself. The “supernatural agent” is none other than the sacrificial victim,
who is elevated to the status of a god (or demon) in the eyes of the mob. In light of
xviii Introduction

its stunning success, the act of sacrifice is refreshed thereafter in ritual homage to
this victim-god, who showed his or her power to the group in the way that sacrificial
scapegoating revealed a path to order. Ritualized sacrifice is thus institutionalized
in human cultures, alongside myths that justify it, and laws of prohibition aimed
at preventing the recurrence of violent social collapse. This ritual is not merely a
mechanical imitation of the original violence, however, but represents a means to
recreate the restorative unanimity of sacrifice, hence habituating the social group to
the mimetic transcendence discovered through scapegoating.
Yet, Girard’s journey into the meaning of sacrifice did not stop here. He himself
underwent a major shift in understanding sacrifice over the course of his academic
career, particularly through the influence of Fr. Raymund Schwager SJ. After arguing
that scapegoating is at the heart of human culture, Girard further identified how the
biblical tradition exposed this violence as unjust by telling the story of the innocent
victim. Moreover, through his exchanges with Raymund Schwager, Girard eventually
came to recognize another side to sacrifice: the side of loving self-giving that is
particularly exemplified by Jesus Christ on the cross. Girard came to recognize that
in a sense he had actually been scapegoating sacrifice itself, and hence only half
understanding its meaning. In contrast to the violently sacrificial that takes from the
other to acquire being and builds identity and unity by offering that other in sacrifice,
loving sacrifice takes the form of a self-offering that gives of its self—and gives up its
claim to the superiority and anteriority of its own desire—for the good of the other.
In fact, this fuller understanding of sacrifice provided the ground for Girard to realize
the full implications of his earlier work on the “romantic lie” and “novelistic truth”:
that conversion toward relationship and unity with the other (rather than denying the
dependence of our desire upon that of the other, according to the “romantic lie” of
our own pristine, autonomous, anterior desire) revolves around loving sacrifice as the
fundamental expression of the individual and the social.
Exploring in more depth the implications of Girard’s groundbreaking mimetic
theory for the understanding of sacrifice is the task of this volume, the second in a
developing series emerging under the auspices of our Australian Girard Seminar,
while enlisting the engagement of our many friends worldwide in the Colloquium
on Violence and Religion. Girard has provided the outline and tools for a deeper
understanding of sacrifice that must be carried forward into the different disciplines
to bear full fruit. Carrying on the method and vision of Volume 1 of Violence, Desire,
and the Sacred, which was subtitled Girard’s Mimetic Theory Across the Disciplines, the
current volume undertakes its task with a decidedly interdisciplinary vision and intent:
that the use and exchange of disciplinary expertise is necessary for future advances in
human understanding, and that this exchange and dialogue can occur on the common
anthropological ground provided by Girard.2
Girard himself leads the way in this interdisciplinary endeavor by ranging across,
drawing on, and providing fresh insight into multiple disciplines, especially literary
criticism, classics, sociology, anthropology, ethnology (and even some paleontology),
theology, politics, and history both ancient and modern. Girard has developed his own
wide-ranging expertise over four decades of constant exploration; not unsurprisingly
 Introduction xix

he has drawn criticism for disrespecting normal disciplinary boundaries—though he

sees this expansive interdisciplinarity as a justified risk if deeper insights into human
life, desire, religion, and culture are to be gained.
The most notable contribution of this volume to Girardian studies is to bring
distinct disciplines and scholars into dialogue—from politics, cultural studies,
literary studies, theology, and psychology—in order to understand sacrifice in its
different manifestations and influences. Some of these disciplines, such as politics,
cultural studies, and psychology, were not represented in the first volume of
Violence, Desire, and the Sacred. It is our special pleasure as editors to set aside a
part of this volume for the practical applications of mimetic theory. One of the most
commented-upon aspects of mimetic theory for those who have seen merit in it is
how it helps them to understand their own identities, relationships, rivalries, desires,
emotions, and actions in greater depth. In fact, any likely socio-historical impact
of mimetic theory will only begin as we come to better understand and reform our
own lives and relationships, particularly away from distorted desires and violence.
These “applied” chapters range from understanding our own desires and thoughts,
to effective pastoral leadership in churches and the systemic wellsprings of clergy
sexual abuse, to peacemaking, to recasting the role of atonement theory in American
culture.
The volume has a straightforward layout, with each chapter falling into a distinct
area, though many chapters have implications for other disciplines. All chapters are
noteworthy, though there is an insight in one of them that we would particularly like
to highlight, as it offers a foundation for this volume as a whole and has very signif-
icant implications for mimetic theory. As a leading Girardian political theologian,
Wolfgang Palaver argues in his chapter, the dichotomy between violent and pacific,
negative and positive sacrifice, must be deconstructed. The theoretical opposition of
violent and pacific sacrifice, just like negative and positive mimesis, is true on one
level, but it cannot be absolute. Positive and negative forms of sacrifice and mimesis
are not equal and opposed, as if they are mimetic rivals fighting over a common object.
To oppose them as such is to make them the basis for a new rivalry and so to scapegoat
one or the other, as Nietzsche made the mistake of doing. It is important to emphasize
that positive sacrifice is the form of sacrifice that by its character seeks transformation
and conversion; negative, violent sacrifice feeds off and distorts good forms of sacrifice
for destructive and selfish ends. Negative forms of sacrifice (which Girard defines
in terms of scapegoating) are parasitical manifestations of an original and good
sacrificial mode of human being. This original mode involves desiring according to
the other for the purpose of giving the self to the other (even to the violent other)
rather than acquiring the other’s being. This means that when positive and negative
sacrifice confront each other (as they did on the cross between the violent mob and
the forgiving victim), positive sacrifice does not oppose the negative as if it were a
case of a violent rivalry intent on winning. Negative sacrifice is oppositional, whereas
positive sacrifice is transformational and always open to self-giving and relationship.
While negative sacrifice opposes and destroys, positive sacrifice reconciles and trans-
forms. Thus, through this confrontation runs the possibility that distortions can be
xx Introduction

transformed—that positive sacrifice can encompass, heal, and transform the violently
sacrificial. This is neatly summed up by Dag Hammarskjöld in a quote from Palaver’s
chapter:
Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who “forgives” you—out of
love—takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness,
therefore, always entails a sacrifice.3
The editors take this opportunity to thank the following people and organizations
for their support: the authors, foreign and domestic, who have kindly contributed
to this volume; Imitatio, and in particular the most helpful Lindy Fishburne, for the
financial support that helped us in preparing the manuscript; Christopher Brennan,
for his meticulous work in copy editing and indexing; Haaris Naqvi, for his interest
and support at Continuum/Bloomsbury; and our colleagues and supporters in the
Australian Girard Seminar. We are particularly grateful to veteran Girardian and
philosopher Paul Dumouchel, who traveled from Japan to Sydney to address our
January 2013 Conference of the Australian Girard Seminar, and who has kindly
offered a foreword to this volume.
Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge

Notes
1 René Girard, A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare (New Malden: Inigo
Enterprises, 2000), 214.
2 See “Introduction,” in Violence, Desire, and the Sacred: Girard’s Mimetic Theory
Across the Disciplines, Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge (eds) (New
York: Continuum, 2012), xiv–xix. Similar to that volume (no. 1), which emerged
from the January 2011 conference of the Australian Girard Seminar, the current
volume (no. 2) draws on material from the January 2012 conference, held in
Melbourne.
3 Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings (1964), trans. L. Sjöberg and W. H. Auden, Vintage
Spiritual Classics (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 197.
 1

Mimesis, Violence, and the Sacred:

An Overview of the Thought of René Girard1
Chris Fleming

This chapter provides an overview of the thought of the French–American literary

and cultural theorist René Girard, beginning with his theorization of “mimetic desire,”
the explanatory hypothesis Girard employs to theorize interpersonal relations. Girard
postulates that desire is pre-eminently imitative. Thence we turn to the “scapegoat” or
“victimage” mechanism—Girard’s model for how cultural and religious formation takes
place through the banishment or lynching of a victim. This event—or series of events—
functions to initiate and sustain cultural stability. Finally, we consider the relationship
between Judeo-Christian scripture and the scapegoat mechanism, considering Girard’s
depiction of the Bible as representing a trenchant critique of “sacred violence.”

Mimesis: A theory of desire

Beginning with the books Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary
Structure2 and Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky,3 Girard
developed a new theory of desire based around the idea of imitation or “mimesis.”4 As
Aristotle noted in Poetics,5 imitation is perhaps the single best defining characteristic
of humanity, which distinguishes itself from the rest of the animal kingdom through
its increased aptitude and propensity for imitation. From the acquisition of language
and the development of regional accents, to the practices of religious discipleship
and formal education, it is predominantly through imitation that we are able to learn
and come to “inhabit” a culture. Girard suggests: “If human beings suddenly ceased
imitating, all forms of culture would vanish.”6 Girard adds that desire is as dependent
on imitation as other cultural phenomena, since we learn to desire both what and how
others desire. Girard distinguishes between “appetites” and “needs” on the one hand
and “desire” on the other. Where the former are constituted by the biological basis of
life, and include such things as the basic requirement for food and water (rather than
any particular kind of food or water), desire is more amorphous than appetites and far
less easy to satisfy:
2 Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 2

Once his basic needs are satisfied (indeed, sometimes even before), man is subject
to intense desires, though he may not know precisely for what. The reason is that
he desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems
to possess.7
Thus, Girard argues that what we desire is always “mediated” or “modeled” to us by
other people, who in turn have their desires mediated or modeled to them. Desire,
in this sense, is contagious—it is capable of being “caught.” This jars with popular,
Romantic ideas about individual human autonomy, which tend to suggest that
desires are invariably the product of “inner,” subjective (rather than intersubjective)
preferences. By claiming that desire is “mimetic,” Girard’s view of desire appears
structurally—if not substantively—similar to Freud’s: it is most easily schematized
by the triangle. Desire is not a single line of force that runs between the subject
and the desired object, but is more properly figured as a triangle in which the
real energy of desire is provided by the mediator, who renders an object desirable.
This understanding figures desire as pre-eminently relational; that is, desire (like
the Newtonian notion of “gravity”) resides not in any one object or person by itself,
but rather is constituted in the relationships between people. In this respect at least,
Girard’s thought remains firmly within the tradition of French psychoanalysis of the
late twentieth century, which emphasized the radically social character of human
psychology over the monadic, or individual, self.8 As Jacques Lacan states in Écrits: “It
is in the specific reality of inter-human relations that psychology can locate its proper
object and its method of investigation.”9
In Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, a collection of studies on the novels of Cervantes,
Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Proust, Girard argued that the theory of mimetic
desire, despite his systematization, was not quite his invention. Rather, he identified
its incipient logic in certain novels, detecting a comprehension of the mimetic or
imitative nature of desire that he argued was on a par with, and often outflanked,
the most perceptive of standard behaviorist or psychoanalytic approaches to human
behavior. Here, literature has an epistemological value as powerful as, or more
powerful than, its esthetic or ethical value.
In Miguel de Cervantes’ seventeenth-century novel Don Quixote the hero
announces his desire to be a perfect imitation of the legendary knight Amadis de Gaul:
I want you to know, Sancho, that the famous Amadis of Gaul was one of the most
perfect knight errants … Amadis was the pole, the star for brave and amorous
knights and we others who light under the banner of love and chivalry should
imitate him. Thus, my friend Sancho, I reckon that whoever imitates him best
comes closest to perfect chivalry.10
The imitation of Amadis, so enthusiastically taken up by the hero, exerts heavy influ-
ences on Don Quixote’s judgment, his actions, and his emotions; it determines his
romantic attachments, religious observances, and even his vision. Quixote hallucinates
and transforms a quotidian Spanish countryside into a place of damsels in distress,
lurking evil, and heroic knights. In turn, Quixote’s imitation of Amadis itself proves to
 Mimesis, Violence, and the Sacred 3

be contagious: Sancho Panza, the simple farmer who is the hero’s companion and who
imitates his master’s desires, suddenly wants to become governor of his own island and
his daughter to become a duchess.
The kind of mimetic desire at work in Don Quixote is what Girard describes as
“externally mediated.” Here, the model/mediator of desire is removed—historically,
ontologically, spiritually—from the desiring subject such that there is no realistic
possibility for rivalry between the subject and the mediator concerning an object of
desire. Don Quixote is as unlikely to become a rival of Amadis of Gaul as a Christian
is to become a rival of Christ.
But Girard also provides a description of a type of mimetic desire structured
by “internal mediation”: a situation in which the subject’s and the model’s objects
of desire overlap and become a matter of potential, and often actual, conflict. For
example, in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, the character Monsieur de Rênal decides
to hire the tutor Julien Sorel on the basis that his rival, Monsieur Valenod, is thought
to be planning to do the same. As it tums out, Valenod wasn’t planning this, but now
that Sorel has been employed by Monsieur de Rênal, Valenod also attempts to hire
him—although both men are, in actual fact, indifferent to the educational possibilities
of tutoring and seem to care very little for the tutor himself. That this constitutes
“internal mediation” is evidenced by the explicit rivalry between model and mediator,
possible because both Valenod and Rênal occupy a similar social status and live in
the same town during the same period in history. Unlike Quixote’s admiration for
Amadis, the antagonists of The Red and the Black serve both as models for each other’s
desire and, most notably, as obstacles to its consummation.
Having identified this propensity for mimesis to increasingly generate internal
mediation, and hence conflict, Girard pursued his inquiry into the new fields (for
him) of cultural and social anthropology. By the time his third book, Violence and the
Sacred, appeared in 1972, Girard had incorporated his notion of mimetic desire into a
more general theory of cultural formation.

Violence and the Sacred: Scapegoating, myth, and texts

of persecution
One of the central insights of Girard’s early work was the notion that conflictual
(internally mediated) desire moves in the direction of the effacement of differences
between people: as rivalry intensifies, characteristics that previously distinguished
individuals begin to erode and antagonists effectively become “doubles” of each other.
This intensification of the mutual imitation of rival desires and actions produces a
situation where the protagonists become progressively more obsessed with each other
than with the putative object of their desire. They mirror each other in an attempt
to differentiate themselves—to be the one to acquire the object of desire over the
other—though such an intensification does nothing but eliminate differences. It is thus
an ironic effect of rivalrous (internally mediated) desire that increasingly desperate
4 Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 2

attempts at differentiation work toward the effacement of all significant differences

between people; for example, the more Rênal and Valenod attempt to outdo each other
(in their quest for Julien), the more both come to resemble each other.
This escalation of conflict and rivalry operating through the effacement of differ-
ences on a social scale is what Girard calls a “sacrificial crisis,” an intensification of
violent activity that works—starting at a local level—progressively to undermine
cultural order. For Girard, cultural order is simply a “regulated system of distinctions
in which the differences among individuals are used to establish their ‘identity’ and
their mutual relationships.”11 Logically, then, the sacrificial crisis, being essentially
a “crisis of distinctions,”12 gradually undermines the identities of subjects and the
social hierarchies that underwrite these: “Culture,” Girard asserts, “is … eclipsed as it
becomes less differentiated.”13
But there is a problem with this scenario left simply as it is: if mimetic desire often
moves in the direction of internal mediation, and if the pervasiveness of internally
mediated desire invariably produces conflict and rivalry—the effacement of differ-
ences and the production of conflictual “doubling”—then humanity seems destined to
endless cycles of violence and the erosion of social and cultural structures. Given that
this is Girard’s contention, how then can one account for the development and mainte-
nance of culture, and the continued operation of highly complex social institutions?
Violence and the Sacred represents Girard’s first sustained attempt to consider
this question in detail. Here, he argues that at the most intense moment of conflict,
a violent resolution to the crisis will emerge; violence is itself invariably culture’s
“answer” to disintegration and disorder: a directed act of violence functions to resolve
violence at a general, diffuse level. Girard contends that ultimately we deal with
conflict generated by mimetic contagion and progressive undifferentiation by means
of fixing our attention on some marginalized figure or group, and, after attributing
to them the cause of the tensions, moving to expel or lynch them. The communal
response to the debilitating threat of social collapse tends towards the attribution of
cause, and the resultant imputation of blame, to an unprotected, marginal “other”:
the scapegoat. In a situation of heightened sensitivity to mimetic suggestion and
burgeoning conflict, an accusatory gesture is all that is required to unite (and hence
to reconcile) warring parties around a common enemy. Thus, what Girard calls the
“scapegoat” or “victimage” mechanism names the seemingly perennial means of
siphoning off the internal conflict generated by conflictual desire by means of the
elimination or banishment of a surrogate victim. This victim (or group of victims),
by absorbing the projection of hostilities, is turned into the “outsider” and carries
blame for the social unrest; she or he is the victim whose expulsion or immolation
temporarily restores harmony and peace to a community through the generation of
an esprit de corps.14
However, the “scapegoat mechanism” itself ensures that finding the emissary victim
is not done consciously; here, perhaps, one should speak of the victim as “appearing
to” rather than “being found by” the mob. The mechanism can operate effectively only
if people believe that the expulsion is strictly necessary and the victim is deserving of
his or her fate:
 Mimesis, Violence, and the Sacred 5

In order to be genuine, in order to exist as a social reality, as a stabilized viewpoint

on some act of collective violence, scapegoating must remain nonconscious. The
persecutors do not realize that they chose their victim for inadequate reasons, or
perhaps for no reason at all, more or less at random.15
The act of scapegoating—the targeted use of violence to keep greater violence at bay—
allows for the restoration of harmony and peace to a group, at least for a certain length
of time. The scapegoat mechanism is central to Girard’s theory of religion, which,
he maintains, legitimizes or sacralizes a certain social or cultural configuration. For
Girard, the special function of particular kinds of religious ritual is to maintain the
peace achieved through scapegoating by institutionalizing a repetition of it in sacrifice,
at the same time that this repetition works to cover up its historical reality. For Girard,
the textual form of this “covering up” is what he characterizes as “myth.”16
Girard points out that the lynching of a victim is very often an integral factor in the
constitution of polities, especially as these are represented in myth. For instance, in
the legend of the foundation of Rome, the twin brothers Romulus and Remus become
engaged in a squabble. During the ensuing action Romulus kills Remus and in so
doing establishes Rome and becomes its first king. The theme of “warring brothers” is
a very common one in world myth; for Girard, this theme is a mythical representation
of the mimetic doubling and undifferentiation brought about by the intensification
of rivalrous mimesis.17 The ancient historian Livy’s recounting of this event is what
Girard would classify as “myth”; yet for Girard, myth is neither simply a “falsehood,”
nor the expression of some ineffable “truth.” Myth, in his sense, represents the trace
of a real event, although the representation of the event itself has been disfigured in
its recounting.
Myths “are the retrospective transfiguration of sacrificial crises, the reinterpre-
tation of these crises in the light of the cultural order that has arisen from them.”18 But
although myths often attempt to “keep secret” the violence that lies at their origin, they
invariably leave sufficient clues for detection by those who are sufficiently textually
inquisitive. In this respect, Girard examines Guillaume de Machaut’s fourteenth-
century poem Judgement of the King of Navarre.19 Machaut’s text undoubtedly contains
highly improbable, mythical elements: people are felled by rains of stones; there are
heavenly signs in the sky; whole cities are demolished by lightning. He also claims that
Christians died as a result of drinking water poisoned by Jews, who were duly revealed
as evildoers by “heavenly signs” and then massacred. Girard asks what aspects of the
poet’s account might be considered legitimate or believable. He suggests that, at first,
most of Guillaume de Machaut’s text would seem highly suspect as a strictly factual,
historical document. And yet even a present-day reader—one accustomed to regarding
all referential elements of texts with suspicion—might suspect that actual events stand
behind or beside the mythical elements. The “signs” in the sky, the hail of stones, the
destruction of cities by lightning, or the manifest guilt of the Jews and their accom-
plices do not strike the reader as credible. And yet not all seemingly “incredulous”
events are of the same order, or can be treated in exactly the same way. Behind these
elements of the text lies a historical reality that, once discerned, the mythical elements
6 Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 2

do not conceal, but actually work to reveal. Girard argues that there is scant reason to
disbelieve Guillaume’s reporting of a number of deaths, despite rejecting the meaning
he attributes to them. Guillaume furnishes us with some details of a historical event
despite not perceiving the event adequately himself; he attributes the plague to the
Jews, while we would not question their innocence.
For Girard, it is not simply the extant historical work on anti-Semitic persecution
in the Middle Ages that allows us to discern the credulous from the less credulous
in Judgement of the King of Navarre. We accept that the poisonings could not have
taken place, in part because we know of no poison of that era capable of inflicting the
degree of carnage reported; but we also suspect Guillaume’s account on the basis of his
obvious hatred of the accused. And yet, as Girard states, “these two types of character-
istics cannot be recognized without at least implicitly acknowledging that they interact
with each other.”20 That is, if there really was an epidemic, then it might have worked
to stir up latent persecutory tendencies. By the same token, such a persecution might
be comprehensible if the accusations against the Jews were “proven” to be correct. The
correlation of these two factors prompts Girard to discard the generally endorsed rule
that a text be considered reliable only to the level of its most dubious element:
If the text describes circumstances favourable to persecution, if it presents us with
victims of the type that persecutors usually choose, and if, in addition, it repre-
sents these victims as guilty of the type of crimes which persecutors normally
attribute to their victims, then it is very likely that the persecution is real.21
In the case of a text like Guillaume’s, if one attends to, and works to understand, the
perspective of the persecutors, the obvious unreliability of their accusations against
the scapegoats works to validate rather than undermine the informational value of
the account, if only in terms of the violence that it depicts. The more spurious the
accusations against the scapegoat, the more probable the mob violence reported; it is
not simply the text’s inaccuracies that prompt Girard’s conclusion, but the very nature
of those inaccuracies.
This reading of social history would also apply to sixteenth-century witch hunts,
the accounts of which present an interaction of probable and improbable elements
that are highly suggestive of actual persecutions. In other words, it would be unwise
to disbelieve the reality of the persecutions on the basis of unreliable claims directed
against those so accused. Although everything in the accounts is rendered as fact, we
believe only select elements, while our willingness to disregard those elements that we
consider spurious has little or no effect on those we think are reliable. Again, it is even
the case that certain kinds of distortion in the retelling of events make the reality of
the persecution more certain:
… the mind of a persecutor creates a certain type of illusion and the traces of his
illusion confirm rather than invalidate the existence of a certain kind of event, the
persecution itself in which the witch is put to death.22
The Judgement of the King of Navarre and the accounts of witch hunts are what Girard
terms “texts of persecution”: accounts of actual violence that are characteristically,
 Mimesis, Violence, and the Sacred 7

even predictably, distorted by virtue of being recounted from the perspective of the
persecutors. Girard has also been interested in the way that these texts share certain
key structural features with a variety of mythological and dramatic texts in which
he identifies the same features (“stereotypes”) that characterize texts of persecution.
These apparent homologies constitute evidence for Girard of the actual lynching of a
scapegoat.
In important respects, Girard’s work builds on that of Durkheim (1915) and shares
many of its concerns. In the first instance, Girard, like Durkheim, rejects the liberal-
individualist conception of society: the notion that the individual constitutes the most
primitive unit of society, while community and the body politic are simply epiphen­
omena of individuals’ decisions. For both Girard and Durkheim, society is prior to
the individual, rather than something that is reducible to the psychology of individual
agents. Religion, in this purview, is neither primarily supernatural, involving divine
irruptions into the normal workings of nature, nor mystical, involving divine irrup-
tions in the soul of an individual. Rather, religion pertains to the workings of a social
group, offering a symbolic representation of social laws and bonds.
Girard has made vigorous criticisms of Durkheim’s work, but still sees him as the
first significant theorist to take issue with Voltaire and the Enlightenment’s dismissal
of religion; Voltaire was le premier à reagir vraiment contre cet escamotage sceptique
du religieux. For Girard, the “Voltairean interpretation, which is still dominant,
makes religion the widespread conspiracy of priests to take advantage of natural
institutions.”23 Eschewing this option (that religion is essentially some kind of “trick”
executed by a powerful minority), Girard, along with Durkheim, argues that religion is
foundational and coeval with society, rather than something that happens “once it gets
going”—something superimposed upon realities that are more fundamental. Girard
supports Durkheim’s intuition of the “identity of the social and religious domains,
which means, ultimately, the chronological precedence of religious expression over
any sociological conception.”24
For Girard, like Durkheim, religion always exists, however disguised and trans-
formed, at the foundations of every society; there is no culture without religion and
no religion without sacrifice. But where Durkheim emphasized the socially unifying
function of religion, Girard emphasizes its violence. Or, rather, Girard emphasizes
the means by which violence functions to produce socially unifying effects via the
victimage mechanism. As already touched upon, it is a process that works best—and,
strictly, only ever works properly—when the beneficiaries of its effects are ignorant of
its true workings.
Girard’s emphasis on this social and violent nature of the “sacred” has led some to
believe that his views of religion are entirely negative. This is not the case, however—
far from it. Girard’s work, beginning with the publication of Things Hidden Since the
Foundation of the World, has increasingly engaged with properly theological questions
concerning the Judeo-Christian scriptures and their impact on archaic religion and
secular forms of violence.25
8 Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 2

Violence unveiled: The Judeo-Christian scriptures

Certainly the most controversial of Girard’s theses explores the role of Hebrew
scripture and the New Testament in the secularizing destabilization and deconsti-
tution of communities and cultures founded on sacrificial violence. For Girard, what
is distinctive about the Judeo-Christian scriptures, culminating in the crucifixion of
Jesus, is that the mechanism of scapegoating is itself progressively unveiled.
We can see that the significance of the Kingdom of God is completely clear. It is
always a matter of bringing together the warring brothers, or putting an end to the
mimetic crisis by a universal renunciation of violence.26
Girard believes that the Judeo-Christian scriptures represent an unequaled unveiling
and trenchant critique of the victimage mechanism, substituting the promotion of an
ethic of love and forgiveness that allows humanity to loosen its hold of the seemingly
ineluctable necessity of scapegoating.27 Largely at odds with the intellectual climate
in which his work initially developed, Girard has repeatedly argued that the Bible
is unique in its disclosure of the victimage mechanism by virtue of its narrative
identification of God with the victim. To be clear: Girard aims not to mitigate the
atrocities of Christian (or Jewish) history, but to provide a critique of such practices
from within.
Although mythology is recounted by those who benefit from the scapegoat
mechanism, Girard argues that the biblical perspective reflects the outsider perspective
of a victim. For example, the psalms contain the first sustained outcries in world
literature of the lone victim. This theme crystallizes in Job, whose exhortations to God
reveal his persecution at the hands of his neighbors. The same theme is again taken up
in the prophetic story of the Servant of the Lord (Isa. 52.13–53.12), who is scapegoated
by his own people and does not resist; he is the “lamb led to the slaughter.”
Finally, by taking the prophets’ denunciation of bloodshed and sacrifice and
carrying it to its conclusion, Jesus institutes a social space in which all violence is
abandoned (cf. Matt. 5.38–40). However, it is not simply his pronouncements but
the whole drama of Christ’s life and death that has such destabilizing effects on the
violent structures of culture. Caiaphas says to the Pharisees and the chief priests: “it is
expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and the whole nation perish
not” (Jn 11.50). By incorporating statements specifically addressed to the function of
sacrifice for generating social cohesion, the Bible works as a textual force to reveal
this mechanism “hidden since the foundation of the world” (Lk. 11.50) so that this
knowledge (aletheia) might set us free.
Girard acknowledges that he was by no means the first to sense the full historical
significance of the empathy for victims that the gospel invokes. Nietzsche also recog-
nized this and wrote extensively—perhaps obsessively—about it. The Christocentrism
of Nietzsche’s philosophy has been underemphasized by contemporary European
philosophers, perhaps now embarrassed by this preoccupation.28 Nietzsche even goes
so far as to explicitly frame his later works in terms of a self-confessed “fundamental
antithesis”: “Dionysus versus the crucified.” This antithesis is, again, predicated on
 Mimesis, Violence, and the Sacred 9

the construal of Christianity as a religion fostering “active sympathy” or pity for the
victim. In book four of The Will to Power, Nietzsche specifies the “two types”:
Dionysus versus the crucified: there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference
in regard to their martyrdom. It is a difference in the meaning of it. Life itself.
Its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence creates torment, destruction, the will to
annihilate. In the other case, suffering—the “Crucified as the innocent one”—
counts as an objection to this life, as a formula for its condemnation … The god
on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; Dionysus
cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and reborn and return
again from destruction.29
In relation to Girard’s work, the significance of Nietzsche’s “antithesis” is difficult to
overemphasize. Dionysus is the wandering god, associated with wine, madness, and
most importantly the destructive reconstitution of culture, often through military
power. As a performative genre, Dionysian ritual is associated with the dismem-
berment of a sacrificial victim to appease the deity, in ritual repetition of what was
believed to have happened to the god himself.
Like Nietzsche, Max Weber, in Ancient Judaism, emphasizes repeatedly that
the authors of the Bible take the side of the victim.30 And Eric Gans, distinguished
Professor of French at the University of California Los Angeles, states: “Christianity’s
impact on the West is a tribute to the power of its basic conception, which is the
absolute centrality of the position of the victim.”31
Undoubtedly, Girard’s work continues (by other means) Simone Weil’s intuition
that before offering a theory of God, a theology, the biblical tradition offers a theory
of humanity, an anthropology.32 As such, Girard’s work sheds surprising light on
those elements of biblical texts most often considered “mythical” or “fantastic” by the
contemporary mind. For instance, in suggesting, as the Gospels do, that those involved
in Jesus’ crucifixion were on the side of “Satan” is simply to render tangible, through
personification, the power of rivalrous desire to engender accusation and violence.
This is the nature and the extent of Satan’s reality. Consistent with this reading, the
New Testament is continually at pains to indicate that evil has power only in so far
as it is embodied in a particular person or group. Thus, the personification of Satan
as rivalrous mimesis—as that which engenders accusation and violence—is necessi-
tated by the way in which this power attaches itself to a victim at the epicenter of the
scapegoat mechanism: they are viewed as a demon or devil. Further, Satan is a Hebrew
word that means the “accuser”; the Christian revelation also speaks continually of
Satan as the “father of lies” and the “murderer from the beginning” (Jn 8.44). That lie,
suggests Dominique Barbé—with an insight that parallels Girard’s—consists precisely
in covering over the violence that lies at the base of all societies.33 This construal makes
sense of the biblical claim that Satan is both the archon, the ruler or prince of this
world, and the arché, the origin of the spirit of murder that founds the earthly polis.
The last stage in Girard’s work has involved a consideration of war—in particular
the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s On War—in a book entitled
Achever Clausewitz (“Completing Clausewitz”), appearing subsequently in English as
10 Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 2

Battling to the End.34 Girard contests Clausewitz’s idea that war, as the continuation
of politics by other means, can be constrained by governments. Girard sees hints that
Clausewitz himself began to think otherwise when, as a witness to Napoleonic Wars,
he saw clearly the escalation of conflict that was beginning to haunt Europe. This
“escalation to extremes” (Clausewitz) was finally brought to consummation in the
horrific violence of the twentieth century’s escalating mimetic rivalries. These went
unrestrained by any adequate scapegoat mechanism because the cultural diffusion
of Judeo-Christianity’s exposure of that scapegoat mechanism has made it harder
and harder to function effectively in restraining the escalation of conflict. Here again
we see Girard’s anthropological appropriation of biblical language—in this case,
the “apocalypse”—as a hermeneutic key for understanding our culturally turbulent
contemporary world. Girard’s contention is not that the apocalypse represents a future
divine judgment on the human race but, rather, the acknowledgment of humanity’s
incapacity to limit its own violence, which now threatens to engulf the globe.

Conclusion: An epistemological postscript

Girard’s body of work—both in its methods and in its conclusions—is largely out of
step with current theoretical trends in the humanities and social sciences, and yet in
itself it is hard to see this as a disrecommendation. Perhaps Girard’s greatest potential
as a theorist of culture is the extent to which his work sheds welcome light on the
vexing question of how and why violence seems central to many religious practices
and expressions.35 As I have argued, Girard’s somewhat paradoxical formulation
suggests that religion provides a mechanism for defusing and controlling violence
through violence; it “contains” violence in both senses of the word: it deploys so-called
“good,” sanctioned violence against “bad.” Yet with his insistence on the links between
violence and cultural formation, Girard’s work also points to the continued presence
of the “archaic”—the “primitive,” the violent, the “tribal”—in the so-called civilized,
secular present.
As might be expected, responses to Girard’s work have been mixed; where
some critics see tendencies toward “reductionism,” advocates welcome its theoretical
elegance and explanatory fruitfulness. Indeed, his work has prompted fierce criticism,
but has also inspired the establishing of an academic journal (Contagion: The Journal
of Violence, Mimesis and Culture), series of books, numerous associations, conferences,
and symposia, and a considerable amount of interdisciplinary engagement among
areas as diverse as economics, philosophy, psychology, theology, and musicology.
Girard is, at the very least, a provocateur, someone whose theories hold out consid-
erable generative scope and, commensurately, much need for further scrutiny and
analysis.
 Mimesis, Violence, and the Sacred 11

Notes
1 An earlier, substantially different, version of this chapter appeared in Australian
Religion Studies Review (Autumn 2002): 57–72. Thanks to Equinox Publishing for
permission to reuse some material from the original essay. Thanks also to Mindy
Sotiri, John Fleming, Scott Cowdell, and Joel Hodge—and to an anonymous
reviewer for helpful comments on that earlier draft of this chapter.
2 René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure
(1961), trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965).
3 René Girard, Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky (1963), trans.
James G. Williams (New York: Crossroad, 1997).
4 “Mimesis” is a Greek word meaning “imitation.” There are two primary reasons
that Girard chooses to use the word “mimesis” rather than simply “imitation”
in his discussion of desire: first, the latter term tends to imply that the desire is
invariably conscious, rather than something that very often occurs below the level
of awareness; and second, the word “mimesis” has conflictual valences that the word
“imitation” does not bear out.
5 1448b, 4–10.
6 René Girard, with Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort, Things Hidden Since the
Foundation of the World (1978), trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1987), 7.
  Although Girard’s statement concerning the importance of imitation in
human development may seem hyperbolic, it has received strong, albeit indirect,
corroboration from studies in cognitive and developmental psychology (A. Meltzoff,
“Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates,” Science l9, no.
7 [1977]: 75–8; A. Meltzoff, “Infant Imitation after a 1-Week Delay: Long-Term
Memory for Novel Acts and Multiple Stimuli,” Developmental Psychology 24, no.
4 [1988]: 470–6; A. Meltzoff, “Infant Imitation and Memory: Nine-Month-Olds
in Immediate and Deferred Tests,” Child Development 59 [1988]: 217–25; and A.
Meltzoff, “Imitation of Televised Models by Infants,” Child Development 59 [1988]:
1221–9) and cognitive science (V. Gallese and A. Goldman, “Mirror Neurons
and the Simulation Theory of ‘Mind-Reading,’” in Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2
[1998]: 493; G. Rizzolatti and M. Arbib, “Language within Our Grasp,” in Trends
in Neurosciences 21 [1988]: 188; and V. S. Ramachandran, “Mirror Neurons and
Imitation Learning as the Great Driving Force behind the ‘Great Leap Forward’
in Human Evolution,” www.edge.org/documents/archive/’edge69.htm1 [accessed
October 10, 2012]).
  Additionally, the role of imitation in the behavior of nonhuman animals has
also been a repeatedly studied feature of contemporary ethology (F. DeWaal, Good
Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals [Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1996], 19–20, 71–3). There are interesting resonances
between Girard’s notion of “mimesis” and what psychoanalysts term “identification,”
Judith Butler’s notion of the “performative citation” (Gender Trouble: Feminism
and the Subversion of Identity [New York: Routledge, 1990]), and Louis Althusser’s
notion of “interpellation” (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes
Towards an Investigation,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben
Brewster [London: New Left Books, 1971])—all of which (broadly) figure corporeal
12 Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 2

or symbolic imitation as a key element of subject formation—but investigating these

resonances is beyond the scope of the current chapter. Most recently, Scott Garrels
has edited a fine collection on mimesis and science (Mimesis and Science: Empirical
Research on Imitation and the Mimetic Theory of Culture and Religion [East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 2011]).
7 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1972), trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 146. There are parallels here between
Girard’s schema and Hegel’s distinction in The Phenomenology of Mind
between “the sentiment of self ” (which is common to nonhuman animals)
and “self-consciousness” (which is particular to humans). G. W. F. Hegel, The
Phenomenology of Mind, trans. I. B. Baillie (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967).
8 J. Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections on Twentieth-Century France (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
9 J. Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 73.
10 Quoted in Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 1.
11 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 49.
12 Ibid., 49.
13 René Girard, The Scapegoat (1982), trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1986), 14.
14 It is interesting to note that in the French and German languages the main words for
“victim” (French, victime; German, Opfer) can also entail “sacrifice.”
15 René Girard, “Generative Scapegoating,” in Violent Origins: Walter Burkett, René
Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, Robert G.
Hamerton-Kelly (ed.) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 78.
16 Girard’s choice of the myth of Oedipus for an analysis of scapegoating is strategic;
he is here contesting the Freudian engagement with the same text (cf. S. Freud, The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols.,
(ed. and trans.) James Strachey, vol. 18, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the
Ego [London: Hogarth, 1953–66; 1955], 65–143; Freud, The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 19, The Ego and the Id [1961], l–66; Girard,
Violence and the Sacred, 169–222; and Girard, Things Hidden, 352–92). The root
of the Greek word for “myth,” muthos, is mu, which means “to keep secret” or “to
close.”
17 René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999), trans. James G. Williams
(Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001), 22. For Girard’s discussion of Romulus and Remus,
see The Scapegoat, 88–94. Cf. M. Serres, Rome: The Book of Foundations, trans.
Felicia McCarren (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
18 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 64.
19 Girard, The Scapegoat, 11–14.
20 Ibid., 6.
21 Ibid., 6–7.
22 Ibid., 11.
23 Girard, Things Hidden, 63.
24 Ibid., 82.
25 Cf. J. Alison, Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination (New
York: Crossroad, 1996); J. Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin through
Easter Eyes (New York: Crossroad, 1998); G. Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at
the Crossroads (New York: Crossroad, 1995); S. Goodhart, Sacrificing Commentary:
 Mimesis, Violence, and the Sacred 13

Reading the End of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996);
R. G. Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence: Paul’s Hermeneutic of the Cross (Minneapolis:
Fortress, 1992); R. G. Hamerton-Kelly, The Gospel and the Sacred: Poetics of
Violence in Mark (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994); J. G. Williams, The Bible, Violence,
and the Sacred: Liberation from the Myth of Sanctioned Violence (San Francisco:
HarperCollins, 1991); R. Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation: Toward a
Biblical Doctrine of Redemption, trans. James G. Williams and Paul Haddon (New
York: Crossroad, 1991); and R. Schwager, Must There be Scapegoats? Violence and
Redemption in the Bible, 2nd edn, trans. Maria L. Assad (New York: Crossroad,
1994).
26 Girard, Things Hidden, 197.
27 Cf. Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and
Michael Hughes (New York: Routledge, 2001), 30.
28 C. Fleming and J. O’Carroll, “Nietzsche, The Last Atheist,” in Violence, Desire and the
Sacred: Girard’s Mimetic Theory Across the Disciplines, Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming,
and Joel Hodge (eds) (New York: Continuum, 2012), 226–50.
29 F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Collingdale (New
York: Vintage, 1967), 542–3/ §1052. Cf. F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The
Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Collingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 127–31/ §§2–7.
30 M. Weber, Ancient Judaism, trans. H. H. Garth and D. Martindale (Glencoe, IL: Free
Press, 1952), 19–22, 86, 475–6, 492–5.
31 E. Gans, “The Victim as Subject: The Esthetico-Ethical System of Rousseau’s
Réveries,” in Studies in Romanticism 21, no. 1 (1982): 3–31, at 4.
32 Cf. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 182.
33 D. Barbé, A Theology of Conflict (Maryknoll: Orbis, l989), 54.
34 René Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre (2007) (East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010).
35 See M. Juergensmeyer, (ed.) Terrorism and Political Violence 3, no. 3 (1991), a special
issue on violence and the sacred in the modern world.
Part One

Politics
 2

Abolition or Transformation?The Political

Implications of René Girard’s Theory
of Sacrifice
Wolfgang Palaver

John Lennon’s song “Imagine” from 1971, the unofficial hymn of the peace movement
of that era, claims that peace demands the abolition of sacrifice, which so often goes
together with nationalism and militarism. The following passage is central in this
regard:
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
“Nothing to kill or die for” comprises the modern anti-sacrificial attitude. Thirty years
ago, when I became a pacifist and a conscientious objector, I roughly believed in a
world described by this part of “Imagine.” I rejected sacrifice without being aware that
in order to avoid sacrificing others I might be forced to sacrifice myself, to give up my
own claims, even to risk my own life. The following reflections will again and again
come back to this problem so elegantly overlooked by Lennon and many of his pacifist
followers—including me.

Between the sacrificial thinking of political Catholicism and

the modern abolition of sacrifice
The question of sacrifice addresses one of the most difficult problems of every theory
of religion. There are at least two pitfalls of which we have to be aware, or we could
easily fall into one of them. Let me first address the pitfall into which many traditional
Catholic thinkers have fallen. Without distinguishing between pagan and biblical
concepts at all, they strongly emphasize the necessity and inevitability of sacrifice,
18 Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 2

accepting also immediately the political consequences that follow from this point of
view. A telling example is the tradition that developed from the Catholic reactionaries
Joseph de Maistre and Juan Donoso Cortés, to the German law scholar Carl Schmitt.
All three represent sacrificial thinking as an offspring of the scapegoat mechanism that
René Girard discovered at the origin of human culture. Again and again, they affirm
the age-old sacrificial logic that a few drops of blood may avoid streams of blood.
According to Donoso Cortés, the following three things have to be believed: “That
the effusion of blood is necessary, that there is a manner of shedding blood which is
purificatory, and another mode which is condemnatory.”1 For de Maistre, everything
depends on the spilling of blood: “We can say that blood is the manure of the plant we
call genius.”2 According to de Maistre, the world is nothing but a huge sacrificial altar,
and war—following this way of sacrificial thinking—is something divine:
The earth cries out and asks for blood … Thus is carried out without cease, from
maggot to man, the great law of violent destruction of living things. The entire
world, continuously saturated with blood, is nothing but an immense altar where
all that lives must be slaughtered without end, without measure, without slack-
ening, until the devouring of all things, until the extinction of evil, until the death
of death … War is therefore divine, in and of itself because it is a law of the world
… War is divine in the mysterious glory which surrounds it, and in the no less
inexplicable attraction which draws us to it.3
Similar thoughts about war were also expressed by Juan Donoso Cortés, who believed
that the abolition of war would result in the destruction of the world. Both also
strongly supported capital punishment, which is another offspring of the foundational
murder. Like war, in their eyes the death penalty is necessary because it reduces
violence inside a society and any abolition of it risks “a more bloody future”: “Blood
will then gush forth from the rocks, and the earth will become a hell.”4 De Maistre
shows his position on capital punishment in his celebration of the executioner, whom
he views as the central figure of political order:
All greatness, all power, all subordination rest on the executioner. He is the terror
and the bond of human association. Remove this mysterious agent from the
world, and in an instant order yields to chaos: thrones fall, society disappears.5
Those passages in the New Testament—such as Hebrews 9.22, “Without the shedding
of blood there is no forgiveness of sins”—that, due to their ambivalence, tend to
obliterate the difference between the biblical perspective and archaic religiosity, play
a central role in the writings of de Maistre and Donoso Cortés.6 But although our
repugnance concerning the main theses of these two writers is understandable, we
should be aware that these thinkers are not supporting war and capital punishment for
completely immoral reasons. Like archaic religions, both want to foster cultural and
political peace through the controlled and well-aimed use of violence.
In the twentieth century, the German legal scholar Carl Schmitt developed his
political theology in the footsteps of the Catholic reactionaries, de Maistre and
Donoso Cortés. Like them, he justifies the sacrifices demanded by war. He sharply
 Abolition or Transformation? 19

criticized pacifist liberalism that tried to create “a world without the distinction
of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics,” losing thereby also the
strength to demand sacrifices:7 such a “pacified globe” does not recognize an antithesis
“whereby men could be required to sacrifice life, authorized to shed blood, and kill
other human beings.”8
Against such versions of Catholic understandings of sacrifice, the Reformation
and the Enlightenment led to the modern abolition of sacrifice that characterizes
our world today. In particular, liberalism is deeply influenced by its break with the
sacrificial thinking stemming from the archaic world. One can recognize a line
of anti-sacrificial thinking going from Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls and Jürgen
Habermas in our time.9 According to Hobbes’ definition of the law of nature, it “is
forbidden to do, that, which is destructive of his [a man’s] life, or taketh away the
means of preserving the same.”10 The unilateral option of the Sermon on the Mount
to risk one’s own life in tragic situations where there is no alternative between killing
and being killed is against Hobbes’ understanding of natural law. The individual is
not allowed to risk his own life, but has to look toward his own self-preservation, the
highest obligation of this early version of liberalism. Modern versions of liberalism
emphasize this anti-sacrificial stance even more. John Rawls, the most prominent
representative of contemporary liberalism, dealt with the problem of sacrifice in his
criticism of utilitarianism. Against utilitarian justifications of individual sacrifices
for the sake of an increase of overall utility, Rawls emphasized the inviolability of the
individual:
Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of
society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of
freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not
allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of
advantages enjoyed by many.11
Close to Hobbes, Rawls too rejects the idea of a unilateral self-sacrifice. Moreover,
Habermas explains in several of his books that modern “rational morality puts its seal
on the abolition of sacrifice.”12 Taking military duty, capital punishment, and the duty
to pay taxes as his examples, he claims that the “normative core” of “Enlightenment
culture” consists “in the abolition of a publicly demanded sacrificium as an element of
morality.”13 Connected to a German discussion about a monument commemorating
the Holocaust, Habermas again made clear that it is especially the connection between
sacrifice and cults of war that explains his critical view of sacrifice. He especially criti-
cizes the traditional “cult of sacrifice” that “still during my own youth, was devoted
to the image of the heroic dead, of the supposedly voluntary sacrifice for the ‘higher’
good of the collective. The Enlightenment had good reasons for wanting to abolish
sacrifice.”14
20 Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 2

René Girard’s theory of sacrifice

Girard’s mimetic theory is especially helpful to critique those types of sacri-
ficial thinking that I summarized in the first part of this chapter. According to
Girard, archaic religion and culture stem from a foundational murder—the so-called
scapegoat mechanism. Many different myths from a broad variety of cultures show
traces of a primordial crisis—of a war of everyone against everyone—that turned
into a state of peace and order by expelling or killing one member. These scape-
goats became the gods of these archaic tribes because they were not only seen as
the troublemakers that caused the crises but also as those beings that enabled the
community to live in peace. The scapegoat mechanism—Girard also uses the term
“victimage mechanism”—is the origin of archaic or pagan sacrifice.15 Sacrificial rites
are, according to Girard, an imitation or repetition of the scapegoat mechanism.
In order to strengthen the peace that followed the foundational murder the groups
repeat consciously and in a controlled way what they seem to have experienced
during the crises that led to the foundational murder. Wherever a cultural order is
based on the sacrifice of single victims by the collective, we are facing a sacrificial
culture stemming from the scapegoat mechanism. Girard refers to reactionary
Christian thinkers such as Joseph de Maistre or Carl Schmitt to emphasize how
their way of divinizing the social order is much closer to the sacrificial patterns of
paganism than to genuine Christianity.16 These thinkers represent a distortion or
mutilation of the biblical legacy.
Contrary to thinkers such as de Maistre, Donoso Cortés, and Carl Schmitt, Girard
emphasizes a fundamental difference between archaic religions rooted in the scapegoat
mechanism on the one hand, and religions that stem from the biblical revelation on
the other. Pagan religions side with the persecuting mob justifying the victimization
of scapegoats. The biblical tradition, on the contrary, is characterized by its rehabili-
tation of persecuted victims. The story of Cain and Abel, the binding of Isaac (Gen.
22), penitential psalms, the dialogues in the book of Job, passages in the prophetic
literature—especially the Suffering Servant of Yahweh (Isa. 52–3)—and other texts,
too, tell us about the Bible’s siding with victims, often with innocent victims of
collective violence. The Passion of Christ shows convincingly how Christianity also
sides with innocent victims of persecution. Girard early on emphasized the difference
between archaic sacrifice and Christianity so much that in his earlier writings he
vehemently rejected the use of the term “sacrifice” to describe Jesus’ laying down of
his life on the cross.17 To distance himself from religious studies as they developed
during the nineteenth century, with their identification of myth and the Bible, he
avoided using the same term for the pagan sacrifice and for Jesus’ giving his life on
the cross. At that time Girard understood the traditional Christian use of the term
“sacrifice” as a relapse from the non-sacrificial position of the Gospels. He recognized
such a distortion already in the New Testament, especially in the letter to the Hebrews,
in which the death of Jesus is interpreted from the point of view of sacrifices in the
Hebrew Bible.18 Girard referred especially to Hebrews 9.22–6 and 10.11–14. It is true
that Hebrews sees Jesus’ death as the perfect and definitive sacrifice, avoiding therefore
 Abolition or Transformation? 21

a relapse into an archaic understanding of it. But the singular non-sacrificial position
of the Passion narratives was, according to Girard (at this stage of his thinking), lost
in this part of the New Testament.
Girard, however, did not maintain his initial and radical rejection of the term
“sacrifice.” Similar to his critique of Catholic reactionaries, which sits alongside his
rejection of the opposite political attitude (the divinization of social disorder and
revolution), his long-time collaboration with Raymund Schwager, a Jesuit teaching
dogmatics at the University of Innsbruck, led him to the conclusion that emphasizing
the difference between archaic sacrifice and Christian self-giving love did not prevent
him from falling prey to a humanistic and progressive illusion concerning his under-
standing of sacrifice. In an interview with Rebecca Adams, conducted in 1992, he very
openly criticized his earlier position. He admitted that he was scapegoating Hebrews
and also scapegoating the word “sacrifice,” really “trying to get rid of it.”19 Regarding
his interpretation of Hebrews, he even went as far as to say that he was “completely
wrong.”20 The most extensive treatment of Girard’s new approach on sacrifice can be
found in his contribution to the Festschrift that was published on the occasion of
Raymund Schwager’s sixtieth birthday, in 1995.21 Since the publication of that article
he has repeatedly explained his changed attitude regarding sacrifice.22 Most important
in this respect is the French volume from 2007 that comprises Girard’s first four
books. In a long footnote he distances himself from his earlier position, and he also
deletes a passage from Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World that became
most questionable to him.23 How can we, then, summarize Girard’s new position on
sacrifice?
First, Girard maintains, of course, that the difference between “archaic sacrifices”
and the “sacrifice of Christ” is so great that hardly anything greater can be conceived.24
In a recent interview Girard emphasized this difference despite the fact that he now
uses the term “sacrifice” for both these attitudes: “No greater difference can be found:
on the one hand, sacrifice as murder; on the other hand, sacrifice as the readiness to die
in order not to participate in sacrifice as murder.”25 Girard holds to his view developed
in his earlier work that there is a fundamental difference between myth and the Bible.
But this important distinction does not have to be understood as a radical separation
negating any connection between archaic religions and the Judeo-Christian revelation.
According to Girard, there exists a “paradoxical unity of all that is religious” if we
take the whole of human history into account.26 With this expression he is referring
indirectly to an ontology of peace that is rooted in creation—that there is a good and
basic disposition toward peace in humanity—and that has a formative influence on the
archaic religions, too. Whoever rejects this unity—we modern people are tempted to
deny it—easily turns toward scapegoating because, by occupying a seemingly innocent
and pure position, one thinks oneself to be legitimated to condemn all archaic
attempts to make peace. Modern massacres—the slaughter of indigenous people in
Latin America legitimated by the rejection of human sacrifice is one telling example—
are the result of this moralistic attitude of a corruptio optimi pessima, a corruption of
the best always leading to the worst.27 Due to Schwager’s influence, Girard was able
to avoid these pitfalls by understanding Christian redemption in a way that maintains
22 Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 2

its fundamental difference from, as well as its connection with, archaic sacrifice.
According to Girard, Jesus’ substitutionary self-giving of his life has to be understood
as a “divine re-employment of the scapegoat mechanism”: “God himself re-employs
the scheme of the scapegoat at his own expense in order to subvert it.”28 It is Christ’s
sacrifice on the cross that overcomes pagan sacrifice.
Girard’s emphasis on the paradoxical unity of all that is religious opens his theory
toward an interreligious perspective because it no longer relies on an unbridgeable
gap between Christianity and all other religions. It is also important to understand
with Girard that we cannot easily put aside all violence that necessitates sacrifice.
Violence—as long as it remains part of human relations—is either shifted on to
someone else (the scapegoat mechanism) or it is overcome by someone ready to
endure it (Christian self-giving).
Again and again, Girard has referred to the biblical story about the judgment of
Solomon (1 Ks 3.16–28) to explain his understanding of sacrifice. Throughout his
work Girard has not changed his high estimation of this biblical passage.29 In it, two
women quarrel about who is the true mother of a living child. After Solomon has
decided to divide the child in two, the bad mother accepts his judgment and demands
the death of the child. She represents the sacrificial spirit of the scapegoat mechanism.
The good mother, on the other hand, sacrifices her rights to the child when she asks
the king to spare the life of the child and give it to the other woman. She even risks
her own life, since she could be accused of being a liar after she gives up her right
to the child. In his earlier interpretations of this text, Girard suggested that one
shouldn’t use the term “sacrifice” in relation to both of these mothers. He wanted to
strengthen the difference between pagan sacrifice and Christian sacrifice. In his later
work he talks about the danger that goes along with this view. He criticizes it for its
illusory assumption that there exists some “neutral ground that is completely foreign
to violence.”30 Archaic sacrifice and Christ’s sacrifice “are radically opposed to one
another, and yet they are inseparable. There is no non-sacrificial space in between,
from which everything could be described from a neutral viewpoint.”31 To claim that
kind of neutral ground seeks to avoid even the smallest costs that may have to be paid
to overcome violence. Because violence is rooted in mimetic rivalries between human
beings it will not simply disappear without anyone being ready to sacrifice their own
desires or a willingness to prefer suffering to violating someone else. Sacrifices in this
sense are the only means to overcome pagan sacrifice.
The French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, whose work significantly
influenced Girard’s theory, was able to express the difference between archaic sacri-
fices and Christian self-giving without relying at all on an illusory neutral ground:
“The false God changes suffering into violence. The true God changes violence
into suffering.”32 The exodus from the world of archaic sacrifices is therefore not a
complete break with the pagan world but its transformation. The existing amount
of violence has to be transformed. From this perspective sacrificial Catholicism is
not completely false but a starting point that has to be taken seriously, needing,
of course, further clarifications and precise descriptions of the different types of
sacrifice. Girard adopted such a view in his most recent book, Battling to the End,
 Abolition or Transformation? 23

in which he discusses Madame de Staël’s Catholic understanding of sacrifice and its

parallels with Joseph de Maistre. Regarding de Maistre’s understanding of sacrifice,
Girard insists that:
… the anthropology that was being sketched in this case was still in its infancy. It
cannot grasp the revealing reversal of Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the
World. De Maistre’s work contains an aborted meditation on sacrificing the other
and sacrificing oneself: the victims are innocent, but at the same time the sacrifices
have to have an expiatory function. Nonetheless, it was on this romantic loam that
anthropology took root, and a science of religion beyond theological speculation
became possible.33
The importance of a transformation is underlined in this book with reference to
Hölderlin, in whom Girard recognizes an important attempt to relate pagan and
Christian sacrifices to each other.34 Girard’s turn toward a deeper understanding of the
meaning of transformation brings him close again to Schwager’s dramatic theology,
with its emphasis on the transformation of sacrifice.35

Dag Hammarskjöld’s understanding of sacrifice

An illuminating example of a transformative approach toward sacrifice in the realm
of politics, which is close to Girard’s later perspective, can be found in the spiritual
diary Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary-General of the United
Nations. I assume that Hammarskjöld’s view of violence was at least as critical as it is
true for probably most modern and enlightened people in the Western world. It was
his dedication to create a more peaceful and less violent world that motivated him to
understand his work as Secretary-General as a “selfless service to … humanity.”36 At
the same time, however, his spiritual diary is so full of references to a religious under-
standing of sacrifice that one starts to doubt if Hammarskjöld can really be counted
among modern, enlightened thinkers.
Having the modern abolition of sacrifice in mind, I want to refer to one of
Hammarskjöld’s more puzzling entries on sacrifice in his diary. A passage from 1957
refers to Greek mythology and the sacrifice of Oedipus, who gave his life to save Thebes:
Oedipus, the son of a king, the winner of a throne, fortunate and innocent, is
compelled to recognize the possibility and, in the end, the fact that he, too, is
guilty, which makes it just that he should be sacrificed to save the city.37
Oedipus is, according to Girard, an archetype of a mythic scapegoat, whose expulsion
should overcome the social crisis in Thebes.38
Was Hammarskjöld endorsing the age-old way of sacrifice (he himself calls it a
“barbarian cult”39), neglecting the abolition of sacrifice by the Enlightenment? No,
not at all. Everything depends on his understanding of sacrifice. In a meditation on
the Passion of Christ according to the Gospel of John—especially the footwashing
during the Last Supper—he emphasizes Jesus’ nonviolent “commitment to life.”40 Jesus
24 Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 2

is understood as the nonviolent “Lamb of God.” An important subsequent entry in

Hammarskjöld’s diary underlines his emphasis on Jesus’ self-giving of his life lovingly
for the sake of the others:41
Does he sacrifice himself for others, yet for his own sake—in megalomania? Or
does he realize himself for the sake of the others? The difference is that between
a monster and a man. “A new commandment I give unto you: that ye love one
another.”42
There remains, however, the open and challenging question why Hammarskjöld did
not abandon the notion of sacrifice completely. Let us compare his understanding
of sacrifice with Lennon’s song “Imagine.” Again, Hammarskjöld does not part from
Lennon in regard to the rejection of violence, as clearly expressed in the following
entry in his diary:
Acts of violence—Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the
meaningfulness of death—and the meaninglessness of killing.43
He clearly prefers life-giving creation to destruction and turns this distinction into an
important criterion regarding his own life:
Do you create?
Or destroy? That’s
For your ordeal-by-fire to answer.44
Hammarskjöld also distances himself from all masochistic longings for death and
suffering. One entry is especially telling in this regard:
Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a
fulfilment.45
Every “pleasure-tinged death wish”—often going together with a “narcissistic
masochism”—belongs to one of “two abysses” that have to be avoided.46 In one of his
self-critical entries Hammarskjöld writes that even a heroic risking of one’s life may
still result from “your solipsism, your greed for power, and your death-wish” if it is
“not tamed by the yoke of human intimacy and warmed by its tenderness”:47
It is better for the health of the soul to make one man good than “to sacrifice
oneself for mankind.”48
But as clearly as he rejects violent killings as well as a masochistic or power-greedy
death wish, he also distances himself from an attitude that tries to avoid death or
sacrifice by any means. Here he parts from a perspective like the one expressed in
Lennon’s song because, for Hammarskjöld, we also have to avoid the second abyss,
“the animal fear arising from the physical instinct for survival.”49
A concrete example from the world of peace politics can illustrate in what way
sacrifices may become necessary. Following a proposal by the Canadian foreign
minister Lester Pearson, Hammarskjöld helped to establish peacekeeping operations
by the United Nations. Peacekeeping, as we know, may demand sacrifices. Since 1948,
 Abolition or Transformation? 25

nearly 3,000 people have lost their lives engaged in peacekeeping operations for the
United Nations.50
The most plausible example of the need for sacrifice in his diary can be found
where Hammarskjöld addresses the question of forgiveness. Forgiveness has become
very important in our contemporary world because our growing awareness of scape-
goating and victimization easily contributes to an escalation of violence if our concern
for victims is not accompanied by it.51 Forgiveness may demand sacrifices or substitu-
tionary suffering, as is seen in the example of Jesus Christ. Violence can be overcome
only by undergoing it, by the sacrifice of voluntary suffering.52 Hammarskjöld
expresses the interrelation between forgiveness and sacrifice in one of the most illumi-
nating passages in his diary:
Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who “forgives” you—out of
love—takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness,
therefore, always entails a sacrifice.53
With the “chain of causality” Hammarskjöld refers—at least indirectly—to the mythic
connection between wrong and retribution as it stems from the scapegoat mechanism,
which was overcome through Jesus’ forgiving and loving sacrifice on the cross.54 Until
today the spirit of retribution has contributed largely to the escalation of conflicts in
the realm of international politics, which can be overcome only by acts of forgiveness
and the voluntary renunciation of claims and entitlements. As he was noting down
this relation between forgiveness and sacrifice during Easter 1960, Hammarskjöld was
most likely aware of the larger political implications of this important insight.55
Summarizing Hammarskjöld’s understanding of sacrifice, we can see that he parts
from archaic sacrifice in the same way that the Judeo-Christian Bible has overcome
archaic religions. This does not mean, however, that he thinks that violence can be
avoided without any kind of sacrifice. Like Weil or Girard, he realized that sometimes
we have to undergo violence or suffering in order to avoid perpetrating violence
against others. Whoever thinks they can avoid such dilemmas forever easily risks
justifying the sacrifice of others in a disguised form.
This problem can be shown in those anti-sacrificial concepts of liberalism that
I mentioned in the first part of this chapter. Hobbes is a good example to illustrate
the sacrificial consequences of an anti-sacrificial liberalism. He is not only an early
representative of liberal individualism but also a mentor of the absolutist, centralized
state. What starts as an anti-sacrificial individualism ends as a sacrificial ideology of
an absolutist state emasculating individuality. Moshe Halbertal rightly emphasizes the
sacrificial nature of the modern state, referring also to its indirect connection with
Hobbes’ philosophy:
Humans never created a greater altar to Molech than the centralized state. The
modern state’s hunger for human sacrifice is insatiable … The history of the
modern state is in some ways a return of the repressed. In its demand for self-
sacrifice, the centralized state manifests the vengeful eruption of the sacrificial
desire that Hobbes everywhere attempted to marginalize.56
26 Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 2

Similarly, Jean-Pierre Dupuy has convincingly shown that John Rawls was finally not
able to overcome sacrifice entirely.57 Rawls’ theory remains consistent only in so far
as it excludes all those situations necessitating sacrifice. Contrary to Rawls, Habermas
does not exclude tragic situations entirely and expresses his admiration for those
people who follow the biblical command to love and who are willing to sacrifice
for their neighbors in ways that cannot be demanded morally: “Supererogatory acts
can be understood as attempts to counteract the effects of unjust suffering in cases
of tragic complication or under barbarous living conditions that inspire our moral
indignation.”58 Similarly, in his discussion in 2004 with Cardinal Ratzinger (who later
became Pope Benedict XVI), Habermas maintained that every democracy relies on
the sacrifices of its citizens, which, however, cannot be enforced by law but may only
be suggested to them. A democracy relies on voluntary acts of sacrifice:
In a democratic constitutional state, a legal obligation to vote would be just as
alien as a legal requirement to display solidarity. All one can do is suggest to the
citizens of a liberal society that they should be willing to get involved on behalf
of fellow citizens whom they do not know and who remain anonymous to them
and that they should accept sacrifices that promote common interests. This is
why political virtues, even if they are only ‘levied’ in small coins, so to speak, are
essential if a democracy is to exist.59
I began this chapter by quoting Lennon’s song to demonstrate that demanding that
there should be nothing “to kill or die for” is, in an oversimplified form, wrong
because it eliminates all the difficult and tragic situations we may face in our life. Weil
was for a long time a pacifist herself. In one of her late reflections on this issue she
emphasized in what way pacifism may turn into a danger. By this she addressed the
second pitfall, or abyss, connected to sacrifice into which we may fall. It is not the
pitfall where we could meet people like de Maistre or Schmitt, but it is, nevertheless,
dangerous:
Pacifism is only capable of causing harm when a confusion arises between two
sorts of aversion: the aversion to kill, and the aversion to be killed. The former
is honourable, but very weak; the latter, almost impossible to acknowledge, but
very strong.60

Notes
1 Juan de Donoso Cortés, Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism: Considered
in Their Fundamental Principles, trans. M. Vinton Goddard (Albany: Preserving
Christian Publications, 1991), 284; cf. Wolfgang Palaver, “A Girardian Reading of
Schmitt’s Political Theology,” Telos 93 (1992): 43–68, esp. 62–4.
2 Joseph Marie Maistre, Considerations on France, trans. R. A. Lebrun, Cambridge
Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 29.
3 Quoted by David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of
 Abolition or Transformation? 27

Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 310–11; cf. René Girard,
Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre (2007), trans. Mary Baker,
Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture (East Lansing: Michigan State University
Press, 2010), 84.
4 Donoso Cortés, Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism, 292.
5 Quoted by Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of
Ideas (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 117.
6 Joseph de Maistre, Über das Opfer, trans. C. Langendorf (Wien: Karolinger, 1997),
36; Donoso Cortés, Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism, 288.
7 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (1932), trans. G. Schwab (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007), 35; cf. Wolfgang Palaver, “Schmitt’s Critique of
Liberalism,” Telos 102 (1995): 43–71.
8 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 35.
9 Palaver, “Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism,” 43–7.
10 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),
ch. 14, at 91.
11 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971) (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2005), 3–4.
12 Jürgen Habermas, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans.
C. Cronin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 34, translation corrected.
13 Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans. M. Pensky
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 101; cf. Jürgen Habermas, Time of Transitions
(2001), trans. C. Cronin and M. Pensky (Malden, MA: Polity, 2006), 166.
14 Habermas, Time of Transitions, 46.
15 René Girard, with Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort, Things Hidden Since the
Foundation of the World (1978), trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1987), 95.
16 René Girard, The Girard Reader, James G. Williams (ed.) (New York: Crossroad,
1996), 203.
17 Girard, Things Hidden, 240–3.
18 Ibid., 227–31.
19 René Girard, with Rebecca Adams, “Violence, Difference, Sacrifice: A Conversation
with René Girard,” Religion and Literature 25, no. 2 (1993): 11–33, at 29.
20 Ibid., 28.
21 René Girard, “Mimetische Theorie und Theologie,” in Vom Fluch und Segen der
Sündenböcke. Raymund Schwager zum 60. Geburtstag, Józef Niewiadomski and
Wolfgang Palaver (eds) (Thaur: Kulturverlag, 1995), 15–29. The French original of
this article, “Théorie mimétique et théologie,” was later published in René Girard,
Celui par qui le scandale arrive (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2001), 63–82.
22 René Girard, De la violence à la divinité (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2007), 28, 1001;
René Girard, with Pierpaolo Antonello and João Cezar de Castro Rocha, Evolution
and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origin of Culture (London: Continuum, 2007),
216–17; Gianni Vattimo, with René Girard, Christianity, Truth, and Weakening
Faith: A Dialogue, trans. W. McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010),
92–3.
23 Girard, De la violence à la divinité, 28, 998, 1001; cf. Girard, Things Hidden, 243.
24 René Girard, Celui par qui le scandale arrive (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2001), 76.
25 Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 215.
26 Girard, Celui par qui le scandale arrive, 79.
28 Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 2

27 Wolfgang Palaver, René Girards mimetische Theorie. Im Kontext kulturtheoretischer

und gesellschaftspolitischer Fragen. 3 edn, Beiträge zur mimetischen Theorie (Münster:
LIT, 2008), 296–9.
28 Girard, Celui par qui le scandale arrive, 80.
29 Girard, Things Hidden, 237–45; Girard, Celui par qui le scandale arrive, 77–80;
Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 214–17.
30 Girard, Celui par qui le scandale arrive, 80.
31 Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 216.
32 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947), trans. E. Crawford and M. v. d. Ruhr
(London: Routledge, 2002), 72.
33 Girard, Battling to the End, 170–1.
34 Ibid., 120–30, 217.
35 Raymund Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation: Toward a Biblical
Doctrine of Redemption (1990), trans. J. G. Williams and P. Haddon (New York:
Crossroad, 1999); Józef Niewiadomski, “Transzendenz und Menschwerdung:
Transformationskraft des Opfers im Fokus österlicher Augen,” in Das Opfer –
aktuelle Kontroversen. Religions-politischer Diskurs im Kontext der mimetischen
Theorie. Deutsch-Italienische Fachtagung der Guardini Stiftung in der Villa Vigoni,
October 18–22, 1999, B. Dieckmann (ed.) (Münster: LIT, 2001), 293–306; Roman
A. Siebenrock, Wolfgang Palaver, and Willibald Sandler, “Wandlung. Die christliche
Eucharistiefeier als Transformation ‘der kotigen Wurzeln unserer Kultur.’ Eine
Antwort auf Aleida Assmann,” in Aufgeklärte Apokalyptik: Religion, Gewalt und
Frieden im Zeitalter der Globalisierung, W. Palaver, A. Exenberger, and K. Stöckl
(eds) (Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press, 2007), 279–320.
36 Bernhard Erling, A Reader’s Guide to Dag Hammarskjöld’s Waymarks (1999) (St.
Peter, MN: Gustavus Adolphus College, 2010), 281.
37 Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings (1964), trans. L. Sjöberg and W. H. Auden, Vintage
Spiritual Classics (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 149.
38 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1972), trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 68–88.
39 Hammarskjöld, Markings, 110.
40 Ibid., 68–9; translation corrected by Gustaf Aulén, Dag Hammarskjöld’s White Book:
An Analysis of Markings (London: SPCK, 1970), 53; cf. Jos Huls, “Hammarskjöld’s
Interpretation of the Bible,” HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies 66, no. 1
(2010): 1–7.
41 Cf. Aulén, Dag Hammarskjöld’s White Book, 52–5.
42 Hammarskjöld, Markings, 69.
43 Ibid., 121.
44 Ibid., 190; cf. Aulén, Dag Hammarskjöld’s White Book, 92.
45 Hammarskjöld, Markings, 159.
46 Ibid., 159.
47 Ibid., 133.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid., 159.
50 See www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/fatalities/documents/StatsByYear_1.pdf
[accessed September 13, 2013].
51 Wolfgang Palaver, “The Ambiguous Cachet of Victimhood: On Violence and
Monotheism,” in The New Visibility of Religion: Studies in Religion and Cultural
 Abolition or Transformation? 29

Hermeneutics, M. Hoelzl and G. Ward (eds) (London: Continuum, 2008), 68–87;

Wolfgang Palaver, “The Ambiguous Cachet of Victimhood: Elias Canetti’s Religions
of Lament and Abrahamic Monotheism,” Forum Bosnae 49 (2010): 19–31.
52 John Howard Yoder, The War of the Lamb: The Ethics of Nonviolence and
Peacemaking (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009), 30–33.
53 Hammarskjöld, Markings, 197.
54 Aulén, Dag Hammarskjöld’s White Book, 86–8; cf. Hans Kelsen, “Causality and
Retribution,” Philosophy of Science 8, no. 4 (1941): 533–56; René Girard, The
Scapegoat (1982), trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1986); Walter Burkert, Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early
Religions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 102–28.
55 Erling, A Reader’s Guide to Dag Hammarskjöld’s Waymarks, 255.
56 Moshe Halbertal, On Sacrifice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 105–7.
57 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “The Self-Deconstruction of the Liberal Order,” Contagion:
Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 2 (1995): 1–16, esp. 12–13.
58 Habermas, Justification and Application, 35.
59 Jürgen Habermas, with Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason
and Religion, trans. B. McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006), 30.
60 Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards
Mankind (1949), trans. A. Wills (London: Routledge, 2002), 159; cf. Wolfgang
Palaver, “Die Frage des Opfers im Spannungsfeld von West und Ost. René Girard,
Simone Weil und Mahatma Gandhi über Gewalt und Gewaltfreiheit,” Zeitschrift für
Katholische Theologie 132, no. 4 (2010): 462–81.
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all the Ladies, to keep up our Courage. Every body talked
fast and ate fast too, as we were elated at our Escape and
pretty hungry. I should tell you, the fat Woman maintained
that her snappish little Puppy had thrown the Robber off his
Guard; but the Squire shook his Head upon't. While fresh
Horses were putting to, a couple of Horsemen, apparently a
Clergyman and his Servant, rode into the Inn-Yard. The
Squire, stepping out to them, related what had just
occurred, and cautioned them against crossing the Heath
unarmed. They thanked him, but told him they were two
Police-Officers in Disguise, and well armed in the Hope of
Attack. In fact, as we have since learnt, they were beset by
the very Men who had assailed us, and giving Chase to the
Gang, who dispersed as wide as they could, followed them
all across the Country till they succeeded in capturing two;
one of whom swam his Horse across a River, but was taken
on the other Side. The Squire has since been asked to
appear against them, but has declined, saying there is
already sufficient Evidence, and he has no Mind to swear
away Lives that he spared when his Blood was hot.
"After this, you may suppose we could talk of Nothing but
Murders, Robberies and such-like delightful Subjects during
the greater Part of our Journey: and each seemed trying to
outdo the other, in hope of making the others forget how
tamely all had behaved except the Squire. Gradually we
dropped our Companions at one Place or another, till none
remained but the Squire, myself, and the fat Woman. He
now began to be amused at the Joy I could not help
betraying at the Sight of every well-known Landmark, and
tried to tease me by supposing a Dozen ridiculous Accidents
that might have happened at Home, to disappoint me of
my Pleasure. At length, we stopped at the Corner of a By-
Road in Larkfield Parish, and young Mr. Heavitree comes
up. 'Are you there, Father?' says he, scrambling up on the
Step to look in. 'All right, my Boy,' says the Squire, grasping
his Hand, which he shook heartily, 'and here's Gatty
Bowerbank come Home to see her Mother.' Mr. Heavitree
gave me such a cheerful Smile! 'How glad they will all be!'
said he, 'they do not in the least expect you, and have been
wondering why you have let them be so long without a
Letter. I was at your Mother's just now.' 'She's quite well,
then?' cried I. 'Oh yes,' said he, 'but you don't look very
well, I think.' 'Manners, Jack!' says the Squire. 'Well, Father,
I meant no Harm; here are Horses, Sir, for you and me, and
a light Cart for your Luggage.' 'Put Mrs. Gatty's Baggage
into the Cart too, my Boy,' says the Squire, 'and send the
Horses round to the Green Hatch, for I've a Mind to walk
across the Fields with this young Damsel, and see what
Reception she gets, and I suppose you won't Mind coming
along with us.' 'Not I, Sir,' said Mr. Heavitree, 'I shall like it
very much.' So, when the Luggage was put in the Cart, and
the Coachman was settled with, we started off, as sociable
as could be, talking about the Highway Robbery; and the
Squire took Care to tell his Son that I was the only Woman
who did not scream when the Pistol was fired into the
Coach. Well, we got to the dear old Garden-Gate; and
there, strolling along the pebbled Walk just within it, were
Lucy and Pen, their Arms about each other's Necks.—The
Squire hemmed; they looked round; and oh! what a Cry of
Joy they gave! My Mother, hearing the Noise, came out....
"Dear Mrs. Patty, I am writing as small as ever I can, and
must write still smaller, if I mean to get in Half of what I
want to say. Imagine what a happy Evening we had! My
dear Mother shed many Tears, though, when she heard of
your Kindness to me throughout my Illness; and desired me
to express her Thankfulness to you all in the strongest
Terms I could frame. My Ten Pounds proved very
acceptable, as it made up, with her Savings, just the Sum
she wants to bind Joe to our Village Doctor. Penelope is
learning to make Bone-Lace; and Mrs. Evans is so well
 content with Lucy, that she is going to take her as second
Teacher in her School next Quarter, so that we are all
getting on mighty well, one Way and another. Also my
Mother has realized a pretty little Sum by the Sale of some
of my Father's Latin Books, and there are yet more left.
Your delicious Plum-Cake was done ample Justice to, and
the Boys declare there never were such Gingerbread-Nuts.
Now I have filled my Paper to the very Edge, and yet how
much I have left unsaid! Put yourself in my Place, and you
will know all I would say to you, and to dear Mrs.
Honeywood, and to Prue; not forgetting Mr. Honeywood, to
whom give my kind Regards."
"Your ever attached and grateful

"Gertrude Bowerbank."

My Father, who was smoking his Pipe whilst I read this Letter to him
and my Mother, presently said, "I see them all!"
"See who, Father?"
"Everybody in Mrs. Gatty's Letter—The old Woman with her Pipe, the
old Gentleman in his Roquelaure, the Robber hung in Chains on the
lone Heath, the Highwaymen, the stout old Squire leaping out with
his Blunderbuss, my Lord Duke coming up, the Police-Officers riding
into the Yard, the young Farmer coming to meet his Father, Gatty
flying up to her Mother—that Letter is as full of Pictures as this
Chinese Paper."
After ruminating on it a While longer, he began again, with:
"Gatty ought to marry the Squire."
"Oh Father! his Son, if you please!"
"How do you know the Son is a single Man?"
"Nay, how do we know the Squire is a Widower? He's too old."
"Perhaps she won't marry either," said Prue.
"Perhaps not, Mrs. Prue, but let me tell you, neither you nor your
Sister could have writ that Letter."
"Well, Father, I suppose a Woman does not get married for writing a
Letter. For my Part, I don't see much in it. Anybody, I suppose, could
write, if they had Anything to write about."
"No, that don't follow—it's a non sequitur, as the Scholars say."
"I don't set up for a Scholar, not I," said Prue, "I never was so good
a Hand at my Pen as Patty; but I worked the best Sampler, for all
that."
"Well," says my Father, "say, when you write to her, Patty, that I
don't care how often I pay a Shilling for such a Voice from the
Basket as that. I wish she'd send us one every Week."
It indeed was Something curious, how my Father's Fancy was hit by
this Letter, which he got me to read to him many Evenings following.
What was more remarkable, Mr. Fenwick praised it too, though after
a more temperate Manner. He called it easy Writing. Now, sure, what
is easy, is not so meritorious as what is difficult! And he added it was
almost as good as some of the Letters in the Spectator; which,
everybody must own, was immoderate. Gatty could historify plain
enough what passed before her own Eyes and was heard by her
own Ears; but she could not frame a Sentence that required some
Exertion of the Mind to follow; which, I take it, is the Perfection of
good Writing; at least, I know that's the Way with our best Authors.
And no Shame to her for it: Women are not to be blamed for not
shining in what is out of their Province; and she spelt perfectly well,
and wrote a neat, flowing Hand, which had found Plenty of Practice
under Lady Betty; only, to set her up with the Amandas and
Dorindas that corresponded with Sir Richard Steele; why, the Thing
was clearly preposterous.
Meanwhile, Mr. Fenwick continued to find his Way down to us most
Evenings, with his Book in his Hand; and I must say he made the
Time pass very pleasantly and swiftly; but though he read quite loud
enough for such a small Company, 'twas evident to himself as well
as to us, that his Voice would by no means yet fill a Church; besides
which, his Breath soon became short, and a red Spot would come on
his Cheek; which, whenever my Mother noticed, she always made
him shut his Book, and would talk about Anything that chanced,
rather than let him over-tire himself. Meanwhile, he heard Nothing,
as far as I could glean, of Mr. Caryl: I know he got no Letters, nor
received any Visitor; and that, I think, tended to make the red Spot
infix itself on his Cheek. I pitied him heartily—"Hope deferred
maketh the Heart sick"—but yet it was a Matter I could not presume
to express Sympathy with him upon; nor was I qualified to allay any
of his Uneasiness. But I kept anxiously looking out for Mr. Caryl's
entering the Shop. One Forenoon, Lady Betty's Man, Mr. James,
came in; and, says he, "Your Servant, Mrs. Patty—My Lady is going
to give a grand Masked Ball to-morrow Evening; and it occurred to
me that you and your Sister might like to look on. If so, I can secure
you good Places, where you will see without being seen; and you
will only have to come early, and ask the Hall Porter for Mr. James."
I thanked him, and said it would be a vast Treat to us; and after a
little Talk about Mrs. Gatty, and my offering him some Refreshment,
which he readily selected in the Form of Cherry Brandy and
Macarons, he went away.
 Chapter IX.
Lady Betty's Masquerade.
Prudence was mighty pleased to hear of our Engagement, as it would
afford her a near View of the gay World, which was what she had
long been desiring. After the Shop was closed, we set forth,
attended by Peter, who was also to see us safe back; and on
reaching the Square, we descried the House directly by the lighted
Flambeaux.
Both the private and public Entrance were already in Commotion;
but we asked the Hall Porter for Mr. James, who presently appeared,
still in Deshabille. "You have taken me at my Word," said he smiling,
"Your Coming is of the earliest, and I dare not let you go up-Stairs
yet, so you must wait awhile in the Servants' Hall, till the Company
begin to arrive."
I was never in a Servants' Hall of that Description before; and I must
say that it afforded me Matter and Leisure for several Reflections.
Servants, Pastry-Cooks—Men and Boys, and so forth, were bustling
in and out, and we were pushed about a good Deal till we got into a
quiet Corner behind the Clock. It struck me that the Pleasures of the
Quality were purchased at the Price of a good Deal of Immorality in
their Dependents. Many a Glass of Wine did I see swallowed on the
Sly; many a Tart and Custard whipt off and hastily eaten in Corners.
One would have thought, in a great House like this, Fragments of
Dainties had been so common that they would have been no
Temptations; but doubtless the poor Servants had been so
overwrought and debarred of their natural Rest and regular
Refreshments, that their Strength required a little keeping up, for
they had an arduous Evening before them. The Maids flirted and
jested; the Men used intemperate Language; in and out among
them all sailed my Lady Housekeeper from Time to Time, as proud
as a Dutchess, and in a Head and Primers that a Dutchess had
probably worn, before they were a little soiled.
By-and-by the Bustle increases. Mr. James comes in, superbly
attired, and smilingly offers us Tarts and Tokay; but, though pressed,
we declined. Then he beckoned us to follow him, and piloted us into
a brilliant Ante-room where, behind some huge Orange Trees in
Wooden Tubs, he found us Seats that commanded a Vistoe of the
two Drawing-rooms beyond. Sure, the King's Majesty could scarce
dwell in greater State. I think that neither Whitehall, Windsor, nor
Hampton Court could ever have made a greater Show. The Ante-
Chamber Hangings were blue Velvet and Silver, the Drawing-room
that came next beyond was amber Satin and Gold; the Chamber
beyond that was hung with Goblin Tapestry. Also there were some
large Mirrours, in which one might behold one's self from Head to
Foot.
I had very little Notion of what a Masked Ball was really like, but I
concluded the Company being attired as Monarchs, Roman Senators,
and Potentates of various Descriptions, would be sufficiently
possessed with their imaginary Dignities to display Gestures and
Deportment of a corresponding Sort, which would doubtless be very
majestical. And these again would be relieved by Light-Comedy
Parts, which, well supported, would be humorous and diverting.
As, let People assemble as late as they will, some one must still be
first, so it was on the present Occasion. A little Man, gaudily attired,
entered with a good Deal of Flutter and Importance, who, as soon
as he found the Apartments empty, exchanged his Strut for his
ordinary Gait, took off his Mask and put it on again several times,
perambulated the Saloons, peeped into everything, examined
himself again and again before the Mirrours, acted a little in Dumb-
Show, sat down before one of them, and finally curled himself up on
a Settee and dropped asleep.
I wonder how much the Expectation of Pleasure makes up the real
Amount of Pleasure apportioned to us in this Life. The Pleasure itself
continually disappoints; the Expectation of it has often Something
troubled and impatient; so that either Way there's perpetual Alloy.
Prudence and I were now mighty anxious for the Company. A Group
at length entered, consisting of Maids of Honour and Courtiers of
Queen Elizabeth's Time, very much furbelowed and bedizened, who
believed themselves the first till they espied the little Man on the
Settee, when there were some small Jokes made about Cymon and
Iphigenia, Milton and the Italian Lady, Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,
and so forth. Then the Ladies settled their Ruffs at the Mirrours, and
sailed up and down; and one of them walked through Part of a
Minuet without Music with a Gentleman she called Sir Christopher
Hatton, who pointed his Toes extremely well. Then one of them said,
"My Mask makes my Face so hot!" "And red too," said the other;
"but what will it be by-and-by?" "I wonder if Harry will come," says
one; "I'll lay any Wager I shall find him out."—"I'll lay any Wager you
won't," says the other. Thought I, is this the Way Maids of Honour
used to talk in the Days of good Queen Bess? Well, perhaps it may
be.
Just then the little Man woke up, rubbing his Eyes, and saying
drowsily, "John, my hot Water at seven ..." on which the Ladies
tittered, and he woke up, looked about, and probably felt foolish.
Now the Musicians came, and took their Places, and began to tune
up; and Prue whispered to me, "How delightful!" Indeed, the Music
was, or seemed to me, first-rate, and I enjoyed it as much as
anything; yet at length became inured to it, and scarce more
attentive than to a common Street Band; and finally wished the Men
would not play so loud, for it prevented my hearing what People
were saying. The Ball-Rooms now began to fill fast; and were soon
crowded with Jews, Turks, and Saracens, Nuns, Monks, and Friars,
Goddesses, Shepherdesses, and Milkmaids, Pulcinelloes,
Mountebanks, and Ministers of State. Their Dresses were excessive
fine, and I almost trembled to think of the Expense People had put
themselves to for the Amusement of one Night; however, that was
all for the good of Trade—if so be they paid their Bills.
As for supporting their Characters, there was scarce an Attempt at it;
the utmost that the greater Part of 'em did was to say, in little
squeaking Voices, "You don't know me!" "I know you!" This seemed
to me stupider than Child's-Play; and I was beginning to weary of it,
when Prudence jogged me as a very pretty Figure passed, in striped
Gauze and pink Satin, sprinkled with Flowers, as the Goddess Flora;
and whispered, "Lady Grace Bellair."
Soon after, a smart young Spanish Cavaliero came in, whom she
pronounced to be Mr. Arbuthnot; and a Bashaw with three Tails,
whom she decided upon as Sir Charles Sefton. Whether any of her
Guesses were right, I knew not. By-and-by, Dancing began in the
inner Saloon; and, for the first Time, I had a Glimpse of Lady Betty,
who was the only Woman without a Mask; and when I saw how
great was her Advantage therein over the rest, I wondered how
Persons that evidently thought mainly of outward Appearances could
make themselves such Frights.
By-and-by a singular Couple, Arm in Arm, left the Ball-Rooms for the
Ante-Chamber, dressed like Charles the Second's Courtiers, all but
their Heads; for one had the Head of a Fox, and the other of a
monstrous Goose. The latter said, "Quack!" whenever he was
pushed by the Crowd, which was held an exceeding good Joke, for
Folks cried, "Well done, Goose! Quack again!" and, when he did so,
went into Peals of Laughter. At Length, with his Friend the Fox, he
sat down on a Bench just in Front of our Orange-Trees, exclaiming to
his Companion, "Precious hot Work! Even Popularity may be too
fatiguing."
"I never had enough of it to know that," says the Fox.
"You! Why, you've been steeped in it to the Lips!—among a certain
Coterie at any Rate. You are feigning Modesty, Mr. Fox."
"All I said was, I had never had too much; perhaps, not enough. We
belong to an insatiable Race. By-the-by, I proved myself a Goose To-
Night in choosing to play Fox, for you are by far the more popular."
"And only by saying Quack."
"Quackery goes a great Way in this World,—I might have known
'twould be so."
"Monstrous fine Masquerade this!" said the Goose.
"Oh, delightful! Have you made out many People?"
"Why, to tell you the Truth, I've been so observed myself, I've had
no Time to observe others."
"Quack!"
"Sir! name your Hour, Place, and Weapon."
"How quiet and retired is everything in this little Spot! You have
Time to observe now."
"Why did you deny yourself to me Yesterday? I know you were at
Home."
"The Truth is, I was desperately hypped."
"What made you so?"
"Study."
"What were you studying? The natural History of the Fox?"
"No, I was learning some Verses by Heart; and I'll spout them to
you."
"Now then; don't be tedious."

"'Three Things an Author's modest Wishes bound;

My Friendship, and a Prologue, and ten Pound.'"

"Oh, come! that's Pope!"

"Well, and it's my Case too—pretty near. A callow Poetling writes a
Piece, dedicates it to me, and expects me to patronize and print it."
"You? Why, I never saw your Name head a Dedication!"
"Well, Sir, you may shortly—if I find no Way of adroitly declining the
Honour, as I have done similar Favours before."
"Why decline?"
"Oh, the Thing's burthensome."
"The ten Pounds may be; but most People consider themselves
honoured, and are willing to pay for an expensive Luxury."
"Well, it's no Luxury to me."
"Don't have it, then."
"How avoid it?"
"By simple Neglect. He can't ask for the ten Pounds, if you forget to
send them."
"No, but he may abuse me."
"If his Abuse is not clever, Nobody will read it. Come, you are
making a Mountain of a Molehill. If he has sent his Poem to you,
send it back 'with Thanks,' or forget to return it altogether, or let a
Spark fall upon it."
"Then a Spark would fall upon me."
"Nay, if none of those Expedients can fit you, you must help yourself
to one. I begin to think you ought to have played Goose, in good
Earnest."
They now fell to talking of the Company, and criticizing their Dresses
and Deportment, but I was too preoccupied with what they had
been saying to attend much to their caustic Remarks; for though
they spoke quietly, and their false Heads somewhat disguised their
Voices, I could not help entertaining an Impression that the Fox was
Mr. Caryl. Was it poor Mr. Fenwick, then, he alluded to so
unhandsomely? Oh, the Hollowness of Worldlings! Why, had I not
with my own Ears heard him commend Mr. Fenwick's Poem to his
Face, and thank him for the Compliment of the Dedication? And yet,
here he was waiving it off, as 'twere, and even hinting that Mr.
Fenwick wanted to be paid for it! whereas I knew he had refused
Money when offered! Oh, the Meanness!... He was jealous, and
envious too, I could make out, of a Man that had writ better Verses
than his own; and would fain have them supprest. Well, well, this is
a wicked World we live in; and that's no News neither.
A false Head and a false Heart, thought I, as the Fox walked off with
the Goose. I declare my Hands tingled to pull off that Fox's Head
and expose him; but that would have been witless. I got tired of the
Vanity-Fair long before Prudence did. At length even she had had
enough (and no Wonder, for our Attention had been on the full
Stretch for many Hours, without Refreshment or Change of Posture);
but the Difficulty was, how to steal away; for the Lobbies and grand
Staircase were as thronged as the Ball-Rooms, and we could not in
our plebeian Dresses, and unmasked, attempt going among the
Company; so there we continued to sit, long after we wanted to
come away. At length the Rooms began to thin; and we took
Advantage of a chance Dispersion of the Company to make a sudden
Flight to the back Stairs. I thought I heard Remarks and
Exclamations made, but never looked round; and there, at the Foot
of the back Stairs, stood Peter as pale as Death, thinking he had
missed us, and never should find us. He had passed the Night, of
course, at a Public-House—no good place for him, nor for scores of
others that did the same; and was now waiting with our camelot
Cloaks and Clogs, which he had stowed safely somewhere where he
knew he could find them again. Once equipped, we followed close at
his Heels as he elbowed his Way through a Rabble-Rout of
Chairmen, Link-Boys, Hackney-Coachmen, Pickpockets, and Lookers-
on. It was pouring of Rain, the Pavement shone like Glass, Day was
breaking, and I never heard such an uproar in my Life.... "Lady So-
and-so's Chariot!" echoed from one hoarse Voice to another all along
and round the Corner; and then "Lady So-and-so's Chariot stops the
Way!"—till Lady So-and-so stepped in and drove off.
At length we got quit of it all, and picked our Way Home as we best
could, and a long Way it seemed! We had too much to do in minding
our Dresses, to have Leisure for talking. As we got towards the Five
Fields we met plenty of Market-Carts; and now and then we heard
the shrilly Cry of some poor little Chimney-Sweep. Once at Home,
we were soon in Bed and asleep; and I awoke nearly at my usual
Time, chilly and yawnish, but Prue continued sleeping, and I did not
wake her.
I was not down quite as soon as usual, after all, and the Milk and
Bread were behind Time; and, of Course, Mr. Fenwick did not get his
Chocolate as soon as usual. When he heard what had made me late,
he looked grave. I said, "Sure, Sir, there was no Harm in looking
on?" He said, "Well, I don't know.... It is dangerous to attend not
merely Places of pernicious but of doubtful Amusement. Do not your
Feelings this Morning tell you that there was Something unsound
and unsafe in the Revelry of last Night? And if so in the Case of
mere Spectators, how much more in that of actual Participators? and
of all those poor People, no voluntary Promoters of it, who only
obeyed Orders, and got no Pleasure at all, but what was allied to
Dishonesty and Intemperance? I don't want to be overstrict; but am
I right or wrong, think you, Mrs. Patty?" And I was obliged to own
that I believed he was in the Right on't.
As for Prue, she was fit for Nothing all Day; but she would hear of
no Wrong in what had to her been so delightful. So I left her to
amuse my quiet Mother with her lively Chat, and attended to the
Shop myself.
 Chapter X.
Tom's Presents.
I was sitting behind the Counter, when a smart-looking, sunburnt
young Man of about two-and-twenty, attired as a Sailor, came into
the Shop. He said, "Hallo, Patty! how are you?" I said, "Why, Tom!
can it be you? I thought you had been in China!"
"I have been there," says he, "true enough; more-by-Token, here's a
China Orange for you;" and clapped one into my Hand with such
Force that it went near to go through it.
"How are you all?" said he; "I'm glad to see you, and I hope you're
glad to see me."
"Oh yes, very glad, Tom; pray walk into the Parlour—we are all at
Home."
"How are you, Uncle?" says he, so loud and sudden that he made
my Father jump. "And you, Aunt!"—kissing her. "And you!" kissing
Prue too.
"'Manners, Jack!'" says my Father, quoting Gatty's Letter.
"My Name's Tom, Uncle, not Jack, though I suppose you meant Jack
Tar. Well! so here you all are! I've only just landed—Didn't forget
one of you in foreign Lands; I've brought my Aunt a Monkey."
"A nasty Beast!" cries my Father; "we won't have him here, Tom!
He'll break all my China."
"Well, Uncle, I thought she might do a little Damage that Way, ('tis
the prettiest little Creature you ever saw; her Ears are bored, and
her Name's Jessy!) So I brought you, Sir, a Tea-Service, to cover
Breakages; the Cups and Saucers fitting into each other; and the
Teapot, no bigger than this Orange, fitting in o' Top; the whole
Concern packs in a Cylinder no bigger than a Spice-Box."
"Dear Tom," says my Mother, nervously, "we've more Tea-Services
already than we should know what to do with, if we did not keep a
genteel Kind of Tea-Garden for the Quality."
"But as you do, Ma'am, won't it be acceptable? Or otherwise, won't
you want Jessy to break it? She's the prettiest little Dear you can
imagine, the Darling of the whole Ship. Well! it seems you're each
discontented with the other's Presents;—my Uncle don't like your
having the Monkey, and you don't like his having the Crockery. Then
I'll tell you what I'll do—chop and change. I'll take your Presents
down to my Father and Mother, and you shall have theirs. I've
bought you a Pair of Slippers, Prue, but of course they're too big."
And out he pulled a Pair of little Chinese Slippers that might have
pinched Cinderella.
"I'm sure you can't wear them, Prue," said I.
"I'm sure I shan't try," said she, jerking her Chin.
"Well, Patty, since I could find you Nothing better, I've brought you a
Feather Fan with an Ivory Handle."
"Thank you, Tom!" said I; "it will do nicely to flap the Flies off the
Pastry."
"And since you, Aunt, will not have the Monkey, you must be content
with some Gunpowder Tea."
"I shall like that a great deal better, Tom, I assure you. The only Sort
of Gunpowder I approve."
Here Tom pulled out of his Pocket what looked like a Mahogany
Rule, about nine Inches long. "Now, Sir," says he to my Father,
"what's that?"
"I can't for the Life of me tell," says my Father, after eyeing it
askance and then handling it.
"I knew you couldn't! See," (unfolding it,) "it's a Boot-jack!"
"A queer one, Tom!"
"And what is it now? Why, a Reading-Desk! What is it now? A
Cribbage Board!"
"Ha! Tom, that's ingenious."
"Ingenious, Uncle? I believe it is! What is it now? A Ruler. What is it
now? A pair of Snuffers."
"Ha, ha, ha!"
"Ah, I knew you'd laugh—what is it now? An eighteen Inch Rule.
What is it now? A Pair of Nut-crackers. What is it now? Two
Candlesticks. What is it now? A Picquet-Board. What is it now! A
Lemon-squeezer. That's for you, Uncle. That's all the Changes. It will
go into your Coat Pocket."
"It shall go there, Tom! 'Tis a real Curiosity."
"I knew you'd say so, Sir. I wasn't sure about the Monkey, but I
knew you'd like this. Jessy shall go with me Home, but I shan't go
there till next Week, because they don't know we've come up the
River, so I shall stay a little here first."
"But, Tom, I don't know how we can take you in, for we have a
Lodger."
"Oh my Goodness! Nay, don't put the poor Fellow to Inconvenience
on my Account, pray."
"Certainly not!" cried Prue, indignantly. "Why, Mr. Fenwick is quite a
Gentleman!"
"Oh, is he so?" said Tom, bursting out laughing, "and pray, what am
I? 'Sir, you're no Gentleman!'—is that it, Prue?"
"Why, you're Tom, and that's all."
"And that's enough too, isn't it? Oh, I can swing my Hammock
anywhere. I wouldn't put Anyone to the smallest Inconvenience.
Would sooner catch my Death of Cold, or lose every Shot in my
Locker."
"Tom, you're such a thoughtless, good-tempered Fellow, we must
pack you in somewhere."
"Oh, no, Uncle! don't think of it. I'll be off to the Three Bells. Only,
there are two Belles here I like better."
"But, Tom, I shouldn't like you to get your Pocket picked."
"And I," said my Mother, "should not like you to take your Death of
Cold."
"Never caught Cold in my Life, Ma'am, that was only Flummery; a
Sailor has Something else to do than keep sneezing and blowing his
Nose. And I can leave my Money and Watch here."
"Prudence," said I, "you and I could sleep in the little blue Closet."
"Why shouldn't Tom," said Prudence, "now the other Door is un-
nailed? We should have to move all our Things."
"Thank you, Patty," said Tom, "you were always as sweet as Syrup
to me. I shall like the blue Closet a precious deal the best, I can
assure you, instead of being mast-headed."
So thus it was arranged; and the light-hearted Fellow was soon
established among us, spinning long Yarns, as he called them, about
John Chinaman.
The next Day, he was absent for some Hours, and when he came
back, he said he wanted Prue and me to go with him in the Evening
to see a Conjuror. Prudence, for some Whim, would not go; but I
accompanied him with Pleasure. The Way Tom went on, however,
spoiled my Evening's Entertainment.
The Conjurer was dressed somewhat in the Oriental Style, and I
should have taken him for a real Foreigner, only that Tom whispered
to me that was all Sham. In Fact, he began by addressing us in very
good English, and saying that the Marvels he was about to display
were unaccompanied by any Fraud or Deception, and that any Lady
or Gentleman who doubted his Word might come and sit at his
Elbow. "I accept your Invitation!" cries Tom; and immediately "slued
himself round," as he expressed it, round a Pillar between us and
the Stage, slipped down it as if he had been a Monkey, and was at
the Man's Side in a Moment. The Conjurer looked sufficiently
annoyed, but not more so than I felt, for it seemed to me that the
Eyes of all the Audience were alternately on Tom and me, as indeed
they well might be. Luckily for my Comfort and Respectability, he left
me sitting next to a very steady-looking elderly Couple, the nearest
of which said, "Never mind, young Lady, we'll take Care of you." I
said, "It was so very thoughtless of him to leave me!" and felt quite
uncomfortable. "It was very thoughtless," said the good Woman's
Husband, smiling, "I should think, Miss, he's in the sea-faring Line."
I said, "Yes, Sir," and we then began to attend to what was going
on, on the Stage; but I sat on Thorns all the While.
Tom, quite unembarrassed by the Publicity of his Position, kept his
Eyes fixed on the Conjurer's Proceedings with an Air of lively
Interest. The two or three first Tricks drew from him such
Exclamations as "Capital! Excellent!" which appeared somewhat to
mollify the Cunning Man; but at length, when Something was done
which seemed very surprising, Tom coolly remarked, "Ah! I see how
that is managed," in a Voice as clear as a Bell, that was heard all
over the House. The Conjurer shook his Head at him and frowned;
but went on to Something else. Again Tom was pleased; again he
clapped as heartily as any. The next Trick he marked his Approval of
by saying, "Very neat, very neat." At Length came the grand Feat of
the Evening, which was swallowing a Carving-Knife. Everybody's
Attention was riveted, when Tom said in an Expostulatory Voice,
"But, my dear good Fellow, how can you say there is no Fraud or
Deception?" "Sir, I defy you to prove any," says the Conjurer. "I will
prove it directly," says Tom, "for I have often seen the Thing better
done in India." "Sir, you are an impertinent Fellow," says the
Conjurer; "I must insist upon it that you withdraw. If you will not
retire of your own Accord, you shall do so on Compulsion, for it is
highly indecorous to interrupt a public Performance in this Manner."
"Well, but why did you ask me?" said Tom. "I didn't!" says the
Conjurer. "You did," says Tom. "Didn't he?" to the whole House.
"Knock him down! Throw him over!" cried several Voices. "Give him
into Custody!" "Nay," says Tom, "I don't want to make any
Disturbance:—if you wish me to go, I'll go, for I never like to put
People to the least Inconvenience, and I'm sure if I'd known you
didn't mean to be taken at your Word, I would have stayed where I
was!" Saying which, he swung himself up the Pillar again, and was
by my Side the next Moment, looking as merry and good-tempered
as ever. But I was so penetrated with Shame, that I could not bear
to look up, but begged him to let us go Home, to which he acceded,
though with much Surprise. The next Morning, I was giving my
Father and Mother an Account of my uncomfortable Evening, when
Tom, coming in to Breakfast, says, "Who is that pale, lanky Chap I
met just now upon the Stairs?"
"Tom!—" said Prudence, very indignantly, "it was Mr. Fenwick!"
"How should I know who he was?" rejoined Tom unconcernedly, "I
thought he might be a Thief."
"A Thief, indeed!" muttered Prue, as she buttered her Roll.
"Well, Prue," said he briskly, "I gave Patty a Treat last Night, so now
it's your Turn."
"You did give Patty a Treat, indeed, my Lad," says my Father
ironically.
"I'm glad she found it so, Uncle," says he, quite cheerfully, "so, To-
Night, Prudence, I'll take you to the Play."
"I don't know that I want to go," says Prudence.
"Oh! very well, then I'll take Patty."
"Thank you, Tom," said I, "but I don't quite approve of Theatrical
Amusements."
"You don't? Oh my Goodness!—And do you disapprove of them,
Prue?"
"No, not I," said Prue, "I think Patty more nice than wise."
"Oh, then, come along like a good Girl, and let's go together."
"But, Tom," says my Father, "I shall put a Spoke in that Wheel,
unless you promise you won't forsake her as you did Patty last
Night."
"I'll promise you a Dozen Times, Uncle, if you think that will make it
more secure."
"No, if you promise once in earnest, that will do."
"I do promise."
"But, Tom," put in my dear Mother, "I share Patty's Objections to the
Play-House, and I think two such young Heads as you and Prue are
hardly to be trusted there. In short, I would rather she did not go."
Prue pouted a little on this—My Father began to chafe.
"Fiddlesticks, my Dear," says he, "you and I often went to a Play
together when we were young, and why shouldn't they?"
"Why, my Dear, as I am no longer young, I see Things in a different
Light."
"It may not be a truer Light, though, Mrs. Honeywood, and you can't
expect young Folks to see Things differently from what you yourself
did when you were young. Tut, tut! let the Girl go, and say no more
about it."
"But, Mr. Honeywood...."
"But, Madam!" (very loud and angry,) "haven't I said it should be so,
and have I a Right to be minded?"
Here my Mother turned pale and trembled, which I never could bear
to see; and I was going to urge Prue and Tom, in a low Voice, to
give up their Treat rather than foment a Family Quarrel, when I was
called into the Shop, which prevented my knowing how the Matter
ended. Presently Tom went through the Shop, out of the House; and
the next Time I could look into the Parlour, it was empty.
Prue, however, was singing about the House, so I argued that Peace
had been restored somehow; most likely by her giving up the Play.
By-and-by she comes in all Smiles, and says, "I'll take up Mr.
Fenwick's Chocolate," and, before I could say a Word, took the little
Tray out of my Hand and was off with it.
I had forgotten all about this, when, some Time after, happening to
go up Stairs for my Knotting-Bag, in passing the open Door of Mr.
Fenwick's Sitting-Room, I saw him and Prue standing at the Window,
their Backs towards me, in earnest Conversation; he holding her by
the Hand, and she apparently in Tears. This gave me the oddest
Feeling I ever had in my Life—I went up into my Room, sat down on
the first Chair I came to, and could hardly turn my Breath. I could
not think what had come over me! Presently I got up and tried to
drink some cold Water, but could hardly get it down. It seemed to
me as if I could not think; and yet there was a great, dull, dark,
unwelcome Thought in my Head all the while!
I leant my Head against the Wall; and having quieted myself a little,
rose to go down Stairs. Just then, Prue came in, and looked as if she
had hoped to find the Room unoccupied. I said, "You've been crying,
Prue!" She said, sharply, "No, I haven't!—and what if I had?"—I said,
"Only that I should have been sorry to know that you were in
Sorrow." She said, "Tears are shed for Joy, sometimes, as well as
Sorrow, are not they?" "Certainly," said I; and turned away. "What
could make you think I had been crying, Patty?" says she hurriedly.
"Well," I said, "I thought you might be vexed about the Play."—"The
Play? oh, that was given up before Tom went out," said she—"Of
course it did vex me, and I think it was unkind of my Mother not to
let me go." "You know her Motives are always kind," said I. "Well, of
course I do," says she, still crossly, "but don't harp any more on such
a disagreeable Subject. If you do, I shall run away from you." And
away she ran.
Then it was not the Play; then it was not about Anything connected
with Tom, that had made her cry! I'd thought as much! "Tears are
shed for Joy as well as for Sorrow," sometimes, though not very
often. I sat down again, and turned my Face to the Wall, with my
Head resting against it, and cried bitterly. Mine were Tears of
Sorrow, not of Joy!
 Chapter XI.
The Old Angel.
I do not much like to look back on that Time:—I was under a Cloud;
a very dark one; and saw, heard, and felt Everything under its
Shadow. I did not seem to love Prue much, nor to believe she loved
me; I took Pleasure in Nothing, and did Nothing well.
I wonder, now, how I could have been so silly. I am very glad People
could not see into my Heart, nor guess what was passing in my
tossed and fretted Mind. Oh! if our Neighbours sometimes lay to our
Charge Things that we know not, how often might they lay to our
Charge Things that they know not! They think us on good and
pleasant Terms with them, maybe, when we are full of Envy,
Jealousy, and Suspicion. They utter the careless Word and laugh the
cheerful Laugh, little guessing that their lightest Look, Word and
Tone are being weighed in a Balance.
I suppose my troubled Mind tinctured a Letter I wrote, at about this
Time, to Gatty; for in her Reply to it, which followed very quickly,
she said:

"I think I can see by your Writing that you are not well, nor
in good Spirits. How earnestly do I wish, dear Mrs. Patty,
you would come down to us here, and try the effect of a
little Change. Yours is a very toilsome, anxious Life, though
you carry it off so well; always afoot, always thinking of
others! But this may be overdone, and I think you have
overdone it now; so come down, pray, before you get any
worse. You know your Way to the Old Angel, dear Patty!
and though the Days are so very short now and the
Weather cold, the Roads are in fine Order and you shall
 have a warm Fireside. My Mother will be more joyed to see
you than I can express, and so will my Brothers and Sisters,
and I need not say how acceptable your Company will be to
me! My Month's Holiday is up, and I have writ to Lady
Betty; but she returns no Answer, and perhaps considers
me no longer her Servant. I cannot say I shall fret much if
it prove so; but the Fact must shortly be ascertained; as in
that Case I must seek another Service. How I should like to
go to that reverend, comfortable old Mrs. Arbuthnot!
Perhaps, when I send her Aprons, I might write a respectful
Line, saying I am in want of a Situation. Hers would be a
vastly different Service, I fancy, from my Lady Betty's. And
yet, do you know, that strange Sister of mine, Pen, is
certain she should like to live with my Lady! Dear Mrs.
Patty, I must abruptly conclude, as we are preparing to
spend the Evening at Roaring House. It is a good Step, and
there will be no Moon, but we shall do well with Lantern
and Pattens, and are not fear'd at Hob-Goblin.
"I depend on your coming, so name the Day; and wrap up
very warm, or else come inside the Coach. Tell the
Coachman to set you down at the Mile-Stone, just before
he reaches the Green Hatch; and we will be there to meet
you. There have been no Highway Robberies these three
Weeks, and only one Overturn, so don't be afraid."
"Your Affectionate,
"Gertrude Bowerbank."

"Roaring House," slowly repeated my Father, knocking the Ashes out

of his Pipe, when I had read him the greater Part of this Letter. "It
must be a very queer Place, I think, that has such a queer Name....
A roaring House!—hang it if I should like to live in it!—A House that
roars, or that has been accustomed to roar, very likely in the old
Days of the roaring Cavaliers!—A monstrous queer Name indeed!—
Aye, aye, many a Hogshead of strong Ale has been swilled in its
great, rambling Kitchen by roaring Boys, I warrant ye—A great,
rambling, scrambling, shambling House, with Doors and Casements
loose on their Hinges, that creak in the Wind, and with loose Tiles on
the great gabled Roofs, and Swallows' Nests in the great, windy
Chimneys, and creaking Boards in the uneven Floors and rotten old
Staircases, and dark Corners, and dark Cup-Boards, and windy Key-
Holes and winding Passages. That's my Notion of Roaring House."
"Is that where Gatty lives?" said Prudence heedlessly.
"No, where she was going to drink Tea; with Lantern and Pattens,"
said my Father—"Didn't you hear Patty read? Ha! Time was, I
wouldn't have minded being her Foot-Boy."
"But, Patty," said my dear Mother anxiously, "she does not think you
are well, Love. Do you wish to go to Larkfield?"
"Why, certainly, Mother, it would be a great Treat; only I don't see
how I could well be spared."
"Oh, we can spare you well enough," cries Prudence; "you won't be
missed!"
"Thank you," said I abruptly; and thought I would not go.
"We will manage to spare you very well, my dear Love," said my
dear Mother—"We will contrive so that you shall not be missed."
Just the same Thing, only said how differently! I thought I would go.
A kind Word spoken in Season, oh! how good is it!
In short, I decided to go, for I felt I wanted a Change; and I was
hourly in dread of saying in my present irritable State, something to
Prudence which I should afterwards be bitterly sorry for. I saw she
wanted me to go; I knew she could, if she would, supply my Place
for a little While; and I hoped after a short Absence to return with a
new Set of Ideas, and find all Things straight.
So I wrote to Gatty, to name my Day, and began to pack up. When
Mr. Fenwick heard I was going, he looked very much surprised; but
said Nothing. I was glad of the one and the other. I liked his being
surprised, and I liked his making no common-place Speeches. In the
mean Time, he had, I knew, addressed a Letter to Mr. Caryl; and I
found, rather unexpectedly, he had got an Answer;—in this Way.
I had carried up his Chocolate, and found him with his Elbow on the
Mantel-Piece, and his Thumb and Fore-Finger pinching his Chin very
hard, while he frowned anxiously over a Billet he was reading.
"This is very strange,—very provoking!" cried he, looking round to
me for Sympathy—"I don't know why I should trouble you to hear
about it, Mrs. Patty, but I am vexed!"
"I should like to hear about it if you please, Sir," said I quietly.
"Why,—the Matter is this. I sent Something I had been writing,—
Something I had taken a good deal of Pains with,—to Mr. Paul Caryl.
He seemed a good deal pleased with it, took it up quite warmly,
promised to put it in Train for me and give it his Patronage. A long
Interval has ensued, without Anything coming of it; at length I
venture to write him a gentle Reminder; and he, with a hundred
thousand Protestations and Apologies, writes to say that 'how to
excuse himself he knows not, but the plain Fact is, a Spark falling on
my Manuscript, has utterly consumed it.'"
"I don't believe it!" cried I with sudden Passion, "I don't believe one
Word of it!"
"Why, it's hard to believe—" begins Mr. Fenwick with an aggrieved
Air.
"It's not to be believed!" interrupted I vehemently; "it's a Falsehood,
if ever one was told! A trumped up, vamped up Story!"
"Hush, Mrs. Patty—"
"No, Sir, I can't hush, I know it's as I say: I'm sure of it! Oh, the
Meanness!—"
"My dear Patty!—"
"It's abominable, Sir! He, call himself a Gentleman?"
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