Kojeve, Girard, Nagel: surprising affinities

I was reading the beginning of Kojeve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel and was struck by how similar his account of desire was to that found in Girard and in Nagel. Kojeve speaks of how we learn to desire what others desire. This is the beginning of what Girard terms mimetic desire. Kojeve then says when we love others, we desire their desire in return. This is an insight Nagel arrives at quite differently in his essay on sexual perversion (though Nagel does say he is offering a sort of phenomenology of sexual desire, and Kojeve is writing on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and Nagel rhymes with Hegel). Whether there’s much more in it I don’t know, but when several people independently (if it is independent) arrive at a similar conclusion it surely makes it more plausible.

A Girardian homily for palm/passion sunday

Liturgy of the Palms: Lk 19.28-40

Liturgy of the Passion: Is. 50.4-9a; Ps 31.9-16; Phil 2.5-11; Lk 23.1-49

A contemporary comedian has a little aphorism: I can’t help thinking things might have gone differently for Jesus if only he’d turned up for his trial looking a bit smarter. This raises theological questions that we should consider in light of the Passion narrative; namely, why did Jesus die? and did he have to die? I think we’re all familiar with a fairly common answer to this question. It runs roughly as follows. God made people to be in relationship with each other and with God, but then people sinned against God and one another. God wanted to forgive us out of his great mercy, but was also constrained by his justice: a wrong had been done and had to be righted. Jesus resolves this dilemma by dying in our place so that we can have a restored relationship with God. Different explanations are offered for how this works. God’s honour has been slighted and must be restored, but only an infinite recompense can do this. Jesus, because he is God and human, can offer such infinite recompense. Or perhaps Jesus’ death on our behalf satisfies God’s wrath at our sin, and it satisfies his love and mercy because it restores us to relationship with God. We deserved death, but if Jesus dies in our place, our death can be avoided. In other words, Jesus is a sacrifice that reconciles us to God. This tells us why Jesus died and that his death was necessary. We simply cannot be reconciled to God without Jesus’ death: that’s the how and the why. I want to suggest there’s something problematic about this picture.

Here’s the first problem. God neither needs nor lacks anything. God cannot be diminished by anything we do. To suggest therefore that God somehow needs to make up for lost honour misunderstands God, making him too much like us. This story has created an idol. The thing about idols is that even though we create them, they end up exerting power over us. (A bit like Pop Idol, but more insidious). This brings us to the second problem: the effects of this picture of God and salvation are to make violence and victimisation valuable and sacred. If we have a god – in actuality an idol – who demands violence and the victims of violence, this can legitimate a lot of our violence, it can prevent us from helping victims by ending injustice. A woman I know was in an abusive relationship, but partly due to the value given to suffering and partly due to a belief in male headship, she was encouraged by her church to continue living with that abuse for a long time. A belief in a god who requires victims can paradoxically make our own victims invisible to us.

Our passages, however, may suggest a different understanding. To see this, we need a quick detour into the thought of René Girard. Girard was an anthropologist, and in his studies of peoples and cultures he came to the conclusion that pretty much everything in human behaviour is learned through imitation, through copying. This is true of our desires: we learn to want what the people around us want, from food to visions of the good life. Girard’s studies at first concentrated on what he called ‘primitive’ societies and religions. He noticed that if lots of people desire the same limited number of objects, this can produce conflict. If this conflict escalates the community will tear itself apart. One solution to this is to produce a victim, a scapegoat. The conflict of all with all is now replaced by the conflict of everyone against this one victim. The victim is killed and, because there’s no-one on the side of the victim to take vengeance, the conflict that threatened to destroy the community is averted. The victim was chosen arbitrarily: they hadn’t actually done anything wrong, certainly they were not responsible for the societal conflict as a whole. Yet, because their death ends the conflict, the result of their sacrifice seems to confirm the guilt attributed to them by the rest of society. It can also appear that the victim caused the peace that followed their death, and so the victim is regarded as sacred. And so Girard concludes that the ‘sacred is violence’; religion is an ‘immense effort to keep the peace’, but it does so by creating random, innocent victims and sacrificing them. To take a small example, consider the way in which groups try to maintain and build up their unity by rejecting another person or group. Children do this when they bully someone, the BNP does it in its treatment of immigrants, churches sometimes do it in their treatment of homosexuals. What is crucial to this process is that it remains hidden. If people know they are transferring their violence onto an arbitrary, innocent victim, they can no longer believe in its sacred powers to produce peace. If people realise the bullied person or immigrants or homosexuals are not the real problem they have no other way of ending conflict and uniting the group.

Girard found this same mechanism again and again throughout different societies and religions. He naturally expected to find it in the Judaeo-Christian scriptures. After all, the Old Testament has a sacrificial system and the common story about Jesus is that his death is a sacrifice. Yet, to his surprise, Girard discovered that the Old Testament begins a process, finally perfected in Jesus’ life and the Gospels, of revealing the victim precisely as an arbitrary and innocent victim. This process happens slowly and haltingly, as we might expect, but it reaches its highpoint in the Jewish Scriptures in the prophets, and especially the servant songs of Isaiah, one of which we have just read. In Isaiah 50 the speaker listens to God, is not rebellious, and believes that he will be vindicated by God and shown to be guiltless. Yet the servant is struck and humiliated. So we see the servant as a victim but what is beginning to emerge, for the first time in human history, is the innocence of the victim. Yet with Isaiah we still have an ambiguity. Is this violence and humiliation the will of God, or is it a human reaction to the servant’s divine message, neither desired nor approved of by God, but a likely, even inevitable, result of the message nonetheless? Isaiah never answers the question, but the Gospels do, and that is what makes them unique, both a fulfilling of the process begun in the Old Testament and a decisive step beyond it.

In Luke’s Passion account, the innocence of Jesus could not be emphasised more thoroughly. Pilate, Herod, the centurion, and one of the condemned criminals all declare Jesus’ innocence. Jesus is contrasted with Barabbas who actually has followed the way of violence through insurrection and murder. What is unique about the Gospels is that they reveal to us the ‘founding murder’, the establishment of our peace on the violent exclusion of the innocent victim. This brings us to the third thing wrong with the sacrificial reading of Jesus’ death. This reading tells us we cannot be forgiven without Jesus’ death, but before he dies, Jesus goes around telling lots of people their sins are forgiven. One of the central messages of Jesus’ preaching was that ‘reconciliation with God can take place unreservedly and with no sacrificial intermediary’. In other words, God does not require any sacrificial victims in order to forgive, especially not his own beloved Son. That means there is no metaphysical cosmic law requiring Jesus’ death, as if the Old Testament system of sacrifice is somehow coded into the universe. God is not bound by some law to require Jesus’ death in order to forgive us. On the contrary, what Jesus’ life reveals is that God doesn’t need anything to persuade him to forgive.

Jesus’ message is that we should renounce violence just as God does, that we should not found our societies on innocent victims because neither does God. Now Jesus’ message did not prove particularly popular. His critique of the sacrificial system in the Temple as a means of forgiveness, coming on the back of his indiscriminate pronouncements of forgiveness, was the last straw for his enemies who had him killed. Why did Jesus die? Because people killed him, not because God wanted him to die or required his death. Did Jesus have to die? No. If people had accepted his message and begun to renounce violence and live in peace, as he suggests in the Sermon on the Mount, they wouldn’t have killed him. But instead, the very power structures that Jesus was revealing as violent, decided to silence him through murder, thus proving his point. But now Jesus has shown them up for what they are, as based on the death of the sacrificial victim. And we know that revealing the sacrifice mechanism is the first step to disarming it. That is why Paul says in Colossians 2.15 that Jesus ‘disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in’ the cross. And in 1 Corinthians 2.8 that ‘None of the rulers of the age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.’ Jesus’ death is an result, not a means of his saving us. He was killed because we react violently against anyone trying to show us our own violence, not because his death was needed by God to fix our relationship with him. It shows the difference between the world as we construct it and the world as God wants it to be.

Jesus reveals to us the basis of all religion and culture in violence. Insofar as we cling to the belief in a God who requires a sacrifice in order to forgive us, we perpetuate the very violence Jesus came to end. Jesus invites us to join the project of ending violence. Since we learn our desires and behaviour from other people, what we need is a group of people with a culture that is not founded on the sacrificial victim but on the free, gracious forgiveness offered by Jesus’ God. At this point it would be neat to say, ‘that’s what the church is!’ But the church and we as individuals are still not as free from violence and sacrificial thinking as we would like to believe. So our religion should not be a comfort to us here so much as a question we constantly put to ourselves. That’s Paul’s challenge in Philippians 2. Let the same mind be in us that was in Christ, who was obedient to the very end.