http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9708
The sacred and the human
Today's atheist polemics ignore the main insight of the anthropology
of religion-that religion is not primarily about God, but about the
human need for the sacred. As René Girard argues, religion is not the
cause of violence, but the solution to it
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton is a philosopher and a research professor at the
Institute for the Psychological Sciences, Virginia
It is not surprising that decent, sceptical people, observing the
revival in our time of superstitious cults, the conflict between
secular freedoms and religious edicts, and the murderousness of
radical Islamism, should be receptive to the anti-religious polemics
of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others. The "sleep of
reason" has brought forth monsters, just as Goya foretold in his
engraving. How are we to rectify this, except through a wake-up call
to reason, of the kind that the evangelical atheists are now shouting
from their pulpits?
What is a little more surprising is the extent to which religion is
caricatured by its current opponents, who seem to see in it nothing
more than a system of unfounded beliefs about the cosmos-beliefs that,
to the extent that they conflict with the scientific worldview, are
heading straight for refutation. Thus Hitchens, in his relentlessly
one-sided diatribe God is Not Great, writes: "One must state it
plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where
nobody... had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the
bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt
to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort,
reassurance and other infantile needs)."
Hitchens is an intelligent and widely read man who recognises that the
arguments most useful to him were well known 200 years ago. His book
takes us through territory charted by Hume, Voltaire, Diderot and
Kant, and nobody familiar with the Enlightenment can believe that our
contemporary imitators have added anything to its stance against
religion, whatever examples they can add to the list of religiously
motivated crimes. However, Enlightenment thinkers, having shown the
claims of faith to be without rational foundation, did not then
dismiss religion, as one might dismiss a refuted theory. Many went on
to conclude that religion must have some other origin than the pursuit
of scientific knowledge, and some other psychic function than
consolation. The ease with which the common doctrines of religion
could be refuted alerted men like Jacobi, Schiller and Schelling to
the idea that religion is not, in essence, a matter of doctrine, but
of something else. And they set out to discover what that might be.
Thus was born the anthropology of religion. For thinkers in the
immediate aftermath of the Enlightenment, it was not faith, but faiths
in the plural, that composed the primary subject matter of theology.
Hence the appearance of books like CF Dupuis's Origine de tous les
cultes, ou Religion universelle (1795), and the busy decipherment of
oriental religions by the Bengal Asiatic Society, whose proceedings
began to appear in Calcutta in 1788. For post-Enlightenment thinkers,
the monotheistic belief systems were not related to ancient myths and
rituals as science to superstition, or logic to magic. Rather, they
were crystallisations of the emotional need which found expression
both in the myths and rituals of antiquity and in the Vedas and
Upanishads of the Hindus. This thought led Georg Creuzer, whose
Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker appeared between 1810 and
1812, to represent myth as a distinctive operation of the human
psyche. A myth does not describe what happened in some obscure period
before human reckoning, but what happens always and repeatedly. It
does not explain the causal origins of our world, but rehearses its
permanent spiritual significance.
If you look at ancient religion in this way, then inevitably your
vision of the Judeo-Christian canon changes. The Genesis story of the
creation is easily refuted as an account of historical events: how can
there be days without a sun, man without a woman, life without death?
Read as a myth, however, this naive-seeming text reveals itself as a
study of the human condition. The story of the fall is, Hegel wrote
(in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1827), "not just a
contingent history but the eternal and necessary history of humanity."
It conveys truths about freedom, about guilt, about man, woman and
their relationship, about our relation to nature and mortality. For
Hegel, myths and rituals are forms of self-discovery, through which we
understand the place of the subject in a world of objects, and the
inner freedom that conditions all that we do. The emergence of
monotheism from the polytheistic religions of antiquity is not so much
a discovery as a form of self-creation, as the spirit learns to
recognise itself in the whole of things, and to overcome its
finitude.
Between those early ventures into the anthropology of religion and the
later studies of James Frazer, Emile Durkheim and the Freudians, two
thinkers stand out as the founders of a new intellectual enterprise-an
enterprise which seems not to have been noticed by Hitchens, Dawkins
or Daniel Dennett. The thinkers are Nietzsche and Wagner, and the
intellectual enterprise is that of showing the place of the sacred in
human life, and the kind of knowledge and understanding that comes to
us through the experience of sacred things. Nietzsche, in The Birth of
Tragedy, and Wagner, in Tristan, The Ring and Parsifal, as well as in
his writings on tragedy and religion, painted a picture that, while
rooted in the post-Enlightenment tradition, placed the concept of the
sacred at the centre of the anthropology of religion. The lesson that
both thinkers took from the Greeks was that you could subtract the
gods and their stories from Greek religion without taking away the
most important thing. This thing had its primary reality not in myths
or theology or doctrine, but in rituals, in moments that stand outside
time, in which the loneliness and anxiety of the human individual is
confronted and overcome, through immersion in the group-an idea that
was later to be made foundational to the sociology of religion by
Durkheim. By calling these moments "sacred," we recognise both their
complex social meaning and also the respite that they offer from
alienation.
The attempt by Nietzsche and Wagner to understand the concept of the
sacred was taken forward not by anthropologists but by theologians and
critics-Rudolf Otto in Das Heilige (1917), Georges Bataille in
L'Érotisme (1957), Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane (1957),
and, most explicitly and shockingly, René Girard in La violence et le
sacré (1972). It is Girard's theory, it seems to me, that most
urgently needs to be debated, now that atheist triumphalism is
sweeping all nuances away. For it helps us understand questions that
even atheists must confront, and that their dogmatic certainties
otherwise obscure: what is religion; what draws people to it; and how
is it tamed?
Girard begins from an observation no impartial reader of the Hebrew
Bible or the Koran can fail to make, which is that religion may offer
peace, but has its roots in violence. The God presented in these
writings is often angry, given to fits of destruction and seldom
deserving of the epithets bestowed upon him in the Koran-al-rahmân al-
rahîm, "the compassionate, the merciful." He makes outrageous and
bloodthirsty demands-such as the demand that Abraham sacrifice his son
Isaac. He is obsessed with the genitals and adamant that they should
be mutilated in his honour-a theme that has been explored by Jack
Miles in his riveting book God: A Biography (1995). Thinkers like
Dawkins and Hitchens conclude that religion is the cause of this
violence and sexual obsession, and that the crimes committed in the
name of religion can be seen as the definitive disproof of it. Not so,
argues Girard. Religion is not the cause of violence but the solution
to it. The violence comes from another source, and there is no society
without it since it comes from the very attempt of human beings to
live together. The same can be said of the religious obsession with
sexuality: religion is not its cause, but an attempt to resolve it.
Girard's theory is best understood as a kind of inversion of an idea
of Nietzsche's. In his later writings, Nietzsche expounded a kind of
creation myth, by way of accounting for the structure of modern
society. On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) envisages a primeval human
society, reduced to near universal slavery by the "beasts of prey"-the
strong, self-affirming, healthy egoists who impose their desires on
others by the force of their nature. The master race maintains its
position by punishing all deviation on the part of the slaves-just as
we punish a disobedient horse. The slave, too timid and demoralised to
rebel, receives this punishment as a retribution. Because he cannot
exact revenge, the slave expends his resentment on himself, coming to
think of his condition as in some way deserved. Thus is born the sense
of guilt and the idea of sin. The resentment of the slave explains,
for Nietzsche, the entire theological and moral vision of
Christianity. Christianity owes its power to the resentment upon which
it feeds: resentment which, because it cannot express itself in
violence, remains turned against itself. Thus arises the ethic of
compassion, the mortification of the flesh and the life-denying
routines of the "slave morality." Christianity is a form of self-
directed violence, which conceals a deep resentment against every form
of human mastery.
That "genealogy" of Christian morals was effectively exploded by Max
Scheler in his book Ressentiment (1912). Scheler argues that the
Christian ethic of agape and forgiveness is not an expression of
resentment but rather the only way to overcome it. Nevertheless, there
is surely an important truth concealed within Nietzsche's wild
generalisations. Resentment remains a fundamental component in our
social emotions, and it is widely prevalent in modern societies. The
20th century was the century of resentment. How else do you explain
the mass murders of the communists and the Nazis, the seething
animosities of Lenin and Hitler, the genocides of Mao and Pol Pot? The
ideas and emotions behind the totalitarian movements of the 20th
century are targeted: they identify a class of enemy whose privileges
and property have been unjustly acquired. Religion plays no real part
in the ensuing destruction, and indeed is usually included among the
targets.
Girard's theory, like Nietzsche's, is expressed as a genealogy, or a
"creation myth": a fanciful description of the origins of human
society from which to derive an account of its present structure. (It
is significant that Girard came to the anthropology of religion from
literary criticism.) And like Nietzsche, Girard sees the primeval
condition of society as one of conflict. It is in the effort to
resolve this conflict that the experience of the sacred is born. This
experience comes to us in many forms-religious ritual, prayer, tragedy-
but its true origin is in acts of communal violence. Primitive
societies are invaded by "mimetic desire," as rivals struggle to match
each other's social and material acquisitions, so heightening
antagonism and precipitating the cycle of revenge. The solution is to
identify a victim, one marked by fate as outside the community and
therefore not entitled to vengeance against it, who can be the target
of the accumulated bloodlust, and who can bring the chain of
retribution to an end. Scapegoating is society's way of recreating
"difference" and so restoring itself. By uniting against the
scapegoat, people are released from their rivalries and reconciled.
Through his death, the scapegoat purges society of its accumulated
violence. The scapegoat's resulting sanctity is the long-term echo of
the awe, relief and visceral re-attachment to the community that was
experienced at his death.
According to Girard, the need for sacrificial scapegoating is
implanted in the human psyche, arising from the attempt to form a
durable community in which the moral life can be successfully pursued.
One purpose of the theatre is to provide fictional substitutes for the
original crime, and so to obtain the benefit of moral renewal without
the horrific cost. In Girard's view, a tragedy like Sophocles' Oedipus
Tyrannus is a way of retelling the story of what was originally a
ritual sacrifice in which the victim can be sacrificed without
renewing the cycle of revenge. The victim is both sacrificed and
sacred, the source of the city's plagues and their cure.
In many Old Testament stories, we see the ancient Israelites wrestling
with this sacrificial urge. The stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and
Isaac and Sodom and Gomorrah are residues of extended conflicts, by
which ritual was diverted from the human victim and attached first to
animal sacrifices, and finally to sacred words. By this process a
viable morality emerged from competition and conflict, and from the
visceral rivalries of sexual predation. To repeat: religion is not the
source of violence but the solution to it-the overcoming of mimetic
desire and the transcending of the resentments and jealousies into
which human communities are tempted by their competitive dynamic.
It is in just this way, Girard argues, that we should see the
achievement of Christianity. In his study of the scapegoat, Le Bouc
émissaire (1982), Girard identifies Christ as a new kind of victim-one
who offers himself for sacrifice, and who, in doing so, shows that he
understands what is going on. The words "Father, forgive them, for
they know not what they do" are pivotal for Girard. They involve a
recognition of the need for sacrifice, if the guilt and resentment of
the community is to be appeased and transcended, and the added
recognition that this function must be concealed. Only those ignorant
of the source of their hatred can be healed by its expression, for
only they can proceed with a clear conscience towards the tragic
climax. The climax, however, is not the death of the scapegoat but the
experience of sacred awe, as the victim, at the moment of death,
forgives his tormentors. This is the moment of transcendence, in which
even the cruellest of persecutors can learn to humble himself and to
renounce his vengeful passion. Through his acceptance of his
sacrifical role, Christ made the "love of neighbour"-which had
featured in the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible as the standard to
which humanity should aspire-into a reality in the hearts of those who
meditate upon his gesture. Christ's submission purified society and
religion of the need for sacrificial murder: his conscious self-
sacrifice is therefore, Girard suggests, rightly thought of as a
redemption, and we should not be surprised if, when we turn away from
our Christian legacy, as Nazis and communists did, the hecatombs of
victims reappear.
Girard's account of the Passion is amplified by many references to
Freud and Lévi-Strauss, and by a conviction that religion and tragedy
are, as Nietzsche argued, adjacent in the human psyche, comparable
receptacles for the experience of sacred awe. The experience of the
sacred is not an irrational residue of primitive fears, nor is it a
form of superstition that will one day be chased away by science. It
is a solution to the accumulated aggression which lies in the heart of
human communities. That is how Girard explains the peace and
celebration that attends the ritual of communion-the sense of renewal
which must always itself be renewed. Girard takes himself to be
describing deep features of the human condition, which can be observed
as well in the mystery cults of antiquity and the local shrines of
Hinduism as in the everyday "miracle" of the Eucharist.
There are many features of Girard's theory that can be criticised-not
least the idea that human institutions can be explained through
creation myths. We need more evidence than is contained in a creation
myth for the view that our "original" condition is one of vengeful
competition. And the alleged "mimetic" nature of human competition is
underjustified. Moreover, there are other plausible explanations of
the ancient ritual of animal sacrifice besides the one offered by
Girard; and the success of the Christian ethic has other causes
besides the mystical reversal that allegedly occurred on the cross.
The growth of towns under Roman imperial jurisdiction meant that
people were in daily contact with "the other," and living under
competing urges both to exclude and to forgive. Why is that not an
equal factor in explaining the rapid spread of a gospel of
disinterested love?
Such criticisms do not, it seems to me, account for the comparative
neglect of Girard's ideas. Girard's thesis has been received with the
same dismissive indifference as Nietzsche's in The Birth of Tragedy,
and though he has been honoured with a siege (seat) at the Académie
française, the honour has come only now, as Girard approaches his 90th
year. I suspect that, like Nietzsche, Girard has reminded us of truths
that we would rather forget-in particular the truth that religion is
not primarily about God but about the sacred, and that the experience
of the sacred can be suppressed, ignored and even desecrated (the
routine tribute paid to it in modern societies) but never destroyed.
Always the need for it will arise, for it is in the nature of rational
beings like us to live at the edge of things, experiencing our
alienation and longing for the sudden reversal that will once again
join us to the centre. For Girard, that reversal is a kind of self-
forgiveness, as the concealed aggressions of our social life are
transcended-washed in the blood of the lamb.
Girard's genealogy casts an anthropological light on the Christian
ethic and on the meaning of the Eucharist; but it is not just an
anthropological theory. Girard himself treats it as a piece of
theology. For him, it is a kind of proof of the Christian religion and
of the divinity of Jesus. And in a striking article in the Stanford
Italian Review (1986), he suggests that the path that has led him from
the inner meaning of the Eucharist to the truth of Christianity was
one followed by Wagner in Parsifal, and one along which even Nietzsche
reluctantly strayed, under the influence of Wagner's masterpiece.
Of course, you don't have to follow Girard into those obscure and
controversial regions in order to endorse his view of the sacred as a
human universal. Nor do you have to accept the cosmology of monotheism
in order to understand why it is that this experience of the sacred
should attach itself to the three great transitions-the three rites of
passage-which mark the cyclical continuity of human societies. Birth,
copulation and death are the moments when time stands still, when we
look on the world from a point at its edge, when we experience our
dependence and contingency, and when we are apt to be filled with an
entirely reasonable awe. It is from such moments, replete with
emotional knowledge, that religion begins. The rational person is not
the one who scoffs at all religions, but the one who tries to discover
which of them, if any, can make sense of those things, and, while
doing so, draw the poison of resentment.
