HeyJ LI (2010), pp.

45–59

METAPHYSICS AND THE REDEMPTION OF

SACRIFICE: ON RENÉ GIRARD AND CHARLES
WILLIAMS
JACOB SHERMAN
Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, UK

René Girard is something of a Janus for philosophers and theologians interested in the question of
sacrifice. On the one hand, few thinkers in any century have made such a compelling case for the
importance and centrality of sacrifice within all human culture. On the other hand, Girard has steadfastly
insisted that sacrifice be understood in exclusively anthropological terms thus foreclosing the
metaphysical and theological questions that prima facie seem to attend any robust consideration of
sacrifice. In this essay, I seek to move beyond this Girardian impasse by supplementing Girard’s late-
thought with a more robust metaphysics of sacrifice as found in the work of the novelist, literary critic,
and theologian, Charles Williams (one of the Oxford ‘Inklings’ and a close companion of C.S. Lewis). To
begin with, I first explain Girard’s understanding of the mimetic mechanism and the sacrificial origins of
human culture. I then consider a number of the criticisms with which he has been charged, especially the
accusation of methodological reductionism. I explore the way that Girard’s late work has responded to a
number of these criticisms but argue that Girard’s responses fail to diffuse the charges. By way of
conclusion, I suggest that Girard’s insights can be saved when supplemented with the kind of relational
metaphysics found in Williams’ most perfectly realized novel, Descent into Hell. Rather than dispensing
with ontology in favour of praxis, Williams transforms the profoundly Girardian themes of mediated
desire, the doppelganger, mimetic rivalry, ritual, and the function of sacrifice by placing them in the
context of what he calls the metaphysics of ‘co-inherence.’ This allows Williams to provide a far more
positive account of both mimesis and sacrifice (even in its substitutionary mode) than Girard, not just
non-retaliation but the actual bearing of one another’s deepest burdens in communion, prayer, and love.

I. THE GIRARDIAN VISION

Henri Bergson held that the work of every great philosopher was animated by a single
point of intuition, an insight so powerful and ‘so extraordinarily simple that the
philosopher has never succeeded in saying it. And that is why he went on talking all his
life.’1 This remark perhaps characterizes certain thinkers more than others, but it is
nowhere more true than in the case of René Girard. Over the course of nearly half a
century, Girard has laboured in the service of a single insight that can be called the
mimesis-sacrifice complex. Girard has so persistently stayed with this one theme that those
who have once understood him are liable to wonder why they should read him again. Isn’t
it always just ‘the same old Girard’? While there is some merit in this concern, there are
good reasons for us to return to Girard at this time in particular. To begin with, in the
midst of renewed controversy about the meaning of atonement in theological circles, and
about the meaning of sacrifice in cultural theory and philosophy, attention must be paid
especially to Girard. No one has thought more profoundly, creatively, and doggedly about
these matters, and for this work he was rewarded, in March of 2005, with an election to the
Acade´mie française, the highest honour that can be given to any French intellectual.
However, it is not only present controversies and recent laurels that invite us to reconsider

r The author 2010. Journal compilation r Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered 2010. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600
Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
46 JACOB SHERMAN

the man, but also metamorphoses within Girard’s thought itself. Girard’s one insight has
continued to develop in profound and suggestive ways, as evidenced especially by the
publication of his recent Evolution and Conversion (2008). This text is a sort of sequel and
amendment to what remains Girard’s most famous and influential work, Things Hidden
Since the Foundation of the World (1978). Both volumes are written as dialogues, each a
three-way conversation between Girard and a pair of interlocutors, but the recent volume
both revises and develops the older one especially by clarifying Girard’s new attitude to
sacrifice and by pushing his mimetic theory further into the recesses of evolutionary
history. In this volume we see where Girard stands today. If Things Hidden was the always-
Augustinian Girard’s Confessions, then Evolution and Conversion is his Retractiones. There
is much to welcome in Girard’s development but also some ambiguity, for by pressing his
theory to its limits, Girard makes more acute certain criticisms that had already been
levelled against him, especially as regards his methodology and the need for a metaphysical
and theological supplement to Girard’s anthropological insights.
Let us begin, however, by recounting the basics of Girardian theory before considering
the ways he has now revised it.2 At the heart of Girard’s work is what I called above the
mimesis-sacrifice complex, the vision of which Girard arrived at through a series of literary
and anthropological studies in the 1960s and 70s. In Girard’s hands, the mimesis-sacrifice
complex becomes a global theory of origins explaining both human behaviour and the
genesis of cultural institutions. The complex can be broken down into five sequential stages:
1. Mimetic desire
2. Mimetic doubling
3. Mimetic crisis
4. The Single-Victim-Mechanism
5. Theogony and the genesis of culture
The first stage is an account of the way that all human desire is fundamentally a function
of mimesis. Girard develops this thesis in his debut book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, a
study of the five European novelists Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, and
Dostoevsky.3 He argues that the fundamental insight of the modern novel, present
already in Cervantes, is that human desire is always mediated through a model. Desire is
not a binary relation between a subject and an object but a triadic operation between a
subject who desires, an object that is desired, and a model who shows the subject how and
what to desire.4 In Cervantes, for example, Don Quixote sets off to become chivalrous by
imitating the legendary Amadis of Gaul, the perfect knight errant. As Girard writes:
Don Quixote has surrendered to Amadis the individual’s fundamental prerogative: he no longer
chooses the objects of his own desire – Amadis must choose for him. The disciple pursues objects
which are determined for him, or at least seem to be determined for him, by the model of all
chivalry. We shall call the model the mediator of desire. Chivalric existence is the imitation of
Amadis in the same sense that the Christian’s existence is the imitation of Christ.5

What makes Quixote peculiar is not that his desire is mimetic, but that he selects the
uncanny model of a legendary knight from ages past, rather than the more quotidian
models of neighbor and surrounding culture, or the sanctioned models of accepted
religion. Radicalizing Aristotle’s insight that human beings are distinguished from animals
by our capacity for imitation (Poetics 4.2), Girard’s mimetic theory insists that our
instinctual animal drives (e.g., hunger, thirst, sex, etc.) only become human desires when
mediated through a model. In contrast to the subjective turn in so much modern theory
 METAPHYSICS AND THE REDEMPTION OF SACRIFICE 47

Girard holds that desire precedes the self. There exists no isolated self in possession of its
own inviolate desires: we only ever become selves in the first place by mimicking the desires
of others. As Girard explains in Things Hidden, because mimesis is originary, we are never
ourselves individuals; we are always ‘interdividuals.’6
Girard distinguishes between two crucially different sorts of mediation: external and
internal. External meditation occurs when the mediator is sufficiently removed from the
subject’s world that there can be no danger of rivalry between subject and model.7 Amadis
can no sooner be threatened by Quixote than Christ can be in competition with his
disciples. External mediators are gods, demigods, heroes, the dead, those of different
lands, and those whose social status renders them all but inaccessible to the subject (nobles
and commoners, for example, or today, celebrities and their fans). Mediation is internal,
however, when the model is found within the subject’s world. In this case, the social,
symbolic, spatial, or temporal hiatus between subject and model is not wide enough to
prevent them from becoming competitive. Think of two children in a sandbox. Both may
conveniently ignore a bright yellow bucket in the corner until one of them decides to play
with it. Suddenly the other finds it desirable, as well. This unleashes a mimetic shuttle
between the two children, each becoming the model for the other’s desire, and aggravating
the other’s desire in turn, until the ferocity of their mutual demand for the single yellow
pail issues in violent conflict. Nor is any of this surprising. As Girard notes, ‘The mimetic
quality of childhood desire is universally recognized.’ However, what is rarely acknowl-
edged is that ‘adult desire is virtually identical, except that . . . the adult is generally
ashamed to imitate others for fear of revealing his own lack of being.’8
Internal mediation for both children and adults is thus the harbinger of the second stage in
the mimesis-sacrifice complex, that of mimetic doubling. In myth and literature, this mimetic
doubling is often represented by the familiar themes of fraternal conflict, the evil twin, or the
doppelganger. We desire what our model desires and how our model desires it. The nearer the
model to our world, the more danger that we will not only seek to be like him, but that we will
seek to possess what he possesses, to be who he is. At this stage, we no longer desire merely an
object, we desire the being of our model, we seek to take his being. The proper name for this
is, of course, violence. The model, in turn, will respond with violence not only in order to
protect himself or his possessions, but also because our violent desire becomes a mimetic
model for him. Our desire for violence becomes his desire for violence, and his becomes ours,
and so violence becomes yet more attractive in the escalating shuttle between model and
subject. Soon the initially desired object will be entirely eclipsed; all that remains is the
identical desire for violence. Girard’s analyses of this are often incisive and profound. The
desire for violence is raw desire, desire without an object, the sublime. He writes:
Violent opposition, then, is the signifier of ultimate desire, of divine self-sufficiency, of that
‘beautiful totality’ whose beauty depends on its being inaccessible and impenetrable. The victim of
this violence both adores and detests it . . .. Desire clings to violence and stalks it like a shadow
because violence is the signifier of the cherished being, the signifier of divinity.9

The sublime vanishing point of pure violence is the fulcrum around which a sort of mimetic
chiasm turns. In the end, rivalry effaces all differences leaving two doubles locked in
violent contest.
The almost mechanical precision with which violence escalates in mimetic rivalry poses
a very great threat to the community surrounding the contestants. For the promiscuous
circulation of desire is not easily contained but instead acts like a contagion; the stronger it
grows the more likely that it will leap from the initial rivals and thereby infect mere
48 JACOB SHERMAN

bystanders. This is the advent of the third stage, the mimetic crisis. The desire for violence
produces doubles everywhere, suppressing all differences, destroying the hierarchies that
alone allow the group, tribe, or society to function. The weakening of hierarchy and
institution encourages the spread of mob mentality, further augmenting mimetic
susceptibility. It does not matter whether the proximate cause for the weakening of these
structures lies in the entirely immanent mechanisms described above (internal mimetic
desire leading to rivalry leading to crisis) or whether external forces such plague, famine, or
war intervene. The end result of either scenario is the same: rampant mimetic rivalry and
social disorder. Once begun, a rigorous logic governs the exponential spread of the crisis.
As the paroxysm of violence intensifies, the social barriers that would contain it collapse,
and the violence grows fiercer, the mimetic reduplication more rapid, until the entire
population is left in the Hobbesean state of nature: bellum omnia contra omnes.
Girard hypothesizes that upon reaching this point, many early human communities simply
vanished, consumed by an insatiable violence. But others managed to survive. How? The
answer is found in the mechanism of mimetic violence itself. Like the bleeding lance of
Wagner’s Parsifal that both wounds and heals, mimetic violence is its own cure. Recall that at
its highest pitch mimetic desire is desire without an object, a raw desire for violence alone. So
long as rivals compete for an object, mimetic desire divides them against one another. But
once the desire becomes the sheer desire for violence, pure hatred, then the possibility of
communal reconciliation is opened.10 The permeability of individuals to one another’s desires
can produce a situation in which the crowd focuses its antagonism upon one mimetically
chosen culprit, victim, or scapegoat. In such cases, raw mimetic violence initiates a unanimity
event. The crowd descends with one ravenous voice upon its victim, the bellum omnia contra
omnes suddenly transfigured into a bellum omnia contra unum. As Girard writes:
The rivalrous and conflictual mimesis is spontaneously and automatically transformed into
reconciliatory mimesis. For, if it is impossible for the rivals to find an agreement around the object
which everybody wants, this very agreement is quickly found, on the contrary, against the victim
whom everybody hates.11

This is the fourth stage in the sequence, what Girard often calls the scapegoat or the single-
victim mechanism. Like Freud in Moses and Monotheism, Girard stubbornly insists that
we take this lynching quite literally; this is the founding violence of Romulus against
Remus and Cain against Abel, the real murder that lies at the origin of human institutions,
culture, and society.
Only when we grasp that communal stability is the result of the single-victim mechanism
are we finally in a position, argues Girard, to understand the ubiquity of sacrifice throughout
ancient culture. The problem of sacrifice is one of the most intractable anthropological
mysteries, producing the wildest of explanations including the theory that no explanation is
possible for sacrifice is held to be inherently irrational.12 Girard vehemently disagrees. Not
only is sacrifice perfectly intelligible in itself, but we owe our very rationality to the efficacy of
such sacrifices. Sacrifice is the ritual re-enactment of the single-victim mechanism, but in order
to understand it we must try to imagine how the mob in its mimetic frenzy experiences the
original lynching. If the single-victim mechanism is to be effective, it must remain invisible.
The murderers must believe in their own innocence and thus perforce in the guilt of the victim.
Although the root of the community’s crisis lies in the mimetic rivalry that grips it, the mob
unconsciously (me´connaisance) transfers its own culpability to a single victim selected because
of their marginal or exceptional status (think of Oedipus’s disability, Jacob’s favour for
Joseph, the suspect parenthood of the Christ, the role of gender in witch-hunts, and so on).
 METAPHYSICS AND THE REDEMPTION OF SACRIFICE 49

The crowd hurls accusations against the selected victim: incestuous trysts, liaisons with the
devil, the casting of curses, the evil eye, poisoning crops, food, and water, looking luridly upon
a woman of another race or class, and so on. The more taboo and the harder to verify, the
better. The crowd justifies its violence by vilifying its victim. And then a second unconscious
transference occurs. The death of the sacrificial victim is experienced as a kind of alchemical
operation transforming baleful into benevolent violence.13 Its anger spent, the community
finds itself at peace. Metonymically, the victim is awarded responsibility for the community’s
harmony and newfound exaltation. The victim, who was initially demonized, is now divinized
for, the crowd reasons, who but a god could have solved our crisis? Rather than the body of a
victim, we remember the presence of a god. Thus this second transference hides the real corpse
behind a sacred cloak, blinding us to the genuine violence of the operation.
This religious sublimation of actual violence is the explanation, Girard believes, for the
almost universal trope in archaic myth, religion, and tragedy of divine ambiguity. If the
gods are always found to be both good and evil, responsible for both our woe and our
weal, if they first punish and then heal, this is because behind the gods lie real victims of
communal violence. In the double transference lies the entire machine of ritual sacrifice,
and thus of archaic religion. This is what I labelled the fifth stage of the mimesis-sacrifice
complex, that of theogony and the creation of culture. People discover that exhausting
their violence against a single victim brings harmony and so when the next mimetic crisis
arises they search more deliberately for a new victim. Eventually, this entire process is
ritualized in order to prevent the crisis from emerging in the first place. Ritual sacrifice is
born. Myths arise as the story of the crisis told from the perspective of the murderers who
assume both their own innocence and the coupling of guilt and divinity in the victim.14
Laws, institutions, prohibitions, language, writing, all of the accoutrements of culture
emerge out of this ritualizing of the single-victim mechanism. The sacred is the father of all
human culture and, as Girard says, ‘the sacred is violence.’15
Girard’s is indeed a radical thesis. As Rowan Williams rightly notes, Girard ‘effectively
turns on its head the textbook view of the relation between religion and social order: social
power is a transformation of the sacred . . . rather than the sacred being an ideological
transformation of social relations.’16 Girard does not believe that his radical thesis is an
aperçu of his own but is rather a re-narration of the discovery that lies at the heart of
Jewish and Christian revelation. Already in 1959, while writing his first work on the five
European novelists, Girard had converted back to the Catholicism he abandoned in his
youth, but the importance of the Christian revelation for his work was not made apparent
until the publication of Things Hidden in 1978. Since then Girard has made it increasingly
clear that he sees his work as simply the anthropological complement to the theological
and scriptural language of Judaism and Christianity. As Girard writes, ‘Our own ability to
detect the scapegoat mechanism is wholly determined by the detection that has already
taken place within the gospel.’17 The Hebrew and Christian scriptures remarkably unveil
the victimizing mechanisms that have been hidden since the foundation of the world
because they tell the same story as the myths and rituals of sacrifice, but they do so from
the perspective of the innocent victim. Thus Girard proclaims, ‘Myth is the guilt of
Oedipus; truth is the Cross of Christ.’18 The disclosure of the single-victim mechanism,
however, is only possible by the failure of the unanimity event. Something must intervene
in order to short-circuit the mimetic consensus and unveil to members of the crowd their
own violent albeit unconscious functioning.19 For Girard the Catholic convert, this
intervention is properly called revelation and is what occurred most fully in the
resurrection of the one who prays, ‘Forgive them, Father, for they know what they do.’
50 JACOB SHERMAN

II. REAPPRAISING MIMESIS AND SACRIFICE

What are we to make of this? Girard has been immensely influential and for good reason. There
is remarkable internal coherence, interdisciplinary application, heuristic power, and assertoric
muscle in what he writes. In an age when all of his colleagues were fleeing from truth claims,
Girard obtusely insisted on the stubborn literalism of his discoveries. Rather than taking shelter
in a disciplinary enclave, Girard has consistently reached across departmental divides in order
to participate in a sustained dialogue with theologians, social scientists, biologists, philosophers,
and literary critics, a process that resulted in the formation of the annual Colloquium on
Violence and Religion (COV&R) in 1990 and a peer reviewed journal (Contagion) to boot.
Nevertheless, Girard has not been without his critics. He has been accused of everything from
being too religious to being too secular; he is apparently too Protestant, too masculinist, too
pessimistic, too hopeful, too modern, too premodern, and too postmodern.
The charges come thick and fast, but perhaps the most persistent and pointed criticism
of Girard is methodological. He seems to suffer from a kind of procedural myopia. Rather
like a mimetic crisis, Girard’s approach tends to level the differences between diverse forms
of religion, culture, violence, and the sacred. Just as in the Bacchae everyone becomes
Dionysus, so for Girard every myth conceals a founding murder and the truth of all
religion and culture is the mimesis-scapegoat complex. Girard’s own susceptibility to such
mimetic levelling no doubt conditions him to discover it at work in the world – and he
exposes it masterfully – but it might also account for his exaggerated tenacity and wilful
refusal of other explanations even when the evidence all but demands them.20 It is for this
reason that John Milbank rightly places Girard’s approach to religion squarely within the
positivist tradition. As Milbank explains, for Girard, ‘[i]t is religion that first of all secures
‘society’; feelings of social solidarity are linked with arbitrary sacrifice; religion can be
‘explained’ in social terms; social science replaces philosophy and is itself identical with
true religion, in this case Christianity, rightly interpreted.’21 Han Urs von Balthasar voices
concerns similar to Milbank’s. Balthasar worries that, for all of his avowed Catholicism,
Girard is in practice too much of a Barthian. Girard has no confidence that the world itself
might approach the truth, or that its religion might be otherwise than demonic. If, in
Girard, creation itself is not entirely given up to depravity, nevertheless human civilization
and culture certainly is. As Balthasar writes:

Girard’s synthesis is a closed system, since it wants to be ‘purely scientific,’ jettisoning all ‘moribund
metaphysics.’ All philosophy is secularized religion, and religion owes its existence to the covert
scapegoat mechanism. There is therefore no such thing as a ‘natural’ concept of God. This brings us
back to the ‘theology’ of the young Barth (and also to Barth’s later theology insofar as he regards the
analogy of being ‘as the invention of the Anti-Christ’); for Girard, religion is the invention of Satan.22

One way to describe this would be to say that Girard’s failure is a failure of the
imagination. It is not that Girard lacks imagination – for his reconstruction of human
origins is nothing if not evocative, compelling, and in many ways redolent of the truth –
but rather that he is reticent to imagine in diverse ways, unwilling to imagine other equally
compelling, plausible, and emancipatory scenarios. Enchanted by his own vision, he
refuses to embrace a more metaphysical imagination that would allow for a greater
diversity of concrete instantiations. This is especially problematic when it comes to the
problem of religion. The religious question demands to be treated under a rubric wide
enough to allow for the radical diversity we actually encounter in religious practices
(including the diversity of sacrificial practices).23 Even on the most reductionistic accounts,
 METAPHYSICS AND THE REDEMPTION OF SACRIFICE 51

the homogenization of religious experience is entirely suspect. For example, in the

cognitive science of religion, recent PET and fMRI studies demonstrate the diverse and as
yet unnumbered array of neural correlates for what we identify as experiences of the
sacred.24 At the very least, such plurality at the basest neurological level ought to give us
pause when we encounter monolithic theories at the sociological level, theories that would
reduce religion to a single causal mechanism.
Soon after the publication of Things Hidden a number of theologians and religious
scholars responded to Girard’s account of sacrifice by crying ‘foul’. In 1978, Girard’s moral
opposition to the notion of sacrifice was at its highest pitch; he felt that ‘sacrifice’ as a
constructive concept should be banished from Christian thought and even suggested that a
text like the Epistle to the Hebrews had no place in the New Testament because of its reliance
upon priestly and sacrificial language.25 Girard had succeeded in presenting his powerful but
troubling argument that the mimesis-sacrifice complex lay at the foundation of all of human
culture, religion, and civilization, but this success had grave consequences. If everything in
human culture participates in this cycle of collective murder, then what hope can there be for
the world? At this point in his work, Girard seemed to present the rejection of the sacrificial
order by Israel and the Christ as a merely negative gesture, the refusal of scapegoating, the
withholding of vengeance, but no discernible positive vision supervened upon this refusal.
Milbank argued that although Girard intended to present an Augustinian thesis, Girard did
not, in fact, ‘present us with a theology of two cities, but instead with a story of one city, and
its final rejection by a unique individual.’26 Similar criticisms were raised in other circles.
Rebecca Adams, in an influential article, argued that Girard’s mimetic theory was
handicapped for want of a positive doctrine of creation or, to put it more philosophically,
for lack of a coherent account of salutary desire as metaphysically prior to violent mimesis.27
Girard introduced so wide a gap between God’s non-violent desire and our invidious mimetic
desires that no room was left for any sort of positive mimesis. ‘Following Christ,’ Girard said
in Things Hidden, ‘means giving up mimetic desire,’ but as his entire anthropology argued for
the ineluctable centrality of mimesis in all human activity, following Christ seemed to mean
shedding our very humanity.28
Girard has responded to such criticisms in two primary ways, both of which can be
clearly seen in the new volume Evolution and Conversion. On the one hand, he has
withdrawn a number of his starker statements about sacrifice and now allows that the New
Testament does not simply reject sacrificial language but transforms it.29 On the other
hand, Girard has simultaneously sought to explore the more positive dimensions of
mimetic desire and in doing so has pressed his exploration of mimesis further back into the
obscure depths of evolutionary history. As to the point about sacrifice, Girard is explicit.
He says he made two errors in Things Hidden. ‘The first is the rejection of the word
‘sacrifice’ in relation to Christianity. The second is the hasty and wrongheaded dismissal of
the Epistle to the Hebrews.’30 Girard recuperates the language of sacrifice by
distinguishing between self-sacrifice for others and the collective sacrifice of others.
Reflecting on his earlier work, Girard says:

Since the meaning of sacrifice as immolation, as murder, is the oldest one, I decided that the word
‘sacrifice’ should apply to the first typology, the murderous sacrifice. Today I have changed my
mind. There is no doubt that the distance between these two actions is the greatest possible, and it is
the difference between the archaic sacrifice which turns against a third victim the violence of those
who are fighting, and the Christian sacrifice which is the renunciation of all egoistic claiming, even
to life if needed, in order not to kill.31
52 JACOB SHERMAN

Thus, Christ’s death on the cross is indeed a sacrifice. However, it is not one demanded for
the expiation of sins, but is rather a self-sacrifice whose efficacy lies in providing an
example: by renouncing all sacred and retributive violence, Christ both exposes the archaic
sacrificial system and provides a model that we too can follow.32
Girard goes even further. The archaic practice of sacrificial murder is, ‘in its own imperfect
way,’ prophetic of Christ’s ultimate non-violent sacrifice. Girard seems to hint at a kind of
correspondence between the two orders of sacrifice and thoroughly renounces his previous
attempts to find some third non-sacrificial space. The entire history of humanity is bound up
with sacrificial practices, so we cannot simply reject sacrifice (even in its mode of archaic
violence) without rejecting the order of creation as such. ‘The archaic religions,’ Girard says,
‘are the real educators of mankind, which they lead out of archaic violence.’33 We can neither
deny our violent history nor remain content with it. ‘There is both a break and a continuity
between the archaic, sacrificial religions and the biblical revelation, which dispels but does not
authorize us to condemn sacrifice, as if we were by nature strangers to violence.’34
Girard’s reappraisal of sacrifice is matched by his equally vigorous reconsideration of the
way that mimesis may function positively. Perhaps the most notable aspect of this is the
attention Girard pays to the evolutionary role of mimesis. Correlative to this is his growing
concern with empirical studies in animal ethology, developmental psychology, neuroscience,
and evolutionary biology.35 Research in all of these latter fields increasingly suggests that
imitation may be the key to the emergence of distinctively human forms of learning,
consciousness, language, and culture. The discovery of mirror neurons, for example, (that is,
neurons that fire both when an animal performs an action and when it observes that action
being performed by another) has suggested to many a possible neural mechanism for such
phenomena as social cognition, empathy, the attribution of mental states to others, and
language acquisition. Girard, eager to present his theory in an evolutionary framework,
explores the relation between his work and that of the Canadian neuroscientist Merlin Donald,
the evolutionary semiotician Terrence Deacon, and the biologists E. O. Wilson and Richard
Dawkins, among others.36 For example, Girard suggests that the mysterious leap that so
fascinates Deacon, the leap in hominid evolution from indexicality to symbolicity, from a
binary relationship in signification to one that dissolves the link between sign and object, is
traceable to the mimetic crisis and its resolution in the single-victim mechanism. He writes:
In order to break down the indexing relation between actual referent and sign . . .. one needs a
catastrophic moment in the evolutionary process, which isn’t solely tied to encephalization. This
catastrophe is the mimetic crisis . . . The scapegoat resolution, which saves the proto-communities
from the crisis of mimetic violence, is disciplined into a ritual system of norms and prohibitions, and
produce in turn these forms of ‘counterintuitive’ symbolic structures [that become human language].37

Where before Girard’s gaze was almost entirely fixed on the agonistic nature of mimetic
desire, he now provides a much more irenic reading of mimesis. Our interdividuality is not
only cultural but also genetic. We are neurologically programmed to be programmable
through imitation of those around us, and this is a good thing for it is the source of our
very humanity. He no longer believes that we could ever renounce mimetic desire.
Discipleship does not entail leaving the mimetic cycle but rather maturing and choosing
the appropriate model.
Evolution and Conversion is thus in many ways a lengthy response to the sort of criticism
we met in Milbank, Balthasar, and Adams. Girard not only tempers his judgments about
sacrifice but also establishes a bridge between archaic violence and Christian non-violence,
explores various salutary functions of mimesis, and roots his entire structure more
 METAPHYSICS AND THE REDEMPTION OF SACRIFICE 53

thoroughly in a creational or evolutionary framework. Indeed, Girard’s most recent

thought seems to conform to the Thomistic maxim that grace does not destroy but fulfils
nature, and yet there is bound to be something troubling about this.38 To put it
theologically, does Christ really perfect the practice of collective murder? Is the peace that
comes as an epiphenomenon of lynching actually prophetic of the peace that passes all
understanding? There is a profound ambivalence here. Girard wants a progressive vision
in which humanity matures, with the help of revelation, away from its violent origins and
into the practice of Christian non-violent community; but because he steadfastly refuses to
imagine that the archaic sacred could have been anything more than just the ritualization
of collective murder, he ends by making Christian peace and human civilization the
maturing of a horror rather than the fulfilment of a covenant. The problem is no less severe
even when taken outside of the theological register. The question remains: is human
flourishing really derived from the most grisly practices of ritualized violence?39
One can argue further that by amending his work Girard has only augmented the
methodological problems with which we opened this section. By pushing the origins of
mimetic desire back into the chthonic depths of evolutionary history, Girard’s current work
seems to adumbrate an implicit mimetic ontology, but he explicitly continues to ignore the
metaphysical question, a somewhat strange refusal for a thinker so willing to use God-talk,
a refusal that, moreover, only confirms Balthasar’s previous accusations of Barthianism.
For Girard, even after all of his concessions, the world can be understood only in the dual
terms of the secular sciences, which explain the mimesis-scapegoat complex, and the biblical
revelation, which unveils this complex and offers a model for an alternative way of life; but
between these two he permits no mediating discourse, which is to say, no metaphysics.
Whereas in his earlier writings, Girard tended to oppose the natural mechanism of
scapegoating and the evangelical life of non-violence according to a stark either/or,
Girard’s current stance seems to assimilate one to the other according to an evolutionary
logic and an implicit process theodicy by which biblical non-violence supervenes upon
archaic sacrifice (and here Milbank’s accusations of classical positivism retain their force).
So Girard remains ironically trapped in his own version of the mimetic cycle, shuttling
between anthropological positivism and theological fideism, searching for a way beyond the
violence he discerns everywhere in our past. Because sacrifice is the foundation of culture we
need sacrifice, but we can bear no more victims. Is there a way out?

III. CHARLES WILLIAMS AND THE REDEMPTION OF SACRIFICE

I have suggested that a number of the most recalcitrant problems in Girard stem for his
desire to present his vision solely in anthropological terms, drawing certain theological
conclusions but never tackling the metaphysical question directly, and this despite the fact
that the continuing sweep of his work presses in ever more metaphysical directions. It is
important to be clear: Girard is already doing metaphysics, but by refusing to do this work
openly and reflexively he allows a number of untoward and unsubstantiated theses into the
mix. This is especially clear in Girard’s identification of sacrifice tout court with collective
murder. This is not something demanded by the evidence alone but an interpretive choice;
it is a reading of the evidence through an ontology of primordial violence. We might say
that Girard’s work falls into the now largely forgotten genre that the eighteenth century
Scottish philosopher Dugald Stewart dubbed ‘conjectural history.’40 Girard recognizes
that his theory outpaces the evidence but, comparing his work to early Darwinian theory,
54 JACOB SHERMAN

he contends that this choice is a heuristic necessity.41 What he fails to recognize, however,
is that this heuristic choice is equally a metaphysical choice, no less so than the
metaphysical choices made by Darwin,42 or the Enlightenment conjectural historians.43
One could equally (and perhaps with more justification) begin with an alternative
metaphysic, an ontology of original peace, the sort of creational shalom that the biblical
tradition associates with the seventh day.44 On this account, the violence of mimetic rivalry
and collective ritual murder would not come first, but would rather be read as perversions
of a more primordial relationality. The diversity of sacrificial practices are reflective of the
various ways this primal relationality can be ‘spun’ (to use a term of Charles Taylor’s) in
either beneficent or invidious directions, from the conviviality and hospitality of a shared
meal to the full terror of the mimesis-scapegoat complex, and a thousand particular local
iterations in between. Such an account allows us to hold on to Girard’s monumental
insights without his problematic reductionism.
The difficulty, of course, is to make a relational metaphysics intelligible and concrete
rather than just an exercise in speculation or wishful thinking. Here, I suggest, we take a page
from Girard and pay special heed to literary expressions of the metaphysic we are after. I
would like, therefore, to conclude by drawing attention to the work of the novelist, literary
critic, and theologian, Charles Williams. Williams was a close companion of C. S. Lewis and
a member of the Oxford literary circle known as the Inklings. He is remarkable for the way
that his theology so thoroughly permeates the worlds within which his novels take place.
Although still too little known today, he has been deeply admired by W. H. Auden, T. S.
Eliot, and more recently Geoffrey Hill. Rowan Williams has expressed his admiration of the
earlier Williams (no relation), calling him ‘a deeply serious critic, a poet unafraid of major
risks, and a theologian of rare creativity.’45 His novels seem to fall into a genre of their own
that one is tempted to name ‘theological realism’ for the distinctive way they render the
spiritual dimensions of everyday events concrete and intelligible.46 He has a special capacity
for dramatizing the liminal space – which is, of course, classically a sacrificial space – between
the natural and the supernatural; and to this end he crafts even the stylistics of his prose,
which in rhythm, precision, and density is almost nearer to poetry.47
His most perfectly executed novel, Descent into Hell, provides a marvellous contrast to
Girard precisely because it is so thoroughly concerned with characteristically Girardian themes,
tropes, and mythologems; it abounds with the notions of mediated desire, the doppelganger,
mimetic rivalry, the foundations of the city, interdividuality, the moral consequence of illusion,
the nature of ritual, and the function of sacrifice.48 Unlike Girard, however, rather than dealing
with these themes in the context of an ontology of original violence, Williams suffuses his entire
narrative with what he calls the metaphysics of ‘co-inherence’ or ‘the way of exchange’ and thus
situates his argument within the context of an original peace.49
The difference this makes can be especially seen in the way Williams deals with the
theme of the double. The central plot of the novel is the haunting of a girl named Pauline
by her doppelganger, while the secondary plot concerns the infatuation of an aging
scholar, Lawrence Wentworth, with the imagined double of a real girl, Adela Hunt. This
imagined double is a succubus who leads Wentworth away not only from the real Adela
but from the entire world of exchange, coinherence, and relationship. It is a frightening
fate, as if Wentworth were thereby plunged into a frozen Dantean abyss, left only with the
nescience of the self in the company of its own horrors. Described so curtly the novel seems
to have all the marks of a Gothic thriller, but Williams is careful to introduce the
supernatural elements gradually so as to never tear the fabric of realism that binds the
narrative together. Moreover, other, less supernaturalistic doubles appear throughout the
 METAPHYSICS AND THE REDEMPTION OF SACRIFICE 55

story: certainly, what Girard would call mimetic rivals abound, but Williams also explores
the doubling produced by real friendship, by teachers and students, and the identity in
difference that seems to be at the heart of healthy romance.
When the story opens, we discover a frightened Pauline who has been terrified since
childhood by occasional encounters with her doppelganger. She is unable to find relief until she
meets the playwright, Peter Stanhope, probably a masque for Williams’ own ideal self-image.
Stanhope offers to take the burden of Pauline’s fears upon himself, an action that Williams
glosses by reference to the Pauline injunction: ‘Ye shall bear one another’s burdens.’50

She said, still perplexed at [his] strange language: ‘But how can I cease to be troubled? will it leave
off coming because I pretend it wants you? Is it your resemblance that hurries up the street?’
‘It is not,’ he said, ‘and you shall not pretend at all. The thing itself you may one day meet – never
mind that now, but you’ll be free from all distress because that you can pass on to me. Haven’t you
heard it said that we ought to bear one another’s burdens?’
‘But that means – ’ she began, and stopped.
‘I know,’ Stanhope said. ‘It means listening sympathetically, and thinking unselfishly, and being
anxious about, and so on. Well, I don’t say a word against all that; no doubt it helps. But I think
when Christ or St. Paul, or whoever said bear, or whatever he Aramaically said instead of bear, he
& meant something much more like carrying a parcel instead of someone else. To bear a burden is
precisely to carry it instead of. If you’re still carrying yours, I’m not carrying it for you – however
sympathetic I may be. And anyhow there’s no need to introduce Christ, unless you wish. It’s a fact
of experience. If you give a weight to me, you can’t be carrying it yourself; all I’m asking you to do
is to notice that blazing truth. It doesn’t sound very difficult.’51

Pauline finds the whole business incredible and silly but agrees to allow Stanhope to at least
try to bear her fear. And in one of the novel’s most moving episodes, the compact between
Pauline and Stanhope does allow her to meet her double without fear. Williams is careful
with his language. Stanhope ‘endured her sensitivities but not her sin; the substitution there
. . . is hidden in the central mystery of Christendom which Christendom itself has never
understood, nor can.’52 Williams courageously describes the transfer in evocative detail; it is
as much psycho-sexual as metaphysical, though the difference between the two may not in
fact be so wide.53 Elated and perplexed, the young Pauline discovers herself unburdened
and Williams is quick to point to the metaphysical consequences:

She wouldn’t worry; no, because she couldn’t worry. That was the mere truth – she couldn’t worry.
She was, then and there, whatever happened later, entirely free. She was, then and there incapable
of distress. The world was beautiful about her, and she walked in it, enjoying. He had been quite
right; he had simply picked up her parcel. God knew how he had done it, but he had. A thing had,
everywhere and all at once, happened. A violent convulsion of the laws of the universe took place in
her mind; if this was one of the laws, the universe might be better or worse, but it was certainly quite
different from anything she had ever supposed it to be. It was a place whose very fundamentals she
had suddenly discovered to be changed.54

The way of exchange is the way of the kingdom or what Williams prefers simply to call ‘the
City.’ Just as much as for Girard, so for Williams we are all interdividuals, internally and
externally porous one to another. This sets sacrifice in rather a different light, for the
collective murder by which a mob vents its aggression is no longer pre-eminent; before any
such perversion of relationship can take place, we are created to bear one another’s burdens.

The central mystery of Christendom, the terrible fundamental substitution on which so much
learning had been spent and about which so much blood had been shed, showed not as a
miraculous exception, but as the root of a universal rule . . . ‘behold, I shew you a mystery’, as
56 JACOB SHERMAN

supernatural as that Sacrifice, as natural as carrying a bag. She flexed her fingers by her side as if she
thought of picking one up.55

Williams connects the whole phenomenon of the double explicitly with the thematics of
sacrifice. Stanhope, in his own offering, takes Pauline’s fear for her, and this allows her to
finally greet the double that had so long haunted her. This double turns out to be
something akin to her own higher self, herself as known by the Omnipotence (to use a
Williamsesque phrase) – and it is because Stanhope has empowered her to embrace this
holy doppelganger that she is, in turn, empowered to make her own offering and so to
intercede for her relative in the midst of his martyrdom. Clearly, Williams’ approach to the
double in these episodes is a long way from the agon of mimetic rivalry. The narrative of
Pauline and the double will not easily fit any of the Girardian categories; it precedes
mimetic rivalry in importance and rises above it in scope; it touches on a reality more
profound and more basic than what Girard’s analyses allow.
We do not, however, have to leave the novel to find a Girardian double. We simply have
to look to Wentworth and his relationship with his academic rival, Aston Moffatt. This
relationship is an almost perfect instantiation of mimetic rivalry as described by Girard.
Professionally, Wentworth and his rival are nearly indiscernible:

Aston Moffatt was another military historian, perhaps the only other worth mentioning, and
Wentworth and he were engaged in a long and complicated controversy . . ..56

Williams adds, ‘The question [of their controversy] itself was unimportant.’ For
Wentworth, at least, the rivalry with Moffatt simply is the desired object, and the details
of history will be twisted in order to give him an advantage over this rival. They are
competitors for the same honors, honors that Wentworth comes to desire only because
Moffatt first possesses them. It is when Wentworth finds himself thus frustrated by one of
Moffatt’s achievements that this desire without an object turns suddenly to raw hate and
then to fantasies of murder.

He knew that his rival had not only succeeded, but succeeded at his own expense . . .. He walked,
unknowing, to the window, and stared out. He loomed behind the glass, a heavy bulk of monstrous
greed. His hate so swelled that he felt it choking his throat, and by a swift act transferred it; he felt
his rival choking and staggering, he hoped and willed it. He stared passionately into death, and saw
before him a body twisting at the end of a rope. Sir Aston Moffatt . . . Sir Aston Moffatt . . ..57

It is this act of violence – the sacrifice of Wentworth’s rival (even if only in his own fantasy) –
that first conjures the succubus, the double of Adela Hunt whom Wentworth desires. Once
again, the psycho-sexual dynamic – perhaps the most immediate expression of the
coinherent reality into which we are all plunged – this psycho-sexual energy is again
present, but this time under a shadow.

As he stood there, imagining death, close to the world of the first death, refusing all joy of facts, and
having for long refused all unselfish agony of facts, he heard at last the footsteps for which he had
listened. It was the one thing which could abolish his anger; it did. He forgot, in his excitement, all
about Aston Moffatt; he lost sight, exteriorly and interiorly, of the dangling figure. He stood
breathless, listening. Patter, patter; they were coming up the road. Patter-patter; they stopped at the
gate. He heard the faint clang. The footsteps, softer now, came in. He stared intently down the
drive. A little way up it stood a woman’s figure. The thing he had known must happen had
happened. She had come.58
 METAPHYSICS AND THE REDEMPTION OF SACRIFICE 57

Of course, it is not Adela; it is Wentworth’s image of Adela, a hollow phantasm that will
lead only to his destruction. Here again, sacrifice and the double are linked. Pauline was
able to embrace her double because of Stanhope’s substitution and this allowed her to
make her own offering to a martyr in need. By contrast, Wentworth’s perverse sacrifice of
his rival leads to an inhuman reduplication – not to a true or higher self in communion
with others, not to the reciprocal eros of sexual embrace, not to the way of exchange that is
the operation of the City, bur rather to a monster and to his own solitary hell.
The precision of this account is too great to suppose that Williams was ignorant of the
mechanisms of desire that Girard describes, though of course he didn’t know them in their
Girardian form. Like the five European novelists Girard began his career studying,
Williams sees into the machinery of mediated desire and discerns its capacity for violence
and illusion. But unlike Girard, Williams shows us how to read this as a kind of fall rather
than an ontological given. This not only allows Williams to sustain a more positive vision
of human flourishing – bearing one another’s burdens in a very real sense – but it also
allows him to see more precisely into the diverse iterations of evil. Wentworth, for
example, clearly participates in the Girardian model of rivalry and violence, but what is
most frightening about Wentworth is not his violent scapegoating of another but rather
the way he removes himself from the world of exchange. This is a dimension of human evil
that Girard’s account, because it lacks metaphysical breadth, tends to elide, since
everything is read in terms of the mimesis-sacrifice complex. Thus Girard, for all of his
insight, cannot help but miss aspects both of human flourishing and human depravity.
Both of which, furthermore, have repercussions on our understanding of sacrifice.
Following Williams, we begin to imagine a world in which sacrifice might have more
meaning than Girard has dreamt of, a world so constituted that substitution is a more basic
and more benevolent form of relationship than rivalry and scapegoating. The way of
exchange is more primordial; indeed, the fall into distorted forms of sacrifice is only
possible because we are first metaphysically constituted as relational creatures porous to the
movements and needs of one another, and permeable to the commerce of heaven and earth
that is a mirror, for the Christian, of God’s own coinherent life. It is only through the
perversion of this primordial relationality that we end in its murderous or suicidal rejection.
We dare not lose Girard’s formidable insights into the workings of violence, nor his
knack for appropriate suspicion, but neither ought we to remain content with these. A
larger, more metaphysical imagination allows us to resituate the entire question of sacrifice
and to avoid Girard’s interpretive excess. Still attentive to evil and guarding against
illusion, without losing this critical eye or robust realism, a wider metaphysic such as that
found in Charles Williams may permit us to re-open the question of sacrifice, even to
redeem it in its substitutionary mode, just as Williams believed sacrifice itself was once
redeemed on a Hill outside of the City some two thousand years ago.59

Notes

1 From the lecture ‘Philosophical Intuition’ in Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics,
trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Citadel Press, 1974), 108–09.
2 Although Girard, in contrast to some of his compatriots, is an extremely lucid writer himself and can be read
without extensive reliance upon secondary sources, there are a number of fine introductions to Girard’s work available.
Among the best are Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads (New York: Crossroad, 1995), S. Mark
Heim, Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2006),
Michael Kirwan, Discovering Girard (London: Darton Longman & Todd, 2004).
58 JACOB SHERMAN

3 René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel; Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore,: Johns Hopkins
Press, 1965). Girard has often returned to explore the theme of mimesis in other works of literature, especially in the
Greek tragedians and Shakespeare. Cf. René Girard, ‘To Double Business Bound’: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and
Anthropology (Baltimore,: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), René Girard, A Theater of Envy: William
Shakespeare, Odeon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), René Girard, Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on
Rivalry and Desire, ed. Mark R. Anspach (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004).
4 Clearly, there are similarities here to the Hegelian notion of desire, especially to Hegel as interpreted by
Alexandre Kojève and it is true that Girard read Kojève while writing Desire, Deceit, and the Novel in 1959. However,
where Kojève and Hegel locate mediation primarily in our desire for the desire of the other – that is, our need to be
recognized by the other – Girard insists that we fundamentally desire only what the other desires. For Girard, mediated
desire is not confined to intersubjective relations, but is the fundamental character of all desire as such. Cf. Kirwan,
Discovering Girard. Alexandre Kojève and Raymond Queneau, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (New York,: Basic
Books, 1969). For Girard’s early account of ‘triangular desire,’ see Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.
5 Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 1–2.
6 René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987),
299–305.
7 Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 9.
8 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Johns Hopkins paperback ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1979), 146. A fear of mimesis had led many developmental theorists to pathologize adult mimesis, on which see
René Girard, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (New York: Continuum, 2008), 59.
9 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 148.
10 The only way to solve this crisis is to descend upon a single victim, a victim incapable of retaliation. And a single
victim is possible because of the mimetic porosity of the crowd; everyone is already imitating his or her neighbour.
11 Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 66.
12 For two succinct yet insightful surveys regarding sacrifice, cf. John Milbank, ‘Stories of Sacrifice’, Contagion 2
(1995), Joseph Henninger, ‘Sacrifices,’ in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987).
Cf. also Jeffrey Carter, Understanding Religious Sacrifice: A Reader, Controversies in the Study of Religion (London;
New York: Continuum, 2003).
13 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 95.
14 ‘In the myth, the victim is always wrong, and his persecutors are always right.’ René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like
Lightning (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2001), 109.
15 Girard, Things Hidden, 32.
16 Rowan Williams and Mike Higton, Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology (London: SCM,
2007), 173–74.
17 Girard, Things Hidden, 436.
18 René Girard and Michel Treguer, Quand Ces Choses Commenceront ([Paris]: Arléa, 1994), 154. Quoted in Heim,
Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross, 37.
19 Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 188.
20 In saying this, I am not trying to introduce and ad hominem, but am in fact saying no more than what Girard has
said about the authors – Shakespeare, Proust, and Dostoevsky among them – that he most admires. Indeed, it is Girard
who alerts us to the need for conversion in apprehending the mimetic theory. All I am suggesting is that this conversion,
for all the light it sheds on mimesis, may blind to certain non-mimetic aspects of behaviour. On the role of conversion in
mimetic theory, see _______, Evolution and Conversion, 172–73.
21 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.,
2006), 397.
22 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, 5 vols. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1988).
23 Bruce Chilton, for example, calls Girard to task for neglecting the centrality of shared meals in the genesis of
culture and indeed in sacrificial practices themselves. See Bruce Chilton, The Temple of Jesus: His Sacrificial Program
within a Cultural History of Sacrifice (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1992).
24 Thus one can observe a slowing in the posterior superior parietal lobe when Tibetan monks meditate, or an
activation in the frontal-parietal region of the brain when Evangelicals pray Psalm 23, or again differential activity in
the posterior sensory and associative cortices known to participate in imagery tasks when Yoga teachers engage in the
relaxation visualisations of Yoga Nidra. See Nina P. Azari, et al., ‘Neural Correlates of Religious Experience’,
European Journal of Neuroscience 13 (2001), Hans C. Lou, et al., ‘A 15O-H2O PET Study of Meditation and the Resting
State of Normal Consciousness’, Human Brain Mapping 7: no. 2 (1999), Andrew B. Newberg et al., Why God Won’t Go
Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, 1st ed. (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001).
25 Girard, Things Hidden, 227–31.
26 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 398.
27 Rebecca Adams, ‘Loving Mimesis and Girard’s ‘Scapegoat of the Text’: A Creative Reassessment of Mimetic
Desire,’ in Violence Renounced: René Girard, Biblical Studies and Peacemaking, ed. Willard M. Swartley (Telford PA:
Pandora Press, 2000).
28 Girard, Things Hidden, 430–31.
 METAPHYSICS AND THE REDEMPTION OF SACRIFICE 59

29 Girard had already made such a concession, but in more cautious terms, during his 1993 interview with Rebecca
Adams. See Rebecca Adams, ‘Violence, Difference, Sacrifice: A Conversation with René Girard’, Religion & literature
25: no. 2 (1993), 23.
30 Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 40.
31 Ibid., 215.
32 Girard’s thought here can be best understood in terms of a more or less Abelardian moral-influence theory of the
atonement. On Girard and the moral-influence theory, see Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross:
Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2004), 133–53.
33 Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 216.
34 Ibid., 218.
35 See S. Mark Heim, ‘A Cross-Section of Sin: The Mimetic Character of Human Nature in Biological and
Theological Perspective,’ in Evolution and Ethics: Human Morality in Biological and Religious Perspective, ed. Philip
Clayton and Jeffery Schloss (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publ. Co., 2004). Scott R. Garrels, ‘Mimetic
Theory of René Girard and Empirical Research on Imitation’, Contagion 12–13 (2006).
36 See especially chapter 3, ‘The Symbolic Species,’ in Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 96–135.
37 Ibid., 110.
38 ‘Gratia non tollit sed perficit naturam.’ Summa Theologiae I, 1 8 ad 2.
39 It will not to do to insist, as Girardians occasionally do, that human flourishing is derived precisely from the
rejection of such violent practices. This was Girard’s position in 1978, but because it involved intractable (almost
Manichean) problems of its own, it is a position Girard no longer holds.
40 Conjectural history is a genre that began with David Hume (1757) and was developed in the work of writers such
as Adam Ferguson (1767), John Millar (1771) and Adam Smith (1776). It characteristically proceeds beyond empirical
evidence by supplementing ethnographic data and historical artefacts with deductions from natural law theory in order
to arrive at a supposedly universal series of stages through which peoples are assumed to pass as they ascend towards
civilization The term was coined by Stewart (1794) in his account of Adam Smith. See Dugald Stewart, Biographical
Memoirs, of Adam Smith, Ll. D., of William Robertson, D. D. And of Thomas Reid, D. D.; Read before the Royal Society
of Edinburgh. Now Collected into One Volume, with Some Additional Notes (Edinburgh,: Printed by G. Ramsay and
Company, 1811).
41 Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 159–96.
42 On the metaphysical choices in Darwinism, see Stephen R. L. Clark, Biology and Christian Ethics, New Studies in
Christian Ethics (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 58–93. Conor Cunningham, ‘Trying My
Very Best to Believe Darwin, or, the Supernaturalistc Fallacy: From Is to Ought,’ in Belief and Metaphysics, ed. Conor
Cunningham and Peter M. Candler (London: SCM Press, 2007).
43 On the metaphysical choices inherent in Scottish conjectural historians such as Adam Smith, see Milbank,
Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 7–48.
44 Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for the Modern Man (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2005).
45 Rowan Williams, ‘Charles Williams, the Odd Inkling,’ review of Gavin Ashenden, Charles Williams: Alchemy
and integration, The Times Literary Supplement, 18 June 2008.
46 In his introduction to All Hallows Eve, T. S. Eliot suggested that what Williams had to say was really beyond the
bounds of any genre yet devised. See T. S. Eliot, ‘Introduction’ in Charles Willams, All Hallows Eve. (New York:
Farrar Straus Giroux, 1963).
47 On Williams rhetoric, see Charles A. Huttar and Peter J. Schakel, The Rhetoric of Vision: Essays on Charles
Williams (Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press 1996).
48 Like Girard, Williams’ anthropology is inseparable from theology, and although I believe the argument can be
ecumenically useful, I make no attempt to suppress the particularities of Williams’ confessional voice in what follows.
49 See the essay, ‘The Way of Exchange,’ in Charles Williams, The Image of the City and Other Essays, ed. Anne
Ridler (London: Oxford University Press, 1958).
50 Galatians 6:2.
51 Charles Williams, Descent into Hell (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans, 1990), 98.
52 Ibid., 101.
53 On the sometimes troubling psycho-sexual dynamics of William’s metaphysics and lived piety, see especially Lois
Lang-Sims, Letters to Lalage: The Letters of Charles Williams to Lois Lang-Sims (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University
Press, 1989).
54 Williams, Descent into Hell, 104.
55 Ibid., 189.
56 Ibid., 38.
57 Ibid., 81.
58 Ibid., 189.
59 I would like to give special thanks to Douglas Hedley for helpful comments on a previous version of this essay,
and to all those who helpfully responded to the paper at the University of Oslo during the 17th European Conference on
Philosophy of Religion, August 2008. Special thanks as well to the Cambridge 1405s.