This book contains a series of three public debates between Girard and Vattimo, from the late 1990s, followed by concluding essays by both men, summarizing their differing positions. Girard is a French anthropologist and Vattimo an Italian philosopher, but both are practicing Catholics, though neither doctrinaire by any means. Girard should be regarded as the more traditionalist of the pair, whereas Vattimo considers himself a left Heideggerian nihilist, who has found his way back to Catholicism. The two find plenty in common, however. The debates’ moderator, Pierpaolo Antonello, suggests, “if we seek a unifying philosophical theme encompassing both authors, a common cornerstone of their outlook, that would be “the death of God” in both the philosophical and the anthropological senses.”
Vattimo states that, after reading Girard, a key term he began implementing was secularization. He defines it thus, “secularization, which I take to mean the effective realization of Christianity as a nonsacrificial religion…. Secularization is not the relinquishment of the sacred but the complete application of the sacred tradition to given human phenomena…. Christianity is the religion that opens the way to an existence not strictly religious, if we take “religious” to mean binding restraints, imposition, authority…. Charity takes the place of discipline.” Girard offers a word of caution. “If our cultural evolution has led us to substitute ourselves for God, then we had better realize that we have taken on an enormous responsibility…. Judaism and Christianity are aware that if we try to do away with all the prohibitions, the limits that the archaic religions imposed, we are putting at risk not only ourselves but the existence of the whole world…. Secularization also entails the end of the sacrificial…. When, thanks to Christianity, we get rid of the sacred, there is a salvific opening up to agape, to charity, but there is also an opening up to perhaps greater violence.” Girard goes on by describing the facts common to all archaic myth, as he sees them. “Every myth is a failed Passion. Not in the sense that the victim was not killed, but that the anthropological truth of this death, of this innocent death, was not unveiled. The question the Passion poses is: which side are we on? Are we with the crowd that accuses Jesus of being guilty, or are we on the other side?… Myth is always dominated by the viewpoint of the crowd, which designates the victim and proclaims his guilt, whereas in the Passion story we see the other side too, the position of the innocent victim.”
In the next debate between Girard and Vattimo, the two discuss cultural, ethical, and moral relativism. Vattimo begins, “I think of God as relativist because he is the only entity who really could be, given that he gazes down on the various cultures of humanity from on high.” Girard brings in his ideas on mimetism. “The mimetic theory is an effort to demonstrate that cultural differences, no matter how significant they may be at one level, are insignificant at another…. Man is essentially competitive and inclined to rivalry. He wants to outdo his neighbor, and so he competes with him. Human intelligence, the spirit of initiative, is basically competitive.”
In the final debate, where the men discuss their readings of Heidegger and Nietzsche, Girard brings up what he sees as the crucial point. “The most important thing Nietzsche ever said about religion (and, I would hazard, the most important thing said in theology since the time of Saint Paul) is that in myth the victim is always expelled and justly killed (and in this sense, I, too, could claim to be a bit of a Nietzschean), whereas the community bears no blame. Sacrifice is something necessary and therefore positive because a community, a society, that cannot kill, that cannot victimize, no matter if the victims are innocent, is condemned to extinction; it is condemned to exactly the kind of weakness we have today, a weakness inherited from Christianity…. [Nietzsche] chooses to take the part of violence!” In the end, Girard asks of Vattimo, in a world stripped of the safety valve of the scapegoat mechanism, “How do we control the ever-present tendency of the crowd to veer off into some excess?”
No comments:
Post a Comment