Louis Bouyer Contra Rene Girard
Edward Oakes has a post up at First Things about Rene Girard. There has been much talk about Girard at First Things lately, as Oakes himself notes, but as well at National Review, where Peter Robinson has an interview up (but which I was unable to find in a quick search). It has inspired me to post a stinging criticism of Girard’s theory of the origin of religious sacrifice taken from Louis Bouyer (Cosmos: The World and the Glory of God, 1988, p. 238, n. 14). In explaining the tenor of the following quotation, I should point out that Bouyer had a strong aversion to theories of the necessary evolution of a religionless Christianity, such as one could find in Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, and he seems to have seen Girard as a proponent of this sort of thinking. In other words, anathema to him were those who think that Christianity is necessarily secularizing and that Christ’s sacrifice put an end to religion. Also, he had a strong aversion to annihilationist theories of sacrifice. Sacrifice, he held, is divine self-gift to humanity in which we are ourselves incorporated and made fully self-gift, and it is consummated in the sacred meal, wherein our being comes to fulfillment. Sacrifice is not consummated in the putting to death of a sacrificial victim. The sacred meal is the fundamental activity of man, and the pre-Christian religions pre-figured the Christian Eucharist in this regard, without ever having had access to a truly efficacious communion with deity:
The ideas developed by Rene Girard on the nature of sacrifice have recently created a considerable stir in learned circles. But his brilliant speculations overlook virtually all the contributions made in the last hundred years on this undeniably fundamental aspect of religion. Which may be why he considers supremely indicative of the meaning of sacrifice the apotropaic rites now recognized by all specialists as never having been looked upon as sacrifices by those who practiced these rituals. Quite simply, scapegoats and all variations on the theme, far from ever being considered as sacrifices to God, were always sent to the devil! On the materiality of sacrifices — the necessary starting point before any attempt to unravel their meaning — one may refer to works such as R.K. Yerkes’s Sacrifice in Greek and Roman Religions and in Primitive Judaism. This kind of factual study inevitably leads to a firm conclusion: it is not the killing which determines sacrifice, even when the victim is put to death, which is far from always being the case (see in this respect E.O. James, Origins of Sacrifice, London, 1953, pp. 256 ff.). Neither is its nature established by the oblation to the divinity. Instead, a sacrifice is a meal, but a meal considered as sacred because the divinity partakes of it, whether the sacrifice is exlusively intended for the deity (as in the holocaust), whether priests alone also take part (as in the Hebrew sacrifices for the expiation of sins), or finally whether the entire people participate with them, as in the sacrifice of communion. Or indeed in the Passover, and this seems to have been a characteristic of the very earliest sacrifices, in which all is consumed by the participants, with no role clearly reserved for the divinity.
This explains why, in the most ancient mythic expression of their significance, sacrifices are far from appearing as tremulous attempts of terrified humans to placate a bloodthirsty divinity through some kind of ritual murder. Instead, the gods themselves, acting either directly or through kings deemed to embody or represent them, are the initiators of sacrifices, and thereby show themselves as the quintessential benefactors of mankind, and more particularly the sources of human life in that which maintains it (nourishment) and produces it (sexuality). The idea of sacrifice as a ritual murder is nothing but the fabrication of self-styled scholars, who thus prove that they belong with the pathetic dupes who persist in taking seriously the alleged Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
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Thanks for the post! I’ve not heard about this intrinsic connection between sacrifice and the meal, but as soon as you mentioned it it made total sense. What a strong apologetic for the Eucharist! Could you point me to any other resources that address this relationship directly?
Comment by Jim S — December 9, 2009 @ 11:59 AM
Jim S,
Other than several of Bouyer’s works, and perhaps Jeremias (a Protestant theologian) on the Eucharist, I’m not sure. It might be present in certain phenomenologists of religion, such as Mircea Eliade, and perhaps even in Jean-Luc Marion, but I’ve never checked into it very closely. I found it to be a disconcerting idea when I first encountered it, because I wondered if it strips the Cross of its sacrificial value. But I think the point is to see the sacrifice of the Cross in the most intimate connection with the meal, where the grace of Christ’s self-gift to the Father is embodied in us and completes us. It does give a profound sense of the unity of action in the Cross on Golgotha and the gift of the Eucharistic bread and body.
David has some interesting thoughts about the phenomenology of eating and the Eucharist that connect to this understanding of sacrifice. Perhaps he’ll share them with us in a post.
Comment by hierothee — December 9, 2009 @ 1:49 PM
Jim S,
I forgot: check out Joseph Ratzinger on sacrifice in his “Feast of Faith,” which follows Bouyer to some extent.
Comment by hierothee — December 9, 2009 @ 1:54 PM
Interesting thoughts on Girard there (and it’s not surprising that a “theory of everything” presumes to explain more than it really can), but I really do hope you reconsider your take on Barth. While Barth was careful to condemn “religion,” it was largely a rhetorical ploy on his part. If nothing else, Barth insisted that theology return TO Christ (and that philosophy also do so, for that matter). Although I’m not always the biggest fan of Barth, I do have to point out that you don’t seem to have treated him fairly here. His rhetoric on issues like “religion” can be extreme, but that’s why Barth scholars have done a lot of interpretive work to situate his polemic against liberal Protestantism in particular. Or have you mistaken him for Bonhoeffer, perhaps?
Comment by Stephen — December 10, 2009 @ 12:18 AM
Stephen,
Note that I say “such as one can find in Barth and Bultmann”: and, such, indeed, can be and has been found in Barth by reputable scholars. Bouyer certainly found it in Barth. Cornelio Fabro, in “Modern Atheism,” places Bonhoeffer’s thesis of “religionless Christianity” in the tradition of Barth’s dialectical theology. So, he found it in Barth.
I mean, as you say, the man was “careful to condemn religion.”
I know that there’s a lot of debate right now about the extent to which Barth really rejected the analogy of being. If he rejected the analogy of being outright, in as “performatively non-contradictory” a manner as possible, then it would make sense that he would, as much more than a rhetorical ploy, condemn religion. And this would lead to a “Christological narrowing” in his thinking (to invoke one of Balthasar’s criticisms of Barth) and to later doctrines of religionless Christianity. If he did not, in the end, reject the analogy of being, then it is possible that his condemnation of religion was indeed merely a rhetorical ploy.
I don’t think that the issue of Barth on the analogy of being is at all settled one way or the other. So, the trajectory of “religionless Christianity” thinking, such as one found it from Bonhoeffer to the “death of God” theologians, is even to this day not implausibly placed in the trajectory of Barth’s theology. Certainly, it can be placed in the tradition of aspects of his thinking.
I would be much more interested to know if Girard is really, in the end, a religionless Christianity type of guy. Bouyer wrote “Cosmos” (in French) in 1982. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then.
Comment by hierothee — December 10, 2009 @ 12:34 PM
“who thus prove that they belong with the pathetic dupes who persist in taking seriously the alleged Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
Ouch! That’s going to leave a mark.
Comment by Arturo Vasquez — December 12, 2009 @ 8:54 AM
Arturo,
I just looked at your blog. You seem to be sort of a blog-o-sphere version of Mircaea Eliade, though much less ambitious (which is implied in being a blogger rather than a U of C professor with hundreds of academic books and articles — speaking from my own personal apathy, I know how that goes). Eliade’s life mission was to infuse the modern West, and to reinvigorate the Church, with the folk Christianity of Romanian peasants: whose religiosity was so much like that of the folk Catholicism of Latin America. At least initially, he seems to have wanted to instill the “cosmic Christianity” of these Christian peasants into the abstract sphere of theoloical discourse. He also was, like you, influenced by Renaissance Neo-Platonists, though he was of course also a major scholar of the religious thought of these figures. He seems eventually, as so many of the twentieth century French Catholic Neo-Platonists would do (at least that’s how Church historian Keith Cassidy tells it), to have rejected Christianity, although the point is debatable. Douglas Allen argues that Eliade was no Christian. I believe it is Glenn Olsen who has argued that he was.
It seems curious to me, then, that you would take such a disliking to Bouyer, who seems rather to have aspired to be the ecclesiastical version of Mircea Eliade, but who took great measures to chasten himself against the temptation to fall into a purely pagan Neo-Platonism. Thus, he, like Balthasar, would heed the warnings of Barth, though at the same time repudiating in the strictest manner Barthian nominalism.
Of course, Catholic theology has taken an irreversible course in a Christological direction. Benedict XVI’s theology of cosmic liturgy is thoroughly Christic, again, taking seriously the challenge levelled at Catholic theology by the Reformers, but showing the uniquely integrative power of Catholic theology. It seems inconceivable that there would be any going back on Christocentrism in Catholic theology at this point. And such an approach to theology is not necessarily a Protestant narrowing, as Maximus the Confessor’s theology (recovered by Balthasar and Bouyer) provides the exemplary model. Bouyer’s turn to the East (he was close friends with and present at the death beds of Serge Bulgakov and Vladimir Lossky, and he travelled Greece with a bit of envy at the splendor of Greek Orthodox liturgy and the Greek way of life at that time), and to the Gothic and the Romanesque rather than to the Baroque, is actually a turn to a more “peasant-oriented,” cosmic, and religious religion.
He was certainly no theological rationalist, as Davide Zordan has shown in his book on Mystery and Gnosis in Bouyer (only available in French).
Comment by hierothee — December 19, 2009 @ 1:34 AM