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French-American anthropological philosopher René Girard argues that modernity is the end of history, in effect it’s the apocalypse foreseen by the Book of Revelation, if not in a literal, yet still in a Biblical sense. According to Stephen Gardiner, Associate Professor of Philosophy, because Girard expresses this in scientifically neutral terms, he could equally suggest that modernity is the apocalypse of Christianity, or of the West, a fatal moral crisis of a secular civilization uniquely generated by Western Christendom.
Of course Girard could be referring to the apocalypse in terms of all the above instances as well.
Secular modernity ‘realizes’ Western Christianity by way of its breakdown, tensions between medieval theology and philosophy on the one hand, and the claims of the Roman church and the emergent nation-states of early modern Europe on the other. In the space opened up by these ruptures, secular modernity appears, - along with the return of a utopian logic derived from the apocalyptic eschatology of original Christianity. Thus follow the notions of progress, revolution, in fact the whole gamut of modern political eschatologies since the French Revolution, from fascism to liberalism, Marxism, communism, neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, and social democracy.
All these utopianisms have shattered over the last one hundred years, leaving modernity without any ideological crutches.
Gardner states that Girard may be understood as a culminating moment in this eventuality, the ideological self-destruction of modernity.
Girard’s view of history derives from the same mystical rationalist roots displayed by the Catholic reactionaries of the Counter-Enlightenment such as Joseph de Maistre. He maintained what prevented humanity from spontaneously combusting in an all-consuming orgy of violence is the careful maintenance of equilibrium, a mechanics of order by calculated variations of social pressure using religious and political means. Girard thinks this only works when it is unconscious and instinctive, as in ‘sacrificial religion,’ when it becomes conscious, as illuminated by the Enlightenment, it breaks down into ineffectual scapegoating, the fruitless ideological battles and civil wars of modern politics.
The natural condition of humanity being chaos, a Hobbesian war of all against all whose natural tendency is escalation and the functions of politics and religion is to keep a lid on it.
According to Counter-Enlightenment thought, it was difficult, if not impossible to achieve social peace without alter, throne and not least, executioner- religion and sovereign power wedded in the sword. Law must be imposed from above; order is repression through a holy matrimony of love and terror; and punishment dispenses as economy of compensation keeping the cosmos in balance.
Joseph de Maistre originally epitomizes the moral mechanics of this trinity of order:
And yet all grandeur, all power, all subordination rests on the executioner; he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple, and society disappears. God, who is the author of sovereignty, is the author also of chastisement: he has built our world on these two poles; For Jehovah is the master of the two poles, and on these he makes the world turn.
Theorists in the modern vein had to contend with the de-sacralizing onslaught of the Enlightenment (as prior generations of Christians did not). They were spiritually closer in some ways to those Roman pagans who attacked Christianity as responsible for the weakening of the Empire.
Refugees and exiles, they washed up on the shores of emergent democracy from the traumatic disintegration of medieval Christianity, culminating in the French Revolution.
Girard held to the view that reversing the drift of democracy by religious violence and dictatorial discretion was equally hopeless. Girard was at odds with dominant Christian tradition; he rejected the divine institution of the sword asserted by Paul, although he asserts the effectual truth of the Counter-Enlightenment insight, which to him was the fatal reality of the human condition.
The question remains however, what are we to make of Girard’s attempt to resurrect Christian apocalyptic in the mantle of the human sciences, a kind of fundamentalism for intellectuals?
In addition to being one that envisions a catastrophic end of history, of civilization, and of humanity itself. Girard resurrects two core features of Christian apocalyptic: Armageddon, the symbolic place of a decisive battle between good and evil at the end of history, consuming the world without remainder; and Revelation, the return of Christ in glory defeating the Anti-Christ and Satan once and for all, in an altogether new Jerusalem, descending from heaven to earth in the dream of John.
Girard insists that these features be deducted from a “scientific” point of view, an “anthropological”analysis of the evolutionary origins of history and humanity. It is progress itself that brings on the apocalypse. His theories of ritualized scapegoating mythically disguised as sacrifice and of desire as imitation that on a purely immanent (inter-personal) level tends to degenerate into mortal conflict, afford him the Archimedean leverage with which to cast modernity as the end of history in the Christian sense of a terminal working out in salvation or damnation.
Apocalypse neatly ties everything into a narrative whole. In the end, humanity must succumb to the violence of its beginnings.
Both socially and personally, mimetic desire is already for Girard apocalyptic; it leads either to conversion or to perdition. This insistence is a constant of his thought. Announced at the beginning in his first work, on the modern novel, the last chapters read like an unrelenting rationalism hovering over the insanity of a dialectic breakdown. So sacrifice- “religion” in the original sense- is an evolutionary strategy saving the human species from an internal tendency to violence that would have destroyed it were it not contained.
According to Girard the Passion of Christ is essentially a political story, but one robbing politics of its mythical covers, which we might call its ideological disguises.
It reveals the essence of sacrificial religion as politics, and of politics as scapegoating.
Part 1
