In Defense of René Girard's "Apostasy"

Resolving the Girardian Civil War of Sacrifice Through David Bentley Hart

I attended my first René Girard academic conference a couple of months ago. Since one of my scholarly interests is mass movements, I was eager to uncover in the little temporary society of this conference an inevitable feature of these movements: factions. I was disappointed. People were direct and nuanced in their scholarly disagreements and at the same time very nice and polite. It is hard to uncover the ideological fault lines when you see both differences of perspectives and agreements everywhere, without the appeal to emotions that accompany power games. (I had a great time!)

Thankfully, Michigan State University's Contagion Journal, the publication of this same community, recently released its volume for this year, and its closing article is "Girard's Apostasy" by Matthew Pattillo. It looked promising (for someone looking for academia's version of UFC).

The article delivered. Pattillo takes a side: what I call the "80s-era antisacrificial Girardians," whose most famous and powerful member is the Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel. He even names the opposing faction: the "Innsbruck Girardians." Now, if you have read Ryan Holiday's Conspiracy (2018), which is an entertaining account of the PR and legal war between Thiel and Gawker's Nick Denton, and involves Hulk Hogan's sex tape scandal and a shadowy operator named Mr. A, then you'd probably wonder, just as I did, if this is just one more extension of Thiel's many tendrils. So I asked ChatGPT o3 to evaluate whether the article is a hit job. It concluded:

• Scholarly merit: Solid: careful textual contrasts, broad engagement with the Girardian literature, useful synthesis of a long-running debate.

• Tone: Sharper than needed: the title and a few flourishes edge toward polemic.

• Hit-job status: No. This is a forceful but academically grounded critique with a few rhetorical excesses.

Okay, maybe not a hit job. But clearly this is one member of a faction of Girardians taking aim at another. It also attacks Girard himself—or uses 80s-era Girard to attack Girard in his later years. The article concludes by quoting Girard promising to return to the source of contention of these two factions and apologizing for saying so little about it. My guess is that Girard died before he could do so. Otherwise, we'd find his attempt at a resolution in this article.

Let me share a possible resolution I found in David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite (2003), wherein he critiques Girard's understanding of sacrifice, and which I extensively quote below. I’m actually more interested in its implications. I’ll present plans for future explorations based on this foundation, particularly on the question of violence in Christian history, how to be antisacrificial IRL (eg, in business), and the epistemology of theology.

(To Pattillo, Thiel, and other antisacrificial Girardians: bro, this is not the way. We cannot scapegoat the "sacrificial" Girardians. We need to be antisacrifice-maxxing. We need to find a solution that does not demonize one side or one version of Girard. "In future, all violence will reveal what Christ's Passion revealed, the foolish genesis of bloodstained idols and the false gods of religion, politics, and ideologies. The murderers remain convinced of the worthiness of their sacrifices. They, too, know not what they do and we must forgive them. The time has come for us to forgive one another. If we wait any longer there will not be time enough." - The Scapegoat, 80s-era Girard.)

The fault line

Yes, this is very inside baseball, but as you will see in the last section below, resolving this conflict has very practical consequences for everyone who operates in the real world. To appreciate the solution from Hart, we first need to understand the point of contention. Pattillo does a great job at this, and presents both sides clearly despite being partial to one. Let me give a short summary of the conflict, in case you don't have access to the paywalled article or if you're not ready to jump deep into the fray of this battle of the nerds.

The conflict boils down to a single word: "sacrifice." In his 1978 book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Girard argued it would be an "abominable misconception" to use the same word—sacrifice—to describe both ritualized acts of collective murder (ie, the practice of ritual human sacrifice found practically in all pre-Axial-Age societies) and Jesus's nonviolent self-sacrifice. There was, he insisted, an "abyss" between these two phenomena.

But Girard later changed his mind. In dialogue with Jesuit theologian Raymund Schwager, Girard evolved his position and agreed that one could and should use the term "sacrifice" to characterize Jesus's death.

The antisacrificial Girardians see this "apostasy" as a catastrophic betrayal—a capitulation to “institutional Christianity” that gutted mimetic theory of its most radical insight. If Jesus's death is just another sacrifice, even a superior one, then Christianity becomes merely the best religion among many rather than the definitive exposure of religion's violent foundations. To quote Pattillo,

In 2013, Catholic theologian Peter Stork took up and amplified Georg Baudler’s lament that, with Girard’s concession to Schwager on the question of sacrifice, “institutional Christianity had lost an opportunity to repent of a theological mindset that too easily attributes violence to God,” and “by even now subscribing to the view that God enlisted the murderous scapegoat mechanism in divine service (albeit at God’s own expense) Girard now reaffirmed the demand for ‘sacred violence’ at the heart of institutional Christianity.”

[…]

If Girard’s thought has been coopted to serve as theoretical underpinning to dreams of Catholic nationalism, for which sacrifices will most definitely have to be made, he has himself, and this article in particular, to blame.

My interests in this question are more practical. For instance:

• Is entrepreneurship, or participation in capitalism, inherently sacrificial? In other words, is wealth nothing but the capture of other people's production "surplus," as Marxists continue to assert? What would an antisacrificial business look like?

• Is "no pain, no gain" true? Do physical, emotional, relational, and spiritual growth depend on suffering? Or at least do pain and suffering have inherent value? There's a good chance that we'll suffer as we grow old and near our deaths. Is there a point to all that upcoming pain or is that just an unavoidable evil?

• Is pain and suffering a necessary part of following Christ? Is that what this Gospel passage means? “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” — Luke 9:23

Let's hear from an actual theologian

Like Girard, I'm no theologian, so I rely on people who spent their lives thinking about these matters. For instance, the best critique of René Girard I've ever come across is pages 344 - 360 (of the 2004 paperback/bootlegged PDF edition) of David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. If you're a reader of Girard, I can't recommend this section of the book enough.

After opening with scriptural passages on sacrifice as epigraphs, Hart starts the section with this image of the sacrificial economy, from Rome all the way to the modern nation-state:

Totality is, of necessity, an economy, a circulation of substance, credit, power, and debt, a closed cycle of violence, a perpetual oscillation between order and chaos, form and indeterminacy. The myth of the cosmos as a precarious equilibrium of countervailing forces, an island of order amidst an infinite ocean of violent energy — which is also the myth of the polis or of the empire — belongs principally to a sacral order that seeks to contain nature's violence within the stabilizing forms of a more orderly kind of violence: the sheer waste and destructiveness of the cosmos must be held at bay and controlled, by a motion at once apotropaic — repelling chaos by appeasing its chthonian energies and rationalizing them in structures of Apollonian order — and economic — recuperating what is lost or sacrificed in the form of a transcendent credit, a numinous power reinforcing the regime that sacrifice serves. One could argue, in fact, that all pagan order was just such an order of sacrifice, a system of exclusion, which mactated the singular so as to recover the serener forms of the universal, making a holocaust even of the desirable and the beautiful as an appeasement of the formlessness besetting the fragile order of cosmos and city from every quarter. Perhaps, more boldly, one might say that all secular order as such subsists upon sacrifice, upon the calculus of an economy of violence, and preserves the stability of its closed cycle of exchange by rescuing the good of society from the superfluity of what society cannot assimilate — by, that is, converting the inassimilable (the criminal, the surplus of wealth, the impure, cosmic violence itself) into ousia, incorruptible wealth, the source and substance of every social order; secular society sustains itself by practicing limited violences that contain and somewhat subdue the limitless violences of being. (p. 346)

(I have to mention that my novel Rajah Versus Conquistador owes the resolution of its Magellan's arc to this passage. It's in the chapter entitled "Apollo Versus the Crucified." Writing this chapter allowed me to resolve questions I've had for years related to violence and Christendom, questions that I was not able to resolve with mere intellectualizing.)

Hart then employs Girard. Lucky for us, Hart unpacks precisely the point of contention between the antisacrificial Girardians and the Innsbruck School.

Can, though, sacrifice defeat sacrifice? Is not the cross of Christ another myth of peace won through violence, of chaos and death subdued by a propitiatory offering, and of, indeed (as Nietzsche said), the infinite multiplication of debt rather than its discharge? One would obviously wish to say not, but one must also have a care that, in making one's argument, one does not fail to account for the element of oblation in the story of salvation. A salutary example, both for good and ill, of how delicate a matter it is to argue against the idea of the cross as divine violence is René Girard; no one else has made so great an issue of the difference between the death of Christ and the death of the "sacrificial" victim. Girard's most extensive treatment of propitiatory exclusion is found in The Scapegoat, where he draws an absolute distinction between the mythology that dictates that religions make room, on ritual occasions, for disorder in subordination to order and those biblical narratives that tell their story from the perspective of the victims of both that disorder and that order. Mythologies, according to Girard, generally reflect the thinking of the class of persecutors; and "[s]trong in their righteousness, and convinced that their victim is truly guilty, persecutors have no reason to be troubled" (104). Not that persecutors are always creatures of malice; more often than not they are guardians of the public weal, whose prudence prevents violence from erupting into riot, warfare, or internecine strife. Their sacrificial economics is simply the art of responsible politics. (p. 347)

Hart then starts his critique (with a nice little jab) but at the same time recognizes the importance of Girard's observations.

That Girard's arguments suffer from an occasional want of subtlety scarcely needs be said; in particular, his failure adequately to distinguish different senses of sacrifice from one another leads him all too often to treat the history of Israel's faith as a stark opposition between a sacrificial cult and a prophetic tradition that has rejected sacrifice, causing him in consequence to overlook the manifold meanings inherent in Israel's many sacrificial practices, the dependency of the prophetic tradition upon the language of sacrifice, and the ways in which the life and death of Christ are received in Christian thought as perfecting God's covenant with Israel — even insofar as that covenant involves sacrifice. If Christ's death overcomes a certain sacrificial order, it also fulfills one. Still, Girard's observations must not be casually dismissed: it would obviously be repellent, for instance, for a Christian theologian to make of the crucifixion a kind of justification for capital punishment; but within a certain understanding of sacrifice, the immolation of the hostia and the execution of the criminal belong to the same motion of exclusion, the same inhibition of chaos, the same economic gesture; and this is a distinction that cannot be ignored. (p. 348)

Okay, I'll shut up now. Let's sit back and enjoy Hart's massive and mellifluous paragraphs (some of these are not even the entire paragraph).

The answer, for Christian thought, must begin with Israel, apart from which one cannot grasp the way of being that Christ embodies and that the Father vindicates at Easter; it is in Israel's many orders of sacrifice that sacrifice (conceived as an economy of violence) begins to be undone. Girard, however, fails to see the richness, multivalency, and ambiguity inherent in the language of sacrifice in Jewish and Christian thought; he fails to grasp, in particular, the conversion theology effects of the story of wrath into the story of mercy, or how it replaces the myth of sacrifice as economy with the narrative of sacrifice as a ceaseless outpouring of gift and restoration in an infinite motion exceeding every economy. The sacrifice that Christian theology upholds is inseparable from the gift: it underwrites not the stabilizing regime of prudential violence, but the destabilizing extravagance of giving and giving again, of declaring love and delight in the exchange of signs of peace, outside of every calculation of debt or power. The gift of the covenant — which in a sense implores Israel to respond — belongs to the Trinity's eternal "discourse" of love, which eternally "invites" and offers regard and recognition; it precedes and exceeds, then, every economy of power, because all "credit" is already given and exhausted, because the love it declares and invokes is prior to, and the premise of, all that is given. (p. 350)

[…]

Within the context of trinitarian dogma, it is possible to think of sacrifice (conceived as gift rather than debt) as the free expression of a love desired of Israel by God, and so not simply owed in any elementary economic sense: a gift given because the graciousness of the gift already received draws forth a response of love and gratitude. That the gift is prior to debt, moreover, and prior to any stabilizing economy of violence, is shown in the resurrection: God's balances are not righted by an act of immolation, the debt is not discharged by the destruction of the victim and his transformation into credit; rather, God simply continues to give, freely, inexhaustibly, regardless of rejection. God gives and forgives; he fore-gives and gives again. There is no calculable economy in this trinitarian discourse of love, to which creation is graciously admitted. There is only the gift and the restoration of the gift, the love that the gift declares, the motion of a giving that is infinite, which comprehends every sacrifice made according to love, and which overcomes every sacrifice made for the sake of power. (p. 351)

[…]

The rule of economy is that what is sacrificed is recuperable as something else, something desired or needed. This is, after all, the grand Indo-European mythology of sacrifice: the universe — gods and mortals alike — as a great cycle of feeding, nourished on death, preserving life through a system of balanced transactions. There is clearly an essential nihilism in this economy: tragic resignation followed by prudent salvage, for order's sake. But the gift is another thing: it is the refusal of prudential transaction, it is by nature exorbitant and somehow sweetly jealous of its own worth; it has, that is, the shape of love — I want you, I give to you, I cannot bear to lose you. Hence Israel does not turn toward the eternal heights of the numinous to recuperate its "investment," but toward the eschatological horizon to find the gift restored as it was given: it cries out for vindication of the just, for the return of the murdered, for resurrection. This violates all sound economics; Israel resists the reduction of the commodity to its exchange value; it is willing to exceed the contained system of cosmic exchanges, and its regularities, so long as it is not forced to relinquish the gift except as gift, to be given again; it calls upon justice, which is to say the infinite, rather than the fiduciary equivalences of totality. As it longs for the infinite of the other — which is the just measure of the other — Israel forsakes economic recuperation for the rescue of the particular, of every particular; its longing is for the "bad" infinite, which can be made subordinate to no economy at all. This is the infinite excess of God's gift: that it will not cease to be gift and become value. (p. 352)

[…]

The pagan or secular sacrificial regime obeys the logic of the boundary, the "justice" of demarcations, the blow with which Romulus slays Remus; the sacrifice that Christ is obeys the life of the God who is apeiron, aperilepton, boundless, impossible to "leap over," but crossing every boundary in absolute freedom to declare his love. God is then the God who transgresses the bounds of totality, who violates the contained power of every temenos, and whose motion in time must therefore call forth totality's most "natural" gesture: crucifixion. From a pagan perspective the cross is a sacrifice in the "proper" sense: destruction of the agent of social instability in the interests of social order, and the surrender of the particular to the universal; but the shape of Christ's life, its constant motion of love, forgiveness, and righteous judgment, seems (from this same perspective) no sacrifice at all, but merely an uneconomizable force of disorder, an inversion of rank and judicious measure. The God who proceeds as he will, who crosses boundaries and respects no order — law, commerce, empire, class, nations, dominions, markets, death — except the order of love (the only infinite order), is a Word that disrupts the narratives that sustain the world as a reserve, a controlled expenditure, and a recuperation of power. It is expedient that such a Word be silenced, lest the nation perish. (p. 353)

[…]

The cross marks the place where the totality, in its most naked manifestation as political terror, attempts to overcome infinity — for the infinite, when it invades totality, does so as a kind of anarchy, prodigal in love and uncompromising in judgment — but the cross ultimately fails to put an end to the motion of Christ's life, to the infinity of his gift. Thus one order of sacrifice is raised up, the other cast down, reduced to a kind of futility; and thus we are freed from servitude to the absolute. The sacrificial economy of totality, in the end, can repeat only a single gesture: it has the power to crucify; but the sacrificial self-outpouring of the infinite cannot be brought to an end by crucifixion, because it continues to be the gift it is even in surrendering itself to the violences of the world. Its motion is repeated, unabated, even in being suppressed; even the cross, Rome's most "persuasive" image of terror, is conquered and becomes a far more persuasive image of love. (p. 354)

Memetic transformation, not mere condemnation

A couple of years ago, I attended a dinner with my extended family for some major celebration. Tent with firefly lights in the garden, roast beef turning, karaoke machine blaring, relatives I only meet twice a decade gossiping and laughing. I was sitting beside my godmother. At some point she asked me what I was working on. I was in the middle of my research for Rajah Versus Conquistador and for what eventually became an article on the scapegoat mechanism in Southeast Asia published in the same volume of the Contagion Journal as Pattillo's "Girard's Apostasy." I told her the truth: "I'm working on the topic of ritual human sacrifice." You should have seen her face lol. It had "my godson, WTF are you doing with your life" written all over it.

My godmother's disgust and disbelief contrasts with the ubiquity of ritual human sacrifice prior to the Axial Age. Her visceral reaction—shared by virtually everyone in the modern world—shows that something fundamental has shifted in human consciousness. We no longer see collective murder as sacred, but as something abhorrent (most of the time). As Tom Holland shows through history in his 2019 book Dominion and Girard through his critique of Nietzsche, this transformation didn't happen because we developed better philosophical arguments against sacrifice, but because the Christian narrative has so thoroughly saturated our cultural imagination that even secular humanists now instinctively side with victims rather than persecutors. By using the same word—sacrifice—for both the pagan economy of violence and Christ's self-offering, Christianity did not merely offer an alternative to the old order but achieved total memetic domination over it. The concept of "sacrifice" itself has been converted, transformed from within. In his article, Pattillo describes the position of Schwager, as "pragmatic, above all," and quotes the theologian explaining how "it's finally a question of tactics!" Perhaps this is what Schwager meant. Using the same word for archaic sacred killing and Jesus's death allows the latter to gradually replace the former in our minds.

This transformation is still ongoing. As I presented in "The Scapegoat Mechanism in Southeast Asian Ritual, Myth, and Politics," the demonization and sacrifice of the powerless Other continues to be an effective pathway to power (DM me if you want the PDF). A similar transitory state can be observed in our psychology. In a previous post, I introduced a cognitive bias which I call the "sacrificial fallacy"—that everything has a cost. The antisacrificial Girardians and the Innsbruck School both have a point. It is true that the archaic sacrificial mindset continues to afflict both in our cultures and our individual minds. However, scapegoating this sacrificial mindset is like condemning violence through more violence. The antisacrificial approach to archaic sacrifice is to convert it.

It was right for Girard to change his mind on sacrifice, perhaps after experiencing the deep well of its varied meanings in his theological conversations with Schwager. I can only speculate based on my experience—as a layman of this domain—of sensing this depth in reading theologians like Hart. I hope quoting him at length above gave you a taste of what I'm talking about. Another option, especially for those who find Hart's style too baroque, is Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week — From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection (2011), especially the chapters on the Last Supper and the Passion, which explores the question of sacrifice through both the Jewish and Christian lens but without any reference to Girard's theories.

Open Questions

This post will be a foundation to engaging with the concerns posed by Pattillo:

• Does the usage of "sacrifice" for Christ's crucifixion mean that “institutional Christianity had lost an opportunity to repent of a theological mindset that too easily attributes violence to God,” and “by even now subscribing to the view that God enlisted the murderous scapegoat mechanism in divine service (albeit at God’s own expense) Girard now reaffirmed the demand for ‘sacred violence’ at the heart of institutional Christianity”?

• Has Girard's thought "been coopted to serve as theoretical underpinning to dreams of Catholic nationalism, for which sacrifices will most definitely have to be made"?

What violence does "institutional Christianity" need to repent for? This is easy to answer for an internet-era Catholic, being endlessly reminded of the church’s sins by the movements who use her as their scapegoat. Of the top of my head:

• The massacre of the Cathars

• The Crusades

• The Inquisition

• Copernicus, Giorgio Bruno, and Galileo

• The Age of Conquest

As someone from a postcolonial nation, I have the sacred positionality of being a victim of colonization. At the same time, I spent more than a year living inside the mind of Magellan, so I could faithfully write his character in my novel, Rajah Versus Conquistador. I plan to use a chapter in the book titled "Apollo Versus the Crucified" to share how I finally made sense of the violence in the history of Christendom after many years of ruminating on this question. Another option is to use True Detective Season One, which to me is the best conquistador film ever made, similar to how I used the 2006 film The Departed to present my model of The Three Epistemologies.

I'd also like to expand on this line from my sacrificial fallacy post which is the most reposted sentence in my Substack (an all-time record of 2).

Truth is the escape from the sacrificial economy: scientific and technological truths that allow us to fulfill human desire without coercion and blood, and moral truths—like the equality of all—that enables such a world.

What are other escape paths from the sacrificial economy aside from truth? Off the top of my head: virtue (goodness) and art (beauty). But why? I'd like to answer this along with the following:

• Is entrepreneurship, or participation in capitalism, inherently sacrificial? In other words, is wealth nothing but the capture of other people's production "surplus," as Marxists continue to assert? What would an anti-sacrificial business look like?

• Is "no pain, no gain" true? Do physical, emotional, relational, and spiritual growth depend on suffering? Or at least do pain and suffering have inherent value? There's a good chance that we'll suffer as we grow old and near our deaths. Is there a point to all that upcoming pain or is that just an unavoidable evil?

• Is pain and suffering a necessary part of following Christ? Is that what this Gospel passage means? “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” — Luke 9:23

Lastly, I'd like to explore the epistemology of theology though the language of David Deutsch. A number of presentations in the Girard conference I attended were based on papers that try to reconcile Girard's theories with those of others (e.g., Georges Bataille's explanation of ritual sacrifice). I'd like to build on the categorization of explanations that I presented in my Contagion article:

• Theories of origin

• Theories of function

• Theories of meaning

My previous crossovers between Deutsch's and Girard's ideas helped me clarify my own thoughts (e.g., do social sciences, like Girard's theories, represent real things?)

That's at least three future posts! If you know of works that explore these questions, please share them in the comments!