Before the Foundation of the World

The Necessity of a Transcendent and Personal Radix et Origo for Human Culture

1       Introduction: Making Satisfaction to the Past.. 1

2       The Foundation of the Good Creation... 3

2.1    The Transcendent Foundation of Creation.. 3

2.2    Human Personhood and Immanent Relation.. 4

2.3    Human Culture and the Stability of Truth.. 4

3       The Foundation of the World.. 5

3.1    The Problematic Enlightenment Vision of the Human Person.. 5

3.1.1      Renaissance and Reformation. 5

3.1.2      The Autonomous Subject 6

3.1.3      The Death of the Subject 6

3.1.4      The Rubble of Autonomy. 7

3.2    The Problematic Enlightenment Vision of Human Societies. 7

3.2.1      The Slide into Relativism.. 7

3.2.2      Moral Culture’s Need for the Transcendent and Personal God. 7

3.3    Secularism and the Cycle of Violence.. 7

3.3.1      Some Problems of Secular Philosophies: The Denial of Actualization in Relation. 7

3.3.2      Autonomously-Actualized Personhood is the Only Subjective Solution to Secularism.. 8

3.3.3      Mimetic Contagion is the Necessary Outcome of Subjectively-Autonomous Actualization. 8

3.3.4      Extremism, Violence, and Hedonism – the Disordered Response to Modern Secularism.. 9

4       The Renewal of Creation... 10

4.1    The Death of the World.. 10

4.2    The Gates of Hell. 11

5       Works Cited.. 14

1           Introduction: Making Satisfaction to the Past

Near the conclusion of his book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, anthropologist René Girard identifies Christianity as being always “in our day…the scapegoat of last resort.” (Girard 164) As this sort of scapegoating hastens onward, one might begin to wonder whether modernity, though seemingly burgeoning with success and future potential, may in fact be reaching its end as, still dependent upon a unifying scapegoat, it turns viciously upon God and Christianity as the scandals of last resort against which a quaking world can unite itself.

To discover the snag upon which the self-proclaimed seamless robe of secular humanism has caught and begun to unravel, we may turn to one of the news media’s recent popular Christian scapegoats, a theologian who, nearly 1,000 years ago, took up like those before him the central question of Christianity: “Cur Deus homo?” Why did God become a man? First of the medieval scholastics, it was St. Anselm of Canterbury who – synthesizing thousands of years of scripture and a millennium of Christian tradition – answered this question with the doctrine of Satisfaction. His argument runs thus: God’s honor and lordship are infinite. Humanity exists in relation with God privately as individuals and corporately as a race. In this relation, humanity owes total obedience and honor to God as creature does to Creator. Sin defies this relation and offends God’s justice, hence demanding that recompense be made. As God’s honor and justice are infinite, an infinite payment is required to make good humanity’s debt to God. Such a payment, humanity cannot provide. Hence the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, who owes nothing and can give infinitely, became Man to shoulder physically the spiritual reality of humanity’s burden and restore right relation with God by a life of obedience, complete surrender, and finally death on a cross. (Kent, “St. Anselm” in The Catholic Encyclopedia 1907 ed.)

Now fashionably reviled, this doctrine is viewed as hopelessly archaic on the basis of two claims. First, it is a cruel system in which God must exact punishment to satisfy His wounded honor. Second, it rests upon an arbitrary legalism that is mechanical at best and a cold-hearted un-Godly evil at worst.

These charges, however, fundamentally misread the medieval mind, which we may understand in two premises. First, the movement of the human will – for or against God – is in fact a movement of the will for or against one’s own existence. God is the cause of our being, sustaining our existence in His personal relation with us. Second, the right of God to be obeyed is no arbitrary and haughty dictum but is the medieval expression of the interaction between our utter creaturely dependence upon God and the independence of free will that He has given us. Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper (“Justice” in The Four Cardinal Virtues) explains the Scholastic view:

…the man who does not give a person what belongs to him, withholds it or deprives him of it, is really doing harm to himself; he is the one who actually loses something – indeed, in the most extreme case, he even destroys himself. (Pieper 47)

For the medievals, legal language did not signify an arbitrary after-the-fact imposition of rules and regulations. This is exemplified in the reign of medieval kings by “divine right.” The King’s duty was not to make new laws but to uphold the existing natural order of creation that was ordained in relation with God, an order outside of which creation simply cannot exist. To call our relation with God “law” is not to appeal to arbitrary divine mandates. It is to recognize that this law, the dynamic of freedom and love into which we are called by surrendering to God, is as constitutive of our spiritual existence as the divinely-created laws of physics are of our material existence.

God is not the gentleman who, with wounded pride, demands “satisfaction” from the one who has insulted Him, nor is satisfaction the forensic payment of a speeding ticket. Rather, it is the long climb up the cliff-face over which one has just plunged one’s vehicle. It is a re-formation of human will, a will which in total freedom had taken into itself the seed of opposition to God and thus taken flight into shadow, a state of woundedness, internal conflict, and darkened vision. An offense to God’s justice is not an insult. It is humanity’s active opposition to the very personal relation of creature and Creator. It is refusing ultimate good, refusing the intimacy of God and creation, refusing the glorious end for which God intended all humanity, if it would but surrender in loving and transformative relation. The individual may surrender to God, but, for all humanity to receive a restored will and spiritual relation, one with ultimate freedom undertook that long climb. That all may have open to them divine heirship by adoption, the One who possessed divine Sonship by nature took upon Himself the brokenness of our state as He climbed the cliff-face of Calvary. Sanctification, resurrection, and beatitude in union with God, the fruits of this arduous ascent, are offered to all who would follow Him.[1]

But what has this to do with the modern world? Two cultural shifts have enabled a forensic and purely-juridical view of the doctrine of Satisfaction.

First, early Reformation thought rejected the human person’s sanctification by and in cooperation with God’s grace, leading to the subsequent rejection of humanity’s active relationship with God – thus a rejection of a personally and corporately relational order, leaving us with a cold legal God who exacts punishment according to some abstract “justice.”

Second, the French Enlightenment brought to its conclusion a journey begun in the Renaissance: a view of the person as the self-constituting and autonomous rational subject and hence of law as the ex post facto construct of society, reflecting the corporate relation neither of men nor of creation and God, but solely the exercise of the will of men. Thus, forsaking St. Thomas’ assertion – “If…a thing itself is contrary to natural right, the human will cannot make it just” (Pieper 48) – we arrive at a rejection of a transcendent order, effectively rendering God capricious in His legalism, for His law is not rooted in anything but divine whimsy.

We argue that these trends have been detrimental and that the stability of human culture as well as the welfare of the individual can be achieved only in a society philosophically established upon the transcendent and personal God, embracing therewith the ancient Christian understanding of the human person and of the relational law knitting together the very fabric of the cosmos.

2          The Foundation of the Good Creation

2.1        The Transcendent Foundation of Creation

Recall that, for the medieval mind and thus for the culture of Western Europe nearly until the dawn of the 18th century, the ground and reference of all truth was God, the transcendent Creator and personally immanent Lord, the “first beginning and last end” of all things. These two factors, the transcendent lordship of God and His personal immanence, undergirded an epistemological basis for culture that anchored humans to and in relation with a God beyond themselves, a triune God whose Persons exist in eternal self-giving relation with each other. The philosophical ground of human society, in its structure, basis, and legal maintenance, was incarnational: a visible and materially-mediated reflection of the uncreated divine order, a constitutive and dynamically transformative relation of creation to Creator.

2.2        Human Personhood and Immanent Relation

To properly appreciate “surrender” in our context necessitates a grasp of the ancient Catholic understanding of human personhood, the theology of the imago Dei, the image of God. The creaturely person is constituted by his relation to God, the uncreated purely relational triune Lord. Moreover, by his own movement of the will, man engages in personal relation both with God and with created persons, thus actualizing – that is, developing in the spiritual sense – his personhood. (Weinandy, Does God Suffer?) Consider the soul at conception as an unpolished glass sphere. The movement of one’s will outside of oneself, engaging in relation with other persons, facets this sphere until it is a glittering diamond to reflect and refract the light of God. Imaging the Persons of the Holy Trinity, complete actualization of human personhood comes in the surrender of complete self-gift. The ideal of marriage is reflective of the divine and forms the basis for human personhood – a sanctifying complete and freely-willed surrender, complete trust, complete disclosure, as well as complete reception of the other. In this do we find the image of God. Free to choose, yet dependent upon God for our constitution in existence, we may find fully-actualized personhood not in solitary autonomy but in relation – gift and reception through the movement of the will exercised in intellectual thought and embodied action. Such is the ancient patristic and later medieval tradition of anthropology. In his audience of 14 November 1979, Pope John Paul II remarked:

The function of the image is to reflect the one who is the model, to reproduce its own prototype. Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion. Right “from the beginning,” he is not only an image in which the solitude of a person who rules the world is reflected, but also, and essentially, an image of an inscrutable divine communion of persons.

This vision combines the autonomous (that is, uncoerced) will with the necessity of surrendering one’s will, at the deepest level, to God and to one’s fellow persons, necessarily implying a culture of charity. God is the beginning and end of this order, and thus the order transcends the individual who participates in it.

2.3        Human Culture and the Stability of Truth

A culture thus anchored enjoys a fundamental stability. Concepts of personhood, of law, and of culture are rooted in the unchanging Lord, in the reality of “how things are,” which law each person holds within himself.[2] Moreover, Truth itself is immutable. While human understanding may deepen and develop, there is no sense in which the Truth may itself change. Human laws, therefore, must exist in service of and bear witness to moral truth. As reality is relational, and as personhood implies and requires relation, a just and moral interaction of divinely-oriented charity – not in the sense of mere almsgiving but in the strong sense of self-giving agape – is the only cohesion for human culture that properly reflects reality.

While men may hold differing opinions, may treat each other unkindly, and may in all senses behave in a fallen manner, only a society philosophically based on the transcendent foundation and immanent relation that we have heretofore described presents an ideal of functioning that is in fact stable. Christian tradition, which holds this model to be the actual constitutive reality of the universe and of each individual person, argues that such a model is the only one that can cohere.

3          The Foundation of the World

3.1        The Problematic Enlightenment Vision of the Human Person

3.1.1         Renaissance and Reformation

Despite its artistic, musical, and scientific glories, certain elements of the Italian Renaissance began the slide from the personhood understood by incarnational Christianity into the subjective chaos of modern secular humanism. John Edward Sullivan O.P. (The Image of God) sacrifices diplomacy for succinctness as he writes of this shift and that of the Reformation. Renaissance humanism, “though it remains largely Christian in name, knows little or nothing of the medieval concept of man as the image of God. The natural, the reasonable man is overexalted to the degree that man’s dignity is sought and found independently of his fundamental relation to God as an image of the divine.”

Furthermore, while the Renaissance “exalted man to a point where the natural divine image loses its necessary and basic relation to the heavenly Exemplar,” key elements of the early Reformers’ theology “lower the dignity of man to the depth where any reference to the divine image is meaningless. The relation of man to God, in this view, is purely arbitrary, founded neither in “corrupt” human nature, nor really restored or renewed by the cloak of “extrinsic” grace.”  Thus, Sullivan concludes somewhat darkly, “both the Renaissance man and the Reformation man…are divorced from every stream of Christian tradition.” (Sullivan 295-296)[3]

The Renaissance person is constituted autonomously by his rationality rather than by a relation with God. The Reformation’s doctrines of total depravity and forensic justification, in attenuating the mystical communion of God and Man, render God’s law arbitrary and separate the person’s actualization from relation with the divine. These shifts prepared the way for a more complete mutation of personhood and society through the “change from a theocentric to an anthropocentric viewpoint” (Hans urs von Balthasar, New Elucidations 75) encountered in the Enlightenment.

3.1.2         The Autonomous Subject

Typified by Descartes’ axiom “I think therefore I am,” the Enlightenment saw a number of themes propelled to disastrous ends. Ignoring Augustine’s prayer “our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee,” Descartes and others sought to know the greater reality by first knowing the individual human self apart from all else, twisting the Thomist primacy of the rational soul (held by virtue of its relation to the divine essence) into a new primacy of the human intellect (held by virtue of the supposed ‘autonomy’ of its individual particularity – constituted by thought rather than by God). In a culture bereft of a Christological framework, this rapidly led to the greatest of assaults on the human person.

Descartes’ claims regarding the mind’s capacity for “clear and direct perception,” conspiring with Kant’s descriptions of the subject as autonomously knowing and acting, served to make the self private. Transcendence of history, culture, and even body were summed up under the ‘modern’ rubric of “self-transcendence” as the ultimate goal and inherent capacity of the autonomous self.  This philosophy directly opposes the ancient Christian belief that the totality of the self entailed a full restoration and reacquisition of the image of God within oneself, a process that, far from a solitary individual pursuit, was grounded in submission to the divine will and seeking after ever-closer relation with God and others. The Enlightenment sought none of this, proffering instead a self-constituting autonomous subject in knowledge, action, and individuality. From these concepts came greater ills.

3.1.3         The Death of the Subject

The Autonomous Knowing Subject – destined for glory by dispassionate and rational self-improvement – was trounced by the observation that the presence of such great evil as that horrifically thrust upon us by the first World War militates against rational autonomy and any claims for a rational ‘unfolding’ of Hegel’s Geist. Added to this was the contradiction between functional (knowledge-is-power-and-freedom) and intrinsic (the ultimate value of the ‘autonomous’ individual) valuations of the being. Thus an end to human dignity. (Kevin Vanhoozer, “Human being, individual and social” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine 168)

The Autonomous Spiritual Subject – self-constituting and fully and freely in control of its actions – was similarly threatened by evil and gave in to the weight of behaviorism, psychologies of the unconscious, along with evolutionary and genetic approaches, all of which averred that the individual’s mental life is neither autonomous nor even rational. Thus an end to human freedom. (Vanhoozer 169)

The Autonomous Individual Subject – possessed of opinions, tastes, and internal systems of morality and values – fell beneath philosophies of deterministic cultural transmission and linguistically-enforced subjectivity. The structuralists believed one’s experience to be entirely determined by the binary oppositions present within one’s cultural system and cultural codes: the self is a function of the system. The post-structuralists deconstructed ideology so that all structure is a product of convention rather than nature. The “de-centered” self is an artificial by-product of language which imposes an artificial order on a fragmentary personhood (Vanhoozer 169-170). Thus an end to the self.

3.1.4         The Rubble of Autonomy

Amidst the rubble of autonomy, the post-Enlightenment era has brought with it the serious challenges that threaten a philosophical concept of personhood. The paradox of the post-modern conception of human personhood can be summarized in the following statements. First, the person is an organism integrated into and produced of his sociological, biological, genetic, and instinctual milieu. Second, humanity claims for itself inherent and unique properties as well as intrinsic value (Vanhoozer 162). The desire for inherent and intrinsic value for a self somehow shaped entirely by the outside world leads to a circumscribed arena of will in which only the subjective experience can be considered valid for one’s own view of self. Hence only relativism can provide both complete exterior determination and self-affirming intrinsic value.

3.2        The Problematic Enlightenment Vision of Human Societies

3.2.1         The Slide into Relativism

The most famous tenet of the French revolution was that the authority of the laws enforced by the government is constituted not by any objective reality of those laws but by the consent of the people. The self-constituted rational subject of the Enlightenment is thus not only the ground of personhood but also the ground of law, for it is the masses that by majority vote determine the constitutional law of the land. Yet as each subject is autonomously-actualized, it cannot be that this law is a representative manifestation of any corporate reality; it is merely the statistical poll of a collection of individuals. While it may speak for the majority, the law does not of necessity bear any relation to a particular individual, as there is no analogue to the law in human nature. How, then, can it be considered “truth” for all in any but an expedient sense? There is no “corporate humanity” here to speak of, for human truth is determined by the exercise of the will, and each person exercises that will autonomously. The ground of truth is held by the majority and could shift overnight. Here, as we did above for the individual, we reach relativism for societies.

3.2.2        Moral Culture’s Need for the Transcendent and Personal God

To summarize, in losing the transcendent and personal God we lose the foundation of personhood and of moral culture. First, if we are not constituted transcendently, then our personhood is not directly concerned with transcendent concepts such as morality. Second, if we are not constituted relationally, then how can we say that the same law of relation governs both our interpersonal actualization and the relational fabric of the universe? That is, how can there be a transcendent law of relation – morality – if the ground of existence is not relational?

3.3        Secularism and the Cycle of Violence

3.3.1         Some Problems of Secular Philosophies: The Denial of Actualization in Relation

At the extremes of popular secular philosophy – self-denying post-structuralism versus self-actualizing relativism, we encounter complementary errors which individually weaken culture and, in combination, dissolve it. In fact, most of the modern popular accounts of human personhood that are explicit or implied in self-help, psychology, and “spirit-freeing” New Age philosophical literature, are some compound of the post-structuralist and the relativist worldviews, the former allowing us to evade responsibility for our actions by denying our independent personhood, and the latter permitting us to justify our actions “from our point of view” by denying objective truth whenever we feel that unwelcome suspicion of personal responsibility that once went by the name of conscience. Because any such worldview denies the possibility of true objective actualization-in-relation, it must require of the self-perceiving subject an implicit philosophy of autonomous actualization (by the autonomous exercise of will) in order to permit any coherent experience of daily life.[4]

3.3.2        Autonomously-Actualized Personhood is the Only Subjective Solution to Secularism

Serious difficulties now arise. Even while lacking the relational and divinely-ordered understanding of human personhood and exchanging transcendent relational law for a relativistic absence thereof, daily life must bow to the impression or appearance of the autonomously-actualized individual because the subjective impression of our self-hood is a perception of reality. We believe ourselves to be rational individuals needful of relation and love because we are so. As the post-structuralists aver, the philosophical discourse of a culture does inform our conscious understanding of personhood, but it cannot destroy our intuitions about objective truth and personal relation. Therefore, our intuitions are set in opposition to our language and our environment; we are not robbed of our personhood but rather of the linguistic and societal wherewithal to properly conceive of the actualization of that personhood in accordance with the true order of creation. If we are told that there is no transcendent except that which we create by the free exercise of our will, then we are left alone and impoverished, having the subjective impression of personhood and will but no objective guidance for its role in human society. Whether this society tells us that we have no self or whether it tells us that we have no environment save that which we imagine, the result is equivalent: our inchoate intuition of selfhood and of objective truth and morality is severed from the our philosophical environs which tell us that such an intuition is a lie.

This conflict of internal and external begets two ills. First, we have the perception that we must assert our subjective personhood over against the external world. Only one’s freely-achieved will can establish one’s personhood. Second, we are troubled within ourselves, for such an internal philosophy of necessary and utter autonomy clashes with our inescapable impression of the need for human unity and of the effect of relation upon us. Here, then, is the destruction of human society, for selfish autonomy and moral conflict create within us a frenzied search for stability through some higher law. If that law is not the law of God, it will be, as Girard terms it, the law of Satan.

3.3.3        Mimetic Contagion is the Necessary Outcome of Subjectively-Autonomous Actualization

When the human person perceives himself as autonomously self-actualizing through unencumbered and free-willed self-determination, every relationship or even interaction with another becomes the occasion for a potential clash of wills in which – in order for self-actualization to continue – each person must attempt to surmount the other in order to “have his way” in this destructive form of individualism. Competition now occupies the place once held by moral order. Thus in place of the Conscience, which Cardinal Newman called the “aboriginal Vicar of Christ” (Diff. II, 248) and the Creator’s “implanted…Law, which is [H]imself, in the intelligence of all [H]is rational creatures” (Diff. II, 246-247), we have instead self-assertion:

 Conscience is a stern monitor, but in this century it has been superseded by a counterfeit, which the eighteen centuries prior to it never heard of, and could not have mistaken for it, if they had.  It is the right of self-will. (Diff. II, 250)

Even when the wills of many are united for a common good to form a society, the failure of Communism shows us that each individual cannot equally share in the goods obtained. Equal sharing and the perceived equal exercise of autonomy can only occur, therefore, when society unites not to obtain (for this breeds discord) but to cast out. Girard has demonstrated this phenomenon throughout the literature (secular and religious) of pagan societies ancient and modern; it is this “mimetic contagion,” he notes, which unites adversaries and makes allies of competitors as they converge against the one unifying victim who has become “scandal” to them in this “sacrificial crisis.” In the end, by the need to self-define over against the will of the other, the autonomous self-actualized person becomes subject to mimetic contagion not merely to obtain stability but to maintain his very selfhood. A society of such persons, in which the ground of truth is the freely-exercised will of the fractious majority, inevitably seeks its stability in uniting against the single victim.

3.3.4        Extremism, Violence, and Hedonism – the Disordered Response to Modern Secularism

With an immanent foundation not explicitly based on relation, human personhood and society is made into a house built upon sand. We have already argued that the reality of relational constitution and actualization imply a necessary instability in the modern concept of the person. Considering this, we further posit that – bereft of an objective and universal standard for truth (the transcendent God) and bereft of a similarly transcendently-based model of relation (the personal God) – human society must turn, through mimetic contagion, to extreme and even violent methods of defining a universal order. We may see this phenomenon nascent in the rise of European nationalism, which defined great masses of humanity by geography and government; continuing through National Socialism, which defined as a universal foundation the superiority of the German race; and culminating in atheistic Communism which only dimly recognized the individual, as one provided for by the collective. None of these models supply the necessary transcendent and relational underpinnings for a successful society, for they fail to unite the personal definition of the individual and of his relation to the whole including a universal and transcendently-founded order.

This breakdown is further witnessed in Girard’s description of anti-Christian neo-paganism:

Faithful observance of the moral law is perceived as complicity with the forces of persecution that are essentially religious…  Neo-paganism locates happiness in the unlimited satisfaction of desires, which means the suppression of all prohibitions. (Girard 181)

Clearly, the epistemology of moral truth and the ontology of the human person are inextricably intertwined. When, through relativism, the person is defined by the exercise of will (here in the acquisition of pleasure), failure to achieve the intended ends entails a diminution of personhood. In light of the inherent propensity of such a system to devolve into violence through mimetic contagion, an extremist super-context is the only way to visibly unite a group of people. The tendency toward scapegoating and violence is not the conscious program of a philosophically-minded salon of secularists but is rather the natural human reaction to the apparent absence of objective truth, relation, and unity. We may see this principle operating today in the rise – within Germany and France – of neo-Nazism (specifically, virulent anti-Semitism) and in the rapidly-growing popularity of Islamic fundamentalism among ethnic Europeans. Such are the fruits of modern secularism.

We may understand the lament of Pope Pius XII (Summi pontificatus 31-32) at the “darkness over the Earth” thus entailed:

Many perhaps, while abandoning the teaching of Christ, were not fully conscious of being led astray by a mirage of glittering phrases, which proclaimed such estrangement as an escape from the slavery in which they were before held; nor did they then foresee the bitter consequences of bartering the truth that sets free, for error which enslaves. They did not realize that, in renouncing the infinitely wise and paternal laws of God, and the unifying and elevating doctrines of Christ’s love, they were resigning themselves to the whim of a poor, fickle human wisdom; they spoke of progress, when they were going back; of being raised, when they groveled; of arriving at man’s estate, when they stooped to servility. They did not perceive the inability of all human effort to replace the law of Christ by anything equal to it; “they became vain in their thoughts” (Romans i. 21).

With the weakening of faith in God and in Jesus Christ, and the darkening in men’s minds of the light of moral principles, there disappeared the indispensable foundation of the stability and quiet of that internal and external, private and public order, which alone can support and safeguard the prosperity of States.

4          The Renewal of Creation

4.1        The Death of the World

The mimetic competition endemic in secularism manifests itself in a concern for victims that is perpetuated in self-aggrandizing one-upmanship:

We do not all have the same experience at St. Peter and St. Paul, who discovered that they themselves were guilty of persecution and confessed their own guilt rather than that of their neighbors. It’s our neighbors who kindly remind us that we should be compassionate, and we render them the same service. In our world…we are all bombarding each other with victims…

From now on we have our antisacrificial rituals of victimization… First of all we lament the victims we admit to making or allowing to be made. Then we lament the hypocrisy of our lamentation, and finally we lament Christianity, the indispensable scapegoat, for there is no ritual without a victim, and in our day Christianity is always it, the scapegoat of last resort. (Girard 164)

In neglecting the transcendent standard and immanent relation of the God of the Christian revelation, modern society seeks its own destruction. Against the voice of Christ who, from the Cross, pleaded: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” we now have a world that denies that Father, our relation to Him, and His forgiveness; we have those who raise their own voices as their own final authority, their own individualistic standard, in short, their own relation-less God. The belief-system of those who “know not what they do” engenders among the societies of the world a mimetic contagion equally dangerous. In forgetting the God who taught them concern for victims, they have become those who would exalt themselves by their supposed concern. As Girard writes, “we hear repeated in every way that we no longer have an absolute. But…this concern [for victims] is not relative. It is our absolute.” (Girard 177)

Concern for victims may be our culturally-unifying absolute. Yet the blind discussion of abortion as a matter of competing sympathies rather than of universal moralities and the growing contempt for religious minorities (including practicing Christians), who object to the dominant materialism and oft utilitarian flavor of the day, demonstrate that this concern functions only partially. At best it is a corporate but not personal concern, uniting itself against the past and against absolutes. At worst it is simply a veneer covering with subtle artifice the same mechanisms of scapegoating that have plagued human societies since the Fall. Clearly this cannot endure.

4.2        The Gates of Hell

Having pursued this topic somewhat philosophically within the Catholic theological tradition, we now turn to more explicitly-theological considerations. Writing in the late fourth century, the Greek archbishop St. Epiphanius of Salamis proclaimed:

…This was befitting in the First of the Apostles, that firm Rock upon which the Church of God is built, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it….The gates of Hell are heretics and heresiarchs. (St. Epiphanius, Tome 2)

According to St. Epiphanius, the gates of chaos and instability, of rivalry and finally of evil, are first opened by those who forsake the truth of God and establish their own systems of belief to replace Him Who can neither deceive nor be deceived. This rebellion against God, which in its refusal to surrender to God is a denial of relation to Him and thus either a denial of His existence or of ours, is properly described by von Balthasar as “the real atheism that does not want to be obliged to anything or to anyone, but rather wants to create man itself.” [Emphasis mine.] (von Balthasar 84) In attempting a definition of personhood without reference to the relational and the transcendent personal God, we worship a phantasm not even dimly reflective of our true nature (see also Summi pontificatus 28):

In trying to satisfy his yearning precipitously and on his own initiative, what he represents as religious objectifications is, according to the testimony of the Bible, not an approach to the image that God has set up of himself, but rather its miscarriage and perversion: an “idol”, a “false god”. (von Balthasar 75)

We cannot properly approach anthropology or culture apart from the Christian understanding of personhood, nor can we achieve enduring stability apart from apprehension of the truth presented in Christianity.  As Christians, writes von Balthasar (86), “we are not called on to build a flimsy (transcendental) framework of Christianity over humanity, in order to use it as a bridge from which to set out on our mission work…”  Rather, we must, “with God’s complete project called Jesus Christ” confront “the always partial and defective projections of humanity, which is trying to construct its own self-fulfillment…”  Any human-created order will rise and fall with humanity and cannot be the super-context in which the human context is anchored. Conflict is a relational problem; therefore it requires a relational solution. We must recognize atonement not merely as exposing the violence at the root of the world but as restoring the pre-violent condition as an existence open to all who would embrace it.

Any human-created order will rise and fall with humanity and cannot be the super-context in which the human context is anchored. Conflict is a relational problem; therefore it requires a relational solution. We must recognize atonement not merely as exposing the violence at the root of the world but as restoring the pre-violent condition as an existence open to all who would embrace it.

As Girard has demonstrated, all myths begin with violence. In contrast, only Judaism and Christianity recognize a time before the pagan beginning, the original innocence and harmony in the garden prior to the Fall and Cain’s murder of Abel. To return to the state prior to those founding murders (Eve’s murder of innocence and Cain’s murder of Abel), we must recognize what enabled such mimetic contagion. Thus do we come to the “foundation of the World,” a World of rivalry and misdirected mimesis built on the cornerstone of the Fall and founded against the good Creation. Adam and Eve laid this foundation in exchanging a relational imitation of the divine self-gift for the false divinization offered to them through imitation of the Serpent’s regard for the Fruit (false autonomy). Yet here we must respectfully differ with Girard by recognizing that the Fall was not in the first instance a case of imitative desire, for the design of that foundation was first sketched by the Serpent himself, who – having once been the brightest of the angels – sought to define himself without self-gift, without surrender, as divine without imitating God; to be Lord of the World without imitating His kenotic love; to mirror the Creator without miming Him. The Serpent sought autonomy and brilliant actualization on his own, alone, and apart. Humanity’s error was to imitate the wrong model; yet that model exists also as an objective reality which – just as would be the fall of Man – was personally and relationally accomplished by the fall of Satan. Thus it is that the search for personhood apart from God – the search for non-relational personhood and for autonomously-constituted and actualized non-transcendent personhood – is, in fact, the root of the Fall. We see what it has wrought in the post-modern philosophies of personhood, and we see it in the fall of the Serpent. It is the seed of contagion, the perversion hidden before the foundation of the World. We know it traditionally by a simpler name: Pride.

Near the end of I See Satan, Girard writes:

By offering a natural, rational interpretation of facts formerly perceived as relevant to the supernatural, such as Satan…[we do] not minimize the hold evil has on humans and their need for redemption….By desacralizing certain themes, by showing that Satan exists first of all as a figure created by structures of mimetic violence, we think with the Gospels and not against them. (Girard 192)

With this statement we cannot agree. By desacralizing and stripping them of their relevance to the supernatural, we remove them from the sphere of relation with the divine and depart utterly from the Christian tradition which Girard’s work seeks to explain. To depersonalize the Devil destroys the reality of humanity’s necessary choice between imitation of the divine and imitation of the first fallen. Thelogically, by removing the real and personal event of non-mimetic self-definition (Satan’s fall), we lose that pre-Fall rebellion in which is rooted all mimetic contagion. By making Satan the “spirit of accusation” rather than the one who accuses, we conflate Satan with evil itself; evil is thus treated as a purely-anthropological phenomenon in such a way as to disrupt the relational link of humanity and God, thus undermining the supernaturally-constituted personhood of man and setting us once more on the philosophical road trodden after the Enlightenment.

Girard states that he has pursued his research “as long as possible without postulating the reality of the Christian God. No appeal to the supernatural should break the thread of the anthropological analyses.” (Girard 192) Yet, while Girard himself may seem to prefer a disavowal of theologically-based anthropologies, we have pointed out in the broader sweep of his work the evidence that an atheistic[5] anthropology, philosophy[6], or sociology, is radically flawed. Understood in the context of our paper’s presentation, portions of Girard’s analyses present a fundamental corroboration of theological truths. Only by referring to the transcendent can we fully explain the human person and break the cycle of mimesis. For, it is only in the appeal to the super-natural that we find the reality of the natural; it is only in personal relation with the transcendent God that we encounter the reality of the anthropological. To reach right relation with each other, we must recognize the basis for the true and transcendent law of relation in the true freedom that comes through true imitation of the divine: surrender rather than subjection, and love rather than belligerence. The convergence of transcendence and immanence is the only possible foundation for a definition of personhood that will sustain civilization. Therefore, the restoration of human culture comes not merely through Man, but through the God-man. As St. Paul wrote, “…no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” (I Cor. 3:11) In the Incarnation is revealed the immanent relation of Creation’s transcendent and personal radix et origo: the self-emptying triune God who has made us in His image. When we forsake this Truth, scandal must come.

5          Works Cited

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von Balthasar, Hans urs. (1979). “Human Religion and the Religion of Jesus Christ.” Trans. Sr. Mary Theresilde Skerry. In. New Elucidations. Ignatius Press; San Francisco, CA, USA: 74-87.

Kent, W. H. (1907). “St. Anselm.” In The Catholic Encyclopedia vol. I, 1907 Edition. Robert Appleton Company; New York, NY, USA. Accessed March, 2005.
http://www.newadvent.org

Girard, René. (1999). I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Trans. James G. Williams. (2001). Orbis Books; Maryknoll, NY, USA.

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Pope John Paul II. (November 14, 1979). General Audience “By the Communion of Persons, Man Becomes the Image of God.” Trans. Vatican. Accessed July 23, 2004.
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/audiences/catechesis_genesis/documents/hf_jp-ii_aud_19791114_en.html

Pope Pius XII. (October 20, 1939). Encyclical Letter Summi Pontificatus. Trans. Vatican. Accessed July 23, 2004.
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_20101939_summi-pontificatus_en.html

Sullivan, John Edward, O.P. (1963). The Image of God – The Doctrine of St. Augustine and its Influence. The Priory Press; Dubuque, Iowa, USA.

Vanhoozer, Kevin. “Human being, individual and social.” In Colin E. Gunton (ed.) (1997). The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine. Cambridge University Press; Cambridge, UK: 158-188.

Weinandy, Thomas G. (2000). Does God Suffer? T&T Clark; Edinburgh, UK.