The Silence of the Goats.
An Update from the Hermitage on Scapegoating, Solitude and Silence.
I am now just finishing up a week here at the monastery of silence and solitude. The small monastic community here has gone elsewhere on retreat and has left me to my own devices out in the depths of the wilderness. Oh, the horror! Actually, it has been a beautiful week of silent prayer, reading, and meditating on the perennial troubles of the human condition. The monks will be back on Monday, and though that means, alas, that the recorded monastery bells will get turned back on1, it will be good to see them all. I hope that had a fruitful time away.
Over the past fifteen years, I have made various attempts to understand the ideas of Rene Girard. I must admit it has frequently been tough going and over all that time I don’t think I have made much actual progress. What he has to say is often obscure, or at least counter-intuitive to how we usually think about life, culture, and the nature of religion, particularly Christianity. It has been quite elusive to me, anyway. My last such attempt at understanding was about three years ago and once again I felt that I had failed. So much so, that in the various book purges conducted over the past year to lighten my load for moving, I had only kept one book on Girard.
This week, however, and for reasons unknown, I had something of small series of insights. It became clearer to me what he is saying about sacrifice and the scapegoat mechanism and its import for diagnosing and hopefully understanding our catastrophic age2. Previous to this, I was in the midst of working on a post that I felt was slowly converging on something sufficiently coherent; but these realizations have sidetracked that—though not entirely, I think. Rather, Girard’s insights have required me to try and deepen what I was trying to get at and to strive to express it closer to the heart of the matter. That is what I aiming for, anyway. We shall see how it goes.
The danger with a thinker like Girard is that once his worldview is more or less comprehended, it is easy to become something of a fundamentalist. Like many other great thinkers, what was previously unthinkable can be thought and what was dark is now seemingly so brightly illuminated. Girard uncovers so much and so deeply that it is tempting to think it illuminates pretty much everything. Though I am now amid the first flush of this fuller comprehension, I will do all I can to spare you from the zealous regurgitation of a convert. I have had enough of these kinds of “intellectual epiphanies”3 to know that full comprehension of the ways of the world will lie depressingly ever beyond my reach. Thank goodness for that.
If you have any interest in learning more about the thought of Rene Girard, I would recommend the following:
CBC 5-part series of interviews with Girard by David Cayley.
Otherwise, all is well here and I plan to fully enjoy my last few days of solitude and silence and not only by meditating on the significance of scapegoating to our escalating wars, cultural and otherwise. For one, I have been enjoying the calming effects of the wood-burning stove as it has been very cold up here at night. As I write this, however, the sun is shining, so once I send this off, I think I will go out for a good, long walk.
I hope everyone here in the States had a joyful Thanksgiving yesterday. And that everyone else had a joyful Thursday!
May all your Thursdays be joyful!
Turning off the monastery bells, was my first order of business. Yes, indeed, silence is golden.
The novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, though written before Girard had developed his work exemplifies similar themes. In some ways, it is in reading the novel that Girard’s work slowly has become intelligible to me. For those who have read the novel, this isn’t comforting news.
Intellectual epiphanies do bring understanding, but also disappointment. The hope of comprehensive comprehension is always dashed. Darn.
What I find helpful with thinkers like Girard is to remind myself that their insights, no matter how comprehensively they may seem to explain things, are really only ever imperfect models for our complicated existence in this world. As such, we should feel free to set them aside when they don't seem to match the terrain of reality, or to help us make sense of things. Their models may be insightful for others, but not for ourselves, at least in a particular moment. Or, to put it another way, they're maps, and we should never mistake the map for the territory - no map is ever exact unless it is 1:1, and then it become unwieldy reality itself. And sometimes one type of map is more descriptive of things than another, depending on what it is we're encountering, or trying to understand. As you say, it's easy to become a bit of a fundamentalist, which is essentially the act of trying to make the terrain fit the map. I've found Girard a struggle myself - at times he seems to be exactly describing reality, at times he's so abstruse that I'm lost. Personally, sometimes I find Douglas Adams a better guide - just laugh at the absurdity without necessarily trying to find hidden meanings.
Hi Jack, I just finally finished listening to David Cayley's series on Girard that you linked in this post. I'm slow. I think he's brilliant, and what's even more rare, humble and honest. Like you, I am fighting the urge to bubble up with amazing connections to everything going on all around me. My hubby was drawn in to a "drama" at the town level where one of the selectmen (the most sincere and wise one of the 5) was scapegoated (forced to resign). The whole situation was so precisely suited to illustrate the psychological forces Girard wrote about. I really appreciate the 'ambivalence' he expresses about things like progress, capitalism, violence etc. I've only just begun the other link with the two younger guys discussing him. It seems clear to me that these insights are deeply Christian. If used as an interesting or helpful philosophy, as they seem to be doing, it is understandable that they conclude that Girard leaves one hopeless. I yelled at the screen when they said that, though. He doesn't leave us hopeless, he shows that we must hope in God and the salvation we are offered. In a real sense, he clarifies that hopes of reforming the world are vain, but hoping to follow in Jesus' steps is a very real hope. Thanks for sharing your journey here so I can tag along at my own pace. --Clara