Rene´Girard is something of a Janus for philosophers and theologians interested in the question of sacrifice. On the one hand, few thinkers in any century have made such a compelling case for the importance and centrality of sacrifice within all human culture. On the other hand, Girard has steadfastly insisted that sacrifice be understood in exclusively anthropological terms thus foreclosing the metaphysical and theological questions that prima facie seem to attend any robust consideration of sacrifice. In this essay, I seek to move beyond this Girardian impasse by supplementing Girard's latethought with a more robust metaphysics of sacrifice as found in the work of the novelist, literary critic, and theologian, Charles Williams (one of the Oxford 'Inklings' and a close companion of C.S. Lewis). To begin with, I first explain Girard's understanding of the mimetic mechanism and the sacrificial origins of human culture. I then consider a number of the criticisms with which he has been charged, especially the accusation of methodological reductionism. I explore the way that Girard's late work has responded to a number of these criticisms but argue that Girard's responses fail to diffuse the charges. By way of conclusion, I suggest that Girard's insights can be saved when supplemented with the kind of relational metaphysics found in Williams' most perfectly realized novel, Descent into Hell. Rather than dispensing with ontology in favour of praxis, Williams transforms the profoundly Girardian themes of mediated desire, the doppelganger, mimetic rivalry, ritual, and the function of sacrifice by placing them in the context of what he calls the metaphysics of 'co-inherence.' This allows Williams to provide a far more positive account of both mimesis and sacrifice (even in its substitutionary mode) than Girard, not just non-retaliation but the actual bearing of one another's deepest burdens in communion, prayer, and love.
Early modernity tended to appeal to the trope of the book of nature as a way of securing knowledge—including knowledge about God—against the exigencies of history and culture, but as theorists such as Timothy Morton, Bruno Latour, and others have argued, today this assumed dualism of nature and culture is both ecologically and critically suspect. What might it mean to read the book of nature in a time of ecological precarity, what many have called the Anthropocene? I will argue that premodern theological traditions of the book of nature, such as one finds in the twelfth century Hugh of Saint Victor, have something extremely important to add to a postmodern ‘terrestrial’ hermeneutics of nature, precisely because the premodern book of nature already performs the construal of nature as culture (and of culture as nature) so often recommended today by critics such as Latour, Haraway, and others. On such an account, nature is neither a fantasy object to be ignored or fled, nor a stable text to be tamed, rationalized, and epistemically leveraged, but rather the changing concept and experience of nature is a symbol illuminated in a book we half receive, and half create, a symbol open to both critique and contemplation, which gives rise to thought, action, and the sort of novel moral intuitions we need now more than ever.
The world is deep: deeper than day can comprehend. . . .-Friedrich Nietzsche 1Is there a mysticism of the Event, and if so, what does it look like? Does such a mysticism take us out of the world of bodies and politics, of relationships and locales, or does it somehow give these things back to us? Surprisingly, these questions have recently been raised by revisionist studies of the thought of Gilles Deleuze. Radicalizing and improving upon the earlier critiques of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, Peter Hallward argues that there is a theophanic philosophy or spiritual theology waiting to be extracted from Deleuze's writings. For Hallward, this theological element contaminates and cripples the political and social value of Deleuze's work, transforming him from a thinker of materiality, corporeality, and relation into a theorist of "contemplative and immaterial abstraction," 2 a philosopher who "is most appropriately read as a spiritual or subtractive thinker, a thinker preoccupied with the mechanics of dis-embodiment and de-materialization." 3 Hallward claims that the centre of Deleuze's project is a process philosophy that equates being simply with creativity and issues in a kind of philosophical mysticism that dismantles the daylight world in order to find union with the dark eternal flux of pure becoming, casting aside all our relations, bodies, projects, and political aspirations. 4 Hallward's reading of Deleuze seems to demand a theological response. In what follows, I first introduce Hallward's critical reading of Deleuze, and then
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