Rene Girard..... Revealer of Cultural Genesis and 'Way Pointer' to a Christ Centred Future

I must thank Steve Berg of 'GROW MERCY' for turning me onto the writings of Rene Girard whose ground breaking thesis presents the most hopeful case for a Christ centred world view I have ever encountered. This view is so powerful because it makes sense of our past present and future in a way that is vastly superior to the old sacrificial understanding of the Gospel that has dominated our thinking for two millennium.

Girard is a man whose breadth of vision has taken in the history of mankind from the time the first collection of homanoids became conscious of themselves as different than the animals we emerged from, through our development as religious and cultural beings and right up to our present secular (sometimes)nihilistic time and beyond to a future where we can become aware of our full humanity shared with Jesus the the son of God.

The process of homanization (becoming human) is explained as the need to channel the mimetic process of desire (without which no learning or culture could come into being).  There has been no greater need than to control and direct that overwhelming force so as not to allow it to wash over and destroy the human experiment.

Girard came to his revolutionary ideas by studying literature. He discovered the human heart revealed in books by such great authors as Proust and Dostoevsky. The mimetic heart that most longs for the things that others have is seen in all our competitive desires and our inability to value things in themselves without reference to how others (often falsely) value them.  

The memetic process allows us to learn and to grow but also to come into the most heated and deadly forms of competition.  Old sacrificial rituals and even the substitutionary slaying of a sacrificial victim has often been necessary to control the destructive/creative force of memesis. Girard shows us how the life and death of Jesus gives us the tools needed to overcome the deadly flaw of this process and allow us to enter a more hopeful, more peaceful and more human future.

Beyond expositing literature Girard has become a cultural anthropologist of the the first order and someday (if there is any justice) will be given a place of honour at least as great as Charles Darwin. Like Darwin in the natural world Girard has in the human world synthesized so much so well and has seen more clearly than anyone before that he represents a watershed in our intellectual and spiritual development.


I just finished Girards' "Things Hidden From the Foundations of the World" and am eager to begin his other works.

Thanks Steve for turning me into a Girard fan. I hope that someday Christians all over the world will know and value the insights and truths revealed by this great thinker.

LH