René Girard, a French-born thinker on faith, culture and war

By ERASMUS

ONE of the most influential contemporary thinkers about religion, war and peace died this week at his home in Stanford, California at the age of 91. René Girard was a literary theorist, a philosopher of history and anthropology, and a kind of theologian. In 2005, when he was elected to the Académie Française, the intellectual inner circle of his native France, he was hailed as the "Charles Darwin of human sciences"; his powerful, quirky intellect looked for recurring patterns in collective human behaviour from the dawn of human history to the present day.

Where did this inquiry lead him? A few deceptively simple concepts lay at the heart of his world view, which he developed through the study of European literature, of early mythology and religious texts. He was struck by the way in which human desire is imitative or "mimetic"; once basic needs are met, people's desires are shaped in emulation of others and this leads to deadly competition. This would lead to perpetual anarchy, in his view, were it not for the capacity of human communities to achieve a kind of stability by ganging up on one individual who becomes a scapegoat. In every seemingly stable community, one must look for the "founding murder"—an act of victimisation, real or mythological, that somehow holds the perpetrators together. This can be acted out ritually as well as literally, and that was the original function of religion: to make sacrifices, of humans or animals, that led to a kind of compact among the sacrificers.

Girard thought that for "scapegoating" and sacrifice in its traditional form to work, the perpetrators had to believe that the victim was guilty. But as he describes things, this begins to change in the Hebrew scriptures, which present innocent victims of sacrifice. The reversal is complete in the Christian story of the self-sacrifice of the Son of God, who is portrayed as radically innocent. In his later years, an apocalyptic strain developed in Girard's thinking. Having shown how the use of force was "functional" in traditional human society ("the institution of war was originally a way of regulating and limiting human violence," as one follower put it), he came to feel that violence was escaping all constraints.

For Girard, one summary view might have it, at the very beginning it is not religion that leads to violence, but violence which leads to—which indeed creates a need for—religion, as a way of channeling and constraining the use of force.

But once the process starts, religion can of course fuel violence, as Girard could see. You don't have to be one of his devotees to observe that scapegoating as a form of team-building has taken many different forms, from the Salem witch-trials to the anti-communist hysteria of 1950s America to ritual denunciations of erstwhile comrades by the Soviet Politburo. But there is something particularly vicious and destructive about a religiously inspired lynch mob whose blood is up, and has somehow been convinced that its own salvation (and internal cohesion) lies in annihilating the heretic or the infidel.

At the very minimum, Girard's work is a help in understanding how religions (Christianity in particular, but perhaps also Buddhism) can be pacifist in content but often violent and bullying in historical practice. Think of the mobs that rampaged through Jewish quarters in European cities during the Middle Ages, especially in Holy Week. At a time when Christians were supposed to be identifying with a victim of scapegoating, they perpetrated that very thing.