Fantastic, bang on take of the nature on evil but it lacks imagination

Very earnest narrator but he can’t bring the text to life as do good narrators.

As for Girard, he’s has hold of a game changing insight into the nature of evil, the birth of the sacred, and the apocalypse but he fails somehow. Lovely man, but I can’t put my finger on it, his writing is somehow too one dimensional. Too flat. Christianity will not survive as an institution but as a vision. It’s the vision that is contagious and is what made Jesus immensely popular until the conditions he created made it impossible for society to accommodate him. Just as mimetic rivalry is contagious so too is God contagious. That vision contains Girard’s profound insight but also something more, something revolutionary that proclaims and can make an apostle out of a fisherman. How do you explain the power of the American revolution? Proclamation! That’s the Bible. Northrop Frye seems to understand the delivery system of that message though I’m not sure Frye quite put his finger on what Girard exposes. The structure of imagery in the Bible - the apocalyptic and its demonic parody - as outlined by Frye in The Great Code though, neatly accommodates Girard’s conception of Satan. Girard has plenty to say about the power and nature of Satan but he has nothing to say about God’s countering imaginative power. Isn’t God a man? Such a man as Shakespeare might conceive? The common people followed him gladly. It’s the vision that awakens. Here is Frye on the power of the Christian myth (Girard has a very reductive use of the word myth by the way - myth and metaphor can also be seen as a positive form of imitation):

“The New Testament presents the ultimate human life as a divine and human Logos, but the Logos has transcended its relation to logic and has expanded into mythos, a life which is, so to speak, a kind of self-narration, where action and awareness of action are no longer clashing with each other. I conclude with this reference because the New Testament was written in a koine in the ordinary sense, a simplified Greek understood over most of the Mediterranean world. What it had to say with this language was a mythos , a story of immense scope and suggestiveness which was the spearhead of its advance through the Western world. Anything that proposes to become a significant part of human consciousness today will have to use the same kind of mythical koine, narratives with a verbal shape that can inform other arts and sciences as well, and draw them together in a unity of thought and action.”
(from the essay The Koine of Greek)

Ultimately, Girard is great on the demonic but fails to to take account for the revolutionary power of God. His answer is the culturally circumspect churches (specifically Catholic in Girard’s case) of the West which everyone are abandoning. His answer is we are scapegoating Christianity but that’s only partly true. The churches lack imaginative power and vision. Something more universal is needed, you know, like the Beatles or Dylan, but obviously greater.

I’ll let Paul have the last word (2 Corinthians 12:12):
“The signs of a true apostle were performed among you in all patience, signs and wonders and mighty works.”

We need more sign and wonders and mighty works. What Jesus brings is access to something of the imaginative world that Bottom awakens from in Midsummer Night’s Dream. I know Girard’s reading of Midsummer Night’s Dream but he only has half of it.

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