René Girard

Christian Apocalypse of Modernity, or Modern Apocalypse of Christianity?

Stephen Gardner

Abstract
René Girard argues the modernity is the end of history, in effect the apocalypse foreseen by the Book of Revela-
tion, if not in a literal sense. Given the “scientific” terms in which he claims to assert this, though, this thesis
invites reversibility: It suggest more likely that modernity is the apocalypse of Christianity, a fatal moral crisis of
a civilization generated by Western Christendom. Secular modernity ‘realizes’ (Western) Christianity by way
of its breakdown (which it exacerbates), the consequence in part of a utopian logic derived from Christianity,
translated into the idea of progress or other historical eschatologies, like those of reactionary apocalyptics such as
Juan Donoso Cortés, the Catholic theorist of dictatorship. Despite Girard’s own convictions, there is nothing
in his theories that enables us to decide one way or another whether modernity is a Christian apocalypse or an
apocalypse of Christianity. I suggest this scenario by examining his hidden debt to or affinity with Catholic
reactionaries such as Joseph de Maistre and Donoso Cortés and their twentieth-century heir Carl Schmitt, and
the underlying impasses or antinomies in Girard’s apocalyptic construction of the conversional “decision” he
claims is imposed on us by modernity. Paradoxically, he is a utopian anti-utopian, pushing utopia through to
historical self-destruction, but without actually abandoning it. Thus his all-or-nothing approach to the problem
of violence in history.

Keywords
Girard, Apocalypse, Modernity, Violence, Progress, Utopianism, Katechon.

The despair of this man… often bordered on insanity; according to his philosophy of history,
the victory of evil is self-evident and natural, and only a miracle of God could avert it.
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology

What Carl Schmitt said of his soul brother Juan Donoso Cortés, the 19th
century theorist of dictatorship, might apply equally well to René Girard. The
politics of the French-American anthropologist of historical doom are of course
diametrically opposite those of rightists and monarchists such as Schmitt or
Donoso Cortés. Girard’s view of history, though, derives from the same mythi-
cal and rationalist roots evinced by the great Catholic reactionaries of the Coun-
ter-Enlightenment, echoing St. Paul’s image of the Katechon, the great plug or 1123
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“restrainer” that prevents spontaneous human combustion from exploding by

calculated releases of pressure. This notion of politics assumes a certain anthro-
pology. The natural condition of fallen humanity is chaos, a Hobbesian war of
all against all whose natural tendency is escalation, and the function of politics
and religion is to keep a lid on it. It is difficult if not impossible to achieve this
aim without altar, throne, and not least, executioner—religion and sovereign
power wedded in the sword. Law must be imposed from above; order is repres-
sion through a holy matrimony of love and terror; and punishment maintains
an economy of compensation keeping the cosmos in equilibrium. Joseph de
Maistre originally epitomizes this trinity of order:
And yet all grandeur, all power, all subordination rests on the executioner; he
is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible
agent from the world, and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones
topple, and society disappears. God, who is the author of sovereignty, is the au-
thor also of chastisement: he has built our world on these two poles; For Jehovah
is the master of the two poles, and on these he makes the world turn.2
The executioner foundationally effectuates the whole. In sovereign power, reli-
gion and blood meet and sustain each other; it is that mixture of the sacred with
the sharp edge of order that makes the latter what it is. Where there is no sacred
blood, there is no religion, nor order either.
De Maistre is not just stating a long-standing conviction of Christianity that
goes back to St. Paul, who declared the sword divinely instituted. There is a mod-
ern stress that the sword be sacralized to be effective—and that the sword is
equally essential to the sacred. This one could not find in Paul, for whom Ro-
man imperium was a secular force, amongst the other “powers and principalities,”
long before Christendom itself became a “power and principality,” a sacred order.
Theorists in this modern vein had to contend (as prior generations of Christians
did not) with the de-sacralizing onslaught of the Enlightenment. They were spiri-
tually closer in some ways to those Romans who attacked Christianity as re-
sponsible for the tottering of the Empire. Refugees and exiles, they washed up
from the traumatic disintegration of medieval Christendom, culminating in the
French Revolution; for them the experience of modernity is apocalyptic, a crisis
of civilization that puts history itself in the dock. Even the Revolution seemed to
be divine wrath of divine justice, a scourge modernity brought upon itself. Their
1124 politics is not just directly theological but involves a reflective meta-politics of the
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sociological dynamics of order; it stresses the political function of theology, and it

is profoundly historical. And so they rob the Enlightenment of its claim to repre-
sent the teleology of history. In refuting its utopianism, the impossible ambition
to base polity on reason or progress, they create another one, under the auspices of
Catholic authoritarianism and later of fascism. Girard brings this utopian project
to completion, where it refutes itself.
This Counter-Enlightenment point of view would not be possible without
the Enlightenment, of course, but neither would it be felt necessary. It is so to
say a self-refutation of the Enlightenment, a reasoned defense of non-rational
authority, a refutation of any authority based solely on reason, in which socio-
logical demands of order justify religion, as much as religion justifies order. It is
impossible to disentangle the political motive from this theology. Even though
human beings are social by nature, in the absence of supernatural authority
community brings out the worst. And there can be no transcendental anchor-
age, a divine reference outside the system, unless there is a living element within
it that links the two levels. That is the sacrificial victim or his analogues and
relatives, such as the King or the priest. In de Maistre’s account, the execution-
er is also such a sacred individual, a boundary figure (as the mere soldier is not),
both human and non-human, inside and outside human community, unlike
the others in a particularly terrifying but still holy way. In a sacred exchange,
he assumes the anathema of his victims (criminals whom he punishes) as he
renders them to God in judgment. In a certain sense he saves them by taking
their sins upon himself. The executioner incarnates Christ, because he sacrifices
himself—puts himself outside of the community, isolates himself within it—in
a drama welding the community, a sacrificial exchange of punishment. For
punishment is a ritual on this view. This lucid defense of mystery or rather of
mystification as the mantle of authority is uncannily akin to that of the Grand
Inquisitor in Ivan Karamazov’s tale.
Girard of course does not approve of this; at odds with dominant Christian
tradition, he rejects the divine institution of the sword asserted by Paul. If there
is any political sentiment consistently characterizing his thought, it is neither
conservatism nor progressivism but suspicion of politics as such.3 Practically,
though, he asserts the effectual truth of the Counter-Enlightenment insight, for
him, too, the fatal reality of the human condition. The breakdown of medieval
order exposes the anthropological need of authority all the more sharply.
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Girard’s visceral repudiation of the Grand Inquisitor (whom Schmitt endors-

es ) is not a repudiation of the Inquisitor’s view of politics so much as of politics
4

itself, hopelessly tainted by Caiaphas (“Better one man, etc.”). From Girard’s
point of view, de Maistre and his descendants would remake Christianity as if
Christ were the sacrificial founding of social order. The Inquisitor was right
to have him immolated again, not just to save that sacred economy from his
return but to reenact its original ground. For Girard, though, the Christ who
says nothing whatsoever in response to the Inquisitor is the true Christ.5 He
makes no attempt to reply or refute. He doesn’t have to; the Inquisitor himself
in effect admits the futility of his efforts in the long run, by the very arguments
that justify him in the short term. An order that rests on sacrificial violence
may certainly work up to a point, but in the end it is mortal, like everything
else. When the masses lose their sense of mystery, sacraments, and authority,
all hell will break loose, sooner or later, and the man of spite will emerge from
Underground to destroy the Crystal Palace of the Enlightenment once and for
all. Dostoyevsky predicted it in the rise of messianic leftism in The Demons and
other novels. There is one insight the Inquisitor displays missing in the Catholic
reactionaries, though: The “freedom” Christ offers can only have cannibalistic
consequences. If Girard rejects the Inquisitor, he agrees with Dostoyevsky’s
fictional Torquemada on one decisive point: “the divine Incarnation has made
everything worse.” Contrary to the Inquisitor, so much the worse for man, not
Christ. For Girard, too, Christ leads ultimately both to the Crystal Palace of
democratic modernity, and thence to the cannibalism of the triumphant race
of subterranean men who cannot live up to the demands of pure love, through
no fault of his own. Rejecting the Catholic Right’s drift towards dictatorship
in the 19th and 20th centuries, Girard still shares their radical repudiation of
democratic politics, in the sense best exemplified by Raymond Aron in the after
math of WWII and against the Red peace. For Aron, democratic politics was
a lucky, skin-of-the-teeth escape from the apocalyptic ideologies of the prior
century and a half. For Girard, it was the real beginning of the end.
What are we to make of René Girard’s notorious attempt to resurrect Chris-
tian apocalyptic in the mantle of the human sciences, a kind of fundamental-
ism for intellectuals? Not biblically literal, to be sure, but one that nonetheless
envisions a catastrophic end of history, of civilization, and of humanity itself.
Girard resurrects two core features of Christian apocalyptic: Armageddon, the
1126 symbolic place of a decisive battle between good and evil at the end of history,
 René Girard

consuming the world without remainder; and Revelation, the return of Christ
in glory defeating the Anti-Christ and Satan once and for all, in an altogether
new Jerusalem. Girard insists that these features be deduced from a “scientific”
(neither dogmatic nor literalist) point of view, an “anthropological” analysis of
the evolutionary origins of history and humanity. Christ, Christianity, and
Christendom are historical agencies, actors or forces competing against others
but ultimately pushing history inexorably to its conclusion, the unraveling of
sacrificial order and the escalation of violence to the point of civilizational self-
immolation. His theories of ritualized scapegoating mythically disguised as
sacrifice and of desire as imitation that on a purely immanent (inter-personal)
level tends to degenerate into mortal conflict, afford him the Archimedean lev-
erage with which to cast modernity as the end of history in the Christian sense
of a terminal working out in salvation or damnation. Apocalypse neatly ties
everything into a narrative whole. In the end, humanity must succumb to the
violence of its beginnings.
Historically and personally, mimetic desire is for Girard apocalyptic; it leads
either to conversion or to perdition. The blind teleology of violence rules by
an implacable “mechanism.” Sacrifice—“religion” in the original sense—is an
evolutionary strategy saving the human species from internecine violence that
would have destroyed it. It is destined to fail in the long run, though, because
it creates culture and history, a space of revelation in which its own workings
will be exposed and rendered powerless. Its spell is irreparably broken by the
judicial murder of Christ, the turning point of history. The political lynching
of God on the Cross strips humanity of its only strategic defense against itself.
On Girard’s reading, the Passion of Christ is essentially a political story, but one
robbing politics of its mythical covers, what we today might call its ideological
disguises. Once this secret has been leaked, sacrificial institutions will even-
tually crumble away, at first slowly then with increasing acceleration, leading
into the modern saeculum of human dignity, individualism, rights, science, law,
markets, party politics, and popular government. Ethically, recognition of the
victim is a revolutionary advance. Yet violence paradoxically increases, Girard
believes, thanks to the simultaneous emancipation of mimetic desire from tra-
ditional religious constraints.6 The basic structure of this regime of morality/
violence is modern equality, which Kierkegaard described as the “negatively
unifying principle” of modern life (that is, envy).7 Institutions are more just,
but human beings are mimetically as violent and concupiscent as ever, only 1127
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now, the religious means to tame them are lacking. Amplified by technology,
democratic resentments must spiral out of control. The very moralization of
life in the modern period invites the return of the war of all against all, the
chaotic origins for which sacrifice afforded an exit. Modern politics, ultimately
a consequence of Christian de-mythologization and de-sacralization, is more
moral, just, and rational, and more cynical, calculative, and violent, than any
previous regime. It promises individual freedom and delivers the herd mental-
ity if not the mob. Thus its catastrophic periods, rhythms of peace and prosper-
ity alternating with social explosions in which each successive episode is worse
than the last.
That leaves humanity with a stark set of alternatives: Either transform itself
collectively into a peaceable kingdom by universal conversion, or be done in by
its mimetic violence. Given the power of modern technologies, even the slight-
est remnant of resentment carries a catastrophic potential. And given globaliza-
tion, a war of all against all threatens to engulf the planet. The combination of
high technology, egalitarian resentments, diminishing resources, and environ-
mental distress, create the conditions for a perfect apocalyptic storm. The drift
of actual history seems to be irresistibly approximating the mad visions of the
biblical imagination. Real and metaphorical senses of apocalypse seem to be
converging asymptotically.
To Girard, this confirms the dream at Patmos nearly two millennia ago.
The anthropological theory of history underwrites what is perhaps the central
ethical notion of Christianity, absolute decision. The finality of the disinte-
grative teleology of history demands total renunciation of violence, of the lex
talionis, and so of politics. Apocalypse entails cosmic choice, between two and
only two exclusive alternatives. The battle between ultimately superhuman
forces of good and evil, freedom or mechanism, to determine the fate of the
world and man crystalizes the demand for a totalizing decision, the world-
shattering all-or-nothing of biblical monotheism. This is not a choice between
empirical alternatives but one that transcends all natural and social horizons.
In this sense the transcendental concept of “will” is uniquely biblical. All mid-
dle ground vanishes. Decision cannot appeal to reason. Christ comes with a
sword because he cuts the world in two, and ne’er the twain shall meet. There is
only one God; all others are dispatched to perdition with their idolaters in train.
Revealed monotheism has historicity embedded in it, as eschatology. Known
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only be revelation, the true God must reveal himself to and through the elect
in time. Revelation envisions history, in which revelation triumphs against its
adversaries. Girard’s account is adamantly, even fanatically Christian in this
sense. His entire work is a theodicy aimed at conversion.
In the modern age, the only thing that can forestall the self-destruction of
the species, Girard asserts, is wholesale conversion to non-violence. The either/
or Christianity imposes guarantees perdition, since humanity can never decide
so decisively for or against violence or peace, the City of Man or the City of
God. Radical decision judges the entire world, not part of it within it; it must
stand outside of it. The world is always peace and violence, unable to disen-
tangle them, except perhaps in the most extreme of cases. They are relative to
each other. As Gillian Rose argued against Girard, violence enters into love
too.8 Nothing shows this better than Girard’s own equivocations on the sub-
ject of politics and war, in which he occasionally displays a sensible realism his
pacifism doesn’t support. In the absence of total conversion, even pacifism, he
admits, may feed violence rather than deter it. The very shape of the specifi-
cally Christian bid—yea, yea, or nay, nay (Matt 5:36), all or nothing—damns
humanity, always inevitably trapped in the middle.
Girard’s thesis invites a certain reversibility, though, in which modernity is
not so much an apocalyptic vindication of Christianity, as an apocalypse of
(Western) Christianity itself. Rather than see modernity as Girard would like
us to see it, perhaps we should see Girard in terms of modernity, and modernity
as a continuation of the crisis of Christendom whose medieval breakdown first
gave rise to it. Even on Girardian grounds, we may ask if the ostensibly apoca-
lyptic dimensions of modernity confirm Christian revelation, as Girard argues,
or if they are historical effects of Christianity itself, the breakdown of whose
theological antinomies in the late Middle Ages gave birth to secular modernity,
which it was able neither to escape nor to resolve. On this view, modernity
realizes Christianity (as for example G. W. F. Hegel argues), but by way of its
insoluble crises and internal breakdown (as writers such as Hans Blumenberg,
Anthony Levi, or Michael Gillespie suggest). It is not a teleological realiza-
tion (as Hegel would have it) as its effectual truth. There is something at least
metaphorically “apocalyptic” about modernity, but it might be the fatality of
Western Christendom, not of the world as such, however global its implications
might be. The modern imperative to dominate nature and subdue the race to
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a single moral idea—one that is utopian and thus self-destructive—owes to

its Christian genome, the principal source of its utopianism and of the idea of
progress, according to John Gray.9 Despite his own convictions, there is noth-
ing in Girard’s argument that enables us to decide these differences, or even to
preclude that they might both be somehow true (paradoxical as that may be,
the truth of Christ and the failure of Christendom). The Girardian account
lends itself equally well to either of these seemingly exclusive sets of alternatives,
if we shift our angle of vision, as with a lenticular image. Girard’s Christian
apologetics effortlessly convert into a critique of Christianity.
The flip side of the view that order depends on sacrifice is that justice and
enlightened reason, however true, are not only not social bonds but actively
weaken the social bond, intensifying social conflict and even the breakdown of
society. This may be the single most important error of the Enlightenment, the
naïve assumptions that justice brings forth peace, reason brings forth consen-
sus, and equality brings forth fraternal sympathy. Moreover, morality, justice,
and law come into being only through their opposites, the most cruelly arbi-
trary violence. The entire Girardian opus is caught in this antinomy, the most
unrelenting moral severity versus the historical conditions of morality itself.
Justice and truth in excess undermine order as much as their complete absence
does. Girard expresses a crisis in modern conscience even more acutely than the
existentialists of the 50s and 60s who declared rhetorically, “Who can judge?”
The Holocaust inaugurated the age of the victim, the foundational category of
contemporary politics, and perhaps of ethics too. Nearly every major political
battle since has sought to claim the mantle of victimhood. In the victimary,
ethics and politics intersect, quickly degenerating into the victimological, as
victimhood itself acquires a coveted aura and offers new disguises for victimiza-
tion. It is the last refuge of the sacred, nearly the only place today from which
one can presume to sit in judgment, or at least get away with it.
Enlightenment universalism supplies the noose by which modernity closes
the circle and strangles itself in post-modernism. Public discourse, politics,
media, entertainment, and educational institutions in the West are consumed
litigating past injustices, real and imagined, ever since this threshold was de-
cisively crossed in the Sixties. Politics has disintegrated into “culture war,” in
principle non-negotiable (unlike ordinary politics, where nearly everything is
negotiable). Victimary revelation splits modern culture into fraternal enemies,
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the sacred and the profane, the religious and the secular, the archaic and the
progressive. The inherent relativity and indeterminacy of the notion of the vic-
tim renders it inherently polarizing. No culture can be unified on the basis
of respect for victims merely, and the tenuous peace between rivals on which
modernity depends goes to pieces.
If we follow Gray, Enlightenment utopianism owes ultimately to Christian-
ity, to the apocalyptic conviction that evil can be definitively defeated. Gi-
rard deconstructs modernity by driving the utopian element—the pursuit of
the impossible, subduing of nature to spirit or an idea—to the point of self-
annihilation, but without actually abandoning it. Girard both completes and
destroys utopianism by pulling it back to its Christian provenance. Only in his
dispensation, the inevitable failure to defeat evil entails the destruction of the
world. All the utopianisms sustaining modernity, laissez-fair and socialist, lib-
eral and fascist, traditionalist and neo-liberal, neo-conservative and post-Soviet
pacifist, have crumbled or crashed one after another. The West has run out
of ideologies to sustain its historical vision of itself. The insolubility of this
dilemma not only rules, it constitutes Girard’s work. He not only thinks this
impasse, but exemplifies it in his own person, his intellectual personality, which
is profoundly ambivalent. Girard condemns modernity both for pursuing the
impossible and for failing to achieve it. Those who read his work seeking a
solution to his frustrating ambivalences miss the point. It is a mistake to think
one can resolve them by discovering in him a liberal or conservative, or a social
democrat or neo-liberal. He is all of these and none of them. He declares the
end of utopia not in the name of a kind of realism (like John Gray), but to the
contrary, by pushing secular utopianism to annihilate itself in the notion of a
kingdom of non-violence, not of this world. But for him, the failure of utopia
vindicates God and condemns the world.

Stephen Gardner
Associate Professor of Philosophy
The University of Tulsa
Tulsa, Oklahoma
U.S.A.
stephen-gardner@utulsa.edu

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Endnotes
1. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab,
University of Chicago Press ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 58.
2. Joseph Marie Maistre, The Works of Joseph De Maistre, trans. Jack Lively (New York,: Schocken Books,
1971), 192.
3. René Girard and Benoît Chantre, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre (East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 2010).
4. The affinity between de Maistre and his descendants (especially Schmitt) and the Inquisitor have often
been noted. Jacob Taubes, To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections (New York: Columbia University Press,
2013), 7.
5. René Girard and James G. Williams, Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky (New York:
Crossroad Pub., 1997), 61 ff..
6. The perception of an increase of violence in the modern world has been effectively debunked by the Har-
vard evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence
Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011).
7. Søren Kierkegaard, Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong, Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present
Age: A Literary Review (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 81.
8. Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society (Oxford, UK ; Cambridge, USA: Blackwell,
1992), 147 ff.
9. John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, 1st American ed. (New York: Farrar
Straus and Giroux, 2007).

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