NOTE: For the Contemplative Order of the Sons of the Holy Cross, a lay Order I belong to, several members contribute papers and presentations. Until this year, it had been in a published book form. Now they appear under Contributions on the website. What is below will show up there.
The following is about a powerful and immensely hopeful read of Scripture in the direction of the subtitle: The Bible’s Evolution of Divine Nonviolence.
You may click on the PDF here: Book Review of Signs of Change.
***
Book Review of Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Divine Nonviolence, Anthony Bartlett, Eugene: Cascade Books, 2022; 328 pages.
NOTE: All bracketed page numbers in the main text are for the book under review. Since I bring in two other books by the author, I shall use a title identifier.
Introduction
In 1998, I prepared a talk at friend Ron Dart’s invitation for a Fraser Valley BC “Christ and Violence” Conference, on brilliant French scholar René Girard in relation to violence. Presenting it almost got me fired before hired! One of the interviewers for my (then new) position as Executive Director of M2/W2 Association[1] had taken exception to the presentation for being “too academic/esoteric.”[2]/[3]
I make a ready confession though: it took several tries for me to read Girard with understanding.[4] I began by learning from others. I only reluctantly agreed to do a kind of “impossible”: explain Girard simply in about 20 minutes at this Conference! Gratification for me in this case was: Gil Bailie, a noted Girard interpreter, told me that I’d “gotten it right.”[5]
I am not a “Girardian” (if there is such), but one convinced by his insights into reading the Bible through his understanding of mimetic desire, scapegoating, and the nonviolent exit plan — unique in world literature, Girard claims. (What do I know?) This way, claims Anthony Bartlett, is that of biblical semiotics.
I am reviewing the book above by one who is deeply indebted to Girard, and is also a masterful biblical exegete. I have as well had to work at gaining understanding — particularly in the use of semiotics as a biblical hermeneutic. I shall look mainly at the reviewed book in this Introduction, and the first three chapters by Bartlett of his introductory book to semiotics: Theology Beyond Metaphysics: Transformative Semiotics of René Girard.[6]
NOTE: This review is heavy with citations by the author. . . And in the end, and for the purpose of writing it to a reduced length, I only deal with a few chapters.
Review
The author in the Introduction cites Noam Chomsky who wrote, “The bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon.”[7] (p. 13) Bartlett does not disagree. He writes that “The Bible has always had a struggle of transcendence.” (p. 14) And transcendence has always been tentacled by violence. He continues:
Is not the Bible, by definition, a slow-burning question mark about transcendence itself? The question is inevitably posed at first in terms of which “god” has the greatest firepower at his disposal, the greatest ability to inflict misery. But little by little, the hollowness of that formula is exposed, and something very different emerges. “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6). (p. 28)
He continues:
. . . biblical Scripture has always struggled with the unfathomable identity (the unseeable face) of Israel’s God, and, hand in hand, it has engaged in a struggle with the root conditions by which we establish human meaning itself.
. . . However, not only does the Bible “reveal the victim” (Girard’s pivotal claim[8]), by the same token and more primordially, it brings with it the possibility of a transformative humanity—one of compassion, nonviolence, and peace. This is indeed a new transcendence, and it has been working like leaven in and through the Bible’s diffusion through Western culture since the first centuries of the Common Era.
The very prevalence of violence in the Bible, alongside a progressive theme of nonviolence, suggests that this is the true problem that the text has been struggling with all along. It is out of the biblical reaction against oppression that a deeper, more truly radical revolution of compassion and forgiveness is born. What is really striking is to see an emergent questioning of the default of violence and an alternative possibility of genuinely nonviolent humanity. (pp. 14-16; emphasis added)
Hang onto “this is the true problem that the [biblical] text has been struggling with all along.”
He asserts then:
Our latter-day response, therefore—of disgust at violence in the Bible[9]—has to acknowledge a parallel and actually more powerful principle: one of positive nonviolence, one which we have gleaned not in reaction against but actually from the Bible. The present book sets out to present a coherent narrative of this biblical principle, tracing it from the Old Testament to the New, and showing both its struggle against the “natural” transcendence of violence and, at the same time, its essence as the most profound and creative content of revelation. (p. 16; emphasis added)
In the already-mentioned earlier publication but clearly pointing to the book currently under review, Bartlett writes:
. . . the Bible discloses (reveals) again and again the innocence of the victim. Through Abel, Joseph, Job, Jonah, the Suffering Servant, and of course Jesus, and along with many other stories exposing oppressive violence, the biblical text undergoes a progressive travail that announces the culture of murder and rehabilitates its victims. This Hebrew and Christian revelation is at the heart of the Western history of concern for the victim, something clearly articulated by Nietzsche, and lies for Girard at the source of his own anthropology.[10]
He then necessarily turns to Saint Augustine[11], who, second only to Saint Paul, profoundly impacted the Western Church. We read:
I have given space to these details because, unarguably, Augustine’s is the paradigm for a constructed theological narrative in Western Christianity. His effect continued through the Medieval world and into the Reformation, and out the other side. The work in the present book obviously gives a very different plena narratio[12], shifting the biblical travail in a distinctly new direction. The Bible does not pivot around the fall of the soul, and sex as the proof [pace Saint Augustine], but around a holistic account of the human organism and its motifs of mimetic desire and violence—signaled clearly and emphatically throughout Genesis. We have inherited a broad semiotic Augustinianism, but with Girard’s irruptive reading of the Bible, alongside the materialism of neurological mimesis, we are in a decisively new situation. It is important, I think, to flag the dramatic difference with Augustine in order to plead a decisively new dynamic of evangelism. The biblical journey to divine nonviolence is something emerging today in ever greater relief; all that remains is for Christianity to embrace it with the same imaginative and spiritual fervor with which it once embraced the Augustinian narratio of the soul.
. . . This revelation of forgiveness and nonretaliation is in fact the core biblical revelation, its true apocalypse, because it shows the true and definitive character of Godself.[13] The present book offers a coherent story of that deeper revelation. (pp. 25-26; emphasis added)
After pointing to the interactive fascination by multiple theologians[14] with Girard’s thought vis à vis the Bible,[15] he writes in Theology Beyond Metaphysics:
The revelation of violent origins of human language must necessarily bring with it a destabilization of meaning in the world, but by the very same token it introduces totally a new meaning—the inverse of violence. Love is the revelatory engine bringing us the truth of the human condition, but that is exactly the point. It is divine and human love which shows us at one and the same time the dysfunction and the transformation of the Anthropos [Greek: human], giving us together human reality misspoken, and human reality re-spoken and remade.[16]
We read again in Signs of Change:
To make everything hinge on salvation/loss of the immortal soul is to promote a mimetic economy grounded in external objects and original violence. To nurture the nonviolent relation of faith, derived from the whole biblical journey, is to enter a door into a new creation, something beginning now and promising ultimate fulfilment. We cannot foresee the end state, but biblical semiotics surely point the way. (pp. 27-28; emphasis added)
Theology Beyond Metaphysics
I shall now turn to Theology Beyond Metaphysics to understand the author’s hermeneutical use of semiotics. He writes:
. . . this is very different from traditional theologies of law, grace and eternal destiny by which the work of the gospel has been understood. (TBM, p. 21)
He briefly suggests two possible lines of disagreement, then adds:
Right now, my response is to assert how these thoughts fit within an anthropological and semiotic scheme calling out unquenchably for a future of love. Although it might claim also to be Christian theology how can this be other than a desirable human destiny? (TBM, p. 21)
And later:
To nurture the nonviolent relation of faith, derived from the whole biblical journey, is to enter a door into a new creation, something beginning now. . .
It has theological value for all who embrace it in faith, as God’s way of bringing about the divine purpose of life and love. We are reading the text backwards semiotically, from Christ, but forwards too: forwards from Abraham to the point where Jesus was able to embrace the revolutionary meaning of the Old Testament. From that point then it makes perfect sense to see how Jesus’s intervention would continue fundamentally to impact and shape real historical human meaning. Within this horizon we are now able to launch fully into an investigation of semiotics, beginning with our key thinker, Girard. (TBM, pp. 28 & 29; who hovers over all three books by Bartlett; emphasis added)
Incidentally, while Bartlett is indebted to Girard, he also departs at significant points from him.[17]
Bartlett also discusses Jacques Derrida to establish:
Thus, full presence of “truth” is never possible, and all our statements are approximations. Language is like a dog chasing an unseen rabbit down a trail. The dog has a good nose, and we all trust its path and the fact that the dog is pointing to the rabbit, but the dog never actually catches the rabbit!
Indeed, if we say that language is always about an absence and the simulacrum of a presence, we must admit that the dog is also a fox and we are always being, at least to some degree, foxed! (TBM, p. 64)
But, claims the author, Girard and Derrida — both contemporary 20th-century French intellectuals — saw things quite similarly, writing:
For both, truth is deferred—for one [Derrida] it is always already so, for the other [Girard] it can be traced back to an original murder, one congenitally denied. But in both cases violence is always a crucial part of making the whole ramshackle world of “truth” work in the first place. (TBM, pp. 64 & 65; emphasis added)
For Derrida
. . . [Deconstruction’s] . . . ethical goal is to overcome social oppression enshrined in hierarchy. (TBM, p. 65)
But for Derrida and the whole Enlightenment project, there is no radical move to get to the root of such violent origins. But in the second part of his career, he did move in the direction of a transformative semiotics.
Bartlett cites Derrida’s remarkable assertion, perhaps like the disappearing smile of the Cheshire cat:
If right or law stems from vengeance, as Hamlet seems to complain that it does— before [Friedrich] Nietzsche, before [Martin] Heidegger, before [Walter] Benjamin —can one not yearn for a justice that one day, a day belonging no longer to history, a quasi-messianic day, would finally be removed from the fatality of vengeance? Better than removed: infinitely foreign, heterogeneous at its source.[18] (TBM, p. 75; emphasis added)
Bartlett responds in can’t-have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too fashion:
He asks, on the other hand (and almost in desperation), whether there can be an “atheological heritage of the messianic.” This, in one way, seems to be factually indisputable—once the messianic has entered the semiotic repertoire, first through the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and then through its secular appropriations (Marxism), it belongs to the legacy of what it means to be human. But to claim an “atheological” source of the messianic is a bridge too far. (TBM, p. 76)
Then the comment:
Derrida hesitates because a semiotics of transformation depends on a concrete tradition: on that of the Bible, on its stories, people, losses, and times—times of struggle, yearning, suffering and hope. An abstract messianicity simply would not have enough compelling force to mobilize the coming of the other which Derrida envisages, and envisages precisely through iconic stories like those of Abraham, Moses, Jesus. (TBM, p. 77)
For Derrida, it seems, this hope is as vacuous as Samuel Beckett’s famous existentialist (Theatre of the Absurd) play Waiting for Godot. It is a waiting for Transcendence that simply never comes: an empty semiotics without destination or fulfilment. Hence Bartlett’s conclusion:
Meanwhile, a transformative semiotics is currently at work: in Girard it is directly found in the biblical narrative, and with Derrida it is an atheological language that cannot escape the Bible. (TBM, p. 79)
The author asks:
Is it possible to see the Bible as such an instrument, as something which over the slow course of the years has changed the very substance of our sign systems, opening up “the absolute surprise” of an entirely other human way of being? If this is the case, then the “nondogmatic doublets”[19] of Christianity emerging from so many philosophies are but a consistent recognition of its transformation of discourse. (TBM, p. 79)
He turns next to a discussion of the semiotics of ontology/being, with another great 20th-century thinker, Martin Heidegger.
He draws first though on the work of American philosopher and semiotician, John Deely. Deely claims that the first to use the concept systematically was Augustine, who wrote of linguistic “signs.” Explains Bartlett:
It is the materiality of these signs which leads him to establish a commonality between natural signs and words. As Deely comments, Augustine’s thought is mobilized by “his special interest in the words of scripture and the sacraments of Christian life, for both of these signs directly involve the senses.”[20] (TBM, p. 80)
Augustine did not pursue this line of thinking, though he claimed that scripture was a series of transformative signs/semiotics. But in seeing the Bible as a factum of truth, he introduced an understanding that Scripture was a system of transformative signs. Deely pursues this, noting in the thinkers (American) Charles Peirce, (Italian) Umberto Eco, and also that of a French semiotician, Ferdinand de Saussure similar understandings. What he offers then is an emerging clarity in the science of semiotics in interpreting Scripture. Bartlett argues
. . . that it is the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures which create the underlying [hydraulic] springs, both changing actual meaning and, in parallel, prompting semiotics as a crucial discipline for attention. In every case we are navigating across a revolutionary terrain. (TBM, p. 83)
Against the backdrop of Girard’s assertion that all human culture begins with a founding murder — an act of violence — we read Bartlett explaining:
The first chapter of Genesis is by no means a neutral account of creative power. It is to be understood rather as a conscious rereading of violent origins, a semio-ontological gesture of resolute boldness and compassion. It deliberately and fearlessly shifts the semiotics so that the text remakes the world away from violence and by means of peace. The bloody battles and sacrificial deaths by which the earth and heavens are first constructed are too well known in world mythology to need rehearsing.[21] The Bible itself contains strains of violent beginnings, and their robust presence throughout the text (cf. Ps 74:14; Job 26:12; 41:1; Isa 27:1) gives testimony of how necessarily “modern” the Genesis 1 account would be. (TBM, p. 87; emphasis added)
Far from being, according to Creation Science, a statement in line (ironically for such believers) with the methodology of modern science, it is a rereading in poetic narrative form away from all violent mythologies of human origins. So we read:
Genesis 1 gives us a new semiotics of beginning, one where God creates by the effortless generosity of a pure word, one conspicuously without conflict. The repeated antiphon “God saw that it was good” is not an abstract philosophical comment: it relentlessly affirms that the created space is not an enemy, nor does it contain enemies, but rather it can be trusted as a suitable space for life and its triumph. The repetition of “good” is a linguistic (possibly liturgical) echo-effect, reinforcing the semiotic validity of the nonviolent creation. (TBM, p. 87; emphasis added)
This is utterly in contrast to the Babylonian Creation Myth, where creation is a violent victory over an enemy older than creation. Evil is prior to good. Violence is in the godhead itself. Humanity is created out of bloody violence, and hence humans are seen to be violent to the very core.[22] While jarring, is this not descriptive of human history? Over against which “God creates by the effortless generosity of a pure word.” And the Gospel of John[23] introduces that “Pure Word” in its first chapter as: God Incarnate. And also, there is an absolute lack of violence in creation.
In moving on, the author discusses Thomas Acquinas and Martin Heidegger, summing up:
But then, conversely, Genesis 1 offers a radical new beginning to being, out of and away from violence, a biblical re-creation which is always the plan and purpose of God.
Genesis is never a flat literal description of creation, a banal report of sovereign potency. A semiotic reading gives us instead a truly prophetic description of creation, one that is true to the deep original purpose of God but that will be fulfilled only in the seventh (or eighth) day of God’s final sabbath blessing. Actual prehistoric death (including the dinosaurs!) is elided in the account, not because original creation was without death, but for the sake of an amazing transformative revelation of future creational peace and life. (TBM, p. 91)
Bartlett challenges the Thomistic joining of Aristotelian metaphysics with Christian theology, claiming Greek philosophy is mired in the same founding murder of all cultures.[24] He writes:
In the meantime the Christian gospel actually represents a full-blown new revelation, a new logos of what is, one realized semiotically. The Crucified and Risen Messiah is the ultimate other, that which is yet to come, under circumstances and under guises we are yet fully to know, but always in every case as the victim returned to itself, and to us, in love. (p. 98; emphasis in the original)
Bartlett writes therefore:
The victim is no longer the passive victim of collective violence, but rather a massively proactive agency of forgiveness and love. So rather than, as before, being being formed out of violence and dread, there is a new ens primum cognitum[25] in which configuring violence is transformed by and as love. Its essential character is nonviolent relation and at once the phenomenon of “being” becomes something utterly different, no longer uncanny and dangerous, but urgent with reconciliation and peace. (TBM, p. 99)
Conclusion: Semiotics — The Authentic Beginning or Arche of Biblical Theology
This all impresses as immense Good News! So Bartlett:
If we take the semiotic thesis of the Bible at full value, especially the gospels—and, in particular, the nonviolent cross—then it is possible to suggest that there is a set of signals at work in the Bible which emanates from a source otherwise than science or metaphysics and yet, at a primordial, semiotic level, is generatively meaningful. . .
In any case, we have arrived at the authentic beginning or arche of theology for the sake of new human existence. It is a discovery, not a logical proposition, an encounter, not a deduction—although there is very much evidence for it. (TBM, p. 99; emphasis added)
And in the subsequent book — that in part under review — we are taken on an exhilarating journey through Scripture to track “the evolution of divine nonviolence.” We visit enroute Exodus, Genesis, Job, The Servant, Ruth, Daniel, Jonah, Jesus, Paul, and finally The Lamb of Revelation.
I urge the reader to embrace the author as tour guide!
Bartlett adds to Signs of Change an “Appendix on The Lamb” of the Book of Revelation. He concludes thus:
All violence is gone, and there is an entirely new principle of meaning and communication, a semiotic novum—the Lamb. And there is God-according-to-the-Lamb, a transcendence without violence.
The destiny of history is the overcoming of violence.[26] The Book of Revelation, and its hero, the Lamb-standing-as-having-been-slain, reveal this to be the case: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah and he will reign forever and ever” (Rev 11:15). (pp. 315 & 316; emphasis added)
Amen!
________________________
[1] Then, but sadly no longer, a Restorative Justice Program.
[2] How could I relate to prisoners?, he wondered. Besides the implicit prejudice in such a question, I’ve met a lot of deeply thoughtful such over a long career of prison visitation that began in 1974. One friend for example—out now over 40 years—with whom I still meet regularly over breakfast, gave me this outstanding book four decades ago to read and discuss: Light From Many Lamps.
[3] There is a longer version of the paper I presented, here: “René Girard and Violence.”
[4] I might add: difficult to understand, in part because I did not know a lot of the literature Girard covered.
[5] However, the best “got-it-right” explanation, according to René Girard himself, is David Cayley’s Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) Ideas series: The Scapegoat: René Girard’s Anthropology of Violence & Religion, first aired March 5 – 9, 2001 (also found here; and full transcript here). That’s where I still would start now, if new to Girard. David Cayley has his own website that I introduce here. There are multiple other introductions to/interactions with Girard here: Colloquium on Violence & Religion.
[6] A tentative excursus. Saint Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:18 – 31 posits Christ Crucified as God’s Power and Wisdom, in juxtaposition to what his fellow Jews sought in the sign of a conquering and powerful “Messiah,” and to what Greek philosophers pursued in their wisdom alone. Paul declared something greater, in his words:
22Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
A crucified Messiah was pitiful for the Jews. A crucified criminal defied all logic for the Gentiles. . . especially one raised from the dead — as with Paul on Mars Hill. (See Acts 17:22-31.) Bartlett however, following Girard, takes his cue from the grand sweep of the biblical story, not in a proof texting biblicism, rather in the Bible as a “factum of truth” (see below), in a biblical semiotics as ultimate pointer to the nonviolent Way of the Cross. See further below too my citing Bartlett, saying that “the Christian gospel actually represents a full-blown new revelation, a new logos of what is, one realized semiotically.” Such wisdom, claim Girard and Bartlett, stands apart from classical Greek thought — as we shall see.
[7] Chomsky, Noam. “Interview by Wallace Shawn.” Final Edition 1.1 (Autumn 2004) 10–25.
[8] Below, I shall draw on an earlier publication by Bartlett. I’ll introduce now his perspective on that “pivotal claim”:
By developing the hermeneutics of the scapegoat, or generative violence, as inherent to the biblical narrative, such that it is the narrative that is seen first producing these hermeneutics, the anthropological, interpretative frame becomes itself the typology. Yet in this way biblical hermeneutics are also revolutionary: they are demonstrated as a world-subversive disclosure developing over a temporal sequence beginning with, sustained by, and promoted by the biblical narrative. (Cross Purposes: The Violent Grammar of Christian Atonement, Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2001; 162.)
A page later the author draws on theologian George Lindbeck, writing:
Therefore, if on this reading we can and do claim a biblical typology of violence. . . [Then as] a key hermeneutical frame of the text it surely qualifies, in Lindbeck’s terms, as a regulative principle in the religious meaning of the Bible. The disclosure of violence can be seen as a deep “rule” of the biblical account that serves to define and maintain the ultimate life-reference of the whole. [See George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, Westminster: John Knox Press, 2009, 120; 25th Anniversary Edition.] He describes this method of hermeneutics as the “intertextual reading,” one that seeks “to derive the interpretive framework which designates the theological controlling sense from the literary structure of the text itself. This would seem to fit the Girardian method well. . . This is what makes Girard’s interpretative method striking, a theologia crucis [theology of the cross] of exceptional challenge and seriousness. It becomes itself a way of preaching the gospel in and to the contemporary world, one that is sharper than any two-edged sword, able to penetrate the secret places “between joint and marrow” where human violence resides. The synchronic tension of the text—what holds it together as a literary narrative—is simultaneously an unrelenting catalogue of the history of murder from Abel onwards. (Cross Purposes: The Violent Grammar of Christian Atonement, 163-164.)
[9] David Cayley writes:
Modern reformers complain, quite justly, about the violence of Christianity [and the Bible], [René] Girard says, but they fail to notice that “they can complain [only] because they have Christianity to complain with.” In this way, there arises a race of super-Christians who have renounced Christianity but have no other basis for their fantastic hopes and their extreme sensitivity to injustice [their ethical epistemology] than the Gospel that they consider to be entirely superseded.—Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 404. And, for some I’ve met, they actually believe they came up with that ethical epistemology all by themselves!
At another point, Girard writes:
We are living through a caricatural ‘ultra-Christianity’ that tries to escape from the Judeo-Christian orbit by ‘radicalizing’ the concern for victims in an anti-Christian manner.
[10] Bartlett. Cross Purposes: The Violent Grammar of Christian Atonement, Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2001, 39 – 40; emphasis added.
[11] A too-brief excursus: Bartlett, in the book adduced in the previous footnote, Chapter Two, discusses the development in the West of violent atonement theory. He begins with the brilliant and bombastic second/third-century lawyer Tertullian, to trace three historical factors that developed into the “violent grammar of Christian atonement”: 1. An early-Christian-thought drive to interpret Christ in a broad apologetic hermeneutic of violent substitutionary metaphysics; 2. The need to confront Gnosticism; and 3. The unique shaping of Western Christian theology within a Roman legal mindset. An almost fourth element is Saint Augustine. From him the West learned, for instance, violent predestination and hell for babies under God as ruler of terminal violence and “Just War” — both the necessity of the magistrate in the given sinful order to torture and kill (CP, p. 59), and the necessity of a righteous Christian army to slaughter on the battlefield (see Just war theory); a modelled full embrace of violence in response to the Donatist controversy — and his “theological euphoria over the shift of the might of empire to the cause of Christ” — and the violent eradication of the Donatists (p. 60); and ultimately relentless divine terror — his understanding of God’s affirming “an imperial stasis of violence” (CP, p. 61) — towards wrongdoers/enemies that eventually underwrote the 11th-century Anselmic violent satisfaction theory of the atonement in Cur Deus Homo, which Bartlett discusses under the Heading: “A Master-Text of Divine Violence (CP, p. 76).”
That theory in turn created grim penal consequences in the development of Western jurisprudence:
As it entered the cultural bloodstream, was imaged in crucifixions, painted over church chancels, recited at each celebration of the Eucharist, or hymned, so it created its own structure of affect one in which earthly punishment was demanded because God himself had demanded the death of his Son (Timothy Gorringe, God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 102 & 103; emphasis added).
Or as Bartlett puts it:
It would provide a permanent cultural vehicle, a culture medium in every sense, for the infection of sacrificial crisis in Western society and history. (p. 86)
One might ask: Who back then was not reading Jesus?, who emphatically declared in Matthew 9:13:
But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (He was citing Hosea 6:6.)
My entire criminal justice career and writings have been in opposition to this “structure of affect” (click my for general writings) or “infection of sacrificial crisis” (click for my Justice That Transforms series.): one where the Christianity of newly evangelized Anglo-Saxons and continental Germans was “reformulated within a warrior ethos. (p. 75)” Under Pope Gregory the Great, there was institutionalization of “a constant daily practice that negotiated the possibility of human security in the face of eternal violence.” (CP, p. 75)
Chapter Two titled “Imitatio Diaboli” (Imitation of the Devil) masterfully fills in the significant detail, thereby presenting a
. . . “compelling picture. . . of the way mimetic exchange has been the crucial vehicle of thought in this area of Western theology, and so provided theological grounding for the Christian practice of violence.” (CP, pp. 62-63)
It is now God who imitates the Devil, thereby, in Athanasius’ De Incarnatione Verbi, God’s requiring the death of Christ — rather than the Devil!
Bartlett briefly touches down on the contrary never-took-hold view of Anselm’s younger contemporary, Peter Abelard; then the Reformation — in particular Martin Luther; summing up:
Through a long tradition of mimetic reasoning the dark hypostasis of violence is fixed in the background of Christian imagination and, despite vigorous protest on any number of occasions, nothing has been able to dislodge it. (CP, pp. 93-94)
[12] [full story]
[13] God is love. (I John 4:8) This is not an attribute, implies that text, but God’s essence.
[14] Interestingly, brilliant French Christian sociologist, Jacques Ellul wrote in Jesus and Marx: From Gospel to Ideology, chapter V (first published in 1988):
Recently we have witnessed the appearance of a new interpretation grill [semiotics] presented by René Girard in Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (Paris: Grassett, 1978 [Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World]), a nonsacrificial interpretation of biblical texts. Rather than presenting merely another interpretation, Girard gives us a genuine method [semiotics]. Since it fits no ideological canon, I feel certain it will never attract notice or be taken into account by biblical scholars. (One must add: Caveat Propheta! — Let the prophet beware!) I’m immensely grateful for Anthony Bartlett and so many other theologians, and the philosophers in the book noted in the next footnote!
[15] Andreas Wilmes and George A. Dunn last year also gave us an edited first-time, first-rate philosophical reading of Girard: René Girard and the Western Philosophical Tradition, volume 1: Philosophy, Violence, and Mimesis.
[16] Bartlett. Theology Beyond Metaphysics: Transformative Semiotics of René Girard. Eugene: Cascade Books, 20; emphasis added. Prior to publishing the book under review, Bartlett introduced “transformative semiotics” in the above book. He urges reading that for a fuller understanding of this way of biblical interpretation: grounding it in the biblical literature, in Augustine, most recently in Girard, and in multiple Western thinkers.
[17] For example, David Eagle writes:
Bartlett. . . employs a deconstructive approach to temper the all-encompassing and negative tenor of Girard’s metanarrative, and is wary of Girard’s claim to have found the truth about the origin of human society. Bartlett blends aspects of Girard’s thought with a postmodern twist to envision the atonement that completely rejects violence while giving a positive impetus towards alternative practice. (“Anthony Bartlett’s Concept of Abyssal Compassion and the Possibility of a Truly Nonviolent Atonement,” David Eagle, The Conrad Grebel Review, Volume 24 Number 1, Winter 2006, 66-81, 68.)
Reading the entire review carries its own reward!
[18] Derrida. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, 25.
Derrida has a name for such schemes of thought which trade in a barely hidden way on the legacy of biblical meaning. He calls them a “nondogmatic doublet.” (Bartlett. Theology Beyond Metaphysics: Transformative Semiotics of René Girard, 78.)
[20] Deely. Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Toronto Studies in Semiotics and Communication), 223; Bartlett’s italics.
[21] See below for instance my reference to the Babylonian Creation Myth, one that theologian Walter Wink has argued underscores current world cultural myth:
Violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world (Wink. Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992, 13).
[22] See for instance on this, David Livingstone Smith’s The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War.
[23] Bartlett does a lovely brief commentary in Theology Beyond Metaphysics, “Chapter 10: The Semiotic Gospel.”
[24] See the excursus in footnote 6. Bartlett also writes at the end of Cross Purposes:
It is here alone [in the contingency and particularity of one man’s life and death, interrupting from within the essential order of the world. . .] that love can begin to speak endlessly, without guarantees either of eternal ideas or cosmic exchange. Here alone can love change from possessive desire, from its legacy of violence, into a freedom and unconditionality before unknown, needing the New Testament redefinition of the little-used Greek word, agape, to give it a name. In this light all the brilliant apparatus of Greek thought, of mind, being, substance, and nature, is rendered relative, provisional and secondary to the anthropological challenge of the Gospels. . .
Testimony, not the eternity of ideas, is the mode by which this truth is declared, is its true modality. (258 – 260.)
[25] It is a concept Deely gleaned from Aquinas: being-as-first-known. (See Theology Beyond Metaphysics, 93 and following.)
Jesus and his destiny are, symbolically speaking, the lens through which the rays of all history since the creation of the world are focused and projected into the future.—Hans Schwarz (I cannot find the exact source of this quote.)
I add, based on Bartlett, based on biblical revelation: It is ultimately a future of a transcendence without violence.
