Matthew Condon abstract

The starting point of my paper in light of the conference's themes of vulnerability and tolerance concerns Emmanuel Levinass comments on unnecessary suffering and tragedy, and the failure of philosophy and religion to justify them. What I will examine further is the extent to which, if at all, Girards notion of the scapegoat is itself a form of theodicy.

I argue that it is precisely evil (understood as tragic, unjust suffering and not at all supernatural) that ruptures us and tears apart our being and makes us feel most vulnerable. Because it is foremost experienced as a power that threatens to dissolve away our sense of who and what we are, unjust suffering is antithetical to all forms of reconciliation. For the individual on the receiving end of that power, there seems no hope for a happy end or a better future. That is because unjust suffering eludes rationality.

But the task of theodicy is to rationalize suffering, since it seeks to identify and define, by a logically informed philosophical defense, God's goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil. However, any attempt to reconcile evil with a powerful, good God glosses over the existence of real suffering and misfortune and serves merely to diminish the real plight and vulnerability of the sufferer. In other words, theodicy, in both its theological and secular forms, is the temptation to find some sort of justification to reconcile ourselves to useless, unbearable suffering. The purely intellectual exercise of theodicy, therefore, commits a kind of transgression, because it does nothing to diminish or address suffering in short, theodicy sins. It hopes to order that which not only lies outside of any order but is also irreconcilable with all order. Intellectual honesty demands, then, we concede that the practice of theodicy is over and dead.

I will further argue that what makes us human is our capacity to respond in an ethical manner to the suffering of others. If we fail to respond, we succumb to the law of evil. But we can respond not by gaining more refined knowledge or by thinking more or better about evil in the only way that is adequate with the suddenness of suffering encountered: in the moment in which we recognize responsibility for the suffering other.

Such is the basis of my paper. I want to pursue these Levinasian premises further in relation to what Girard has to say about the mimetic architecture of scapegoating. I will develop further the thesis that scapegoating is a form of theodicy. In addition, I will raise questions and concerns that the Girardian scapegoat runs the risk of both resuscitating theodicy and truncating active, effective responsiveness.

Matthew G. Condon received his Ph.D. in religious studies from the Divinity School, The University of Chicago, in 2003. Since 1999, he has taught full-time for the Religious Studies Department, Indiana University Indianapolis, where he has developed new courses concerning religion and violence. - Articles in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and Literature and Theology, including several book reviews for Religious Studies Review. - In addition to religion and violence, his teaching and research interests include issues of identity; history of ideas; moral philosophy and religious ethics; comparative religion; modern religious thought.

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