Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers 

ALAN CORK

The Humanity of the Mediator: Vulnerability and Transformation in the Context of L'Arche

Email - Profile - Subtheme # 5 - Abstract

PAPER 

1. Hypothesis

People with disabilities figure in René Girard’s work in at least two important respects: in what would appear to be their disproportionate representation in ancient and archaic mythology, and secondly, on account of their undeniable representation in what are now called persecution texts. In positing the scapegoat mechanism as the hidden origin of myth and ritual, Girard suggests an underlying continuity between these two phenomena; and he of course attributes our greater sensitivity to and awareness of violence in the second case to the progress of the biblical revelation in our world. In general, as societies increasingly prohibited violence against individuals capable of reprisal (and therefore of spreading violence within the community), it is in a sense understandable that violence would look to discharge itself on those who were unable respond, and particularly on those who were “disabled in some way” (Things Hidden 420-21). And although Girard does not tend to single out or defend particular victims or categories of victims in his work (there being an ever present danger of reproducing the structure of condemnation that one wishes to denounce) we find a significant exception in The Scapegoat: “The ‘handicapped’,” he writes, “are subject to discriminatory measures that make them victims, out of all proportion to the extent to which their presence disturbs the ease of social exchange. One of the great qualities of our society is that it now feels obliged to take measures for their benefit” (18).

In this paper, I would like to pursue the first of these observations, taking the moral and epistemological point about the concern for victims for granted. Not only are people with disabilities frequently innocent of the “crimes” laid against them: they would also seem to be relatively innocent of the metaphysical desire and rivalistic one-upmanship which, according to the mimetic theory, underlie our forms of social exchange. If we can limit our view to people with mental disabilities for the sake of argument, a certain constitutional immunity from the more virulent forms of acquisitive mimesis would seem to follow from their more obvious difficulties in learning (imitating) the language, values, and norms of their society. If there is anything to this assumption, then people with mental handicaps may present potentially significant exceptions to Girard’s otherwise extremely fertile suggestion that mimetic desire is the same in all people (Things Hidden 283-91).

I will explore this hypothesis through the writings of Jean Vanier, the founder of the international L’Arche movement and co-founder of Faith and Light, both networks of communities with and for people with developmental disabilities. Vanier has long espoused a vision of the mentally handicapped person as “a kind of cement” for society (Our Journey Home xi): a possibility which speaks to one of Mayor Cohen’s concerns as recounted in Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam (244), and which resonates within the broader terms of this conference. To explain this position briefly: although people with disabilities are often very limited in physical and intellectual terms, they are often extremely rich in “qualities of the heart,” which to say in openness, welcome, and trust in others. When they meet new people, for example, they make no distinction between those who are important in the eyes of the world and those who are not; they are not governed the diverse and often incompatible social conventions that make up our divided world.

Being therefore open to people as people, it has been Vanier ’s experience that, in their weakness and consequent need of others, people with disabilities can become a real focus of unity for people of different generations, dispositions, and backgrounds. This has been well confirmed in L’Arche over the last 40 years, in small communities situated in a wide variety of cultural contexts. And if identification with weak and vulnerable people can sometimes take puritanical and even fanatical forms, as the case of Pim Fortuyn’s murderer, Volkert van der Graaf, would seem to suggest, the anecdotal reports coming out of L’Arche strongly suggest that it may also awaken energies of tenderness and compassion which can “transform” identities constituted through dynamics of rivalry and competition. While it is important to emphasize that L’Arche sees itself not as a solution to the world’s problems but as a “sign” that love is possible, there must be something in this tradition of knowledge and experience that can serve in the endeavour to build a world without scapegoats.

In looking to Vanier’s work for a possible solution to the more specific question of the conversion of negative into positive reciprocity, I have been struck by the remarkable asymmetries between Girard’s account of the “metamorphosis of desire”—the supposedly “inevitable” movement from mimetic desire to mimetic rivalry to mimetic violence (cf. Adams)—and Vanier ’s experiential account of how he and others have been “transformed” by living with people with disabilities. I will present a preliminary account of these differences in the next section.

In as much as Girard’s theory is validated by its ability to explain a wide range of literary and ritualistic motifs, from archaic myth to the modern novel (Violence and the Sacred 164; 316), significant deviations from what the theory teaches us to look for and expect would seem to call for an explanation in terms of the theory. This is where the hypothesis of relative immunity from mimetic desire (or “ontological innocence”) comes in, no doubt far too quickly. Ultimately, I will qualify the hypothesis in two important respects before applying the set of considerations to the problem of reconciliation. And, time permitting, I will end with two arguments for toleration.

2. Vanier and Girard: Some Contrasts

It seems important to underline that Vanier bases his understanding of what it means to be human not so much in the theoretical sciences as in his immediate experience of living with people with disabilities, and the many young persons who have come to assist them (Our Journey Home xv). As it may be needless to say, there was and continues to be a great diversity of people in L’Arche, both among the “core members” (the people with disabilities) and their “assistants” (those who have chosen to share life with them, whether for a period of 1-3 years or on a more permanent basis). Significantly, Vanier , like Girard, claims to detect in the Christian gospels an anthropology, a vision of what it means to be human (Spink 183); but for all the continuities between the gospel message and what he and others have been living in L’Arche since its earliest beginnings in Trosly-Breuil, France—and as Vanier does not appear to be on to mimetic theory—his reading of these texts is quite different from Girard’s.

If there is one theoretical constant in his writings, it is perhaps his view of how our hearts have been wounded in early childhood, when we felt rejected, not loved by our parents. The pain of “broken communion” awakens in some people a guilt-motivated drive to succeed, to prove themselves, to win in the competition of life; in others, modalities of anger, rebellion and depression. Recognizing that many people with disabilities suffer particularly from having been rejected or made to feel a disappointment by their families, L’Arche seeks to build community around them, and to transform their broken self-images through love. I suppose the assumptions underlying this work might be illuminated by mimetic theory, especially considering the importance that Vanier (who wrote his doctoral thesis on Aristotle) attaches to role models and imitation in human development.

What makes L’Arche’s experience of mutually transforming relationships particularly interesting from the standpoint of mimetic theory, in my opinion, is the idea of “normal” people being constituted not, or not only, by powerful and prestigious models, but also by weak and vulnerable people, those who count for nothing in the eyes of the world. This counter-cultural possibility does not fit neatly within Girard’s categories of external and internal mediation, for at least two reasons. Certainly at the level of acquired cultural abilities and consequent “spheres of possibility” (Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel 9), the “spiritual distance” between core members and assistants is very great. This suggests a form of external mediation, particularly if considered from the point of view of those who require greater or lesser assistance in order to go about their lives, make choices (to the extent they are able) and develop and share their gifts and capacities. This distance, moreover, is not merely cultural or symbolic; it is to a significant extent grounded in the facts of biological nature.

On the other hand, young people who come to L’Arche are in fact choosing to share what is largely the same form of life as the people with disabilities: an often busy but relatively simple round of work, meals, celebrations, worship, and special outings. When people live so closely together, one would expect their desires frequently to converge on the same objects, and no doubt they do. If I am not mistaken, this a defining feature of what Girard calls internal mediation. Furthermore, it is essential to what L’Arche is doing in the world that the “rich” can indeed identify with the “poor,” and even learn from them. As Vanier writes in his short history of L’Arche: “People with mental handicaps reveal important elements of our human nature that are often hidden in people who have developed their intellectual and manual capacities” (An Ark for the Poor 102). So much, then, for distance.

The second basic reason concerns the kinds of objects that fall under L’Arche’s concept of community. Although a marginal person’s thirst for love, friendship and affirmation cannot always be satisfied, these are common or collective goods that can in principle be shared and indefinitely expanded, as Dante knew. While it may be true, as Michael Ignatieff argues in The Needs of Strangers, that helping people to find meaning and fulfillment through love cannot be imposed or regulated by law, L’Arche has shown that it is possible—under the rubric of providing for the basic needs of disabled people—to organize is such a way that these needs are emphasized and given a certain priority. As the particular gifts of people with disabilities begin to flourish under appropriate conditions, assistants experience their own “fecundity” or capacity to give life, as well a deep sense of belonging which prepares them to make further choices. In my view, this virtuous interaction is a large part of what makes L’Arche such a joyful and attractive possibility for our time.  

Although there are certainly challenges to living community in the spirit of the Beatitudes in the modern world—notably the need to balance competence (or professionalism) and spirituality—mimetic rivalry between core members and assistants does not seem to be one of them. Indeed, we might expect that the presence of mentally handicapped people at the heart of L’Arche communities would set a break on mimetic snowballing, if only on account of the need to protect their vulnerabilities. But beyond that, there are fairly robust (if not exactly “stable”) differences between the two basic categories of membership, set within a social context of eminently shareable concerns.

Now adding to the physical and especially the emotional demands of caring for sometimes deeply wounded and rejected people, assistants in L’Arche must learn to live and work with a diverse and constantly changing group of fellow assistants. Here, one might think, is much more fertile ground for the development of rivalry and competition, and so it is. (As Vanier observes in Community and Growth, relationships with core members are often in the long run easier than relationships between assistants.) But just as one can easily touch one’s own weaknesses and limitations when confronted with the needs and sometimes irritating or disagreeable manners of people with disabilities, a truly humbling experience which can bring up all that one has hidden or tried to suppress behind (what Vanier calls) “walls,” including difficulties in relationship and one’s capacity to hurt others, so too is one constantly seeing both the unique qualities and the particular vulnerabilities of other human beings living through similar situations. These conditions, in my view, are not particularly conducive to the religious transfiguration of the object which, on Girard’s account, constitutes the unity of internal and external mediation. Rather, they provide daily reminders of our essential fragility as human beings, and of our need to help, support and forgive one another.

            One significant point of overlap between Vanier and Girard is the view that the weak and vulnerable people are often scapegoats. Both writers, for example, have recourse to the illustration of the man who does not dare to talk back to his boss and who goes home to abuse his family (Girard, I See Satan 156; Vanier , Finding Peace 29-30). Moreover, it seems to me that Vanier has a profound sense of the extreme undifferentiation which Girard diagnoses as characteristic of the modern world. As he writes in The Broken Body (1988): “Today we are seeing the birth of a newly fragile humanity: lonely, bewildered, lacking references and a sense of belonging; feeling empty, but finding nothing to fill the emptiness” (11).

My third point of contrast, then, is that whereas Girard sees the historical development of mimetic desire as leading to violent undifferentiation combined with the illusion of absolute difference, Vanier ’s example of the “downward path” of humility and compassion teaches us to recognize our common humanity, and our need of one another. This need includes the various kinds of support we require if we are to live L’Arche in a competent, life-giving, and sustainable way; but it also concerns others insofar as they are able to bear witness to and confirm the sometimes elusive spiritual realities of what we are living. One of the challenges currently facing L’Arche, as Kathrin Spink relates in her excellent biographical history of the movement, has to do with communicating and sustaining its “prophetic” element, particularly among new assistants who may be coming to L’Arche with no religious background. 

This consideration suggests a fourth point of contrast, concerning Jean Vanier’s conception of the sacred. Whereas Girard detects in the ambivalence of the archaic sacred traces of the scapegoat mechanism which he believes lies at the origin of all human societies, Vanier (doubtless reflecting the influence of his spiritual accompanier Father Thomas Philippe) speaks of a loving creator God who longs to transform people as they learn to accept their own and each other’s humanity. The key to Vanier ’s theological teachings must be considered to be his faith in the Word made flesh: the all-powerful God who became a vulnerable human child, who lived simply in community for the larger part of his life, and who, through his ministry and Passion, showed us how to live our humanness; which is to say in loving self-donation to one another and to God the Father. These intuitions find some corroboration and support in the writings of Henri Nouwen, the Dutch priest who spent the last ten years of his life in Daybreak, a L’Arche community near Toronto . 

3. Analysis and Conclusion

Now the hypothesis of ontological innocence may go some way towards explaining these differences, assuming that I have understood them properly. But clearly it cannot be the whole story. At the very least, something more must be said about the particular setting in which people with handicaps are not pushed aside or ignored—nor treated as mere clients or objects of care—but welcomed as friends and even teachers. Certainly Henri Nouwen, in his moving account of his relationship with Adam Arnett, a man with severe disabilities who died in 1996, wrote not only of his friend’s peaceful presence (which he compared to that of Jesus) but also to the community which formed around him. In my view, the genius of L’Arche is to have created situations within an anonymous and highly competitive society where people can let down their barriers, open up to one another, and provide each other with mutual support. Last year’s conference organizer, Vern Redekop, aptly termed such relational systems “mimetic structures of blessing.”      

            Furthermore, what seems to be essential to the dynamics of transformation is not so much the degree of desire and violence within a person (which may in the nature of things be quite substantial) as the degree of weakness and vulnerability that enables individuals as it were to “disarm,” and truly encounter one another. But this way of putting it seems auspicious for the theme of reconciliation as the conversion of negative into positive reciprocity.

            While it is undoubtedly the case that Vanier conceives of the resolution of deep-rooted conflict ultimately in terms of “a deepening in spirituality and in a love that flows from the heart of God” (Finding Peace 6), we can I think read into what has been said so far an implicit response to the question at issue. For in their extreme weakness and vulnerability—not to say in their often corresponding gift for friendship and communion—people with disabilities enable us to let down our barriers and to be vulnerable with them. Having seen the value of, and begun to accept my own, vulnerability, I am more likely to welcome the vulnerability of another; and this with a good faith that may be imitated. This analysis gives some sense to the gospel passage that whoever welcomes “these little ones” in Jesus’ name welcomes the God who sent him (Luke 9:33 -37).

            To conclude, it would seem that after a lifetime of working with vulnerable people Jean Vanier remains deeply convinced that people who are weak and in need can lead us into a world of peace and relative harmony, but only on condition that we as individuals are prepared to enter into personal relationship with (at least some of) them. The reality of “communion”—which is “mutual vulnerability and openness one to another” (Becoming Human 27)—presupposes but seems ultimately to transcend the conception of society as a system of positive and negative exchanges. If such openness does not and cannot guarantee that individuals will not sometimes be hurt, it at least keeps alive the possibility of humanity’s evolving into something new. This is (roughly speaking) the ground of Vanier ’s call for a new vision of humanity in his 1998 Massey Lectures, Becoming Human.

4. Arguments for Toleration

The foregoing reflection ties the prospect of reconciliation to the inclusion and “embrace” (Volf) of marginal people who may have nothing to do with the wars and conflicts that beset our world. In this respect it seems broadly in line with Xavier Le Pichon’s view that throughout the evolution of our species, human beings have become more human as they opened up to the weak, and to the reality of death and suffering. But it remains the case that people with disabilities make many people feel uncomfortable, and are frequently regarded as being little more than a burden and a financial problem. I would therefore like to end this paper with two arguments for toleration, both of which follow the “collective goods” form of argument outlined in Joseph Raz’s The Morality of Freedom.

In the first place, then, it seems to me that the liberal ideal of toleration applies to people with disabilities in much the same way as it does between the more active and autonomous members of society. If we are inclined to be intolerant towards them, we should tolerate their often very obvious limitations on account of the gifts (or “virtues”) they have to offer, which is to say the many ways they can and do enrich our collective life. These gifts include simplicity of spirit, purity of heart, welcome, trust, gentleness, an enviable capacity to live in the present moment, a capacity for celebration, and—as some believe—a closeness to God. To quote from the Charter of L’Arche, people with disabilities are “a living reminder to the wider world of the essential values of the heart without which knowledge, power and action lose their meaning and purpose.” In its homes, work programs and public relations, L’Arche works hard to make these real but often hidden qualities manifest to the world.

            At another level, for those who choose to enter more deeply into the mystery of the disabled person, there is—as it would seem—the real possibility of living the paradoxes that Jesus announced in the Sermon on the Mount. As Bill Clarke observes in his recently republished book on the early years of L’Arche: “In discovering in the despised and rejected Jean-Charles, Claude, or Jacqueline a brother and a sister who have much to teach me both on the human and spiritual level, I realize implicitly that there is no one who should be despised and rejected” (85). Although perhaps transpiring on a smaller and less dramatic scale, the nature of this realization seems to me not unlike that of Paul’s conversion of the road to Damascus . One may not have consented to outright violence, of course, but relationship with a disabled person has a way communicating the extent to which our common ways of seeing are in fact shot through with arbitrary exclusions. In a society which compels all significantly autonomous person to make substantial choices in order to give content to their lives—choices which frequently require us to assume a competitive stance towards others pursuing different but equally valid forms of life—is it not politically important to keep this message of love and total acceptance of others alive and publicly visible?

Indeed if “befriending the stranger” in the integral way that Vanier has shown us should leave people particularly vulnerable to accusations of “treason” from those following the mainstream of power and promotion, they have in this last a strong rejoinder. It is a strange, but perhaps not unintelligible, development that the weakest and most vulnerable members of society should be in a position to confer this blessing on their brothers and sisters in humanity. As Jean Vanier is also fond of saying: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”

Adams, Rebecca. “Loving Mimesis.” Violence Renounced: René Girard, Biblical

Studies, and Peacemaking. Ed. Willard M. Swartley. Studies in Peace and

Scripture 4. Telford : Pandora; Scottdale: Herald, 2000. 277-307.

Beumer, Jurjen. Henri Nouwen: A Restless Seeking for God. New York : Crossroad,

1997.

Buruma, Ian. Murder in Amsterdam : The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of

Tolerance. New York : Penguin, 2006.

Clarke, Bill. Enough Room for Joy: The Early Days of l’Arche. 1974. Ottawa : Novalis,

2006.  

Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. 1966.

Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore : John Hopkins UP, 1976.

 ---. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. 2001. Trans. James G. Williams. New York : Orbis;

Ottawa : Novalis; Leominster : Gracewing, 2002.

---. The Scapegoat. 1986. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore : John Hopkins UP, 1989.

---. Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. 1987. Trans. Stephen Bann and

Michael Metteer. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. 

---. Violence and the Sacred. 1977. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore : John Hopkins UP,

1979.

Ignatieff, Michael. The Needs of Strangers. 1984. New York : Picador-Metropolitan-

Henry Holt, 2001.

L’Arche Canada . More Than Inclusion: Honouring the Contributions of People with

Developmental Disabilities. Toronto : n.p., 2005.

Le Pichon, Xavier. Aux racines de l’homme: De la mort à l’amour. Paris : Renaissance,

1997. 

Nouwen, Henri J. M. Adam, God’s Beloved. 1997. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2006.

---. The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming. 1992. New York : Image-

Doubleday, 1994.

---. The Road to Daybreak: A Spiritual Journey. 1988. New York : Image-Doubleday,

1990.

Raz, Joseph. The Morality of Freedom. 1986. Oxford : Clarendon-Oxford, 1988.

Redekop, Vern Neufeld. From Violence to Blessing: How an Understanding of Deep-

Rooted Conflict Can Open Paths to Reconciliation. Ottawa : Novalis, 2002.

Sen, Amartya. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. 2006. New York : Norton,

2007.

Spink, Kathrin. The Miracle, The Message, The Story: Jean Vanier and l’Arche. Toronto :

Novalis, n.d.

Vanier, Jean. An Ark for the Poor: The Story of L’Arche. Toronto : Novalis; London :

Chapman-Cassell; New York : Crossroad, 1995.

---. Becoming Human. Toronto : Anansi, 1998.

---. Befriending the Stranger. Toronto : Novalis, 2005.

---. Community and Growth. 1979. Rev. ed. Trans. Jean Vanier . New York : Paulist,

2001. 

---. Finding Peace. Toronto : Anansi, 2003.

---. Man and Woman He Made Them. Toronto : Anglican, 1985.

---. Our Journey Home: Rediscovering a Common Humanity Beyond Our Differences.

Trans. Maggie Parham. Ottawa : Novalis; Maryknoll: Orbis, 1997.

---. The Broken Body. 1988. London : Darton, 2003.

---. The Heart of L’Arche: A Spirituality for Every Day. Ottawa : Novalis; London :

Chapman-Cassell; New York : Crossroad, 1995.

---. The Scandal of Service: Jesus Washes Our Feet. Ottawa : Novalis, 1996.

Volf, Miroslav. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity,

Otherness, and Reconciliation. Nashville : Abingdon, 1996.