Joel Hodge abstract

This paper will examine how the forgiving victim shatters the violent imagination of the world and inaugurates a new imagination that is grounded in standing alongside the victim. The complete vulnerability and self-giving of the victim, Christ, exposes the hypocrisy and mediocrity of violent human cultures, including those that advocate tolerance as a veiled restraint on vengeance and scandal. Tolerance is a degraded virtue that puts itself in the place of the Christian virtue of complete acceptance and sacrifice, which requires complete mimetic openness and self-giving. Instead of one Body in Christ, humans become many bodies in a state that forms its citizens to seek their own good tolerantly, i.e., in concealed and controlled contempt for the other that is restrained until the appropriate outlet is given by the state to vent built-up rivalries and violence.

I will draw on the work of Girard as well as the American theologian, William Cavanaugh, who has written extensively on the false anthropological and theological basis of the state and its claims to give security and maximise its citizens freedoms. According to Cavanaugh, the state creates a certain imagination through its use of violence, the channeling of its citizens desires, and its distorted appropriation of Christian virtues. The state provides some security from generalized violence like a typical sacrificial structure by creating its own rituals, myths and laws. The state structures relationships, desires and consciousness by dividing individuals from each other and making them dependent on the state in the pursuit of self-interest (or welfare) under the guise of tolerance.

Tolerance is the minimal requirement to control ones own desires and lifestyle. It does not require honesty or acceptance but a vow not to interfere with the other until the state deems it appropriate. As all sacrificial systems, the state breaks its own rule of tolerance as a mimetic outlet in scapegoating, such as with the intolerant (and so intolerable) religious fanatics or illegal immigrants. The state does this so to protect its power, order and moral superiority against those who traverse the sacred boundary of tolerance, and thereby exposes its hypocrisy and sacrificial structure that feeds off rivalry with intolerant people. The state controls and channels distorted desire, and so needs continual crises and scandals.

According to Cavanaugh, Christ gives a different imagination that shatters the violent indoctrination and mediocrity of the state (that advocates self-interest and tolerance) by making a new Body. This Bodys substance is the self-giving mimesis and faith of the forgiving victim. I will explore how these imaginations are fostered in the context of East Timor.

Joel Hodge is a PhD Candidate in the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics at the University of Queensland, Australia. His doctoral dissertation aims to further the dialogue between anthropology and theology which René Girards mimetic insight gives interesting and unique possibilities. It explores the implications of Christianity for human violence and culture, with particular reference to East Timor. He has recently had an article published in the Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament on sacred kingship in Greek tragedy and the Bible. He has presented in two previous COV&R meetings and received the Raymund Schwager Memorial Award in 2005.

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