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

BRUCE WARD 

Tolerance and the Persecution-Resentment Dynamic: René Girard and Dostoevsky

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ABSTRACT

The modern secular concept of tolerance originated during the Enlightenment in explicit opposition to a substantial public role for revealed religion. That this concept of tolerance is now in a state of crisis, on the levels of both theory and practice, is generally acknowledged. This crisis is apparent in both the historically dominant western models of tolerance as, first, the more or less resigned acceptance of difference (the original sense of the word “tolerance”), and second, the more or less enthusiastic affirmation of difference (contemporary “multiculturalism”). Historical experience (certainly in North America ) shows that the first model inevitably gives way to the second, reflecting the dominance of what Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, has called “the politics of recognition.”

My paper will begin with an analysis of the contemporary crisis of tolerance, arguing that it presents an opportunity for reconsidering the resources in the theological tradition for the sort of “recognition” of otherness crucial to religious tolerance. The main focus of the paper will be on the education of the potential persecutor, since either model of tolerance noted above presupposes the overcoming of those human passions that result in a violent reaction to human difference. Two principal and equally necessary elements of such an education will be advanced: 1) First, a critical understanding of the mechanism of persecutory violence, and in particular the phenomenon of “demonization” of the vulnerable other, which will draw particularly from René Girard’s analysis of the stoning of the beggar in “The Horrible Miracle of Apollonius of Tyana”; 2) Second, and more positively, what might be called an enlivening of perception that allows the human dignity of the other to be revealed, as an essential counter to the temptation to demonize. As one exemplar of such an enlivening of perception, my paper will point to the literary art of Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky himself claimed that the Christian idea of “raising up the lowly” is the central ethical task of modern literature. I will show how this idea is embodied in one of the “lowliest” characters in The Brothers Karamazov, a literary embodiment that vindicates a theological basis for the affirmative recognition, or discernment, of vulnerability. 

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Dr. Bruce Ward is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Laurentian University ( Thorneloe College ), in Ontario , Canada . His main areas of research are religious ethics, religion and literature, and religion and political thought. He is the author of two books on Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky’s Critique of the West: The Quest for the Earthly Paradise and Remembering the End: Dostoevsky as Prophet to Modernity. Previous papers given at the COV&R include “Giving Voice to Isaac: The Sacrificial Victim in Kafka’s Trial” (published in Shofar, Winter 2004, pp. 64-84); “Rousseau and the Problem of Envy in Modern Democracy” (published in Passions in Economy, Politics, and the Media, Ed. by Wolfgang Palaver and Petra Steinmar-Posel, 2005); and in 2006 in Ottawa, “The Liberal Concept of Tolerance and Christianity: Locke, Rousseau, and Girard.”