Reactivating the classical resources of typology, René Girard sought to interpret archaic religion as a whole as a prefiguration of the “Judeo-Christian revelation”. By unveiling the violence long contained in myths and rituals, the Prophets and the Gospels opened the possibility of a “new culture.” Fifty years after the formulation of this hypothesis, the renewed interest in Girard’s thought seems to coincide with a global unleashing of violence. This apocalyptic convergence calls for clarification.
How can one “show that Christians are called to bear witness to an embodied history that has not yet said its last word1”? And how can this be done, moreover, by presenting René Girard’s apocalyptic thought? The exercise would be a wager were we not convinced that a work such as his was built upon a profound hope. One might therefore say, in summary, that Girard recapitulated the best of literary criticism and the human sciences of his time in order to make them manifest what they sought to erase: the singularity of the Judeo-Christian heritage. At the very moment when positivist and structural anthropology had reduced messianicity, that “specific oracle of the Western world2,” to the rank of one faith among others, Girard redefined it as identical and different, both similar and opposed to all the others. Re-tightening the old springs…