Girard, Giussani & the Abstraction of Reality
Those who listened in on our most recent podcast episode on persons would have heard us mention the ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation, founded by Luigi Giussani.
Regular readers, on the other hand, would probably also have noticed me peppering the blog with references to Rene Girard, especially in the last 18 months or so, given some of that work had gone into a chapter of A Theological Engagement with Pornography. Some may also have noticed that I had a particular obsession with Girard’s notion of internal mediation, which was one of the key contributors to the escalation of rivalry.
For context, internal mediation is a form of copying one’s desire in such a way where the model of your desire is seen to be “on par” with the subject of desire (ie yourself). In other words, you and your model are seen to be “equals”. According to Girard, a seeming equality between the two increases the likelihood that the copying of desire could turn the relationship into an escalating rivalry.
One question that came to me in passing was whether there was any overlap between the two, and one tentative area where there might be concerns precisely in the area of internal mediation on the one hand, and Giussani’s notion of faith as the pursuit of reality on the other.
If faith is the pursuit of reality (the fullness of which is expressed in the encounter with the living mystery of Jesus Christ), then internal mediation is the enemy of faith insofar, as Girard explains it in Deceit, Desire & the Novel, as internal mediation causes the rivalry to become increasingly intense. As that rivalry intensifies, Girard argued, the rivals would seek to try and find ways to differentiate one from other, only to find that each are actually becoming increasingly like the other.
As this transformation happens within the rivals, Girard also argues that a transformation happens with their desire. Whilst before, the desire may have been oriented towards a concrete object, desire in an escalating rivalry would become more and more abstract. Girard uses the word “metaphysical”, which may indicate desiring after loftier goals, but those goals are only lofty because they lack form.
If we are showing signs of living in an era where rivalries are indeed escalating, what we may also be seeing is an era where we are becoming less and less sure of the goals of that rivalry, and less and less in touch with the reality of things. What may end up happening is that the rivalry itself becomes the goal, rather than a means towards the goal.
Where both Girard and Giussani converge is in their call for a truer conversion to Christ (especially among Christians who are meant to be the points of extension of reality, but are increasingly showing signs of sliding into all forms of fantasy), since it is only through Christ that one can really encounter reality and not some abstraction of it.
