What do libertarian Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Republican vice-presidential candidates, staunchly left New York playwrights, writers for HBO prestige dramas, Catholic bishops, and the top academic institutions in France have in common? All have explicitly drawn influence from French scholar René Girard. Girard devoted his life to championing three key anthropological insights:

1. We want what we want through the imitation of others’ desires.
2. This imitative structure of human desire leads to rivalry and eventually to collective violence of all against a scapegoat.
3. This violence forms the basis for all archaic sacrificial religions.

Christ’s coming and his sacrifice on the cross not only expose the scapegoat mechanism but also reveal man’s purpose to himself—interpersonal communion with God, a mimetic imitation of the life of the Trinity—and makes the achievement of this purpose possible. Penguin’s new collection of Girard’s writings, All Desire is a Desire for Being, edited by Girard’s friend and colleague Cynthia Haven, traces the development of these arguments over the course of the French scholar’s life. 

Though Girard has been called the “oracle of Silicon Valley” for predicting how the contemporary technocratic paradigm commodifies and weaponizes desire, Haven’s collection contends that “mystic” would be a more fitting moniker. In an interview on his life and method, Girard remarks that his work stems from two events, which happened within a few weeks of each other, that form one whole and cohesive insight into human nature.

The first was an intellectual revelation. Girard was a historian by training, not a literary scholar, but in the post-war period, he found an academic job in the Midwest teaching, among other things, French literature. (His major qualification for this position was that he was French.) While teaching a course on the history of the novel, Girard, who had little prior exposure to great authors like Cervantes or Dostoevsky, pulled away from the typical approaches of literary theory in favor of a careful examination of the texts themselves. 

What Girard found, by reading these texts in dialogue with one another, was that they all revolved around problems of desire, which they portrayed as fundamentally imitative or mimetic. Girard contended that all the great works of literature were unanimous in seeing the desires of their protagonists, which spurred the plot, as coming not from themselves but from a model, like a friend or mentor, who unconsciously becomes the measuring stick for all that the characters do. In their attempts to imitate their models, the characters eventually become rivals of their now-former friends, seeking to acquire something or someone that their models desire but that only one person can have, like a lover or a title.

As Girard developed his theory of mimetic desire, he was struck by another recurring theme: why do all these great novels also end with deathbed conversions, with renunciations of rivalrous desires and the violence they bring? Why do novelists, from those deeply steeped in Christian ideas like Cervantes to anti-clerical partisans like Stendhal, always end their novels with a moment of revelation, a moment of self-realization in which the protagonists at least have the opportunity to realize the futility of mimetic desires and the pursuit of egoism? As Girard describes:

I was thinking about the analogies between religious experience and the experience of a novelist who discovers he’s been constantly lying, lying for the benefit of his ego, which in fact is made up of nothing but a thousand lies that have accumulated over a long period, sometimes built up over an entire lifetime.

As Haven observes in her biography of Girard, “his revelation was a revolution of the self—religious and literary and anthropological and deeply personal, and this conversion experience would be the basis of his thinking and writing. ‘Everything came to me at once,’ he explained.”

This formed the foundation of Girard’s reversion to Catholicism. The great novels are great because they strike us, on some fundamental level, as being true to reality. They accurately depict that which is, including the reality of who we are in our fallen state. Good books portray our desires as mimetic because they are: beyond basic animal needs like food and shelter, we rely on models and mediators to know what to want, and in so doing we eventually desire to become our model—all desire is metaphysical, a desire for another’s being to the point that we lose sight of the goodness of our own being. This leads to violence against those we seek to emulate and against ourselves; on a societal level, mimetic crisis leads to mob mentality, in which the crowd ultimately singles out someone on the fringes and blames him for all its woes. After it slaughters this scapegoat, the unity of all against one leads the rivalries to subside, and the victim is deified—since, after all, he stopped the unrest—leaving the cycle to begin anew.

Girard saw the truth that great novels reveal: our natural mimetic desire will continue to lead to self-destruction unless it is oriented towards the transcendent Being-beyond-being that it truly seeks. Only through Christ’s suffering and death on the cross is mimetic desire overthrown and the cycle of the scapegoat mechanism broken. The only way to eternal life and lasting peace is through the imitatio Christi. It was this insight that brought Girard back to the faith—Girard speaks of this experience not as an academic breakthrough but as a legitimately mystical apprehension of God’s glory and grace.

The second experience occurred during a series of train rides between Baltimore and Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where Girard was teaching. “During this period,” he writes, “I usually just looked out at the scrap iron and the vacant lots in that old industrial region, but my mental state transfigured everything, and, on the way back, the slightest ray from the setting sun produced veritable ecstasies in me.” During one of these ecstatic train rides, Girard found a skin tag on his forehead which he believed to be cancerous. Though the tumor was benign, Girard’s dermatologist failed to report this information to him, leading Girard to believe that he would soon die. This period of uncertainty coincided with Lent, which Girard spent in anguish. On Wednesday of Holy Week, Girard was told that he was healed. “I’m convinced,” says Girard, “that God sends human beings a lot of signs that have no objective existence whatsoever for the wise and the learned. The ones those signs don’t concern regard them as imaginary, but those for whom they are intended can’t be mistaken, because they’re living the experience from within.”

Like Girard himself, Haven contends that all Girard’s thought, the breadth of which the collection captures—from his work on Shakespeare to his recontextualization of war theorist Carl von Clausewitz to his defense of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ—came out of “a single, extremely dense insight”: there is, according to Girard, “no ‘Girardian system’ … I’m just a sort of exegete.” Girard always staunchly denied being called a prophet, since “all prophecy stops with gospel Revelation.”

I think this is critically important to a correct understanding of Girard. Girard did not see his theories as secret knowledge, a gnosis that would separate the ignorant from the wise. It was not a key to all mythologies that would at last usher in a utopian period of peace and goodwill among men, allowing us to separate evil desires from good ones so we can achieve a salvation earned through knowledge. (As Luke Burgis has noted, “Manichaeism and Pelagianism are both things that Girard can be accused of, though usually due to an uncharitable reading or an inadequate understanding of what he’s actually trying to say.”) Rather, all desire is a desire for the being of God, for a being with God.

We can pursue this beatitude through ways that are ultimately detrimental to our nature (i.e., sinful desires), but those methods are still seeking after the good, albeit in a flawed way. Likewise, no human wisdom can ever achieve or earn salvation—Girard says explicitly that even the Apostles were “unable to understand the teaching of Jesus at the time they hear[d] it from his own mouth” because they lacked the “conversion experience” of the resurrection and “the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost when they were filled with a grace which was not theirs when Jesus was still alive.” More simply put, Girard believed that “no philosophical thought will master the shift to charity.”

 In light of Haven’s arguments for Girard as mystic, the most important text in this collection for understanding his thought isn’t his essay on “Literature and Christianity” (the most brilliant precis the book provides of his thought) nor his work on belonging nor even the interview where he talks about his conversion. Instead, it is his induction address at the Académie française, “The Mystic of Neuilly,” a treatment of the life of Father Ambroise-Marie Carré. Though ostensibly a biography of the Dominican whose seat on the Académie Girard filled in 2005, the text has as much to say about Girard as it does about the priest. 

As a young man, Fr. Carré first felt the call to the priesthood when, “‘one evening, in my little bedroom, I felt with an incredible force, leaving no room for any hesitation, that I was loved by God and that life … there before men, was a marvelous gift.’” Fr. Carré believed this was the opening salvo to a life filled with “mystical experience,” but it was not: “On a fairly frequent basis, Father Carré complains of God’s silence, of the despair that this causes him. After [this experience], ‘mystical consolations’ … were almost always refused him.” The moment he thought would be the “first step—the lowest—on a staircase pointed to the sky,” the beginning of a narrative in the life of a saint, became instead its peak—or at least, that’s what it felt like. Fr. Carré confessed in his writings that he later reacted to his mystical experience with ambition, taking “for his models those our society admires, men of action, ‘doers, ‘entrepreneurs,’” while failing to recognize that “the very thing that gives the modern world an immense advantage in the practical domain … constitutes a disadvantage in the mystical life.”

In this address, we have a man whose mystical experience in his youth became the cornerstone for the rest of his career narrating the life of a man whose mystical experience in his youth became the cornerstone for the rest of his career. The reflections Girard highlights by Fr. Carré show his hubris in trying to will his success and pursue his glory by turning his mystical moment into a monomania. Here we see Girard at his most self-critical. 

But this is not a selfish text, a chance for Girard to engage in self-flagellation. Instead, it’s a reflection on the truths that Fr. Carré (and Girard) after much trial and error, realized:

• A life of holiness, of seeking after the being of God, is one of suffering, of “‘laborious [faith], shaken by storms,’” in which one remains “‘faithful only through heroism,’” the faith of a virgin mother whose heart was pierced by sorrow. 

• Uncertainty is not from God, but from “excessive ambition.” At the end of his life, “Father Carré understood that he should have modestly and piously cultivated the grace from his youth” rather than seeking to turn it into glory.

• Closeness with God is not something we can earn. “During the years of dryness, Father Carré thought he was left all alone. In reality, it was he who turned away from God by trying in his modern voluntarism to come close to Him by his own efforts.”

• To become a saint, we have to “rely on more than [our] own will.” To want to become a saint is a desire that must be expressed by thinking about God rather than ourselves. This is a gift, not a hurdle to clear. “Instead of making God into an Everest to scale, Father Carré in his later years sees in Him a refuge. It is not a skeptical humanism that is expressed [here] but abandonment to divine mercy.”

The conclusion here is clear. Insofar as Girard’s insights help us to learn these lessons “with great humility,” we should use them. If instead they lead us to trust in our own power and our own will, we must set them aside. The goal of Girardian thought is to become Christlike.

What does this look like on a practical level? In her introduction, Haven relates an anecdote from a conference Girard attended: “After the talk, one man asked a provocative question: ‘Given that we can’t entirely trust the veracity of ancient writings, how would you measure the success of your theory?’” Girard simply answered, “‘You will see the success of my theories when you recognize yourself as a persecutor.’” Holiness and wholeness are impossible without the renunciation of pride, envy, and the rivalries they cause, and this cannot be done without the gift of grace.