Courtney McGrail
In the aftermath of René Girard’s death, websites poring over the Catholic intellectual’s work have been struck time and again by its timeliness.
A patheos.com piece by Artur Rosman at ‘Cosmos in the Lost’, for instance, is getting a lot of traction. Addressing the issue of assisted suicide, Rosman quotes Girard as saying “The experience of death is going to get more and more painful, contrary to what many people believe”.
He continues: “The forthcoming euthanasia will make it more rather than less painful because it will put the emphasis on personal decision in a way which was blissfully alien to the whole problem of dying in former times.
“It will make death even more subjectively intolerable, for people will feel responsible for their own deaths and morally obligated to rid their relatives of their unwanted presence. Euthanasia will further intensify all the problems its advocates think it will solve.”
Observing how Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation analysed how the Protestant Reformation ultimately played out, he notes that “it’s a strange paradox of life how solutions end up causing more trouble than the problems they address”.
At aleteia.org, meanwhile, Matthew Becklo’s ‘Paris as Prophecy’ quotes Girard’s observation that “history, you might say, is a test for mankind. But we know very well that mankind is failing that test”.
The Paris attacks, Becklo believes Girard would have argued, can be understood as a wake-up call to a universal phenomenon at the heart of all human society.
“Our civilization is the most creative and powerful ever known, but also the most fragile and threatened because it no longer has the safety rails of archaic religion,” Girard had observed, claiming that in the aftermath of the Passion, violence finds meaning only in itself. Events such as the Paris attacks are still all too common, Girard argued because, despite the revelation of the scapegoat mechanism that underlies how we think: “We are not Christian enough.”
Self-cultivation vs self-esteem
Over at nytimes.com, Mark Lilla reviews Robin Lane Fox’s Augustine: Conversions to Confessions, observing that for a millennium the Confessions served as a model for those who would imitate Christ but struggled on the way.
It was during the Renaissance that this approach broke down, he says, with Montaigne and others favouring an attitude of self-acceptance instead.
“As modern people we have chosen Montaigne over Augustine,” he writes, continuing in a way some might think slightly unfair to Montaigne, “we traded pious self-cultivation for undemanding self-esteem. But is love of self really enough to be happy?
“You know the answer to that, dear reader. And so did Augustine.”
A baffled Orthodox
At firstthings.com, meanwhile, Orthodox author David Bentley Hart has stirred up a fascinating debate with his article ‘Habetis Papem’. “Far be it from me – not being a Roman Catholic,” he begins, “to tell Catholics what they should think of their pontiff”.
But, he says, he feels it important to say that he feels a “wholly unqualified admiration for Francis”, such that he is “utterly baffled by the anxiety, disappointment, or hostility he clearly inspires in certain American Catholics of a conservative bent”.
As if this might not have been inclined to trouble readers of the esteemed conservative website, he continues: “And frankly I find it no more inexplicable in its most extreme expressions—which at their worst verge on sheer -hysteria – than in its mildest – an almost morbid oversensitivity to every faint hint of hidden meanings in every word, however innocuous, that escapes the Pope’s lips or pen.”
It’s worth reading the whole thing.
