Paolo Diego Bubbio

1. Philosophy and Religion in Girard’s thinking

One of the aspects of René Girard’s thinking that is most fecund and given to development is his seeing a substantial homogeneity between philosophy and religion: in fact religion and philosophy, like myth, ritual and every other symbolic and cultural product, must rest on the basis constituted by mimesis, sometimes in spite of themselves or even without being aware of it, if they are to be significant in the eyes of the community of which they are an integral part and at the same time found. Mimesis, therefore, plays an important role in the relationships between religion and philosophy or, in other words, every philosophy of religion, being necessarily symbolic, is also mimetic.

According to Girard, Christ's coming made sacrificial expulsion more difficult: the evangelic demystification showed the victim as such and the persecutor's role became very unpopular. Our hypothesis is that, after Christ’s coming, religion and philosophy, both sacrificial tools since their very birth, have served to channel the mimetic conflicts, together with their violent solutions; conflicts that, conveyed through force, would be too evident to consciences no longer blinded to the truth of the victims. It is the same mechanism that is perpetuated, in less apparent forms, in what we can define as "intellectual symbolism".

By intellectual symbolism, we mean a specific historical stage in which the sacrificial signs are expressed. The mimetic-sacrificial mechanism, in fact, no longer uses religion and philosophy merely as tools to perpetuate the beneficial effects of sacrifice, but also uses them as alternative subjects in the sacrificial relationship; and in doing so, camouflages itself. In other terms, the being that is the only victory sign embodies in religion and in philosophy insomuch that the mimetic conflicts determine the genesis of an intellectual symbolism, which remains itself sacrificial. Girard himself points out that the victims replace an original scapegoat: so we can admit the possibility of replacing the original victim with intellectual scapegoats.

Consequently, the expulsion of victim can be an intellectual operation. So, there is no impediment to religion and philosophy playing the same role of subject and victim within a mimetic process. Religion and philosophy, every time they meet, repeat, in a more or less conscious and clear manner, that same mimetic and circular game: they expel an intellectual scapegoat that replaces the victim that was originally truly expelled, therefore again obtaining real effects from this purely intellectual expulsion. So, the Girardian theory of the mimetic process leads us to consider the intellectual expulsion as the founding event of the philosophy itself.

Having ascertained the plausibility of considering the symbolic and cultural forms as elements of an intellectual symbolism (still, and a fortiori, sacrificial), a possible reading of the Girardian text naturally presents itself to us: highlighting the role of the mimetic-sacrificial mechanism in the historical succession of philosophical doctrines. In this sense, philosophy of religion becomes, for reasons that we will try to explain, the privileged mystification of the mimesis, and therefore, also the favored field of its exhibition, in the problematic identity of its two terms.

With regard to the concept of "philosophy of religion" itself we are in a state of serious indecision, and it is therefore necessary to attempt to assume a point of view, on one hand is as general as possible and on the other considers the Girardian perspective within which we are working. The perspective that seems to us most adequate for reaching the determination of the role of the mimesis with respect to philosophy of religion is offered by J. Hessen. He states that pre-eminence can historically pertain to religion or to philosophy; we will simply use his scheme as a perspective from which to observe the role of the mimetic-sacrificial mechanism, in the context of philosophy of religion. In rereading this scheme in the light of Girard’s thinking, we will try to highlight some of those now we can label "intellectual sacrifices" (i.e., solutions of sacrificial crisis in which the victim's role is attributed to a symbolic-cultural form). Where the supremacy belongs to religion, we will recognize traces of expulsion to the detriment of philosophy; similarly, where supremacy belongs to philosophy, we will recognize traces of expulsion effected by philosophical thinking to the detriment of religion. Obviously, we have to expect such an expulsion to have been mystified in the philosophical text, just as, in the myths, the expelled victim's presence is only marked by the more or less awkward attempts made by persecutors to hide it.

Now, the possibility of applying this scheme to the history of philosophy becomes apparent. For reasons of space, we will not examine the victimization of philosophy by religion. We, instead, will take into consideration modern philosophy, verifying whether is it possible to find in it the traces of a sacrificial expulsion of religion by philosophy.

2. Religion as scapegoat of philosophy

Until humanism emerged, the sacred was considered to be anything that surrounded man although it had only rare points of contact with him, formed of rituals. With humanism, the idea of the extraneousness of the sacred was progressively rejected and the sacred was brought back to earth. So, the process of the worsening of the ontological evil began, passing from a moment in which all men were equally sinners beneath a sky populated by the sacred, to a moment in which, while it is said that the Sacred is within us, each of us feels devoid of it and sees the others as possessing it.

What appears to be the advance of humanism, and can appear as such in virtue of his skepticism towards anything concerning religion, according to Girard, is instead inheritance of religion: in fact it assumes the role of persecutor thus perpetuating the entire mechanism. This is the moment in which the greatest benefits are obtained from expulsion, because it succeeded perfectly: the victim is respected and adored, to the extent in which we are completely convinced that he is responsible for all the evil and for all the violence.

Girard himself shows as a constant of all modernity the repeated expulsion (we will dare to say the ritualised expulsion) of the religious, which is blamed for of all the violence of civilization.

The sacred is often even ignored; ignoring the expelled scapegoat also shows the attempt to hide the sacrifice, as the persecutors of every era do; once more, the mechanism repeats itself without major differences. Whether it is the expulsion from an Australian village of a cripple, or the intellectual expulsion of a religious individual, pausing to reconsider what happened is always a risk: it is sufficient to think of the expulsion just enough to ritualise it and enjoy its benefits. The attention is concentrated here: the community is pacified, compacted once more in an unexpected and miraculous harmony. It is not by chance that modern philosophy begins with Cartesius and his "morals of generosity."

Modern individualism was born when philosophy thought it had removed violence and evil from the earth by expelling religion and placing man at the centre of things, the Io, or Self. The Self is the new protagonist of this phase, the Self that believes it has removed the discordant element (the scapegoat, i.e. the religious), the Self that believes in its divinity and basks in the peace found again, but which, to do that, still needs to confirm its identity by opposing the expelled religion.

The religious evoked as an enemy to be defeated is no longer a real danger for philosophy. But it is useful to keep an enemy that could easily be defeated, and which may have already been defeated, alive. Philosophy first denounces the persistence of religion and intensifies the declarations of war towards it; later it tastes the effects of sacrifice and then preaches generosity; when at last religion proves to be too weak to still play the role of the skulking enemy, philosophy, to keep it alive, discovers sensitivity and Romanticism. Attacks then give way to concessions, to admissions of rights, to the discovery of the "rightful place of religion."

It is time for Romanticism, for the romantic "lie" opposed by Girard to the "novel truth". Romanticism is not really any more false, or mystified, than the thoughts that preceded it, but its peculiarity consists in considering sublime passions that are in fact awfully worldly. Romanticism feels the glamour of a mediator who is increasingly a rival: it is the presence of this intermediary that Romanticism notices but does not express, while the major novels place it in the foreground. It is therefore in the literary world, and not in the philosophical one, that the truth begins to emerge. Girard sees Romanticism as the philosophy of the meta-physical desire, considering man as established by a spontaneous desire to be, while he does not see that the desire derives from a feeling deprived being of that which others are perceived as having. The Other (in our case: religion as sacrificed otherness) is still ignored, but in the passage "from the Cartesian generosity to the pre-romantic sensitivity," something must have happened, to determine such an aggravation of the ontological evil. The problem is that the sacrificial expulsion has worked too well: soon we become aware that the expiatory victim is not returning, in the consciousness and in history, to take up the mimetic conflict again. Once the beneficial effects of the expulsion have been discovered, the victim should offer himself to the adoration of the earlier persecutors, but that does not happen: the attempts to do this, end up demystifying the mechanism more and more, highlighting its dynamics. Why does that happen?

We must not forget that what we are dealing with happened after the evangelic revelation. We introduced the notion of "intellectual symbolism" justifying it, in accordance with Girard, as an attempt performed by the mimetic-sacrificial mechanism to mystify the truth by camouflaging itself with intellectual mechanisms. And yet, we notice now that this ploy of the mechanism turns to detriment of the mechanism itself: in fact, if on the individouble level the possibility of replacing the original victim with some ritual victim is potentially infinite, on the intellectual one it is shown to be more difficult, because philosophy preserves memory of itself. No one adores religion any more, because everyone remembers the role that this element played and partly still plays. Considered under this point of view, therefore, the prevalence of intellectual symbolism could be really considered an event in the history of salvation, because it facilitates the emergence of the truth.

Thus, the history of the sacrificial expulsion of religion by philosophy has a destiny different from history - that for many directions is mirror-like - of the sacrificial expulsion of philosophy by religion: the beneficent effects derived by the expulsion gradually cease and the religious does not get back any more as god of the harmony to be adored and be ritually sacrificed. So the terrible truth emerges: god died. It is clear for Girard that the god that dies is the violent sacred, the jealous god of the Old Testament, the vengeful god against whom Job rebelled in the name of all victims. From now on - Girard is explicit about this point - all the efforts of philosophy will be aimed at looking for a "substitute god."

So, philosophy finds the substitute god in man. And yet, this pharmakon produced by philosophy to recover from the metaphysical evil shows itself (consistently to his ambiguous nature) as a powerful poison instead of a miraculous remedy: "the man" is only an invention of a symbolic-cultural product which philosophy is, while only "the Self" and "the Other" exist in reality, and none of these is able to fill the empty space left by religion.

Idealism is characterized by the attempt to replace the religious with the human, an attempt that is, from its very beginning, destined to the failure. The human being, Girard reminds us, always divides into Man-Self and Man-Other: it is so already dual; recourse to it reveals the beginning of a sacrificial-intellectual crisis. The kudos, the temporary victory sign, begins to rest first on the one and then on the other cyclically, therefore preventing in this phase the choice of a scapegoat. So, on one hand Idealism is an attempt to come to some agreement with the religious forms of desire, with religion in its sacrificial meaning; and on the other hand, to consider religion as developing humanism is to reverse the terms of the relationship and to hope that Humanism can in the future play the same role with religion, still producing major benefits, in terms of reconciliation and harmony. However, it is an attempt destined to have no curative effect on the metaphysical evil.

The aggravations of metaphysical evil produce nihilism. It is not by chance, according to Girard, that Nietzsche’s thought begins with a meditation on Christ and the destiny of Christianity. In the sacrificial crisis of the modernity that Girard shows, Nietzsche is really a central figure because his thought is in the intellectual centre of such crisis. His reflection captures fundamental aspects of the current process, even though it results in impossible conclusions. So this is Nietzsche’s view reread by Girard: Christ set the men on the track of God and gave them a glimpse of eternity. Man’s impotent efforts impinge on humanity itself and generate the atrocious universe of deflected transcendence, i.e. the conviction of insufficiency of the Self and superiority of the Other. Then it is necessary to reject Christ's madness and to renounce the infinite. Thus, Nietzsche proposes the inversion of the desire as a pharmakon able to cure the ontological evil deriving from the idolatry of the Other: it will not be the man-Other that replaces the religious, as in the Cartesian generosity and the romantic sensitivity, but the man-Self.

Although Nietzsche sees the attribution of divinity to the Self rather than to the Other, from this point of view it is fully consistent with the individualistic preludes that have characterized philosophy since the very beginning.

The evangelic message is now more unbearable because it is becoming more intelligible; the true novelty of Nietzsche’s thinking, according to Girard, is the attempt to oppose to the demystification of Christ a new Gospel, the Self's Gospel, without noticing that many of his demystifications were in fact made possible by the very evangelic message which he wants to replace.

So, Girard does not deny that in Nietzsche’s thinking there is a revealing dimension, determined by a certain "fullness of times" in which the action of Paraclytos becomes increasingly clear; this dimension is also identified by Girard in the precise nietzschian criticism towards sacrificial Christianity, toward the Christian religion as self-sacrifice, in a word toward the ressentiment. So, what is the ressentiment according to the Girardian reading? Resentment is a disease, one of the signs of propagation of the metaphysical illness; Nietzsche’s error lies in seeing only the weakest as infected, in thinking that the divinisation of Self can prevent the disease from spreading.

Moving the divinity from the Other to the Self is nothing but another sign of gravity of the sacrificial crisis: it means that every man, every individouble "Self" has the illusory conviction of having a victory within his grasp, while the only consequence of such a conviction is a new and bloodier return of the violence.

Somehow, Nietzsche truly puts an end to an epoch, the epoch in which the truth could still be mystified because the unity had been renewed on the sacrificial expulsion of religion. His was the last possible attempt, and it failed. The proud Self, which substituted the role covered in past by the religious, collides with the Other, which continuously reminds the Self of his humanity.

The place left vacant by the religious cannot be left to the Self; on the other hand - and it has the value of a final test in a Girardian prospective – the entire mimetic-sacrificial process is based on a feeling of original inferiority: so it is absurd to think that the Self can convince itself of its divinity. But neither can the place of the religious be left the Other, and not only for the reason (always valid, within the kingdom of mimetism), that the teacher often disappoints the subject-disciple (what is really important is that the place of the religious is replaced), whether or not the substitutes follow each other more or less quickly); what prevents the full replacement of the religious with the man-Other is the level of awareness which the demystifying evangelic truth (always operating in history) has reached.

In the hypothesis that we have outlined so far, philosophy kept a fake enemy in life, religion, to be able to sacrifice it ritually and enjoy the benefits of such a sacrifice. When then religion revealed itself to be absent, philosophy looked for something with which to replace it, but it never stopped to expel the religious to obtain those more and more poor beneficial effects that the ritual sacrifice was producing. However, in the context of mimetic psychology, a bluff can easily change into reality. Keeping an enemy alive always involves the risk that it may recover the strength it had lost. However, this is not merely a new transformation: through the centuries, the evangelic message has continued to lurk in the human minds and the religion of which philosophy is beginning to be afraid is no longer the religion that had been defeated in humanism and in the first Illuminism. Rather it is a religion, a symbolic and still sacrificial form that still carries, though still in embryo, that demystifying "faith" which refuses to stay inside the mimetic-sacrificial mechanism. The evangelic truth now emerges not more as religion but as faith. So, modern thought begins to sense its end, to discover its persecutory past and to reveal itself as a dissembler. This also requires philosophy to its critical weapons on itself, in order to highlight the fact that its presuppositions must also be subjected to demystification.

So, if the demystifying truth of the Gospels, what we have labelled faith, has nothing to do with religion as a symbolic-cultural system bearing a sacrificial content, then this crumbling of this system is part of the progressive revelation of the faith and it can therefore be included in the history of salvation. In other terms, the secularisation, i.e., the process of the progressive loss of sense of the Sacred in view of potential transparency is not hostile to the faith but a condition for its development and a consequence of it. What the secularisation demolishes is specifically the violent Sacred, the religion that was expelled by philosophy and that can no longer return.

In Girard’s perspective, anything contributing to the progressive realisation of the evangelic prophecies is part of the history of salvation: following our hypothesis, we can therefore affirm that the genesis of the intellectual symbolism and the consequent sacrificial expulsions of philosophy by religion first and of religion by philosophy later, are phenomena which can be read in two ways. On one hand, they are expedients that mimesis puts into act to camouflage itself and to perpetuate itself; on the other hand, they are necessary stages so that such a mechanism cannot be repeated any longer and the truth can show itself.

The last stage of this process is also the decisive moment, in which the humanity can autonomously choose its destiny. Behind the modern phantasmagoria, behind the events and ideas whirling, at the end of evolution always quicker than the internal mediation, there is the pure Sacred. We reached so the paroxysm of the crisis.

3. Knowledge in faith

Men become gods for each other. It does not mean that the promises of humanism and illuminism become true, but that the man's ontological insecurity worsens. Moreover, the deficiencies of the scapegoats - or rather, the increasing difficulty of playing the role of persecutor without being recognized as such - by themselves first and then by others - renders the crisis almost inevitably irreversible.

A "figure" that Girard often uses in order to represent the mimetic rivalry is that of the Doubles. The phenomenon of Double shows itself at the paroxysm of the conflict between the enemy brothers: they look progressively more and more like each other because they increasingly imitate each other’s desires and therefore they face each other with ever greater hostility. It is then possible to interpret the philosophy of the history of religion as a duel between two enemy brothers - or better, between two enemy sisters. Religion and philosophy meet face to face and the aim of each is to win a victory over the other: every theology and every doctrine would be the final one, the seal on the truth, the last word – a violent word - in the dispute. There is always, however, another doctrine or another theology that answers in its turn with another "final word." Such a reflection leads us to consider more carefully the historical relationship between philosophy and religion. They are not first enemy and then sisters: they are sisters in violence. It is the sacrificial nature that binds them indissolubly. While the sacrificial nature binds philosophy and religion, only a thought situated within the dimension of the revelation of the sacred lie will be able to bring to light such a bond without mystifying it: only a thought referring to the Gospel, or, better, a thought that allows the Gospel guide it. Girard emphasizes that the Gospel has previewed both the victory of a still sacrificial "Christian religion" and the refusal of the evangelic message by the modern culture: i.e., both the sacrificial expulsion of philosophy by religion and the expulsion of religion by philosophy. Through these mirrored roles played successively by religion and philosophy, it is possible to understand their "enemy sisters" nature. In this light, modern philosophical culture, by recognizing in religion the source of all the evils of man, made it a scapegoat: this culture shows therefore a religious origin, and then a sacrificial origin too.

If violent reciprocity is the characterizing element of the relation between the enemy brothers, and therefore also between philosophy and religion, the mystification is a necessary element for perpetuating such a relationship. The true double is always unaware of the relation that binds him to his enemy brother: if he were not, he would notice the illusory nature of its desire and the mimetic mechanism would be definitively broken. If this is not to happen, the subject must be able to always see a rival in its double, because only between rivals will the scapegoat be chosen. Today, anti-Christianity is forced to support the violent nature of Christianity to be ritually able to expel it. We have reached a new nub in our hypothesis: the importance of the rival figure, perhaps above all, within the intellectual symbolism. It is impossible to be a ‘rival’ of oneself, and to be ‘a double’ it is necessary to be so in relation to an individual or symbolic "other," in other words, there must be at least two elements. The whole mimetic-sacrificial mechanism therefore needs a real or symbolical "other", which is also caught in the net of same mechanism: evidence of this is the fact that, if this "other" (Job, Christ) refuses to play first the role of rival and then of scapegoat, the whole mimetic-sacrificial building collapses. So religion requires a sacrificial philosophy to survive: similarly, philosophy needs a religion or a sacrificial reading of Christianity to last. This "sacrificial philosophy" would be nothing without a "sacrificial religion" and vice versa. The rivalry no longer derives from the dispute over an object, whatever its kind (in the intellectual symbolism, the possession of the truth), but from the necessity of keeping its role inside the mechanism.

Let’s recapitulate. When philosophy and religion meet, in the systems of philosophy of religion, they engage all their strengths to find scapegoats in the other system. Certainly, they do it in order to show their perfect innocence and extraneousness to every type of intellectual lynching (it is a dynamics that we know well: at least since the coming of Christ everyone has rushed to proclaim himself innocent and indicate others as culprits). But their innocence is reciprocally denied: the only truth we find, prepared by twenty centuries of rivalry between this two "doubles", is their violent quintessence. Religion and philosophy finally demystify each other. The phenomenon emerging from the crisis paroxysm is the double. At first, the subject splits: reflections are no longer convincing and philosophy (or religion) divides itself in a censured or even despicable pole and in a criticizing and despising pole. This is the sign of failure, and produces a twofold movement. The observer criticizing, the split pole continuously approaches the triumphant rival. As the schism in the internal conscience becomes stronger, the distinction between subject and rival decreases; the two movements converge to produce the "double." Rivals become so equal, one the double of the other, that they no longer stand out. In the intellectual symbolism, the enemy brothers become a "monstrous double." Contemporary culture, then, is in exactly the situation described above, in the midst of an intellectual-sacrificial crisis.

On this subject, it is opportune to emphasize how reason itself has, since its origins and also in its fundamental practices, shown itself to be a sacrificial tool. To develop a demystifying action, reason should be more than what it wants to demystify; but this is not the case, because the subject of this demystification is pure reason (the reason without outside help), and the object is reason itself. In fact, the reason, creating a crisis around itself and trying to self-demystify, anticipates its self-sacrifice act; if on one hand it so remains inside the sacrificial mechanism (because it intends, in any case, to perform a sacrifice), on the other hand, considering the effects of such an act, reason conceptualises it and, by doing so, eludes it: thus implementing the utmost untruth.

If every rational consideration of the problem can constitute an "astute obstacle" to evangelical demystification, did Girard not contribute to the last and more astute mystification, while believing that he was carrying out a work of demystification?

The answer to this objection can make use, above all, of the Girardian conviction that he has not "invented" anything: the demystification in his works would not depend so much on recourse to reason and social sciences (they are, at most, supports used by him, in the spirit of what we can label "evangelic cunning"), but on an authentic reception, by a converted heart, of the evangelic message. Secondly, we saw that, in the Girardian universe, what could appear to be a defeat is then revealed as a victory from the point of view of history of salvation, because it prevents same mistake from happening again. We can therefore say that, even if this Girardian, rational exposure of the "logic of the world" is the last and more subtle cunning of reason, it would have a place in the history of salvation, as a step towards the progressive revelation of an evangelic message, now completely free of every sacrificial implication. Girard himself clarifies this point. The mimetic-sacrificial mechanism, that we labelled the "logic of the world," is, above all, a set of thoughts. Such a system is all-inclusive of reason, language and every other intellectual, cultural and social form of civilization. It so will never be able to produce, at least not without "external" contributions, a doctrine, a hypothesis, or a theory able to demolish it. The aim is to go beyond the kingdom that violence and its untruth have been building "since the foundation of the world" and for this, a mere form of human "wisdom" is not sufficient. So, it is necessary for evangelic cunning to oppose reason’s cunning. Nothing in the Gospels seems to push man to disown his mimetic nature; in fact, other hand, he could not do so, because this is the nature of man. The Gospels, according to Girard, do not preach an ethic of spontaneity. They do not expect man to give up imitation; they recommend imitating the only model that cannot change (if one really imitates him as children do) into a charming rival. And this only model is Jesus: he, in fact, not being, thanks to his divine nature, trapped by the desire and violence chains, does not compete with those who imitate him, but he returns imitation with love. The Gospels furthermore push man - and what we labelled evangelic cunning especially emerges here - to the imitation of the desire to refuse every imitation. The real difference between slavery produced by every other imitation and freedom produced by the imitation of Christ becomes difference between a charmed imitation and an imitation in full humility of that model which promises the biggest happiness, the most lasting wealth.

What relation has this knowledge, illuminated by faith, with philosophy? If we deprive philosophy of the framework of intellectual symbolism to replace it with the Christian symbolism and if, moreover, we deprive it of a specific field of investigation and of the pretension to the intelligibility of the world according to the canons it has always given itself, can we still talk about "philosophy" in the demystified Girardian universe?

Our answer is in the affirmative: we can still talk about philosophy as a gateway to knowledge that is narration of the difficulties encountered in the search for truth. Philosophy not as possession, but as research. Now, this "knowledge in faith" is precisely the non-sacrificial philosophy of religion that we were looking for. A philosophy of religion as knowledge in faith assumes the outside intellectual symbolism, canceling its violent effects; and it does so through the Christian symbols: in fact, the intellectual symbolism is assumed and already demystified in these Christian symbols. This philosophy of religion is "incarnation": the place of fulfillment of the mystified experience, the point from which the Logos of revelation’s strength can work with all its efficacy, imposing a reversal guided not by folly, but by truth, the centre of that circle of violence on which humanity, and particularly western humanity in its intellectual history, has always moved. This philosophy of religion does not bring with itself violence residues because the centre is not "the privileged point of view," but the gathering place of every point of view, i.e., the nothingness of all the points of view. This does not mean that it is not possible to understand the centre as such (this would be a "mystical" result); it rather means that this possibility is not a "concept": is not, an "idea," in the Greek sense of the term (idéin), is not a "point of view." Girard insists on the fundamental inadequacy of every purely philosophical and rational effort to gather what, by anthropological definition, eludes the Greek logos to be met again, so transfigured, in an "other" knowledge form represented, in the first place, by philosophy of religion. The intellectual symbolism appears in the Christian symbols, the intellectual sacrifice appears in the deconstruction of the knowledge in faith. The choice between destruction and palingenesis, between violence and love, is then totally delivered in the hands of humanity and of every single man. The ways culture decides to behave constitute this choice in its deepest essence. If the reason remains a pure sacrificial tool, man will choose apocalypse: if instead man accepts the evangelic illumination, the choice will be palingenesis.

Sure, "knowledge in faith" emerging from the Girardian reflections is a borderline concept: it always remains besides our descriptive possibilities. In fact, we are in the time of no more (because the omnipotence of the intellectual sacrifice definitively waned) and of not yet (because revelation is not completely accomplished) and really because of this, we need knowledge that can perceive the distance that separates us from the "last times". If and when humanity is able to reach, or better, to build God's Kingdom, the knowledge itself will have served its purpose, or it will undergo a palingenesis: in any case, we are venturing into hypotheses that are not really demonstrable, because they refer to a time and a condition "other", so far from ours that it would be presumptuousness (or superstition, so, once more, sacrificial thought) trying to imagine them. In any case, we think that this is really the direction in which all the Girardian thought can be developed: for the moment, turning in such a direction it is not our task. As a conclusion to this essay, we want to point out the fruitfulness of research in the field of philosophy of religion as knowledge in faith. We can call upon a metaphor of such knowledge in faith in the parable of the "Great Inquisitor," as Girard presents it. Nowadays, philosophy (or the human reason, if it is preferred), just like the Inquisitor, sees everything, knows everything, even understands the love’s silent appeal, but it is unable to answer. The meaning of the kiss that Christ, without saying a word, gives to the unfortunate old man is that, when there is no answer, all that can be done is to reaffirm the presence of this love. So, this kiss can be the image of that Logos the "Gospel According to St. John" talks about, of that "knowledge in faith" which constitutes the future of philosophy of religion.

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Girard, René. Theater of Envy. New York: Oxford Un. Press, 1991.

Hessen, Johannes. Religionsphilosophie. Munchen-Basel: Ernst Reinhardt, 1955.

Serres Michael. Hermès V. Le passage du Nord-Ouest. Paris : Ed. de Minuit, 1980.

Schneider, Matthew. "Mimetic Polemicism: René Girard and Harold Bloom contra the "School of Resentment." Anthropoetics 1 (1996).