Scapegoating

When we suspect people around us of giving in to the temptation of scapegoating, we denounce them indignantly. We ferociously denounce the scapegoating of which our neighbors are guilty, but we are unable to do without our own substitute victims. We all try to tell ourselves that we have only legitimate grudges and justified hatreds, but our feeling of innocence is more fragile than our ancestors'.

—René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999)

The Unionization of Failure

R.G.: Yet even in literary criticism there is nothing more banal and mystifying, finally, than the obsessive emphasis on the infinite diversity of literary works, on their ineffable and inexhaustible character, on the impossibility of repeating the same interpretation—on the negation of any definite statement, in other words. I cannot see in this anything more than a huge unionization of failure. We must perpetuate at any cost the interminable discourse that earns us a living.

G. L.: A harsh judgment.

R. G.: It is certainly too harsh, but we live in an intellectual universe that is all the more conformist for its belief in possessing a monopoly on nonconformist views and methods. That much obviates any genuine self-criticism. Time is spent breaking down doors that have been wide open for centuries. This is still the modern war on prohibitions that rages on all fronts, whereas it was already ridiculous during the surrealist period. As in the Greek Buphonia, we keep stuffing the old and dried sacrificial skins with straw and standing them up in order to beat them down for the thousandth time.

—René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978)

'like a bottle of champagne on an empty stomach'

In 1953, the fashionable streets of New York bloomed with Belle Epoque nostalgia. Cristobal Balenciaga was enjoying the pinnacle of his career. Bustles, hoops, corsets, and crispy crinolines flared under his confections. Like the dressmakers of the nineteenth century, Balenciaga could actually cut and sew, and his refined technique reflected the era's desire for elegance. Christian Dior had ushered in this stylized, hyperfeminine silhouette in 1947 with his New Look. His boned bodices, nipped waists, and bouffant skirts hit the postwar generation like a bottle of champagne on an empty stomach. A New Look dress required dozens of meters of extra fabric--thrilling after years of wartime austerity.

—Elizabeth Winder, Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 (2013)

Desire

Once his basic needs are satisfied (indeed, sometimes even before), man is subject to intense desires, though he may not know precisely for what. The reason is that he desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess. The subject thus looks to that other person to inform him of what he should desire in order to acquire that being. If the model, who is apparently already endowed with superior being, desires some object, that object must surely be capable of conferring an even greater plenitude of being. It is not through words, therefore, but by the example of his own desire that the model conveys to the subject the supreme desirability of the object.

—René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1972)

Life Is Not an Error

In fact, there is no way to "return to the faith of your childhood," not really, unless you've just woken from a decades-long and absolutely literal coma. Faith is not some half-remembered country into which you come like a long-exiled king, dispensing the old wisdom, casting out the radical, insurrectionist aspects of yourself by which you'd been betrayed. No. Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life--which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived--or have denied the reality of your life.

To admit that there may be some psychological need informing your return to faith does not preclude or diminish the spiritual imperative, any more than acknowledging the chemical aspects of sexual attraction lessens the mystery of enduring human love. Faith cannot save you from the claims of reason, except insofar as it preserves and protects that wonderful, terrible time when reason, if only for a moment, lost its claim on you.

--Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss (2013)

The Vocation of a Systematic Theologian

I took the pieces you threw away and put them togather by night and day. Washed by rain, dried by sun, a million pieces all in one.

—Howard Finster, Folk Artist (20th Century)

'To write for everyone or for no one'

When we consider the style of our times, we cannot help wondering about the reasons for its corruption. The modern artist is a solitary who writes for himself or for a public of which he has no precise notion. Linked to an epoch, he struggles to express its features; but this epoch is necessarily faceless. He does not know whom he is addressing, he does not imagine his reader. In the seventeenth century and the one following, the writer had in view a small circle whose requirements he knew, as well as its degree of finesse and acuity. Limited in his possibilities, he could not depart from the rules, real though unformulated, of taste. The censorship of the salons, more severe than that of today's critics, permitted the flowering of perfect and minor geniuses, constrained to elegance, to the miniature and the finite.

Taste is formed by the pressure the idle exert upon Letters, especially in epochs when society is refined enough to set the tone for literature. . . . The terrorism of taste has ceased, and with it the superstition of style. To bemoan the fact would be as ridiculous as it is ineffectual. Behind us lies a sufficiently solid tradition of vulgarity; art must adapt, must resign itself to it or be isolated in an absolutely subjective expression. To write for everyone or for no one—each man decides the matter for himself, according to his nature. Whatever choice we make, we are sure of no longer meeting on our way that old scarecrow, a failure of taste.

—E.M. Cioran, "Style as Risk," The Temptation to Exist (1956; trans. R. Howard 1968)

We Sin Alone

The poor human race dreams from century to century of breaking that solitude — but it's no use! The devil, who can do so many things, will never succeed in founding a Church, a Church that will put in common both the merits of hell and the sin of all. From now until the end of the world, the sinner will have to sin alone, always alone — for just as we die alone, so also do we sin alone. The devil, you see, is the friend who never stays with us to the end.

—Georges Bernanos, Monsieur Ouine (1943)

'He had better begin somewhat sooner.'

I mean this: When a carpenter is ill he asks the physician for a rough and ready cure; an emetic or a purge or a cautery or the knife,—these are his remedies. And if some one prescribes for him a course of dietetics, and tells him that he must swathe and swaddle his head, and all that sort of thing, he replies at once that he has no time to be ill, and that he sees no good in a life which is spent in nursing his disease to the neglect of his customary employment; and therefore bidding good-bye to this sort of physician, he resumes his ordinary habits, and either gets well and lives and does his business, or, if his consitution fails, he dies and has no more trouble. 

Yes, he [Glaucon] said, and a man in his condition of life ought to use the art of medicine thus far only. 

Has he not, I said, an occupation; and what profit would there be in his life if he were deprived of his occupation? 

Quite true, he said. 

But with the rich man this is otherwise; of him we do not say that he has any specially appointed work which he must perform, if he would live. 

He is generally supposed to have nothing do do. 

Then you never heard of the saying of Phocylides, that as soon as a man has a livelihood he should practise virtue? 

Nay, he said, I think that he had better begin somewhat sooner.

—Plato, The Republic, Book III (360 B.C.E.; trans. B. Jowett 1894)

Genius

But to find no contradiction in the union of old and new, to contemplate the Ancient of days with feelings as fresh, as if they the sprang forth at his own fiat—this characterizes the minds that feel the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it! To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years has rendered familiar, this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguishes genius from talent.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817)