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The 2015 Teilhard de Chardin, SJ Lecture: Violence, Mysticism, and Rene Girard by Prof. Ann Astell
Wednesday, 30 September 2015
4:00PM - 5:30PM
McComick Lounge, Coffey Hall
Lake Shore Campus, LUC
This event was free and open to the public!
Although the Church is often called the 鈥淢ystical Body of Christ,鈥� 鈥渕ysticism鈥� and 鈥渕ystical experience鈥� are seldom associated in modern thought with social life and its historical violence. Rather, 鈥渕ysticism,鈥� narrowly defined, regularly designates the mysterious, transformative experiences of individual persons in their encounters with the Transcendent.
When modern psychologists engage the conjoined topics of mysticism and violence, therefore, they focus almost exclusively on the pathological experiences of unusual individuals, featuring case studies that involve eroticized violence, fear, psychological regression, internalized aggression, and/or demonic projection. Historians of asceticism, by contrast, often see a positive value in individual and communal practices of religiously motivated self-denial鈥攔eformist practices with social impact鈥攂ut, following Max Weber, they separate asceticism from mysticism, opposing the two.
Reacting against William James鈥檚 emphasis on the mystic individual in Varieties of Religious Experience (1917), sociologist 脡mile Durkheim explicitly rejected the mysticism of religion in favor of his own scientific approach, which nevertheless has often seemed to his readers to be quasi-mystical in its analysis of the sacred and the profane, its unveiling of their hidden inter-connection. Following Durkheim鈥檚 impulse toward what might be called a scientific mysticism of the social life, Ren茅 Girard offers a mimetic theory of the origins of social violence, culture, and religion that retains and indeed necessitates a place for personal and communal mysticism, for grace and conversion, for asceticism and sanctity.
In this he revives for a postmodern age the mysticism of the Bible, of Augustine鈥檚 Confessions and City of God, of Dostoevsky鈥檚 Brothers Karamazov, of Simone Weil鈥檚 Poem of Force, and of Peguy鈥檚 鈥淧olitical Mysticism.鈥� Girard does so, moreover, as a mystic among mystics, anticipating a universal apocalypse.
