Mimetic Type and Antitype: A Girardian Comparative Reading of the Women of Genesis 3:1-6, 20 and John 2:1-12
2014; Wiley; Volume: 58; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/heyj.12229
ISSN1468-2265
Autores Tópico(s)Thoreau and American Literature
ResumoFor Eve, who was virgin and undefiled, gave birth to disobedience and death after listening to the serpent's words. But the Virgin Mary conceived faith and joy; for when the angel Gabriel brought her the glad tidings that the Holy Spirit would come upon her and that the power of the Most High would overshadow her, so that the Holy One born of her would be the Son of God, she answered, ‘Let it be done to me according to your word’ (Lk 1:38). – Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho By disobeying, Eve became the cause of death for herself and for the whole human race. In the same way Mary … by obeying … became the cause of salvation for herself and for the whole human race … And so the knot of Eve's disobedience was untied by Mary's obedience. What Eve bound through her unbelief, Mary loosed by her faith. – Irenaeus, Adversus haereses Renewed interest in Rene Girard's mimetic theory has reopened the discussion on what has traditionally been called ‘figurative’ readings of Scripture.1 The goal of such readings, as illustrated by Justin Martyr and Irenaeus of Lyons, has been to show how a person or situation in the New Testament is a ‘fulfillment’ of a person or situation in the Old Testament. Such readings, observes Girard, were based on an ‘intuition’ that ‘could not be justified.’2 The goal of this essay is to bring together two texts – Genesis 2:1–6, 20 and John 2:1–12 – that have from early Christian times been juxtaposed as type/antitype, or figure/fulfillment. This essay does not intend to use the figurative method that Girard claims to justify scientifically.3 Rather, its goal is to reattempt to juxtapose these texts in a meaningful way by seeing them as examples of Girard's negative and positive mimesis. This essay will use Girard's theory, in particular his theory of mimetic desire, internal and external mediation, the process of ‘doubling,’ and his analysis of various positive forms of imitation to read John 2:1–12 as a mimetic intertext of Genesis 3:1–6, 20. In particular, the purpose will be to show how each text, when juxtaposed, suggests opposing possibilities for mimetic doubling. One possibility is a doubling that leads to rivalry and violence. The other possibility is a doubling that leads to imitation and loving service. Reuven Kimelman's literary and reader-response analysis of the Genesis 3 story is especially illustrative of Eve's mimetic doubling of the serpent through internal mediation. Mary, conversely, engages in external mediation with her son, and rather than engaging in mimetic doubling, her loving obedience triggers a welcoming of the previously expelled divine Logos into the world and an initial revelation of his self-sacrificial glory. In Eve and Mary, positive and negative examples of mimetic behavior stand side by side. This essay will read two narrative pericopes side by side and will attempt to analyze the mimetic processes that take place in each. It may be possible to show by a careful narrative reading of the Genesis 3:1–6, 20 text that Eve engages in what Girard describes as mimetic rivalry leading to mimetic violence in the form of the expulsion of God's original command. It may also be possible to show how the narrative in John 2:1–12 articulates an opposite form of mimetic modeling. There is no concern in my argument for historical or cultural setting or Jewish tradition in dialogue with Girard's mimetic theory. This creates a boundary which keeps an identification of typology bound to the text. I also hold back my argument from theological implications which might arise from the typology or reading of the texts which I present. … Rather than the historical or cultural world in which the textual ritual may have taken place, the text creates a world which must be imagined unless a real-life experience overrides a reader experience.5 When Girard reads ancient myths, he thinks there is ‘something essential about the mimetic structure of these relational configurations.’6 In times past, the figurative reading method operated off of a hunch that there was something similar between, for example, the Oedipus Rex and Jesus' passion.7 When it came to reading back and forth between the Old and New Testaments, ‘spiritual exegesis’ operated out of the assumption that there was one primary author of Sacred Scripture. Vatican II's document on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, asserts that since the Sacred Scriptures ‘have God as their author,’ Scripture must be ‘interpreted in the same Spirit in which it was written.’8 The unity to be found between the Old and New Testaments was thus derived from its single authorship. This unity derived from divine authorship, however, will not justify the comparative reading of this essay. Rather, this essay will presume a unity based on Girard's anthropological theory of mimesis. If similar patterns of mimetic desire can be ‘read off’ of the two texts under analysis, then a comparison between them will be justified. In this way, the ‘mother of all the living’ in Genesis 3:1–6, 20, this essay argues, could function as a ‘typological pair’ with the ‘mother of Jesus’ in John 2:1–12. The women in both texts on a narrative level demonstrate either mimetic doubling or resistance to mimetic doubling. And so, to paraphrase Anstis, ‘I engage with Girard's mimetic theory as a hermeneutical lens in order to highlight the [mimetic doubling] mechanism within the intertext between the [Johannine narrative of Jesus and his mother], on the one hand, and [the story of woman and serpent], on the other.’9 While for Eve the ‘object’ of desire is lost in her doubling of the serpent (and the misrepresented divine command), for Mary, the ‘object’ is never lost sight of, and, rather than trying to ‘take the being’10 of Christ and absorb him into herself – as happens between Eve, the serpent, and the divine command – she offers her being to Christ and becomes a model of positive, non-violent imitation. My comparative mimetic reading of the two texts involves a certain amount of reader involvement. Whenever motives for desire are imputed, they must of course be rendered plausible by the text. As Kimelman notes of the Genesis text, ‘Without … an exegesis that demands considerable reader involvement, many of the keys to the story's meaning would be missing.’11 The result of any serious engagement with a literary work is a ‘common consciousness’12 between the reader and the text. The result of this ‘common consciousness’ in my own mind has been to see a mimetic parallel between the Eve and Mary stories, a parallel revealing two mimetic possibilities. It is the task of this essay to render this reading as plausible as I can. Once upon a time there was a group of hominids that found itself unable to do anything in concert because of rivalry among them. Each one [was] inwardly compelled to imitate some other. As the imitation became more successful he found himself a rival of his model, and the more like the model he became the more violent became the rivalry. Co-operation was impossible until one day, [the momentous day human culture began, two] of them discovered that it was possible to agree on one thing, to agree to kill someone else. This was such a compelling possibility that the whole group imitated them, and so the first moment of human solidarity happened as the fellowship of the lynch mob.13 It is a central claim of his theory that the first uniquely human forms of communication were pointing and pantomiming, both not simply used as imperative signals to trigger certain behaviour of the other, but used as communicative signals to refer jointly to shared objects and situations. He analyses those situations to be triadic rather than dyadic: two individuals direct their intentions to a third object and thus jointly turn towards it in a communicative situation. Human beings share goals and are intentionally directed towards objects and situations of which they know that the other is attending to them as well and that both know about each other's knowing that.18 Second, for Girard, desire is necessarily negatively mimetic and only progresses towards positive mimetic possibilities as a result of God's self-revelation in Scripture. In other words, there is no such thing in Girard, as Balthasar has noted, as a ‘natural’ concept of God. The natural ‘sacred is violence.’21 Girard makes distinctions between basic appetites (which he does not call ‘desires’), acquisitive desire, and metaphysical desire.22 All ‘desire’ is mediated through a model. Nor is there a ‘self’ that exists before desire. For Girard, ‘desire precedes the self’23 and gives rise to the self. Thus, desire loses its object only at the frenzied high point of mimetic doubling, not at its originary moment. Yet Neil Ormerod calls this vision into question using the thought of Bernard Lonergan. Lonergan claims that desire is originally object-less. It is ‘the pure, detached, disinterested desire to know.’24 The orientation of this desire is later specified by objects, but originally it is ‘disinterested’ and oriented towards ‘God,’ or ‘being’ in general.25 Such a vision contains a positive notion of creation and of the self, a view nowhere found in Girard. If desire precedes the self, then ‘what’ desires? What causes one to desire positive mimetic behavior rather than violent mimetic behavior if all of behavior is conditioned by negative mimesis? Is the only possibility for positive mimesis found through divine intervention in the process of revelation? Citing Rebecca Adams, Sherman notes that ‘Girard's mimetic theory was handicapped for want of a positive doctrine of creation, or to put it more philosophically, for lack of a coherent account of salutary desire as metaphysically prior to violent mimesis.’26 I would thus agree with James Alison's conclusion that ‘mimesis is then the absolute condition for the existence of humanity (as opposed to quasi-mimetic or pre-mimetic animals).’27 And I would agree with his much more nuanced hedging of the question of desire than is found in Girard. He concludes: ‘This means that the constitution of human self-consciousness is not in principle a conflictual reality, constituting self by means of an over-against, even though it is always so historically.’28 In principle, the ‘natural desire for being,’29 historically actualized as mimetic domination, can be revealed as ‘not the original mode of desire, but a distortion of it. That which was chronologically original (and seemed to us to be simply natural) is discovered to be logically secondary to an anterior self-giving and creative desire.’30 The John 2:1–12 narrative provides an important ‘uncovering’ of this logically anterior mode of desire. The third critical caveat to Girard's theory follows closely upon the heels of the first two. Since Girard has no positive doctrine of creation, the divine Logos is entirely absent from his anthropological world, originally ‘expelled’ from the world in the very process of becoming human until the moment of the Incarnation. Girard quotes fondly from John 1:11 to make his point: ‘He came to his own home, and his own people received him not.’31 Because of this ‘metaphysical choice’32 based on a flimsy reading of a single scriptural verse, Girard must view both the Priestly account of creation in Genesis 1:1–2:4a and the second creation account in Genesis 2:4b-3:24 in a negative light.33 Girard does not substantiate his naïve negative reading of either account. He simply concludes: ‘Something common to all cultures – something inherent in the way the human mind functions – has always compelled us to misrecognize the true Logos.’34 So, read in the light of John 1:11, both Genesis accounts must be guilty of their own expulsion of the Logos.35 Because of his ‘metaphysical choice,’ Girard is forced to find an absolute misrecognition of the Logos, of any positive mimetic behavior, in both of the Genesis creation accounts. Both are built upon hidden murders and divine manipulation. Girard's broad readings do violence to the Hebrew text, and obfuscate what is positive in his analysis of human mimesis. Girard's problematic readings could sidetrack us from what is, I propose, a valuable insight into the human desire structure. As Alison explains: ‘We often build up [ourselves] over against, rather than by serenely allowing the other to be a beneficent influence on our lives.’36 From the earliest years of life, human beings have their desire structures formed by mimetic conflict. My contention is that the Genesis 3:1–6, 20 narrative uncovers the same basic mimetic structure of human desiring that is found in Girard. It offers a narrative that concurs with Girard's insight that ‘something common to all cultures – something inherent in the way the human mind functions – has always compelled us to misrecognize the true Logos.’ In this essay I will take ‘the true Logos’ to refer to positive empowering imitation of the divine. The misrecognition that Genesis 3:1–6 uncovers is the command of God in Genesis 2:16. As Kimelman's careful reading will demonstrate, Eve misrepresents the command of God and ends up becoming a double of the serpent in her expulsion of God's command. In the Johaninne narrative of John 2:1–12, Mary obediently represents the command of God – the first in the Gospel of John to do so adequately – becomes an example of positive mimesis through external mediation, and as a result of her hospitality to the divine Logos precipitates a preemptive revelation of the glory of God. Read alongside one another, these two texts offer complementary portrayals of the conflictual, metaphysical, human desire structure and of the overcoming of this conflictual structure by means of positive, empowering, imitation. The compelling need to misrepresent the Logos by means of metaphysical rivalry, according to Girard, is rooted in the fact that ‘we owe our very rationality to the efficacy of … sacrifices.’37 Rationality is rooted in murder. Since human beings do not want to recognize this fact, they misrepresent to themselves the truth about Logos. As we have noted already, such is not the biblical story. The biblical story is one in which human desire is fundamentally oriented towards relationship with God. Human desire in its ‘pure, detached, disinterested state’ is oriented towards ‘God.’ Yet in actual practice, human desire is mimetically constructed and leads to violence. This is much closer to the biblical story, and the blending of these two visions allows for a mimetic reading between Genesis 3:1–6, 20 and John 2:1–12 that may be extremely illuminating. My mimetic reading is based upon four literary and narrative features of these texts that will have to be demonstrated. The first is a literary feature, and the next three are narrative stages. First, in both, women are the heroes of the story and representatives of humanity. This first feature focuses on the characterization of each of the women. The purpose of the characterization of the women as ‘representatives’ for this essay is that their behavior thus becomes demonstrative of universal patterns of behavior: in Eve's case of how human beings generally in fact do act (negative mimesis), and in Mary's case of how human beings ought to act (positive mimesis). The next three characteristics are narrative stages through which the text moves. First, both women share a conversation with a divine being (God/Jesus) whom they then represent or misrepresent to themselves and others. This representation/misrepresentation is important because it sets the stage for the breaking down of the boundaries that maintain external mediation, thereby driving the plot toward its climax. Second, mimetic doubling takes place between the women and their dialogue partners, one as the result of internal mediation, the other of external mediation. This stage is the climax of the narrative. Eve's doubling is ‘metaphysical’ while Mary's is empowering. Third, the denouement of this mimetic doubling is the internalization of the serpent's voice with the result of the expulsion of God from humanity in the one case, and the welcoming and internalization of the word of the Logos of God with the result of the manifestation of the glory of Christ to humanity in the other. The woman is both theologian and translator. She contemplates the tree, taking into account all the possibilities.The tree is good for good; it satisfies the physical drives. It pleases the eyes; it is aesthetically and emotionally desirable. Above all, it is coveted as the source of wisdom (haskîl). Thus the woman is fully aware when she acts, her vision encompassing the gamut of life. She takes the fruit and she eats. The initiative and the decision are hers alone. There is no consultation with her husband. She seeks neither his advice nor his permission. She acts independently.43 In the very next scene, however, where either could do the naming, it is Eve who names Cain and Abel (4:1) and subsequently Seth (4:25). The significance of this is evident from the fact that Genesis takes pains to note that Abraham named his sons Ishmael (16:15) and Isaac (21:3); that Isaac named Jacob (25:25), as underscored by the singular use of the verb; and that Jacob's wives named each of their sons, with Jacob adding only the name of Benjamin to his last son. Also with Judah and his wife, it is specified who named which son (38:4–5). As name-giver, Eve maintains her prominence.44 As the story comes to a close in chapter 3, the woman moves from being a ‘round’ character to being a ‘type’ character. A type character is a representative whose character ‘represents a class of people with these traits’46 and whose story becomes an ‘exemplum’47 for those who read it. The woman becomes Havva, a tightly-packed neologistic description of her representative character. Her name becomes a description of her actions throughout the chapter, and as representative ‘of all the living,’ she becomes a type of human action. Her actions in this chapter as main actor and hero make her mother and representative in an important way that is more than biological. She represents every human being in their interactions with their internal struggles. Of course, ‘only a reader attuned to the serpentine wiles of human presumptiveness will comprehend how much one has been presented with the workings of one's own inner life where so often the borders between protagonist and antagonist become blurred.’48 Yet those who can understand will see themselves in the woman. The differences add up to a diminishment of divine authority, a shift from generosity in the direction of arbitrariness, a reduction of the import of the tree to a location, a tinkering with the extent of the prohibition, through addition or subtraction, and a belittling of its gravity. Such changes and omissions are too consequential and systematic to be accidental. They point to a tendentious reformulation. Through them, the narrative signals Eve's suggestibility if not susceptibility to the snake's argumentation by showing the movement she has already made in that direction. In this sense, the snake functions to extend the direction of Eve's thinking rather than to instigate it.52 In the process of the conversation, the woman ‘expels’ the command of God from her mind, piece by piece. She has begun, with the help of the serpent, to construct a different God-image than the one she had. Little by little, God becomes violent from loving, prohibitive rather than generous. As Beier notes: ‘The main success of the serpent has been to distort the image of God so completely by fear that God no longer can be counted on as a help against the fear but rather appears as its source and cause.’53 To borrow from the language of Lonergan and Girard, the original object of desire has become distorted by this conversation to the degree that ‘God’ is no longer desired but rather the woman's ‘self.’ The object has disappeared, as the woman becomes a double of the serpent, and desires as the serpent teaches her to desire: to become God, or to ‘take his being,’ as Sherman explained. Third, an important mimetic doubling takes place between the woman and the serpent as a result of internal mediation. Girard explains: ‘When all differences have been eliminated and the similarity between two figures has been achieved we say the antagonists are doubles.’54 Doubling can take place in a situation of internal mediation, i.e., mediation that takes place ‘when the model is found within the subject's world.’55 This form of mediation, as opposed to external mediation, always leads to violence and doubling. Ultimately, the object of desire completely disappears, and the subject looks only to consume the being of the rival, to become the ‘other’ in a destructive, violent way. Kimelman is especially helpful in showing how this ‘doubling’ takes place between the woman and the serpent. When doubling takes place, ‘we desire what our model desires and how our model desires it.’56 On the one hand, the model does not fit perfectly. The woman and the snake are not transparently rivals in the sense of the word that Girard uses, since it is not exactly clear what the object of desire is for the serpent that the woman wants. However, through the help of the serpent, the woman begins to see the command of God as a rival to her own desires. The ambiguous liminal status of the serpent allows it, in her mind, to speak for the divine. ‘Nothing in the narrative suggests that the serpent is the devil or a preconfiguration thereof.’ Rather, ‘part of the serpent's relational and functional identity is represented in its interactions with the humans, the disclosure of information about the Deity, and a challenge to the Deity's trustworthiness.’57 Insofar as she allows the serpent to speak for the divine, as we have seen, she allows the misrepresented divine command to blend with the voice of the serpent. In the doubling process that takes place, she blends both the serpent, and the misrepresented divine command that it begins to represent, into herself. The achievement of similarity between the woman and the snake in the text is partially constructed by careful wordplays. The first important wordplay is between ‘arum and ‘arrumim, ‘shrewd’ and ‘nude.’ At the peak moment when the woman and man believe they will become like God, they realize they are simply naked.58 They have been tricked into thinking that God is on their own plane, subject to internal mediation. They came to believe that they could absorb the being of God within themselves, become ‘like God,’ when actually all they get is the disappointing being of the serpent, its ‘shrewdness’ or ‘nudeness.’ When humans convince themselves that God is a rival, they only end up in miserable alienation. Although as characters in the myth they do not fully understand how they have been tricked, we as readers see the full extent of their misery. Mimetic doubling has led to the sacrificing of the command of God, and the result is not knowledge but shame, not mimetic love but mimetic violence and misery. The wordplay in the text reveals a doubling between the humans and the serpent that is a result of their mimetic action. The implied rivalry between the woman and the snake becomes explicit rivalry following the eating of the fruit: ‘I will put enmity between you and the woman’ (Gen 3:15). The second linguistic wordplay that reveals a ‘doubling’ between the woman and the serpent takes place in Genesis 3:20 when the woman is named Havva, often translated ‘the mother of the living.’ But Kimelman notes that if that is all she was, she would have been named Hayya, life-bearer.59 What Havva adds to Hayya is Hivya, the Aramaic word for serpent. The author thus creates a neologism, combining the two in order to keep together the allusions to mother/serpent. To compound the matter, the word Havva can also mean ‘speech.’60 The woman is named mother/serpent/speech, and becomes the representative of all three of them ‘for all the living.’ The standard objection against the interiorization of the serpent is that the serpent is actually cursed. That, however, occurs prior to its literary metamorphosis into the human drive for divinity. Until the woman is designated by the serpent-sounding Havva, the serpent is to be grasped in all its vivid animality. That is what gives it its punch. Only at the end, in a moment of self-revelation, does the reader realize she has been had.63 Finally, the result of Eve's mimetic doubling of the serpent is the expulsion of God from human consciousness. Whatever the motive of the serpent, ‘it was not to help the humans in their status elevation, but to challenge the Deity's authority. They became the first pawns who are used against themselves to fulfill another being's motive.’64 The woman absorbs the serpent (along with a falsely constructed divine image); the serpent absorbs the woman. Both become permanent antagonists, and God is permanently rendered untrustworthy. The text reveals God as the one who expels, presumably to protect them from living forever in such a miserable state. Yet on a more sinister level, it is humanity that expels God. From the moment that the woman looks upon the fruit and ‘saw that it was good’ (3:6a), from the moment the language of God's creation is evoked and she thinks she is on the threshold of becoming divine, harmonious relationship with God has been expelled.65 While Trible thinks this is a high moment for the woman,66 because it comes at the instigation of the serpent, I think that interpretation must be ruled out. The woman is not ‘fully aware.’ On the contrary, her consciousness is now the false consciousness of the serpent. As I think Beier very perceptively observes, ‘Never has she been more powerless than in the moment she imagines herself to be like God.’67 The God of human consciousness in chapter 2 – the God of external mediation – is no longer the God of human consciousness in chapter 3. This new ‘god’ is a projection of human fear and creates a religion based on fear. The ‘punishments’ do not consist in a change of the world nor in a change of God, but in a change in the human experience of the world and of God. Both the world and God appear in a world ‘without God’ as adversarial. It was knowledge of how harsh the world would be without God, without the creative source of life, which God wanted to spare humans.70 The same four narrative and mimetic characteristics highlighted in the Genesis story – the woman as representative of humanity, in conversation with the divine, engaged in mimetic doubling, internalizing the voice of the other – are also found in the wedding at Cana story in John 2:1–12. The crucial difference is that, while the woman of Genesis engages in negative mimetic rivalry with an internal mediator who convinces her of her sameness with God, the woman of John engages in positive mimetic modeling with an external mediator whom she imitates while remaining different. The imitation of Mary, I contend, serves to empower the other rather than metaphysically to absorb the other into the self. Each of these four characteristics will be demonstrated in order to reveal a deep mimetic coherence between these two foundational texts. The evangelist concentrates the character of these figures into a single or a couple of traits that are highlighted and intensified. The character becomes a kind of incarnation of the feature or trait. … The trait that is highlighted and personified is something historically associated with the real person. The evangelist is using history symbolically, not inventing ‘symbols’ out of whole cloth.71 To be sure, the phrase ἀρχὴν τῶν σημείων in v. 11 appears to betray a sequential numbering from a written signs source which reappears again in 4:54. But other details strongly suggest that the verse as a whole is shaped at least as much by the evangelist's composition as it is by tradition: the emphasis on the location of Cana in Galilee; the obvious connection this verse creates between the epiphany miracle just concluded and the revelation of δόξα in the evangelist's own comment on the Logos hymn in the prologue (1:14); and the possibility that the phrase ἀρχὴν τῶν σημείων is deliberately turned to mean more than the πρῶτον σημείον (‘first sign’) of a source's sequence – ‘a primary sign … representative of the creative and transforming work of Jesus as a whole,’ in a sense commensurate with the place of the narrative at the head of the first major division of the gospel in chapters 2–12.73 Second, as the narrative moves forward, the woman engages in conversation with the divine and interprets the cryptic nature of his speech. Jennifer Maclean explains the immediate backdrop to these events in the Nathanael pericope (Jn 1:43–51) and its clear reference to the dream of Jacob (Gen 28:11–21): ‘In ch. 1 Jesus' ministry is presented as recreating Israel as a nation no longer characterized by deception and tricksterism, and Jesus himself is shown to be the divine presence and true object of veneration.’74 Yet paradoxically, Jesus' ‘central action in the Cana narrative consists of a trick.’75 ‘Trickiness’ is a central feature of the operative behavior of Jesus in the Gospel of John. His ‘deceptive speech’76 is curiously similar to that of the serpent. His ‘conversations are riddled with misunderstandings stemming from his cryptic language … His mode of speaking is intended to stump his conversation partners by making no sense on a common, human level of interpretation.’77 And so Jesus' puzzling words to his mother, ‘O woman, what have you to do with me,’ are not unexpected: ‘It is possible that Jesus' apparent refusal of his mother's request in 2.4 … is an example of just such deceptive speech.’78 These are almost surely words of rebuke, as examples from the Old Testament demonstrate.79 The majority of scholars see this phrase as precise
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