134: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

Hi, and welcome to Classical Stuff You Should Know. My name is AJ Hindenburg, and I'm here with two of my compatriots, Brandon Donaldson. I am one of your compatriots. And Thomas Mayhew.

I am the other compatriot. And we talk about classical stuff. Anything you can look at and say, whoa, that's classical, that's pretty much what we do. Like, oh, that's a classical thing.

Sure. Then that's a thing that we address. I mean, with some, you know, some boundaries. We don't address the classical Beach Boys album, although we should, because there are supposedly great ones.

Come on. Yeah. Don't ruin my episodes. Anyway, we all teach at a school down in Austin, Texas, and we like it, and we talk about books and stuff, and that's what we do.

Sure. And today, we are actually talking about birding, and the story of one particular birder, who one day, while he was sitting outside, saw a very large bird fall from the sky, quickly, aggressively, and as he looked closer, he saw that the bird had a very torso-looking, human torso-looking middle. Yes. It looked a lot like a person bird.

Okay. And then he wrote a book. Correct. So, and it wasn't a bird, it was the devil.

Devil bird. Today, we are looking at a book by, man, I don't even know what to call him. I guess he's a philosopher, he's a theologian, a biblical interpreter. His name is Rene Girard.

He is, oh, recently retired in the early 2000s, Andrew B. Hammond, professor of language, literature, and civilization at Stanford University. Oh, I've seen them. Originally published in French, but translated, and it is called I See Satan, Fall Like Lightning.

Quite a title. He is known for having rock and roll titles to his books. So he's got I See Satan, Fall Like Lightning, obviously making reference to the Gospel of Luke. And he's got another book called Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.

So, dude's got some, like, he's got some title chops, for sure. And we're really only going to talk about, like, the first chapter of I See Satan, Fall Like Lightning, because I think that what he's doing is, well, we'll get to what I think he's doing, and we'll see if we want to take that conversation in that direction. But, so, Rene Girard, he writes a book, and he is writing about, his launching off point is talking about the Decalogue. He's talking about the Ten Commandments.

And he sort of has in the back of his mind, what is that thing that makes human beings different from the animals? So when we, so classically speaking, when we look at sort of the biblical idea of man, when God creates the heavens and the earth, he creates angels, which are spiritual beings, and he creates animals, which are carne beings, they're living meat. And then there's man, and man is this body-soul composite. This is sort of the classical understanding of the human person, the Christian understanding of the human person, is that you are a body, so you're an animal, and you are a soul, you are a spirit, and you are together.

And you are made in God's image, and this sort of body-soul composite. And so, Rene Girard is looking at the Ten Commandments, and he's doing this sort of interpretation of the Bible to ask this question of, like, what is this faculty that is this differentiation? So, he starts off his book in this chapter. I thought it would be industry.

Like, the ability to do stuff? We have industry. We have factories. Oh, I see.

Like, shoe factories? Yeah. Animals don't have that. I mean, bees make honey, but not to sell.

They can't bottle it. They don't bottle it. They don't, like, send it to other hives because they have better honey. The factories may actually end up being, like, a derivative of what it is.

Really? Did I nail it? Nah, kind of. Organization?

No. We're just better at killing another, like, we're at the top. We won. That's why we are different.

So, well, do you want me to spoil it or do you want me to build up to it? I want to build up. Okay. So, he looks at the Commandment 6, 7, 8, 9.

This is where he starts. The commandment of, you shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. And he's got this, like, interesting passage that he spends a lot of time talking about, like, the order of that. Like, kill being first, and then you sort of got this, like, de-escalation of, you know, kill, and then adultery, and then steal, and then lying.

And then the last, tenth commandment is... I wonder if that was for memorization purposes. God's like, look, if they start memorizing, then I only remember the first five. I got to hit the biggies in the first five, and then...

He actually kind of makes that point. He makes the point that, like, that when you get to the end of the list, well, then the last commandment is you shall not covet the house of your neighbor, you shall not covet the wife of your neighbor, nor his male or female slave, nor his ox or his ass, nor anything that belongs to him. And so he sort of makes it, I don't know if he's being serious when he says this, but he kind of makes a joke that it's like, you shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, and then he's just like, just everything, just all this stuff, just don't do this stuff. And he's like, throw away everything in there.

But he, you know, his big sort of light bulb moment was that he looked at the word that we translate as covet. And he says, sort of, in the translation of covet, we tend to translate that and add a bunch of meaning to covet, that it is this inordinate desire, it is this exorbitant desire, it is this inappropriate desire. But he says, the definition in Hebrew is not some sort of covet of an inordinate desire, it's just the word desire. So he says that...

Any amount of desire, not just... Yes. He says, without being actually wrong, the modern translations lead readers down a false trail. The verb covet suggests that an uncommon desire is prohibited, a perverse desire reserved for hardened sinners.

But the Hebrew term translates as covet means just simply desire. It's the same word that Eve had when she looked to the fruit. It is just desire as such. And so his argument ends up being that...

About this desire, so he says... Let's see, where is it? We must pose some questions about the implication of desire as it is defined in the Tenth Commandment, the desire for the neighbor's goods. If this desire is the most common of all, what would happen if it were permitted rather than forbidden?

There would be perpetual war in the midst of all human groups, subgroups, and families. The door would be wide open to the famous nightmare of Thomas Hobbes, the war of all against all. And so he ends up coming up with... He posits that this desire for the goods of your neighbor is that differentiation between man and the animals.

And that sounds like a super bummer, but it's actually a good thing. And so this desire, that you see what your neighbor has and you want it, he calls it... The term he gives for it is mimetic desire, that you are basically borrowing your desires from the fact that somebody else has it. So this is a...

You're saying this is exclusively human faculty? Yes. We are the only ones who do this? We are the only ones that do this and amplify it to the place of scandal.

We'll get to that in a second. Animals take things from each other. Yeah, squirrels kill all the time. Okay, maybe we'll get to that point.

So the difference between animals and human beings is that the squirrel has the desire for the object, and the human person doesn't have the desire simply for that object, but that they have the desire in general for something that somebody else has. So the squirrel wants the nut, and when he has the nut, the squirrel is satisfied, and the squirrel doesn't have the desire for anything beyond the nut. Like, when the squirrel gets the nut, he is a content squirrel. But when a man gets...

Like, let's say that you were walking on an airplane, and you passed by somebody who was sitting in first class, and you really wanted that seat, and you're going back and sitting in coach. If you get that seat in first class, and so someone's like, oh, there's a seat opening up, and for whatever reason, you get it, and you go to the front, and you end up sitting next to that man, who's also in first class, there's something where you're still kind of hoping that he now has to go back and sit in coach. He says that's sort of the difference between... He doesn't give that example.

So the difference between the animals that were jerkholes? Or that were angsty? Like, angsty jerkholes is what makes us human? Yeah.

That's horrible. It's not horrible, because he says this is only... No, it is horrible, because it can go to such lows, but without it, we don't have the ability to partake in the glory of being like God. So, can you make that connection?

Trying to grok it. Well, you don't have all the information yet. It's true. Stop testing me on that.

Anyway, so... So he says that, okay, so he says the genius of the Decalogue in the Old Testament is that it is putting a prohibition on desire. It basically says that when the law of the Old Testament looks at the problems of human community and says, where do human communities go wrong? So, in other words, the only reason we're making laws is to try to create a peaceful world.

And he says it's only the modern man who thinks that a peaceful world can come about without prohibitions, which is kind of funny. He has a lot to say about the riots of 1968 in France and the spray painting on the wall where the guy said, where does he say, il est entel d'entel dio, which translates to is forbidden to forbid, which was like the famous cry of the socialist rebellion, student rebellion in 1968 in France. But anyway, I lost my train of thought. What was I saying?

Oh yeah, he says, so when the ancient world looked at the problems of violence in society and they were trying to curb violence in society, they realized that they needed to not just put a curb on actions, but they needed to put a curb on desire. So he says this, if individuals are naturally inclined to desire what their neighbor possesses or to desire what their neighbors even simply desire, this means that rivalry exists at the very heart of human social relations. This rivalry, if not thwarted, would permanently endanger the harmony and even survival of all human communities. Rivalistic desire are all the more overwhelming since they reinforce one another.

The principle of reciprocal escalation and one-upmanship governs this type of conflict. The commandment that prohibits desiring the goods of one's neighbor attempts to resolve the number one problem of every human community, internal violence. And so what he, so he's starting off by pointing out the problem and he'll get to a point why that this mechanism of desiring what other people have or, or borrowing, or so you look at Megby and you say, I think Megby, Megby seems to be the kind of person that wants this kind of thing. Should I be that kind of person that wants this kind of thing?

I should be that kind of person. Um, he eventually says that this is, um, that mechanism is actually the basis of learning and culture. So the squirrel just wants nuts, but a baby does not learn how to speak. A baby doesn't want to learn language for language.

He doesn't want to know language so that he can have language. So the squirrel wants a nut because he wants to eat the nut, but a baby doesn't want to learn to speak so that a baby can speak. The baby wants to learn to speak so that it can participate in like life with other speaking people. So, um, uh, it, um, if it, if it just had the animal instinct of wanting its sort of daily sustenance, language wouldn't be necessary.

Um, so you're saying if the baby just wants to sustenance, language isn't necessary. Yes. So they disagree. The reason the baby talks is to tell you what he wants directly.

I need, I need to be changed. I need food. I'm tired. Like that's the reason babies learn in the first place is to communicate specific direct needs about objects, not because they're like, I want what you desire.

It's like I have poop in my shorts. He's saying that a parent who takes care of its child and who can, who finds out there's poop in the shorts. That baby is still going to desire to know language, not just because of its daily needs, but it's going to desire to know language because it like, think about little kids. Little kids want to be like older kids.

Yeah. I still think, I still think maybe it's just that babies throw a wrench into this because I don't think babies have any idea what they want. They have very basic primitive needs. And then I think language, learning language with them is incidental.

It's where their brain is at. It's because it's used around them all the time and because it's repeated to them. I don't think there's any desire there. I think it's, I think it's an incidental accident of babies being near language.

When you say gram language, are you talking about, so like babies cry for all kinds of reasons, but does that kind of language? Because in some sense, my son doesn't need to learn words because basically he cries, we know what he needs. Like, is that the point of being Yeah. Well, maybe I'll skip over to the section where he talks about how that this, this mimetic desire that creates such human conflict is not in itself an inherently bad thing, which is what it seems to be because it, because it creates such violence.

So he spends a lot of time talking about like, um, um, that this mimetic desire is when you desire what somebody else has and that person is now your rival and that rival, you and that person end up, um, sort of having this feedback loop on each other where they have this sort of, they realize that you desire this thing. They have this sick version of wanting to sort of show off what they have and then you get it and then wanting one up and then it sort of builds and builds and builds and builds. He says that this is kind of a function of human society that you've got this escalation of desire that plays off your rival. Um, and he says, and that is differentiating for us from animals, but, but his point is that it is not a wholly bad thing.

So let me get to that section where he talks about how it's not a wholly bad thing and see if we still agree. Um, so let's see. Even if this mimetic nature of human desire is responsible for most of the violent acts that distress us, we should not, we should not conclude that mimetic desire is bad in itself. If our desires were not mimetic, as we don't, we are not located, we're not copying other people, um, they would be forever fixed on predetermined objects like the nut.

They would be a particular form of instinct. Human beings could no more change their desires than cows, their appetite for grass without mimetic desire. There would be neither freedom nor humanity. Mimetic desire is intrinsically good.

Um, so he's saying that like cows cannot change their desires. So a cow only wants grass, but the human being is a creature that at its core has almost like an unnamed desire that just sort of radiates out. I think eventually it's been a long time since I've read the whole book and I was just reading this first chapter for this podcast. I think eventually he does make the argument that this desire, just sort of like the desire for the unnamed thing or the, or the sort of the desire that sort of, that lurches forward into the world to try to find the object of its desire latches onto these things that are lesser and make us miserable.

And in reality, what we want is, is God. Um, and Jesus comes in, he's going to show us the model of how to actually live with it as a man, you know, as God and man, he's going to show us how we should act, the relationship we should actually have with this, um, mimetic desire, um, but left to our own devices, this sort of beating heart of desire, um, latches onto the goods, the perceived goods that other people have. And, um, and other people end up becoming our rivals and, um, or people are rivals see us what we have. And we end up having this sort of self-reinforcing thing of, of sort of one-upping each other.

But animals want specific concrete things, and when they have them, their desire is purely only instinct. But human beings have a desire, have, um, a faculty of desire that can change and desire different objects. Um, and when they get the objects, realize that it's not actually the object itself that satisfies it, unlike the cow, when they get the grass, the cow is a happy cow. Does that make sense, Sandberg?

I'm arguing with him in my brain. I have beefs. Um, let's see if we can talk about the baby. Does he get to the baby?

Um, that's what I was looking for. Humankind is that creature who lost a part of its animal instinct in order to gain access to desire, as it is called. That's a differentiation. Once their natural needs are satisfied, humans desire, humans desire intensely, but they don't know exactly what they desire, for no intrinsic, for no instinct guides them.

We do not each have our own desire, one really our own. The essence of desire is to have no essential goal. Truly to desire, we must have recourse to people about us. We must borrow their desires.

So he's painting a picture of what human beings are. Give a man shelter, food, clothing, everything that he needs for bodily comfort, and he still has a hunger inside him for something. And he doesn't know what is going to fill that hunger for something. And so he looks around the world around him, and he sees what other people have, and he begins to desire what those people have.

When he begins to do that, and others begin to do that with him, it becomes a sort of nasty, self-reinforcing thing where you sort of one-up each other. But it's not only nasty, right? Doesn't he say there's a good part to this also? The good part to this also is to have your desire...

Well, the good part of this is to do... I'm sorry, he says... Where is it? It sounds like there's a reinforcing cycle to it of I want something, and I get it, someone else wants it, so then they get it, and then I'll do me, and then we ratchet up every time.

Yeah, he says that this commandment to not desire the goods of your neighbor lays the groundwork for what Christ says. Yeah, this 10th commandment signals a revolution and prepares the way for it. The revolution comes to fruition in the New Testament. When Jesus invites us to imitate in his own desire, the spear that directs him towards the goal on which his intention is fixed, to resemble God the Father as much as possible.

His goal is to become the perfect image of God. And so that's what our innate desire that we are made, that we are built with, is to be. Is that, like, we have the desire to be like God, but we take that desire, and we confuse it with lesser desires, and when we do that, it creates this kind of violence that is different than the kind of violence you see in the animal world of sustenance grabbing. It is this violence that takes sort of pleasure in...

So it's the pleasure of not just getting the first-class seat, but bumping somebody to coach. That's the sort of this mimetic violence that he says is sort of part of the human person. But it's kind of like you have to risk the mimetic violence in order to have the creature who can hunger after God. Does that make sense?

Yes. I'm having trouble with it being tied to, like, the part of humanity. So we're saying humanity is defined by an evil, but maybe I'm... No, humanity is defined by a capacity, I think.

Humanity is defined by... A capacity for desire. Yeah. In other words, you could say it's a spiritual thing.

The angels hunger after God, but they see him face-to-face and can go and can, like, commune with the Father and can be with him. I see Satan fall like lightning is when Satan changes, you know, takes his desire for God and turns it on to himself, or turns it on to something different, and then falls. Human beings have the same capacity that angels do to desire God, but we don't see God face-to-face, and we end up, like, using that capacity for other things. So this is...

You know, Lewis talks about this with, we were built for a life at the seashore, and we play around in mud. God's mind-to-desire is not too strong, but too weak. I'm familiar. I still take issue.

Go for it. Is this the AJ gets to take issue portion of the song? Yeah, let's get you out your magazine rack. AJ's got issues.

That's good. So I have two issues. Perhaps you can explain them to me. So my first issue is that we are not...

We're not giving due credit to animals. Anyone with ever owned pets has seen competitive, I want this other animal to not have what he has, even if I don't want it that bad. That is certainly in animals. And also, how the heck do we know?

And, like, there are fights within wolf communities for power, right, because they want sex, right, or they want to have one over on the other animals, or, like, there are fights for territory, there are fights for social fights, there are certainly social class within animals. So I think the answer to that is, let's use your wolf example. So that would be, like, a strong wolf who's not the alpha wolf wanting to be the alpha wolf. So the instinct to be on top is still for a concrete thing, and then when he is the alpha wolf and has everything else, he still doesn't have an existential burning desire for something greater.

How do you know? Well, then this is a silly conversation that we can't know. Well, this is my point. If we anchor...

The way that we can know is that we don't see wolves who have all of their needs being met. Like, maybe it's because we haven't talked about scandals. Have we ever seen, in, say, a zoo, where an animal is having all of their needs met and yet is despondent? That we can't know.

I think maybe more... Well, then, it's a need for, like, being in its natural environment is not being met. At the level of action, we would say that once... You see this in monkey colonies, that the goal is to become that kind of head position, and they don't...

They eat, they get fat, and they get killed. Like, once they get to that spot, they're not after anything else. You can't know their intentions around it. That's, AJ, your point.

But by actions, you would say their goal is to get to that one spot, and then they're satisfied. That's what you're saying. But I would say that's not, like... Take the wolf, for example.

He doesn't just get to the top and... I mean, they don't always just stop. His goal is to have more kids, to pursue these things, and I think it takes an awful leap to say that our desires are not necessarily for concrete goods. The desire to sit in first class is the desire for a comfort level.

The desire to see the other man reduced is a desire for, like, less competition, for being the... being envy and respected, which is a power and respect thing. Like, these are all concrete goods. Animals don't have this thing where they completely end up destroying...

Let's say, for example, if you're looking at a Shakespeare tragedy, they don't have this thing where they end up completely destroying the family because of their ego. That's what he's getting at. So, like, King Lear destroys his entire... everything he's built his entire life on because of his inability to let go.

Like, you don't have that same... that sort of same ego-driving desire in the animal kingdom as you do in the human kingdom. You don't have, like, an entire community wiped out because of the vanity of the alpha wolf. Don't you?

The vanity of a wolf? Have you ever heard of, like, an alpha that is overly aggressive and destroys all the other males in his troop and thus reduces the group? But that would be... And again, that's an instinct...

Driven by ego. No, no. That's just an instinct. So, obviously, there was just not...

It was an accident of nature that he did not have wolves that were strong enough to stand up to him. The word instinct is a word that means we have no idea how X or Y works. That's what instinct means, is that we have no idea how it functions in nature. No, Lewis.

Yeah. The word instinct is a word for we know not what, which is frustrating. So, that is a side thing, right? That is actually my lesser beef.

My greater beef is that if it is true that this inordinate desire is what defines us as humans, then the more content I become, which is a call in Scripture and also one of the aspirations of most sages, the less human... No, no, no. You're mistaken. The more content you become, the more you are fulfilling what you were supposed to be doing.

Because you are fulfilled by God. That's right. The desire is met in God. Yes.

The desire is made... So, the desire that seeks fulfillment is not just supposed to always be pulsing out and never satisfied. It's supposed to find satisfaction in the correct thing. So, it is desire for, would you say, a concrete good?

Insofar as God is concrete, I suppose. Yeah. But, then fine. Then we can recast it by saying that the difference between man and beast is that our desires are for the spiritual reality of God and the beastly desires are for the concrete realities of food and good.

But I think the burden of proof is on you to show that wars of vanity and the absolute destruction of animal civilizations is as prevalent in the animal kingdom as it is in the human realm. My point is that this argument depends an awful lot on that, like, understanding the psychosis or the psyche of animals. But I'm still struggling with the, if I'm becoming more content, I'm becoming less human. No, no.

If the desire is being fulfilled is, I think, what he's saying. But contentment isn't always brought about by the fulfillment of desires. It's often the reduction or abandonment of desires. So, let's see.

If you look at sages that are non-Christian, right, say Buddhists, for example, the point is not to have all my desires fulfilled. That's not the point. The point is to stop desiring. Would you say that they are making themselves less human in doing so?

I think the goal, again, this is like a stoic epithea, I do think that it's less human to reduce desire. I think a Christian mystic is not denying, they're not missing out on something by becoming a mystic, by becoming a hermit, by becoming whatever, they're having a truer, closer experience to God. By focusing their desires on one object? On God, yeah, which I would not call concrete.

Yeah. I don't think it's a denial of desire to turn away from material things. I don't know if Gerard gets to that point, turning away from material things or spiritual things. He's saying that by, that the material world produces a massive stumbling block because we are beings that have that desire.

If you want to change it to human beings are things that love, I think that would be an interchangeable thing is that we're not thinking about things that love. Going back to certainly Jamie Smith, you are what you love. The core of the human person is that it has this desire for fulfillment. I'm all for that being true.

And the basis of human violence is that we locate the fulfillment in trying to copy what we think is the fulfillment in others around us. And then when that rivalry takes place between two people, it is always going to build up and then builds up into something that always explodes into something quite violent. The word he uses for that is scandal simply because he's translating scandal on in Greek. And ultimately, he's going to make his point that this is where scapegoats come from.

We're not going to talk about that because I haven't read that chapter yet and I'm still not familiar with that point. But yeah, I guess I just want to see how you think that human beings are creatures that love and are trying to find its fulfillment in something outside of themselves is not differentiating us from animals. There are animals that love. Penguins.

Mate for life. There are many animals that when they lose their mate they become depressed and disowned on it and sometimes die with the loss of a mate. That is a thing in nature. When some animals in zoos...

I am perfectly comfortable with the argument saying, as a side note, desire is part of the human experience and what is the perfection of the human is not necessarily abandonment of desire but focusing of that desire from the physical thing to the spiritual. That sounds reasonable to me. I can jump on board with that. I still am a little uncomfortable with saying that people who are abandoning their physical desires and not necessarily focusing on the heavenly, i.e.

Buddhists, are making themselves subhuman. I have to think about it a little more. That's not the point I'm making. The point is that even that person is focused on a better spiritual thing than the physical.

But kind of pure Buddhism is not necessarily that. Their point is to avoid suffering and the way you avoid suffering is by abandoning desire. That's the point, is to avoid suffering. is anchoring the differentiation between man and beast in desire.

I'm uncomfortable with that because we don't fully understand the desires of animals and our desires, like if I desire things less, does that make me less human? No, no. So that jump that you're making is not... So he would say that desiring things less is the wrong move.

He thinks it's an impossible move. That the Buddhist project is an impossible one to create to be a person who desires nothing. Actually, I think he would say that the person who is seeking after desiring nothing is moving towards a state of oblivion which is not how a human person was meant to exist. That the desire is supposed to be in becoming, desiring to be the image of the Father.

That's the Christian move on this and so that's when Christ comes and sort of says, here's the relationship that man ought to have with his desires. It is to be the image of God the Father. So I think Rene Jarrei probably would say that the Buddhist project of trying to have no desire is an attempt to remove humanity. So I don't necessarily, I always think about that, I don't necessarily disagree that if I desire nothing in this world, if I have no ambition, no anger, nothing I want, then really maybe I am not, like I'm not part of the mix, I'm not part of the party, right?

But that still doesn't, like equating... You're saying the humanity part of it is the problem. Yeah, equating our desire with our humanity means that, and this is true, I typically tend to desire things just less. Like, I don't need stuff.

I don't, like if, if breaking stuff I love, it's usually an okay thing. Like, I'll get over it and there's just, I don't have a whole ton of personal ambition for cash or success or power or any of those things. I am generally pretty contented and some of that is anchored in Christ, but does that mean that I am abandoning my humanity? That is a hard pill to swallow, boys.

Does he have a more technical definition of desire? Is that the problem we're having here? Hmm. Let me, so let me look at, so the right, let's look at the right relationship.

Um, so this will be helpful. I did not expect a 40 minute discussion on animal psychology. That was a surprise to me today. I'm sorry.

That's fun. When Jesus declares that he does not abolish the law but fulfills it, he articulates a logical consequence of his teaching. The goal of the law is peace among humankind. Jesus never scorns the law even when it takes form to the prohibitions.

Unlike modern thinkers, he knows quite well that to avoid conflicts is necessary to begin with prohibitions. The commandment to imitate Jesus does not appear suddenly in a world exempt from imitation. Rather, it is addressed to everyone that memetic rivalry has affected. Non-Christians imagine that to be converted, they must renounce an autonomy that all people possess naturally, a freedom and independence that Jesus would like to take away from them.

In reality, once we imitate Jesus, we discover that our aspiration to autonomy has always made us bow down before individuals who may not be worse than we are but who are nonetheless bad models because we cannot imitate them without falling with them into the trap of rivalries in which we are ensnared more and more. We feel that we are at the point of attaining autonomy as we imitate our models of power and prestige. This autonomy, however, is really nothing but a reflection of the illusions projected by our admiration for them. The more this admiration memetically intensifies, the less aware it is of its own memetic nature.

The more proud and egotistic that we are, the more enslaved we become to our memetic models. So, okay, I think I've got it. So, the problem is that human beings have desire and that desire, when it's put into the wrong object, we first love our objects of desire. Man, I really want to be like LeBron James because he's so cool.

And then the more that we have a desire for something outside ourselves, eventually that desire turns into hatred and wanting to sort of like master it. Remember in that Josh Gaines book, what was it, the first one? Yeah, something. Where he asks his students what they want for Christmas and then that student goes from like, I want to have an autograph to do LeBron James, I want to hang out with LeBron James, I want to have LeBron James in like a...

I want to be LeBron James. I want to be LeBron James. I want to kill LeBron. Yeah, and so that sort of illustrates his point is that, okay, so here's the human problem is that we are creatures that desire and we put our desire into something outside of ourselves.

We first love it and then we eventually hate it. There are two ways to beat that problem. One is the Buddhist way which is try to eliminate desire and by so doing, you are also going to gut your humanity, I think would be Rene Girard's argument. Or the other thing is to imitate.

If you're going to have a desire to imitate, then imitate the right thing which is to try to imitate God, try to be the image of God, have your mimetic desire to be the things of God. This is what Christ does when he's alive. And this is getting to the point I wanted to get to this podcast because I don't even know how much time we're going to do it. But so that for Girard, Jesus then is the perfect image of God because his mimetic desire is on things of the Father.

And that is the thing that is supposed to drive human beings. And so instead of removing the software, desire, because the software is causing problems, it's now like have the software run in its sort of proper usage. Does that make sense? Yeah, I don't necessarily disagree with it, unless with a couple of questions.

Number one, what do you mean by desiring things of the Father? And number two, I think my biggest beef here, I don't disagree that desire is an integral part of the human experience. Don't disagree with that. I also don't necessarily disagree that removing desire altogether would make you something other than human.

I probably agree there as well. My biggest beef is when you say that is what differentiates us with the animals, that's what makes us human. I don't think that's true. What is it then?

For most of the classicism, it's reason. Almost every classical philosopher says the thing that sets us apart from the animals is reason. I think it might be the imago dei. I think it might be, like, there are a lot of things that separate us from the animals, that make me more animal.

And there are animals that certainly have desire. Like, this is, it frustrates me. Like, animals that have every single need met and yet are unhappy. Yeah, and Graham started his talk with this, of the Morton Rattlers and Topicon, the opening of the great books of the Western world, puts the, what makes human as animal plus angel, it's body plus spirit.

The question of what that spirit is can incorporate reason, but will also incorporate some kind of emotion. There's more to it, but reason to be part of that, but it's body plus spirit. Yeah, so I agree with pretty much everything, except that it's where our humanity is anchored. And again, my last question is, what do you mean by desiring things of the spirit?

Is that simply relationship with God, or is that qualities of God that exist? Prohibition and always in terms of models and imitation, it is because he draws out the full consequence of the lesson offered by the 10th commandment. It is not due to inflated self-love that he asks us to imitate him. It is to turn us away from mimetic rivalries.

Where is it? What is the basis of imitating Jesus? It cannot be his ways of being or his personal habits. Imitation is never about that in the Gospels.

Neither does Jesus propose an ascetic rule of life in the sense of a Thomas Akempus and his celebrated imitation of Christ, as admirable as that work may be. Great book. What Jesus invites us to imitate is his own desire, the spirit that directs him towards the goal on which his intention is fixed, to resemble God the Father as much as possible. The invitation to imitate the desire of Jesus is only his own desire.

His goal is to become the perfect image of God. Therefore, he commits all his powers to imitating his Father. In inviting us to imitate him, he invites us to imitate his own imitation. So it is to have the desires that we have.

So if the desires that we have radiate from out of us and when we fix them on lesser things, the goods of our neighbors, for the lives of our neighbors, or these lesser idols, when we worship these other things, we begin to hate those things. And so what we are supposed to fix and worship and idolize is God and then try to imitate God. Yeah, try to imitate Jesus and his desire for God. Yeah, so if we're going to copy a person, if we're going to locate our mimetic rivalry in somebody, it is not going to be a rivalry when we imitate Christ.

Because Christ is not going to try to one-up us. He's already upped. So the imitation that we have of him is actually the way that human beings are supposed to sort of utilize this capacity of desire. So my question still hasn't been answered.

If Jesus desires to be like God, be the Godhead, how in the world do we do that? I'm not omnipotent. I'm not omnipresent. I don't know why.

Okay, so that's kind of what I was driving for. It does come down to, you know, to love the things that God loves. So it again comes down to that, like changing of the affections, to set your minds on things above, these kinds of things. But that's what I'm trying to drive at, is that I think there's a lot of Christians, and this included me when I was young, that are told, like, desire to be like God.

And I was like, how in the flipping world do I do that? Like, I can't. But there are answers to that. There are qualities that God has that we see tangibly in Scripture.

He's self-sacrificing. He's charitable. He's just. He's constant.

He is kind. There's some things about God that we probably shouldn't imitate. And your book actually touched on it. Self-love.

God does love himself, right? It is. It isn't an inordinate self-love because every ounce of love he can give to himself is an appropriate ounce of love. He's the greatest thing in the universe.

So Jesus Christ does love himself. We should not imitate that. Only in that we all should also love God, too. Does that make sense?

So it's not that he wants us to change our desire, not necessarily only to get us out of these rivalries. Your book said it wasn't out of inordinate self-love, but it is out of inordinate self-love. He wants us to love the greatest thing. And so it's yes, it's true.

This is probably where Rene Girard is not so orthodox. He is saying that Christ is telling us not to love him as himself, but to love him because he's trying to imitate God. Yeah, but he's also telling us to love him as himself, as far as I know. Follow me.

And then there's. But follow is different. Follow is copy me in what I'm doing. And what I'm doing is the will of my father.

That sounds like a leap, but there are also passages like, you have a bridegroom with you, right? You always have a bridegroom with you. And he talks about how, what's her name? The girl's sitting there at dinner, and her wife wanted her to, or not her wife, but her sister wanted her to help with food.

And he's like, look, she shows the better part. She's sitting with me because I'm here. Right? She likes me.

And then, I don't know. What's your perspective on this one? You're saying that? He said, and this is as close to quote as I can get, it is not from inordinate self-love that Christ desires us to follow him, but out of a, to prevent us from these competitive, these competitive mimetic.

It's not due to inflated self-love that he asks us to imitate him. It is to turn us away from mimetic rivalries. It's both. Yes, it is from self-love.

Inflated self-love. It's just inflated, no. Well, it is inflated to the absolute full. It cannot inflate further, I think would be the right answer to that.

In the actual Godhead, maybe in Jesus, because he has submitted to the God, God the Father, it's a little bit different, but that's my pushback, I guess. Sure. I find it interesting also, it almost becomes more of a language of loyalty of, you quoted this a while ago, but it's, again, it's not whether you will serve, it's who you will serve, and so it's not what you will desire, or it's not whether you will desire, but what you desire. AJ, do animals worship?

He's an FCS. Maybe. Oh my gosh. AJ, you can't just give us an argument out of ignorance.

We can't know. No, no, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying it depends on your definition of worship. Do certain dogs love a certain voice?

No, not love. Worship. What do you mean by worship? I think it's what he's mean, is what Rene Girard is getting at, is that worship and idolatry are the same thing.

Idolatry is, so worship is the act of this mimetic desire, and when it is on the right thing of God, it is appropriate, and when it is on the wrong thing, it is an idolatry that eventually turns to hatred. So my point is that the dog will never love the ball so much that the dog hates the ball, but human beings will love something so much they will eventually hate that thing. They will worship something so much that they eventually hate the thing. That's the key difference that Rene Girard gets at when he's talking about this desire.

So what makes a human is eventually hatred? No, what differentiates you from the animal is that your worship has such capacity for glory and such capacity for depravity that is not available to animals. I can say the same thing about my capacity for reason. This is going out on a limb.

It would not surprise me if Rene Girard said that the decoupling of reason and desire is a move that we shouldn't have made a different capacity for desire and that desire is a human thing and to make myself desire-less as to perhaps decouple myself from humanity. I'm just saying that I'm not sure that's the thing that makes us human. I call beef. I think in the ancient world when they talk about reason as a differentiation between man and beast, we as modern people think logic and what they actually mean is this consciousness-desire sort of hybrid that they're talking about.

We talked about the great chain of being back with E.F. Schumacher. The difference between animal and human is animals have a consciousness so they are aware, they can desire, they can act on instinct, but humans have a self-consciousness. They can reflect on that consciousness.

To say we have a study about that is not the same as to say this is a theory of what is animal, what is material versus what is spiritual. That's what he's at least riffing on that. That's a medieval concept. But no, I guess I haven't even talked about it so it goes back longer than that.

These are theories of the essence of animal. At some level, there's no, you cannot prove that because we can't talk to the animal. So from what I, let's see, there's an Aristotle idea that the man's soul is made up of three basic soul chunks. The vegetable soul, which is growth and that's available to all growing things, right?

So plants grow, but they don't have the sensitive soul and the sensitive soul is, let's see if I can find it here. There are, there's like memory, estimation, imagination, fantasy, common sense, touch, smell, sight, sound, taste. Like they can sense, sense things, right? A plant can't necessarily sense that you've got its leaves off and it can't remember things and imagine things, but animals can.

And then the rational soul is human. And that includes a kindly inclining back to God, which is this desire that you're talking about, right? It is the source of moral truths, right? Intellectus.

And then it's both intellectus and ratio. So according to Aristotle, this is the thing that is available only to humans. So the inclining back to God, which is your desire, source of moral truth, intellectus, and ratio. So reason is a piece of it.

Intellectus, for those of you who have listened to our early episodes, it's the simple grasp of an intelligible truth, like pondering over something that is knowable and sort of just... So maybe I'm overstating it by saying that Gerard is saying that desire is the sole thing that differentiates us from the animals. But to eliminate, but to not talk about mimetic rivalry as something that is differentiating us from the animals is not to fully understand what we mean when we say reason, I guess. Like that this is really part of what differentiates us from the animals.

We don't have this rivalry to the point of destruction scandal that in the animal kingdom as you do everywhere in human life. Gerard is saying we can pick where that loyalty goes, where we choose to mimic, correct? Yes, where the cow cannot change his desire for the grass. The human person can say, man, I really admire Megby and everything that Megby does, I really idolize him.

And at some point, you change it to something else. Not because your desire changes, you still desire, but the locus of your desire changes and that can change throughout your life. You can either do it consciously or it can be done to you subconsciously. But that's the reason there.

That would say I can go from a lesser good to a greater good, correct? And then what people are doing when they accept Christ is that they're choosing the higher good. And it would be wrong to say that the Christian life is one of asceticism where we are trying to strip desire away. We do not hate the world in that sense where we try to eliminate desire, but seek you first the kingdom of God and all these things are added to you.

So the great joy of the sensual world comes to you insofar as you locate your desire in the right place. And the way to do that is by imitating Christ. Well, we call it contentment. I mean, but I think contentment is perhaps not necessarily the removal of desire, but the refocusing of the desire.

But contentment comes when a desire has landed in its home. Like, my heart is restless till it finds its rest in you. Yeah, you should be desiring things spiritual and not desiring the physical. And so that might feel like removal because you're not desiring physical.

Now, the thing that I wanted to get to with this podcast is use this as an example of an interpretation of scripture that isn't sort of regular. So many, many podcasts ago we talked about that there are four ways of reading scripture. There's the literal, there's the allegorical, there's the anagogical, and there's the moral. So just real quick, if you're doing the Exodus story, the literal would be God parted the waters and saved the Israelites.

The allegorical would be Christ will. Christ, yeah, Christ will sort of part the waters and Christ will save us from the destruction of our enemies, of sin and death, nipping at our heels, and we will do it through miracle. Sure. Allegorical.

Moral, you should be like Moses. He trusted God and look where it got him. And then anagogical, the end of the world, God will one day bring all into the promised land of eternity with him. So there's the four ways.

What Rene Girard is doing, I was thinking about this, I was like, is he doing, so he's obviously using scripture to talk about the sort of psychological reality of human desire. And he is convinced that the Bible is telling us a truth about the human person by looking at the commandments and by looking at the person of Christ. Is he doing, is his reading of the New Testament any of those four ways or is he doing a fifth new thing, a psychological reading of scripture? Is he doing like a Jungian psychology?

Is it a form of allegory? That was the only thing I could come close to is that it is a form, that allegory is doing that. That it's a form of allegory. Yeah.

The other grouping of those four readings is the, again, you said literal for the first and then spiritual is the other three. So at the minimum it falls in that spiritual reading. Is it moral though? Is it his reading telling us how to live our lives?

There's part of that. How to take it? Yeah. Maybe he's conflating allegorical and moral together.

They all go together. And so then this led me down this path of thinking of, so the practice of psychology is, I'm just wondering if, so if psychology in the 19th century, sort of psychoanalyzing a person to try to sort of think about their psyche to cure the ills of their soul, this is sort of what Freud and Jung were doing. They saw people in despair and they were trying to figure out how to help them. It was a medicine.

I wonder if theology used in the way that Girard is using it meant that function in the Middle Ages of psychology and then once we stopped believing in the Bible we still needed soul work and then psychology sort of came in as a backfill for that. That's maybe a whole other podcast but just maybe think like is modern psychoanalysis pastoral care without Christian doctrine or theological, an attempt to give people frameworks for the lie without believing in a doctrine. Pastoral meaning that of a pastor. Yeah, shepherd meaning not of a sheep.

Not of like a small rural town that of a pastor. No, no, I mean pastoral care like a priest. So in the Middle Ages if you had melancholy, if you were depressed and you went to the priest and you were talking about your melancholy well he would probably believe you, that's a whole other conversation. But there was a sense that the right belief in doctrine was medicine to the soul.

I was looking for the reference on this, I couldn't find it. And that part of being a doctor of philosophy was that you were a soul doctor and when someone came to with a spiritual ailment you had medicine for that and it was right understanding of doctrine which sounds so foreign to us. But nowadays if you have a soul problem we don't call it a soul problem we call it a psycho we have to call it a psychological problem but psyche and soul same thing or at least the same word and now we have people who are trained to try to give medicine to that problem with, I don't know, daily affirmations or some kind of medicine and I'm just wondering if what we call psychology if we could transport someone from the Middle Ages they would say oh that person is just doing theology except their theology doesn't have God in it or the Bible or I don't know do you ever say maybe someone who's gone through like you've done pastoral counseling and did they ever talk about this in pastoral counseling classes? We as Christian pastoral counselors believe that the human person is one thing Christian pastoral counselor believes in the body the human person is something else and in those differences there's actually, like, there's professional conflict.

Like, if you're a psychoanalysis who believes that the world is just material, versus someone who believes the soul is eternal, you're going to have different medicine for the ailments of the heart. Yeah, my classwork is through the Christian Counseling Education Foundation, which is through Westminster University out of Pittsburgh. One of the classes has us reading, Irvin Yalom, a psycho... is he a psychiatrist or a psychoanalyst?

I'm trying to look it up, but he wrote Love's Executioner, which is... I was trying to look it up, but apologies, I'll have to bring it another time. He opens the book with his, like, four truths that it's his goal to teach all of his clients. I forget what they are, but one of them is, like, everything is meaningless.

Like, all you have to life are meaningless, you will die one day. Be kind. Watch out for witches. Learn the runes.

So, to read that, you're like, you know, I don't agree with these things, but you still have to deal with the fact he has great results. And that's the point of the book, is to walk through, like, actually, sometimes people need to realize they're attaching too much significance to minor events that don't actually mean anything. I think this is a so fascinating podcast. It'll have to be an episode, but yes, it's huge, and even within Christian Counseling, there's this, the founder of it, is it Jay Abrams, I think is the guy's name, he rejected secular research.

He would not allow it to be brought into the counseling setting, and so that's kind of a long-standing, I mean, it's only, like, 40 years old, this field, but of Christian Counseling, which is his own conversation, but the question of what to do with things that aren't in the Bible. The reason I read this up is that people would look at Rene Girard, and he's often credited as, oh, he's doing, he's talking about human psychology, and he's using the story of Christianity as, like, an example of human psychology. And I think Rene Girard would come at it from the other way around. He says, the doctrine of Scripture reveals us to ourselves.

And anyway, so then, yes, is it a fifth reading to say that he's psychoanalyzed in the Bible, or is he doing, like, an allegorical or moral reading or conflating or something? I don't know. That's a whole other thing. Anyway.

Sorry I made such a big thing about animals today, guys. I was right. I think your instinct was right in that it was at the heart of the issue. And that's whether he's right or not.

Now, that thing that we just went through is the groundwork that he lays for why Christ was killed and why the crowd turned on him so fast, and his whole theory about scapegoats, which maybe we can get to if I think it's interesting. Okay, this has been classical stuff you should know. You should check out our Patreon if you haven't already. That's the way to throw us some support.

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