Doing Theology From BelowSample

Mimetic Desire

Yesterday, we talked about the Incarnation as the human catechism, the invitation to become fully human. This is the very essence of what it means to do theology from below. God comes to us as we are – as human – the very thing we want to deny. When we leap over our humanity to get to God we find ourselves worshipping, not the Father of Jesus, filled with mercy, but a projection of our own distorted humanity, that is hungry for sacrifice. We end up worshipping distorted and monstrous versions of ourselves. It’s we who are the angry deity we worship in a complicated form of self-hatred. We don’t see things as they are, we end up seeing things as we are and that is the problem.

And so doing theology from below is to turn our eyes to the human one. And learn to see through those eyes. It was Stanley Hauweras who said, “We can only act within the world we see.” By learning to see human-ly we can see God for who God is and act accordingly. This is how Jesus returns us to ourselves, clothed and in our right minds, by showing us how to be human.

And so, the very first question that Jesus asks in the Gospel of John is “what are you looking for?" In other words, “What do you want?” It is a question of desire. Why? Because Jesus knows that humans are created in and through desire, and have a highly developed capacity to imitate desire. It’s what makes us human and sets us apart from all other animals. Unlike instincts, (i.e. survival, food, reproduction) which are hardwired into our biology, desires are “mimetic” or imitated and culturally-conditioned. We imitate or borrow the desires of others. As anthropologist René Girard suggests, “We desire according to the desire of others.“ He calls this “mimetic desire.”

We think there is a direct relationship between us and the object of our desire, as if we really do want the thing we seek. However, as marketers understand, Subject A does not desire Object B in any direct sense. Suffering the loss of this illusion is essential to transformation. The object of our desire, whether a pair of shoes, a car, a house, or even a person, is always mediated by Model C, who makes the object desirable to us. When it comes to desire, it’s the model that matters most. In this sense, desire is triadic, not dyadic. We want what we want because our desires have been modeled for us by another.

Our capacity to imitate each other is largely good and is what makes the bonds of human community function. Unfortunately, our highly-developed mimetic capacity leads to conflict as we compete for the objects of our affection, not realizing that what we are really competing for is each other. In an attempt to bring peace and minimize the rivalries sparked by competing desires, we create scapegoats. Scapegoats bring temporary peace to unstable communities. When Jesus invites us to imitate him, he shows us a way out of this cycle of violence. He shows us how to borrow our desires from God—to imitate the One in whom there is no violence. All desire in God is non-rivalistic. The Son imitates the Father in the Spirit of self-giving non-rivalry (mutuality). This pattern of desire calls forth an entirely new way of being human, which is the hope of the world.

When we imitate Jesus and practice Christ-like desire we unplug from the rivalries that lead to violence and open the way to real and lasting peace. Christ-like desire allows us to live scapegoat-free lives. Awakening and modeling such desire is the work of transformation. It is the work of becoming human. It is the work of Jesus in the Gospels.