Too few people know about René Girard, who passed away on Nov. 4 at 91. He was undoubtedly one of the most important men of the 20th century.
A longtime professor in the U.S., Girard was perhaps destined to leave France, the country of his birth. He had not come up through the ranks of its factory for intellectuals, the tiny and elite École Normale Supérieure. He was of no trendy intellectual school of thought; he was no post-modernist or post-structuralist ”” until, that is, he ended up quite involuntarily hailed as the founder of one. And he was a Christian.
In the end, his country recognized him, giving him perhaps its highest honor for intellectuals of the humanities, a seat at the Académie Française.
While I grieve his passing, I have been sorry to see Ren̩ Girard garnering more and more attention over the past years. His understanding of desire (or envy) is solid and sheds a great deal of light on the destructive power of sin on individuals and societiesРso far so good. But his application of his theory to the wider Christian story, particularly to the atonement, takes him outside the realms of orthodox Christianity.