Violence, Mysticism, and René Girard

Abstract

Blending the science of acknowledged mystics—Dostoevsky, Weil, Péguy, Pascal, Hölderlin, and Augustine—with the insights of social scientists over the course of a long and distinguished career, René Girard contributed to an understanding of the mysticism of social life through focusing attention principally on the ersatz mysticism of metaphysical desire and mob behavior, but also on the interdividual’s contrastive experience of Christ’s “innermost mediation” of grace for conversion and charitable work in the world.