57	RETURN TO CHRISTIANITY

The ultimate and most scandalous chapter of my history—and it obviously didn’t come out of the blue—is that I became a Christian again.

There are many overlapping reasons.

I asked myself why it was that I adopted a “left” reading of Heidegger, that of “increasing lightness,” versus a “right” reading, because one does exist. (And here the reference is purely philosophical, to the Hegelian right and left, even though it was the Hegelian right that read Hegel as the restoration of traditional religiosity, whereas Marx and Feuerbach were out to cause trouble.) Purely because he seemed to me closer to the political left? Not in your wildest dreams. Because . . . I am Christian. Because I am someone who thinks of the good in terms of withdrawal rather than of affirmation. God incarnates himself. Indeed he does . . . but he’s a carpenter who winds up being crucified—in other words, he’s not exactly the triumphant Messiah.

Here’s where René Girard comes in. Casually once again: Marco Vallora, an ex-student of mine, asked me to review Girard’s book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.

I read a few pages and realized immediately that it was right up my alley. (Girard and I have become friends in recent years.)

I read Girard, and it was like an illumination. I owe him a great deal and am greatly devoted to him, although we differ on some points. It was he who re-Christianized me (albeit in my own way), it was with him that I began to think that it might be possible to bind weakening, secularization, and Christianity closely together.

Girard invented the theory of the scapegoat: human society is an agglomeration in which everyone imitates everyone else, but this imitation produces continual crises. Your car is bigger than mine; I want one like that, too, though if I hadn’t seen yours the thought would never have occurred to me. This situation is resolved only when a scapegoat is found, belonging to neither group, like the referee in a soccer match. Shouting “arbitro cornuto” (the referee is a cuckold) is a typical example of how opposing groups of fans can form alliances and instead of massacring each other, cast all the guilt onto a scapegoat.

The scapegoat par excellence is Jesus Christ.

For Girard the whole social mechanism is built up around this sacrality of the victim. But he thinks (and the difference is not insignificant) that the mass, the symbol of the sacrifice, is indispensable to keep the originary violence from returning. Sacrificing a victim still serves today as an outlet for social violence. If we secularize too much we are done for, because violence reemerges in its raw form. It has to be bridled.

I, on the other hand, think that Jesus Christ comes to renounce, not fulfill, the sacrality and the necessity of the victim. Jesus is the first great desacralizer of the natural religions. He comes and declares to everyone that it’s not true that we have to offer sacrifice to God. On the contrary, God calls us friends. And Jesus was crucified because everyone was so scandalized at the fact that he was telling them that until now they’d only been sacrificing in vain, that they couldn’t bear him. He was nailed to the cross because he repudiated the victimary mechanism.

This is such a shattering novelty that it could only have come from “outside.” I would even hazard that the proof that Jesus is God is precisely the fact that it could only have come from a nonhuman wisdom, this radically new news. This is not a proof of the existence of God, of course, or the divinity of Jesus, but for me it’s a beautiful thing. Almost too beautiful to be true.

I am unable reasonably to disavow it.

Therefore in recent years I have increasingly considered myself a Christian philosopher vis-à-vis philosophers who were mainly Jews. Nothing to do with anti-Semitism. It remains the case that as a Christian I think that history has a salvific meaning: there is a history of salvation, in well-marked stages. The promise of the Messiah, the arrival of the Messiah, and after the Messiah the wait for the Parousia, the return. Coherent Jews like Levinas and Derrida think that the Messiah never did arrive, and they don’t even know if he ever will. They imagine him as Water Benjamin does, a sort of “weak messianism”: he is always somewhere on the horizon, there is an unending tension toward the other who is to come but who never does come, and who apart from anything else doesn’t even leave signs.

I always used to ask Derrida in person, and not in jest, “How do you distinguish between Hitler and the other who is yet to come? Hitler was something so absurd that nobody could have anticipated him. But then, if the other who is yet to come is he whom you could never have anticipated, how can you say that Hitler isn’t the Messiah? I can say it because I have the example of Jesus Christ, but you?”

Consequences.

All the phenomena of secularization in modernity, to the extent they represent a desacralization of the sacred, are the heritage of Christianity.

Weakening is a vision of modernity as true realization of Christianity in nonsacral terms.

Modernity interprets Christianity in terms of individual rights and freedom of conscience, all the things against which the Church has always fought to the death. Like it is doing today. But notwithstanding that, for me the authenticity of Christianity lies in modern-liberal-socialist-democratic thought, in defiance of all the popes and cardinals.

Postmodern nihilism is the up-to-date form of Christianity.

Therefore weak thought is the only Christian philosophy on the market. The market, though, doesn’t give a hoot.

Weak thought is also the only thinkable Christian philosophy. The Church doesn’t realize that? Monsignor Carlo Caffarra paints me as the devil? There’s nothing I can do about that, so much the worse for them.

I think that Christianity is a religion that self-annuls, in the sense that it annuls all forms of dogmatism. Hence, God willing, a religion and a nonreligion.

That is the only thing to preach. The other remedies on the market all entail joining up with one side or another: either you sign up with the Christians, or with the Enlightenment fundamentalists, or the Islamic fundamentalists.

For my part, I don’t want to enlist. I’d like to sign up with the “debilists.” But we’re just a tiny handful.