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While varieties of Catholic theology in the last generation have shown a relatively open posture toward evolutionary science,Footnote ³ I see a continued struggle among theologians to fully come to terms with the evolutionary emergence of a human “soul.” Sometimes referred to as “ensoulment,” this topic often concerns the uniqueness, origin, and nature of human consciousness—or, humanity's apparent difference from other animals in their freedom, morality, transcendence, cognition, etc. Commonweal writer John Farrel has deemed ensoulment as a defining topic of what makes us human and a key point of friction between Catholic faith and evolutionary theory. He states, “the church's conception of human nature seems to require a more clear-cut origin for homo sapiens than the fuzzy species boundaries acknowledged in evolution.”Footnote ⁴ But can we in a post-Darwinian world embrace such clear-cut-ness?Footnote ⁵

A common theological posture toward this problem is to regard the differences between humans and other creatures as so exceptional that they cannot be explained through evolutionary mechanisms—rather, our difference can only be explained as a miracle. And such special providence, coupled with the idea of our soul's immediate creation as Pius XII put it, tends to be regarded as a doctrinal safeguard for human dignity. Aiming to protect this divine miracle of humanity, some theologians then seek to reconcile Genesis’ creation account with paleoanthropology, tracing the uniquely human “soul” to a single couple, or at least a region.Footnote ⁶ Or, for those less concerned with biblical literalism, others theorize at what point human consciousness came in touch with the beauty of transcendence, a moral sense, analytic rationality, or with the “religious spirit”—at which point we might again identify humanity's “soul,” its distinction from the animals.Footnote ⁷

While the “conservative” method above tends to short-circuit a fully robust evolutionary and naturalistic analysis, the “liberal” method tends to have an unwarranted idealism about what we mean by a “religious spirit” in humanity's evolution. Both methods tend to reserve “religion” and “the soul” as proxies for humanity's divine unexplainability, against naturalistic analyses that supposedly explain away the sacred. This involves a God-of-the-gaps method, which Celia Deanne-Drummond describes as an error in its presupposing a

Such uniqueness-approaches to ensoulment seem inclined toward what Joseph Ratzinger called theologians’ “constant rearguard action” toward evolution: scientific explanations are feared as the enemy of mystery.Footnote ⁹ But scientific explanation need not mean “explaining away.”Footnote ¹⁰ Instead of avoiding the fully evolutionary idiom through appeals to mystery, and instead of idealistic appeals to the “religious spirit” at the root of human evolution, I instead argue that we must seriously consider the pre-rational and violence-containing role that religion must have played in evolving humanity and its “soul.” This will help us conceive how human evolution has indeed involved an “ontological leap”Footnote ¹¹ while not short-circuiting an evolutionary analysis of humanity's striking difference from other animals. Too simplistically deeming humanity's leap as both unexplainable and univocally good fails to grasp the radical critique of human culture that is housed not only in the doctrine of original sin, but also in a branch of anthropological and evolutionary theory known as “mimetic theory.” This theory, in which mimesis refers to our prerational imitation of one another, was originally generated by René Girard and is a topic of continued multi-disciplinary extrapolation today.Footnote ¹² One of its explicit aims was to theorize how proto-humanity crossed the threshold into the current state of humanity. While I will describe that theory below, the above epigraph from one of its theological exegetes, James Alison, gets to the heart of its seeming conflict with most approaches to immediate ensoulment: human consciousness emerged through mimetic acts of victimization and a misapprehension about them. Mimetic theory, roughly speaking, argues that mimesis, as channeled through patterns of “scapegoating,” helped usher proto-humanity into its current form of consciousness. Is there any room for an exchange between such a theory and Catholic theology of the soul?

This paper aims to answer in the affirmative and extrapolate how the notion of an “immediate creation of the soul by God” receives significant qualification in light of mimetic theory. I will do that by 1) briefly reviewing some approaches to ensoulment, 2) briefly clearing away some tempting misuses of the imago dei doctrine from Genesis when considering ensoulment. And 3) I will distill a mimetic theory approach toward the soul, with special reference to one of its theological exegetes, James Alison. Drawing upon mimetic theory, I hope to point a way toward theologically appreciating how the structure of human consciousness could emerge through the expansion of our mimetic faculty and the misapprehension that surrounds scapegoating.Footnote ¹³

Brief Theological Background on Ensoulment

The Catholic need for a clearer-cut human origin and nature is stated firmly in the above papal epigraph from Humani Generis, wherein the “immediate creation” of the human soul is obligatory dogma in Catholic theology.Footnote ¹⁴ The encyclical is not very specific on this point, but we can infer that “soul” connotes something like our unique endowment with rational consciousness, mind, reason, or apprehension, as it did for St. Augustine. Or, to avoid the idea that this means a disembodied spirit—like some extraneous and imputed spiritual letter inserted into the envelope of the body—we should recall that Augustine saw the “soul” as the whole bodily creature, who is uniquely endowed with “mind.”Footnote ¹⁵ With this sense of distinguished human capacity, Ratzinger discussed the human soul with reference to our unique “ability to think and pray,” and what Kant called our moral reason and freedom—marking humanity in the image of God and making us “more than earth.”Footnote ¹⁶ Such an emphasis on human-uniqueness seems in use by others who contrast humanity's “higher-order consciousness” with the “primary consciousness” of nonhuman animals. In this sense, “consciousness,” with its social denotation, is a fitting synonym for our unique souls: con-scientia implies intersubjective social consciousness.Footnote ¹⁷ Such a notion of consciousness will have to serve here as a sufficiently clear but broad definition of what the Catholic lexicon can mean by the human “soul”: it encompasses dimensions of other-attention and openness, a sense of moral consciousness of others, and some acknowledged difference from other animals.Footnote ¹⁸ This broad definition tries to bridge the ideas of soul as “the whole human creature” and the more restricted approach that treats soul as “our unique form of consciousness.”

As for the soul's “immediate” creation in the encyclical, this is not entirely clear. In one sense, it would seem to imply a punctuated emergence in time, delineating pre-human from human; and it would also seem to imply the rejection of a totally materialistic account of the mind—like, the mind as mere epiphenomenon of matter. But it another sense, one must ask if any created thing has a non-immediate relation to God. For if God knows all things into being and continually sustains all, then immediate and direct relation to God is omnipresent. In any case, in light of how the Church has long fended off the idea that the soul immediately is God—from the Manicheans to the Hegelians—we can infer Humani Generis was attempting a middle-way: treat the soul as not divine in itself, but a creature; yet, the soul is not a mere byproduct of matter.Footnote ¹⁹ This concept of the human soul, as situated between the heavens and the humus, is usually housed in the symbol of the “immortality” of the soul.Footnote ²⁰

The encyclical's next paragraph is also informative as to what is meant by the immediate creation of the soul. It rejects “polygenism,” the belief that humans emerged disparately, in multiple places and genetic lines. The encyclical denounces such a theory on the grounds that it would violate the theological commitment to the doctrine of “original sin”—which it interprets to mean an act of sin from a singular pair of humans, passed on to all humans through generation.Footnote ²¹

John Paull II echoed the claims of Humani Generis, declaring that “theories of evolution which, because of the philosophies which inspire them, regard the spirit either as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a simple epiphenomenon of that matter, are incompatible with the truth about man.”Footnote ²² Joseph Ratzinger, too, pronounced on the issue. Familiarized as he was in the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Ratzinger wrote with attention to the gradualism that the increasingly-stabilized evolutionary theory of his day suggested. He clarified that Genesis cannot mean a sense of humans created in a finished state; Genesis generously portrays humans as “beings en route, beings characterized by transition. They are not yet themselves.”Footnote ²³ And he referred to the soul-threshold with a qualified immediate relation to God: proto-humans became human in forming the first thought of God, the great Thou, “however dimly,” “however stammeringly.”Footnote ²⁴ This first dim gesture toward the Transcendent in human evolution constitutes for Ratzinger “the properly human,” in contrast to the proto-humanity “of the clay.” Scripture and theological doctrines, for him, do not technically describe “our process of becoming”—this he was pleased to leave to the competency of evolutionary science, as a “complementary” knowledge.Footnote ²⁵ Thus, theology does not compete as an evolutionary theory, but names what makes us us: “it is not the use of weapons or fire, not new methods of cruelty or of useful activity, that constitute man, but rather his ability to be immediately in relation to God.”Footnote ²⁶ And yet, amidst Ratzinger's subtle attention to humanity's dim, gradual becoming, he nonetheless insisted that humanity's crossing its soul-threshold must not be seen as a product “of chance or error.”Footnote ²⁷ But, can scientifically minded Catholics hold to both Humani Generis’ immediate creation of a soul and this resistance to chance and error? It certainly leaves doubts among those who take as a scientific given the apparent nonteleological drift we find in species morphology.

James O'Sullivan recounts how theologians like Karl Rahner put critical pressure on Humani Generis, arguing that the special creation of the soul in some distinct proto-human pair (i.e. monogenism) was not logically tenable. Rather, conceiving of human origins through some “group” was sufficient (polygenesis) to accommodate for the messiness of evolution while maintaining a theological sense of a unified humanity who shares a common “original sin.” In turn, he thought that a polyphyletic origin would dissipate this unity.Footnote ²⁸

Some theologians today avoid any “naturalistic” analysis of the soul's emergence, treating the “immediate creation of the soul” in a strict sense—seeing it basically as a supernatural infusion, for which the only evolutionary question is when it entered our species. As one example, Dr. Kenneth Kemp of the University of St. Thomas frames ensoulment as a divine “gift of a rational soul.” That is, at some point in proto-humanity, “God selects two and endows them with intellects by creating for them rational souls, giving them at the same time those preternatural gifts the possession of which constitutes original justice.”Footnote ²⁹ He considers this a sort of fiat creation of the first philosophical, intellectual, and ultimately “theological” humans.

As will become apparent in my offering an alternative to this method, I see in such an approach no deep intersection between theological and scientific idioms. Instead of a fully bifocal integration of both idioms, the theological annexes the biological. For it offers no word on the how, the evolutionary mechanics that could have coincided with or even catalyzed the soul's emergence. Rather, the “soul” is presumed, defined as intellect or reason,Footnote ³⁰ which is just unexplainably imputed into some homo sapiens through “a creative act of God,”Footnote ³¹ maybe as a “new gene” carrying the trait of ensoulment—supposedly different from all the other creative acts of God. While Kemp says his hope is to “accommodate the facts of paleoanthropology,” this imputed notion of the soul short circuits thinking in an evolutionary way about humanity. That is, it takes it as un-explainable how there could emerge “an animal body capable of the brain activity prerequisite for rational thought.” For in this more restrictive notion of immediate creation, “God” simply is the explanation.

Others, like Rev. Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco employ a slightly more naturalistic line of analysis in the emergence of the human soul. For him, ensoulment is homologous with the emergence of “language”—and with it, human rationality and abstract thought. For him, the genuinely “human” soul coincides with the emergence of language—and its concomitant rationality—within the last 100,000-50,000 years of the homo sapiens lineage.Footnote ³² He maintains that a “first” human (“the first speaking primate”) must have somehow come upon this gift. While this supplies some greater empirical foothold for discussing this “soul,” centered on our linguistic and rational capacity (using Chomsky's proposal that this capacity arose in a single human individual), it still lacks what Kemp lacked, leaving untheorized the how and why this language and rationality would have emerged. Whence the linguistic jump?

Amidst the varieties of approaches to the soul, it seems there is a shared hesitancy to engage in naturalistic analysis that might treat the human soul as anything but a mysterious fiat, lest the soul be “explained away.” And there seems to be a habitual identification of the soul not with the whole biological creature (mediated, like all the cosmos, through evolutionary mechanisms), but with a sui generis reason and intellect—and presuming these align well with humanity's first gestures toward a Transcendent Thou. Mimetic theory, I will argue, offers a way of naturalistically re-conceptualizing human reason, our consciousness, and our religious origins—broadly, our “soul,” so to speak—and how this could have emerged through certain social and biological phenomena. This will serve to qualify what exactly is meant by human reason, consciousness, our religious spirit, or our relationship to God. But to get there, I will clear away some exegetical presuppositions regarding the book of Genesis’ supposed relation to human origins, especially its notion of the “image of God.”

Genesis and the Image of God

Any standard exegesis of Genesis today involves comparative reference to Babylon's Enuma Elish creation myth, showing how Genesis appears to have, in part, adapted and adjusted extant mythic material from around the exilic period of the 6^th Century B.C.E.Footnote ³³ While Humani Generis conceded that Genesis’ literary raw material could indeed have involved such sources, the encyclical also insisted that, Genesis’ creation accounts, while using popular symbols, nevertheless pertains “to history in a true sense” and its concern is a “description of the origin of the human race.”Footnote ³⁴ We do well to qualify that encyclical with later interpretation, as seen in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which argues for Genesis’ figurative and not literal meaning, as well as the above nuances from Ratzinger and Rahner.Footnote ³⁵

A non-literalistic hermeneutic becomes even more warranted when we consider how Genesis’ raw material, Enuma Elish, seen in its context, was not even a “creation story” at all.Footnote ³⁶ Rather, the Enuma myth—modified over centuries to justify various political principalities—bears all the marks of an etiological myth of Babylon's political ascendancy in the Levant and the justification of its slave structure.Footnote ³⁷ As such, Enuma’s genre at that time would have been less a meditation on human origins and more about “world” order, closer to what we now call socio-political propaganda. The myth bears more sociological payload than cosmological—or, rather, the two are inextricably woven together. We know this from accounts of Enuma’s annual public recitation in the Akitu festival amidst great political pomp.Footnote ³⁸

If we compare Babylon's deployment of Enuma with the myth's significant modifications by the authors of Genesis, the latter's revelatory meaning is boldfaced. The Babylonian myth is about a society's foundation being laid upon a conflict and a murder—and that the earth is composed of the torn apart body of a victim, Tiamat, slain by Marduk. This was common pattern in archaic creation myths; the story is not about the “universe,” but the foundations of human order, culture, and thought—and their relation to a primordial violence. Parallels in ancient literature abound.Footnote ³⁹ In stark contrast with this common Babylonian political theology, Genesis proclaims that the world's foundations are originally laid in pacific simplicity, without bloodshed or the medium of a victim's body. Violence only enters this origins story much later, as not divine (though the Jahwist seems no pacifist) but as a corruption of the good through human hubris.

Keeping this contextual hermeneutic in mind deepens our appreciation for what Genesis accomplishes in relation to myths about the nature of humanity and royalty. This is especially important with respect to the imago dei concept. That humans are “created in the image of God” is often treated as some divine imputation of a unique rational soul. But, just as we know that Enuma Elish's genre is not merely cosmological but also sociological, so too the “image of God” must not be reduced to a “religious” reading of biology and human constitution. Rather the imago dei is firmly established in the Ancient Near East record as a widely-used religio-political concept, applied most commonly to royalty, kings, and rulers. Jan Assmann writes plainly of the ANE and Egypt: “the ‘image of God’ is a common royal epithet.”Footnote ⁴⁰ And particularly in the 6^th century Babylonian context (around the time and place Genesis was likely redacted), the imago concept was employed in the aristocratic casting of those bearing the divine image, on the one hand, and slaves on the other.Footnote ⁴¹

For Genesis’ writer(s) to adopt this royal epithet and then apply it to all humans in the plenary—not just the royal class—is rightly seen as a courageous and brilliant proclamation. The stamp of divinity dispensed in such gratuity motions toward a more egalitarian understanding of humanity; it is an attack on caste, a critique of the charade of glory that was housed in ancient divine royalty. What is unique about Genesis’ imago dei is not some endowment with reason that distinguishes humanity from the animals but its dissolving the distinctions between humans. Genesis’ morphology of the imago dei concept suggests the “image of God” is not a static definition for theological anthropology, nor is it a claim of the origin point of the “soul” to be cross-checked with paleoanthropology. That reifies the text into some kind of “blueprint” notion of both God and humanity: an overly teleological reading of humanity as intentionally “made” to be the way it currently is.Footnote ⁴² This makes too much out of Genesis’ being the “first” book in the canon, treating it as the book of origins-answers and design. Such a blueprint theology becomes especially dangerous and a distortive lens when superimposed over our analysis of the nature and emergence of homo sapiens. It presumes, a priori, some generic sense of what the dignified human soul is—the mind as reason, extraneously minted by God—and that it was infused into hominins at some point.

Instead, Genesis is rather a polemical, prophetic symbol which makes sense only in relation to its contextual proclamation: it reveals a dangerous truth in the face of imperial oppression, symbolically subverting it. It demythologizes not only politics but the world, making the heavenly bodies not gods and demons but mere “lights.”Footnote ⁴³ In sum, to read Genesis merely as an account of the origins of the cosmos and humanity reduces its prophetic meaning. Instead of a static document of origin-claims, Genesis is more a subversive intervention on trenchant socio-political myths of that time. This is not to reduce Genesis to mere “myth”; to the contrary, its similarity with its contextual myths only illuminates its important difference from them. With such prophetic differences established, theologies of mystical and spiritual valence—as we find in the rabbis, Origen, or Augustine—find their verve only intensified.Footnote ⁴⁴

For me to continue into a mimetic perspective on the soul, I will have to presume this above hermeneutical relationship to Genesis, decentering it as some blueprint with which we must force-fit into harmony with evolutionary theory, as this stretches the text's genre beyond reason. Ratzinger approximated this to an extent in his leaving room for the sciences to offer complementary explications of the process of human becoming. Such an evolutionary and naturalistic theory of the soul's emergence can find significant resources in Girard's mimetic theory.

Mimetic Evolutionary Theory and the Soul

René Girard (d2015) was an interdisciplinary theorist, working in anthropological, literary, psychological, and theological genres. His work, though not without controversy, has enjoyed generous reception, whether in his induction as an “Immortal” into the Académie Française or Michael Serres’ praise that he is “the Darwin of the human sciences.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Engaging in materialistic or naturalist accounts of religion,Footnote ⁴⁶ his Violence and the Sacred was framed as “atheistic” in method.Footnote ⁴⁷ Though his method became quite complexified over time, he maintained throughout his work an explicit commitment to engage in science “devoid of religious and anti-religious assumptions,” to not interrupt anthropological analyses with appeals to divinity—that is, to fill in the gaps of explanation with appeals to mystery.Footnote ⁴⁸ This involved theorizing how religion may not have been originally connatural with the earliest human expressions of transcendence and rationality, but instead a pre-rational social mechanism whose “sole originary purpose” may have been to “prevent the recurrence of reciprocal violence.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Like any scientific theory or chain of hypotheses concerning evolution, Girard's mimetic theory takes as a presupposition the phenomena of random genetic and cultural mutations, and that this has made possible a constant menu in the biosphere for the manifold changes in species. Such changes happen when some genetic or cultural mutation—in conjunction with ecological niche—proves to be adaptive (and, through fitness, nature “selects” these features to survive and grow). But, also, some changes in species can emerge, grow, and abide for no adaptive reason. Some features can become very pronounced, like obscenely ballooned antlers on moose or a peacock's effusive plumage. Such oddities may serve certain adaptive purposes in some species, while for others it can become maladaptive in the long run. And so virtually all species have genetic histories of dead-ends, die-offs of certain feature-variations, prolonged oddities, and so on. Some end up with features whose function is different from their original purpose: like electric eels, whose initial capacities served the purpose of electrical navigation in muddy water, and only later did this serve defense and predation. Such evolutionary principles suggest that one cannot look at species and conclude too much “design”: in its blindness, nature doesn't always “select” what is best, or “build” features for an intentional “purpose.”

Mimetic theory, taking such principles as a given, analyzes mimesis as humanity's outsized feature and a critical factor in the transition from proto-human to human.Footnote ⁵⁰ “Mimesis” refers to the pre-rational or pre-conscious imitation of others. It refers to how we do not merely desire things, but we imitate others’ desire for things. The classic example is how poorly children mask their mimetic desires, grasping at a toy that their sibling just picked up—only because the others’ desire sparked their own.

While we will soon discuss the dangers of mimesis, we must first appreciate its great good: mimesis involves the fundamental opening of a creature to the other.Footnote ⁵¹ It obviously benefits the creature by making them interested in and sensitive to the outside world, psycho-somatically permeable, and not a dense rock. Humanity's elevated levels of mimetic desire is, for Girard,

Because of this opening and permeable character, mimesis refers to how our minds and bodies do not originate our thoughts and desires as subsistent “selves” but are always-already interdividual. We are selves-from-others.

Mimesis is evident in lesser ways among many species, in the joint attention of birds or mammals, present due to its fitness advantages in other-observation, group-movement, and learning. I imagine scenarios as simple as wolves running to a downed deer: even if some wolf does not see what the others are running to, it must be of some value to the other wolves; and so the wolves more mimetically sensitive to the others run anyway and benefit from the carrion feast. Wherever such fitness is enjoyed, one can surmise that it might over time be naturally selected and thereby increase in time, even if in minimal ways comparable to human imitation. (While Girard offers novel layers of theoretical analysis of mimesis, he is by no means the first to identify it as an outstanding feature in human behavior.Footnote ⁵³)

But how did humans become the elaborately mimetic creatures that we are? One can begin to imagine how mimesis may have played a crucial role in the transition from proto-human to human by observing the studies of mimesis and violence in our hominid cousins, chimpanzees.Footnote ⁵⁴ In Mimesis and Science, for example, research from several studies shows how, when a group of chimpanzees reaches a certain number of males, these groups will tend to periodically act very differently. They leave the community in single-file lines, not get distracted, and find a chimp from another community to collectively beat it to death.Footnote ⁵⁵ What seems to be happening here is that the chimps enjoy a certain level of mimesis, owing to the noted fitness advantages. But, their mimetic capacities are also becoming dangerous to the group's cohesion; they are imitating each other too much and thereby escalating conflicts. Their usual pecking orders or “dominance patterns” can solve this to some extent, but the groups with more males are stressing to a breaking point the group's order. If the mimetic faculty continues to grow over time, the concomitant increasing danger could result in the group dying off (and maybe some of them have or will). Or, as we observe, some are habitualizing what was originally a random group killing, channeling their mimetic excesses outward from the group.

To go out as a group and kill in this manner is like a safety valve. Instead of the group dangerously simmering with mimetic attention upon others in the group, potentially boiling over into destructive mobbing, the mimetic attention is instead collectively exteriorized and made safe (with the exception of the one killed). How these semi-ritualized killings came into practice could have been a matter of sheer, random “luck”; and when the group happened to repeat this act or was somehow impelled to (without “thinking” or “planning,” of course), it safeguarded the group's internal cohesion.Footnote ⁵⁶ Such “cultural” mutations must have coincided with the random genetic mutations that favored the mimetic faculty; and when genetic and cultural mutations coincide long enough, there grow habits and instincts.

Risking oversimplification of Girard's mimetic theory, it argues that if you gave these chimps a few more million years, and if they happened to continue channelizing their mimesis, exercising it, and likewise safeguarding its excesses by such habits, you might end up with creatures endowed with extravagantly outsized mimesis and thus something more akin to humans. While Girard did not theorize chimps at length, that example is shorthand for describing his concept of the mimetic “single victim mechanism” and its generative capacities in ushering proto-humans over the threshold into humanity. He describes this as a generative feedback loop because the mimetic problem is also its mimetic solution.Footnote ⁵⁷ This doubly useful feature suggests that proto-humans enjoyed increases in mimetic desire (stemming largely from its benefits in fitness), which in turn abetted mimetic conflict, which also—if the group stumbled upon such a pattern—made possible the increased mimetic attention upon a single victim. The latter of which can bring a relatively pacific end to mimetic violence in a way that the old dominance patterns never could. That is, the mimetic solution grows along with the mimetic problem: the very mimesis that abets violent chaos is precisely the mimesis that can cohere collective scapegoating, bringing peace to the rescue. As such, the scapegoat mechanism is a group fitness machine, abetting progressive increases in mimesis in the proto-human.Footnote ⁵⁸ The chaos of group violence and the apparent breakdowns of group order are thus ultimately not mere exceptions; they are precisely part of humanity's generative principles. There is no antinomy in human evolution between order and chaos, regularity and upheaval, cooperation and conflict, ritual and violence; the two are both aspects of humanity's adaptive mechanisms. If this mechanism is like a safety valve, the flow aperture of mimetic capacity grows the more it is practiced. In sum, “the scapegoat mechanism can be thought of as a source of ‘good’ biological and cultural mutations…Sacrificial resolution, which separates mankind from the other animals, was a crucial response to errors and gaps in the transcription and expansion of dominance patterns.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Girard's hypothesis is that this unconscious, serendipitous, evolving, and order-producing mechanism, over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, helped channel, protect, and thus catapult human mimetic-intelligence and brain size into its current extreme disproportion compared with other species.Footnote ⁶⁰ This was a catalyst in ballooning our craniums to three times beyond what a normal evolutionary pattern would have predicted.Footnote ⁶¹ Our extravagant capacity for mimetic joint-attention, inseparable from our capacity for cooperative scapegoating and the apparent ubiquity of sacrifice in human culture, is humanity's version of a peacock's plumage. The overall hypothesis is summarized here:

We can get at understanding how this hypothesis relates to the evolution of “the human soul” by describing some basic anthropological phenomena here.

“Taboos” or prohibitions in this theory are the most basic building blocks in human culture and are antecedent to “rationality.” Taboos are whatever safeguarded proto-human groups from excessive imitation, restraining anything that resembles the disorder, crisis, and violence. Taboos are mimetic in that they involve careful other-attention; but they also suppress acquisitive mimesis, stopping actions which otherwise lead to the contagious dangers of escalation. Taboos also involve differentiation and stratification, damming up any propensity toward mimetic undifferentiation—the ways in which rivals become mirrors of one another. Many “primitive” taboos which appear to us today as irrational—whether in the violence toward outsiders one finds in uncontacted tribes like the Sentinelese or in the killing of twins—aren't mere “superstition” in origin. That is too cognitive. Rather, they suppress danger. Only in time do taboos get dressed up with “rational” trappings, like that certain acts/objects are “contaminating” or “polluting.”Footnote ⁶³ Though seemingly superstitious, taboos stem from a fitness value.

“Rituals”—and most conspicuously sacrificial ones—are attempts to repeat the cathartic effect of an originally spontaneous murder through reenacting a mini-crisis and resolution. Ritual's “function is to perpetuate or renew the effects of this mechanism; that is, to keep violence outside the community.”Footnote ⁶⁴ “Sacrifice” is the repetition of the original group-attention and violence on a replacement. If archaic religious institutions contain violence, it is because they not only entail but also restrain the violence of disorder.Footnote ⁶⁵ Taboos and rituals are basically what one must do and not do to protect the community. This protection is even more basic to human evolution than verbalized words, myths, and gods.Footnote ⁶⁶ In this sense, religion in its originary forms was not so much an expression of the intellect, nor is it the early attempts at explaining first causes; rather, it preceded and helped domesticate human intellection.Footnote ⁶⁷

“Myths” in this theory are the distorted remembering of the group's relationship to its violence, imputing guilt to the killed victim and innocence to the lynching group. Less about intentional, rational construction, myths at their foundation are about the experience of danger, accusation, and unanimity surrounding a group's expulsion. Myths in this sense would have begun even before language: they are how the group relates to itself and its violence.Footnote ⁶⁸ “Myth is primarily the accusation of the victim presented as guilty.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Myths, then, are both about forgetting and remembering: they attach to the dangerous memory of violence and salvation through misremembering that history.

The shared components that Girard often finds at the basis of archaic myths are: “(1) a crisis of undifferentiation (which corresponds to the orgiastic elements in rituals); (2) a victimary sign that singles out a villain; (3) an expulsion/killing of this villain (which is also represented as a hero because he/she eventually saves the community),” followed by the imposition of taboos and the offering of sacrifices.Footnote ⁷⁰ The logical inconsistencies apparent in so many myths, in spite of their diversity across cultures, Girard writes, “points to the presence of a common cause of logical distortion at the threshold of human culture. I believe this cause is the original founding murder, and myths do their best—unconsciously at first, and then more consciously—to erase the traces of scapegoating.”Footnote ⁷¹ Some myths have existed for so long and been cleaned up for so many generations, that the original violence may be entirely washed out—expressing a story almost unrecognizable to the original event. For example, a Tikarau myth that evidently involved a person being driven off a cliff by a mob was refracted as the man turning into a flying god—like an eagle. One can easily imagine how, thereafter, the eagle myth could take on infinite variations of mythic expressions, devoid of any explicit reference to the man thrown from the cliff.Footnote ⁷²

When we can today see the obviously irrational scapegoating in an old story and see it as false—like in witch hunts or Jews poisoning medieval wells—we are encountering a disruption of the originary “fitness” of mythic unanimity. The group's violence would normally be taboo in group life; but applied in exceptions and misconstrued in memory, myth abets unanimous attention to the group's “necessary” violence. The mythologization of unanimous violence became baked into human culture as a survival adaptation. “Archaic religions were based on a complete absence of criticism regarding this unanimity.”Footnote ⁷³ For Girard, mythical unity that obscures the group's relation to victims is the survival value of “mythology”—muthos from the root mu, “to close” or “to keep secret.”Footnote ⁷⁴ In sum, misapprehension, as mediated by myths regarding victimage, safeguarded the sacrificial mechanism and human evolution.

French psychologist Jean-Michel Oughourlian describes this mis-cognition in psychological terms, referring to how our mimetic desire entails something of a perpetual bent-ness toward forgetfulness. Instead of recognizing the others’ role in the genesis of my desire, we self-deceive and see ourselves as “original. We insist we are self-subsisting. In effect, “we try to expel the ‘other’ who is our rival. Our ‘I’ is in fact built on that expulsion.”Footnote ⁷⁵ This self-mythologizing of our mimetic brain, Oughourlian writes, is at the root of human psychoses and neuroses. But, even more, insofar as misapprehension abetted our hominization through the scapegoating mechanism, mimetic theory suggests that this blind spot to our “expulsions” is constitutive of common human consciousness. James Alison writes that the “unknowingness” of our mimetic desire “is what permits consciousness. It is not a mysterious, subjective inner reality, but an unknowing of the real state of affairs that have constituted the consciousness.”Footnote ⁷⁶

By “gods” Girard means the transcendentalized victim of group murder.Footnote ⁷⁷ As mysterious creatures who are cause and solution to a group's crisis, the victim represents “a sacred force that is believed to be outside the community and is powerful enough to punish as well as to protect it…the victim is always seen as the god or replaces it, since this victim brings back peace with his or her death.”Footnote ⁷⁸ As is often the case with group killings, a victim of the violence is often demonized—a projection of a group's problems, chaos, or social crisis.Footnote ⁷⁹ But the victim is also retrospectively worshipped, divinized for how their death “solved” the crisis.Footnote ⁸⁰ The “instinctual bond” forged in group violence and its resolution involves an intense, novel experience for proto-humanity: group chaos suddenly stilled, with the victim as somehow related to this event. This bequeaths to us the mysterium tremendum et fascinas, the sense of blessing and curse that surrounds “the sacred,” homologous with the intensely contrastive experience between violence and peace. “The divinization of this victim is possibly tied to this emotion and cognitive event.”Footnote ⁸¹

Such intense experiences and their referent in a victim, Girard argues, slowly birthed in the early human mind the capacity for a sort of transcendence, a perceived “externality”Footnote ⁸²: “even though the mechanism is totally endogenous, it is perceived as something external.”Footnote ⁸³ Even though it was the group's mimetic violence that brought about its cohesion, the participants do not think themselves as “responsible for their reconciliation, and they attribute it to its only possible cause in the context of their total experience, the scapegoat.”Footnote ⁸⁴ These victims become “transcendent” in that they somehow continue to protect and save the group even in their absence, insofar as the group imitates their own memory: repeat the originary murder in ritual and prohibit that which portends danger.Footnote ⁸⁵ This is why the gods demand sacrifice: nature selected out those who failed to do so: the group really will perish under the weight of mimesis if they do not sacrifice. Ritual sacrifice is “redoing what the gods have done to save us.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Numerous creation myths—not only Enuma Elish—entail gods who were killed and dismembered, perhaps cannibalized, to create the world through their body parts. Girard suggests reading these as distorted memories of actual events. The victims’ bodies are divinized as the source of their tribe, nation, land, and culture because, in a sense, their lynching truly did found and cohere the group order. That is, religion at this originary threshold ultimately worships the victim. “All gods begin first of all by dying.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Michael Serres resonates with Girard in theorizing that, as early human groups enacted and became shaped by its prohibitions and rituals, this shaped our unique “subjectivity,” or the consciousness of the individual subject. This is evident in the numerous rites of passage that force the neophyte into the group's social consciousness. The inductee is put into the position of the victim, brought into a near death crisis, or even sometimes killed:

In all, we have here a theory of “religion,” which ushers humanity over a threshold into a new form of social consciousness—what we might call a new stage of the human “soul.” Of the varieties of rituals, taboos, myths, and gods, Girard synthesizes their protective role in containing human violence in our evolution.

On the Prerational Character of This Dynamic

From our perspective today, this primitive transcendence seems “distorted,” or superstitious consciousness.Footnote ⁹⁰ But, to be clear, this is not “distorted” in the order of evolution; for it is not as if we are comparing it to some previously clear consciousness. Rather, this process births humanity's unique form of consciousness. In this theory “the sacred” or divinity is not “applied” to the victim at the threshold of hominization, as if it already existed as a concept of transcendence in the mind. Rather, the sacred is born through this mimetic process. The sacred is not some pure, pre-existing concept imputed from some exogenous deity. Rather, it is “the sum of human assumptions resulting from collective transferences focused on a reconciliatory victim at the conclusion of a mimetic crisis.”Footnote ⁹¹ This is not an “anti-religious” idea so much as it is simply a hypothesis, devoid of any appeals to pre-conceived divine forces, on how human consciousness could have emerged through a particular mechanism.

In other words, “religion” and the experience of the sacred, in this theory, is originally not so much about the rational mind—somehow already formed—reaching out in the quest for meaning, and then creating rituals to answer that rational thought. This wrongly inserts cogitation before religion, as some source of religion.Footnote ⁹² Rather, the mimetic victimage-mechanism constructs humanity into its current cognitive form, not the other way around. Victimage didn't distort previously lucid human cognition but helped create it. Put simply, mimetic theory puts religion before cognition. It places the mimetic forge of religion “upstream” from our rationality and language, thereby shaping everything downstream from it.Footnote ⁹³ Or, as Alison writes: “human language is the result of the meaning which develops around the victim.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Prior to being shaped through this victimage-mechanism, proto-humans surely had some mimetic rituals for conduct, as apes do with greetings. But the threshold into our unique form of cognition in this theory, happens through this intense violence/peace contrast experienced in reference to the group's victim.Footnote ⁹⁵

Cultural anthropologist Eric Gans was a critic of Girard on this point. While agreeing with elements of his mimetic theory, he prefers to locate cognition and language as prior to the victimage-mechanism. Gans writes,

This bears some semblance to the soul-theory of Austriaco, who suggests that language and abstract thinking are the crucial threshold dynamic in hominization. For him, language is treated as an unambiguously “good” faculty, a seedbed for abstract thought, designated as present in some supposed first soul—and for which violence would be its corruption, I presume. While focusing on a specific phenomenon like language is preferable to the imputed “soul” of Kemp, Austriaco does not ask how or why this language emerged—or in reference to what index. What are the mechanics behind language emergence?

Girard retorts that the prerational “religion” of the victim-mechanism precedes and facilitates language emergence. There could be no linguistic “diversion” upon the significance of a victim without any prior experience of it—i.e. actual experience of crisis, danger, and resolution. Girard writes, “Gans presupposes a higher form of rationality that can only follow after a crucial event…there must already be a non-linguistic solution to the problem of violence, which inevitably is a religious solution.”Footnote ⁹⁷ By “religion” he again means a prerational social mechanism in human evolution, wherein genetic and cultural mutations are naturally selected in their coevolving around a mimetic-victimage dynamic. Simply, the sacred showed up in proto-humanity before language and rationality, intimately related to the survival fitness and dangers of these groups. Mimetic theory can be thus largely cataloged—amidst a variety of competing accounts of hominization—among those for whom religion was fundamental to human evolution in its earliest stages, indeed part of the threshold into the human.Footnote ⁹⁸ Contrast this with the old Neolithic and Marxian view (or “cognitive theories of religion”), that religion is an invention of a certain rationality, after humans settled and had the leisure to ponder nature's causes—wherein religion is a superstitious “explanation” for the world, a proto-failed-science.Footnote ⁹⁹ To the contrary, Merlin Donald coheres with Girard's approach when he writes, “the possibility must be entertained that the primary human adaptation wasn't language qua language, but rather integrative, initially mythical thought. Modern humans developed language in response to pressure to improve their conceptual apparatus, not vice versa.”Footnote ⁰¹⁰⁰

Homo sapiens may have made huge language strides within the last 50kya; but Girard pans out to see such advances within a much larger formative context, dating back to at least homo habilis 1.8mya: of protecting and directing the group in relation to its mimetic excesses and violence. By that time, the violence-and-mimesis mechanism would have had to be at least in some very rough form, long before the homo sapiens emergence 200kya. The fact that proto-humans’ incisors had already begun receding very long ago corresponds with the fact that at least around 2mya hominins had taken a big leap in terms of being a danger to themselves, no longer hunting with dentition but with rocks. This must have opened up a phase of both opportunity and danger that could gave extinguished large parts of the species if not safely channeled. And maybe many of them did die off, if they did not serendipitously stumble into this mimetic-victimage cycle with sufficient effect.Footnote ⁰¹⁰¹ In any case, such formative religious elements as described in this hypothesis are placed long before speech or analytic rationality.

To clarify this theory's location within some methodological discourses, mimetic theory avoids some of the excesses of “essentialism” in that it admits that the distinguishing feature of humans, its mimesis, is not solely unique to humans. Mimesis is indeed a feature that is naturalistically explainable within both homo sapiens and other creatures; and yet it also theorizes why and how it is so extremely pronounced in the human species. Mimetic theory likewise doesn't fall into the trap of an evasive “anti-essentialism” that refuses to see any unique, distinguishing properties in humans—lest theory betray superstitious theological bias. No, it detects a rapid accelerant, a leap in human evolution. But it does not simplistically attribute this to some mysterious, univocally good, exogenous miracle, cut off other evolutionary creatures. As we will note below, it takes seriously how humanity's generative principles may be quite “fallen.” In all, by avoiding some excesses in essentialism and anti-essentialism, mimetic theory positions itself in what appears to me as excellent scientific company. I refer not only to “Girardian” scientists,Footnote ⁰¹⁰² but conventional, leading anthropologists with the growing appreciation of humanity's unique “other-centeredness.” One such testament comes from the journal Evolutionary Anthropology’s compilation of responses from numerous anthropologists who were asked, “what makes us human?” Calcagno and Fuentes, editors of this compilation, synthesize its many authors with their conclusion that,

In other words, a scientific consensus is emerging that other-attention—which birthed all our other cultural features—is indeed a distinguishing feature of humanity. There are many aspects of mimetic theory which should remain as critically sifted hypotheses, or rough heuristic suggestions for interpreting data. And the idea need not be treated as exclusivist—as if it were somehow incompatible with other ideas, like that global cooling three million years ago helped catalyze major changes in the Homo genus.Footnote ⁰¹⁰⁴ But, scientific caution should not restrain us from appreciating one of its overarching accomplishments. It radically reconceives our relationship to religion: it has placed religion before human consciousness. And it offers a coherent dynamic for understanding such a relationship.

The Sacred and Our First Dim, Stammering Thou

How can we relate this theory more explicitly to the question of the immediate creation of the soul and the theological preferences for more clear thresholds and “firsts”? Girard's theory certainly thinks in gradations and slow progressions, conceding no “absolute beginning” in human evolution.Footnote ⁰¹⁰⁵ Contrasted with overly strict notions of an immediately created soul, the first theorized signs of human “consciousness” and “the human soul” in this theory are dilated to a very wide time frame. This is empirically warranted, in light of how absolutely diffused our paleoanthropological record has become in only the last 20 or so years—with strong evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthals, Denisovans, so on. And yet, mimetic theory still roughly conceives of “firsts,” or “jumps” in hominization. Wherever the first theorized events of mimetic victimage and its repetition struck, these can be viewed as some “beginning, signifying the passage from nonhuman to human, as well as the relative beginning for the societies in question.”Footnote ⁰¹⁰⁶

As for what might be regarded as a “first human symbol,” something that distinguishes us from the animals, a first “index” to which all other things can be referencedFootnote ⁰¹⁰⁷—Girard hypothesized the body of a “first” replacement victim, beaten or killed by the group. Such a victim “is no longer presumed responsible for the crisis, but it is both a real new victim that has to be killed and a symbol of the proto-event; it is the first symbolic sign ever invented by these hominids. It is the first moment in which something stands for something else.”Footnote ⁰¹⁰⁸ Girard and Alison deem such a victim-symbol, the cadaver, as a first object of noninstinctual attention. Continued relation to this new sign over numerous generations helped “produce properly human consciousness, but the constitution of that consciousness is linked to the victim and to the creation of the sacred that is strictly simultaneous with the development of human culture.”Footnote ⁰¹⁰⁹

Similarly, to imagine a “first” human cultural gesture, Girard again draws us to theorize the scene of a group-killing. Having slain the victim and attained resolution, one member begins to grab toward the victim, violating what is becoming a mimetic group habit: the first “gesture” is someone else holding back such an acquisitive grasp, defending the ritual and the peace just won.Footnote ⁰¹¹⁰ This is the birth of cultural taboo as contrasted with instinctual dominance patterns, in that it now has a new, potent symbolic referent. Similarly, a first symbolic monument of human culture would be something like the tomb, or a cairn of stones upon a stoned victim. “The idea of the tomb does not come from the sacred; it may well be the first and essential manifestation of the sacred.”Footnote ⁰¹¹¹

While such “firsts” have a theoretical place in proto-humanity's escalating mimetic capacity, we need not in any way think about this pattern immediately establishing itself as deeply ingrained instinct. A mimetic killing may have happened in some group, making a curious but ephemeral impression, and was not thereafter repeated; or, the violence/peace contrast could have been experienced only moderately in another skirmish (perhaps not resulting in a completed killing), and such a branch may have then extinguished itself under its own weight of mimesis.Footnote ⁰¹¹² At the same time, this transition indeed involves concrete moments of genetic mutation—like a DNA copy at some point must have involved an actual mutation that clicked up the mimetic faculty by a bit. Likewise, there must have been real, first cultural mutations, like a spontaneous group murder that, because of contingent factors like the group configuration, or the topography and fauna near the event, leaving a special impression on the group that increased the chances of the experience “sticking” and the group repeating that event. Whatever the case, what is at stake here is not the extraneous imputation of a fully intact and rational “soul” but a pre-cognitive impulse that misrecognizes its relation to others, itself, and the divine Thou. And it is not unreasonable to think that, at some point, this “started.”

In Ratzinger's theological terms, if there is a first “Thou” uttered at this threshold of hominization, it is indeed very “dim,” to be modest: its “Thou” is the victim, symbolizing group's projected, exteriorized violence. This notion of the originary divine seems more like a shadow-opposite, a photographic negative, of a God who is Love. The dim view of the Thou is even satanic, insofar as the archaic sacred was unstable and divided against itself, “sacrificing” the one for the many.Footnote ⁰¹¹³ It involved humanity concealing “from himself the human origin of his own violence, by attributing it to the gods.”Footnote ⁰¹¹⁴ The soul's emergence is, simply, less pleasing here. The “divine” Thou here is ambivalent, fascinating, partly feared, partly evil, often to be repelled and kept outside the community.Footnote ⁰¹¹⁵

If one is compelled to hold to the idea that the human soul emerges with the first dim utterance of a “Thou,” it would seem that one must also hold that such an utterance is not so much an expression of rational freedom and “moral reason,” but the mimetic containment of violence and its misrecognition of the victim. This suggests our usual connotations of what our soul is—our social consciousness—is mistaken: its birth, as James Alison writes, “is simultaneous not with the revelation of something, but with its occultation.”Footnote ⁰¹¹⁶ This is a radicalization of the idea of original sin and an intervention on the idea of humans as most distinct from the animals in our elevated “freedom” and self-determination. Rather, this asserts that the birth of humanity's unique consciousness, deeply linked with our earliest religion-cultures, coincides with distortive mis-remembering of our violence and relation to victims.Footnote ⁰¹¹⁷ Culture was not merely an enlightenment but also a darkening. Alison elaborates:

Psychologically, this firmly rejects Enlightenment forms of the autonomous self, the “I think therefore I am.” It suggests instead that the construction of our consciousness stems from “mechanisms of desire long anterior to it, of which it is not itself aware.” What grounds and makes possible our particular form of awareness has been, for most of our human history, not rationally perceivable to ourselves. Insofar as such early consciousness could have involved any vision of our divine origin, our first “Thou” is a dim vision of the transcendent victim—as many ancient myths suggest—through whom the world was made.

Concluding Theological Remarks

While some theologians may regard this theory as having too naturalistic a view of the soul, I see it as paving the way for a profound appreciation for the meaning of Christianity's core symbol: the divine, innocent, and forgiving victim, who illuminates from within the blind spot of our consciousness. “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” The more deeply we penetrate to the originary blind spots of our odd souls, the more deeply we see the divine grace revealing our radical myopia, the penetrating corruption of sin in both our body and consciousness. Theology, in this key, thus becomes party not to pre-fabricated idealist anthropologies but to the work of uncovering our soul's contingent, evolutionary composition. Perfectly complementary with a contextualized reading of Genesis’ imago dei, this approach involves a healthy demystification of the soul, just as Genesis demystified the cosmos. With a deepened appreciation of our sin and contingency comes an even greater appreciation of grace for the error we have been lodged in (Rom 5:21).

While the victimage mechanism can be seen as an originary distortion of the human species, in its positive aspect it aided and abetted our growth in consciousness. Our cognitive transcendence emerged along with a protective misapprehension. To recognize this error, Girard added, is the nature of Christian conversion and repentance. Mimetic theory highlights how the Bible's reorientation toward victimage—and every representation of a crucifix, if we do not sanitize its ugliness—invites us back to our origins to “look once again at constitutive acts of transference so as to discredit and annul them—so as to contradict and demystify the myths.”Footnote ⁰¹¹⁹ This is part of our maturation from the corrupt, human-generated sacred to “the Divine, the Holy.”Footnote ⁰¹²⁰ This new face of God is not “sacred,” for it contains no bivalence, no trace of curse and violence mixed with its blessing. It is “holy” in that it is entirely unlike anything we can imagine, entirely un-graspable by our current form of consciousness.Footnote ⁰¹²¹ This God is “light in whom there is no darkness.” To suggest that the emergence of the sacred is connatural with the emergence of our distorted consciousness involves a deepened appreciation for the apophatic negation of the very idea of “God” in Christian orthodoxy. As James Alison writes, citing the Fourth Lateran council's apophasis, the divine Thou revealed in Christ speaks only by analogy through the word “God.” Compared with the originary distortions of divinity, the revealed God “is much more unlike a ‘god’ than it is like it. Or if you like, the word ‘god’ is a deeply misleading starting place for us with which to begin to talk about God, but the one we have which is least inadequate.”Footnote ⁰¹²²

From the view of Christian dogmatic symbols, this preconscious distortion of the divine and its occlusion of truth of the victim is not entirely “wrong.” For our primitive ancestors, the lie was partly “true” in an odd way: victim-gods indeed “created” early humanity in a sense. And it is not as if Christianity escapes entirely from this pattern, with some new neutral foundation that is alien to violence and sacrifice. No, it too utters its “Thou” to the divine victim upon whom it is founded. With John's Logos revealing God's Son having been unwittingly slain, we see a continuity and discontinuity with the ancient creation-gods who found a new world through their lynching. The Church proclaims the coming into being of a new order and creation through Christ's body and death, much like archaic religions brought forth the world through a god's body and death.Footnote ⁰¹²³ Origen and Chrysostum, for example, among others, saw as much when commenting on the Church and its sacraments flowing from the side of Christ.Footnote ⁰¹²⁴ Christ as the divine victim—through whom all things were made—is both totally like, and yet entirely opposite of, the world flowing from the body of the murdered Tiamat.

As for a brief word on “original sin”, Girard regarded it as “the bad use of mimesis, and the mimetic mechanism is the actual consequence of this use at the collective level.”Footnote ⁰¹²⁵ Insofar as mimetic theory is an analysis of human reproduction and transmission of culture, it offers sound reasons to not minimize the doctrine of original sin, as being somehow superstitious or outdated. Rather, it seems perfectly reasonable, even liberating, to theorize human consciousness as emerging, and continuing to emerge, through a pattern we have only later come to see as erroneous. Our species has grown amidst an always-preceding-us pattern that is fundamentally distorted and that continues to distort us as we pass this on biologically and culturally. This reframes the doctrine, as Alison writes, from an accusatory genre to a descriptive and forgiving one. As such, original sin is not “an exercise in culpabilization, not a seeking to attribute some foundational guilt, but a parting glance at the drastic nature and the futility of a condition out of which we are being empowered to move.”Footnote ⁰¹²⁶ That is, “original sin was discovered as it became possible to leave it.”Footnote ⁰¹²⁷

Thus, there is little to be decried as pessimistic or “outdated,” for example, in Aquinas’ teaching that humanity lives in a state of “suffering from difficulty in distinguishing right from wrong, disposition to injustice, weakness in the face of difficult goods, and concupiscence.”Footnote ⁰¹²⁸ Or that, “first a person infected nature, and thereafter nature infected the person.”Footnote ⁰¹²⁹ Or, it is entirely reasonable to say, as Rahner put it, we have evolved amidst a ruined situation that always “precedes the personal decision of those that come afterward.”Footnote ⁰¹³⁰ Thomas Merton even saw the doctrine quite positively:

Compared with the idea of a human born as a pristine tabula rasa, the mimetic scapegoating theory and its implications for the doctrine of original sin appear to me as more biologically subtle, more attuned to ecological interconnectedness and the messiness of epigenetics. Mimetic theory even resonates with the Catholic doctrinal standard that original sin should be seen as a disease that is not merely transmitted by external cultural imitation, but also biological inheritance. Mimetic theory—with the principles of socio-biology on its side—clearly argues both.Footnote ⁰¹³² The human born as tabula rasa, born as pure without reference to family genetic history, deep cultural patterns, parental diet, environment, stress, histories of addiction, broken relationships, random genetic mutations, without particular taboos and rituals engraved on every artifact of body and culture, born as entirely without some instincts that are contingently constructed: this is a rosy, mythological view of humanity, against which original sin appears realist and anticipating the evolutionary view.

Note that this is not at all a theory centered on “aggression” or “selfishness.” It is a theory about the good but dangerous byproducts of being radically other-centered. This is precisely a theory centered not on selfishness or aggression but mimesis taking on a certain form through the victimage mechanism, in a particular feedback pattern, in human evolution. The theory centers on an otherwise “good” quality like mimesis and its ambivalent effects, and not simply victimage. As such, it does not reduce hominization to univocally “bad” and sinful structures.Footnote ⁰¹³³ Original sin here does not simply mean, as John Haught defined it, “the culturally and environmentally inherited deposit of humanity's violence and injustice that burdens and threatens to corrupt each of us born into this world.”Footnote ⁰¹³⁴ Mimetic theory—centered on a good which became channeled through a bad pattern—is more complex. The “bad” injustices in the “sins” of scapegoating, along with our mythological lies about them, generated extreme benefits in human evolution while holding back violence.

Just as mimetic theory is not centered on aggression, so too original sin need not mean “original selfishness.” Rather, this theory suggests a radically ambivalent notion of attention and consciousness—not the simplistic choice between Hobbesian selfishness and Rousseauian cooperation.Footnote ⁰¹³⁵ Mimesis has ambivalently endowed humans with our current modicum of consciousness and our deeply inter-related selves, while making us adept gossipers, lynchers, and Auschwitz-ers, with a conspicuous blind spot for seeing this in ourselves. The solution to such darkness is not to counter-narrate our origins with optimistic emphases on innate kindness, reciprocity, and “cooperation.” For scapegoating is a supremely cooperative endeavor. Mimetic theory involves the more challenging thought, that our strength is also our weakness.

At the same time, it is hard to make mimetic theory fit with some theological versions of a temporal priority of “original justice” in proto-humanity or a “Fall” from purity.Footnote ⁰¹³⁶ Or, if there is any sense of a Fall here, it is more like a falling-into-humanity. At whatever distant time proto-humans were not ensnared in such “original sin,” I suppose one can say they were indeed innocent, but just as a cow is innocent: they weren't human. Just as Ratzinger did not force a vision of a perfect early humanity—seeing in Genesis a narrative of “humans who are not yet themselves”—Schoonenberg, Rahner, and Fitzmeyer agree we need not posit “a higher form of humanity at the wrong end of man's evolution.”Footnote ⁰¹³⁷ There is no reason we cannot hold to the idea, as Alison does, that “That which was chronologically original (and seemed to us to be simply natural) is discovered to be logically secondary to an anterior self-giving and creative desire…Our chronologically original state is a distortion of our ontologically original state.”Footnote ⁰¹³⁸ In our acquisitive grasping (to call Philippians 2 to mind) we have failed to receive, since the foundation of humanity, the gift of our interdividual mode of being, the divine Thou's primordial gratuity.Footnote ⁰¹³⁹

In sum, the theory I've outlined argues our consciousness, and more broadly the human “soul,” emerged through the mimetic victimage mechanism. As our original sin, it is also the felix culpa that generated us. Mimetic theory offers a cogent paradigm by which to move beyond the theological reservations about humanity as generated randomly or through error; it supplies a massive opportunity for a theological renovation sensitive to the evolutionary idiom. Though it suggests that the “error” of the serendipitous-turned-ritualzed scapegoat mechanism served human fitness, it also paves a way for imagining how it didn't have to be that way. It begins to see how, in the forges of a distorted vision of the sacred, our consciousness took on its particular form and brought us to a place to where, from the perspective of radical forgiveness of the divine victim, we can look back on our hominization as riddled with error and yet the chain of faults that generated us. Even more, it is the path by which the image of God was revealed anew to us: “the image of God is the human victim…Access to God is available not only within the particular racial or cultural group that made the discovery possible, but is universally true wherever the human ‘self’ is formed by victimization, at individual and group level. That means everywhere.”Footnote ⁰¹⁴⁰ If so, the doctrines of our souls and original sin symbolize a deep mine of anthropological truth. And from deep in this mine, where we glimpse at our origins, I think we will hear others digging in from another direction—from anthropological science—arriving at a shared conviction.