Is there a way of talking about our human world today that does not descend rapidly into apocalyptic nightmare, or, alternatively, escape into a religious realm with the promise of a heavenly otherworld to be enjoyed after all this is over?

This question struck me forcibly at a recent conference in Paris that came together on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of René Girard. Girard is famous for discovering human mimesis, the insight that people copy each other preconsciously, and especially in the area of desire. When we understand this, we easily see how wars arise and escalate, and at the conference this was underlined. Just like rival individuals, each political power imitates the other in their desire, their demands, and the fury of their military response. Add the fact that each warring party has nukes and we’re on the very brink of apocalypse. Or, what is called “apocalypse.”

The problem is that the biblical book that gives us this term (the last book of the bible) actually means by it “revelation,” a drawing back of the veil. And part of the revelation (the apocalypse)—along with the violence—is the nonviolent Lamb, a figure which presides over the whole book and in the end gains final wonderful victory on earth.

How does this happen? Is it purely supernatural? Some form of scriptural magic? (In which case, open to serious doubt as a fanciful fairy story.) Or, is there some kind of real and rooted human process than can and will bring this end about?

When people come together at a conference like the one in Paris there are a lot of thoughts and ideas whirling around, and things can often be seen in startling new ways. One of Girard’s original concepts was what he called the “interdividual,” meaning that human beings are not solitary psyches, but actually an open-ended system of interaction and agency with others. A psychologist working with these ideas came up with the happy expression “the self between.” The self is not a godlike pure consciousness, but a mutual product together with others with whom they are in relation. Humanity is always a dense interwoven system of possible and actual connections with others. This “self between” was mentioned at the conference, and it implies that any of us, any “self,” will always and necessarily be in constant interchange with others to achieve our very identity and being in the world.

Another of the concepts at the conference came from Benoit Chantre, the most important of Girard’s collaborators in the final period of his career. Chantre suggested to Girard the idea of “intimate mediation,” something which Girard accepted. This needs a bit of explanation. An original distinction made by Girard was between what he called “external” and “internal” mediation. Essentially this means we all choose models in our lives. A model that truly has our admiration, respect, and honor exercises “external mediation.” Such a model shows us elements of conduct and behavior that we seek to copy, but we never enter into competition with that model. “Internal mediation,” on the other hand, refers to a model which becomes our rival, one whose actual way of being in the world we want to possess and have for ourselves. Bob Dylan perhaps said it best: “You’re gonna have to serve somebody . . . it may be the devil, it may be the Lord . . .” In Girardian terms “the Lord” would be somebody you truly honor, while “the devil” is the rival who makes your life hell.

What Chantre added is really dramatic. He points to a third way, a mediation that goes in another direction altogether, not to something outside and above ourselves which keeps order, nor to something inside ourselves which torments us and creates disorder. Rather, there is something that enters into our selves, in the very same “between” space that the rival enters, but with an entirely different dynamic and outcome. Chantre does not explain this in great detail, but he does say explicitly and precisely that the “intimate mediator” is not our rival.

How does this work? The thought that I added at the conference was that intimate mediation was necessarily nonviolent. It cannot enter into our “selves” in the same place as “internal mediation” and not create rivalry unless it is essentially nonviolent. This would then be close to Dylan’s poetic and biblical thought of “the Lord.” In a world of interior mediation (inside the self) every other model can provoke rivalry. Only the supremely nonviolent, nonresisting Lamb can exercise mediation in the self and not provoke us to retaliate.

But this should not at all be understood in a dogmatic religious sense. It is saying something quite different from “everyone should be a Christian.” First, if interdividual psychology is correct then it means that there is always this “space between” human beings. It is a space that has been steadily growing in power in the romantic ages, until now when just about everyone on the planet is involved in some kind of internal relationship. But, at the same time, the figure of the nonresisting Christ has inspired countless imitators, from Stephen of the New Testament, through to Gandhi, Bonhoeffer, MLK Jr, Romero, Mandela, Edith Stein, Rajani Thiranagama etc. These are heroic, boundary figures, but what they represent is a progression of the “space between” to a progressively new depth and human agency. Here people are prepared to give everything without retaliatory violence, in order to bring life for others. All of them relate to this space for personal reasons, with different kinds of stories and probably different levels of clarity. But what is consistent is the opening up of this space, such that it deserves its own name. Because it represents a depth of giving, a surrender to a sea without bottom where the very water is giving for the sake of others, it might be called “the deep between.”

My argument is that this is a real space, one that stands as radical alternative to mimetic rivalry, violence, and war. Many people don’t recognize it, possibly thinking it a kind of idiocy, or, at best, a religious dream. But the whole Girardian scientific logic, through psychologists like Oughourlian, and astute companions and commentators like Chantres, leads necessarily to this. It is in fact a matter of a general human structure, hidden to the light that looks only at rivalry and violence, but just as real as those things, and even more so. It lacks guns, tanks, bombs, planes, generals, and tyrants. But, nevertheless, it leaves an actual and powerful trace in that world. MLK Jr leaves a trace. Edith Stein leaves a trace. And the trace creates further traces, which are signs and structures that enable peace to flourish. Peace and disarmament treaties, commissions on truth and reconciliation, peace activists, artists and artisans, campaigners for the environment and for the ethical treatment of animals, all these things are traces of the deep between. It is vital to bring this human space to prominence, because unless this space is effective and spoken about, the discourse of war and escalation appears inevitable. (Girard’s own word is “implacable.”) On the contrary, there is no apocalyptic doom, because there is an actual alternative human space of nonviolence and peace which is practically effective in human affairs. It seems vital to continue to raise this space to public discourse in order that it might challenge the fatalism of the so-called apocalypse.

A particularly telling example of ”the deep between” I might suggest is the teaching and conduct of a Turkish Islamic leader by the name of Fetullah Gulen. In the nineteen seventies this person founded a movement called “Hizmet” (service) which now comprises several million followers. They work across the world in hospitals, schools, aid projects, media outlets, but they have been subjected to severe persecution in their native Turkey, falsely labelled “terrorists” by a dictatorial regime needing a convenient scapegoat. Gulen is himself in exile in the U.S., constantly under threat from political forces both in Turkey and the U.S. But he consistently teaches nonviolence to his followers. His words that I give below serve to demonstrate that the human space I am talking about does not belong to the religion of Christianity but is arising organically in the world as a transformed way of being human on the planet. Certain spiritual leaders may see it more clearly because they are sensitive to the transformative impact of revelation. But, once again, that does not remove it from the human. On the contrary, this revelation is radically about being human. The following words belong to a discourse that rises up in our time as a tide of human meaning alternative to the violent clichés of “apocalypse.”

Prepare yourself to forgive these people who committed genocide against you. When they come back with a sorry heart, let them find you with an open arm. Do not become a tyrant yourself by responding in kind. You are fighters of love.

Sometimes history hides its best secrets in plain sight. Over the past few years I have come into contact with the work of Fetullah Gulen and his followers, but only little by little understood how crucial this man and his teaching may be to the future of religion in our contemporary world. The Turkish Islamic scholar is significant for Islam in particular, but also for religion broadly, especially that of the Abrahamic traditions—Islam, Christianity, Judaism, whose members together comprise half the planet.

Gulen belongs to a revival of Islam in Turkey which, in turn, forms part of the nation’s long history as the crossroads where the Asian peninsula  bumps into Europe, a country where strands and layers of culture, east and west, meet, clash and mesh. Turkey was the home of Rumi, the mystic and poet whose name means “Roman” in Arabic and who is beloved of Muslim, Christians and non-believers alike. After the First World War the Ottoman regime, which had ruled Turkey for six centuries, collapsed and a nationalist secular government took its place. The new “Kemalist” politicians legislated against the public influence of Islam, seeking to bring Turkey up to speed with the Western nations which had, as they saw it, established an enlightened critical distance from religion.

Licensed Islamic religion and practice were still permitted in Turkey and Gulen became a government-recognized assistant imam as a teenager in 1958. But both Turkey and Gulen have spiritual energies which expand far beyond narrowly imposed constructs, and social unrest in the former and desire for religious reform in the latter continued to affect the landscape dramatically and progressively. I am not enough an expert in Turkish history to be able to summarize the turmoil in Turkish politics through the sixties all the way to the 2000s, but there were three coup d’etats in this period.

The military seem continually ready at the back door of the state apparatus to break their way in and impose physical order. The key point, however, is that against this background Gulen has continually advocated for tolerance and forgiveness, consistent with an ethic of service rather than power.  (See Christopher L. Miller and Tamer Balci, eds, The Gülen Hizmet Movement: Circumspect Activism in Faith-Based Reform, especially Tamer Balci, “Islam and Democracy in the Thought of Nursi and Gulen.”)

Gulen’s influence grew from the eighties onward. In 1976 he opened a students’ hostel offering scholarships for poorer scholars and hosting informal Quranic discussions. He called the place a “light house” (işık evler) and he invited others to follow the same model. The development of this practice became the genesis of the Gulen movement. My friend, Timur, experienced at first hand a center like this, as a teenager in his hometown in Turkey. He told me he would sleep on the floor overnight simply to soak up as much teaching and spirituality as possible. Social and political reforms in the period favored the growth of these educational centers and progressively the whole thing became a front-line cultural phenomenon. The impression is of a profound religious and cultural thirst which Gulen was able to respond to, despite the harsh opposition sometimes experienced by the students. Timur says he was beaten up in school by teachers, when they understood he was attending a Gulen center! But Gulen’s teaching was always a matter of nonviolent influence on civil society, not a theocratic movement taking over the state apparatus. His followers adopted the name Hizmet, which means service, emphasizing an attitude of self-giving rather the pursuit of power. This approach has been misunderstood and opposed both by the traditional secularists, who see it as yet another religious threat to their vision of society, and by hardline Islamists who see it as rolling over to the West and “pro-American.”

Into this already toxic mix we must also insert the current president of Turkey, Recep Erdogan, and his political party (Justice and Development, AKP). Gulen and Erdogan were initially allies, with Erdogan espousing an Islamic version of society and readily employing Hizmet people. The Hizmet movement offered the most prepared cadre of activists, able to staff schools, universities, the media, the judiciary etc., and they quickly rose to prominence. But fault-lines soon developed, and Erdogan conceived a bitter hatred for Gulen because he would not teach his followers to embrace the normal practice of power.

Erdogan rose to success with the return of Islamic religion to the public square, but he did not change his political philosophy from a standard worldly function of religion–used to undergird systems of manipulation and control. In contrast, Gulen and his followers did not want to promote yet another authoritarian, self-serving political apparatus.  The 2013 corruption revelations in the Turkish government, including members of Erdgan’s own family,  were broadcast by Hizmet media outlets and in some instances prosecuted by lawyers influenced by Gulen’s thought. Erdogan hit back by accusing Gulen of creating a “state within the state” and seeking to overthrow the government. With the upside-down thinking only contemporary media propaganda can effect, Erdogan has branded Gulen as a terrorist and enemy of Turkey, going on to accuse him of responsibility for the farcical but still tragic, failed coup attempt in 2016. Very few Western journalists believe Erdogan and his state-run media’s narrative, but, at the same time, the mere fact of its existence seems continually to put a question mark over the Hizmet phenomenon. Such a broad yet shadowy group must still have clandestine motives, especially if it is Islamic! This is where I think the principle of nonviolence is so crucial. There can be absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to influence and affect society for the better–on the contrary!–so long as violence is not employed as a motive or means. I have learned at first hand the negative consequences of Erdogan’s campaign in the dozens of Turkish men and women, disciples of Gulen, who have lost jobs in Turkey, been imprisoned and dare not return, and whose relatives are in danger simply because they are linked to them. At the same time, I have continually been impressed by the lack of hatred in these individuals, their willingness to endure, and their general response of non-retaliation. If I judge by Jesus’ principle of “by their fruits you shall know them,” then I have to believe in the authenticity of Fetullah Gulen and his teaching.

So where did this principle come from? Timur sent me a wonderful poem by a Sufi writer, Yunus Emre, entitled The Drop That Became The Sea.

It includes the following lines, and Timur told me that Gulen used the second stanza “thousands of times” in his sermons and books.

A dervish needs a wounded heart and eyes full of tears.
He needs to be as easy going as a sheep.
You can’t be a dervish.

He must be without hands when someone hits him.
He must be tongueless when cursed.
A dervish needs to be without any desire.
You can’t be a dervish.

You make a lot of sounds with your tongue, meaningful things.
You get angry about this and that.
You can’t be a dervish.

If it were all right to be angry on this path,
Muhammad himself would have gotten angry.
Because of your anger, you can’t be a dervish.

Gulen used this verse to engender nonviolence in his students. It was only later he understood this was already the teaching of Jesus. Timur also sent me a link to a recent sermon in which Gulen recognizes Jesus as the source of such instruction. The sermon is in Turkish but Timur translated the relevant portion. Gulen is talking about his revised version of a proverb. It is “‘If you worry  that someone will hurt you, try to soften them with your kindness, offer your help.’” Then Gulen comments, “When I was making my own version of this proverb, I was not aware of the message of Master Blessed Messiah on this topic. Then I learned that (the) … Master of Compassion, Mercy, and Generosity says: ‘The real kindness is not returning a kindness, it is responding to unkind with kindness’. So, if someone is running to you with the intent to bite you like an animal, you should treat them like a human and disable their harm with kindness.’” (Timur confirms that “Master Blessed Messiah” is a common Islamic honorific for Jesus.)

Timur concludes with a quote from the Quran: “The good deed and the evil deed cannot be equal. Repel (the evil) with goodness and kindness (i.e. Allah ordered the faithful believers to be patient at the time of anger, and to excuse those who treat them badly), then verily! the one who tries to be your enemy could become a close friend.”

So, it becomes obvious that there’s a living, authentic strand of nonviolence in Islam, one which Gulen continues to distill and bring to prominence. But he also recognizes that it goes back scripturally to Jesus. Here is something of immense importance for Christians and Muslims to share together. And in this connection it is also worth pointing to an essential  crux of concern between Islam and Christianity: the death of Jesus. There is a verse in the Quran (Q4:157) which seems to claim that Jesus did not in fact die on the cross. The interpretation of the verse is debated, but whatever the Quran verse does in fact intend Jesus’ death is obviously pivotal to any standard version of Christian faith practiced today. If, then, there is a breakthrough possibility for Muslims to see Jesus’ death as the Messiah’s own supreme witness of non-retaliation and forgiveness, so it becomes easier for interfaith dialogue to progress. We could also put it the other way round. If both religions—Islam and Christianity—begin to see nonviolence as the revelation of the character of God then it is not unreasonable to think God’s Messiah might indeed agree to suffer to the point of death in order to demonstrate exactly that truth. In any case, Gulen is a key teacher in the 21^st century enabling both religions to know that this is truly the meaning of God and, therefore, the journey and destiny of all his believers.

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A couple of years before I came to the U.S. I took a trip to Sicily. I used a beautiful book as guide, one that stands as a classic for travel in that mysterious island, half Africa, half Europe. It was Vincent Cronin’s The Golden Honeycomb and its title refers to the legend of a honeycomb cast from wax by Daedalus, the famed craftsman and father of Icarus. This holy grail of antiquity was reportedly last seen in the city of Syracuse on the Mediterranean isle.  The author’s guide was a spiritual quest for the honeycomb, if not a physical one. For me fetching up in Syracuse, New York, had quite some irony in light of that earlier journey. I wondered whether, like Cronin, I was searching for a golden honeycomb!

Did I find it?

The honeycomb has always been a fascination. Its hexagonal cell structure caught the attention of Greek mathematicians and was used by Roman architects. The way it is put together by a collective of small insects working together without blueprint is a parable of the amazing possibilities hidden in life itself.

The truly beautiful thing, however, is the end quality of the honeycomb’s overall design–it is a dense gathering of empty spaces. An ingenious architecture of emptiness, providing maximum space with minimum material. It seems totally fitting that into this amazing space something as fabulous as honey should be poured. An architecture of emptiness for a sweetness of the gods!

Today, however, the vastness of outer space beckons us to darkness. What possible importance or meaning can we have in something so crushingly big? Meanwhile, at the other end, the saw of science cuts down to the smaller and smaller, and there seems to be absolutely nothing between the enormous orbits of neutrons and electrons! All this nothing is terrifying and threatens to suck our souls into endless, pointless…nothing.

But we should not step so quick! Somewhere along the line those electrons and neutrons resulted in the honeycomb, and at least at one point in the universe the point of empty space was given as sweetness.

We are faced with a challenge. The human imagination is itself a super honeycomb–a hundred billion cells inside the head folded over and around each other in impossible polygonal structures and sequences. What intricate pathways of thought are provided by our mind and our world! But is there a cast of thought which still remains to be wrought? Is there a sweetness to come, hardly yet dreamt?

We can imagine certainly that all this empty space is in order that it be filled with love. For love is the greatest sweetness we know, and it has its own special relationship to empty space.

Love is movement into empty space, taking the risk of movement to the other. Only empty space will make for love–to reach out to the other you have to cross empty space toward her. Indeed, love thrives on the nothing it crosses, in order to be truly itself. But, then, once it crosses the space, the space is changed. It is no longer nothing. It has become filled with something wonderful and new–the unique unconditional sweetness of love. Our hearts (which is just a word/metaphor for the deep sequences of the neural honeycomb in our heads and bodies) know and experience this.

Thus the architecture of empty space is the condition for the experience of love. The honey supposes the honeycomb. Can we say it the other way round, that the honeycomb begs the prior existence of the honey, in the metaphorical meaning we have given it? That empty space presupposes love? No, despite the attraction of the metaphor, that is an argument that takes condition to be cause. And if indeed we could say that and be sure–that the empty space proves the prior existence of love–then there would no more be empty space. It would be filled with a definite metaphysical something, and we would never truly learn to love. On the other hand, to take the empty space as the final definition of reality, and love as a noble but self-exhausting gesture into that dark night, that is also to go too far, and another form of metaphysics. How can we conclude with certainty that in the end love will not win? That it will not fill everything with the unconditional giving of love? That the honeycomb will not be crammed with honey? Indeed, to reach this conclusion goes against the character of love itself–which “believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

Perhaps, therefore, what we could and should say is this: if one were to set up a universe for the sake of love, this is precisely the kind of universe you would have to set up. There is a love-fittingness to our universe!

For love continues to urge toward its further pouring out, just as the beekeeper will decant the honeycomb into a jar. And because it continues to urge to be poured out we get a sense of its eternity: its self-dispossessing, paying-it-forward going on forever. Love has to be eternal in this endlessly forward giving sense. And once we practice and feel the future eternity of love it creates its own modality of the past, pulling the past behind it. For love cannot arise out of the self-consuming entropy of present being. It demands its  own dynamic “before” to self-dispossess, and so create a love that would go on to self-dispossess, and so on.

That is why, I think, John’s Gospel has the audacity to say that “in the beginning was the Word. ” Because the Word was made flesh and experienced in Christ as the authentic movement of love, then for that to be possible the love must somehow always have been there.

One day studying in Syracuse I came across a saying of the Stoics: “God drips through the universe like honey through a honeycomb.” Christianity was born in a world where Stoicism had a huge influence on the educated classes. It was one of the ways in which the Gospel gained purchase in Roman society and culture. Today we lack this cultural matrix; rather we have the emptiness of space. But, as I said, a metaphysical doctrine, like that of the Stoics, can now be seen as an obstacle to love. So our culture today is tailored for actual love not metaphysics. To seek to fill your particular appointed hexagon with honey, is that not the best chance of one day discovering the whole honeycomb of love? Of one day looking up and seeing those inconceivable reaches of space an endless artwork of gold?

Five Propositions in Favor of the Future

1. Original violence (as described by Girard) is the de facto origin of human culture but not the prospective will of God, which according to Genesis is the Sabbath blessing of life.

2. Jesus came not to compensate for sin but to undo it by means of a new way of being human, thereby bringing about the Sabbath blessing and fulfilment of God’s purpose.

3. The loss of sacrificial foundations due to 2000 years of the gospel has exacerbated human violence to the point of extreme crisis (the argument of Battling to the End.) This looks like the inverse of God’s purpose and a failure of the gospel. But God’s will for creation cannot be reversed. Its ultimate triumph is guaranteed by God’s faithfulness. (Genesis 12:3; Isaiah 45:18, 55:10-11; Revelation 21:1-5.)

4. The standard solution to this quandary is to displace God’s purposes to a supernatural, supra-terrestrial space–“heaven.” Aside from this not being a typically biblical viewpoint it leads itself to a fatalist, rapturist mindset which tacitly or explicitly colludes with the violence. A “new heaven and a new earth” is not to be conceived as another planet somewhere in magical space but this earth radically transformed. “A new heaven” confirms this: the “supernatural” itself is to be renewed as part of a revolution in human transcendence; i.e. no longer violent. It is this revolution which signals and makes possible the new earth.

5. To have faith in the triumph of God’s project on earth is, therefore, neither optional nor whimsical. It means to stake your life on the belief that in the midst of human crisis something dramatically and wonderfully new is emerging. The very consistency of this belief in committed Christians at once provides humanity with an alternative future, within the living moment.

Tony Bartlett

Such beauty should never be in the hands of children, especially badly brought up ones, but that is exactly why it is beautiful!

What is called the Eucharist has been given over into the hands of businessmen, metaphysical accountants and lawyers, but even they have been unable to destroy it. Its sheer profligate giving leaks through the control of temple priesthood, creating a new universe, beyond imagination.

I have calculated that during my time in seminary and afterward as a priest I received the communion bread and wine 7000 times. I could perhaps add another thousand for the times I took communion as a child and teenager. Over the course of the years my experience went from a queasy awe at the holiness of the wafer, to a profound sense of giving and humility, to strange, overpowering love, to finally an absolute nothing. The last feeling came in situations such as the one where a generous local pastor invited me to the table even though I was not “in good standing” with the hierarchical church. When I went up I was grateful for the personal gesture but I felt its utter meaningless. The institutional semiotics that are part and parcel of formal “communion” stood four-square against me.

And, now, paradoxically, it is semiotics that have become the whole point. Forgetting the first and last situations (of holiness and exclusion), the experiences of eucharist spread over those eight thousand times often come drifting back to me, and with a generosity which defies calculation. They come to me purely as sign, a remembered meaning, a memorial moving on the neural pathways of the brain. I believe now and understand that you cannot keep ownership of a sign. As the Sesame Street Muppets might say, how can you own the letter “W”, or the letter “P”! How can you copyright the alphabet? Or, bread as a sign? It’s only when you rig the eucharist as priestly sacrifice—including in the Protestant traditions, as recall of substitutionary death—that you bring it back to the language of mimetic exchange and hence ownership.

In fact in received atonement theology Christ is the supreme commodity—something offered to God as substitute or compensation for sinful humans—and therefore “owned” by the priestly “offering” class. But Rene Girard has given us insight into the violence that is at the root of all exchange (do ut des). At the same time he has highlighted the infinite nonviolence of the gospel which lays that violence bear, and strives to bring new meaning to humankind.

Such reckless beauty to make of a single human body a sign! One of sheer giving to spread abroad in the world! The body of Christ is the transcendental signifier of a new human way, the logos, the word. And the bread and its story is sign of the sign: deep visceral-neural sign of radical newness! Which makes Jesus a directorial genius-artist as well as Messiah: the Martin Scorsese or Andy Warhol of biblical first centuries. Indeed he is Messiah as first-person genius-artist.

Then there’s the consequence. The more this sign is understood in and for itself the less the sign-possessing priesthood makes sense, and the more a sign-proclaiming priesthood is called for. The more the hidden articulations of violence come to view, in the broad revelation that Girard describes, the more the offering priesthood becomes archaic and nonchristian. It is God who first makes the offering to us and gives us it as digestible sign, and all we can say is “mmmmm, thank you”: hence eucharist! A sign works at the level of constructed human meaning and this sign works at the root level of source code. All the Christian community can do is celebrate this source code and stay in its presence, over and over until our root meaning is changed.

Here is the best sense of “metanoia,” a reprogramming of human meaning. Christianity has always been a radical remake of religion, amounting to a new religiosity without duties to God, only the embracing of God’s first giving to us. Over the years, with the accommodation to empire, it took back many aspects of archaic religiosity, above all the exchange of sacrifice as fundamental relation to God. But today God’s true reckless beauty is returning fully to view, and it’s happening because it has itself worked tirelessly at the level of the sign to change our human point of view. At every eucharist we have partaken of the altar’s semiotic destruction, at the same time as taking in a code of unbelievable human newness.

Tony Bartlett