The Middle Coming of Christ and René Girard

For Benedict XVI, the Second Coming of Christ occurs, not only in a final and definitive form, but also in the course of history. He speaks of an Adventus medius, a middle coming.

Saint Augustine sees the clouds on which the Judge of the world is to arrive as the word of proclamation. The words of the message, handed on by the witnesses, are the cloud that brings Christ into the world–here and now.…The ministry of the two great figures Francis and Dominic in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was one way in which Christ entered anew into history, communicating his word and his love with fresh vigor.…We could say much the same of the saints of the sixteenth century. Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Ignatius Loyola, and Francis Xavier all opened up new ways for the Lord to enter into the confused history of their century as it was pulling away from him. His mystery, his figure enters anew–and most importantly, his power to transform men’s lives and to refashion history becomes present in a new way.*

René Girard would roll over in his grave were we to equate his life with that of canonized saints. It must be said, however, that in his last years, when René was less and less able to communicate verbally, there was an intimation of holiness in his smile and his gestures of affection. More to the point of Benedict’s observation, Girard–like Francis, Ignatius, and John of the Cross–left us with both anthropological insights and the vocabulary for recognizing Christ’s presence in history. Indeed, Benedict’s remarks make us realize in retrospect that what we at the Cornerstone Forum have been doing for the last several decades has been to use these Girardian resources in ways analogous to the ways the heirs of Dominic, Francis, and Ignatius tried to work out the broader implications of their teaching and example: that is, to make Christ’s hidden but incomparable presence in human history more palpable, precisely at the moment when the world seems to be “pulling away from him.” In retrospect, I can now see both God’s Gamble and my forthcoming The Apocalypse of the Sovereign Self: Recovering the Christian Mystery of Personhood as efforts of this sort.

* Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 291-2.