I Came to Cast Fire

My foreword to a new book on René Girard by Fr. Elias Carr

I am excited to share this book cover and foreword for Father Elias Carr’s forthcoming book “I Came to Cast Fire”, out November 14. It’s an accessible and powerful introduction to the ideas of René Girard. I had the honor of writing the foreword, which you will find below with permission from the publisher.

Today I am off to Italy for a week to host the first Cluny retreat. Wishing you all great sweater weather in my absence!

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Foreword to I Came to Cast Fire

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us,” wrote Franz Kafka.[1] An axe splits apart, but a fire transforms. Fire melts the ice of the frozen sea, and it clears a forest for new growth. Some books might be axes, but this one works differently: it is filled with the same fire that has been driving a two-thousand-year evangelical subversion of the old sacred forms to clear the way for something new.

This tension between old and new is at the heart of both René Girard’s work and Fr. Elias Carr’s introduction to Girard. I felt a sense of urgency reading I Came to Cast Fire, much like I did when I read Girard’s work for the first time. The words quicken a fire within me, even as the world threatens to snuff it out. The hopeful message of this book, and the hopeful message at the core of Girard’s work, is that this fire cannot be extinguished for those who are committed to battling to the end.

“What if triumph were not the most important thing? What if the battle were worth more than the victory?” asked René Girard in his last book, Battling to the End.[2] This book continues in that same spirit with an incisive view of history that sees Christ as its Lord as well as its redeemer. To battle to the end means to consciously and continually overcome the passivity that leads to death and to choose instead the active love that leads to life. The fullness of that love is available in Christ.

And yet we so often hesitate at the invitation of divine love. We feel torn by a twofold movement of colonization, as Fr. Elias describes in these pages. We feel that we have been colonized by others’ ideas and desires, and by a hostile culture and the many demands it imposes on us. And yet we are reminded constantly about the sins of the past, including our own. They are heaped upon our heads like burning coals. We confront those times when we have been the colonizers—when we have imposed our will on those we falsely view as enemies or threats to our autonomy.

On a human level, there is no way out of the cycles of reciprocal violence, shame, guilt, and cover-up that characterize the life of the world cut off from God. But Christ has given us an advocate, the Paraclete, whose fire destroys the old world and its fears, born of sin, and renews us with the same energizing power that the Apostles received on Pentecost—one that allowed them to boldly go to the ends of the earth, and even to their own deaths, proclaiming the Gospel.

Liberation is only possible through the power of the Holy Spirit, which is stronger than the powers that held the old world together. Freedom comes through the conversion that the Spirit makes possible.

Despite the many attempts to downplay or divorce Girard’s ideas from the lived experience of Christianity, I don’t believe mimetic theory can ever be fully understood except from within a life of faith. Girard, reflecting on his conversion experience later in life, said, “I’m convinced that God sends human beings a lot of signs that have no objective existence whatsoever for the wise and the learned. The ones those signs don’t concern regard them as imaginary, but those for whom they are intended can’t be mistaken, because they’re living the experience from within.”[3]

We may admire the stained-glass windows of a cathedral from the outside, but we see their resplendence and understand their true meaning only from the inside. Likewise, Girard’s work is profoundly spiritual, as Fr. Elias’ book makes clear—and that can be most fully appreciated as one attempts to live out the Gospel. The spiritual life is a journey of desire, a via desiderii, and Girard helps us understand the terrain, temptations, and obstacles along the way. His work is currently undervalued in spiritual theology. This book makes an important contribution.

Conversion of our desire entails setting fire to the merely familiar to make way for what is true, which may appear to us as new (or, in the words of St. Augustine, “so ancient and so new”[4]). The old world is passing away, and it’s natural to want to cling to it. We’re nostalgic for the old world because it’s comfortable there. We can see cause and effect, and we can control things—sometimes through the violence, the scapegoat mechanism, which Girard warns us is part of the old sacred order.

Or perhaps we’re nostalgic for the old world because we are ashamed of what we now know. Like Adam and Eve in paradise, we want to hide ourselves—sometimes even from God. Greek Orthodox theologian Timothy G. Patitsas speculates that perhaps Adam hid himself because the knowledge he gained from eating the forbidden fruit allowed him to see Christ on the cross, the Lamb that was slain since the foundation of the world, and this knowledge was simply too much for him to bear.

Whether we accept that interpretation or not, it amplifies the message of Scripture and history: confrontation with the truth is difficult, and is not even fully possible except in the light of Christ, who shows us the extent to which humanity deceives itself about who is a victim and who are the victimizers. “You will see the success of my theories when you recognize yourself as a persecutor,” Girard once told a skeptic at a conference.[5] That is a truth that each of us must come to terms with.

There are now many books about Girard, but few that aim to speak to the heart as much as the head. This book is one of those few. We recognize our dependence on grace not by thinking about it hard enough, but through humility and love.

Girard believed that we are now living during the apocalypse, but his understanding of the apocalypse was very different from the image in the popular imagination, much of which has been shaped by bad movies. The apocalypse is not God’s wrath destroying the world; that, Girard believed, was one of the many lies we tell ourselves to avoid coming to terms with the truth. The apocalypse, rather, is the final culmination in the great unveiling of who God is and who we are.

The great truth hidden since the foundation of the world—more foundational than the violence that has characterized so much of human history—is the divine love that created the universe and sustains it. That love has been made flesh and has come to cast fire. Fr. Elias has produced a book that is dangerous in the best sense of the word. If you read it well, you, too, may catch fire—and be made new.

Pre-order I Came to Cast Fire here.

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[1]Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken, 1977), 16.

[2] René Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010), xvii.

[3] René Girard, When These Things Begin: Conversations with Michel Treguer, trans. Trevor Cribben Merrill (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2014), 131–132.

[4] Augustine, Confessions, trans. Frank Sheed (Park Ridge, IL: Word on Fire Classics, 2017), 258.

[5] Cynthia Haven, “Are We Ready to Listen to René Girard?,” Zocalo Public Square, August 7, 2023, zocalopublicsquare.org.