René Girard and Benoît Chantre explore the religious and apocalyptic implications of their dialogue on Clausewitz and modern violence. They begin by considering Péguy's attempt to oppose a chivalric conception of the duel, rooted in honor, to Clausewitz's more ruthless vision of war. However, they conclude that this noble vision was eclipsed by the realities of 20th century total war, where the escalatory logic glimpsed by Clausewitz came to full fruition.
Girard argues that Clausewitz's theory reflects a regression to an archaic, sacrificial view of violence as sacred. His ideal of the "military genius" who masters war's "friction" represents an attempt to channel mimetic violence into a heroic mold. However, this masks Clausewitz's underlying fascination with Napoleon as a "god of war" and insight into the modern unshackling of violence from traditional restraints.
This regression was driven by Prussian resentment against French cultural hegemony, symbolized by figures like Voltaire. Clausewitz's generation sought to build a new Prussian identity on a cult of war, symbolized by the "military genius." This laid the groundwork for the rise of Ludendorff and German militarism. Girard sees in this a "monstrous inversion" of archaic sacrifice - instead of immolating victims to save the community, the community's youth is sacrificed to the idol of military glory.
Clausewitz's "remarkable trinity" - the interplay of primordial violence, chance, and rationality in war - is in fact a "sacrificial crisis" that destroys differences and propels violence to extremes. Modernity's "military genius" is a "superman" born from this sacrificial crisis, a "god of war" who can no longer be constrained by political aims. This warlike religion reflects an archaic resurgence that gains strength as traditional brakes on mimetic violence dissolve.
Against this, Girard counterposes the Biblical revelation of the divine victim, Christ, who exposes the scapegoat mechanism at the heart of sacrificial violence. By identifying with innocent victims, the Crucifixion and Resurrection reveal the lie of sacred violence and open the possibility of love beyond sacrifice. However, this revelation also deprives humanity of sacrificial safeguards, intensifying mimetic crises.
Modern society is thus caught between a failed historical Christianity and an archaic regression to neo-pagan violence. Resisting the escalation to extremes requires a full reckoning with the apocalyptic implications of the Gospel. War can no longer establish cultural order as sacred violence once did. The spread of mimetic doubling and loss of differences propel humanity towards a "war of all against all."
In this context, Girard sees Levinas' attempt to find an exit from totality through the "face of the Other" as a profound response. The duel is a liminal experience where the adversary's otherness suddenly breaks through the mimetic fog. This prefigures the possibility of a transformed relationship beyond reciprocal violence. However, realizing this requires a difficult "conversion" within the mimetic dynamic itself, a passage from hostile imitation to love of the other in their vulnerability.
Christianity reveals this path but also radicalizes the mimetic crisis by unmasking the sacrificial mechanisms that once stabilized cultures. The escalation of violence in the modern world is a "sign of the times" that the Biblical eschaton is approaching - the old order is dis-integrating as humanity is propelled towards an apocalyptic reckoning. The spread of global violence is in a strange way the "crucifixion" of the world as humanity is placed before a stark choice - destroy itself or undergo the paschal passage from death to life.
Girard insists that Christian eschatology must be rescued from both progressivist optimism and nihilistic despair. The apocalypse is not a fate to be passively accepted but a call to "resist the course of events" through prophetic witness. This requires a "religious rationality" that reckons fully with the vertical dimension of violence and its possible transformation, without false consolations. In the end, only the divine "Other" revealed in Christ can overcome the closed cycle of mimetic violence.
Confronted with this, Clausewitz's thought remains ambivalent, glimpsing the crisis of modern violence but unwilling to follow its logic to the end. In his fascination with Napoleon and refusal of eschatology, he prefigures the great "Dionysiac" experiments of the 20th century, from Nietzsche to Hitler, that sought a new sacral foundation in will to power. However, stripped of its sacrificial veils by the Gospel, this project could only hasten humanity's descent into an abyss.
Against this, Girard holds out the possibility of an "eschatological resistance" that dares to hope in the paschal mystery's capacity to transfigure history from within. This requires a difficult apprenticeship in non-sacrificial love, a willingness to dwell in the crucible of mimetic conflict without either sacralizing or fleeing it. Only in the "dark night" of apocalyptic unveiling can the world discover the transformative light that has been shining from the beginning - the self-giving love of God crucified and risen.
The dialogue concludes by situating Clausewitz's dark intuitions within the larger drama of Biblical revelation and modern secularization. Girard sees in Clausewitz's text both a symptom of sacrificial crisis and a enigmatic prophecy of the apocalyptic trials awaiting a world that has lost its transcendental moorings. Deprived of archaic safeguards, modernity's "escalation to extremes" reveals the dead-end of sacrificial violence but also clears the way for a decisive encounter with the God of victims - if humanity can find the courage to pass through this night. In this way, Clausewitz and Girard bear paradoxical witness to the ultimate horizon of history as a "combat" between the divine Other revealed in Christ and the "powers and principalities" of a fallen world. The fate of this struggle, which is also a "duel" within each human heart, remains to be seen.
René Girard and Benoît Chantre bring their dialogue to a close by reflecting on the prophetic witness of the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Girard sees in Hölderlin's life and work a singular insight into the apocalyptic crisis of the modern West - one that both parallels and illuminates his own theory of mimetic desire and violence.
Hölderlin, a contemporary of Hegel and Clausewitz, responded to the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars with a profound spiritual and poetic withdrawal. While Hegel saw in these events the "cunning" of reason in history, and Clausewitz the unleashing of war's violent essence, Hölderlin intuited a more tragic reality - the growing absence of the divine and the dangerous "nearness" of a sacred violence no longer constrained by traditional religious and cultural forms.
For Girard, this places Hölderlin at the very center of the modern apocalyptic predicament. The Gospels reveal a twofold movement in history - the progressive withdrawal of the divine as humanity "comes of age," and the corresponding escalation of violence as archaic sacrificial safeguards lose their efficacy. Hölderlin's poetic "madness" and eventual silence reflect a searing awareness of this double apocalyptic unveiling - what Girard calls the "two circles" of sacred history.
Hölderlin's famous lines "But where danger threatens / That which saves from it also grows" capture this perfectly. The "danger" is the disappearance of transcendent difference under the leveling tide of mimetic rivalry. The false sacred of archaic violence threatens to return in more virulent form, as glimpsed by Clausewitz. However, it is precisely in this crisis that the "saving power" of the Gospel becomes manifest, however obscurely - the revelation of a God who identifies with innocent victims and breaks the cycle of retribution.
For Girard, Hölderlin's "Christ hymns" reflect a profound grasp of this uniquely Christian insight. Against the "Romantic" temptation to resurrect a pagan divine, Hölderlin affirms the irreplaceable "otherness" of the crucified and risen Christ. Only Christ can liberate humanity from the "bipolarity" of mimetic desire - the oscillation between idolization and resentment of human models. By his free self-giving, Christ reveals a God who remains transcendent even in absolute immanence, breaking the sacrificial logic that unites divinity and violence.
At the same time, Hölderlin experiences this revelation as an unresolved "strife" between paganism and Christianity in the modern soul. The disappearance of the old gods leaves a void that Christ alone can fill - but at the cost of confronting humanity with the stark "either/or" of faith. In the absence of archaic mediations, only the free imitation of Christ's loving self-withdrawal can save humanity from self-destruction. This is the "apocalyptic" truth that Hölderlin both proclaims and suffers in his own being.
For Girard, the "time of the Gentiles" prophesied by Luke is precisely this time of trial, when humanity must choose between the "two ways" of love and violence. Deprived of sacrificial safeguards, the modern world hovers on the brink of a sacred fury that can only grow until the paschal mystery is fully unveiled. The paradox is that revelation coincides with the greatest historical darkness - a theme captured powerfully in Hölderlin's poetry.
In this light, Girard sees his own mimetic theory as an attempt to illuminate the contemporary relevance of Hölderlin's apocalyptic vision. Against progressivist and reactionary misreadings, Girard insists on the radically Christian orientation of Hölderlin's thought. Only the Johannine logic of the "double apocalypse" - the intensification of both evil and redemption in history - can make sense of the modern crisis. Hölderlin's witness is thus inseparable from the New Testament's eschatological horizon.
At the same time, Girard acknowledges the difficulty of sustaining this horizon in a secular age. The "escalation to extremes" can easily appear as a fate to be endured rather than a call to be answered. In response to Chantre's urgent queries, Girard affirms the ongoing need for an "eschatological resistance" to the nihilism of sacred violence. Even if historically decisive, such resistance will always remain fragmentary, "invisible to eyes of flesh" as Pascal says.
In the end, only the "innermost mediation" of Christ's loving self-gift can break humanity out of the closed circle of mimetic rivalry. This is not a human possibility, but the work of divine grace from beyond history, which Christian hope dares to affirm as the ultimate reality. Hölderlin's poetic withdrawal into a mysterious communion with the "absent God" is a sign of both the necessity and the elusiveness of that redemptive passage, which remains a "saving mystery" to be suffered and celebrated.
The dialogue closes with a profound reflection on the apocalyptic shape of the modern world and the ongoing centrality of the Christ event in human history. Both Girard and Hölderlin emerge as thinkers of the "double apocalypse" - the revelation of a sacred violence at war with itself, and of a divine love that remains present even in apparent absence. In the crucible of that struggle, humanity is called to a decisive conversion - one that can never be taken for granted, but remains the world's only true hope. The dialogue thus leaves us on the threshold of a mystery at once terrible and beautiful - the paschal mystery of a God who unveils himself in the very night of history, and whose sacrificial self-giving remains the key to understanding and transforming the human condition.