Brodbeck, Simon Pearse

The Journal of Religion

Simon Brodbeck

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Collins, Brian. <i>The Head Beneath the Altar: Hindu Mythology and the Critique of Sacrifice</i>. Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014. x+310 pp. $24.95 (paper).

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theories about language and the power of scripture as the Word of God in a moderncontext, liberal evangelicals’ commitment to social reform as an expression of pietyand an outgrowth of Christian conversion, the liberal evangelical curriculum atthe Union School of Religion and its struggle ðand ultimate failureÞ to maintain adistinct evangelical identity, the emergence of a prophetic and confrontationalfundamentalist style in New York City as exemplified by the ministry and publicpreaching of John Roach Straton, and a concluding chapter on Harry EmersonFosdick’s doomed efforts to maintain a robust form of liberal evangelicalism atRiverside Church. It is hard not to read this book as a declension narrative, despiteBowman’s assertion that liberal evangelicals did not capitulate to modernity or didnot see themselves as “selling out” to a secular culture. Almost all of the figures helooks at or the liberal attempts to combine a prophetic commitment to social reform,a priestly emphasis on pastoral work, and personal spiritual conversion and growthend in disappointment or failure or a loss of a distinctive evangelical identity, whichthey had sought so assiduously to retain. So rather than demonstrating that evan-gelicalism is robust when it imagines itself diverse, Bowman’s work instead demon-strates the difficulty liberals encountered who wanted to maintain an evangelicalidentity and how hard it was to occupy a treacherous middle ground. That seems tobe the fate of liberal evangelicalism narrated in this very important if not quite per-suasive book.CURTIS EVANS, University of Chicago.COLLINS, BRIAN. The Head Beneath the Altar: Hindu Mythology and the Critique of Sac-rifice. Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. East Lansing: Michigan StateUniversity Press, 2014. x1310 pp. $24.95 ðpaperÞ.This book takes its lead from the work of René Girard. Girard argues that desire ismimetic—we want what others want—and that this leads to violence, which is mimetictoo, resulting in collective violence against an arbitrary victim. This has a cathartic,socially binding effect, for which the victim is retrospectively held responsible andhence elevated to special, sacred, status. For Girard this is the origin of religion, withsacrifice being a functional reenactment, andmythology a diverse representation, ofcollective murder.Brian Collins applies Girard’s theories to early Hindu myth and ritual, aimingto enrich our understanding of the latter and to allow a better assessment of theformer. Combining these aims, Collins argues that Hindu texts contain a critique ofboth sacrifice and the scapegoating mechanism to stand alongside the critique thatGirard sees embodied in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, who exposed thevictim’s innocence once and for all.Girard’s work has engaged with India only belatedly, in the book Sacrifice ðEastLansing, MI, 2011Þ, which is a study of Sylvain Lévi’s monograph La doctrine du sac-rifice dans les Brâhmanas ðParis, 1898Þ. After introducing his own project, Collins de-scribes the colonial and Indological rivalry between Britain and France, which thenforms the context against which he discusses Lévi’smonograph and, in turn, Girard’sreception of it. Collins thus engages with Hindu texts via Girard’s own engagement.Girard sees the figures Prajāpati and Purus˙a as two aspects of one character and onesacrificial role—Prajāpati the alleged sinner put to death for incest, Purus˙a the pos-itive, creative result—and Collins suggests that this bifurcation persists in post-Vedictexts, not least in the pair of Indra and Vis˙d˙u.The book’smain focus is the abjected side of this equation. After showing, througha convincing reading of myths of Mitra, how one might be dragooned into theBook Reviews127murderous commune on pain of being victimized oneself, Collins leans slightlyuncritically on Jan Heesterman’s theory, whereby an ancient sacrificial system fea-turing rival sacrificers became the Vedic ritual system featuring a single sacrificer. Inthose terms, the abjected victim persona is identified with the defeated ðand thendiscardedÞ second sacrificer and then with a transcendent outsider figure “that em-bodies the self-deconstructive potential of the sacrifice” ð136, 239Þ and that takesmany forms, including the werewolf, the vrātya, the homo sacer ða term taken fromRoman law via the Italian philosopher Giorgio AgambenÞ, and the character Śu-nah˙śepa in the Aitareya Brāhman˙a story that Collins deems “by far the most radicalcritique of sacrifice in the Sanskrit tradition” ð130Þ. Śunah˙śepa, an innocent youth, isto be sacrificed, but he engineers a miraculous escape from the sacrificial post byverbal means.When Collins focuses on the Mahābhārata, he finds within it three generic cri-tiques of sacrifice. The “Śaiva critique” ðthese labels are apparently nonsectarianÞproceeds by depicting—as in the story of Śiva wrecking Daks˙a’s sacrifice—the ab-jected outsider’s violent, uninvited return. The “Vais˙d˙ava critique” exposes the ar-bitrary nature of victim ðand victorÞ selection: when the narrative rationalizes theexecutions of Jarāsadha and Śiśupāla, tokenistic moral justifications are quicklyovertaken by reference to the sacred mystery that is the divine plan. And the “exis-tential critique” is embodied in the character Kard˙a, who although being struc-turally a loser never sees himself as a victim and heroically insists on a course ofaction that is proper and meaningful for him.Given the importance of Girard’s work for religious studies, the project this bookdescribes is overdue, but the book itself is rather diffused. Collins writes that “thereader will have noticed by now ðand hopefully with minimal annoyanceÞ that myargument tends to wander afield” ð81Þ, but if he is aware of the possibility of annoy-ing the reader, he needs to ensure this is counterbalanced by concrete gains. Whilereading the book I often wondered how the current topic related to the overallargument; beginning with the largely uninformative contents page, the signpost-ing is poor throughout; the “Summary of Arguments” at the beginning of the finalchapter comes far too late, and its titular plurality is revealing. I am still not sure thatthe penultimate chapter—“Meaning: The Secret Heart of the Sacred”—adds sub-stantially to the book’s overall argument. Throughout the book there is evidence ofwide reading and bold, creative analysis, but the presentation could have beenmoredirect and accessible.In “wandering afield” Collins also risks not doing justice to the topics along theway, which involve some of the most intriguing passages in the Sanskrit corpus. Hesometimes seems too quick to embrace particular views: along with Heesterman,Georges Dumézil is another example; even if Dumézil’s conclusions were unprob-lematic, the Indo-European angle might still seem superfluous to the project. Andin many cases, inevitably, significant secondary literature is not mentioned. Perhapsthis is partly because the framing project—of trying to relate Girard’s work to Hindumaterials and seeing what happens—encourages creative interpretation. Indeed,that frame might encourage Collins to read contests, rituals, and violence as sac-rificial wherever possible, rivalry as mimetic, and punishment as scapegoating, de-spite more straightforward interpretive options. And if looking through a Girard-ian lens may tend to allow the discovery of what one seeks, the concept of yajñaðsacrificeÞ compounds this by having a similarly encompassing semantic range, ap-parently being applicable, in the history of Hindu thought, to almost any kind ofhuman activity. So when Collins identifies three critiques of sacrifice, it is not clearthat these are necessarily best labeled as critiques of sacrifice or exactly what is beingsaid about them by labeling them thus.The Journal of Religion128Despite theseperhaps predictable concerns, the ethical dimensionofGirard’s workmakes Collins’s project extremely attractive and I suspect underscores his penchantfor unearthing representations of the victim. It comes through strongly in the book’sfinal pages, where Collins suggests that we ourselves can undermine sacrificial think-ing by following Kard˙a’s example and by revisiting Vivekananda’s Vedāntic universal-ism: “it is only by becoming the mleccha ourselves, by becoming the homo sacer, that wecan overcome scapegoating” ð250Þ.SIMON BRODBECK, Cardiff University.CREEGAN, NICOLA HOGGARD. Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil. New York:Oxford University Press, 2013. xi1206. $58.00 ðclothÞ.This book explores the problem of evil in Christian theology, with particular al-though not exclusive attention to the suffering of animals. That the term “suffering”is appropriate here—rather than simply physical pain—is central to Nicola Cree-gan’s argument. She cites extensive research about animal behavior ðethologyÞ thattells us that many nonhuman species are sentient, intelligent creatures with com-plex emotions and capabilities. Many experience both physical and emotional suf-fering in ways that are similar to humans.It is important to Creegan, further, that this suffering precedes the emergence ofhumans as a species. Predation, illness, and injury caused suffering in countless an-imals before Homo sapiens evolved; it cannot be attributed to human sinfulness but ispart of the fabric of the creation. This poses serious questions: “Is God really a lovingGod? Does God care about animals who suffered for many eons before humans cameto be? By what power can humans escape their deep-seated drives?Why does God do itall this way when in the end—in Christ, God reveals Godself to be loving and todemand love?” ð2Þ. This is the old problem of theodicy, with an added ingredient: thesuffering of nonhuman animals. Pursing the question of evil in light of animal suf-fering, Creegan hopes, can help us acknowledge both the thorough goodness ofcreation and the pervasiveness of evil throughout it, from the very beginning.Creegan draws on a combination of theological and scientific resources. She isparticularly interested in alternatives to the interpretation of evolution as a random,purposeless process that emphasizes selfishness and competition. The standard Dar-winian approach, she asserts, “does not see the pattern of darkness and light, forevolution is characterized as much by love and cooperation and symbiosis as it is theopposite; it is as purposeful as it is seemingly random” ð156Þ. Creegan’s character-ization of the “standard paradigm” ð106Þ in Darwinian evolution is oversimplifiedand not always fair. Like Christian theologians, evolutionary biologists are a diverselot. Many pay a great deal of attention to the reality and value of cooperation, al-truism, and other positive social traits. The notion of nature as “red in tooth and claw”is simply not as widespread as Creegan suggests ð106Þ. Even more problematic is herchallenge to another aspect of the Darwinian “standard paradigm”—its rejection ofteleology in evolution. Other Christian thinkers, including the Jesuit theologianTeilhard de Chardin, have ascribed a purpose to the process of evolution, and mosthave been roundly rejected by serious scientists. Creegan relies heavily on the work ofChristian scientists such as Simon Conway Morris. While many of these are seriousscientists and not to be dismissed easily, their arguments for a teleological or purpose-driven evolution are far from generally accepted.However, teleological interpretations of evolution cohere with the theologicalinterpretation of evil that Creegan advocates, in which all of existence, past andpresent, participates in God’s overarching plan. To explain this plan, she uses theBook Reviews129

Collins, Brian. The head beneath the altar: Hindu mythology and the critique of sacrifice. [Book Review]

https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/90603/1/Collins%20review%20published.pdf

Collins, Brian. The head beneath the altar: Hindu mythology and the critique of sacrifice. [Book Review]

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