From Soul Murder to Spiritual Re-education

In 2001, the late Henri Tincq from Le monde received the John Templeton award for European Religion Writer. In his winning portfolio, Tincq not only took up a balanced portrait of the Swiss theologian Lytta Basset, whom he qualified as one of the ‘spiritual masters of Europe’, but he also presented an in-depth interview with René Girard in the aftermath of 9/11. It seems no coincidence that two of these contending articles were dedicated to authors who have complementary analyses of violence and the problem of evil in our societies. Hardly a year later, Basset publishes Sainte Colère (2002), a remarkable psycho-spiritual book on Holy Anger, in which she engages more deeply with the work of Girard than she has done before. Both authors focus on the victim, but they have another perspective on victimary rivalry. The key to understand this difference lies in a different treatment of anger and the sword of Christ. Mimetic anger is blind and contagious and makes differences disappear, whilst holy anger differentiates and opens the victim up to the other because it enables one to get in touch with the painful zones in itself. Mimetic anger imprisons oneself into a false difference to violate or even eliminate the other; holy anger disowns me from a fixated victimary position because it lets me truthfully face the other as he or she is. Speaking out my complaint and my negative feelings to a benevolent other can stop me from acting out. Holy anger disentangles the deadlock between killing or being killed. It opens a third path, the one of revolt and resistance. Finally, it hopes for blessing and is the precondition for compassion and forgiveness. One of the major critiques on Girard is that he never succeeds in giving a substantive content to the concept of good mimesis. His analysis stays on the level of a certain cognitive conversion or the change of the model to overcome the impact of mimetic violence. Basset however, gives some positive examples in the psycho-spiritual realm of what Jesus really means by doing non-violence. Holy Anger is one of them. It is true that, as of her doctoral dissertation on guilt and forgiveness, Le Pardon originel (1994), Basset has already critically and implicitly been dealing with a very basic version of mimetic theory (under the name of ‘reproduction of evil’). In what follows, we will go through three different stages in the oeuvre of Basset to shed light on the incorporation, enhancement and critique of mimetic theory that she performs.