On The War For Order

Girard, Augustine, and the End of Modern Desire

“If no one questions me, I know: if I would explain to a questioner, I know not.” - Augustine.

RESTLESS DESIRE

In every civilization’s final phase, there arises a strange convergence of anxiety and anticipation. Our age is no exception. In a time saturated with images and exhausted by ideologies, the modern West has become obsessed with its own collapse. Predictions of catastrophe are everywhere—artificial intelligence turning against its makers, environmental degradation triggering planetary ruin, nuclear brinkmanship revisited, or the arrival of some alien intelligence to reorder the world. These scenarios, though seemingly grounded in science or geopolitics, share a familiar structure: they function as apocalyptic narratives. Yet, what they conspicuously lack is God. Unlike the eschatological visions of Christianity, these secular apocalypses offer no judgment, no justice, and no redemption. Only the possibility of annihilation or reset. This shift in imagination marks not merely the decline of religious belief, but a deeper crisis in the architecture of human desire.

At the heart of this crisis is a truth long known to the Christian tradition, but articulated with anthropological precision by René Girard: that human beings do not desire autonomously. Rather, we desire according to the desires of others. Girard’s theory of mimetic desire reveals that the very structure of human longing is inherently social and imitative. From this shared desire springs rivalry, conflict, and ultimately violence. Culture, in Girard’s account, originates as a response to this mimetic crisis: the scapegoat mechanism is employed to unify communities by directing violence toward a surrogate victim. But this sacrificial logic, once exposed by the Gospel, loses its stabilizing power. Modernity, having internalized the Christian revelation, can no longer believe in the innocence of the mob or the guilt of the victim. And yet, without belief in Christ, it finds itself disarmed in the face of accelerating desire and dissolving cultural order.

Augustine of Hippo, writing more than a millennium before Girard, offered a theological response to the same human restlessness. For Augustine, the core of the human condition is not rivalry, but disordered love. All humans desire the good, but in seeking lesser goods as ultimate ends, they corrupt both themselves and their societies. “You have made us for yourself, O Lord,” Augustine confesses, “and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Confessiones, I.1). Where Girard sees imitation as the source of rivalry, Augustine sees misdirected love as the root of sin. Yet both converge on a common insight: human beings are not self-contained. We are shaped by what we behold, what we emulate, what we love.

This essay aims to explore the convergence of Girard’s mimetic anthropology and Augustine’s theology of rightly ordered love as a means of understanding the present crisis of modern desire. In doing so, it will argue that Girard provides the clearest diagnosis of our social unraveling, while Augustine offers the only viable remedy. As contemporary culture discards the sacred while preserving the form of sacrifice, it accelerates toward chaos without catharsis. The return of Christ, so long caricatured as an archaic myth, must be reimagined not as a divine spectacle, but as a restoration of the soul’s center. Only in reorienting desire toward what is eternal can the modern world hope to escape the endless cycle of imitation and violence.

GIRARD

René Girard’s intellectual project, spanning literature, anthropology, theology, and philosophy, revolves around a single insight: that human desire is not individual but imitative. What appears to be spontaneous longing is in fact borrowed, modeled upon the desire of another. “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire,” Girard writes. “He turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires” (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 1961). This deceptively simple insight forms the cornerstone of Girard’s mimetic theory. It is not objects that generate rivalry; it is shared models of desire that turn others into competitors. The structure of this dynamic subject, model, and object forms a triangle in which the object becomes the occasion for rivalry, not its cause.

Girard termed this phenomenon mimetic desire. Unlike instinctual appetite, mimetic desire has no internal anchor. It is not merely that we imitate others in a general social sense, but that we come to want because they want. The model, in this arrangement, is both guide and rival. The closer the model is to us socially, psychologically, or spatially the more intense the rivalry becomes. Girard distinguishes between “external mediation,” in which the model is distant and idealized (e.g., a saint or a distant monarch), and “internal mediation,” in which the model is near enough to become an obstacle. This internal mediation is the engine of social conflict, envy, and violence.

Yet rivalry does not resolve itself. The mimetic chain must break. According to Girard, early human societies stumbled upon a crude but effective solution: the scapegoat mechanism. When mimetic rivalry escalates to the point of threatening the entire social order, the community unconsciously unites in collective violence against a single victim, arbitrarily chosen. This scapegoat, accused of causing the crisis, becomes the lightning rod for mimetic energy. Once expelled or killed, the group feels a sudden catharsis, mistaking the peace that follows as evidence of the victim’s guilt and latent power. Mythologies then evolve around this event, deifying the victim, embedding the logic of sacrifice into the sacred. “Violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred,” Girard writes in Violence and the Sacred (1972). The gods of archaic religion are transfigured murder victims.

Over time, ritual sacrifice emerges as a way to repeat the scapegoat mechanism in a controlled, symbolic form. Culture, law, and religion grow from this origin, preserving social cohesion through periodic acts of symbolic violence. Yet Girard’s claim is not merely anthropological. It is theological. In the Judeo-Christian tradition especially in the Hebrew prophets and the Gospels, Girard saw the revelation and inversion of the scapegoat structure. The Bible uniquely sides with the victim. Abel’s blood cries out. Job is innocent. The Suffering Servant bears no guilt. And above all, Jesus of Nazareth is crucified not for what He has done, but for what He represents: a threat to the order founded on violence.

With Christ, the scapegoat mechanism is unmasked. As Girard puts it in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World(1978), “The Gospels reveal the origin of human culture, not the origin of God.” The Passion narrative lays bare the innocence of the victim and the blindness of the crowd. The Cross is not merely a redemptive event but an epistemological one: it shows, once and for all, that violence is human, not divine. God does not demand sacrifice. He endures it.

This revelation has profound consequences for history. As the scapegoat mechanism loses credibility, societies can no longer unify through shared persecution. Yet mimetic desire persists. The modern world, Girard argues, is post-sacrificial but not post-mimetic. We no longer believe in myths, but we are still governed by desire’s triangulations. We still imitate, still rival, still scapegoat now under the guise of ideology, identity, or revolution. In undermining sacrificial order, the Gospel also removes the ritual mechanisms that once stabilized societies. The result is a world exposed to mimetic escalation with no outlet for its violence.

In Girard’s late work, this condition becomes explicitly eschatological. As he writes, “The apocalypse is not some event that will come at the end of time; it is the name we give to history once we can no longer lie about it” (Battling to the End, 2007). Without the sacred to restrain us and without the Cross to redeem us, we face the unbounded proliferation of desire and rivalry, what Girard calls the “escalation to extremes.”

Yet Girard is not merely a pessimist. He offers a path of escape, though narrow: the imitation of Christ. Jesus is the only model who does not become a rival, the only desire that does not provoke envy. By turning our imitation toward Him, we can begin to break free from the cycle of rivalry and scapegoating. Still, Girard’s solution is anthropological rather than metaphysical; it remains a change in imitation, not in being. It tells us whom to desire like, but not yet how to love rightly.

This is where Girard stops, and where Augustine begins. For Girard, Christ exposes the structure of sin. For Augustine, Christ reorders the soul. The former unmasks the lie; the latter heals the wound. To see both clearly is to begin understanding not only the disease of the modern world, but the possibility of its cure.

ESCHATOLOGY

The collapse of the scapegoat mechanism in the modern world has not eliminated humanity’s apocalyptic imagination—it has merely severed it from transcendence. Girard observed that once the sacrificial logic was exposed by the Gospel, the machinery of myth and ritual began to unravel. Yet human beings, still mimetic, still prone to rivalry and crisis, did not cease to long for some terminal moment of judgment, revelation, or purification. In the absence of divine eschatology, we have constructed a secular one. The result is a culture saturated with apocalyptic visions each of them echoing the form of Christian judgment, but stripped of its redemptive substance.

Modern eschatologies are technocratic or ecological, not theological. They envision the end through catastrophe: runaway artificial intelligence, climate collapse, nuclear war, asteroid impact, or alien invasion. These narratives differ in surface detail but share a common structure. First, they frame the present as morally or systemically unsustainable. Second, they propose a moment of rupture, often violent, that will expose the unsustainability of the current order. Third, they anticipate either obliteration or rebirth. A purification by fire or chaos. These are secular sacraments, mimicking the structure of Christian apocalypse while denying the authority of Christ. As Girard noted, “The modern world is furiously religious in a way that makes it more dangerous than ever” (Battling to the End).

One need only observe the tone and language of popular discourse on climate change, artificial intelligence, or social breakdown to detect the quasi-theological register. Phrases like “existential threat,” “point of no return,” or “climate repentance” populate the rhetoric. Even science is now yoked to mythic categories: the anthropocene becomes a new Genesis; AI the Tower of Babel rebuilt; climate collapse the flood revisited. The rituals of modern media. Alarm, panic, expiation. They mirror the scapegoating liturgies of old. The key difference is that there is no god to forgive, no transcendence to reveal meaning, no judge to distinguish good from evil. These are apocalypses without ends, crises without telos.

Why does the modern world cling to these secular catastrophes? Because, Girard would argue, we need them. We have desacralized violence but not desire. We remain mimetic creatures in a post-sacrificial age, and so we hunger for catharsis, for some ultimate crisis that might cleanse the accumulated weight of rivalry and resentment. But with God exiled from the picture, our imagination can no longer conceive of apocalypse as revelation. It is only ever destruction. The Book of Revelation ends with a wedding; ours end with extinction.

Girard’s point is not that these fears are irrational, climate change and nuclear proliferation are real. Rather, it is that our obsession with them reflects a spiritual condition: we have replaced metaphysical hope with material dread. We long for an end because we no longer believe in a goal. “When the Christian revelation no longer informs us,” Girard writes, “we revert to archaic structures of violence, but in degraded form” (I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 1999). The result is what he calls the apocalyptic loop: a society that both fears and desires collapse, because it cannot imagine redemption.

In this context, the idea of a Second Coming becomes not just implausible but offensive. Secular culture can tolerate mythic judgment if it comes from an asteroid or an AI, but not from a returning Christ. The notion of divine intervention carries too much metaphysical freight: the affirmation of a moral order, the exposure of guilt, the possibility of grace. These are realities the modern self has worked to suppress. But as Augustine would remind us, suppressing judgment does not eliminate longing. “For you have made us for yourself, O Lord,” he wrote, “and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Confessiones, I.1). The apocalyptic imagination persists because restlessness persists. The difference is that modern man seeks release, not reconciliation.

This is the condition Girard called the “exhaustion of the scapegoat mechanism.” Once we know that the victim is innocent, once the myth is unmasked, we are left without a means to resolve mimetic crisis. Ritual no longer binds, and belief no longer pacifies. In such a world, apocalypse becomes not a feared event, but a necessary one. The only conceivable means of restarting history. Yet without God, this restart is not a resurrection but a repetition. The violence returns, but the meaning does not.

To move beyond this loop requires more than exposing the mimetic structure. It requires reordering the soul. Girard gives us the lens to see how desire has disintegrated society. But only Augustine offers the tools to rebuild from within. If Girard is the anatomist of modern apocalypse, Augustine is its physician.

INCOMPLETE SALVATION

René Girard’s theory offers a profound diagnosis of the human condition: that our desires are not original but imitative, and that our cultures have been built upon violence masked as order. In unmasking the scapegoat mechanism and its role in stabilizing societies through myth and ritual, Girard reorients the study of religion, literature, and anthropology toward a single revelatory axis, the Cross of Christ. Yet despite his immense contribution, Girard does not, and arguably cannot, offer a fully salvific vision. His solution to mimetic crisis is clear: imitate Christ, not the crowd. But while Girard identifies the right model, he does not provide a metaphysical account of how the soul is transformed in the act of imitation. He offers the ethics of conversion without the ontological means to achieve it.

Girard’s concept of conversion is mimetic in structure. To be converted is to shift imitation from rivalrous models to the model of Christ. In this sense, the Christian life becomes an anti-rivalrous mimesis, a pattern of self-emptying desire grounded in the Gospels. “We must imitate the one who does not imitate,” he writes, “the model who does not become a rival” (Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World). Christ is the only being whose desire is not bound to comparison or conflict. He does not desire at another’s expense, and thus does not provoke rivalry. To imitate Him is to escape the mimetic loop.

This is a powerful anthropological insight. But it does not yet explain how one overcomes the will to rival. To merely say “imitate Christ” is not enough, any more than telling the prideful to be humble or the addicted to be sober. Girard offers a model, but not a transformation. The imitation of Christ, if it is to be more than external behavior, must involve the reorientation of the interior life: the ordering of love, the healing of pride, the restoration of the will. Here, Girard gestures toward grace but does not systematically develop it. His anthropology approaches theology, but never quite enters it. He unveils the structure of sin, but does not articulate the economy of salvation.

This lacuna becomes especially visible when Girard speaks of desire itself. While he critiques the rivalrous nature of mimetic desire, he does not describe an alternative metaphysics of love. Christ becomes the model not because He embodies the good per se, but because He breaks the cycle of conflict. But Christianity does not only offer a new model of behavior, it proclaims a transformation of being. The Christian is not simply a better imitator; he is a new creation (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:17). This language is largely absent from Girard’s work. His conversion is epistemological and ethical, not ontological.

Moreover, Girard rarely addresses the role of the sacraments, the Church, or the interior operations of grace in sanctification. While his focus is cultural and anthropological, this silence becomes conspicuous when he speaks of salvation. For if the mimetic mechanism is as embedded in human nature as he claims, then imitation alone—even of Christ—would not suffice. What is needed is not merely a new model, but a new capacity: the power to love rightly, to desire without envy, to will the good without pride. In short, what is needed is the healing of the will, a theme absent in Girard but central in Augustine.

Girard’s strength lies in showing how the Gospel subverts the foundations of archaic religion and unmasks the lie at the heart of myth. His anthropology is indispensable for understanding how violence masquerades as sacred order, how victims become gods, and how cultures are stabilized through collective murder. But this revelation, though morally clarifying, does not itself save. It is a threshold, not a destination. One sees the structure, but remains entangled in it unless the soul is changed.

This is where Augustine becomes necessary. Where Girard speaks of conversion as mimetic reorientation, Augustine speaks of it as interior renewal. Where Girard unmasks the scapegoat, Augustine unseats the idol. For Augustine, sin is not simply rivalry, it is the disordered love of the will, the turning of the soul inward upon itself (incurvatus in se). The solution is not only to imitate rightly, but to love rightly. Girard critiques the direction of desire; Augustine heals its source.

Thus Girard’s project, while profound, remains incomplete. He prepares the soil, reveals the rot beneath the cultural edifice, and points toward Christ as the only viable model. But the construction of a true City of God requires more than imitation, it requires sanctification. Girard diagnoses the crisis; Augustine prescribes the cure.

AUGUSTINE

If René Girard dissects the contagion of desire in society, Augustine of Hippo descends into the very architecture of the soul to reveal its roots. Where Girard exposes mimetic rivalry as the cause of violence and the foundation of archaic order, Augustine addresses the disorder beneath all disordered imitation: the misalignment of love. His fundamental conviction is that all men desire the good, but in our fallen state, we confuse the order of goods. We love what should be loved less, and we ignore what should be loved most. This concept - ordo amoris, is at the heart of Augustine’s moral psychology and forms the metaphysical antidote to the mimetic crises Girard describes.

“Living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things,” Augustine writes, “to love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved’ (De Doctrina Christiana, I.27).

This principle, rightly ordered love, governs Augustine’s entire moral framework. Human beings are not damned because they love pleasure, power, or esteem, but because they elevate these goods above the eternal. Sin is not simply lawbreaking, but love misdirected. The result is not merely moral confusion but metaphysical disintegration: the soul becomes divided, restless, enslaved to that which cannot satisfy. “For where I was, there I could not be,” Augustine writes of his youth, “and I fought with myself and was torn apart by myself” (Confessiones, VIII.11). He sees sin as a form of internal warfare. A fracturing of the will against itself.

This internal disintegration is given its most powerful expression in Augustine’s diagnosis of pride. Unlike Girard, who places the locus of conflict in the mimetic structure between self and other, Augustine identifies a more ancient rebellion: incurvatus in se, the soul turned inward upon itself. Pride is not first a rivalry with others; it is a refusal of the Creator. It is the desire to be like God, but without God. “I became a problem to myself,” he writes, “and that is the sickness from which I suffer” (Confessiones, X.33). In Augustine’s thought, this inward curvature of the will is the primordial distortion, it precedes rivalry, it generates false imitation, and it breaks communion not only with others, but with God Himself.

Yet Augustine’s diagnosis is not merely psychological or anthropological. He does not leave the soul trapped in its restlessness. He offers not only critique, but cure: the reordering of the will through grace. In contrast to Girard’s emphasis on external imitation, Augustine focuses on the transformation of the interior life. True conversion, for Augustine, is not merely mimetic; it is ontological. It is not simply a change in desire’s direction, but in desire’s nature. The soul must be turned, not by willpower alone, but by the infusion of divine love.

“Give me the grace to do as you command,” Augustine prays, “and command me to do what you will! … When your commands are obeyed, it is from you that we receive the power to obey them” (Confessiones, X.29).

Here, Augustine articulates what would later become a cornerstone of Western theology: the primacy of grace. The will is bound unless freed by God. Imitation of Christ is not sufficient unless accompanied by the inward renewal of the Holy Spirit. The disorder of love cannot be corrected by mere moral effort, it must be restructured by grace.

This emphasis on interiority distinguishes Augustine sharply from Girard. Where Girard sees Christ primarily as a model to imitate, Augustine sees Him as the source of the soul’s healing. Christ does not merely reveal the innocence of the scapegoat; He infuses divine life into the heart. His mission is not to demonstrate but to redeem. The Cross is not only a revelation of violence, but a triumph over it. As Augustine writes, “The Devil was conquered by his own trophy of victory. The very death he had brought upon the human race, the same was by Christ used as an instrument to conquer him” (Sermon 261).

Moreover, Augustine’s vision is cosmic in scope. The drama of desire is not played out merely between individuals or within societies, it is the conflict between two cities: the City of Man, founded on self-love to the contempt of God, and the City of God, founded on love of God to the contempt of self (De Civitate Dei, XIV.28). History is a battleground of these two loves, amor sui and amor Dei. Mimetic rivalry may describe the mechanics of conflict, but for Augustine, it is prideful love that animates the City of Man. And only divine grace can reorient the soul toward the eternal city, where peace is not the absence of conflict but the fullness of order.

This Augustinian metaphysic provides the missing dimension in Girard. Girard gives us the anthropology of crisis; Augustine gives us the theology of restoration. Girard helps us see the false gods born from collective murder; Augustine leads us to the true God who dies for the murderers. Girard warns us that desire, if unmoored from transcendence, will spiral into catastrophe. Augustine shows us that only when love is rightly ordered toward God can the soul, and by extension, society, be made whole.

In a world now awash in false infinities and secular apocalypses, Augustine’s voice returns with prophetic urgency: the heart is not healed by management or imitation, but by return. Convertere! Return, O soul, to the One in whom rest is not an end but a beginning. Only in such a return does the story of desire find not its climax in violence, but its fulfillment in peace.

THE RETURN

In the modern imagination, the Second Coming of Christ is often conceived as spectacle: a divine intervention from above, disrupting history with fire and glory, bringing final judgment to a world that has lost its way. For many, this vision has become either literalized beyond plausibility or discarded as myth. Yet both Girard and Augustine, each in their own way, invite a different interpretation. One less concerned with theatrical arrival than with metaphysical recognition. The return of Christ is not first a disruption of history, but a confrontation with truth: the truth of desire, of violence, of pride, of love. It is not merely that He comes again, but that we finally see Him and in seeing Him, we are judged.

For Girard, the Cross is already the apocalypse. It reveals what was hidden from the foundation of the world: that human cultures are built not on justice, but on murder; not on peace, but on scapegoating. The Passion unmasks the sacred as violence, and violence as collective deception. This unveiling, the Greek apokalypsis, is not future but past, and its consequences unfold across time. Christ has already come as Judge, not in the mode of wrath, but in the mode of innocence. The crucified victim exposes the mechanism that once bound communities together and renders it inoperative. In this sense, Girard writes, “The Christian Revelation has rendered all mythological reconciliations impossible” (Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World). There can be no going back. The scapegoat is no longer sacred.

But this unveiling is not enough. If Christ is to return in history, He must return in recognition, not merely by divine fiat, but through the transformation of vision. “They will look on him whom they have pierced” (John 19:37). This is not just an act of observation, but of acknowledgment. The mob must see the victim. The rival must see the model. The sinner must see the Beloved. In a Girardian world where scapegoating has become transparent, the Second Coming takes the form of a spiritual confrontation: will humanity recognize the one it crucified?

Augustine deepens this recognition into the structure of conversion. For him, the return of Christ is not simply future judgment, but present orientation. The soul turns, the will bends, the eyes are opened. Christ is not absent. He is unseen. “Do not go outward,” Augustine writes, “return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth” (De Vera Religione, 39.72). To recognize Christ is to undergo a reversal of vision. From surface to depth, from desire to love, from the world to the Word. The return of Christ, then, is not a break in the sky but a break in the soul.

Such recognition carries judgment not because it imposes condemnation, but because it reveals what is. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehends it not (John 1:5). For Augustine, judgment is what happens when the false self, built on pride, noise, and domination is exposed to the true good. It is the agony of a will that wants to see but is still attached to its blindness. “I loved Thee late,” Augustine confesses, “for behold, Thou wert within, and I without, and there I searched for Thee” (Confessiones, X.27). The Second Coming is this realization writ large: the return of Christ is the unveiling of His nearness. It is not His absence that damns us, but our refusal to see.

This reframing has critical implications for how we understand the cultural yearning for apocalypse. The modern world no longer anticipates a divine return. Instead, it fabricates substitutes: technological singularity, ecological collapse, global war. These events mimic the shape of revelation without its substance. They preserve the form of judgment without a judge, the form of catharsis without purification. They are violent resets without redemption. But this proliferation of apocalyptic substitutes points to something deeper: a craving for final clarity. The world wants the end to come. Not because it seeks God, but because it cannot bear the weight of continued confusion.

In this sense, the desire for apocalypse is a displaced desire for Christ. Not the Christ of doctrine, but the Christ of truth. The return we await is not one that destroys the world, but one that unmasks it. And this return does not begin with angels or trumpets, but with recognition. First in the heart, then in the Church, and finally, in the world. The Second Coming is already underway wherever Christ is seen not as a rival but as a model, not as an ideal but as a Person, not as an abstraction but as the axis upon which all love must turn.

For Girard, this recognition breaks the mimetic cycle. For Augustine, it heals the will. In both, the return of Christ is not a spectacle to be awaited, but a truth to be encountered. The modern age, hungry for release and blind to reconciliation, will not be saved by crisis. It will only be saved by vision. To see Christ is to see the end of rivalry, the end of pride, the end of false loves and the beginning of true order.

THE PATH FORWARD

If Girard reveals the structure of the crowd, and Augustine the architecture of the soul, then the next step must be to consider the passage from one to the other. The crowd, in Girard’s analysis, is the site of contagion: desire spreads, rivalry escalates, and order is maintained only through the violent expulsion of a surrogate victim. It is a social mechanism, but also a spiritual state. A condition of blindness, a loss of individuality in the torrent of imitation. Augustine, by contrast, offers a vision of the city. Not merely as a political entity, but as a metaphysical community formed by rightly ordered love. The movement from crowd to city is therefore not geographic or historical, but ontological. It is the passage from chaos to cosmos, from scapegoating to communion, from pride to peace.

The City of Man, Augustine teaches, is founded upon amor sui, the love of self to the contempt of God. It is driven by domination, rivalry, and the pursuit of temporal goods as ultimate ends. Its inhabitants may possess order, but never true peace. For peace, in Augustine’s terms, is “the tranquility of order” (De Civitate Dei, XIX.13). The City of God, by contrast, is defined by amor Dei, the love of God to the contempt of self. It is a community of persons who have turned their desire from self-enclosure to self-gift. It is the fulfillment of what Girard’s anthropology implies but does not complete: a society no longer structured by exclusion, but by inclusion through grace. Not tolerance, but transformation.

This Augustinian city is not utopia. It exists in tension with history, not in triumph over it. For as long as the two cities are intermingled in time, the Christian must live in what Augustine calls peregrinatio - pilgrimage. Yet even in exile, the soul may begin to reflect the order of its homeland. This is where Girard’s insights become most urgent: in a world that no longer believes in myth, no longer trusts in scapegoats, and no longer anchors itself in transcendence, we are faced with the terrifying possibility of a global mimetic crisis with no resolution. In such a world, Augustine’s theology is not merely abstract, it is salvific.

The Christian response, then, must not be to flee the world, but to transform its loves. This begins not with institutional programs or ideological battles, but with the reformation of the heart. The path from crowd to city is first trodden within. As Augustine writes: “Two loves have made two cities: love of self to the contempt of God, and love of God to the contempt of self” (De Civitate Dei, XIV.28). To walk this path is to undergo continual conversion, to turn from mimetic desire to rightly ordered love, from pride to humility, from scapegoating to reconciliation.

But this personal reordering must radiate outward. The City of God is not merely a collection of sanctified individuals, but a polity of souls shaped by charity and truth. It is visible in the Church, not the institution as such, but the mystical body of those who imitate Christ not in rivalry, but in love. As Augustine writes: “The Church progresses on its pilgrim way amidst the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God” (De Civitate Dei, XVIII.51). The Church, when faithful to her calling, becomes the visible sign of the city to come: a community where desire is healed, rivalry is overcome, and peace is not the product of exclusion but the fruit of grace.

Girard’s anthropology, when joined to Augustine’s theology, points toward a new kind of cultural witness. In an age addicted to resentment, the Christian must become a sign of reconciliation. In a society defined by envy, the Christian must embody charity. In a world seeking catharsis through collapse, the Christian must hold fast to the hope of renewal. Not through spectacle, but through sanctity. This is not passivity. It is radical imitation: the imitation of the one who loved even unto death, and in doing so, destroyed death’s logic.

To build the City of God amidst the ruins of Babel is to live in truth. It is to see the scapegoat as innocent. It is to recognize desire as gift, not weapon. It is to refuse the violence of the crowd and choose instead the peace of ordered love. This is the only true resistance to modernity’s mimetic collapse. And it is the only true foundation for what comes next.

APOCALYPSE TO ORDER

The world is not falling apart, it is unraveling according to a logic it can no longer understand. The scapegoats are no longer effective, the myths no longer believable, the rituals no longer binding. Men with influence can feel it. The center is gone. Every attempt to replace it, technology, ideology, identity only accelerates the entropy. What we are living through is not just institutional collapse. It is the crisis of desire without order.

Girard explains how we got here. He shows that our desires were never our own, that they were shaped by others, and that in the vacuum of shared belief, imitation turns to rivalry, rivalry to violence. What once was managed by sacrifice is now unmanaged chaos. Augustine shows what comes next. He understood long before modernity that the war is not simply political or cultural, but metaphysical. And he tells the truth no strategist dares utter: that victory begins not with domination, but with conversion, not of the masses, but of the man.

Elite men, those who lead families, build companies, shape culture, are not exempt from the mimetic crisis. They are the most exposed. The most envied. The most tempted to chase what others chase and crush what others fear. But Girard makes it clear: success without transcendence is just glorified scapegoating. And Augustine offers no soft escape. He names the root: disordered love. Amor sui ad contemptum Dei. The love of self to the contempt of God. It is not merely sin. It is suicide by pride.

There is no strategy that can outflank this. No innovation that can replace rightly ordered desire. No reset that can give you what you’ve refused to receive. The world is not awaiting collapse. It is awaiting men who are willing to repent, not theatrically, but interiorly. Not emotionally, but structurally. The kind of repentance that reorganizes a household, restrains a city, and rebuilds a civilization from the ground up. The kind that begins not with spectacle, but with silence. Not with conquest, but with worship.

The Second Coming is not the problem. It is the answer. Not because it ends the world, but because it exposes it. The question is not whether Christ will return, but whether we will recognize Him, before the mimetic crisis consumes everything.

The war is already here. What remains is whether you will lead by force, or by order. By imitation of power, or by submission to the only model who does not rival you: the Crucified.