Mimesis and God's Plan of Salvation
John Paul Wauck
In the Poetics, Aristotle maintains that the inclination to imitate is a basic feature of human nature. If this is the case, then it should play a role in God's plan for humanity. Writing from a Christian perspective, the literary scholar Rene Girard has offered a fundamentally moral interpretation of this mimetic drive both in Western literature and in the Bible, but it would also be possible to view the entire story of salvation -- from Genesis to the end of time -- from the point of view of mimesis, and this paper is a preliminary sketch of such an analysis: an overview of the role that mimesis plays in Christian theology.
