Rivalry, Communion, and the Incarnation

“In fact, the saving Word made Himself precisely what lost man was, by His own act bringing man into communion with Himself and obtaining man’s salvation.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Scandal of the Incarnation: Irenaeus Against the Heresies

I was providentially reading this book—having pulled it from my general To Read pile without a specific reason—assuming, somewhat lazily, that a book on the Incarnation would make for a gentle Christmas read. I hadn’t yet looked closely.

Then I read this line:

“The saving Word made Himself precisely what lost man was.”

And I heard, in my usual way, mimetic language.

The phrase immediately called to mind the literature of mimetic doubling and mirroring: du Maurier’s The Scapegoat, Dostoyevsky’s The Double, Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray. In each case, doubling is dangerous. Nearness produces rivalry. Resemblance becomes unbearable. The double threatens to replace the self.

But this could not be that kind of doubling. This was not human action. This was the action of God the Son.

And it was precisely when I began thinking about rivalry and about how doubling normally unfolds that the next part of the sentence came into focus:

“By His own act bringing man into communion with Himself.”

Communion is not distance. It is closeness, dangerous closeness. In a mimetic world, proximity almost always intensifies comparison, envy, and rivalry. We do not usually become rivals because we are far apart, but because we are too near, too similar, too entangled.

Communion, then, is not the opposite of rivalry because one involves closeness and the other distance. Communion and rivalry are two possible resolutions of the same mimetic proximity.

That insight casts the Incarnation in a new and unsettling light.

The Word becomes man’s Double, but not in order to compete with him, displace him, or expose him as deficient. This is mirroring without scarcity. Doubling without rivalry. The Son does not imitate man in order to take his place over against him, but to enter his place for him.

Here, doubling does not lead to violence. It leads to salvation.

There is a form of communion that arises from violence. Girard gives us its anthropological structure: the false peace and unity that follow scapegoating, when a community stabilizes itself by concentrating its disorder onto a single victim. It worked at keeping peace to a degree, but it was false and murderous.

M. Scott Peck, in People of the Lie, names the moral logic that sustains this unity. The scapegoat becomes the bearer of responsibility that properly belongs to the scapegoater. The lie is not merely spoken; it is shared. And in being shared, it binds the group together.

This, too, is communion, but a shadow communion, purchased at the cost of another’s expulsion. In this case, mimetic tension is resolved through blood-sacrifice.

But the communion Irenaeus and von Balthasar describe is of an entirely different order.

What distinguishes communion from rivalry is not imitation, but sacrifice. And not just any sacrifice, but self-sacrifice for the good of the other.

Rivalry resolves mimetic tension by shifting the cost outward; someone else must bear it. Communion resolves mimetic tension by bearing the cost inwardly. One depends on blood-sacrifice. The other depends on self-sacrifice.

Christ enters the most dangerous mimetic proximity imaginable—becoming precisely what lost man was—without becoming a rival. He absorbs rivalry without returning it. He refuses the logic that demands a victim. The Cross reveals what communion looks like when it is subjected to the full pressure of fallen desire.

From our side, this is not easy to receive. We remain capable, disturbingly capable, of entering into rivalry with Him. Who do you make yourself out to be? The Gospels are unambiguous about this.

As Gil Bailie has often noted, when Jesus asks the disciples, “Who do the people say that I am?” He is not gathering opinions but clearing the field. The question exposes, and quietly disarms, the rivalrous misreadings already forming around Him: prophet, revolutionary, miracle-worker, threat. Only after these interpretations are named and set aside does Jesus press the real question: “Who do you say that I am?”

This is no longer a request for commentary from the sidelines, but an invitation to communion. Peter’s confession is not an opinion, but a transformation. And even then, the scandal remains. Christ’s non-rivalrous closeness must first be endured as disruption before it can be received as salvation.

And yet this is the heart of the Christian claim:

Christ becomes man’s Double so that doubling no longer requires a victim. He makes communion possible where rivalry and scapegoating would otherwise be inevitable.