Thou Dost Love Her: Augustine, Shakespeare, and the Grace of Imitation

“What was it, O Lord my God, that moved me to dedicate these books to Hiereus, an orator of Rome? I have never seen him, but I was won to him for the fame of his learning, which was indeed very notable, and I had heard things he had said which seemed to me admirable. But he pleased me mainly because he pleased others.”
— St. Augustine, Confessions IV.14

Augustine’s question is not rhetorical, he’s really distressed at his own behavior. He suspects the answer already. He was not drawn to Hiereus out of love or shared pursuit of wisdom, but out of desire for recognition. To be admired by the admired. To bask in reflected glory. And yet, even as he wonders why Hiereus holds such sway over his esteem, he says it plainly: "He pleased me mainly because he pleased others." Like his later confession in IV.15, "the false view I had of spiritual things would not let me get at the truth," Augustine is caught between seeing the truth and still being tangled in its illusions. He both diagnoses and suffers mimetic desire at once.

But he names the mechanism with surprising clarity, in Sheed’s translation:

“That is why we are won to a man we hear praised only if we believe that the praise comes from a sincere heart, that is when the praise is uttered by one who truly loves.”
— Confessions IV.14

In other words: we desire the object not directly, but because it is desired. Augustine may try to explain this process in terms of assessing the sincerity of the praise, but this leans too heavily on a romantic and intentional model of desire. René Girard, in contrast, emphasized the near-unconscious and imitative nature of mimetic desire: it is not so much that we choose whom to imitate after evaluating their inner authenticity, but rather that desire itself is caught, contagious, and often unnoticed. Our Enlightenment inheritance prefers to imagine agency where there may be none. The real structure of desire is more subtle, more involuntary, and often veiled to the one desiring. Composite models help explain why we don’t imitate every possible desire around us: we are shaped by particular layers of remembered desire and being, not by rational selections among all available models.

“Thou dost love her, because thou know’st I love her.”
— William Shakespeare, Sonnet 42

Here Shakespeare exposes the same structure. The speaker’s grief is not merely about lost love, it is about the derivation of that love. His friend’s desire is not spontaneous. It is reactive, mimetic. The woman is loved not for who she is, but because she is already loved by another.

The triangle forms.
The rival is also a disciple.
The betrayal is mimetic.

Girard writes in Theater of Envy that the Shakespearean sonnets often depict three characters: the brilliant Old Poet (usually the narrator), the Dark Lady, and a younger, good-looking but inexperienced rival poet. These characters map onto the mimetic triangle of Subject, Model, and Object. In Sonnet 42, Girard shows how the narrator (Old Poet) oscillates through all three mimetic positions of Model, Subject, and even Object, relative to the other two figures.

This structure mirrors what we find in Confessions IV.14. Augustine writes of Hiereus, the famed orator, and the crowd that admires him. Depending on one’s angle, Augustine may be the Young Poet, looking up to Hiereus (Old Poet) because of the crowd’s praise (Dark Lady). Or he may cast himself as the Old Poet, insecure and craving recognition from Hiereus (Dark Lady) as mediated through the crowd (Young Poet).

This ambiguity only reinforces the mimetic complexity. Augustine even intuits the mechanism: "Does such a love pass from the lips of the one who praises into the heart of the one who hears the praise? Not at all." He sees the possibility of contagious desire and then reflexively justifies it.

He backfills his esteem by invoking the crowd’s sincerity: "That is why we are won to a man we hear praised only if we believe that the praise comes from a sincere heart.” But even here, he admits: “I loved the man more for the love of those who praised him than for the qualities for which he was praised… If they had scorned him, I would not have admired him.”

By the end, he shifts models again: “If he [Hiereus] thought well of them, I should be still more on fire for him; but if he thought ill, my vain heart, all void of Your [God’s] stability, would have been wounded deep.”

Augustine is describing what Girard calls the instability of mimetic desire unmoored from God. And yet the solution is not the rejection of mimesis, but its re-centering: “my vain heart… void of Your stability.” God becomes the stable Model not outside of mimesis, but within it, rightly ordered and purified, most particularly through the Incarnation of Jesus.

From Disordered Desire to Sacred Imitation

In The Confessions, Augustine eventually names Christ as the only model worthy of imitation. But he does not arrive at Christ directly. He arrives by imitating those who themselves imitate others (hopefully those who are imitating Christ). This is not a flaw. It is the Christian path.

“We love a God who loves God.”
— Gil Bailie

This is not a paradox. It is the heart of Trinitarian theology. The Son loves the Father. The Spirit is the love between them. Even within God, love is mimetic—but without envy, rivalry, or theft. It is pure gift.

What distinguishes this mimetic love within the Trinity from human mimetic rivalry is that it is grounded in perfect transparency, mutual self-donation, and freedom from lack. The divine Persons do not compete or compare, because each fully gives and receives all that He is. The Father generates the Son, the Son returns all to the Father, and the Spirit proceeds as their mutual love. There is no envy, no withholding, no insecurity—only the eternal circulation of love that gives without fear of diminishment.

And we, as branches grafted to the Vine, do not generate love from nothing. We receive it. We imitate it. We pass it on.

From Shakespeare’s Triangle to the Church Triumphant

What Sonnet 42 shows in tragic form—the collapse of self into rival—is reconstituted in the Church as mutual love:

“I love Him, because I saw you love Him.”

We are drawn into the communion of saints not by direct encounter alone, but by sincere witnesses, those whose love persuades us by its authenticity. As Augustine noted, we are won to another when we believe the praise comes from a sincere heart. The continuity here is striking: just as the soul responds to perceived sincerity in human admiration, so too does it awaken to holiness when mirrored in the authentic love of others.

This dynamic resembles a wick vine stretching toward light: at first, the connection is tenuous, delicate—a desire stirred by witnessing sincere love from afar. But over time, nourished by more models—saints, writers, history, faithful friends—that connection thickens and deepens. What begins at the edge becomes rooted. We pass from admiring those who love Christ to loving Him ourselves.

And in that shift, we become models. Not perfect. Not complete. But real. Through us, others are drawn—just as we were. This is how the Vine lives, spreads, and bears fruit. The Beatific Vision itself is not solitary. We will see the Son love the Father, and rejoice to imitate that joy forever.

Closing Meditation

Mimetic desire is not the enemy. As a deacon recently said in a Sunday homily: "When we ask people to pray for us, what we really are asking for is their relationship with Jesus." This doesn’t take away from the loving act of praying for one another’s immediate needs, the line captured a deeper current in the question: “Will you pray for me?” This line captures the truth that when we request intercession, we are leaning on the being of another and asking to be drawn closer to Christ by the gravitational pull of someone else’s intimacy with Him.

René Girard once wrote, "All desire is a desire for being." That line, placed alongside the homilist's, reveals the spiritual dimension of mimesis: to desire the being of someone who loves Christ is not wrong—it may be the very path of sanctification. We are not meant to find the path alone, but to follow it in the footsteps of the saints, who themselves followed others.

But mimetic desire is dangerous when misdirected—when our models are opaque, rivalrous, or unexamined.

Shakespeare shows us what happens when mimetic love turns bitter.
Augustine shows us how to confess it and be healed.
The Gospel shows us where to go next.

“This is my beloved Son… listen to Him.” (Mt 17:5)

Not in isolation.
Not in self-invention.
But in holy imitation.