Abstract

In this article attention has been drawn to central issues of René Girard's thought such as mimesis, patterns of behaviour seen from the mimetic perspective, scapegoat mechanism, etc. Pivotal to Girard's work is the confrontation between a religious and a secular world view. The two motives in his thought, — on the one hand the motive of mimesis decoding human behaviour and on the other the religious motive according to which man is characterized by a need of transcendence —, might be contradictory. Girard's statement that his beliefs emerged from his work and not from pre-existing beliefs may also lead to the consideration that the character of religion he attributes to the modern world and the character of the Christian belief as well change in accordance with the discourse of his two hypotheses