Imitatio Dei as Pedagogy
Imitation is Underrated
Why should we imitate God? If you look at most religious traditions, you’ll find texts that enjoin us not just to obey God, but to imitate God. Micah 6:8 tells us “To act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God.” While we can interpret the meaning of “walk humbly with God” in a variety of ways, one obvious way is that we should “shadow God”; that is, we should make ourselves into apprentices who learn from God’s example by observing God’s routine. What is a day in the life of God?
The Talmud (Sotah 14a) teaches the principle that “Just as God visits the sick, so should we. Just as God clothes the naked and comforts orphans, so should we.” It would be enough for religious traditions to teach that one should visit the sick because God commands it, and yet we find a constant emphasis on imitating God. And on a phenomenological and psychological basis, it’s easy to understand why. Over longer time horizons, children don’t listen to what their parents instruct, but rather emulate what their parents demonstrate by their deeds. Modeling is the best way to teach and mimesis is the best way to learn. The first thing babies learn on their way to child development is to mirror the faces they see.
In Rupture and Reconstruction, Hayim Soloveitchik argues that the Holocaust transformed Jewish learning from a mimetic tradition to an intellectually heavy-, book-based one. People used to paskan law based on what they grew up with and saw others do. In the absence of such examples, given the demographic collapse wrought by mass death, forced migration and persecution, leaders turned to law books to fill the void. Understood theologically, we can imagine that the study of Torah generally is a kind of substitute for being in God’s presence. If we walked humbly with God we wouldn’t need to consult the book. In fact, this is one of the Christian strategies for overturning Jewish law. If Jesus is in your heart, you don’t need the book. But even within Jewish history we find a version of this debate between Hasidic thought and Misnagdic thought. Hasidim emphasized piety, aspiring to reveal God in the world. Misnagdim, skeptical of revelation and spiritual experience, emphasized study. Both groups might have agreed that walking humbly with God is l’hatchila (ideal), but the Misnagdim argued that b’di eved (ex post-facto), since walking with God is impossible in this world, we should focus on studying God’s books (and the books on those books).
Religious ethics (which overlaps with virtue ethics) is focused not just on doing the right thing, but on developing a God-like character. Even the popular WWJD suggests that we engage in divine “perspective-taking.”
There is also a practical reason why one might engage in asking “What would Jesus do?” namely that Jesus isn’t present to consult. In the absence of the boss, in the absence of clear rules, you need to call on your intuition. In that case, having put in your reps imitating God, you will follow your intuition and be right, rather than merely biased. Mirroring God is the way to become God-like. Why meditate in front of a statue of a Buddha if not to absorb his smile until it becomes one’s own?
The concept of Imitatio Dei is so basic that we fail to appreciate its strangeness. Yet it’s woefully missing in both Utilitarian ethics, which focuses only on outcomes, and Deontological ethics, which focuses only on abstract duty. Both utilitarianism and deontology fail to answer a more basic question than “What should I do?” namely, “How can I learn to become a good person?” Instead they presume that you’ve already formed your character or that one’s character is besides the point. But utilitarians and deontologists aren’t formed in the vacuum.
In 11th grade English, I spent months writing out by hand the essays of Emerson and De Quincey, Coleridge, the speeches of Cicero, Lincoln, JFK and MLK. That is how you learn to write. That is the old school way to train the LLM that is you. We find that in the arts and crafts, people still learn this way. Yet somehow in the realm of ethics popular discourse focuses on tradeoffs, expected value, and trolley problems.
Besides the ethical value of imitating God (or, for the less theologically inclined, imitating one’s moral heroes), imitating God provides epistemological value. You can’t come to know God unless you practice behaving in a God-like way. Ancient and medieval philosophers and theologians understood this intuitively. Remarkably, Nietzsche makes the same point from an atheistic perspective. The problem with God, he writes, is not that God doesn’t exist, but that I cannot be him. I can only be like him, I can only be a demi-god. Thus, one way to think about the “death of God” is the death of role models. We must become the role model. Unfortunately, in a world in which all are role models, none are. No wonder that the most sought after profession amongst today’s youth is Tiktok influencer.
For those who are open to the idea of God’s existence, it’s worth asking if you are properly weighting the idea of imitating God, whatever that might mean. For those less open, it’s worth asking if you are properly weighting the idea of imitating role models, especially in the realm of ethics.
One practical reason to challenge the concept of imitatio Dei is that we simply don’t enough data on God. We don’t know what God does most of the time, so to speak. It is impossible to shadow God. But it turns out that the same is true of celebrities, and of most people, in general. We may think we have an image of their life, but it is a selective one. Whenever we dig deeper into the lives of our heroes, we often find scandal and banality. One take-away might be that God is categorically different than these flawed models and that’s why we should worship God alone. Another might be that as one Talmudic sage says when he gets caught following his teacher around to unseemly and inappropriate places, “this too (your flaws, your humanity) is Torah and I need to learn it.”
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How does this relate to Rene Girard's mimetic desire?
Imitatio Dei seems to be aspirational, while Girardian mimesis seems more descriptive and problematic (creates rivalry/scapegoating). Of course, Imitatio Dei can only be practiced in a social framework, where it's defined by another as desirable... so maybe it just folds back into Girardian mimesis. Or does true Imitatio Dei manage to evade Girardian memesis?
A corollary of Imitatio Dei, where G-d is looked to as the Role Model, might be that, whatever we are doing, we should strive to be a role model while we do it, even if only as a role model for ourselves when there is no external audience.