Fleming wrote that "Violence and the Sacred", the work of Girard's that "Anglophone theorists" were most familiar with, appeared to suggest that Girard was "hostile to religion". He suggested that this view of the work as "atheistic" was a result of Girard's suggesting that "the social and the sacred are coeval; that violence lies at the heart of the sacred; and that the institutions of the sacred give concrete cultural form to the misrecognition and transcendalization of human violence." However, he maintained that "Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World" complicated this view of Girard's perspective without simply overturning it. He saw Girard's theory of sacrifice, as expressed in "Violence and the Sacred", as having significant strengths. It has been compared to the classicist Walter Burkert's "Homo Necans" by the literature scholar William Johnsen and the religious studies scholar Catherine Bell; Johnsen also praised Girard's discussion of Freud, describing it as brilliant. The philosopher Ludger Hagedorn questioned Girard's use of Heraclitus, his emphasis on violence rather than power, and his understanding of Nietzsche's concept of the Apollonian and Dionysian.