Efficacious Sacrifice

Introduction to Sacrifice

We now come the area where we are going to have the most difficulty with Girard’s approach—but not so much in what he sees throughout the ancient world, but in how far he extends it, and what as a result he excludes from the atonement of Christ. He has a great deal of insight into the nature of sacrificial cultures, but we want to be careful here.

An underlying reason for this difference may be seen on p. 69 of the Reader, where the editor refers to the “hominids in the process of becoming human.” If religion is a reasonable device that men came up with in their evolutionary ascent out of bestial violence, then let’s give credit where credit is due, and continue our growth past that. But if all violence began after an expulsion of fully created human beings from an idyllic Garden, then that is a completely different story. The issues of creation and evolution are basic in this discussion.

Lightning Rods In Thunderstorms

This whole process is in the very nature of things. “When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim” (Reader, p. 72). But is not just a matter of “this guy for that guy.” Ultimately, the entire society is involved. “Rather, it is a substitute for all the members of the community, offered up by the members themselves” (Reader, p. 77).

The quarrel may have started out with just two men, but ancient societies knew that two men fighting with one another, with one of them killed, was no more innocent (as far as they were concerned) than to find two members of their community with a bad case of the plague. “This common denominator is internal violence—all the dissensions, rivalries, jealousies, and quarrels within the community that the sacrifices are designed to suppress. The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric. Everything else derives from that” (Reader, p. 78, emphasis mine).

“In a universe where the slightest dispute can lead to disaster—just as a slight cut can prove fatal to a hemophiliac—the rites of sacrifice serve to polarize the community’s aggressive impulses and redirect them toward victims that may be actual or figurative, animate or inanimate, but that are always incapable of propagating further vengeance . . . The sacrificial process prevents the spread of violence by keeping vengeance in check” (Reader, p. 87)

Is Substitution Confused?

Girard holds that in order for a sacrificial system to “work,” everybody has to squint at what they are doing. They have to see just enough of it so that the exercise is plausible, but not enough of it to see that the whole thing is crazy. This victim is like the entity he is being substituted for—so let’s call it good. The victim is unlike the entity he is being substituted for, and so we stop the spread of violent contagion. “Sacrificial substitution implies a degree of misunderstanding. Its vitality as an institution depends on its ability to conceal the displacement upon which the rite is based” (Reader, p. 75).

According to Girard, this misunderstanding furthered by the theologians and priests, but he does not say this in an attack on them. He sees, quite clearly, the essential role that fostering this misunderstanding plays. “The theological basis of the sacrifice has a crucial role in fostering this misunderstanding. It is the god who supposedly demands the victims; he alone, in principle, who savors the smoke from the altars and requisitions the slaughtered flesh. It is to appease his anger that the killing goes on, that the victims multiply” (Reader, p. 77).

Men do not think that they have the authority in themselves to simply assign a victim. The voice of God must be sought. “Men can dispose of their violence more efficiently if they regard the process not as something emanating from within themselves, but as a necessity imposed from without, a divine decree whose least infraction calls down terrible punishment” (Reader, p. 83)

Sacrificial Crisis

The sacrificial rites are born in the founding of a city—usually a founding murder of some sort. But periodically, an established system starts to break down. “If, as is often the case, we encounter the institution of sacrifice either in an advanced state of decay or reduced to a relative insignificance, it is because it has already undergone a good deal of wear and tear” (Reader, p. 88).

Under certain circumstances, the “victim will not longer be capable of attracting the violent impulses to itself; the sacrifice will cease to serve as a ‘good conductor,’ in the sense that metal is a good conductor of electricity” (Reader, p. 88).

Propitiation

In his great book, Til We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis has the priest of Ungit compare the “thickness” of his religion, with its need for blood, with the “thinness” and aridity of the Fox’s philosophical urbanity. Blood is necessary, and at the foundational level. And although it has pragmatic benefits—peace to the community—the reason it brings peace is that the community knows that something fundamentally necessary has been done. This is true even if that community is mistaken about whether the fundamental necessity has been accomplished. It is close enough to be able to make the mistake. Girard is indispensable for showing how the mistake is made via “substitution”—animals for men, this man for that, this man for all of us, and so on. But why does substitution work at all? Is this a design feature of the world, of which all pagan religions are sinful and twisted distortions.

Substitution is the way God made the world, and so men in rebellion counterfeit it in many ingenious and complicated ways, or substitution is something we came up with as a temporary makeshift, and, when we were mature enough to see it, God revealed the true nature of the makeshift to us.

But for those who believe in the plenary, verbal inspiration of Scripture, the question is settled. Just a couple examples should suffice:

Propitiation

is similar to the idea of expiation, although propitiation has the additional element of dealing with the concept of wrath. We know what the word propitiation means in just the same way that we know what the words synagogue, boat, or temple mean. Propitiation contains two halves. The first is the element of appeasing the wrath of an offended party (in this case, God), and second is the element of being reconciled to Him as a result. That said: