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  • The Satanic and the TheomimeticDistinguishing and Reconciling "Sacrifice" in René Girard and Gregory the Great
  • Jordan Joseph Wales (bio)

In recent decades,1 compelling voices have charged that the theological category of "sacrifice" has too long valorized suffering and has fostered a culture of violence, particularly through the notion that Christ's excruciating death on the Cross was a payment demanded by God for human sins. Such an attribution of violence to the godhead itself silences victims while eroding our resistance to victimizers, and a sacrificial understanding of the ideal human relationship to God encourages a pursuit of self-extinction that ends in mere dissipation.2 Of great influence in this wide-ranging discussion is the work of René Girard. Beneath the "sacred" violence of sacrifice, Girard discerns a concealed scapegoat-murder driven by a distortion of human desire that itself must lead to human self-annihilation. My concern here is thus rhetorical and theological—can one speak safely of sacrifice; and can human beings somehow cease to practice the sacrifice that must otherwise destroy them?

Drawing on the writings of Gregory the Great (ca. 540–604),3 this paper proposes an understanding of sacrifice that both distinguishes Christian sacrifice from victim-silencing connotations and renders a possible account of how to overcome the roots of the sacred violence identified by Girard. While [End Page 177] attending to the former, I shall focus on the latter, developing Girard's argument that there are two sorts of sacrifice: one that destroys and one that heals; one that is founded on rivalry and one that is founded on love; and that true peace is secured for human beings only by mimetic participation in Christ's own sacrifice of love.

Four claims structure this argument: First, Girard recognizes two kinds of sacrifice—one, the scapegoat murder, overcomes community rivalries by unanimous imitation of an accuser, who shifts blame onto some third party who is then collectively murdered; the other sacrifice practices renunciation and forgiveness in imitation of God. According to their exemplars, I respectively designate these sacrifices and the cultures they form as the "Satanic" (Girard's term) and the "theomimetic" (mine). Violence is intrinsic and essential to the Satanic, while only incidental upon and nonessential to the theomimetic. Second, I analyze the intrinsic instability that keeps the Satanic from sustaining the societal order and unity that it promises. Third, by a constructive reading of Gregory the Great, I posit that Satanic sacrifice overlooks and indeed exacerbates the root of human covetousness—a failure to love. Fourth, Gregory's teaching on the imitation of Christ enables us to expand on Girard's account of the theomimetic sacrifice of renunciation, to clarify how this latter might not only oppose but also systematically subvert the Satanic by healing the disorder out of which mimetic rivalry and scapegoating first take their rise.

two kinds of sacrifice

Mimetic Desire and the Satanic Sacrifice of the Scapegoat

An exposition of the Satanic, this paper's first point, must precede any presentation of the theomimetic. All human desire, Girard maintains, is "mimetic"; we desire what we see others desiring and do so with an intensity that mirrors theirs. This imitation is an "intrinsic good"4 that frees us from animal instinct and binds us into communities of desire. Yet too easily it is perverted, such that one desires not only the same sort of thing as one's neighbor may desire or possess, but the numerically identical thing. One's neighbor becomes one's rival as one becomes what Girard calls a "puppet" of mimetic desire. The neighbor, too, is drawn into this mimetic thralldom, as his love for his possession defensively increases to match that of his new adversary. Mimetic impasse becomes "scandal" when a rival transfers his attention from the desired object onto his mimetic rival, now seen as the stumbling block that impedes his happiness. All that distinguishes the rivals is subjectively effaced until each sees the other's [End Page 178] very existence as the cause of all distress. For mimetic puppets, the only escape from scandal is violence—whence covetousness, the Decalogue's last prohibition concerning one's neighbor, begets murder, its first...

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