René Girard and the Eucharist as the Eschatological Sacrifice
René Girard’s final work, Battling to the End, has left many of his disciples feeling uneasy. When attending gatherings of Girardian scholars, it is not uncommon for this work to be addressed only in whispers, “Psst . . . have you read Battling to the End? What did you think?”
I will even admit to my own mixed views on Girard’s final work. On the one hand, I agree with Girard’s assessment that Christianity predicts its own failure.[1] After all, there is no need for Christ to speak of an impending apocalypse or to raise the question, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8), if Christ believes that his message will be universally received. However, I do not hold, as Girard does, that the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ have left humanity “deprived of sacrifice.”[2] In fact, in making the claim that Christ has left us in a situation where “we are faced with an inescapable alternative: either we acknowledge the truth of Christianity, or we contribute to the escalation to extremes by rejecting Revelation”[3] Girard falls back into the understanding of “sacrifice” that he held when writing Things Hidden from the Foundation of the World—an understanding that he later admitted “was completely wrong.”[4] I intended to present a case, based largely on the theology of Pope Benedict XVI and the work of Jean-Pierre Torrell, that Christ did not come to end sacrifice, but rather recapitulate and transform our understanding of sacrifice. This new understanding of true sacrifice will then be the only means for establishing true peace, and ultimately true culture.
I. Christian Sacrifice.
When he wrote Things Hidden, Girard understood sacrifice solely “in reference to the rituals of archaic religion.”[5] For him, sacrifice necessarily involved the violent expulsion of a victim by a group of “others.” He explains that with this narrow definition of sacrifice, “it seemed to me that the traditional definition of the Passion in terms of sacrifice furnished additional arguments for those who wished to liken Christianity to an archaic religion. This is why, for a long time, I resisted it.”[6]
Later Girard realized that sacrifice was more than the ritualistic violence imposed upon a victim whose expulsion was intended to recall a founding murder and bring about the conciliatory effects the murder produced. Sacrifice could also be understood as “consecration-on-behalf-of-others.”[7] While this concept functions as an anthropological reality within Girard’s later works, it is rooted in divine revelation, and cannot be understood or derived apart from revelation.[8] The consecration-on-behalf-of-others model allowed Girard to view the Passion as a sacrifice, not because Christ died a bloody death, but because the adoption of a non-violent, non-rivalrous stance by Christ constitutes a sacrifice.[9] That is to say, the defining characteristic of Christ’s sacrifice is not the immolation of Christ as a victim, but rather Christ’s kenosis, his offering of himself for the sake of others.