René Girard and the Symbolism of Religious Sacrifice
by Eugene Webb
University of Washington
René Girard is well known for his critique of the imagery of sacrifice. As he reads
religious symbolism and the rituals that present and enact it, these constitute ways of
simultaneously commemorating and masking the real collective violence and
victimization that gave rise to human society. His Violence and the Sacred argued
forcefully for the universality of this fundamental cultural force: “All religious rituals
spring from the surrogate victim, and all the great institutions of mankind, both secular
and religious, spring from ritual. … It could hardly be otherwise, for the working basis of
human thought, the process of ‘symbolization,’ is rooted in the surrogate victim” (p.
306). As a counterforce to the general pattern of religion, Girard went on to argue in later
studies, the prophetic tradition in Israel, culminating in the story of Jesus of Nazareth,
gradually disclosed these secrets “hidden since the foundation of the world” (Matt. 13:35,
the epigraph of Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World). This
revelation, however, was more than its recipients could bear, and they soon buried it
again under a “sacrificial reading” that interpreted Jesus’ death not as the unmasking and
exploding of the victimizing mechanism but as itself the ultimate satisfaction (and
confirmation) of its exigency. In Things Hidden Girard identifies the Epistle to the
Hebrews in particular as the fountainhead of this sacrificial misreading of Christianity.
I would like in this essay to explore from the point of view of the comparative study of
religious symbolism the theme of sacrifice in Hebrews and to suggest some ways in
which Girard’s analysis of that theme might benefit from the broader perspective that the
history of religions can provide. In particular I will try to show that the epistle’s
symbolism and the experience of spiritual transformation it represents may be understood
more deeply and more favorably than Girard may have realized, through a comparison
with Hinduism and Buddhism.
I realize of course that this comparison may in itself look problematic from a Girardian
point of view, since Girard has spoken critically of those religions too. Near the end of
Things Hidden, Girard makes the important observation that no merely intellectual
process of thinking can win victory over mimetic desire and the urge to victimize; rather
that requires a kind of “conversion experience,” which “always retains the form of the
great religious experiences”; then he adds that “[t]his kind of experience can be found in
the great oriental religions. But there the aim is to allow the individual to escape
completely from the world and its cycles of violence by an absolute renunciation of all
worldly concerns, a kind of living death” (p. 400). Hinduism and Buddhism are most
probably the “great oriental religions” he had in mind. I hope to show, however, that it
may be possible to discover in these something greater, and also more congenial to
Girard’s own thought, than the cultivation of “a kind of living death.” I will argue, that
is, that both the Epistle to the Hebrews and these Asian traditions may share more with,
and offer more to, Girard than he has realized.
For the sake of brevity and because I have already done so at length elsewhere, I will not
try to present a full exposition of Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, mimetic rivalry, and
the sacrificial crisis with its trajectory toward identifying, and sacrificing, some victim as
a scapegoat.1 I will simply summarize a few points pertinent to my initial focus on
Girard’s critique of sacrifice and of Hebrews.
1
A reader wanting a full exposition of those theories might look at Webb, The Self Between: From Freud
to the New Social Psychology of France, especially 87-119 and 175-193.
2
In Girard’s interpretation, the secret “hidden since the foundation of the world” referred
to in Matt. 13:35 (and Luke 11:50-51)—and alluded to, of course, in his book’s title—
was the founding role played in all human enterprises by the mécanisme victimaire
(victimizing mechanism) of scapegoating, which is itself an outgrowth of mimetic desire.
Mimetic desire is a deeply rooted tendency in human beings to imitate the desires of
others. This eventually leads to mimetic rivalry and mimetic conflict—not only because
to desire what another desires, in a world of finite resources, will inevitably lead to
conflict over the same objects of desire, but also because even in a world of unlimited
fungibility it would still be precisely our rival’s object we would desire and not even a
perfect equivalent would satisfy us. The victimizing mechanism is both a further
development in this process and also, in most societies that have developed historically,
the solution to the crises it generates. To explain the logic of Girard’s idea very simply:
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Since mimetic desire is a fundamental trait of human beings, people will
inevitably fall into mimetic rivalries and these will spread like wildfire,
especially where no system of traditional restraints and boundaries has been
developed or where such a system has broken down.
When these circumstances (lack of an effective system of restraints) prevail,
the mimetic conflict will multiply until it threatens to destroy the entire
society in a paroxysm of violence.
At this point the victimizing mechanism will be triggered by the same
mechanism that started the trouble to begin with, namely mimesis. Some
individual (perhaps someone with a limp, or with noticeable racial differences,
or with non-conformist ideas) may attract the attention of several others who
will gang up on him, and others will also be drawn to join them by the
mimesis of their violence.
Those drawn by mimesis into such shared hostility to a common victim will
experience among themselves, in place of their earlier rivalry, a new
unanimity and fellowship.
But the peace that proceeds from this is inherently fragile: new rivalries may
develop and threaten the group—until once again they seek a new common
scapegoat.
Or, as the ancient Israelites did, they may forswear intra-group violence and
restrain themselves from mimetic rivalry by adherence to a Law deemed
transcendent. And they may reinforce their loyalty to that system of restraint
by instituting ritualized commemorations of the original collective
victimization, i.e., ritual sacrifices, to remind them of its originating, lifegiving effects while protecting them from having actually to repeat it in all its
dangerous reality.
But such a system of the control of violence is far from perfectly effective,
especially because it masks the reality of the whole complex of mimetic
desire, rivalry, and victimization. New crises therefore continue to arise and
call for new victims.
This, says Girard, is the reality behind all the imagery of sacrifice in primitive religions
and in the Hebrew Bible, except where the prophets gradually moved toward the
realization that the God of Israel did not want “the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of hegoats” (Isaiah 1:12).2 In the imagery of the gospels, the Satan that Jesus resisted and
2
Cf. the important theological study of Girard’s thought by Raymund Schwager, S. J., Must There Be
Scapegoats?: Violence and Redemption in the Bible, 88.
3
finally conquered is a personification of the victimizing mechanism and the symbol of the
insidious force with which it sneaks up on us from behind and takes possession of us in
all our endeavors.3 The principal act of Jesus and of the gospel writers was their
exposing of this hidden force. This, for Girard, is the truth that makes us free—or can do
so, if we relive in the conversion of our own hearts, the realization the gospels try to
share with us.
The power of the victimizing mechanism to resist being exposed and disarmed is
exemplified with supreme irony in the development Girard calls “historical
Christianity”—the religion that took shape around a sacrificial reading of what had been
the anti-sacrificial revelation in the gospels.4 In this distorted tradition, Jesus came to be
interpreted as having cooperated voluntarily with his victimizers in order to offer himself
in his crucifixion as a sacrificial victim for the purpose of appeasing an angry God. This
conception, says Girard in Things Hidden, “was most completely formulated by the
medieval theologians, and it amounted to the statement that the Father himself insisted
upon the sacrifice. Efforts to explain this sacrificial pact only result in absurdities: God
feels the need to revenge his honour, which has been tainted by the sins of humanity, and
so on. Not only does God require a new victim, but he requires the victim who is most
precious and most dear to him, his very son” (p. 182).
Girard identifies the Epistle to the Hebrews as the chief New Testament source of this
misreading: “The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews interprets Christ’s death on the
basis of the sacrifices under the Old Law. The new bond with God, like the old one, is
inaugurated in blood. But as it is perfect, it is no longer the blood of animals[,] which is
‘powerless to remove sins,’ but the blood of Christ” (p. 228). The author, Girard says,
“may well say that Christ’s sacrifice is, by contrast with the others, unique, perfect, and
definitive. But in reality he can see only continuity with previous sacrifices, if he takes
no account of the scapegoat mechanism.” Hebrews, one might say, is to Girard what the
Epistle of James was to Luther: the one book of the New Testament that really missed the
point.
I think Girard is correct that much traditional reading of Hebrews has fostered a way of
reading Christian symbols that has obscured the very important truth Girard has himself
done such admirable work in bringing to light. I hope, then, that it will not seem merely
retrograde if I suggest that there may be more to this text, and to the theme of sacrifice in
Christianity and in other religions, than Girard’s immensely valuable, but rather narrowly
focused, anti-sacrificial critique has yet managed to take into account.
Girard’s interpretation of Hebrews attributes to it two key ideas that might be analyzed
logically as:
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The true, fully effective sacrifice = Jesus’ crucifixion.
The function of the crucifixion = appeasement of God.
I will try to show, however, that on a more careful reading Hebrews can be seen to be
saying something quite different:
3
Cf. Girard, The Scapegoat, 187: “ . . . the kingdom of Satan is not one among others. The Gospels state
explicitly that Satan is the principle of every kingdom.”
4
See Things Hidden, 225-227.
4
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The true, fully effective sacrifice is not Jesus’ crucifixion but something else
that I will try to clarify below (although his willingness to face death on the
cross was an expression and sign of that something else).
The crucifixion did have a redemptive function, but that function was not
sacrificial in the sense Girard focuses on and had nothing to do with appeasing
God.
Girard is correct that Hebrews is not especially concerned with exposing the scapegoat
mechanism in the manner Girard himself does, but neither is it concerned with affirming
or hiding it; in fact, its explicit critique of the sacrifices of the Temple system as
ineffective constitute an explicit repudiation of the idea that the slaying of victims can be
in any way salvific.
Let me begin my own analysis by looking at a few passages from Hebrews that I think an
interpretation of the theme of sacrifice needs to consider. I will not attempt an
interpretation of Hebrews as a whole, and I will ignore the final 13th chapter entirely,
since it does not appear to have been a part of the original document, which was
something more like a sermon or “homiletical midrash” than a letter, according to George
Wesley Buchanan in the Anchor Bible edition.5
Buchanan’s commentary on Hebrews also presupposes, by the way, the sort of sacrificial
reading Girard criticizes, as do the editors of the New Oxford Annotated Bible (Revised
Standard Version). This way of reading Hebrews has become pervasively conventional,
and Girard is quite right to criticize it. My own reading presupposes Girard’s critique of
sacrifice; far from wanting to oppose or correct it, I wish to complement it with a
recovery of what I think is a deeper, genuinely “anti-sacrificial” (in Girard’s sense)
reading intended by the epistle’s author—or at least implied in what his epistle says. I
hope also, through some comparison of this early6 Christian text with Hindu and
Buddhist themes, to show that there can be further meanings in religious images of
sacrifice than only those that mask and act out the mécanisme victimaire.
I use purposely the phrases “there can be further meanings” and “at least implied,”
because there is no way to prove with certainty what some ancient author meant or “had
in mind,” especially one so lost in anonymity as the author of Hebrews. But a good way
to approach the question of what this text might have meant for its author or at least to an
intelligent Jewish-Christian reader of the mid-first century, is to separate out and set aside
meanings that would seem incoherent or that are based on later ways of thinking that
have lost touch with the original milieu of meaning.
One example of what has to be set aside as such an anachronistic reading is the now
conventional notion of what it means to speak of Jesus as “son of God” or “Christ”: that
he was some kind of divine figure. For first century Jews like the author of this text and
his readers,7 references to someone as “son of God” or as “the anointed one” (the precise
5
Buchanan, To the Hebrews, 246.
Buchanan, 257, thinks Hebrews, because it refers to Temple sacrifices that are sill going on, dates from
before the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. This would make it, along with the epistles of Paul, one of
the earliest documents in the New Testament. J.H. Davies (A Letter to the Hebrews: Commentary by J.H.
Davies, 8) agrees with Buchanan on this early date of the document.
7
If this text really does date from the mid-first century, it would be just one more anachronism to interpret
the author and his audience as “Christians” (as opposed to “Jews”) in the sense that word later took on.
There is every reason to suppose that it would have been a very rare Christian of the first century who
might have thought that Christianity was a new religion separate from the Jewish tradition; for all of its
earliest adherents, the Christian movement was understood as a development within the Jewish tradition,
not something radically different from it.
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5
meaning of “messiah” or “Christ”) would not in themselves have involved the idea that
the person referred to was divine. The term “son of God” had a long Biblical history. Its
most important use was to refer to the calling of Israel as a people, as when God tells
Moses to say to Pharaoh, “Thus says the Lord, Israel is my first-born son, and I say to
you, ‘Let my son go that he may serve me” (Exodus 4:22), or when God says in Hosea
11:1: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”8 To say in the first century Jewish milieu that Jesus
was “son of God” was to say that he truly fulfilled the calling of Israel to live in sonship
to God. When Hebrews speaks of him as a “pioneer…leading many sons to glory”
(2:10),9 it is clear that the focus is on the idea of the first true Israelite leading others to
fulfill the same calling, i.e., the calling of Israel to sonship.
“Anointing” was an image used to refer to the idea that God called and empowered some
individual for an important work. In so far as it might refer to one called and empowered
to fulfill the calling of Israel as a whole to heed God’s will in a filial manner and help
others to fulfill it, the titles “son of God” and “messiah” or “christ” could even overlap in
meaning. In first century Palestine “anointed” was most commonly used to refer to
someone called to drive out the Romans and restore an Israelite state like the one
attributed to David and Solomon. But like “son of God,” the symbolism of being
“anointed” had a long history of more diverse use behind it. In the Hebrew Bible it was
used to refer to a wide range of figures, mainly kings—including Saul, David,
Zerubbabel, and even Cyrus of Persia (Isaiah 45:1)—and important priests, such as Aaron
(Exodus 29:7). We know it was used in the first century B.C.E. community that left the
Dead Sea scrolls to refer to expected leaders of both the kingly and the priestly type,
spoken of in the scrolls as messiahs “of Israel” and “of Aaron” respectively. In most
New Testament documents, “anointed” was used mainly to identify Jesus as a kingly
figure fulfilling the prophecy that someday Yahweh would rule in Zion, but in Hebrews it
is Jesus’ role as high priest that is emphasized, a role that is underscored by associating
him with Melchizedek, whose superior priesthood even Abraham recognized and
deferred to (Hebrews 7:4).
Although he says Jesus “reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature”
(Hebrews 1:3; literally: “being the radiance of his glory and the representation of his
reality” [tes hypostaseos autou10]), the author of the epistle emphasizes that he was fully
human: “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise
partook of the same nature [shared in the same things], that through death he might
destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who
through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage” (2:14-15). Only a human being
could die a human death, but also, only a human being “who in every respect has been
tempted as we are, yet without sin” (4:15) could conquer, as representative of all
humanity, the power of sin and death.
This is the central idea of Hebrews: that Jesus, fulfilling the calling of Israel to divine
sonship, raised humanity itself into sonship in his own person by conquering sin and
breaking the power of Satan over all human beings. Satan’s power was in Biblical
tradition the power to tempt and lead astray. But it was also the power of death. Hebrews
is quite explicit in linking the tendency of humans to sin (i.e., to fail to fulfill their calling
8
Passages from the Bible will be quoted in the Revised Standard Version translation.
Material in brackets will be my own comments and occasional more literal translations. A more literal
translation of archegon than “pioneer” might be something like “original leader.” Arndt and Gingrich’s
Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament spells it out as “one who begins someth[ing] as first in a
series and thus supplies the impetus.”
10
On the meaning of “hypostasis” in early Christian usage, see Webb, “The Hermeneutic of Greek
Trinitarianism.”
9
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to sonship) to their fear of death.11 They have been enslaved by the fear of death, and
Jesus’ death has delivered them from that slavery so that now they are free to respond to
the calling to sonship as he did.
How did Jesus free them from this? How did he break the power of Satan over them once
and for all? Here is the crux of the text. Hebrews does not spell out the answer to this
obvious question, probably because the author expected the answer would be obvious to
his readers. But it is no longer so obvious as it once was. To a western Christian reader
today, as to Girard himself, there is one very obvious answer: Jesus did it by dying on the
cross as a propitiatory sacrifice, i.e., by offering his “blood” to appease the anger of the
God who inflicts death as a punishment. The reason this is so obvious now is that
Anselm of Canterbury answered the question in this way in the 1lth century in his Cur
Deus Homo? (Why Did God Become Man?).12 But would this have been obvious (or
even credible) to the epistle’s first century audience, a millennium before Anselm and
three centuries before Augustine developed the ideas of Original Sin and inherited guilt
that Anselm could interpret as an offense against God’s honor? This propitiatorysacrificial reading is clearly incoherent with numerous elements of the text. For example,
the one who is described in 2:14-15 as having “the power of death” is not an offended
God but “ton diabolon,” the devil. And God is described repeatedly in the text as not
wanting the kinds of sacrifice that involved killing offerings. Girard says in the quotation
above from Things Hidden (p. 182), that “[e]fforts to explain this sacrificial pact only
result in absurdities.” Might it not be possible that this western medieval reading of
Hebrews would have seemed just as absurd to its author and first century audience as it
does to Girard?
To an early Christian there would have been another obvious way to interpret the idea
that Jesus’ death freed human beings from enslavement by the fear of death, a way that is
clearly attested as current in the first century Christian milieu: that Jesus’ death was the
prelude to his resurrection. To someone who believed in Jesus’ resurrection, it would
have shown in the most dramatic and convincing way that the conquest of death was no
longer merely a dream or hope for the future, but had actually become, in the life of one
concrete human being, a reality. And as such it was also a token of future resurrection
for others. Paul alludes to this idea again and again in his own epistles, so it should not
be surprising to find it in Hebrews as well.
That Hebrews does not represent Jesus as seeking crucifixion in order to make his own
death a propitiatory sacrifice should be evident from 5:7: “In the days of his flesh, Jesus
offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to
save him from death, and he was heard for his godly fear [literally, devoutness
(eulabeias)].” This is hardly coherent with the idea of a conscious pact with God to die
as a propitiation, but it is perfectly coherent with the idea that in fulfillment of his prayers
he was raised from death and that their belief in this could be interpreted as delivering the
epistle’s author and audience from enslavement by the fear of their own deaths.
11
For a psychological discussion of the idea of enslavement by the fear of death, see Becker, The Denial of
Death.
12
Written ca. 1094-1098. Anselm is clearly the major figure among “the medieval theologians” Girard
refers to in the quote above from Things Hidden, 182. The reason I speak of this as obvious to specifically
western Christians is that Anselm was a westerner working out of a tradition deriving from Augustine of
Hippo, who developed the idea of Original Sin, which for Anselm is the offense the propitiatory sacrifice
was needed to compensate for. The Eastern Christian tradition did not read either of these Latin writers,
had no doctrine of Original Sin as heritable guilt (although it did believe humanity had “fallen,” in the
sense of going astray from the path God intended for it), and had an entirely different idea of atonement;
for the Christian East, atonement (at-one-ment) was effected by the Incarnation as such, which was
believed to have united humanity and divinity, rather than by propitiation of divine wrath.
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But what then was Jesus’ sacrifice if it was not his death on the cross? For Hebrews does
represent Jesus as offering a sacrifice: “he has appeared once for all at the end of the age
to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (9:26) And this new covenant with God is
even said to be inaugurated in blood: “But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the
good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent … he entered
once for all into the Holy Place, taking not the blood of goats and calves but his own
blood, thus securing an eternal redemption” (9:11-12)
Is this physical blood, like that of the goats and calves, or metaphorical blood? If it is
physical blood, then certainly Girard is right to say that the author of the epistle “can see
only continuity with previous sacrifices.” But if Jesus’ blood here is a metaphor for some
other sort of sacrifice, then the picture is quite different. Which kind of meaning does the
text suggest, and what sort of sacrifice?
It will help to clarify the question further if we consider where the sacrifice is supposed to
take place. It is certainly not in the Temple in Jerusalem like the Levitical sacrifices, but
is it on Golgotha? Several passages in Hebrews make clear that its locus is not there
either. The passage just quoted from 9:11-12 says that passing “through the greater and
more perfect tent” he “entered once for all into the Holy Place….” Where might that be?
The “tent” is a reference to the structure of the Jerusalem Temple, which was spoken of
as divided into two “tents”: “the Holy” and “the Holy of Holies.”13 The “Holy Place” of
9:12 would correspond to the part of the Temple called “the Holy,” where the sacrificial
offerings were prepared for the altar which stood in front of the first tent. The Levitical
priests who prepared offerings there, Hebrews tells us, “serve a copy and shadow of the
heavenly sanctuary” (8:5). Jesus, on the other hand, offered his “blood” in the true,
heavenly “Holy Place,” and having done that, has now passed in his resurrection life into
the true Holy of Holies, “into the inner shrine behind the curtain” (6:19), “not into a
sanctuary made with hands, a copy of the true one, but into heaven itself, now to appear
in the presence of God on our behalf” (9:24).
So Jesus’ sacrifice took place not in a physical place but a metaphorical place. The
“blood” he offered in this metaphorical place, was perforce metaphorical blood. But
what “heavenly” (spiritual or psychological) reality might that metaphor represent?
To get an initial sense of what Jesus’ sacrifice might have involved, let us consider
further the way the text contrasts it with those of the Temple tradition: “When Christ
came into the world, he said ‘Sacrifices and offerings thou hast not desired … in burnt
offerings and sin offerings thou hast taken no pleasure. Then I said, “Lo, I have come to
do thy will, O God,’ as it is written of me in the roll of the book”(10:5; the quotation
within the quotation is Psalm 40:6-8). Hebrews then goes on to say that God, “…
abolishes the first in order to establish the second. And by that will we have been
sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (10:9-10) “The
first” clearly refers to the traditional animal sacrifices; “the second,” just as clearly, is “to
do thy will.”
These passages make it abundantly clear that the “blood” of Jesus’ sacrifice, like the
Holy Place where it is offered, is a metaphor: the sacrifices that involved physical blood
have been abolished; the new, fully adequate sacrifice, “the offering of the body of Jesus
Christ once for all,” is the perfect fulfillment of God’s will. What might that mean, and
why might “blood” be an appropriate metaphor for it? The text does not spell it out, but
13
See Buchanan, 140-142.
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again the answer was probably sufficiently evident to the original author and his intended
audience not to require that. Perhaps the author is referring to what was probably already
Jesus’ well known dictum about the two great commandments cited, for example, in
Matthew 22:37-39: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all
your soul, and with all your mind,” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”14
This certainly describes the calling of Israel, the calling to sonship to God, that was
fulfilled, from the early Christian point of view for the first time in a fully adequate way
by Jesus.
As fine a formulation of God’s will as these two commandments are, however, they
remain by themselves a bit abstract, and it may not be immediately clear just how
fulfilling them could appropriately be imaged as a kind of sacrifice, even if one
demanding only metaphorical blood. To get a better sense of how the imagery of
sacrifice operates here it may help to turn to a consideration of some parallel ideas and
images in “the great oriental religions” to which we saw Girard refer.
It is noteworthy in this connection that Bede Griffiths, a Catholic monk who spent more
than two decades in India practicing a life of contemplative prayer and writing about it in
a way that draws on both Christian and Hindu symbols, opens his book, The Cosmic
Revelation: The Hindu Way to God, with an allusion to the Hebrews: “We are going to
reflect on what I call the Vedic Revelation; and I use the word revelation intentionally
because I think we have to recognize today that God has revealed Himself in other ways
than through the Bible. God has been speaking to man, ‘in many and various ways,’ as it
says in the Letter to the Hebrews, from the beginning of time” (p. 7). Griffiths develops
further this idea of a “cosmic revelation” beyond the confines of Israel and Christianity
by invoking the same imagery of Melchizedek as does Hebrews: “…the Messiah is said
to be ‘a priest forever of the order of Melchizedek’—not the order of Aaron, of the
Jewish priesthood, but of Melchizedek, this ‘pagan’ priesthood…. That is why, when I
enter a Hindu temple, I feel that I am entering a holy place…” (p. 30).
Griffiths’ point of departure for understanding “the Hindu way to God” is the Vedic fire
sacrifice. He explains its symbolism as representing a circulation of gifts: gifts from the
divine to humans and the return of those gifts to the divine. The fire symbolizes the
transcendent source of life and spirit: “…the whole Vedic religion is centered on the fire
sacrifice. The god of fire is Agni, and worship was paid to the sun as the source of fire.
But the sun is the source of light to the mind as well as to the body” (p. 22). The
symbolism of fire in this rite compresses a large range of meanings: the fire is vitality, it
is consciousness, it is energy; it is not only the divine energy descending into incarnate
life, but it is also the energy of the liturgical offering, and as such it is simultaneously
worldly and divine, immanent and transcendent:
Agni, as we have said, is the god of fire. The fire is centred in the sun. … The
fire comes down from heaven and is buried in the earth and when you take twigs
or a flint and rub them together, the fire, Agni, leaps up. This is the god of fire
who has come down from heaven to consume the sacrifice. But this fire is also a
spiritual fire.… Agni, the fire, is the All-knowing One. It is a physical fire, yet
they call it the fire of knowledge, of wisdom, and he is the All-knowing One. He
is the mediator between God and man. He takes the sacrifice, consumes the
14
This interpretation of the essence of Torah was not an invention of Jesus but was already familiar to his
Jewish audience, as can be seen from the fact that in the parallel passage in Luke 10:25-28 it is stated not
by Jesus but by the “lawyer” who m Jesus challenges to tell him what in his view the principal
commandments are. For the traditions behind this summation, see, for example, Deut. 6:5 and Lev. 19:18.
9
sacrifice, and carries it back to heaven, and you ask him to direct your sacrifice.
(P. 23)
What sacrifice in this interpretation symbolizes essentially is the recognition that all life
comes from a transcendent source and ultimately belongs to that transcendent source.
The failure to recognize that concretely, to relinquish one’s claim to possession, and to
thankfully allow all gifts to belong to the one source is the essence of sin: “In the Vedas it
is very clear that everything comes down from above, from heaven. We receive
everything from above and everything must be returned. A sacrifice is the return to God,
and sin is the opposite, the appropriation of something to one’s self. … I am not my own
possession; I am a gift—my being is a gift from God. I have got to return that gift.
Sacrifice is this return” (p. 49).
Likening the Vedic sacrifice to the Christian eucharist, Griffiths says:
So it reads: ‘Who in all his work, sees Brahman, he in truth goes to Brahman;
Brahman is his worship, Brahman is his offering, offered by Brahman, in the fire
of Brahman.’ Now that really is a Eucharistic action. In the Eucharist God is
worshipped. You offer what you are doing to God. At the same time it is God
Himself who makes the offering and who is being offered. God is both priest and
victim. And it is offered in the fire of God…. So every action should be a
Eucharistic action, that is the goal, to be united with Christ in His offering, so
that one’s total life is offered to God. The offering is God Himself, He is offering
Himself in us, in the fire of His own love, that is by the power of His own grace,
resulting in a totally transformed human life. That is to make one’s whole life a
sacrifice. (99)
To get a more concrete sense of the particular sacrifice and transformation pointed to in
Hebrews, it may help to consider further some of the symbols of the Vedic religion and
then compare them with those of Buddhism. There are many deities in Hindu religion,
but in the tradition of the Vedas, Upanishads, and Bhagavad Gita, they are all symbols
and embodiments of what Griffiths terms “the One Being” which the Rig-Veda says “the
wise call by many names” (Griffiths 18). In Hinduism there are three major symbols that
encompass all of the divine in its various forms: Brahman, Atman, and Purusha.
Brahman is the One Being, considered as the radically transcendent source of all that is,
but also as that which can become immanent in the forms of Atman and Purusha. Atman
is usually translated as “self.” It is the spirit of the One Being present within
consciousness and animating consciousness. Purusha is usually translated as “person.”
To the extent that the presence of Brahman becomes embodied as true Atman, one might
say, the result is a true person or “purusha.” Whether one says Atman is the center or
animating principle of one person or of many persons will depend on the angle from
which one considers it; as Griffiths puts it, “Each of us is a little Purusha, and there is one
great Purusha who embraces us all” (p. 74).
The symbolism of the possible unity or multiplicity of Purusha also connects with the
symbolism of sacrifice: “…creation comes from the sacrifice of Purusha. At the
beginning of time Purusha is sacrificed and his limbs are scattered all over the world. In
the ritual sacrifice Purusha is gathered together and becomes one again” (p. 75).
“Aha!” one might hear a strict Girardian say, “Here is an obvious instance of the imagery
of sacrifice masking a primordial collective murder.” Well, that may be true — but it
does not imply that there can be no more meaning to the symbol than that alone, as I hope
will be clear from the comparison Griffiths proceeds to with some similar Christian
symbols: “This has a profound relationship to the conception of Adam and the Son of
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Man. As St. Augustine said, ‘Adam at his fall, was scattered over all the earth.’ Man
was once one, one with nature, one with himself, one with God. And then when he fell
he was scattered and divided. The atonement means that God comes into this divided
universe and gathers those scattered pieces together and in his sacrifice reunites mankind.
He brings all these persons together in his Person. Another wonderful text of St.
Augustine says, ‘In the end there will be unus Christus amans seipsum — One Christ,
loving himself in all his members’” (p. 75).
The Hindu symbolism is complicated by the fact that the symbols Brahman, Atman, and
Purusha can have levels of meaning. For example, there is “the Atman in man which is
the Spirit of God in man; but Atman can also be the ‘spirit of man’” (p. 105). Similarly,
Purusha can refer to the “Supreme Person,” but each one of us can also be said to be “a
purusha.” (The ambiguity is similar to that with which St. Paul uses the word “Christ” to
refer sometimes to Jesus as an individual and sometimes to what sounds more like a
cosmic person embracing all of the redeemed humans who live “in Christ”.)
It is this ambiguity in the Indian tradition—the idea of Purusha and Atman as also human
and individual—that seems to have given rise to the core Buddhist teaching of
“anatman,” or “no-self.” For Buddhism (very much as in Girard and Oughourlian, as will
be explained below) the human self is not an enduring, substantial reality but an
accidental configuration of memory and desire. If, from the Buddhist point of view, one
believes that one has an individual, substantial “atman” or “self,” then that belief is an
illusion that enslaves one to illusory desires—desires that seek to preserve and augment
that illusory, insubstantial self. The whole purpose of Buddhism is to assist the
individual held in this bondage to discover, through meditative practice leading to inward
realization and transformation, the truth of “anatman”: that there is no such self.
Although Buddhists, having dropped the theistic language of Hindu religion, do not use
the symbolism of sacrifice, the Buddhist radical relinquishing of the individual atman
through realization of anatman could also be called a kind of sacrifice of the self.
There have been patterns of thought in Indian tradition (especially in Jain) that have
emphasized the idea of atman as individual in a way to which the Buddhist critique is
appropriate, but the two traditions are not inherently in conflict over this point, as can be
seen from a Vedic verse Griffiths quotes: “When by the real nature of the Atman he sees
as by a lamp the real nature of Brahman, then having known the one eternal God, who is
beyond all natures, he is freed from bondage” (p. 82). Griffiths says that the insight this
verse expresses is “not merely a speculative theory but a fact of experience.” The same is
certainly true for the Buddhist realization of anatman. Both refer to psychological reality
that must be known experientially.
If the symbols of Hinduism and Buddhism are expressions of potentially universal human
experience, then they may also serve as analogies for the experience the author of
Hebrews refers to as Jesus’ sacrifice. Sin, the force within us that causes us to center in
the false self of our mimetic desires rather than in the love of God and of our neighbors,
is the ultimate obstacle to the sonship to which Israel understood itself to be called. In
psychological terms sin may be described as equivalent to what Buddhism calls the
“craving” that binds us to the false atman or illusory self. It was by his conquest of sin
and the shift of the center of his being from the false self to its true center in God that
Jesus fulfilled, for Israel and for mankind, God’s call to sonship. In psychological terms
this shift of the center of personhood may be considered equivalent to putting to death, or
“sacrificing,” the false self.
It is appropriate in this connection to mention also a pertinent Girardian symbol, the moidu-désir or “desire-self” that Jean-Michel Oughourlian explores extensively in The
11
Puppet of Desire. This, like the Buddhist idea of the atman, is an accidental
configuration of memory and desire — of memories, that is, that collect around and give
an illusory sense of permanence to constantly shifting patterns of desire. As Oughourlian
explains his specifically psychological development of Girardian theory:
I have always thought that what one customarily calls the I or self in psychology
is an unstable, constantly changing, and ultimately evanescent structure. I think
… that only desire brings this self into existence. Because desire is the only
psychological motion, it alone, it seems to me, is capable of producing the self
and breathing life into it. The first hypothesis that I would like to formulate in
this regard is this: desire gives rise to the self and, by its movement, animates it.
The second hypothesis … is that desire is mimetic. This postulate, which was
advanced by René Girard as early as 1961, seems to me capable of serving as the
foundation for a new, pure psychology—that is, one unencumbered by any sort of
biologism. … These two hypotheses make it necessary to revise earlier
psychologies, since these are psychologies either of the subject or of the object.
They demand that one renounce the mythical claim to a self that would be a
permanent structure in a monadic subject. (Pp. 11-12)
The idea of the atman that the Buddhist doctrine of anatman opposes is precisely such a
“mythical claim to a self that would be a permanent structure in a monadic subject.” The
very valuable Girardian addition to the Buddhist insight is the idea of the force of
unconscious mimesis and the role of the mediator of desire as a model for the patterns of
desire that spring up and grip us.
Perhaps it may be helpful if I explain this idea a little further. Girard initially developed
his concept of mimetic desire and the role of the mediator of desire in a study of the
novel, Mensonge romantique et vérité Romanesque (Deceit, Desire, and The Novel), the
1961 work that Oughourlian refers to. It has frequently been observed by literary
scholars that a (if not the) principal focus of the novel as a genre has been the conflict
between appearance and reality, both in society and in the life of the individual. What
Girard found in this study of the novel from Cervantes to Dostoyevsky and Proust was
that the great novelists he examined showed that most of what appear to us to be “our”
desires are really imitated from what we perceive to be the desires of others in our milieu.
More particularly, we seek out models of desire (what Girard calls “mediators”) in order
to learn what is worth desiring.
Why do we do this? The reality Girard thinks the great novelists discovered and disclose
to us is that each person who comes into the world begins with a feeling of radical lack or
emptiness, of weakness and vulnerability. Beginning as helpless infants utterly
dependent on powerful others, we feel acutely our lack of power. We also have a strong
inner drive to seek to become like those powerful others so as to acquire their power for
ourselves. We think of the mediator as free from the lack of power we feel. When we
notice that the mediator has desires, we assume that these must be for things the mediator
perceives as having the potential to augment his or her “being” (i.e., power). That is why
we want them for ourselves: we want to “be.” This is why Girard also calls mimetic
desire “metaphysical desire”: mimetic desire is only superficially a desire to have what
the other has or wants; on a deeper level it is a desire to possess not the other’s objects
but his “being,” to be what he is.
All of this normally takes place below the threshold of our awareness — though it is not
exactly unconscious either. Rather our consciousness is virtually “possessed” by our
12
fascination with the mediator, the prestigious other we strive to imitate.15 The great
novelists, however, raise this into awareness and give us the opportunity to reflect on it
and, ideally, to break free from it. This is the “novelistic truth” Girard’s title refers to,
and the “romantic lying” is our tendency in our ordinary lives to avoid noticing that truth.
“A basic contention of this essay,” Girard said at the beginning of that work, “is that the
great writers apprehend intuitively and concretely, through the medium of their art, if not
formally, the system in which they were first imprisoned together with their
contemporaries” (p. 3). Something else they can be said to have apprehended intuitively
and concretely, to put the matter in Buddhist language, is that life in that self-generated
prison is characterized by dukkha, the Buddhist term often translated as “suffering” but
more accurately translated as “unsatisfactoriness.” Mimetic desire is unsatisfactory for
some very fundamental reasons:
•
As desire, it is really illusory. That is, we do not really want what we think
we want or for the reasons we think we want it. We want it because we think
(mistakenly) that the reason our mediator of desire wants it is that he actually
knows what will enhance his being and make it invulnerable. (This is the
“romantic lie.”)
•
Even if we could acquire the object of desire, it would not bring us
satisfaction, because the “being,” the power and invulnerability, we really
long for and of which the object is only a symbol, will always remain out of
reach. We are finite and can never achieve the divine super-sufficiency or
plenitude of being that we attribute to our mediators. (This is the “novelistic
truth”)
To win freedom from self-imprisonment in this system of illusion requires that one both
understand its real structure and be willing to relinquish its illusory comforts — in
particular the comforting belief that if only one could make just a little more progress in
acquiring the mediator’s objects or becoming what the mediator is, or if only one could
defeat the rival (which is really only a negative version of the mediator), or kill the
scapegoat (another negative version of the mediator), then one would enjoy the plenitude
of being one longs for.
The core of the Girardian idea, as of the Buddhist, is that the desire-self, though a
tenaciously powerful force in one’s psychic life, is ultimately insubstantial and that
seeing through it can lead to liberation from the power of the illusions it generates.
Jesus’ breaking free in this way from the whole complex of mimetic desire and its
conflictual and victimizing mechanisms is the heart of Girard’s own christology.
Although the word might surprise a strict Girardian, Jesus’ seeing through and letting go
of the desire-self could also appropriately be described as a kind of sacrifice.
The excursus into “the great oriental religions,” then, has not been a mere detour. One
might even say that Girard is closer to these than he seems to have noticed.
If the imagery of sacrifice in Hebrews is interpreted in the light of these considerations,
the sacrifice talked about there shows two aspects: (1) it refers to something that might be
imaged as the “bloody” sacrifice or putting to death of what Buddhism calls the atman
and Girardian psychology the desire-self; and (2) it refers to the consecration of the true
15
The psychology of possession is a major theme of Oughourlian’s Puppet of Desire. He considers it, in
fact, the key to understanding the other phenomena he analyzes: hysteria and hypnosis.
13
person, the “body” of 10:5 to a life that finds its true center in God: “but a body hast thou
prepared for me.” The image of Jesus’ “own blood” (9:12), that is, represents what dies
in the sacrifice; the image of his “body” represents the person who is consecrated. It also
refers to the continuing life of that consecrated person, which Hebrews speaks of in 8:2 as
that of “a minister in the sanctuary and the true tent, which is set up not by man but by
the Lord.” Jesus’ willingness to undergo crucifixion rather than abandon his prophetic
calling was an expression and sign of his complete consecration of his life to God’s
service. His sacrifice in its full meaning was not his crucifixion alone but his selfemptying throughout his life: both his sacrifice of all false selfhood, of the desire-self,
and his self-giving to God. The “offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all”
(10:10) was the total consecration of his living personhood, of his whole life, to heeding
and fulfilling the calling of Israel to sonship. This was a ministry which constituted
Jesus’ life in this world before his crucifixion and continues still, from the point of view
of the author of Hebrews, in the heavenly sanctuary.
Of course if one were to approach this idea from the point of view of the sort of
mythifying later christology that sometimes interpreted Jesus as a pre-existent divine
person who took on a human body and walked around in it omnipotent and omniscient
but without a really human mind and psychology, then it would be inconceivable that
Jesus could actually experience the pull of a desire-self, the gravitational force of a false
center. After all, he would just be God, and how could the infinite source of all that is
experience temptation or be deceived by a false self-understanding? From this point of
view, Jesus’ fidelity would simply be an expression of his divine nature, not the kind of
costly, even painful, self conquest to which the image of shedding blood would be
appropriate. With no desire-self, there would be nothing to sacrifice or blood to shed
except the physical blood of his physical body on the cross. If one were to view the
whole picture in this way, it would seem natural and virtually inevitable to interpret
Jesus’ sacrifice in the conventional way that Girard rightly finds absurd. But this is not
the vision expressed in Hebrews, with its emphasis that Jesus was truly human and was
“in every respect…tempted as we are, yet without sin” (4:15). Nor is it what eventually
came to be defined in the councils of the fourth and fifth centuries as orthodoxy: the
Council of Chalcedon in 451 echoed the epistle’s phrasing when it described the second
hypostasis as “complete in manhood” and “in every way like us, except for sin.”16
This leaves only the question of what light this analysis of Jesus’ sacrifice in “the Holy
Place” might throw on what it could mean to speak of him as also a manifestation of God,
one who “reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature” (Hebrews
1:3). Any modern New Testament scholar would object to the anachronism of reading
back into this very early document the doctrine of the Trinity, which was not formulated
until the fourth century. But it is not anachronistic to recognize that the seeds that
developed into the Trinitarian idea are in the New Testament already in references to
Jesus as in some manner manifesting divine presence and to the Holy Spirit as indwelling
both him and those who faithfully follow him. The symbol “son of God,” as was
mentioned earlier, carried no connotations of divinity, but “spirit of God” did. How
might the idea of the Holy Spirit relate to the picture developed so far of Jesus’ sacrifice
as a self-emptying and self-dedication? In particular, how might it relate to the
psychological and spiritual structure of the person, the true self, who is left after the death
of the desire-self?
16
“... teleion ... en anthropotéti” and “kata panta homoion hémin choris hamartias.” The conventional
picture of Jesus as omniscient divine person is in fact a mixture of some of the positions the Council of
Chalcedon explicitly rejected in its definition of the hypostatic union: docetism, monophysitism, and
apollinarianism.
14
In Buddhism, too, the question arises as to what remains when the atman is seen through
and transcended. The answer there is “Bodhi,” enlightenment. One who has actually
realized anatman, “no self,” does not cease to exist but becomes an enlightened one, a
Buddha. Sometimes Buddhists also speak of what is left in enlightenment as Buddhamind or Buddha-nature and of the compassion or love for all living things that
characterizes the Bodhisattva life or nirvana. Contrary to conventional western
misunderstandings, it is not the case that in nirvana there is simply nothing left. The
word “nirvana” or “nibbana” means literally to be “blown out” or to be “cooled by
blowing.” What is cooled is the fire of craving, and what is extinguished is the desireself, the atman — but it was never real anyway. What is left is Bodhi, Buddha-nature,
Buddha-mind. Buddhism is not therefore a nihilism or annihilationism; it does not, pace
Girard, cultivate “a kind of living death.” One who becomes enlightened is freed from
the power of karma and the wheel of rebirth, symbols that refer to the power of the
illusory atman, the desire-self, to endlessly regenerate itself in the psychology of the
person who succumbs to its lure. Freedom from that is true life, the freedom to live with
a clear mind and a compassionate heart.
Buddhism is explicit about this new life or animating principle that would be left after the
realization of anatman. The Epistle to the Hebrews may spell it out less explicitly, but it
does seem to have a parallel to Buddha-mind or Buddha-nature in its symbolism of the
Holy Spirit. In many places in the New Testament the Holy Spirit is spoken of as
indwelling Jesus and guiding and impelling him in his work, and also as giving new life
to his followers in fulfillment of the prophecy that the Law that was formerly written on
tablets of stone would one day be written on the hearts of God’s people (Jeremiah 31:33).
In Hebrews the Holy Spirit is mentioned explicitly only once, but in that one verse it is
indicated as the animating principle of Jesus’ sacrifice and of the new life that sacrifice
opens to his followers: “…how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the
eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify your conscience…” (9:14).
This may be the only reference in Hebrews to the Spirit, but it has implications that
gradually unfold as the author goes on to describe the consequences of Jesus’ sacrifice for
his readers: He exhorts them to hold fast in faith to the new life Jesus’ sacrifice has won
for them by freeing them from slavery to the fear of death and by renewing their
consciences. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not
seen” (11:1). Freedom from the fear of death comes from their faith in Jesus’
resurrection and the hope for their own to come. The renewal of their consciences comes
from the breaking of that fear’s power to make them cling to the life of the illusory
desire-self that must be given up. This means they are called to undergo their own
metaphorical but very real deaths: “In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted
to the point of shedding your blood” (12:4). In the last line of what Buchanan thinks is
the original “homiletical midrash” we can even hear a distant echo of the image of the
Vedic Agni as the fire that comes down from heaven, is buried in the earth, and leaps up
again to consume the sacrifice: “Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that
cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and
awe; for our God is a consuming fire” (12:28-29).
WORKS CITED
Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press, 1973.
Buchanan, George Wesley. To the Hebrews. Translation, Comment, and Conclusions by
George Wesley Buchanan. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972.
15
Davies, J.H. A Letter to the Hebrews: Commentary by J.H. Davies. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1967.
Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure.
Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965.
Translation of Mensonge romantique et vérité Romanesque. Paris: Bernard Grasset,
1961.
----. Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. With Jean-Michel Oughourlian
and Guy Lefort. Trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1987. Translation of Des Choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde
(1978).
----. The Scapegoat. Trans. Yvonne Freccero . Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1986.
----. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press, 1977. Translation of La Violence et le sacré (1972).
Griffiths, Bede. The Cosmic Revelation: The Hindu Way to God. Springfield, Ill.:
Templegate Publishers, 1983.
Oughourlian, Jean-Michel. The Puppet of Desire: The Psychology of Hysteria,
Possession, and Hypnosis. Translated with an introduction by Eugene Webb. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1993. Translation of Un Mime nommé désir. Paris: Grasset et
Fasquelle, 1982.
Schwager, Raymund, S. J. Must There Be Scapegoats?: Violence and Redemption in the
Bible. Trans. Maria L. Assad. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987. Translation of
Brauchen Wir Einen Sündenbock? Munich: Kösel, 1978.
Webb, Eugene. “The Hermeneutic of Greek Trinitarianism: An Approach Through
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Riley. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1988. Also online at
http://faculty.washington.edu/ewebb/R428/trinity.pdf.
----. The Self Between: From Freud to the New Social Psychology of France. Seattle and
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