Girard, the Eucharist, and Priesthood

If Girard’s theory concerning the scapegoat mechanism, and its founding of human culture, is correct, a question arises: what is happening at the celebration of the eucharist, and what is the point of priesthood?

Girard uncovered the insipient lie found in archaic myths in which the innocence of the surrogate victim was obfuscated by claiming the victim’s guilt for social disorder. The mythic coverup apotheosized the criminal into a divine figure whose sacrifice brought forth order and harmony. In time there formed the mimetic repetition of this originary sacrifice/murder/lynching through rituals meant to replicate the initial sacrifice. Unanimous belief in the efficacy of these rituals and sacrifices brought about a renewal of order and harmony. What was hidden in these rituals and their perceived power was the reality of the innocent victim. From this coverup came the fundaments of human culture built on the violent sacred.

Many theologies in the Christian tradition have explicated this tradition of the killing of a supposed guilty victim (he who became sin for us), and whose death became just another in the long tradition of the violent sacred.

But, as Girard discovered, the lynching of Jesus exposed the victimage mechanism, uncovering the actual locale of social violence, that being in the human community itself. So then, if the eucharist is not a perpetuation of the violent sacred, the re-covering of the lie of guilty victimage, then how are Catholics, and those liturgical traditions who celebrate the eucharist, to understand what is happening in the Mass/Eucharistic celebration?

From a Girardian view, as I understand it, and believe it, the Mass is the celebration of the sacrifice of the innocent one who manifests the absolute self-giving of the non-violent, true, sacred – the God of absolute and eternal love and graciousness. It is a ritual exposition of human personal and social violence, and the need to own the origins of this violence. It is the ritual manifestation of the possibility of a new social order, founded on a new, non-appropriating, non-conflictual mimesis. The priest is the one who has been called from a community – a community whose very being is to be a witness to this loving non-violent God – to officiate and pronounce in constant repetition the words and symbolic gestures of the life giving words and loving actions of Jesus, who revealed to humanity a God who is, and has never been, complicit with any form of conflictual appropriation due to acquisitive mimesis.

Is the eucharistic celebration a sacrifice? Yes and no. No, not in the order of the violent sacred that hides the culpability of the lynchers. Yes, in that God in Christ sacrificed himself, his comfort, his dignity, his power, and his very divinity, in order to give to humanity a new way of being – a being brought forth, or recovered, into a creature of gracious willing acceptance of the gracious kenotic offer from the non-violent, self-giving creator.