https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=aKAs7MbcSSs
When I was completing the dissertation, I spent a couple of years just reading all the literature on sacrifice I could possibly find. So I had to read, you name it, Gustav Allen, all these different ones. I read everyone who talked about different aspects of sacrifice, some of them Christian, some non-Christian, anthropological studies. I came to René Girard and I was trying to see in what ways his scapegoat idea, you know, and there’s a sense that I saw that there’s some parallels between his idea of the scapegoat and how he says that Christ ultimately fulfills that. He becomes one who takes on everything, you know, but it was a little, still, it’s a little bit too Protestant-y for me, you know. It’s not just that, it’s that Girard misses another aspect of sacrifice. If you take the Amkipur sacrifice, for example, it’s like there are two sacrifices, my friend. There’s one that is out to the wilderness and there’s one that’s offered up. The sacrifice that’s offered up is not the same, Christ brings them together in a very mind-shattering way, but they’re not the same. And so, you know, it’s like, for example, like the pouring out of libations and all of these types of behaviors that the ancients said cannot be reduced to scapegoat sacrifices. So Girard, it’s as if Girard gets half of the story right, but he’s missing an entire half of the story, which makes his theory, in my opinion, insufficient and means that it’s difficult for him to reach this conclusion. So his tendency will be to say that Christ has abolished sacrifice and now there’s no more sacrifice. Right. Now there’s no more sacred. There’s actually no more sacred anymore. Whereas the true Christian position is to say Christ has shown how all of this has to become internalized and that we can be, take the sins of others to some extent even, that we can sacrifice ourselves, that we can become the scapegoats in many ways, but that is a healing and that internalized process now is the way that we live. And it’s actually the way that it’s actually our morality is based on that implicitly or explicitly is based on that image of what the sacrifice is. Well, in the 20th century and St. Silouan the Athenite, he has this idea that, you know, the ultimate goal is for us to all become Adam and take on the sins of the world in a sense, right? To be like Christ is to be able to become a scapegoat ourselves, to become, you know, the Passover offering ourselves, to the entire, all the symbolism of the Old Testament sacrificial system capitulated in Christ, we have to imitate that. We have to take that on in some way and live a life of self-offering, of constant sacrifice. And it’s unbearable. Like it’s, I hate every moment of what you just said. Like, I just hate that. I don’t want to do that, but I can see in the stories, like if you look at some of the stories of the saints, you have very powerful images, especially in the monastic stories of monks who do exactly that, who actually take on blame of things they did not do towards the salvation of others. And in the, in the, and when people see the monk taking the blame for their sins onto themselves, you know, they’re transformed in ways that reproach or that just scolding or whatever punishment would never be able to accomplish. It’s, it’s, some of these stories are pretty amazing.