Heresy and sacrifice

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I wish to tread gingerly here. It may be that Rene Girard's notion of sacrifice can shed some light on some cases of heresy. (Wiki: Rene Girard)

I don't pretend to understand Girard very deeply, though I have read some of his work, but I was taken by (a limited grasp of) his reconstruction of primitive sacrifice as a continuing - occasional - element in social relationships, not least in religion.

My sparse summary is that, in circumstances of discontent, people look for someone to blame: a scapegoat (Wiki). 

At times, in primitive societies, generalised discontent - whatsoever its cause - would become fixed on a particular individual: someone must be to blame for the mess we're in. This someone could be at the top or the periphery of the community, but either way the sense might grow that we'd all be better off without them.

In this context, the key elements of sacrifice (as opposed to murder) were, first, that the whole community was involved and, second, that death should come about in such a way that everyone was complicit and no-one was to blame. Hence death by stoning, for example, or crowding the victim over a cliff edge: after all, who could tell which stone was the fatal one, or who made the last and fatal shuffle forward?

At times there are hints or elements of sacrifice in allegations of heresy, in particular where the alleged heresy is an innovation engendering generalised discontent. The spread of critical approaches to the Bible, for example - by which academics seemed to make themselves judges of Scripture instead of holding themselves subject to it - caused a great deal of unhappiness and bewilderment. 

I do not want to push this argument very far. Most heresy cases came nowhere near being sacrifices. Prosecutions were more often evidence of authorities' confidence than discontent. And failed prosecutions generally caused no more than harassment to the prosecutors.

And yet, perhaps, the possibility of sacrifice is also part of the frisson of heresy.

Imagined communities

Sacrifice may be focused on the individual victim but it is an inherently communal action. The possibility of sacrifice - in the form of expulsion from the community (as well as, often, home, security and income) - overlaps with, strengthens, the imagining of the Church community. 

Such an action can reinforce the sense of belonging to a community by making a border visible that is normally implicit, by instancing a limit to communal elasticity, by evincing the church authorities' will, power and capacity to ensure the continued authenticity and validity of the church. Complicity separates 'we' who remain from 'them', the disgraced.

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