Victim Exchange

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), one of the greatest of Irish poets, was also a staunch nationalist. So much of the impetus for the establishment of an Irish Free State apart from British hegemony was a long cultural memory of oppression and of sacrifice on the part of the people of that beautiful, impoverished isle. Yet as he himself acknowledged in his work Easter, 1916, “too long a sacrifice/can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?”

Yeats’ question, like much of his poetic work, is evocative: how much sacrifice is necessary on the part of men and women, until nothing is left of them? When is sacrifice truly sacrifice, and when is it desperation? It is clear in the alluded-to Irish War of Independence that the sacrifice attained its end. Yet for many struggles in human history, it is far from clear that the sacrifice was needful or productive: the American Wars in Vietnam or in the Middle East leap to mind for many people as an example of costly, yet futile, struggle. Vain sacrifices tend to multiply injustices, rather than remove them.

Every epoch has its conflicts, and for every future to be born, some degree of sacrifice must be offered. What is often forgotten today, however, is how primal and visceral the language and reality of sacrifice and victimhood are. They are intrinsically religious, and bespeak metaphysical, unseen realities. Even if the goal is not, strictly speaking, metaphysical or invisible, the attainment of that goal often involves the invocation of abstract or unseen ends. An example of this could be a parent who sacrifices for a child’s (yet unknown) future, or a political leader who composes a law or policy whose legacy will shape the destiny of unborn generations. Therefore, it ought not surprise us that talk of sacrifice is often linked with the half-remembered language of virtue, especially the virtues of courage, hope, and faith.

The words sacrifice and victimhood both etymologically come, at least for western tongues, from the Ancient Roman religious vision. Sacrifice literally means “to make holy”, with everything that the complicated and multivalent word sacer (“holy”) means. Victimhood is from the Latin victima, which even etymological dictionaries acknowledge may be derived from the Latin vicis, or “turn” or “occasion” which indicates some sort of exchange made with the gods. Victims were often offered in proportion to the favor asked of the god. We see this even in the Old Testament practice, where certain sacrifices were connected to particular victims, and these sacrificial victims were offered for specific sins or events in the life of the nation of Israel.

As frightening as sacrifice appears, even to ancient people, it was viewed as necessary to spiritual survival, if not physical survival. Without the goods of rain and temperate weather, peace, and fertility, most civilizations do and will find themselves close to collapse. But alongside these notions of sacrifice and victims for the sake of an individual or nation, there is also the notion of false or vain sacrifice. In these cases, something was ritually improper about it which renders it unfit: either the victim was defective, in quantity or quality, or the Priest(s) offering the victim was unfit, or something else.

Although the Old Testament and the Book of Hebrews especially remind us that the sacrifices of the Old Covenant were mandated by God, the Prophets also reminded Israel how sacrifice and victims without interior righteousness and right relationship are ultimately in vain. The Jewish prophetic tradition was sharply critical of the sacrifices of the pagan nations, not only because they were idolatrous, but because, on account of that fact, they were ultimately a waste. One may survey even today the archaeological digs in ancient Carthage or Tenochtitlan and see the bones of hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people, including children, and shudder at the barbarism and superstition which fueled the perception that such a thing was necessary.

Of course, the Christian Spiritual Tradition is replete not only with belief in the efficacious, unique and salvific victimhood of Christ, but is equally emphatic about the participation of the individual believer in the same. This is especially true in the Apostolic Churches, which have a belief in a true Eucharist and a true Priesthood, and so actively maintain the very Jewish cultic roots of Christian religion. St. Paul and St. Ignatius of Antioch, each in their turn, explicitly link their own sufferings and martyrdom to that of Christ, and to explicitly eucharistic or euchological conceptions. Of course, St. Paul reminds us that the body can be offered as a “living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1), which, in tandem with the Passion and Death of Christ, forms so much of the spiritual foundation for martyrdom.

Sacrifice and victimhood, along with martyrdom, therefore, are not foreign concepts to Christian faith, but constitutive ones. Even if a particular Christian denomination lacks the theological vocabulary or sacramentology for discussion of ‘re-presented’ sacrifice in the Eucharist, it is not uncommon to hear, especially when money is involved, discussion of sacrifice and offering. However, if I may make an observation as an aside, it seems to me that an understanding of sacrificial victimhood seems to vanish in proportion as an understanding of priesthood recedes from the consciousness of the Christian believer. This is true, I believe, even in those denominations which acknowledge solely a ‘Priesthood of the baptized’, and have acknowledge no ministerial Priesthood proper.

Let me return to my earlier question, however, partially borrowed from Yeats: how much sacrifice can one take? Although I think the answer is unique to each person, and involves realities as mysterious as Divine Grace and Predestination, let alone one’s native capacities for psychological and physical endurance, it seems clear that for all people, sacrifice and victimhood is both personally and societally necessary. The only perfect sacrifice, Priest and victim is Christ Jesus himself. On our side, however, there are limits. After all, the grace of joyful martyrdom ‘for the sake of the name’ is an extraordinary grace reserved for a few.

One of the losses in the past sixty years in ‘Catholic language’ is that of the title ‘Confessor’, which is meant to indicate a person who, while stopping short of actually dying for the faith, made great sacrifices for The Faith under persecution. There are perhaps far more Confessors than there are martyrs, and they help us conceptually to place people who practice that so-called ‘white martyrdom’. Ancient Christians had an instinct, due to their extensive knowledge both of the Scriptures and the Apostolic Tradition, that Christian Faith is fundamentally at odds with “the world” as St. Paul understood it theologically. Thus even St. James reminds us, “friendship with the world is enmity with God” (James 4:4). I think the title of ‘Confessor’, which in the Latin can mean “to praise”, as well as “to confess” in the sense of both The Faith and sin, can help us understand how making that “spiritual sacrifice” that Saint Paul talks about, even in the most ordinary ways, can be a source of praise to God, a manifestation of faith, and a participation in Christ’s atoning sacrifice.

Suffering by the world is often viewed as senseless. Yet there is a way in which I think we can agree with the worldly assessment, when we see suffering as inflicted by human sinfulness and obstinacy. For the Christian, no suffering united to Christ’s suffering is wasted. At time same time, however, we as Christians are called to alleviate suffering wherever we find it. Just like Socrates said it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it, we as Christians can say it is better to suffer than to inflict suffering on others unnecessarily.

As our secular culture becomes more and more disengaged from the theological and sacral language of victimhood, and attaches more to the merely legal and secular conception, the more I am concerned that we will not only fail to understand the value of sacrifice, suffering, and victimhood, but also the very essence of justice. Most germane to this subject now is the national (indeed, international) outcry over the death of George Floyd. George Floyd is, pretty clearly, in most senses of the word, a “victim” of a discrete police action which led to his death. But what does not seem to be understood by those reacting violently to the injustice of his death, is that one cannot solve the problem of victimhood by creating more victims; injustice cannot be cured by creating a new form of injustice. Floyd’s death, especially just after so many weeks of quarantine, I think has assumed in the minds of people not only the legal elements of victimhood, but the metaphysical and symbolic elements. He is now a lightning rod or a point of contact between those who see multiple real or imagined social ills behind his death. What is lacking, however, is that unlike the great civil protest movements in the 20th century, there is almost no metaphysical horizon to our discussion today. The secularized society can only voice its demand for legal remediation. The language of natural justice is almost completely illegible to postmodern people, because to them there is no such thing as objective right and wrong. There are only the oppressed and the oppressor.

We have almost completely absorbed what I am calling the ‘victim exchange’ system of justice, which is understandable when a society can no longer agree on what justice really means. Rather than correcting problems in the moral or metaphysical realms, we merely shift the victim. This is great for the business of lawyers, but is a fast-acting solvent to social cohesion. In the 21st century, the conversation has completely decoupled from discussions of what is just, right, or wrong, and instead, the language is infected with Marxist classism, and victim groups multiply and are exchanged with alarming frequency, with some victims being more worthy than others. Instead of the pagan priests of old who examined the victims’ worthiness to be offered to placate the gods, the modern priests, who are the media and academia, symbiotically (or should I say, parasitically) assign victimhood and conduct secular rites of atonement, which are written in the blood of the slain, the tears of the bereaved, and the ink of compensation checks. People grow richer as their hearts become emptier, scores are settled as trust lies unrestored, and although we may self-congratulate ourselves that we made better laws, policies and procedures, we ourselves have become more depraved, more callous, and more loveless.

The Church, which is supposed to be a lover and promoter of justice, has also absorbed the noxious concept of victim exchange. First, there was the identification of a real problem, and real victims: children and vulnerable adults, abused by Priests. Then, we identified a systemic problem: Bishops engaged in cover-up. Then, while all the while claiming to indemnify the aggrieved, which is right and proper in itself, we made a victim exchange to in order to ignore the moral and metaphysical problem, and merely focus on the secular and legal problem. Just like it is unjust for protesters to burn down businesses and hurt innocent police officers (in essence, to make them victims) in the name of a stated victim, it was, and is, unjust, for Bishops to destroy the reputation of their Priests and the Church itself in the name of addressing the legal justice of victims of Priests.

I mention the Church in this problem of victim exchange not just because it is a common theme upon which I write, but also because, as I have said before, I believe that the Church is ahead of the culture both in terms of the problem, and in terms of the possible solution, if we have the courage to embrace it. All around us, we are seeing the social dissolution and violence which occurs when we abandon metaphysical justice and victimhood for merely this-worldly justice and victimhood. How can we be worthy of being called Christ’s disciples, when our primary concerns are money and legality, and not the Gospel and the Commandments? As Our Lord said, no one can serve two masters; and once again, I think we face a choice between God and mammon, which in this case is manifested via lawsuits and compensation funds. Where will we place our trust for our continued institutional survival: in God, or legal maneuvers?

“Too long a sacrifice/can make a stone of the heart”, indeed. The sacrifice of our principles above all makes this poetic verse true, because to multiply victims without principle only increases resentment. If we sacrifice our Christian beliefs in justice, charity and truth, which are ultimately grounded in our theological convictions, what hope does the world have of recovering these notions? And furthermore, what credibility will we even have, when the time may come when we have to pick up the extinguished torch of our fallen civilization? Justice, both divine and human, as the prophets proclaimed, does not come with the multiplying of vain sacrifices and endless victims. It is accomplished, albeit imperfectly, by ordinary men and women who decide to follow the light of conscience, and forsake all contrary counsel. Sacrifices in the name of conscience, and with the help of grace, do not make a stone of the heart: on the contrary, like the broken rock of Meriba, or the opened heart of Christ, they pour forth cleansing, healing water to remove the stains which blemish our souls.