god is thought to be appeased only by the death of a man. But it is not always necessary that the victim should be the actual offender. The death of a substitute may expiate his guilt. The expiatory sacrifice may be vicarious.
We shall see, in a subsequent chapter, that, as a general rule, human victims are sacrificed for the purpose of saving the lives of the sacrificers: before the beginning of a battle or during a siege, previously to a dangerous sea-expedition, during epidemics, famines, or on other similar occasions, when murderous designs are attributed to some superhuman being on whose will the lives of men are supposed to depend. But these sacrifices are not always expiatory in nature. A god may desire to cause the death of men not only because he is offended, but because he delights in human flesh, or because he wants human attendants, or—no one knows exactly why. It is impossible to find out in each particular case whether the sacrifice is meant to be an expiation or not; it is not certain that the sacrificers know it themselves. Yet in many instances there can be no doubt that its object is to serve as a vicarious atonement.
In Eastern Central Africa, “if a freeman were to set fire to the grass or reeds beside a lake, and cause a great conflagration close to the chosen abode of the deity, he is liable to be offered up to the god that is thus annoyed,” but if he be the owner of many slaves he can easily redeem himself by offering one of them in his place.241 The Ojibways, it is said, were once visited with an epidemic, which they regarded as a divine punishment sent them on account of their wickedness; and when all other efforts failed, “it was decided that the most beautiful girl of the tribe should enter a canoe, push into the channel just above the Sault, and throw away her paddle.”242 In Bœotia, a drunken man having killed a priest of Dionysus Aegobolus, and a pestilence having broken out immediately after, the calamity was regarded as a judgment on the people for the sacrilege, and the oracle of Delphi ordered them to expiate it by sacrificing to the god a blooming boy.243 In his work on the Jews, Philo of Byblus states that “it was the custom among the ancients in cases of great dangers, that the rulers of a city or a nation, in order to avert universal destruction, should give the dearest of their children to be killed as a ransom offered to avenging demons.”244 The idea that sins could be expiated by the death of one who had not deserved it, was familiar to the Hebrews. It was said that “the death of the righteous makes atonement.”245 The passage in Isaiah liii. 12 was interpreted of Moses, who “poured out his soul unto death246 and was numbered with the transgressors (the generation that died in the wilderness) and bare the sin of many “that he might atone for the sin of the golden calf.247 Ezekiel suffered “that he might wipe out the transgressions of Israel.”248 And of the Maccabaean martyrs it is said, “Having become as it were a vicarious expiation for the sins of the nation, and through the blood of those godly men and their atoning death, divine providence saved Israel which had before been evil entreated.”249 In these cases, of course, there was no sacrifice in the proper sense of the term, but they obviously illustrate the same characteristic of the divine mind. In fact, the death of Christ, by which he atoned and obliterated the sins of all ages, was conceived as a sacrifice, or spoken of in sacrificial figures.250
241 Macdonald, Africana, i. 96 sq.
242 Dorman, Origin of Primitive Superstitions, p. 208.
243 Pausanias, ix. 8. 2.
244 Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, i. 10. 40 (Migne, Patrologia, Ser. Gr. xxi. 85).
245 Moore, in Cheyne and Black, Encyclopaedia Biblica, iv. 4226.
246 Exodus, xxxii. 32.
247 Sōṭāh, 14 A, quoted by Moore, loc. cit. col. 4226.
248 Sanhedrin, 39 A, quoted ibid. col. 4226.
249 4 Maccabaeans, xvii. 22, quoted ibid. col. 4232.
250 See Moore, loc. cit. col. 4229 sqq.
It is said that, according to early ideas, “it did not essentially concern divine justice that the punishment of faults committed should fall precisely on the guilty; what did concern it was that it should fall on some one, that it should have its accomplishment.”251 Men, we are told, could not fail to discern that a transgression produces suffering as its consequence, and, seeing this, they “associate suffering with the expiation of sin, and, in atoning for their transgressions, they mark their contrition by the suffering which they inflict vicariously on the victim. They argue thus: ‘I have broken a law of God. God exacts pain as a consequence of such a breach. I will therefore slay this lamb, and its sufferings shall make the atonement requisite.’ ”252 But, so far as I can see, this interpretation of the idea of vicarious expiation is not supported by facts. The victim whose suffering or death is calculated to appease the wrathful god is not anybody at random, whosoever he may be. He is a representative of the community which has incurred the anger of the god, and is accepted as a substitute on the principle of social solidarity. So, also, according to the Western Church, Christ discharged the punishment due to the sins of mankind and propitiated the justice of his Father, in his capacity of a man, as a representative of the human race; whereas in the East, where it was maintained that the deity suffered (though he suffered through the human nature which he had made his own), the idea of substitution could hardly take root, since, as Harnack remarks, “the dying God-man really represented no one.”253 The Greek Church regarded the death of Christ as a ransom for mankind paid to the devil, and this doctrine was also accepted by the most important of the Western Fathers, although it flatly contradicted their own theory of atonement.254 There can be no doubt that expiatory sacrifices are frequently offered as ransoms, in other words, that the god or demon is supposed to be appeased, not by the suffering of the victim, but by the gift. Among men it often occurs that the offended party is induced by some material compensation to desist from avenging the injury—in many societies such placability is even prescribed by custom—and something similar is naturally believed to be the case with gods. From this point of view, of course, it is not necessary that the victim should be a person who is connected with the offender by ties of social solidarity, although he may still be regarded as in a way a substitute. He may be an alien or a slave; or animals or inanimate things may be offered to expiate the sins of men. Among the Dacotahs, “for the expiation of sins or crimes a sacrifice is made of some kind of an animal.”255 Of the Melanesian sacrifices, says Dr.