Natural Life, Supernatural Death

Yesterday we touched on the ubiquity and universality of human sacrifice, and how it might even be man's first Big Idea. 

It seems that sacrifice in general is the nuclear physics of primitive peoples, but why? Is it all just a huge mythunderstanding, or is there something to it that we can't grasp because we don't have access to a mentality that spontaneously produced it?

How can something so seemingly irrational be at the foundation of humanness? It's an offense to the left brain!

So, let's take the elevator down to the bottom of the psyche and try to figure this out once and for all. I want answers, not just a lot of yada-yada-ing over and past it!  

It is first mentioned in the Bible in Genesis 4, but as mentioned yesterday, it's just taken for granted: Abel offers his sacrifice, Cain his, and too bad for Abel. In Prager's exegesis of the passage,

The Torah states matter-of-factly that Cain and Abel brought offerings to God, suggesting the universality of sacrifice, prayer, and belief in a deity. We know of no pre-modern society that was atheistic and of no ancient society that did not have sacrifices to its god(s).

True, but why? And just because everyone does it, does that make it moral? Morality is not democratic, rather, as we touched on a few posts back, must be rooted in an accurate perception of reality. 

As to the underlying reality, in an essay called Priesthood and Sacrificial Worship, Peiper writes that

we are losing the ability to see that experiencing sacrificial worship is at all meaningful and that it could even be necessary. 

Necessary? Must there be a sacrifice? The modern mind recoils at the prospect. I mean, mathematics, neurochemistry, laws of physics, etc., are one thing, but "sacrifice" seems to belong to another order, and one that is seemingly contingent and unnecessary (to say nothing of inconvenient and even a downright nuisance). 

In another essay called Creation and Sacrament, Pieper suggests -- in the context of the the Last Supper -- that "it is the totality of creation that Christ offers to God as a sacrifice."

So, no half measures: there is an "inner connection between the order of creation and the sacramental order." And Paul says that "true and proper worship" involves offering our very bodies "as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God."

Okay. You first?

But let's try to pin down the more general Principle before addressing the Christian particulars. For this, let's look at an essay by Schuon called Concerning the Principle of Sacrifice. Surely he can shed some light on the subject, if not some obscurity:

Quite evidently, the equilibrium of social as well as individual life is inconceivable without the presence of a regulating sacrificial element. 

Pretty categorical. He then jumps down to Genesis 3, blaming Adam & Eve for introducing -- in a manner of speaking -- "the first disequilibrium" into being. He goes on to say that a

Life well-lived is paved with acts of renunciation; in order to live in accordance with truth and beauty it is necessary to know how to die.

Earlier in the essay he says that "life is woven of gifts and sacrifices; only that is enduring which knows how to die in order to be reborn."

Indeed, 

According to a mystical German saying, "he who dies before he dies does not die when he dies"; this is the very definition of the sacrificial principle. 

Now we're getting somewhere, what with this hidden relationship between life, death, and a "higher" kind of life. It reminds me of a cryptic aphorism that suddenly makes sense:

When one says that death is a “natural” thing, one speaks the final stupidity.

Here's another good one:

The very idea of sacrifice seems absurd to those who are unaware that there exists a hierarchy of goods.

Back to Schuon:

the "Remembrance of God" is a kind of death that day by day interrupts the blind flux of life: without these pauses, the flow of our temporal existence strays and is squandered; with them, it remains faithful to its vocation and is always recreated anew, supernaturally and in the direction of Immortality. 

In other words, prayer is death only in relation to our "horizontal" existence and not in itself; it is privative, hence, sacrificial, from the standpoint of Manifestation which it denies, and not from the standpoint of the Principle which it affirms.

We'll get to bottom of this. To be continued....