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238 Leviticus, xvi. 21.

239 Seaver, op. cit. p. 160.

240 Beauchamp, loc. cit. p. 239.

A sacrifice is expiatory if its object is to avert the supposed anger or indignation of a superhuman being from those on whose behalf it is offered. In various cases the offended 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. Codrington, “some are propitiatory, substituting an animal for the person who has offended.”256 The Shánárs of Tinnevelly offer up a goat, a sheep, or a fowl, in order “to appease the angry demon, and induce him to remove the evil he has inflicted, or abstain from the infliction he may meditate.”257 It would be almost absurd to suppose that in similar cases the suffering or death of the animal is looked upon in the light of a vicarious punishment. Of the Hebrew sin-offering, Professor Kuenen aptly remarks:—258“According to the Israelite’s notion, Yahveh in his clemency permits the soul of the animal sacrificed to take the place of that of the sacrificer. No transfer of guilt to the animal sacrificed takes place: the blood of the latter is clean and remains so, as is evident from the very fact that this blood is put upon the altar; it is a token of mercy on Yahveh’s part that he accepts it. … Nor can it be asserted that the animal sacrificed undergoes the punishment in the place of the transgressor: this is said nowhere, and therefore, in any case, gives another, more sharply defined idea than that which the Israelite must have formed for himself; moreover, it is irreconcilable with the rule that the indigent may bring the tenth part of an ephah of fine flour as a sin-offering.”259 It should also be noticed that a purifying effect was ascribed to contact with the victim’s blood: the high priest should put or sprinkle some blood upon the altar “and cleanse it, and hallow it from the uncleanness of the children of Israel.”260

251 Réville, Prolegomena of the History of Religions, p. 135.

252 Baring-Gould, Origin and Development of Religious Belief, i. 387 sq.

253 Harnack, op. cit. iii. 312 sqq.

254 Ibid. iii. 307, 315 n. 2.

255 Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes of the United States, ii. 196.

256 Codrington, Melanesians, p. 127.

257 Percival, Land of the Veda, p. 309 sq. Cf. Caldwell, Tinnevelly Shánárs, p. 37.

258 Kuenen, Religion of Israel, ii. 266 sq.

259 Leviticus, v. 11 sqq.

260 Ibid. xvi. 18 sq.

To sum up:—The fact that punishments for offences are frequently inflicted, or are supposed to be inflicted, by men or gods upon individuals who have not committed those offences, is explicable from circumstances which in no way clash with our thesis that moral indignation is, in its essence, directed towards the assumed cause of inflicted pain. In many cases the victim, in accordance with the doctrine of collective responsibility, is punished because he is considered to be involved in the guilt—even when he is really innocent—or because he is regarded as a fair representative of an offending community. In other cases, he is supposed to be polluted by a sin or a curse, owing to the contagious nature of sins and curses. The principle of social solidarity also accounts for the efficacy ascribed to vicarious expiatory sacrifices; but in many instances expiatory sacrifices only have the character of a ransom or bribe.

And whilst thus our thesis as to the true direction of moral indignation is not in the least invalidated by facts, apparently, but only apparently, contradictory, it is, on the other hand, strongly supported by the protest which the moral consciousness, when sufficiently guided by discrimination and sympathy, enters against the infliction of penal suffering upon the guiltless. Such a protest is heard from various quarters, both with reference to human justice and with reference to the resentment of gods.

Confucius taught that the vices of a father should not discredit a virtuous son.261 Plato lays down the rule that “the disgrace and punishment of the father is not to be visited on the children”; on the contrary, he says, if the children of a criminal who has been punished capitally avoid the wrongs of their father, they shall have glory, and honourable mention shall be made of them, “as having nobly and manfully escaped out of evil into good.”262 According to Roman law, “crimen vel poena paterna nullam maculam filio infligere potest.”263 “Nothing,” says Seneca, “is more unjust than that any one should inherit the quarrels of his father.”264 The Deuteronomist enjoins, “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.”265 Lawgivers have been anxious to restrict the blood-feud to the actual culprit. The Koran forbids the avenger of blood to kill any other person than the manslayer himself.266 In England, according to a law of Edmund, the feud was not to be prosecuted against the kindred of the slayer, unless they made his misdeed their own by harbouring him.267 So, also, in Sweden, in the thirteenth century, the blood feud was limited by law to the guilty individual;268 and we meet with a similar restriction in Slavonic law-books.269

261 Lun Yü, vi. 4. Cf. Thâi-Shang 4.

262 Plato, Leges, ix. 854 sqq. Plato makes an exception for those whose fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers have successively undergone the penalty of death: “Such persons the city shall send away with all their possessions to the city and country of their ancestors, retaining only and wholly their appointed lot” (ibid. ix. 856). But this enactment had no doubt a purely utilitarian foundation, the offspring of a thoroughly wicked family being considered a danger to the city.

263 Digesta, xlviii. 19. 26. Cf. ibid. xlviii. 19. 20.

264 Seneca, De ira, ii. 34. Cf. Cicero, De officiis, i. 25.

265 Deuteronomy, xxiv. 16. Cf. 2 Kings xiv. 6.

266 Koran, xvii. 35.

267 Laws of Edmund, ii. 1.

268 Nordström, Bidrag till den svenska samhälls-författningens historia, ii. 103, 334, 335, 399. Wilda, op. cit. p. 174.

269 Kovalewsky, Coutume contemporaine, p. 248. In Montenegro it was enjoined by Daniel I. (Post, Anfänge des Staats- und Rechtsleben, p. 181).

Passing to the vengeance of gods: according to the Atharva-Veda, Agni, who forgives sin committed through folly and averts Varuna’s wrath, also frees from the consequence of a sin committed by a man’s father or mother.270 Theognis asks, “How, O king of immortals, is it just that whoso is aloof from unrighteous deeds, holding no transgression, nor sinful oath, but being righteous, should suffer what is not just?”271 According to Bion, the deity, in punishing the children of the wicked for their fathers’ crimes, is more ridiculous than a doctor administering a potion to a son or grandson for a father’s or grandfather’s disease.272 The early Greek notion of an inherited curse was modified into the belief that the curse works through generations because the descendants each commit new acts of guilt.273 The persons who prohibited the sons of such as had been proscribed by Sylla, from standing candidates for their fathers’ honours, and from being admitted into the senate, were supposed to have been punished by the gods for this injustice:—“In process of time,” says Dionysius of Halicarnassus, “a blameless punishment, the avenger of their crimes, pursued them, by which they themselves were brought down from the greatest height of glory, to the lowest degree of obscurity; and none, even, of their race are now left, but women.”274 Among the Hebrews, Jeremiah and Ezekiel broke with the old notion of divine vengeance. The law of individual responsibility, which had already previously been laid down as a principle of human justice, was to be extended to the sphere of religion.275 “Every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man that eateth the sour grape, his teeth shall be set on edge.”276 “The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.”277

270 Atharva-Veda, v. 30. 4. Cf. Macdonell, Vedic Mythology, p. 98.

271 Theognis, 743 sqq.

272 Plutarch, De sera numinis vindicta 19. Cf. ibid. 12; Cicero, De natura Deorum, iii. 38.

273 Farnell, op. cit. i. 77. Maine, Ancient Law, p. 127.

274 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, op. cit. viii. 80.

275 Cf. Montefiore, op. cit. p. 220; Kuenen, op. cit. ii. 35 sq.

276 Jeremiah, xxxi. 30.

277 Ezekiel, xviii. 20. For Talmudic views, see Deutsch, Literary Remains, p. 52.