Ten or so days ago I wrote to Universalis.com about a prayer where it referred to Christ as an innocent victim. I received a reply and posted it on this blog. A few months back, a sermon given by a priest referred to Christ as a holy victim. [1] I disagreed and protested on this blog on June 25, 2013. I was inspired to delve into this topic once again by the reply Universalis.com gave me:
"[W]e didn't write this: the Church did. The Congregation for Divine Worship would be the people to consult.
"The hymn "Victimae paschali laudes" is ancient - and of course Christ is represented as a sacrificial victim (a sheep, in fact) in the Agnus Dei at every Mass."
After much thought, I maintain that Christ is not a victim but that Christ was aptly described as holy by the priest and innocent in the prayer.
In doing so, I though it to be a good idea to start at the beginning and ask if God was a victim of perfection in goodness when Adam and Eve, after receiving their Free Will, willed freely to disobey God by eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.
God is perfection. In perfection, words [2] such as "innocent" and "holy", "pure" and "spotless" are superfluous when describing perfection since perfection sits far above any earthly accolade or concept, at a place beyond the grasp of human intellect and the reach of human verbalization. [3] While "innocence", "holiness", "purity" and "spotlessness" are words are ranked below the realm of perfection, they, among others connoting virtue, are closer to perfection relative to many other words, such as the word "victim." "Victim" is one of those words far removed from the light of perfection, so much so that it is not in the sphere of perfection in the way that no sinner is on the same level as God, or the Son, Jesus, God incarnate. [4]
My placement of "victimhood" in another dimension away from and below God is because I believe that an entity which is perfect cannot be a prey or victim. Only a flawed entity can be a prey of Satan and a victim of Sin's circumstances. A human being is just such an entity -- a flawed one. Man is ever so weak as to fall prey to temptations and become a victim of his own weaknesses, individually, or collectively as part of mankind. Due to his wholly inadequate nature, he cannot resist comparing God to himself, as Adam did when he desired to be equal to his Creator, because whenever man compares himself to God, he is not elevated to the sphere of God. Instead, the man who compares himself to God brings God down to his level and on his terms, turning God in his mind into a creature of imperfection that is beneath him.
Having the tendency to Sin, man cannot truly and fully comprehend God and attain perfection is all its glory. He cannot control himself, but he thinks he can control anyone and anything else, including Christ, by shutting Him out, making Him irrelevant. Therefore, he must deceive himself, aided by Satan, and trust that he is in control of himself and the circumstances surrounding him. This delusion of man is the joy of Satan, because under this delusion, man will make a mess of things, and he has.
In his own megalomaniac world, a world spinning with Sin and all of its irresistible variations, man would have the audacity to describe God as a victim just like him, a perennial victim of Satan. What man has done, describing Christ, the Son of God, Who is as strong in spirit as God the Father but Who as man was weak in the way that human flesh is weak, as a victim is a sin. In the weakness of human flesh, Christ had bled when He was scourged, was pained when He was humiliated and was helpless when He was crucified. Seeing Christ as a prey of the powerful, man was quick to reduce his Savior to a "victim" of circumstances on earth, more specifically, of circumstances resulting from the acts of man corrupted by evil on earth.
Man could not be happier to be able to reduce Christ to his level by labeling Him as a "victim" and that is exactly what man did. By doing so, man is able to triumph over Christ continuously because as a victim, Christ is merely a statistic among all the victims of the world and as such, He would become another nobody over time, to be met with indifference or obliviousness on the one hand and scorn on the other.
The possibility that men of long ago had labeled Christ a "victim" does not lend the label credence in the least. They were sinners just like those who came before and after them. For those who long ago labeled Christ as a "victim" were in my opinion wrong. For those who now find acceptable that Christ is a "victim" are in my opinion minions of Satan because the word "victim" has, as Brother Charles [5] said, has the connotation of meaninglessness whereas the life of Christ has an abundance of meaning and purpose. The fact that the label of "victim" is preceded by an adjective "innocent" or "holy", "pure" or "spotless" does not diminish the error and certainly does not right the wrong or sanctify the sin.
If anyone at the Congregation of Divine Worship is reading this, you ought to reconsider to correcting the error, an error that weakens the foundation of the Church.
I would be naïve to think that my request would be heard, or heard without objection, and the error corrected and an instruction sent to all the religious notifying them that Christ is never to be thought of or described a "victim," however innocent, holy, pure or spotless. The alternative is unsettling. To allow Christ to be referred to as a "victim" would be to reduce Christ to an ordinary sinner capable to falling prey to Satan and its minions -- men who had willingly become the pawns of Satan. As a result, Christ Who willingly sacrificed Himself at the alters of betrayal, torture and crucifixion would carry only the badge of victimhood with the Satanic effect of diminishing the meaning of Christ's life, nullifying the purpose of Christ's Passion and putting into doubt Christ's ability to lead souls to heaven by humbling and sacrificing Himself to compensate for the sin of Adam.
[1] I also heard it twice during the Eucharistic prayer said by two different priests on two separate occasions on EWTN's televised mass. As it turns out, I am not the only person who has trouble with describing Christ as a "victim." I am happy to find a friar's blog on the internet where Brother Charles also has a problem with the word. I quote his blog at http://friarminor.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-translation-victimhood.html verbatim below:
[2] Words in any language."December 31, 2011
"New Translation: Victimhood
"In accord with my practice for the minimum use of Eucharistic Prayer I, I've been praying the Roman Canon through this whole week of the Christmas Octave. This has given me further opportunity to pray through and reflect upon the new translation.
"One thing that strikes me with some intensity is the restoration of the triad at the end of the Unde et memores: offered to God is the hostiam puram, hostiam, sanctam, hostiam immaculatam.
"The new translation renders this as it is in the Latin: this pure victim, this holy victim, this spotless victim.
"The old translation did away with the structure of the triad, replacing it with this holy and perfect sacrifice.
"On the one hand, I like the restoration of the normative structure of the prayer. Now I just have to let go of the interior urge to make the signs of the cross that accompany this moment in the Extraordinary Form! On the other hand, I see the translation problem. In our time and place, victimhood and victimization have such a connotation of meaninglessness injustice. Jesus' victimhood was certainly an injustice, but one that was, in the paradox of the cross, superabundant in meaning. Can we hear this over and above our common connotations of 'victim'?
"Even though hostia and victima may have been somewhat interchangeable in late antiquity when the Roman Canon came together, the meaning-history of hostia, with its general sense of sacrificial victim and technical use as such in ancient religion would seem to be lost to the average pray-er speaking it as 'victim' in twenty-first century English.
"So it goes to some basic questions regarding liturgical translation. For example, what is the value of trying to bring out the sense of terms in our best guesses as to their original connotation and intent? On other hand, one of the values embedded in the new translation, and to which I consent easily, is that sacral language, such as that of the liturgy, is not supposed to be the same as or beholden to common speech.
"So what do you think? Is it an o.k., good, or not-so-good thing to translate the hostia in hostiam puram, hostiam sanctam, hostiam immaculatam as 'victim'?"
[3] God's perfection has not stopped me from verbalizing it, even in the course of doing so I have brought it down to a level so low so that it is within the limits of my understanding. I do not think that attempts to reach for and comprehend the impossible are exercises in futility. On the contrary, the more we try to understand and strive for perfection, however futile our repeated efforts, the farther we are able to distance ourselves from Sin and the closer we are able to place ourselves within the presence of God. In the previous sentence I used the word "farther" to connote an actual measurable distance rather than "further" to connote a conceptual distance because Sin in all its forms and the Master of Sin, Satan are palpable. Sin and all its variations seem abstract because they exist in disguise. The serpent in the Garden of Eden is no longer wrapped around The Apple Tree around the apples of one's eye. (The last three sentences added on November 20, 2013.)
[4] As Brother Charles said victimhood has the connotation of meaninglessness (see http://friarminor.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-translation-victimhood.html ). It also connotes passivity. A victim today is not seen to be blameworthy but rather an individual who has done nothing wrong (without regard that he might not care about God or have done anything good) and hurting nobody (or so it seems) and is merely living in neutrality (as if any sinner can live in neutrality to evil and as if neutrality to evil is a virtue -- a secular virtue perhaps, but certainly not a heavenly virtue). Passivity, a characteristic of the modern victim is far, far away from the light of perfection which is God because passivity does not lead to God. God has given us life, the Free Will and the ability to act in the first instance and act we must in order to go toward God. [6] There are many acts but three stand out. First is to love: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." See http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+22%3A36-40&version=NIV. Second is to be humble: "In order to show that humility is the most beautiful, as well as the most precious of all virtues, our Lord begins His beatitudes with humility, by saying: 'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for to them belongs the kingdom of heaven.' St. Augustine tells us that the poor in spirit are those who have humility for their portions. The prophet Isaias said to God: 'Lord, upon whom does Thy holy spirit descend? Is it perhaps upon those who bear a great name in this world, and upon the proud?' 'No,' said the Lord, 'but upon those that are humble of heart.'" [7] Third is to think and act with purity (without guise, deceit, hypocrisy or the like): "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God." [8] Therefore, being passive or neutral is not enough. Just as Christ had behaved and acted, so must we behave and act. Note: Before Pontius Pilate, Christ did not act passively; He acted respectfully. And Christ was not passive on the cross; He was at every moment of his suffering obedient to God until the very end in order to save us from eternal damnation. Christ is our Savior, not a beloved victim.
[5] http://friarminor.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-translation-victimhood.html
[6] God opened the door and gave us Christ, Christ the Savior, not Christ the innocent, pure, holy and spotless victim, to show us the way.
[7] Ven. Curé of Ars (Jean Baptiste Marie Vianney), Sermons of the Curé of Ars (Minnesota: The Neumann Press, 1984), 258.
[8] http://biblehub.com/niv/matthew/5.htm
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