Augustine's sacrificial economy

By bringing City of God and Confessions into conversation with Stanley Cavell's work, I argue that Augustine imagines sacrifice as the embodied acknowledgment of our common good in the face of loss and death. Affording each other such recognition is the ultimate purpose of economic life. Therefore, sacrifice is neither a tragic necessity nor the means to ends that lie elsewhere. It is the offering of a community whose members have learned how to die well by showing compassion to flesh they share with others. The church is the community that incarnates Christ's compassionate assumption of common flesh as "universal sacrifice.";Augustine divides the first ten books of City of God into two halves, each of which criticizes a different sacrificial economy. The first attacks pagan sacrifices made to acquire death-bound goods; the second, occult offerings aiming at immortality. Following this pattern, my first chapter gives an Augustinian critique of Max Weber's reading of modern economic life. Augustinian sacrifice is the recognition of the good to which the goods of mortal life refer---not the cost of doing business together in a pluralistic economy of agnostic values. My second chapter criticizes Rene Girard's and Nancy Jay's accounts of scapegoating, which Augustine would treat as the demonic tender of hapless flesh for a dark incarnation.;The final three chapters reinterpret Confessions 7, 8, and 9---respectively---to show how Augustine's encounter with the Platonists bears out the sacrificial theory of City of God 10. Chapter 3 contends that Platonic philosophy relieved Augustine of fearing death by teaching him to remember the significance of his soul's separation from his body. Chapter 4 demonstrates that Augustine's conversion freed him to acknowledge the sacrificial economy to which he already belonged unawares. Chapter 5 argues that the church's universal sacrifice incarnates Christ's vision of God. The mystical ascent at Ostia is Augustine's glimpse of that vision. Together, these chapters maintain that the Platonists fail to acknowledge for themselves the divine body that gives their contemplation its flesh. Therefore, Augustine's sacrificial ecclesiology holds the key to understanding the logic of his much-debated engagement with the Platonists.