Abstract

Thomas Aquinas holds that we have a natural duty to offer God external sacrifice, in which something is destroyed or killed. I propose a metaphysics on which that claim makes sense. I first consider the Thomistic grounding for this duty in relations between spiritual and bodily acts, and between natural sacrifice and Christ’s sacrifice; these groundings are a preamble to the Faith. I draw an objection from Francisco Suárez to the anthropological grounding, and another objection from René Girard to the claim that natural sacrifice prefigures Christ’s sacrifice. I respond by developing the Thomistic anthropology that grounds this duty, using the paleoanthropological, evolutionary theory called the “hunting hypothesis” (especially using the ways this hypothesis has been joined to an analysis of ancient myth and sacrificial practice by Roberto Calasso) to argue that we have a natural teleological orientation fulfilled through destructive sacrifice. I argue that we are naturally priests, who offer creatures back to God; grasping this shows how our natural duty to sacrifice prefigures Christ’s sacrifice.