Very good discussion. René Girard is brilliant
Thank you

Also worth looking at regarding Girard are his thoughts on the stumbling block, "scandalon."

Wonderful discussion. I’m not sure that suffering is contraindicated before the Fall. We should remember that Satan and his angels were themselves fallen before the creation of our first parents. As fallen beings, they certainly suffered and could have caused other non-human life to suffer.

We turn to the Lord,
who knows our sufferings and longs
to give us his comfort and peace.
‘Yet ours were the sufferings he was
bearing, ours the sorrows he was
carrying.’
Isaiah 53:4

Girard’s theory culminates in the figure of Christ as the embodied revelation of the human condition. Whereas archaic religions mythologise the scapegoat, concealing collective violence under the veil of sacred necessity, the Gospels uniquely unveil this mechanism by proclaiming the innocence of the victim. In Jesus, God enters the structure of human violence not to affirm it, but to expose and overcome it through self-giving love. This revelation strips violence of its sacred legitimacy — but in doing so, also removes the false catharsis it once provided. Humanity is thus left with a stark choice: either relapse into unbounded mimetic rivalry or receive the gift of grace. For Girard, this eschatological crisis — the apocalyptic moment of full revelation — marks both a danger and a hope. Only divine intervention, not human effort alone, can ultimately save humanity from the mimetic spiral of destruction it has unleashed upon itself. In the end is pure Catholocism.

In the end, Girard offers not just a theory of myth or a critique of violence, but a profound exegesis of Catholicism as the one tradition that fully discloses — and transcends — the scapegoat mechanism. The Cross is not a divine demand for blood, but a divine exposure of our own dependence on sacrificial violence. Christ does not found a new myth; He destroys the mythic by refusing retaliation and offering forgiveness. In this unveiling, Girard sees an imperative: that humanity must abandon its reliance on sacred violence and surrender to grace — the only power capable of breaking the mimetic cycle. Without this surrender, the apocalyptic spiral accelerates. With it, true reconciliation becomes possible. Catholicism, re-read through Girard, becomes not a set of rules but a call to conversion, from rivalry to communion, from myth to truth, from vengeance to peace.

46:00 I think an aspect here is that it seems to imply that the pattern for essentially the Fall seems pre-determinantly baked into the human recipe so to speak by God or else, that God allowed some created cause to undermine our constitution via a historical attack. Neither seems compatible with Christian ontology of humanity and anthropology more generally.

Can not say I share the issue of pre-fall animal conflict though. We are made in the image and likeness of God. I see part of that being an intendedness to be hovering above the lower purely worldly fray. And so the fall crashes us down below our nature. The soul becoming subject to the flesh. And so comes the animalistic passions and the horses leading the driver.

But higher the station, greater the fall so the defect is amplified and wickedness and futility ingredient in it as our nature marred has become, a petty, shrunken and pitiful thing doomed under its own fractured path if not healed and righted by the Lord and His grace.

Sacrifice as offering sounds First Temple and therefore Christian. Have you read Margaret  Barker? She is terribly in teresting on these topics. I can see where Girard would be interesting to people who were not brought up with a deeply Catholic cul t ural education. However, Barker is transformative. For example, on the story of the Fall, etc.

Of course sacrifices have developed. There are transactional sacrifices made to make gods do what people wish. There are sacrifices of atonement to appease the gods. And there are sacrifices to thank the gods for favorable deeds. All this does not debunk the theory of the origin of sacrifice.