By sacrificing a thing to God, we "de-thing" it, and it returns to us as blessed, no longer mere matter, but a vehicle of the Divine. We go from a pure economic economy to a gift economy, God's economy of grace. Bataille, with qualifications, has much to teach us on this.
Bataille, of course, makes the blunder of most intellectuals when he takes the sacramental lived experience of sacrifice, or the intimacy of eating, and disembeds, and therefore disfigures, them from biblical narrative, creedal formulae, and the praxis of an embodied faith community.
Christ, of course, came not to give a doctrine, but His body, the Church, to share us in to a particular type of person whose form of life naturally shapes how how perceive and receive the world - as gift.
Bataille did rightly recoil from any theology that proclaimed eternal life could be possessed in a way that did not actually involve this world :
“One cannot posit divine intimacy unless it is in the particular, without delay, as the possibility of an immanence of the divine and of man.”
Indeed, in the prologue to his Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, St. Bonaventure also says that “no one is in any way disposed for divine contemplation that leads to mystical ecstasy unless like Daniel he is a man of desires (Dan. 9:23).”
Bataille did consider medieval sacred festivals, monuments, and architecture to function as at least partial replacements for the reality of immanence, so that Protestantism with its anti-sacramental cosmos and reformed doctrine of justification, having definitively severed the order of intimacy from the order of things, was for him practically identical with the death of God and the rise of industry .
I don’t think his criticisms of authentic Catholic, and Orthodox, ways to the divine, quiet hit the mark as essential, he’s used to the bland fleshless rationalism we see all too much today, but it is a valid criticism of Protestantism, and elements clearly within lived Catholic life that we need to be conscious of of fight against.
Against the “fall” into the utilitarian “order of things” Bataille opposed the “order of intimacy” which he interchangeably called “life,” “the holy,” “the sacred,” “the mythic”, or even “salvation.” Bataille believed religion was at its most effective when it breaks through the utilitarian order and demands sacrifice—an act of consumption that negates any further use.
“The opposite of project is sacrifice. […] And where only the result counts in the project, in the sacrifice, the act consecrates value in itself. Nothing in sacrifice is put off until later;”
— Bataille
And, if Christianity is true, then Christ’s sacrifice has indeed sanctified the world, by removing all things, including people, form utilitarian “thing hood” and conferred infinite value, sanctity, and all things. Another way of saying the is we are all Priests, and must offer up, sacrifice, the things of the world, ti be returned as blessed by God, no longer objects of mere use for ourselves, but now as means and vehicles to and of the the Divine; sacrifice and gift, are ultimately One - but that is only if indeed there is a divine telos to the Cosmos, which Bataille denies, despite all desire phenomenologically intended toward the good necessarily.
The point of a sacramental sacrifice, in rational Christianity, IS to unite the flesh and spirit in an erotic way that does not degenerate in violent and chaotic multiplicity.
Bataille’s criticisms of reason as a pale discursive faculty have little to do with Christianity’s traditional stance, after all, regardless of what we see today. It is the liturgy which shapes how and what we desire, affirming that true discourse of the God who cannot be grasped by thought must be related to by an open heart in communal praise, charity, and thanksgiving.
This is the sin of Protestant thought, with its “faith commitments” to mere creeds, informational knowledge apart from transformational embodied knowing experience in embodied liturgical forms of life.
Catholic thought, utilizing Platonic philosophy, always knew better than to separate or oppose desire from intellect, after all, one can only know what one loves, one must wish to know a thing first to intend one’s attention to that thing, hence all knowledge begins in the heart.
Think of King David - “I will not give to the Lord what costs me nothing” or the woman who broke an alabaster jar of ointment over Jesus’s feet instead of giving money to the poor.
David’s sacrifice was a destruction of utility and the woman at Bethany recognized that worship does not justify itself by anything other than itself.
Unfortunatly, Bataille refused to accept that sacrifice was in any sense teleological, or that it resonated with the peace of God rooted in the goodness of Creation.
Ultimately, without a proper doctrine of the fall, he ends up in a kind of reverse Gnosticism, divinizing the agony of our present incarnated fleshly existence, and extolling what amounts to yet another death cult, for there is nothing real outside the game for desire to pursue, yet in reality, at the end of discursive thought, it is only true eros which risks the leap of faith past what the mind can grasp to land into the abyss of God’s love.
Naturally, his thought led to his work with the Acéphale (‘Headless’), a human sacrifice-themed secret society, but for Christians Christ is the head of Logos, not a logos severed from eros, but one rational BECAUSE it is first embedded in the story of Christ, the God who sacrificed out of love, and it is this narrative that creates the grammar and "rules", the spirit, of Christian erotic rationality.
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