From the beginning, sacrifice lived a double life in Christianity, both abandoned and essential. Christ’s death on the cross was the sacrifice to end all sacrifice, eclipsing the temple sacrifices of Judaism and paganism. And yet at the center of the lived faith was the repetition of sacrifice: the offering of Christ’s body, the sacrifices of ancient patriarchs, and the sacrifices of martyrs woven through liturgy, theology, and popular devotion.
But this double life collapsed in the Reformation. Quarreling heirs to Christian truth discovered that the sacrifices they once called Christian might be nothing of the sort. To build their new faiths—to discover the truth of Christian sacrifice—they turned to the past, learning from Christianity as it was how Christianity ought to be.
In On the Altar, Jonathan Sheehan offers a new account of sacrifice both sacred and secular. His story is in part a history of the Christian imagination across the centuries of the Reformation, when new martyrs and holy warriors fought for the truth of their sacrifices, when the empire of New World sacrifice was recruited to settle Christian conflicts, and when the sacrifices of the ancient Hebrews were weaponized for orthodoxy. But it is a history of the secular imagination as well, as the vast archive of Christian sacrifice was dispersed and applied to things that humans make, their religions, politics, and societies. With On the Altar, Sheehan reveals a new history of both Christianity and the secular world in which we still live.
Jonathan Sheehan is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of European History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture and the coauthor of Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century.
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“This is a wonderful book. Beautifully written, learned, and ambitious, it has the potential to become, for decades, the definitive work on Latin Christianity’s history of sacrifice and its modern secular afterlives.”—Constance M. Furey, coauthor of Devotion: Three Inquiries in Religion, Literature, and Political Imagination
“Sacrifice is a capacious, puzzling category. What is truly remarkable, Sheehan shows, is the long and rich history of the intellectual efforts, particularly pronounced in Christianity, to get over it, to claim to have reckoned with it and transcended it. But sacrifice does not go away; it keeps coming back as a problem, each time turning into an opportunity for extraordinary creativity. In effect, the history of the sacrifice-problem as told in this study amounts to a history, in a surprising new register, of Latin Christianity and its own beyond. Written in a crisp, nimble, and lucid prose, this is a brilliant work.”—Tomoko Masuzawa, author of The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism
“Sheehan’s control and erudition conduct something wild: a history of world-making as the intensification of what continually overturns its worlds. Sacrifice is the protagonist—part conceptual knot, part tumultuous story, part author in its own right—and a strange, eye-opening guide through the workshops of history itself. This would be enough, but one wonders whether the book invites a yet stranger twist: history as a light on the proceedings until sacrifice, in the melee, blows it out.”—Nancy Levene, Yale University
“Jonathan Sheehan’s exquisitely written survey of our struggles with the intertwined theological and secular meanings of the idea of ‘sacrifice’ tells a crucial story, illuminating the intellectual history of Christian Europe since ancient times in innovative and profound ways. No reader of this book will be able to forget its beauty, or its power to explain why this term still strikes at the hearts of even the most atheistic Europeans and Americans.”—Suzanne Marchand, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
