On the Altar
Jonathan Sheehan's history of sacrifice
Jonathan Sheehan, On the Altar: A History of Sacrifice from the Sacred to the Secular (Princeton University, 2026).
We moderns have finally grown up. We’ve shed the superstitious savagery that plagued humanity during its darkened childhood, and most especially we’ve finally dispensed with the tenacious habit of sacrifice. No more animal massacres, no more Aztec carnage, no more rivers of blood, no more altars billowing with oily smoke signals to the gods. We know now the gods never wanted that anyway, and we even recoil when we allow ourselves to contemplate the holocaust of the abattoir that puts meat on supermarket shelves and our tables. We assure ourselves it’s not squeamishness but maturity. When Europeans discovered existent sacrificial societies in the New World, they knew they had discovered something sub-human. Blood, flesh, smoke: Here, we tell ourselves, is the bright line between civilization and barbarism, between the human and the bestial. We’ve stepped out into the sunshine and beckon the rest of the world to follow, by the point of a bayonet if need be.
Only, quite obviously, we haven’t abandoned sacrifice. Addison’s Cato, with its celebration of self-sacrifice for one’s friends, was, Jonathan Sheehan informs us, “the theatrical event of the eighteenth century,” the very century when humanity is supposed to have reached its majority. Sacrifice pervades Rousseau – sacrifice for love and for country, the sacrifice of personal happiness for the sake of duty, sacrifice as the moral shape of citizenship. Kant considered the Aqedah a “consummate expression of heteronomy,” a surrender of reason and conscience to an alien demand, but in the next breath Kant defined virtue as “sacrifice of the self.” For Hegel, the very negativity of sacrifice discloses the human condition. In sacrifice, man takes something from nature and consecrates it to God, but this bid for communion only constitutes our separation from the divine. The sacrificial knife doesn’t merely dismember the animal, but severs the primal unity of heaven and earth.
If we excuse ourselves with the thought “At least our sacrifices don’t kill,” de Maistre is at hand to point, with some glee, to the sacrificial foundations of France’s revolutionary order, when “millions of innocents were harvested and gathered into the granary.” Wielding sacrifice as the pin to burst our bubble of rationality, de Maistre drew a universal political principle: When men don’t know and serve the living God, they “will always sacrifice men and often eat them.” And all this before Freud, before anthropologists like William Robertson Smith, James Frazer, Marcel Mauss, and Émile Durkheim convinced us we remain more primitive than we can imagine.