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Of This World is a podcast dedicated to discussing religion and politics. Co-hosts Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, a historian at Wesleyan University, and Nick Tabor, a journalist and author, talk with scholars, writers, and theologians working at the seam between faith and the secular. Across each episode they return to one question: can there be an effective religious left in the United States? A joint production with Commonweal magazine.
This is Nick Taber. I'm a journalist and author living in New York.
Speaker 2:And my name is Daniel Simons Jenkins. I'm an assistant professor of history in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, and this is Of This World. Alright. Welcome to another episode. My name is Daniel Steinmetz Jenkins.
Speaker 2:I'm here with my cohost, Nick Taber. How are doing, Nick?
Speaker 1:Doing fine. Happy to be here.
Speaker 2:Excellent. Well, we have a great show for you today. We are going to talk about sacrifice and its history, which is quite rich and long as many listeners are aware. I think if you were to ask someone on the street, what do you think of when you think of sacrifice? They would say many things.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of them would probably have an idea of religion and religion's past. They would think maybe of Judaism or the sacrifice of Christ, or maybe they would even think about something more modern, like the sacrifice one makes for their nation when they go to war or sacrifice someone makes for their family. And so in order to get to the bottom of all this and to show the origins, the evolutions of a very specific line of sacrifice, the Christian notion and its development, we have on the show today Jonathan Sheehan, the Sidney Hellman Erman Professor of European History at UC Berkeley and former director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion. Jonathan is a European intellectual and cultural historian whose work focuses on the history of Christianity, the history of knowledge, and the history of secular modernity. Across his research, Jonathan explores the history of the human sciences, the rise of modern disciplines, and more broadly, the importance of religion in the making of the secular world.
Speaker 2:His first book is entitled The Translation, Scholarship, and Culture, which I highly recommend. It came out in 2005. I remember with that when it came out. Wow. Twenty years time flies by, which shows how the enlightenment transformed rather than rejected the bible, turning it from a sacred text into a work of culture.
Speaker 2:Not so long ago, he published a book he co wrote with Dror Varman titled Invisible Hands, Self Organization in the Eighteenth Century. And he is the author of the book that we're gonna be discussing today, which just came out with Princeton University Press, On the Altar, A History of Sacrifice from the sacred to the secular, which explores a long history of Christian and secular ideas of sacrifice from the ancient world to the modern period. Thanks so much, for joining us on the show today.
Speaker 3:Thanks both of you for having me here. This is great. Looking forward to the conversation.
Speaker 2:Excellent. We are too. So I guess just a broad question. Why write roughly a two thousand year history of sacrifice, or why is it important to understand sacrifice and its long history?
Speaker 3:Well, so sacrifice, I mean, as your opening comments suggested, is on the one hand something super simple. Broadly, we understand it to mean sort of giving something up that's precious to us, either in the names or in the hopes of something else, sometimes something better, or just in a kind of gesture of thanks for having gotten something good or reconciliation possibly. So in that sense, it feels kinda simple. But when you look across time, you realize just how incredibly complicated this institution and practice has been. I mean, just to give one first example, in precolonial Hawaii, there was a New Year's festival that lasted for three months and included a huge variety of rituals from sacrifices to the stars, the feeding of the moon, processions around the islands, you know, pig sacrifices, and much, much more.
Speaker 3:It kind of organized the whole year for this society. And it kind of turns out that humans are a sacrificing sort. Virtually every religious culture does it in some form or another, and it has a lot of curious features. On the one hand, lots of things get sacrificed if you wanna think about animals, goats, cows, pigs, but not everything gets sacrificed. So cats, dogs, and snakes rarely get sacrificed.
Speaker 3:So there's some sort of logic that seems to be working in sacrifice in a broader anthropological sense. That said, sacrifice is more than just killing animals. I mean, there's sacrifices of human beings. Human sacrifice is an ancient and venerable human practice, but also less violent things, the offering of incense, throwing wine on the ground, offering of yourself. Monasticism and asceticism is typically understood in sacrificial terms.
Speaker 3:So and even beyond the just the act, many cultures have built whole societies around sacrifice. So the Temple Of Jerusalem had a whole city. The temple in Tenochtitlan had a whole city. They had an economy that was built around sacrifice. That, you know, if you wanted to be a vegetarian, many Christians, early Christians were vegetarians partly because the meat that they got was the meat that came from animal sacrifice, and they didn't wanna participate in sacrifice.
Speaker 3:So it's had a kind of an economic and a geographic and a political, obviously, a political function as well. Priests and kings were great sacrifices in the ancient world. And, you know, finally, at some level, sacrifice is always, in a sense, a kind of a metaphor. It's a meaning that we give to an act that is otherwise might be indifferent. Killing an animal is not necessarily a sacrifice.
Speaker 3:We kill animals all the time, and we eat them. So it's something about how we understand a particular behavior that is essential, I think, at some level to how human beings understand themselves, the way they imagine themselves, in a sense, kinda create themselves. I mean, as somebody like the philosopher Hegel would say, you know, create not just themselves, but even the gods.
Speaker 2:Excellent. So this is an ambitious book, and I learned so much from it. It's rich. It's essentially a history of the last two thousand years in terms of looking at the history of sacrifice. And you do foreground it in the ancient world and you talk about the Greco Roman world and Christian understandings of sacrifice, but it really focuses on Christianity.
Speaker 2:And so I guess maybe we could start there in relationship to what you just said, at least early on in the early church. What made Christian sacrifice unique is I remember, just from my Sunday school lessons, Christ was viewed as the ultimate sacrifice that abolished all need for any other sacrifice. And yet at the same time, we celebrate communion, and it was just remembering that very thing. Right? Kind of paradoxical.
Speaker 2:Could you talk a little bit about just how the New Testament writers in the early church viewed Christ's sacrifice compared in relationship to the world outside of it?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Mean, you put your finger on it right there, Danny. So, yeah, early Christianity emerges in a in a sort of richly sacrificial surround. On the one hand, Judaism whose priests and texts and lived practices were all about sacrifice of a sort, and then this wider culture of Greco Roman sacrifice. And this Rome in particular, where participation in public sacrifice was was certainly expected and often required from citizens.
Speaker 3:And so one of the defining features of early Christianity was its refusal to participate in those kinds of sacrifices. And in that sense, to be Christian was to say no to sacrifice, at least the sacrifice as people understood it in the world in which they lived. But as you sort of indicated, you know, the the abolition of sacrifice altogether was pretty hard to imagine. I mean, if you track the New Testament writers, the gospels don't really talk much about sacrifice. But already in the letters of Paul, which arguably are happening and written around the same time as the gospel texts themselves.
Speaker 3:They're coming out sometime in the, like, the fifties, sixties, and seventies CE. You start to see the emergence of a pretty rich sacrificial vocabulary. I mean, one big issue at stake among early Christians was what to do with this thing called the Hebrew Bible, which came to be called the Old Testament. And many of these early Christians were themselves obviously Jewish. In fact, early Christianity is probably not the right word for what's happening in this first century.
Speaker 3:But, you know, these early Christians, they don't wanna give up on this Hebrew Bible. It was their scripture. And so far as there was a Christian scripture, it was that. So they want to absorb it into their scriptural canon, and so they come up with ways to relate what's happening in their world, in particular, the crucifixion of Christ, but some other things I'd like to talk about later to the sacrifices that are laid out in books like Deuteronomy and Leviticus. And so you'll find that the anonymous letter to the Hebrews, a very powerful figure, which is what the one you just identified.
Speaker 3:The figure that, yes, indeed, Christ is a sacrifice, but it's the final sacrifice. It's the real sacrifice that the priests were hoping to accomplish but never managed to actually accomplish until the coming of the son of man. Now you might say that, okay. This is the last sacrifice. Right?
Speaker 3:This is the final sacrifice that's over and done with. But, again, the the finality is not so final after all because, you know, the early Christians wanna develop a culture of celebration. They wanna remember and, at times, reenact Christ's death through the Eucharist, through the celebration of communion. And, and almost I immediately, the Eucharist gets described as a sacrifice and offering that celebrates Christ's offering, and you see the kind of absorption of a very powerful sort of, I guess, what examples from Hebrew Bible, like the sacrifice of Cain and Abel or the sacrifice of Isaac that then become part of Christian liturgy. You'll find those on paintings and mosaics, carved altars that then get folded right into Eucharistic liturgy that makes the whole liturgy seem like itself as an act of sacrifice.
Speaker 3:So this abolition and absorption is the dynamic that I'm interested in exploring in this book.
Speaker 1:I think the book does that successfully. You know, I feel like there's been a lot of discussion in recent years about the way Christianity treats the concept of sacrifice, and it's like a lot of people agree there's something unique about this, but they don't all agree on on what that is. So I'll give a couple examples. For one, I'm thinking of Rene Girard, the French Catholic writer and literary critic, who suggests that Christianity shows us how sacrifice is a barbaric practice, because in the Christian story, the sacrificial victim, Jesus, is innocent, and everyone else in the story is guilty. And so, for Gerard, this narrative encourages us to think about our own complicity in violence and encourages us to take the side of the victim.
Speaker 1:Or, to take another example, for Terry Eagleton, the English literary critic, in his book on sacrifice, the Christian story has more of a political valence. Eagleton says the gospels tell a story where a sacrifice is made not to please the gods, but just as a straight up political murder. So for him, it's not about sacrifice itself being barbaric, but the gospels expose the barbarism of the people in charge, the powers of this world. So my point is there are these different arguments out there about what Christianity shows us about sacrifice, and I'm just wondering if you drew any conclusions of your own about that in researching and writing this book.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm not a theorist, And in that sense, I'm sort of disinclined to come up with the the single feature that sets Christianity apart from as in vis a vis sacrifice from so the other sacrificial traditions. Indeed, Christ is innocent, but there's plenty of innocent things that are are sacrificed in cultures all over the world. I mean, this is you know, the firstborn children are not supposed to be guilty in general. So so I I think I would focus less on a theory of Christian sacrifice than a description of the ways in which Christianity has, over its long history, thought about sacrifice in different sorts of often conflicting ways. And I don't think that it's easy to take the the varieties of ways, which even in the gospels and New Testament writings, but certainly by the time you're into the early church writers and boil them down into a kind of this is what distinguishes Christian sacrifice from everything else.
Speaker 3:I mean, so Christian sacrifice has, if you just observe it kind of as an operation in time, three major pillars. Right? It has a pillar that's focused and rooted in the Eucharist and in the celebration of communion that Danny mentioned at the beginning, the celebration of the body and blood of Christ. This means different things at different times. That history is interesting, and I talk about that.
Speaker 3:It involves the cult and culture of the martyrs, which is a different version of sacrifice. It involves much more of the giving up of self and the willingness to suffer, to make suffering and sacrifice kind of equivalent to one another. And then it also includes, probably most importantly, at some level, at least theologically, the atonement. Right? The the sense in which the death of Christ accomplishes something for us in that in terms of our salvation.
Speaker 3:So worship, community, theology. So what makes, I think, Christianity distinctive as regards all of these forms of sacrifice is the sort of self critical way in which it takes them up. So there are no general laws of sacrifice in Christianity. You will, you know, look without any success for something like, you know, the Deuteronomic texts or the Vedic texts that tell you how to do sacrifice. Instead, Christian sacrifice develops in sort of unstable fields of contention.
Speaker 3:And that's because, you know, early Christians are trying to force together two things, which is, on the one hand, a kind of critique of sacrifice, which sometimes is aimed at other traditions, but often, as Christianity develops, aimed inwardly at heretical Christians doing things wrong so that there's a kind of critique of sacrifice and then, a defense of sacrifice done in the right sort of way. And what this right sort of way is supposed to be has produced many long controversies about the fundamentals in the church, the nature of worship, the nature of community, the nature of salvation. These are these are, in a sense, the areas where Christians fight and argue and and and create new ideas about how to how to create community, what theology should look like. So it would be a funny thing for an historian to decide which among all of these different competing versions of sacrifice was the one that crystallizes what's essentially Christian about all this stuff. And I think for somebody like Rene Girard, the project is effectively a theological project, so that's fine.
Speaker 3:He he's somebody with a stake in the argument. And I'm I don't have a particular stake theological stake that I'm trying to advance in this book, but namely just to think about this space of contention that has been Christian sacrifice over its centuries and to think about the kinds of productive ways that Christianity has managed what I regard as a sort of fundamental tension in the tradition.
Speaker 2:Excellent. Yeah. And that tension comes out throughout the book. And, and as we make our way through it, I think one place to look is when the church is essentially Latinized and you have a great discussion of how different church fathers such as Eusebius or Tertullian and so on dealt with what you describe as the abolition and absorption of this tradition. Can you elaborate on this, how the argument works in at that time period?
Speaker 3:So there's lots to say, but rather than talk about the theologians, can I talk about martyrs? Totally. Okay.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 3:Because I think the martyrs are are are are really wonderful example for exploring this this issue in a way that I that I think would be sort of familiar to listener. So the martyrs were, in fact, Tertullian remarks, the seed of the church, And that is among the most powerful inspiring figures of the early church are people like, say, the bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, one of the three apostolic fathers who's burned and stabbed in sometime in the middle of the second century for refusing to offer sacrifice to the Roman emperor. Now in fact, as the stories are recorded in what are called the acts, the acts of these martyrs, many, if not most, of early Christian martyrs are killed for refusing to participate in public sacrifice. In the mid third century, this grows so irritating to the Roman state that in the mid third century, the Roman emperor, Decius, requires a new sort of citizenship requirement that everybody participate in the sacrifice and that the sacrifice be witnessed and that you have to write down on a piece of paper that you did it, and you have to have somebody kind of cosign it. And in fact, we found these pieces of paper buried in the desert in Egypt.
Speaker 3:So we this actually produced a bureaucracy of sacrifice in the Roman Empire. So martyrs don't sacrifice, but they are the sacrifice that that sort of ends the sacrifice, and they're actually immediately seen as such. And this is true among the theologians, but it's also particularly true among popular devotions, among kind of ordinary Christians, that the cult of the martyrs begins to include what we might regard as a sacrificial appurtenances. So, for example, altars that would be made with little special sites where you could put the bread and the wine, just like the altars that they used in Roman, say, celebrations of the departed families, where bread and wine were regularly part of the sacrificial offerings. And these would be offered in the memory of the special dead.
Speaker 3:So the polycarp doesn't get an altar so far as we know. I mean, maybe he did, but, polycarp instead is traditionally seen as at the foundation of the cult of the relics. So we have in his story that, that the other Christians watched him being burned, and then they carefully went and plucked his bones from the smoking pile of ashes, and then they cleaned them, and they venerated them. And the early church takes these relics very seriously. In fact, you could say, in a sense, that the physical body of the church, as it grows in the second, third, and fourth centuries before the before it becomes a kind of institution of empire, is founded on these bodies of these martyrs.
Speaker 3:So church martyr cemeteries are the places where churches are built. The relics need to be put into altars in order to consecrate altars. This becomes a formal requirement at the end of the fourth century so that the body of the church physically as it expands across the Mediterranean has at its core this sort of sacrificial martyrological cult. There's very interesting stories about this. I don't know how much time we're gonna have, but if the you know, one could follow these all these relics as they move from the heartlands of original Christianity in the Mediterranean across the Alps, and there's a kind of a robust trade and commerce in relics.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of relic thievery that happens in order to get get relics for these new churches that are being built, say, in the Carolingian lands and in what's now, you know, France and Germany. So that just is to indicate that the that the church has this in a way, not so that this relationship of of abolition and and absorption is something which is not just happening at a at a sort of metaphorical level, but it's also happening at a quite practical level as Christianity builds itself into a, you know, a a a pretty powerful social and and kind of ecclesiastical force.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'd like to jump ahead to to to Martin Luther, who you have a pretty rich discussion of, and I think we can use him as kind of a touchstone to talk about what happens more broadly in the Reformation, though you certainly talk about other Reformation figures too. You talk about how Martin Luther was repelled by the idea of sacrifice to some extent, because he saw it as a form of works, as in salvation by works instead of grace, And he rewrote the Mass, wrote a couple different versions of the Mass to, erase certain elements, of sacrifice. But of course, you can't really have Christianity without some idea of sacrifice. And you know the last time I was in a Lutheran church it still had crosses everywhere.
Speaker 1:But I guess more to the point Luther sort of, at least part of what he did is to translate his understanding of sacrifice to ethics saying that sacrifice is something Christians should be doing at every moment, that every day is a living sacrifice to God. So could you talk about how Luther grappled with that and how it speaks to broader changes in the Reformation?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So, I mean, I I actually don't think that the what's distinctive about Luther is the translation into ethics. I mean, I think that the Christians have always translated sacrifice into ethics in some form or another, and monastic is an example of that, and in a way, so are the martyrs. So what's, I think, distinctive about the reformation is the, a rediscovery of this critical project, vis a vis the very Christian tradition in which these people had grown up. So the late medieval church is a highly sacrificial church.
Speaker 3:And if we had time, we could talk about all the ways in which the late medieval church is sacrificial, from the growth of the doctrine of transubstantiation, which is comes rather late after sometime in the eleventh or twelfth century, the interest in the literalness of the death of Christ, the interest in the body and suffering of think of medieval crucifixions, paintings, sculptures, Christ covered with blood, the arma Christi, the weapons used to torture him arranged over him in a kind of symbolic fashion. All sorts of other things. So the elevation of the host during the mass so that the parish could look at it, twelfth century. Ringing of the bell to alert the congregation that the consecration had happened and that the Eucharist was transformed from ordinary bread into this special bread, the building of Eucharistic tabernacles to house the the Eucharist in in the church. All these things that make this church really powerfully sacrificial, and not least of those is this notion of the priest who had themselves as performing really a quite a literal sacrifice on behalf of the parish of the body of Christ given to God the father during the during the during the mass.
Speaker 3:So Luther hated all that. Right? He you know, as you say, he wanted we wanna rid the church of the stink of sacrifice, And much of what he hated about the medieval church were these things, the cult of the saints, the, you know, the sacrificing priesthood, and this mass with this sacrificial drama. So what they understood to be their rechristianization project involved kind of trying to scrape away the sacrifices, either that they viewed them as not having been properly purged in the first place or that had maybe crept back in over the centuries. So as you say, they wrote new Luther and all the reformers write new masses.
Speaker 3:They try to reform the priesthood, no longer now, you know, kind of priesthood of all believers, no longer seen as a sacrificing priesthood. Sacrifice understood, as you say, as a work that doesn't contribute to salvation, and new ideas about the Eucharist, about which, by the way, reformers can never really agree on what the Eucharist actually is gonna be. So that's that's a, you know, an interesting theological conversation, but probably possibly too in the weeds for for us today. So but so the dynamic so this is the critical project of the reformation vis a vis the tradition. And then there's, as we would by now sort of expect, there's an and yet.
Speaker 3:Right? The much of the book focuses on these and yets. The the the difficulty or maybe impossibility of cleansing the church in some fashion of sacrifice. Because, you know, whether the thing that needs to be saved is the crucifixion or the doctrine of the atonement, or if it's the relationship between New Testament and what everybody by now is calling Old Testament, which rests on some elaboration and sense that sacrifice is really important to how Christians think about the world. And then also in the sixteenth century during the Reformation, the return of a of a kind of politics of martyrdom that afflicts all of the different confessions, see all the different Christian groups in that period.
Speaker 3:So that is all gonna this is the dynamic that that is unleashed by Reformation. On the one hand, this urge to critique and cleanse, and on the other hand, to remake in some fashion a kind of sacrifice that there would be a newer and better sacrifice, which is, in a sense, the dynamic that was there at the beginning too.
Speaker 1:Right. Yeah. I I think so. That really comes through in your treatment of the Reformation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think Luther is often considered to be some kind of incipient secularist, depending on who's writing. And I think what you show there is there's continuation and discontinuation, which is a theme of the book. And it really takes us to the modern period. And there is kind of a secularization theory at work in the book. And I think maybe even explaining what secularization theory is as it pertains to your argument might be helpful for our listeners.
Speaker 2:You of course have written about the enlightenment in your previous work in regards to the Bible, but take us through what you see as the main distinctives of sacrifice is understood by enlightenment thinkers, how is it transformed, how does this connect to your kind of the general argument you've been making in the book at this point?
Speaker 3:Right. So just to take a quick step back, the new answer reformers come up to to solve this problem is to develop what I call a kind of a Christian archive. That is a, you know, a sort of deep history of Christianity. To answer the question, what is Christianity? They ask the question, what was Christianity?
Speaker 3:And over the course of the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century, this archive gets bigger and bigger. It includes the church fathers. But as Christian controversy and conflict continues, it also begins to expand and includes, I don't know, all sorts of what we might regard as anthropological materials, materials from new world sacrifices, new world kind of Jewish sacrifices, and all sorts of different ways. So my version of how this gets us towards the secular is that this era of hot confessional conflict comes more or less to an end by the sometime in the middle of the seventeenth century. That is the stakes of figuring out this question of what is Christian sacrifice begins to go down as these different groups, Catholics and Protestants of various sorts, more or less just decide that they are no longer gonna be interested in persuading one another that there is one right kind of Christianity that everybody's gonna follow anyways.
Speaker 3:So what happens then historically is that as this era of confessional violence comes to an end, the theological and communal stakes of Christian sacrifice really diminish, and then three things happen at once. The first is the emergence of forms of Christianity that don't care about any of this archive. That is, what we might regard as sort of radically experiential Christianities that we would be, in in a way, familiar with, maybe the traditions you grew up in. I mean but, you know, the deep history of that, Methodism or Moravianism, in which these all of this kind of historical stuff is not that relevant. These are people who wanna feel it kind of rather than rather than defend a particular historical version of it.
Speaker 3:The second is the emergence broadly of free thought. That is people who basically think all this sacrifice stuff is just, you know, so much superstition and drivel. You know, the people like Spinoza or or Voltaire. And then third, and this is this is, for me, the most interesting group, those who wanna plunder this archive for new kinds of political and intellectual projects. And this is where I think a real transformation happens when this older theological archive gets repurposed for different kinds of projects, political, religious, and and cultural.
Speaker 3:I mean, I'm happy to talk about, say, the political if we have time, but but but I'm also happy to stop there.
Speaker 2:Well, I think maybe one political example would maybe, like, a yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Would be worth it. Alright. So in the, you know, in the early eighteenth century, this is the period when so we're in now in the enlightenment at some level. The, you know, the political fact on the ground are the power of these monarchies, and the opposition to these monarchies happens. In in large sense, people who try to reimagine what an older republican tradition would look like, to try to think about what citizenship ought to look like in an age when everybody's a subject.
Speaker 3:And the way that they start to think about citizenship, and this would be intellectual I mean, intellectual historian, this would be writers like, I don't know, the Earl of Shaftesbury, for example. But the way that they think about this is they try to imagine how they might combine kind of older Roman Republican virtues of of self sacrifice for a community with more, this kind of kind of, like, softer Christian ideals about community and solidarity and sociability, and they create this whole new sort of I I don't know. It's a it's like a chimera of Roman and Christian things that becomes the foundation for what I view the foundation for modern theories of patriotism or modern understandings of patriotism. And this turns into an exceedingly powerful way of thinking about what it means to be a citizen. Namely, a citizen is somebody who's willing to first of all, lives in a political community with somebody else, feels love and affection and fraternal affection for other people in that community, and who's willing to give something up if asked, give everything up for that community.
Speaker 3:And that is not something that makes sense in a monarchy. Particularly, the monarchy is the great advantage of a monarchy, somebody like Montesquieu would say, is that it doesn't ask you to do anything. Republicans ask you to do stuff. And when we as we move toward the age of revolutions, this this becomes a very powerful way of conceptualizing the relationship between self and state and and citizen and citizen laterally. And so that's secularization of a sort, but it's secularization by way of a kind of recombination and and and reapplication of a set of older ideas to new contexts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, you know, you, I commented to Danny that I love the way you make use of this, the Patti Smith line that opens her album horses. Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine. I think it comes up twice and it fits really nicely in your treatment of, I guess we'll use the phrase a secular age, the degree to which we're actually living in secularism is like something people debate, there is this desire to strip away some of these stories, these myths, this kind of, you know, some people might say baggage that we have from our Christian history, And in the book you talk about the Patti Smith line as, if I understood you right, it's kind of suggesting that one reading of the line is that it reflects this desire to of free ourselves from all this baggage. And, the way you put it in the book is this desire to imagine ourselves autonomous, free to invent and dispose of the meanings that shape our lives, and I think it's safe to say you're pretty skeptical about the idea that we can do that. And so I wonder if you could elaborate on that and talk about what all this Christian heritage involving sacrifice might mean for, you know, a modern person like Patti Smith.
Speaker 3:So to me, the line is just a wonderful one from I mean, it's, you know, it's a song that I've listened to for a long time. But it it kind of exemplifies some of the things I that I that I have been talking about and and certainly what I've been thinking about. So so on the one hand, like, here's this song which basically says, you know, I'm I reject it. It's not Jesus' sacrifice is not my sacrifice. And and the other hand, it it also repeats it.
Speaker 3:What is what I take to be sort of the deep structures of Christian sacrifice, the its insistence that the age of sacrifice is over and done with and left behind, and then the reinhabiting then of us of that of that very language of sacrifice to make the song interesting. Right? I mean, this is a song that's called Gloria, which is, on the one hand, is about the joyful hedonism and seduction and abandonment to pleasure. And on the other hand, the song is just you know, it's it echoes one of the most ancient songs in Christianity, the the the Gloria and Achalesios Deo that sung by angels at the occasion of the birth of Christ, the lamb of god. You know, it's sung in every Latin mass across Christendom.
Speaker 3:So so this dissonance that she's playing with there between the tradition and leaving the tradition behind and the creating something with this tradition strikes me as just kinda makes this such a powerful metaphor in a sense for for this larger dynamics. And I guess the message I would have at some level is, like, yeah, I am skeptical that we can imagine ourselves autonomous or free to invent and dispose of these meanings, but I also think we shouldn't worry about it as that as much as we do. I think that there's a way in which people seem to think that if we have if there's a certain heteronomy of the secular, this is a problem. That is if the secular is somehow indebted with or infused with the language of Christianity that we're we've somehow, you know, we're we've disappointed ourselves. We failed in our aspirations.
Speaker 3:I think that that makes a big mistake. And one of the big mistakes this book wants to show is that it's it's it imagines that once upon a time, there was an autonomous Christian past, a religious past that itself was you know, couldn't control of its own contents. And the whole book is about how Christianity too is this conjury, kinda creation of different elements that work together until they don't work together. And the secular, in that sense, is kind of like that. And somebody like Patti Smith who can really see it.
Speaker 3:I don't know how much she was seeing it, but she was certainly, you know, aware of it and was kind of using this dissonance between acceptance and rejection to create something new. This is what, you know, makes her great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't I don't think I'm ever gonna listen to the song in quite the same way in the future.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Jonathan, for joining us today. We're getting towards the end of the book here and, you know, I do a lot of, for better or for worse, a lot of history of the present, which is kind of a fraught subject just because so many historians are suspicious of it. But it seems like everyone's kind of doing it these days given the time in which we're living. And as I was reading your book, I obviously was thinking about the present moment and you know, there's a lot of explanations as to how we got here. And one popular explanation is, you know, we're selfish people.
Speaker 2:We're narcissistic. We don't know how to sacrifice. We're individualistic. You know, a lot of people will say the the age in which we're living is an age of anger, an age of resentment. Peter Schlatterdijk has this idea that modernity, or at least the current moment, is embodied by the idea of the loser.
Speaker 2:We have someone like Michel Welbeck who, you know, his main protagonists are resentful men who are, you know, believe that they're entitled to certain things, but they no longer aristocrats, and so they can't just get them naturally, and therefore are full of rage that they can't get the women that they want or they can't get certain things that they normally would. And this is kind of associated with incel literature. And I guess maybe reading your book, one thing that I thought was, you know, I mean, there is a way of reading the story that says we've lost I mean, you talked about in the comment before you responded to the next question, you talked about this kind of emergence of this modern republicanism, which people live for one another. They find a way to sacrifice their own interests for that of their communities. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Is there a way that this, you know, drawing on the archive, I guess, so to speak, is there a way that we can understand this given the history that you've laid out here in terms of almost like, I'm not plenty of people are sacrificial today, but it just it seems that one way people are framing the current moment is is just the opposite of that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, I think, you know, look, I am always reluctant to play the pundit, Danny. But but I think you're right. It's I mean, at some level that it's remarkable how little purchase the the language of sacrifice seems to have in contemporary politics where the price of eggs is the thing we're all worried about, supposedly. And, know, you and there's a way in which, yeah, the incel, the loser, the victim, all these seem to exist in a kind of metaphysical vacuum where the meaning of celibacy, for example, or suffering or victimhood has more or less disappeared.
Speaker 3:So people are just feeling it, and it's but it's meaningless, and it makes you angry if it's you know, suffering is for nothing. And so one version of what it maybe means to live in late capitalism is to is to find sacrifice in language that's hard to to reinhabit. Now so one of the things this book wants to do is reclaim some of this power of sacrifice. Sacrifice. I mean, I think there's a way in which some kinds of, let's say, broadly left politics is quite skeptical of sacrifice because of, you know, the price of eggs.
Speaker 3:It's about the price of eggs. One doesn't wanna speak about in this kind of broader sense about what the what the meaning might be of the suffering that we that we all experience, but some people experience much more than others. And one suggestion in this book is that there are there are resources in this language of sacrifice for thinking about the world that we we live in now. I mean, look. I'm not a sociologist, and I can't point to do a kind sociology of modern politics.
Speaker 3:But, no, I suppose there are mutual aid societies, which seems to be a place where a kind of language of humanitarian sacrifice is happening. What's just so striking is that it's not happening at all at the highest level of politics, unless so all the time, it seems like. So I don't know if anybody's gonna read my book, and try to reinhabit sacrifice in some new form, but if they would be interested, I'd be certainly game to try it out. I mean, I just think, you know, the story of sacrifice, you know, if you're a believer is is a kind of magical and amazing story about how human and divine worlds come into into contact. But if you're not a believer, it's a pretty amazing story too about the staggering power of the human imagination to to try to overcome, in a sense, the practical, the utilitarian, the selfish, the day to day and and then and do something with that.
Speaker 3:Sometimes, sacrifice does terrible things, but it also helps to spur and create deep religious thoughts, amazing works of art, you know, magical works of literature. So that's, maybe people should read my book, or maybe they'll read it and ignore it. But I do think that we're I sort of agree with the initial diagnosis, Danny, that we're at a moment where it's hard to figure out where a kind of language of sacrifice might be publicly available for many of us to think with.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's true. But it also occurs to me you can frame this whole phenomenon of the kind of thing Welbeck talks about, incel phenomenon as a matter of people, especially young men, being disgruntled because they've lost access to things that their parents would have had. At the same time, your comments about the loss of meaning are well taken, think. I'm an Orthodox Christian.
Speaker 1:I go to an Orthodox church in the East Village Of New York. And there's been quite a lot of press in the last couple of years about this enormous surge of converts that were getting in Orthodoxy and one thing I've heard from some priests I know whose parishes are bursting at the seams is that a lot of people who are coming in now, especially young men, maybe the same young men, that they want to be called upon to do something hard. You know, that they want to have something demanded of them. Like they want a context where they can sacrifice and it will have meaning and it will make sense. And they find, like they hear that in Orthodox churches we stand the whole time throughout the services.
Speaker 1:They hear that we have a pretty rigorous fasting regimen, something like a third of the calendar year and all these other ways too. If you kind of do it to the hilt and not everybody does, but if you do then there certainly is something being demanded of you and you are kind of told again and again in the poetry of the services that there's meaning in the sacrifice you're making. And I say all that just because I guess it speaks to this question of why sacrifice has been such a perennial thing in different cultures and you kind of raised the question early on about what is it about us as a species that draws us to this kind of language, this kind of imagery. So, you know, could take these trends that we're seeing in the present day. I think we could take them as another example of the way we're kind of haunted by sacrificial language and desire to sacrifice and find meaning in it.
Speaker 3:I couldn't agree more. I mean, look. I I I would just more or less leave it there. I mean, I I think that that it's not like, the fact that people are insisting that, life should simply be about how many toys you get is actually going to exhaust people's desire for some sense that what they lives amount to, this sort of finite life that we have to live, is of of value in some in some way or another. And sacrifice has certainly been among the most powerful ways to imagine what is distinctive about the human.
Speaker 3:And so I I don't you know, again, if you if you're a believer, you there are very strong and powerful theological arguments for why that might be true. But even if you're not a believer and you're kind of interested in the anthropology or just the history of sort of humans as meaning seeking animals, you know, you you you'd be hard pressed to discount the power of sacrifices it as it exists even in our culture, which is, I think, at some level trying to evacuate itself of all all sorts of metaphysical meanings. So so, you know, your experience sounds right up there. But Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well said. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Jonathan, for joining us today on the altar. It's just out. I highly recommend it.
Speaker 3:Terrific. Thank you, guys.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thanks so much for joining us. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. No. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Absolutely.
Speaker 3:Good to see you both. It's good to see
Speaker 2:you as well.
Speaker 1:That's all the time we have for this episode. We wanna thank Commonweal for sponsoring the show, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us.