From the beginning, sacrifice lived a double life in Christianity, both abandoned and essential. Christ鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥攖o discover the truth of Christian sacrifice鈥攖hey 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.
"A magnificent work of scholarship. . . . The author’s breadth of learning and command of sources is a wonder. . . . Mr. Sheehan accomplishes here what might otherwise take hundreds of scholars to produce in a standard reference work. This is a major scholarly achievement."鈥擠.G. Hart, Wall Street Journal
"On The Altar is a brilliant and fresh exposition of how sacrifice has influenced everything from theology to politics to the shape of modern thought. Grand transhistorical histories often fail, this inspiring book restores confidence in the worthiness of these projects."鈥擟andida Moss, History Extra
"Sheehan’s immense scholarship shows that just about everyone in the ancient world offered sacrifices. . . . On the Altar is a secular book, but Sheehan fairly reports what Christians believe."鈥�Marvin Olasky
"An exhilarating journey. Over the course of 450 pages, Sheehan traverses literal and metaphorical continents of space and time with dazzling erudition. He is consistently informative and thought-provoking, and writes engagingly and accessibly. . . . A major scholarly achievement."鈥擯eter Marshall, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
"On the Altar provides a rich and expansive history of the phenomenon of human sacrifice, exploring variant forms of sacrifice in a host of religions and secular movements."鈥擩esse Russell, The Bookman
“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
