A history of Christian sacrifice

Summary

Podcast Summary: HistoryExtra – "A History of Christian Sacrifice"

Host: Charlotte Vosper
Guest: Jonathan Sheehan, Professor of History, UC Berkeley
Date: May 21, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of the HistoryExtra podcast features a conversation between Charlotte Vosper and historian Jonathan Sheehan about his latest book, On the Altar: A History of Sacrifice from the Sacred to the Secular. The discussion takes listeners on a journey from the roots of sacrifice in ancient religions through its central, complex, and often paradoxical role within Christianity, up to its echoes in modern society. Together, they explore how ideas of sacrifice have shaped religious identities, rituals, and even church architecture—and why the history of sacrifice still matters today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining Sacrifice

Timestamps: 02:50 – 05:10

• Sheehan: Sacrifice seems simple—giving up something precious for something better—but is fundamentally complex.
• Forms of Sacrifice: Not just animal or human sacrifice. Includes fruit, wine, incense, even self-denial.
• Broader Significance:
  • Sacrifice shapes sacred geographies (e.g., temples in Jerusalem, Aztec temples).
  • Ancient economies and feasting often centered on sacrificial rituals.
  • The conceptual unification of diverse acts under the term “sacrifice” emerges with Christianity and Latin translation, replacing varied ancient terms.

"So this is really a complicated phenomenon, and one of the stories of the book is how this variety of different things comes to be gathered under the conceptual umbrella of what we now call sacrifice."
— Jonathan Sheehan (04:35)

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2. Sacrifice at the Heart of Christianity

Timestamps: 05:17 – 10:46

• Christian Origins: Early Christianity was forged amid Jewish and Roman sacrificial cultures but defined itself by rejecting public pagan and Jewish sacrifices.
• Christ’s Sacrifice: The Letter to the Hebrews offers a solution—Jesus’s death as the “final sacrifice,” fulfilling and ending earlier sacrificial needs.
• The Eucharist:
  • Christians both abolish and preserve sacrifice: Eucharist becomes a ritualized remembrance and re-enactment, and is slowly described as a “sacrifice.”
  • Christian art and practice continually link this to Jewish sacrificial traditions.

"Early Christianity, on the one hand, abolishes the sacrifices of its competitor faiths, and on the other hand, absorbs them, puts them to use for its own practices ..."
— Jonathan Sheehan (08:45)

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3. The Martyrs: Paradoxical Sacrifice

Timestamps: 10:46 – 15:19

• Christians as Non-Sacrificers: Early Christian martyrs died for refusing pagan sacrifice, yet were venerated as sacrifices themselves.
• Martyrdom:
  • Martyr’s bodies became relics, literally foundational to Christian worship (altars built atop their remains).
  • Churches competed for relics. Burials close to the altar became a symbol of social/religious status.

"The built structure of churches depends on this...the heart of the Christian sacred is connected to the physical remains of the self-sacrificing dead."
— Jonathan Sheehan (13:52)

• Memorable Example:
  • In European churches, high-status individuals are buried near the altar, underscoring connection to sacrificial martyrdom.

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4. Sacrifice in Medieval Christian Life

Timestamps: 17:41 – 20:47

• Sacrifice Becomes Everyday:
  • By the High Middle Ages, sacrifice is part of weekly worship and popular devotion.
  • Mass centers on the Eucharist as a priestly sacrifice. The set piece: priest raises the consecrated host, bell rings, congregation watches the transformation.
• Popular Festivals: Corpus Christi festival and local cults of the Holy Blood show lay enthusiasm for sacrificial rituals, sometimes outside church control.
• Conflict: Tension between grassroots devotional practices and church authorities persisted.

"These popular religious devotions to the bodies of the sacrificed dead have always been a little hard for the Church to absorb."
— Jonathan Sheehan (19:49)

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5. Protestant Reformation & the “Stink of Sacrifice”

Timestamps: 20:47 – 24:51

• Luther’s Reforms: Luther and other Reformers sought to purge the Church of “the stink of sacrifice” associated with medieval Catholicism (Mass, relics, priestly power).
• Ongoing Tension: Reformers wished to purify Christianity of what they saw as pagan/Jewish remnants but encountered the enduring paradox: Christianity can’t escape sacrifice without losing a central tenet.
• Back to the Future: Efforts to emulate early church practice reveal that early Christianity itself was diverse and “messy,” frustrating all attempts at simple reform.

"Christianity was not as Christian as all that. And the effort to resolve this problem, which for the Reformers would be seen as a problem, just unleashes huge amounts of intellectual energy..."
— Jonathan Sheehan (24:32)

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6. Christianity, Other Religions, and the Universality of Sacrifice

Timestamps: 24:51 – 27:22

• Sacrifice Cross-Culturally:
  • Nearly all religions practice sacrifice in some form.
  • Christians, uniquely, attempted to differentiate their sacrificial logic from others—especially as they encountered new religions during global exploration.
• Aztecs and Empires of Sacrifice: European commentators grappled with understanding (and sometimes demonizing) new sacrificial cultures in the Americas.

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7. Sacrifice in Enlightenment & Modernity

Timestamps: 30:43 – 33:41

• Martyrs become political: Martyrs represented defiance against political/religious authorities—forcing societies to confront the problem of religious pluralism.
• Enlightenment Shifts:
  • The question became whether churches should wield political power.
  • Emergence of new Protestant sects with idiosyncratic sacrificial beliefs, turning sacrifice inward to community practice.

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8. Sacrifice in the Modern World

Timestamps: 33:41 – 36:31

• The “Missing” Language of Sacrifice:
  • Sheehan remarks on the rarity of sacrificial language in recent crises (e.g., COVID-19), noting a shift toward individualistic reasoning.
  • He suggests the loss of sacrificial rhetoric represents a narrowing of political and ethical imagination.

"I see a real impoverishment of political and ethical arguments, partly because this powerful language of sacrifice ... has been pushed aside by appeals on all sides to what politicians over here like to call the price of eggs..."
— Jonathan Sheehan (34:37)

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9. The Meaning of Sacrifice—Religious and Secular

Timestamps: 35:41 – 36:31

• For Believers: A bridge between human and divine, aiming for something “better and truer.”
• For Non-Believers: A testament to the restless creativeness of the human imagination—sometimes destructive, often generative.

"To me, I find the history of sacrifice a testament to, in a sense, both the darkness but also the energy of what a human is capable of."
— Jonathan Sheehan (36:27)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Sacrifice is something that seems utterly simple... but it's this incredibly complicated thing when we focus on the things that get sacrificed."
  — Jonathan Sheehan (03:04)
• "To be a Christian was not to sacrifice, or at least not to sacrifice like that..."
  — Jonathan Sheehan (05:55)
• "At the heart of Christianity is the crucifixion and the doctrine of the atonement and these ancient holy martyrs... How to get rid of sacrifice, but also keep it in such a way that it remains properly Christian."
  — Jonathan Sheehan (22:08)
• "We were asking people to do something really hard...I think this was a missed opportunity because...sacrifice wants to tell us that there's something more important than my own safety."
  — Jonathan Sheehan (34:08)

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Summary Table of Key Segments & Timestamps

| Segment Topic | Timestamps | |--------------------------------------|--------------| | Defining Sacrifice | 02:50–05:10 | | Christianity’s Sacrificial Paradox | 05:17–10:46 | | Martyrdom and Relics | 10:46–15:19 | | Medieval Ritual and Lay Devotion | 17:41–20:47 | | The Reformation’s Battle Over Sacrifice | 20:47–24:51 | | Christian Sacrifice vs. Other Religions | 24:51–27:22 | | Encounters in the New World | 27:22–30:43 | | Martyrs, Politics, and Modernity | 30:43–33:41 | | Sacrifice in Modern Ethical Debates | 33:41–36:31 |

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Tone and Conclusions

Throughout, both speakers balance scholarly rigor with accessibility. Sheehan is clear, engaging, candid about complexities, and unafraid of paradox. The episode ends with a call to recover a richer, more communal and transcendent understanding of sacrifice—one that reaches beyond today’s individualism into the deep history that has shaped both faith and civic life.

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For more, check out Jonathan Sheehan’s book On the Altar: A History of Sacrifice from the Sacred to the Secular.

Transcript

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[Charlotte Vosper]

Your book on the Altar is about the history of sacrifice in Christianity, from the ancient world to the modern day. But before we dive into that long history, what do we mean by sacrifice? What are we referring to when we use that word?

[Jonathan Sheehan]

Well, so sacrifice is a pretty strange thing. On the one hand, it's something that seems utterly simple. You give up something that's precious to you in the name of, or in the hope of something else, something better. But on the other hand, practically, it's this incredibly complicated thing when we focus on the things that get sacrificed. There are lots and lots of things that get sacrificed, but not everything gets sacrificed. It seems like people in general have wanted to sacrifice domestic animals, cows and pigs, but not all domestic animals. So rarely do people sacrifice cats and dogs, for example. And then there's lots of other things we mean by sacrifice. Obviously, human sacrifice features lards, but then lots of other less violent things have been sacrificed as well. So people offer fruits, they offer vegetables, they pour wine on the ground, they offer burnt incense, smoke to the gods. And of course, then just simply denying yourself something they like asceticism, giving something up that you like is often understood as a sacrifice too. Now, that's just about the stuff. You can think then about the worlds that people create in and around sacrifice. So entire sacred geographies have been built in human history focusing on sacrifice. You could think the temple in Jerusalem, for example, or you could think about the great temple of the Mexica of the Aztecs in Mexico City. Actually, economies are often built around sacrifice as well. So you could think a market for meat in the ancient Mediterranean often had to do with the sacrificial temples, and feasting then becomes integral to the practice of sacrifice. So this is really a complicated phenomenon, and one of the stories of the book is how this variety of different things comes to be gathered under the conceptual umbrella of what we now call sacrifice. You know, in ancient Greece, they had different names for all of these different things. They didn't call them all sacrifice. They called each of these different kinds of offerings by a different name. But with the coming of Christianity, but also the translation of many things into Latin, a lot of the variety of offering language just gets folded into the one concept of sacrifice. So it makes it quite a complicated thing to think about.

[Charlotte Vosper]

So in that sense, sacrifice is both a practice and an idea, depending on the context in which we're talking about.

[Jonathan Sheehan]

Absolutely.

[Charlotte Vosper]

With that in mind, in your book, you argue that the history of sacrifice is deeply entwined with the history of Christianity, because in some ways, sacrifice has always been at the heart of Christianity. After all, Christ was crucified for the salvation of others. And yet Christianity has also outwardly rejected the idea of sacrifice. So where does that contradiction come from? Where does this story begin?

[Jonathan Sheehan]

In my view, the story begins at the beginning, which is why the book spans 1500 years. It's important, I think, for listeners to realize early Christianity emerged from two very thick cultures of sacrifice. From, on the one hand, a Judaism whose priests, holy texts, and lived practices were all about sacrifice of a certain sort, as specified by various kinds of biblical texts in Deuteronomy or Leviticus. And then also from the wider culture of Rome, pagan sacrifice, where participation in public sacrifices to the gods or to the emperor was expected and at times required of citizens. So one of the defining features for early Christians as they tried to create their own identity as a distinct religious and political cultural, social group, was to refuse to participate in any of those sacrifices. So in that sense, to be a Christian was not to sacrifice, or at least not to sacrifice like that. And this turns out not to have happened. I mean, I think it could never really have have happened. The abolition of sacrifice was just super hard to imagine because it's such a feature of human relationship to the divine. One of the big issues had to do with the status of this Hebrew Bible. And of course, the earliest Christians, the Hebrew Bible was the only Bible there was not yet a New Testament. So many of these early Christians didn't want to just leave this Hebrew Bible behind. They wanted to absorb it somehow into their own faith tradition. And if they wanted to do that, they had to figure out what to do with all those sacrifices that structure so much of the Hebrew Bible. So one very creative solution was already discovered by the end of the first century when an anonymous author of the letter to the Hebrews came up with the notion that how we should think about this is that Jesus was indeed a sacrifice, but he was the final sacrifice. He was the sacrifice that was prophesied in all of those early Hebrew Bible books like Leviticus or Deuteronomy, and then completed them so that it put it to an end. In this sense, then, yes, we have sacrifice. But sacrifice is now, in theory, over and done with. And yet again, this finality was not all that final after all, because as early Christians wanted to develop sort of their own ritual culture, they didn't want to just imagine that Christ's sacrifice had happened and now basta, it's over. They wanted to remember it they wanted to celebrate it, they wanted to reenact it in various ways. And so the Eucharist, that is the body, the bread and the wine that is used in every Christian service or has been for 1500 years, begins to be described as a sacrifice to an offering that celebrates and somehow is in relationship to the death of Christ. When that happens, then suddenly this Eucharistic liturgical, so worship and church liturgy starts to attract a richer sacrificial vocabulary. So the Eucharist gets described or compared to the sacrifices of Cain and Abel, those first generation supposedly born outside the Garden of Eden. And really early, you can find tons of Christian art that begin to link together the sacrifice of the Eucharist with these other Jewish sacrifices. So the way I put it in the book is early Christianity, on the one hand, sort of abolishes the sacrifices of its competitor faiths, and on the other hand, kind of absorbs them, puts them to use for its own practices, for its own way of being in the world. And then this tension between these two has really animated a very long, long history.

[Charlotte Vosper]

That tension is really interesting. I wonder, just for our listeners who might not be as familiar with the kind of key principles of Christianity and early Christianity, could you just expand a little bit more on what those contradictory beliefs about sacrifice which sit at the center of Christianity?

[Jonathan Sheehan]

So the Christians weekly get together, they celebrate a Mass, right? And at the heart of this is the offering of the Eucharist, the celebration of the Eucharist, the consecration of the Eucharist, and then the sharing of the Eucharist in a community of believers. And the tension sits as to what this actually is about. So on the one hand, people will say this Eucharist signifies the fact that sacrifice is over once and for all. And what's so great about Christ's death is that it actually worked. So older sacrifices, the Jews, for example, they just kept repeating those sacrifices. And Christians thought this was a sign that it wasn't actually very effective. They didn't really save your soul. But the Eucharist, because it was the final sacrifice, the one that actually worked, does save your soul. So that's why it's a kind of perfected sacrifice. All right, so that's the once and for all. And then people do it every day, right? People will go and celebrate these Masses every day, and they will take the Eucharist into their mouth, and they will participate in the repetition of the sacrifice. And they'll participate in the repetition of the sacrifice because you're not saved right now. You have to be Saved in this life. The everyday is something that theologians think a lot about, but priests have to think a lot about, and ordinary parishioners also kind of have to struggle with.

[Charlotte Vosper]

So then, beyond eucharistic devotion and worship, how does this essentially theological kind of contradiction around sacrifice manifest in reality?

[Jonathan Sheehan]

So there's lots to say here. I want to talk mostly about martyrs. So martyrs were among the most powerfully inspiring figures in early Christianity were people like the Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, who was one of the so called three Apostolic Fathers, who was burned and stabbed sometime in the middle of the second century CE for refusing to offer incense to the emperor. Now, in fact, many early Christian martyrs were killed for refusing to participate in public sacrificial worship. And the refusal to participate results in the death of the martyr. In fact, by the mid third century, the Roman emperor Decius was requiring that all Roman citizens confirm their status with a sacrifice that had to be witnessed and documents signed. And we actually have some of these documents. They've been dug up from various document dumps in Egyptian deserts where we can find the signed certificates that say that so and so participated in the sacrifice with the witnesses that sign the bottom of the sheet. So these martyrs die in order not to sacrifice. Right. But the martyrs themselves are seen, describe themselves as also sacrifices, the martyrs that after they die, they become exceedingly important to the foundation of Christian communities. So Polycarp, after he's burned, the story goes, the Christian faithful witnesses went and they gathered up his bones from the ashes and then they venerated these bones as relics. And in that sense, one of the common practices that we have documented was the gathering up of the remains of the martyrs and then their deposit in a sacred place, typically an altar or around an altar at which the Christian faithful would celebrate. And this would structure the Christian festival calendar, worship calendar. So the birthdays, so called, of the martyrs into heaven, become the foundation of Christian time. And then the martyrs bones go on to have this really powerful afterlife. In a couple of different ways. The early Christian communities build their physical churches, at least some of them on top of martyrs remains cemeteries, for example. This disgusted the Romans, who complained about Christians creeping around in cemeteries and worshiping. People didn't like to be around dead bodies particularly. So it was very unusual in the religious world of the early Mediterranean that these Christians wanted to be intimate with the remains of the dead. So they built their churches on top of these cemeteries. So in a sense the built structure of churches depends on this. But when the age of martyrs comes to an end. And the Christian church expands outside of its sort of historic homelands, whether those are in Asia Minor or North Africa or in the Italian world, then the consecration of new churches has to happen. And the consecration of new churches is going to happen by placing a relic, a bone of a martyr under an altar. And so in a sense, the culture of martyr sacrifice gets carried over into the built environment of churches all over Europe. And when the Christian church expands over the Alps into what's now France, for example, they need to figure out how they're going to get bones. There's a big fight between church authorities in the north and the popes in Rome about whether they can get these relics. And finally the popes relent and start sending these relics. There's a brisk trade, thievery, actually. People will go around stealing relics and selling them to other churches so that they can consecrate their church. So practically speaking, you know, it's sort of baked into the bones of these churches. At the heart of the Christian sacred is connected to the physical remains of the self sacrificing dead.

[Charlotte Vosper]

I think there's real irony in that. The idea that actually early Christianity is defining itself ideologically is against performing sacrificial rituals. But actually the deaths of early martyrs are worshipped and revered as sacrifices. And that that becomes, like you say, part of the worshipping landscape in churches. Are there any particular examples which stand out to you as quite interesting?

[Jonathan Sheehan]

Here's an interesting example. So you walk into any church, any church you want, in a big like sort of old church in England or anywhere in Europe, and you'll see that people are buried in the church. Right? You're walking basically on tombstones and you know that somebody is of a high social status if they get to be buried really close to the altar. And then ordinary people get, you know, stuck in the cemetery or churchyard outside. So the burial close to Ad Sanctos, it's called. So as close as possible to the altar is a way of connecting people's own deaths to this special kind of death that sits, you know, really at the heart of the Christian imagination.

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[Charlotte Vosper]

Then moving from the early Christian martyrs and up towards the Middle Ages, would ordinary medieval Christians have understood or thought about that paradoxical notion of sacrifice in their day to day worship, do you think? Or were these discussions limited more to the realm of theologians or people who were consecrating churches with relics from martyrs?

[Jonathan Sheehan]

The medievals believed lots of different things at different times. And we're speaking here about the Latin Church, right? I'm not talking at all about is known now as an Orthodox church. The Eastern Church. But as we move later and later into the Latin Middle Ages, sacrifice becomes more and more an integral part of everyday Christian practice. So if you go to church in like the year 1100, you would see the priest standing with his back to the parish, and at some point during the ceremony, the priest would hold up the Eucharist, that is the wafer of bread for everybody to see. And then you would hear a bell ring that would signify that this Eucharist had been transformed from the ordinary bread to the body of Christ. You would not actually hear the words of the liturgy itself because the priest would whisper the most sacred part where he offers the Eucharist as a sacrifice on behalf of the parish, the body of Christ, the sacrifice to the God the Father on behalf of the parish. But you'd get to see this thing physically. Right? Just to confirm that this is not just theologians nattering about how important the Eucharist is. One example that I really like of this. So in the middle of the 13th century, in 1264, a popular religious festival called the Corpus Christi Festival, which came totally from below, there were kind of guilds, for example, that were devoted to the worship of the Eucharist. And they would perform these public festivals where they would carry the Eucharist around, there'd be a large public parade. They attracted huge amounts of interest and attention from local communities. The Church didn't start this, but they thought by and large this was probably a good thing. And so the Church made it a standard and popular orthodox festival, ratified at the highest levels. One last example of this, of the kind of popular Christianity. This is one that the Church didn't like, especially in places, say in northern Europe. And cults of the Holy Blood began to become quite popular in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, which created large pilgrimages and sites. Fights for public religious devotion, often quite enthusiastic, mostly out of the control of local clerics. In fact, in a certain sense, these popular religious devotions to the bodies of the sacrificed dead have always been a little hard for the Church to absorb. So already in the 5th century, a church father like Augustine is complaining that people are celebrating getting drunk basically at the altars of these martyrs or the death places of these martyrs. And, you know, so there's a tension between the popular interest in celebration of the Christian dead and top down theological descriptions of that. And that tension will last for much of the history of the Church.

[Charlotte Vosper]

That's incredibly interesting, this idea that sacrifice was so central to medieval Christianity in Europe that at both a kind of ordained level, you've got the Sacrificial Mass, which focuses on the Eucharist. And then in a popular sense, you've got religious festivals being created around the Eucharist, this popular concern with the Holy Blood, with seeing images of Christ crucified. So with that culture in mind, then what happened when we get to the Protestant reformation in the 16th century? Because suddenly we've got Martin Luther, who is challenging ideas about the importance of the Catholic sacrificial Mass and transubstantiation, the idea that during the Mass, the Eucharist actually becomes Christ's body. What happened to these ideas of sacrifice as Christianity splits then into Catholicism and Protestantism?

[Jonathan Sheehan]

So the Reformation is about a lot of things, right? But one important thing is about sacrifice. So we must, to quote Luther, rid the Church of the stink of sacrifice. A sacrifice sat at the heart of much of what he hated about the medieval Church, about the cult of the saints and their relics, the Mass with its sacrificial drama, the priest powerful enough to transform a Eucharistic wafer into the living body of Christ. So what the Reformers understood as their own kind of rechristianization project involved scraping away, as they would see it, the sacrifice that had never really been, in their view, properly purged from the Church or that had crept back in over long centuries. And these sacrifices are typically described as kind of like either Jewish or pagan remnants, things that have attached themselves to a properly Christian thing. So they write new Masses that hopefully don't have the stink of sacrifice. There's big debates about whether they should elevate the host in front of the parish. For example, they reform the priesthood. The priesthood is now not going to be a sacrificing priesthood. And yet cleansing the Church of sacrifice is not an easy matter. Again, not least because, you know, at the heart of Christianity is the crucifixion and the doctrine of the atonement and these ancient holy martyrs. I think that the structural tension is there for Reformers. That was also there in the early Church, which is, namely, how to get rid of sacrifice, but also keep it in such a way that it remains properly Christian. And what to do about that turns out to be not obvious. One solution in the period of the Reformation. The notion is, well, we should go back. We should go back to the early Church. We should go back and look at how the early Church did it. Because the kind of corruptions of the medieval Church are things that were added after a kind of imagined time of right practice in the first few centuries of the early Church. Fathers. So, in a sense, history would solve the problem of Christian sacrifice. It would let us know what. What kinds of practices are permissible and which ones are not. Now, this is a risky move because the early church, as we've already talked about itself, was quite diverse. So there's a way in which the Reformed desire to go back to the earliest church, to discover a kind of clean version of Christian sacrifice actually just reveals a messiness about ancient Christianity. Protestants will argue from history that it should be like this, and Catholics can easily argue from that same history that it should be like that. This, I think, is sort of the argumentative heart of the book, that the discovery of what I like to call. I mean, it sounds like fancy language, but I think it's not that fancy Christian heteronomy, the sense that Christianity was not a single thing, right? That Christianity was something which was a kind of congeries of elements that had been put together, and that over time, some of it looks more Christian and some of it looks less Christian, depending on circumstance. Christianity was not as Christian as all that. And the effort to resolve this problem, which for the Reformers would be seen as a problem, just unleashes huge amounts of intellectual energy over the period of the Reformation trying to figure out what kind of thing Christian sacrifice ought to be.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Now, if we look beyond Christianity and beyond the complexities of what counts as Christianity, whether we're talking Catholic, Protestant, or any other derivative, were other religions and actually other cultures as concerned with sacrifice? Did Christian ideas about sacrifice relate to those of other religions and other cultures?

[Jonathan Sheehan]

In a certain sense, sacrifice understood in the terms I talked in the beginning as this, you know, this exceedingly broad and complicated thing is part of nearly every religion we know of in one form or another. We can look at Islam, you can look at Judaism, you can look at, you know, Hinduism and even Buddhism, has a kind of culture of sacrifice, depending on how you define it. The story of the book, though, is, in a sense, the effort of Christians at different times to figure out what's distinctive about their sacrifice in comparison with these other sacrifices that they happen to come into contact with, whether in the ancient world this would be the whole varieties of, broadly speaking, gentile or pagan sacrifices, which include those of Rome, but also of Greece. And as the canon of literature expands, people realize that people are sacrificing in what was then known as Scythia, basically Asia Minor, various sorts in India. In a sense, it's actually the universalism of sacrifice, the fact that everybody seems to do it, that makes it so interesting. And challenging to Christianity, because I think most other religions don't actually care that much about what the other religions are doing or not. Nearly to the extent that Christians have been completely perplexed by this problem of trying to figure out what's distinctive about Christianity in this kind of comparative way. You could say that if Jesus Christ is the last and final sacrifice, the one that actually works, and now all other sacrifices can come to an end, then why is it that everybody keeps doing it? So other religions, I think, are really important to the Christian imagination. And explanations for the universality of sacrifice grow more and more urgent as Europeans sort of violently expand across their borders and encounter the religions of, say, the Americas.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Absolutely. And actually, for our listeners who are interested in sacrifice practice in other cultures, we've got a really interesting article on our website and app. It's about how and why the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice. I'll put the link to that in the description of this episode. So if that's something that you find intriguing, you should definitely check that out. Talking of the Americas and zooming out from 16th century Europe, were there any changes in the debates or thoughts about sacrifice as European exploration of the New World increased?

[Jonathan Sheehan]

Well, so this is a very puzzling and interesting story. So on the one hand, for a long time, not much changed at all. In part, this had to do with the lag time in transmission of what was actually found in the New World. We sort of all know the story now, right? I mean, the story of the discovery of this empire, of sacrifice, of the Aztecs, or the Mexicas, they're called, centered around what's now Mexico City, Tenochtitlan, which was one of the biggest cities that Europeans had ever run across in the first decades of the 16th century. And the city which seemed to be organized entirely around sacrifice, around a humongous temple, around a pantheon of gods who seemed to demand blood sacrifice, human sacrifice, and all sorts of different sorts. A culture of warfare for the procuring of sacrificial victims. And it's just an amazing story. So we know a lot about this. But what early modern Europeans knew about it is a little harder to pin down. The chronology is a little strange. So an early surge of information happens in the first decades after contact and conquest. The letters of Hernan Cortes, for example. The people that we like to read or think about as the great ethnographers, typically Spanish missionaries, people like Bartolome de las Casas or Bernardino de Sahagun, they collect these amazing troves of ethnographic information. About the Mexica, the Aztecs and Incan cultures and religions. But most of the stuff that these guys wrote stay buried in archives until the 19th century. So there's a sort of sporadic or episodic exception of this stuff. Now, in my view, this changes dramatically in the late 16th century when a Jesuit named Jose da Acosta, who's a missionary, he writes a natural and moral history of the Indies and he publishes it and it gets through. It gets through Spanish censorship. And you do get amazing descriptions of these empires of sacrifice. And the question for Europeans, who are, by the way, in the late 16th century, still vigorously contesting and often literally fighting over the truth of Christianity, the question is what to make of the fact of this empire of sacrifice. This takes enormous creativity to figure out how to connect this empire of sacrifice to the stories of sacrifice that Christians had sort of grown up with the Romans and the Jews and whatnot. And, you know, the different theories are developed. You know, one theory is that, you know, the devil went over to the New World and he invented all these sacrifices that are sort of imitating proper Christian sacrifices, which would go on to explain the weird symmetry between the human sacrifices. Even Cortes notices and says when he goes into these sort of blood caked shrine rooms that this reminds him somehow of Christianity, but he's not sure how. And then there's another version of the story, which is simply that everybody's always wanted to sacrifice something and that there's nothing essentially different about the Aztec desire to sacrifice, say, human beings than there was about any other cultures of human sacrifice, which you can find even in scriptural texts. And we shouldn't think less of this of the Aztecs. They were just doing what kind of comes naturally to them. So what actually happens in my story is that all of this New World sacrifice stuff begins to be brought into the conversation in the last decades of the 16th and into the 17th centuries.

[Charlotte Vosper]

How did that change as we move from the Reformation to the Enlightenment period, as we go from beyond the 17th century into the 18th and early 19th centuries, because this is a period which is typically seen as, like we say, moving away from belief and towards rational thought. Where does sacrifice sit in that conceptual shift?

[Jonathan Sheehan]

So again, I would start with the martyrs, because they were always a political issue, right? Whether you're a Catholic martyr or you're a Protestant martyr. So there's a deep way in which martyrs are agents of political and legal disruption. They are aimed against the legal and political status quo, whether it was for heresy, which would happen sometimes, or they were Punished simply for treason, that is, for acting against, in some political fashion, the prescribed tenets of state religion. It was, you know, the confrontation between, let's broadly call it like the religious and the secular, or the religious and the political, gets staged over and over again in the 16th century. As you move from the 16th into the 17th centuries, the martyr in the 17th century becomes a figure of the problem of religion in a secular state. For those who are, who are looking around at what is now nearly 100 years of religious civil wars. France in the Germanies, in England, these warriors for God began to be seen as a problem. And much of the political theory of late 16th and 17th century Europe aimed in one sense or another to solve this problem of martyrdom. And you could do it in a variety of ways. Like you could focus on the need for stronger state monopolies of religion by more control over public worship, or you could focus on the need for something like what we might now call civil toleration, that is to take away the cause that animates martyrdom, namely forced conformity. And there's lots of writers who have that view. But what's interesting is that the martyr in the 17th century becomes a sort of figure of the problem of religion in a secular state. And the problem is caused by the challenge these martyrs pose to notions of civil and state order now in an era of religious pluralism, where Europe is not going to go back to a single Catholic church. And so one response in Christian communities in the later 17th and into the 18th centuries, through sort of enlightenment, is that we will try to imagine our churches anew, churches that no longer need to strive for political power. And what's interesting is that from the sacrifice perspective, you can see, especially in the world of, say, radical Protestantism, the emergence, and this would be like pietists, but also to a certain extent, Methodists, people who are happy enough to remain within, broadly speaking, a conforming church, but then develop quite unusual beliefs about practices of sacrifice inside of their own communities that don't need to conform to any kind of orthodoxy at all.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Can we go even further then and bring this history and sacrifice's ability to kind of permeate all aspects of society and life up to the modern day. Does sacrifice have a role in today's political theater, for example?

[Jonathan Sheehan]

Well, I mean, I always like to say that I don't think historians should be pundits. It's like the value of our work that we don't try to offer quick platitudes about our world around us, but on the other hand, I do think that sacrifice is worth thinking about in a deeper way. So, I mean, it was so striking to me during the pandemic, for example, and this was true in the United States. I don't really know what it was like in England, but just how rarely the language of sacrifice was invoked to talk about what was going on. So we were asking people to do something really hard, asking people to isolate themselves, to accept onerous masking and isolation restrictions, to totally change their lives, and mostly just got framed in individual terms. Do this because it's good for your own safety. Right? You'll be healthier if you do this. I think this was a missed opportunity because I think what sacrifice wants to tell us is that there's something more important than my own safety, that there's something more important than my own interests, whether that's the interest of the divine. If you're a believer, the community or your neighbor or your country or whatever. And I sort of look around the world, I live in, this world of political theater, and I see a real impoverishment of political and ethical arguments, partly because this powerful language of sacrifice, this hugely important feature of the Western political and religious imagination, has been pushed aside by appeals on all sides to what politicians over here like to call the price of eggs, which is, you know, suggests that the reason why people do the things they do is solely to feed their families, which it is often a lot of why we do the things we do. But we're also motivated by other things as well. And I think it's important not to forget those other things. And the language of sacrifice, as complicated and challenging as it is, is one way to talk about those sorts of things in a way that's in dialogue with broader traditions.

[Charlotte Vosper]

What do you think, then, are the wider ramifications of this history? I wonder if we can just pull that out a little bit more. What does a history of sacrifice tell us more widely?

[Jonathan Sheehan]

Well, I mean, obviously I'm biased here, but I happen to think that the story of sacrifice is one of the more incredible stories out there. So if you're a believer, it's a story of this amazing and delicate moment when the human and divine worlds come into contact, when we're directed beyond our worldly concerns to something better and truer. And if you're not a believer, it's a story about the staggering power of the human imagination, which has never been content with the practical satisfactions of this world, but strives to overcome these, is restless for something else. And in this restlessness, does terrible things sometimes, but also creates and thinks deep religious thoughts, makes amazing works of art, writes magical works of literature. So to me, I find the history of sacrifice a testament to, in a sense, both the darkness but a but also the energy of what a human is capable of.

[Charlotte Vosper]

That's definitely food for thought. Thank you very much for talking to us today about your new book. It's been absolutely fascinating.

[Jonathan Sheehan]

Been my pleasure, Charlotte. Thanks so much for taking the time.

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That was Jonathan Sheehan speaking to Charlotte Vospa. Jonathan is professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe. His later book, on the Altar, delves even deeper into the long history of sacrifice.

[Jonathan Sheehan]

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