‘On the Altar’ by Jonathan Sheehan review

‘The Key to All Mythologies’ was the great project of the Reverend Edward Casaubon, the desiccated clergyman who blights Dorothea Brooke’s life in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1868). Casaubon’s formless, unfinished manuscript quoted many a dusty treatise to argue that all ancient myths were distorted versions of the Hebrew Scriptures. The intellectual historian Jonathan Sheehan shares Eliot’s amused interest in the steepling ambitions of Christian antiquarians. In On the Altar, he finds the key to the intellectual history of Western Europe not in Noah’s Flood but on Christ’s Cross. From the Church Fathers to secular modernity, the quest to derive from the crucifixion a Christian vision of sacrifice spawned a cumbrous mass of theology and scholarship. Sheehan uses it to present Christianity as a disputatious and ‘heteronomous’ faith, which generated the doubts that diminished its hold on the West.

Christians worshipped a God who freely accepted his death on the Cross. Yet they also denied that this death resembled the sacrifices of pagans. To be a Christian meant rejecting their ritualised killing and eating of animals. Christians executed for refusing to participate in the sacrifices demanded by the Roman Empire were venerated as martyrs who almost resembled Christ himself.

The engagement with Jewish sacrifice was more complicated because the theologians who won protracted disputes over what Christianity was insisted that it fulfilled rather than broke with Judaism. The New Testament described Christ as the ‘mercy-seat’ in the Temple at Jerusalem, the place sprinkled with the blood of animal sacrifice.

‘Christ died once and for all, that is on the cross, nevertheless every day he is immolated in the sacrament that was done once.’ By the time Peter Lombard formulated this mystical understanding of the Eucharist in the mid-12th century, Christianity was a sacrificial religion. Liturgy and popular piety reinforced centuries of theological reflection. The celebration in art of Gregory the Great’s Mass, in which a medieval pope had seen the saviour on the altar while celebrating the Eucharist, the carrying of the Host in Corpus Christi processions, and its solemn consignment to a tomblike tabernacle on Holy Thursday all expressed the heightened exaltation of Christ as the perfect victim. Yet the foundations of this symbolic edifice were unstable. Disputes over the criteria for martyrdom in the first centuries generated a bulging ‘archive’ of arguments that dissidents and reformers later rediscovered and used to criticise sacrifice. When the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus sought to recover the original meaning of the Eucharist, he developed a new sensitivity for when and why particular Church Fathers had written as they did. This made it possible to view them as clashing authorities rather than the single voice that Peter Lombard had heard.

Protestant reformers took this method to sift true from false forms of sacrifice. They felt that the Roman Mass had borrowed from paganism a misguided faith that humans could sway God. Precisely because they still viewed Christ’s death as the supreme sacrifice, they intended to restore a true understanding of the Eucharist as a pure memorialisation of it, a simple offering of praise and prayer. The 1563 frontispiece of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments grimly visualised their enterprise: it counterposed Protestant martyrs burning at the stake for this truth with an infernal celebration of the Mass.

These disputes are familiar enough to historians, but Sheehan traces their deep and generative impact on early modern intellectual life. When the Protestant heresiarch Faustus Socinus denied that the death of Jesus was any kind of sacrifice, he provoked the publication of around 154 dissertations rebutting his views. His opponents obsessively reconstructed the Jewish Temple sacrifices because they needed to demonstrate afresh that they exactly prefigured the Crucifixion. Sheehan beautifully explains how what may strike us in these works as naive or even mindless ways of heaping up information – indexes, calendars, engravings – were really technologies of argument.

This sectarian antiquarianism went global. Sheehan’s fascinating chapter on New Spain shows that the first writer to present Aztec human sacrifices as a comprehensible system did so because he was a Jesuit zealot intent on destroying the remnants of a satanic faith. Yet the English Protestant Samuel Purchas then used his findings to parallel the errors of the Mass – he likened the slaughter at Tenochtitlan to a ‘Mexican Lent’.

The bottom fell out of this scholarly world with disappointing speed. For all their ingenuity, antiquarians merely amassed materials that freethinkers could quote to dismiss all sacrifice as the vicious ‘invention of priests’. It persisted longest in the investigations of the armchair Victorian anthropologists, who remained dependent on their believing predecessors for working definitions of what sacrifice was, even if they themselves regarded all religious belief as a primitive error.

On the Altar sometimes loses focus. Its later chapters explore notions of civic martyrdom in enlightened thought and revolutionary politics that are only loosely connected to the debates about the crucifixion and the Mass. Sheehan’s Casaubonish delight in particulars can sometimes make him as digressive as the prosy folk that he writes about. All the same, this gargantuan book usefully revives the study of what the Church historian Owen Chadwick called the ‘secularization of the European mind’. Christianity was never just one thing, a conceptual monolith worn down from without by scientific advances or social changes. Because it was a faith that had incorporated symbols and practices from the societies around it, its gravest challenges always came from those who wished to purify it from foreign influences. It was the shock of the old rather than the new that triggered the decline in its cultural authority.

• On the Altar: A History of Sacrifice from the Sacred to the Secular
  Jonathan Sheehan
  Princeton University Press, 608pp, £35
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Michael Ledger-Lomas is a historian of religion.