For God’s sake: why Sacrifice?

Mediating Reflections on Peter Jonkers and John Milbank

Dr. Douglas Hedley, Faculty of Divinity, West Road, Cambridge CB3 9BS, GB

aus dem Kelche dieses Geisterreiches

schäumt ihm seine Unendlichkeit

The root meaning of “sacrifice” has a basis in ritual practice, as its

Latin etymology sacra facere suggests. Though in common parlance it com-
municates a giving up or rejection, the word as we are going to understand it
signifies the substitution, or more perhaps sublimation, of an item or inter-
est for a higher value or principle. Peter Jonkers’ paper ‘Justifying Sacrifice’
provides a subtle and nuanced defence of such offering up ‘for the sake of’
another item or principle. Jonkers presents his position as in basic agree-
ment with the position of John Milbank in his paper ‘Midwinter Sacrifice’.
I think that the opposite is the case. The two positions are diametrically op-
posed. Milbank is proposing a radical critique of any secular justification
of sacrifice; there is no justification of sacrifice ‘for the sake of’. And he is
driven to this by his overarching theory of the secular as itself an illegiti-
mate alternative theology. In my paper I wish first to set out the position of
Jonkers as I understand it. Then I wish to consider the force of Milbank’s
critique of such an endeavour. Finally I shall consider the prospects for a
synthesis between the two positions.
Jonkers is right to emphasise that sacrifice ‘remains at the heart of
conflicts’. Global conflict, schisms within states, and the ecological crisis
highlight the continuing relevance of the topic of sacrifice for contempo-
rary culture. Indeed, Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) noted the oddity of the
phenomenon that sacrifice is a universal and intractable element in human
societies. For de Maistre, Christianity fulfils rather than denies the principle
of sacrifice that forms the basis of the partial truth of heathen piety. The pa-
gans demand regularly repeated “communion in blood,” while Christ sacri-
fices his divinely innocent blood so that the heathen sacrifice, “redemption
through blood,” can find its telos. De Maistre’s account is specifically aimed
at the rationalism of the French revolution and the optimism of its theorists.
De Maistre thought that a failure to recognize human limits, frailty and fini-
tude would create terror.1

1 Owen Bradley, A modern Maistre: the social and political thought of Joseph de Maistre
(London: University of Nebraska, 1999).

NZSTh, 50. Bd., S. 301–317 DOI 10.1515/NZST.2008.021

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302 Douglas H e d l e y

The problem of sacrifice has become much more urgent through a

resurgence of neo-Darwinism in recent anthropology, which is drawing on
cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. Whereas previous anthro-
pologists such as Edmund Leach took a more cultural and sociological ap-
proach to understanding religious practice in anthropology, the more re-
cent revival of Darwinism in writers such as Pascal Boyer focuses upon the
cross-cultural and hardwired elements of religion. Girard holds that such
attempts to explain sacrifice in rationalistic terms prove inadequate. Hu-
man life is shaped by “mimetic desire,” the rivalry to imitate the status and
possessions of other human beings. Hence there is a process of enmity and
a sequence of violence and revenge. The resolution lies in picking a victim
without the tribe who can provide a suitable butt for the accumulated ag-
gression, and thus its solution. In opposing and destroying the scapegoat,
a society can be reconciled with itself and purified of the polluting violence
and discord. Paradoxically, the scapegoat generates awe through this pro-
cess of atonement achieved and the scapegoat becomes holy. De Maistre’s
position is rather different in detail from Girard’s later theory of the scape-
goat mechanism. But the positions of de Maistre and René Girard need to
be discussed in the light of such reductionistic accounts as that of Boyer. Gi-
rard’s account, like that of de Maistre, is a gauntlet thrown at attempts to
purge religion of its sacred and primordial power. There are good reasons
to think that issues of global conflict, problems of terrorism within states,
and the ecological crisis highlight the continuing relevance of the topic of
sacrifice for contemporary culture.

I. Jonkers on the justification of sacrifice

Peter Jonkers begins his paper by noting that sacrifice is a much used
concept. This is a striking fact. The Prime Minster of Great Britain cur-
rently speaks of young men and women sacrificing themselves for freedom
in Afghanistan, and thus drawing upon a commonly recognised feature of
sacrifice, the killing and destruction or consumption of a victim or offer-
ing. Jonkers explores the tension between the potent, inherited imaginary
of sacrifice, which still pervades much political rhetoric, artistic expression,
and popular culture and the problem of its justification. There is a deep gulf
between the images and their emotional freight and how we employ an ade-
quate conceptual apparatus for their articulation. One possible explanation
is that the terminology of sacrifice is simply barbaric, archaic, and obsolete,
and this would seem to be the view of many contemporary intellectuals.
Despisers of religion throughout the centuries have poured scorn upon
the idea of sacrifice, which they have targeted as an index of the irrational
and wicked in religious practice. Nor does its secularised form seem much
more appealing. One need only think of the appalling and grotesque cult

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 For God’s sake: why Sacrifice? 303

of sacrifice in numerous totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. The

perversion of Jihad in radical Islam in contemporary Europe would provide
another sombre instance. Throughout Europe in the last few years we have
seen the revival of a classical Enlightenment atheism, a movement that, far
removed from Nietzsche’s pathos for the Death of God, pursues a vigorous
and relentless policy of Écrasez l’infâme! Indeed, contemporary polemicists
like Dawkins and Hitchens wish to emphasise precisely this dimension of
Christianity: not just false but nasty! The modern cultured despisers of re-
ligion are the self confessed descendants of Hume and Voltaire. Religion
is the product of the period of ignorance in the superstitious and terrified
fearful infancy of humanity, and is the crude attempt to face the natural
human longing for knowledge, consolation and emotional support.
Jonkers boldly strives to uphold the concept of sacrifice against such
cultured despisers. His apology for sacrifice is, however, a mitigated justifi-
cation. He argues for two necessary conditions of sacrifice ‘for the sake of’,
but is wary of sufficient conditions. In particular, he is rightly concerned
about justifying the sacrifice of others. Self-sacrifice is one thing, sacrifice of
others quite different.
Jonkers starts from Hegel’s theory of war in his Philosophy of Right
(1820). Hegel exploits the distinction and dialectical tension between civil
society and the state, the domains of private and the public interest respec-
tively. This leads to a critique of egotism (what Jonkers calls the ‘dispos-
session of self’), and the proper recognition of the imbalance between the
‘private’ interest of the agent and a good transcending that agent. Jonkers’
support of such strategies is mitigated by his reservations about the respec-
tive philosophical implications of Hegel’s metaphysical optimism and the
extreme pessimism of Levinas.
Jonkers is quite right to see Hegel as providing a basis for a theory
of altruism (contra Popper and others). What reasons can one give for a
rational interest in the welfare of others? Some answer needs to be given to
‘might is right’ doctrine of Callicles and Thrasymachus. Jonkers appeals to
Hegel, and later Levinas, since they both give some answer to this challenge.
Jonkers observes that such an answer involves a critique of the individual-
istic psychology of the hedonist.
I think that Jonkers is correct to state that the defences of sacrifice
in Hegel and Levinas are counter-cultural. Secular ethics tends to assume
an individualistic view of human nature, either the optimistic variant in
Rousseau: mankind is naturally good and is so prior to society, or the more
pessimistic: Hobbes. Mandeville’s famous ‘Fable of the Bees’, wherein pri-
vate vices lead to public benefits, is an odd mixture of pessimism and opti-
mism.
Contemporary Western culture, especially under the influence of the
US, is largely optimistic and individualistic. Contractual agreement and ra-
tional co-operation between autonomous individuals is the paradigm, as

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304 Douglas H e d l e y

is Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of disenchantment. In a disenchanted, individualistic

society, what reason can one provide to justify ethics beyond a minimum of
co-operation?
Here Hegel is very useful in reminding us of the dialectical nature of
the personal. Jonkers notes that Hegel’s theory of sacrifice in war is ‘an
application of his famous theory of the double negation’. Hegel presents
the imposition of form and order as the ‘sacrifice’ of the Spirit.
In reflection upon Jonkers’ judicious account of The Philosophy of
Right, one might add a famous line from the end of the Phenomenology:
‘Seine Grenze wissen, heisst sich aufzuopfern wissen’ (763). ’To know its
limits is to know how to sacrifice itself’. For Spirit that is conscious of
itself as spirit, the path to self-realization is through the sacrifice of the
natural and immediate life of the self whereby it is in opposition to the
not-self. Self-conscious or spiritual life is not the development and then
cessation of energy but a continual shattering of the immediate self and
renewal and realization of that self in and through the not-self. This is the
key to the Master-Slave dialectic: self-consciousness is constituted by its
relation to the other. Self-conscious being is thus not limited by the other as
material objects are because the spiritual life is a perpetual dying to self and
rising again. In making that which seems, prima facie, a limit a very part of
itself, spirit or self-reflection has no absolute limit. It knows its own limit,
and it can integrate and thus transcends it. Self-conscious life is properly
a continual dying to live. Thus for Hegel the problem of human identity
eludes biological or sociological analysis because the real self of a human
being is not an observable, empirical item at all, but rather is constituted by
the sublimation of the immediate ego through a process of transformation.
Selfhood is a goal rather than a presupposition.
Jonkers is understandably coy about Hegel’s theory of the Spirit. But
one can find very similar thoughts in severe critics of Hegel’s absolute system
like William James. James is playing on the very same paradox of the spirit
observed in the Master-Slave dialectic when he writes:
It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the
love of life; they seem on the contrary to give it a keener zest. The sovereign source of melancholy
is repletion. Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings
the void.2

Yet in knowing its limits, spirit transcends them. If Hegel’s ‘metaphysi-

cal prejudice’ (Jonkers) is for the ‘eternal and the necessary over the tempo-
rary and the contingent’, it is also the case that only through sacrifice in the
finite and contingent realm – the cup of history in Hegel’s poetic imagery –
that the infinity of Spirit foams forth:

2 William James, The Will to Believe and other essays in popular philosophy (New York: Dover
Publishing, 1956), 47.

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 For God’s sake: why Sacrifice? 305

Aus dem Kelche dieses Geisterreiches

schäumt ihm seine Unendlichkeit 3

The eternal idea is not a refuge from, but is to be grasped within, the
real conflicts and limitations of actual history. The vehemence of Kierke-
gaard’s critique of Hegel is not appreciated by those who fail to recognise
Hegel’s deep and elective affinity to the Christian mystical tradition.
Dante, no stranger to conflict and grim violence in real politics, em-
ployed the idea of sacrifice of self in this Hegelian sense in relation to the
creativity of artist. At the beginning of Paradiso the poet calls on Apollo
for divine inspiration:
Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue
sı̀ come quando Marsı̈a traesti
della vagina delle membra sue

Enter into my breast and breathe there

As when you drew Marsyas
From the sheath of his limbs 4

The brutal image of Apollo’s flaying of Marsyas is invoked at the crucial

first canto of the Commedia. The indwelling of the spirit and the renewal
of self (e.g. Paradiso I l.70: trasumanar significar per verba non si poria: the
passing beyond humanity (that) cannot be put into words, or Dante’s Vita
Nuova) are key concepts in Dante’s oeuvre. This vision of human transfor-
mation and renewal through sacrifice is at the heart of Dante’s thought. At
the beginning of the Paradiso, in the passage about vows, we read:
Lo maggior don che Dio per sua larghezza
fesse creando ed alla sua bontate
più conformato e quel ch’e’ più apprezza,
fu della voluntà la libertate;
di che le creature intelligenti,
e tutte e sole, fuoro e son dotate.
. . . . . . . . . . . . s’è sì fatto
che Dio consenta quando tu consenti;
chè, nel fermar tra Dio e l’uomo il patto,
vittima fassi di questo tesoro
tal quale io dico; e fassi col suo atto.

The greatest gift that God in His bounty made in creation, the most conformable to His
goodness and the one He accounts the most precious, was the freedom of the will, with which
these creatures with intelligence, all and only these, were and are endowed. . . if it be such that

3 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Gesammelte Werke, ed.
Rheinisch-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 9, ed. Wolfgang Bonsiepen et. al.
(Hamburg: Meiner, 1980), 434.
4 Dante, Paradiso, in The Divine Comedy, vol. 3, transl. by John D. Sinclair (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1939), 19–21. I am grateful to Vittorio Montemaggio for his suggestions
on Dante. The text quolation is IBID., 74–75.

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306 Douglas H e d l e y

God consents when thou consentest; for in the establishing of the compact between God and man
this treasure, being such as I have said, becomes the sacrifice, and that by its own act.

In this canto Dante criticizes Jephthah and Agamemnon’s faithful ex-

ecution of their dreadful vows. One can only guess how Dante would have
interpreted Abraham and Isaac!
Vico observes that ‘The poetic speech which our poetic logic has helped
us to understand continued for a long time into the historical period, much
as great and rapid rivers continue far into the sea keeping sweet the waters
borne.’5 I suggest that, following Vico, the poets offer us real knowledge
about experienced reality and a knowledge unattainable through experi-
mental-scientific methods. Furthermore, poets like Dante present vividly the
necessity for the sacrificial transformation of self as a precondition for the
realization of human identity. But the poets also reveal the fragility, anguish,
and savagery of the human psyche; they diagnose viscerally the bondage of
the psyche to the unreconstructed ego, but cannot, apart from their appeal
to a force more powerful than art, provide a cure for the malaise.
As mentioned, Jonkers also draws upon the thought of Levinas, and
especially the manner in which Levinas employs terminology of sacrifice
to break down the concept of the autonomous universal subject. There
are strong differences between the Hegelian and Levinasian subversion of
the atomic self. There is a metaphysical teleology to the Hegelian dialec-
tic which is anathema to Levinas. Yet Jonkers is illuminating in bringing
out both the difference and the similarity between the two. The ethical for
Levinas is quite properly the experience of heteronomy. The ethical other
breaches one’s autonomy: hence Levinas uses the language of ‘hostage’ and
‘substitution’:
Levinas introduces the metaphors of substitution and hostage to make clear that the offen-
sive way in which the other intrudes my singularity confronts me with a radical passivity: I am
taken hostage, without my consent. . . even being asked for.

Levinas’ infinite other: the portrayal of the other with the language of
radical alterity and the absolute claim of the other have obvious religious
resonance. It particularly reminds one of Kierkegaard’s famous attack on
the domestication of religion through the totalizing philosophical system.
The demands of the other are infinite because they cannot be mediated
dialectically.
John Milbank sees both models of the ethical, implicitly that of Hegel
and explicitly that of Levinas, as instances of secularisation of a Chris-
tian theme. Milbank is at one level clearly correct. Hegel’s Master-Slave
dialectic looks like the version of the Pauline-mystical dying-to live – Stirb
und Werde – of the medieval mystical tradition. We have noted the links

5 Giambattista Vico, New Science, transl. by David Marsh (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999),
412.

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 For God’s sake: why Sacrifice? 307

between Levinas and Kierkegaard; and Levinas’ title Otherwise than Be-
ing or Beyond Essence is a reference to Plato’s Republic 509b, a passage
of momentous significance in Western mystical thought.6 Milbank’s arti-
cle “Midwinter Sacrifice” concentrates its fire upon Derrida, Patocka, and
Levinas.7 Milbank sees this secularisation of the Christian sacrifice motif,
which leads to the consensus view of the ethical, as ‘primarily self sacrifice
for the other, without any necessary “return” issuing from the other back
to oneself’.8 At first sight it is not clear why the secularisation thesis invali-
dates the legitimacy of either the contribution of Hegel or Levinas. In order
to appreciate the force of Milbank’s point, we need to explore his position
in some detail.

II. Milbank and the ‘sacrificial economy’

For Milbank sacrifice is a key instance of his central genealogical thesis

as expressed in his justly famed magnum opus, Theology and Social Theory.
The secular is the bastard offspring of Christian Theology. Sacrifice ‘for the
sake of’ provides for Milbank an instance of his broader thesis. His target is
the nothing less than the ‘sacrificial economy’ of secular modernity, which
he deems pernicious:
By pernicious ‘sacrificial’ I mean the giving up of one thing for the sake of something
greater. . . This sacrifice for worldly and temporal gain is to be contrasted. . . with a genuine reli-
gious sacrifice of everything for the sake of its return (repetition, mimesis) as same but different.

This sacrificial economy needs to be unmasked as the illegitimate em-

ployment of Christian motifs while denying the central Christian affirma-
tion of the priority of Divine plenitude. Indeed, secular modernity is dia-
metrically opposed to Christian theology in that it ontologizes evil, scarcity
and suffering.
Milbank writes: “My claim, therefore is that the idea of self-sacrifice
unto death without return for the sake of “the whole,” even if that be the
rule of moral duty to an unspecified other, is not at all the true moral kernel
of the Jewish and Christian legacy, but much more a transcription of secular
modernity that reads time not as a gift-of-self in the hope of an eternal
return, but rather as a giving up of self in time for a future absolutized
space that will never truly be set in place.”9

6 Cf. J.M. Narbonne , Levinas and The Greek Inheritance (Leuven: Peeters, 2006).
7 The essay in many ways is a meditation upon Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996).
8 John Milbank, Stories of Sacrifice,
www.uibk.ac.at/theol/cover/contagion/contagion02 Milbank.pdf, 98.
9 Milbank, ‘‘Midwinter Sacrifice,” in Angelaki. Journal of theoretical humanities 6 (2001), 51.

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308 Douglas H e d l e y

Classical instances of this phenomenon, for Milbank, are the Utilitar-

ian self-sacrifice for the sake of general utility and Kantian freedom of the
law in which the instincts are sacrificed. Secular ethics is characterised by
this ‘cruel and annihilating logic’ of the moral act or ‘self-giving sacrifice’.10
Hence, Milbank insists, ‘in theological terms, I am arguing that resurrection
is an inseparable moment of atonement, or that sacrifice is ethical only when
it is also resurrection.’
I shall consider the problems created by seeing ethics through the lens
of resurrection shortly. Milbank’s basic point is best appreciated by seeing
that, perhaps surprisingly, the philosopher who is not colluding in the ‘cruel
and annihilating logic’ of ‘sacrifice for the sake of’ is Kierkegaard. Milbank
writes:
No ‘thing’ here is given up for a greater something, but rather as Kierkegaard came to
realize in Fear and Trembling, everything is given up in order to be received back differently and
only, thereby as ‘the same’. 11

Milbank’s theory looks prima facie like a mixture of Girard and Kierke-
gaard. Girard posits an economy of sacrificial activity from which Chris-
tianity is exempt and, indeed, which is exposed by Christianity. Kierkegaard
in his Fear and Trembling may be read as upholding an incommensurability
between ethics (conceived of rather negatively as bourgeois Sittlichkeit) –
a target that Milbank attacks with as much relish as his Gallic marxisant
mentors – and true Christian vocation.
What is correct about Milbank’s account? Firstly, sacrifice is a pre-
dominantly Christian preserve among the Abrahamic religions. Although
all three Abrahamic religions use Abraham and Isaac (in Islam the identity
of the son is unclear), it is Christianity that employs a theology that is sat-
urated with sacrificial imagery. We might speculate that this is linked to the
Temple. Much of Christian imagery was drawn from the First Temple.12
Secondly, he is surely correct to emphasise that the Christian account
must include the good news of the resurrection. A robustly sacrificial ethics
apart from the resurrection resembles Stoicism or Buddhism rather than
Christianity. Milbank is correct to highlight the theological dimension, even
if he is too dogmatic – too Barthian – in his insistence upon the resurrection.
However, I would claim that Milbank is ultimately the victim of his
own rhetoric (no pun intended). The claim that sacrifice is ethical only when
it is resurrection has very unfortunate consequences. The major problem
is that it generates a most problematic Christian exclusivism. Would one
wish to argue that Gandhi or Rabbi Hillel would have been more ethical as
Christians? A Christian may well claim that some dimension was missing

10 Milbank, ‘‘Midwinter Sacrifice” (see above n. 9), 62.

11 Milbank, Stories of Sacrifice (see above n. 8), 98.
12 See the seminal work of Margaret Barker, The Great High Priest: The temple roots of Chris-

tian liturgy (London: T&T Clark, 2003).

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 For God’s sake: why Sacrifice? 309

from their lives, but not at the ethical level. Would they have been better
men if Christians? Note that I am not claiming that to do the right thing
requires the correct beliefs about it. The quality of an act and the capacity
to justify it are quite distinct. Christians may well want to say that certain
great ethical reformers were acting through the Holy Spirit or imitating
Christ. But it does seem very restrictive to identify Christian ethics with
resurrection. In Dante the great Pagans are seen in limbo; yet it is very
poignant scene of the Commedia – not least with Virgil. Typically Milbank
is far too extreme. His rejection of sacrifice ‘for the sake of’ is like a doctor
who regards fasting as an index of anorexia! He is too quick to pathologise
sacrifice.

III. Icons and Iconoclasm

Jonkers writes:
Religious leaders try to bridge this gap by seeing themselves as the incarnation of this
sublime purpose, thus leaving no room whatsoever for diverging perspectives whether this or
that sacrifice is justified or not. When I interpret myself and my decisions as the incarnation of
God’s own will or of secular forms of Human Salvation, then both I myself and my decisions
become infallible, so that any discussion about justifying sacrifice becomes senseless. Acting as
if one were the incarnation of the sublime purpose paves the way for the most atrocious and
unjustified forms of sacrificing other people, of which both secular and religious history is full.
Nevertheless running away from one’s responsibility to take a decision in the name of. . . is no
option either. Therefore, in order to be able to justify the sacrifice of others at all, it is essential
that the idea of incarnation is replaced by that of representation.

With this point Jonkers is raising one of the most significant ideas of modern
politics. In order to consider the point that Jonkers is making here, let us
digress somewhat and consider a historical analogy: the English civil war
from 1642 to 1645. It was a period of unparalleled violence on English soil
and culminated in 1649 with the public execution of Charles I. It was a war
fought over power, the power of image. After his execution, the book Eikon
Basilike13 was published. It is an apparent diary of the monarch in which he
prays for his executioners and places his trust in God. And it is a defence of
the absolute monarchy rejected by the English parliament. Charles claims:
I would rather choose to wear a crown of thorns with my Saviour, than to exchange that
of gold, which is due to me, for one of lead, whose embased flexibleness shall be forced to bend
and comply to the various and oft contrary dictates of any factions, when instead of reason and
public concernments they obtrude nothing but what makes for the interest of parties, and flows
from the partialities of private wills and passions. I know no resolutions more worthy a Christian
king, than to prefer his conscience before his kingdoms.14

13 Eikon Basilike. Or The King’s Book, ed. by Ed. Almack (London: De la More Press, 1904).
14 Eikon Basilike (see above n. 13), 40. Thanks to Russel Hillier for pointing me this work.

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310 Douglas H e d l e y

The trial and execution of the monarch becomes thus the occasion
of suffering martyrdom. Charles prays that God will teach him ‘the no-
blest victory over my self; and my enemies by patience; which was Christ’s
conquest.’15 Indeed, it is ‘the greatest glory of a Christians(sic) life to die
daily’16.
The poignant and overt comparison to Christ was very effective for
the Royalists. It was an immensely popular and powerful work. Parliament
was so worried by its popularity that it commissioned John Milton to com-
pose a reply. In the same year Milton published his Eikonklastes in which
he presents the identification of Charles with Christ as a blasphemous im-
posture:
Many would be all one with our Saviour, whom our saviour will not know. They who
govern ill those kingdoms which they had a right to, have to our Saviours Crown of Thornes no
right at all.17

Milton was referring in exasperation to a monarch who infringed tra-

ditional English liberties as protected by common law, by imprisoning with-
out trial, confiscating land, and raising taxes without Parliament.
Furthermore:
As his Charity can be no way comparable to that of Christ, so neither can his assurance that
they whom he seems to pray for, in doing what they did against him, knew not what they did. It
was but arrogance therefore, and not charity, to lay such ignorance to others in the sight of God,
till he himself had bin infallible, like him whose peculiar words he overweeningly assumes.18

Charles became the sole saint formally canonised by the Church of

England; though Queen Victoria had the official remembrance removed
from the Prayer Book. The famous debates between Locke and Filmer have
their roots in these seventeenth century disputes (Patriarcha, or the Natural
Power of Kings 1680). Filmer (1588–1653) was knighted by Charles I. and
John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government employs Filmer as his explicit
target.
I am using this example of the identification of Charles I with the
sacrifice of Christ because it highlights the close link between sovereignty
and the language of the image in the early modern period. Many of the
same issues were addressed with the overthrow and subsequent execution
of Louis XVI (and indeed Czar Nicholas). As we have already noted, one of
the most important theorists of sacrifice, Joseph de Maistre, was the product
of a turbulent period, and the execution of the monarch plays a key role in
his thought.

15 Eikon Basilike (see above n. 13), 187.

16 Eikon Basilike (see above n. 13), 265.
17 John Milton, Eikonklastes, in Complete Prose Works III, ed. by Merritt Y. Hughes (New

Haven Yale, 1970), 417–418.

18 Milton, Eikonklastes (see above n. 17), 657 f.

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 For God’s sake: why Sacrifice? 311

Charles did not claim to represent. He clearly saw himself as bodying

forth the Divine on earth. Jonkers claims:
Decision-makers can never legitimately incarnate, but only represent a sublime purpose,
thus maintaining the essential and unbridgeable transcendence of the ultimate purpose with re-
gard to its human representations. It makes them aware of the inevitable deficit that characterises
every justification of sacrifice, and thus leaves room for discussing and developing less ‘sacrificial’
ways to fulfil God’s will or to pursue the public interest.

Medieval Christendom was never forced to express the Divine Right of

Kings; it largely assumed it along with a sacramental universe.
John Milbank is much closer to his medieval paradigms when he speaks
of ‘true society’ where one has ‘absolute consensus, agreement in desire, and
entire harmony among its members’.19 This is a problematic dimension to
Milbank’s thought: his apparent Utopianism (or angelism?). Many scholars
have seen a theocratic tendency in Milbank, and Chris Insole has written
illuminatingly upon parallels between Royalist theologians of the Stuart
polity and the political theology of Radical Orthodoxy. Both, he argues,
proceed from observations about the order and harmony of the universe in
which the individual participates in a wider and hierarchically structured
whole and from the close identification of the visible order with its invisible
source.20
We might consider in response Charles Taylor’s subtle “polemic against
those ‘subtraction stories”’ that present the Enlightenment as the explana-
tion of how the agents of the secular modern world “liberated themselves
from certain earlier confining horizons, illusions, or limitations of knowl-
edge.”21 Taylor develops a narrative about a new set of “social imaginaries”
which severed society from cosmos. The sacred order of intrinsic hierarchies
was replaced with “the mutual respect and mutual service of the individuals
who make up society.”22 Thus emerged a “public sphere [as] an association
which is constituted by nothing outside of the common action we carry
out in it: coming to a common mind, where possible, through the exchange
of ideas.”23 As a result, we have the “social imaginary” of representative
democracy with its “crucial fiction of ‘we, the people’.”
Vico thinks that if religion is lost among the peoples, they have nothing
left to enable them to live in society.24 He presents the sacrifice of self as an
integral part of the process of civilization. He writes

19 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), 402.

20 C.J. Insole, The Politics of Human Frailty. A Theological Defence of Political Liberalism
(London: SCM, 2004), 158ff.
21 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 22.
22 Taylor (see above, n. 21), 165.
23 Taylor (see above, n. 21), 192.
24 Vico (see above, n. 5), 1109.

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312 Douglas H e d l e y

Because of their corrupt nature, people are tyrannized by self-love, and so pursue their own
advantage above all else. Seeking everything that is useful for themselves and nothing for their
companions, they cannot subject their passions to the conscious impulse that directs them to just
ends. This leads us to establish the following principle. In his bestial state, a man loves only his
own well being.25

But religion can help sublimate and liberate the savage from bestial
self-aggrandising ego. Not least through institutions such as marriage and
burial, laws and customs, language, and the arts. Vico writes:
The sacred or the holy was that terrifying thought of a deity which imposed form and
measure on the bestial passions of these lost men and made them human passions. Such a thought
must have given rise to the moral effort or conatus, which is proper to the human will and which
restrains the impulses that the body urges on the mind. By means of this effort, such impulses can
be completely suppressed by the sage, and can be directed to better ends by the good citizen.26

One might observe that this is the opposite of Girard. Sacrifice is not
part of mimetic savagery: this is contrary to Vico’s sense of a providential
dimension to human institutions and his sense of the corrosive impact of the
‘barbarism of reflection’. It is critical reflection that lapses into irony and
cynicism concerning those institutions which, notwithstanding their flaws
and limits, have preserved and transformed humanity. Such cynicism and
individualism in modernity radically underestimates the legitimate role of
traditional loyalties and commitments fostered by religion.
Vico’s thoughts about the role of the sacred in human society are a
subtle challenge to any crude secularisation thesis. Yet while it is particu-
larly easy today to appreciate Milton’s horror of a tyrannical, taxing, im-
prisoning and confiscating Monarch and Jonkers’ sense of the ‘inevitable
deficit’ that characterises any justification of sacrifice, there is real force in
Milbank’s conviction that the erosion of the organic and sacramental di-
mension in modern Western politics and its replacement with a contract
between disengaged individuals generate deep problems.
Furthermore, any awareness of the limits and finitude of this contin-
gent realm, the ‘fallenness’ of the world in Christian tradition, will reinforce
the insight that ‘offering up’ is a necessity among scarce resources and a
endangered environment. The Christian position lies situated between the
extremes of the utopian and the cynical. There is a legitimate ‘sacrifice for
the sake of’. But its realisation in this world is imperfect.

IV. Joy

Milbank’s strict alternative between Christian plenitude and the sacri-

ficial economy drives an unnecessary wedge between the Christian life and

25 Vico (see above, n. 5), 341.

26 Vico (see above, n. 5), 340.

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 For God’s sake: why Sacrifice? 313

non-Christian morality. A much better way of considering Christian ethics

is in terms of its particular motivation. A Christian theist has a motive for
sacrifice in joy. Before Dante invokes Apollo to flay him like Marsyas, he
produces a paean to the beauties of the cosmos as revealing
La Gloria di colui che tutto move
per L’universo penetra e risplende
in una parte piu e meno altrove.27

The glory of Him who moves all things penetrates the universe and shines in one part more
and in another less.

This joy seems, incidentally, to be a central aspect of Christ’s own

ministry.
Jonkers writes:
The more the world is seen as a place of doom and the less the intrinsic worth of people
counts, the more plausible it becomes to accept their sacrifice for the sake of God’s absolute
holiness as a real option. The conclusion is that sacrifice will always be an inherent aspect of
religion. One could only eradicate it by superseding every kind of religious dispossession of the
self as well as annihilating the structure of the asymmetry, which would mean the end of religion
as such.

Theologically, I would wish to emphasize the incarnation rather than

the resurrection, and insist that cross and resurrection are only meaning-
ful in the light of the incarnation. Philosophically, if the world is seen in
sacramental terms, and articulated with the Platonic eloquence of William
James, ‘the bare assurance that this natural order is not ultimate but a mere
sign of vision, the external staging of a many-storied universe, in which
spiritual forces have the last word and are eternal’.28 The thought of the
brute contingency of the world, the fact that its existence is a mystery and
its non-existence is just as possible as its existence is a primordial motor
of philosophical speculation. From Plato’s and Aristotle’s claim that phi-
losophy begins in wonder to the Stoic adamant rejection: nil admirari! As
William James observed: “Every generation will produce its Job, its Hamlet,
its Faust, or its Sartor Resartus.”29
Of course for Levinas or Derrida this is not the case. The sacrifice
invoked by these writers is shorn of its metaphysical and theological trap-
pings. If we find a combination of Jewish iconoclasm, Christian dying to live
and Neoplatonic apophaticism in Levinas and Derrida, Milbank is surely
justified to question the coherence of such a secularised structure.
What is missing, however, in both Jonkers’ and Milbank’s account
is the role of joy. This joy is grounded in the awareness of the world as
bodying forth the goodness of God, albeit imperfectly. I wish to argue that

27 Dante, Paradiso (see above n. 4) 19.

28 James (see above, n. 2), 56.
29 James (see above, n. 2), 75.

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314 Douglas H e d l e y

the world stands for or re-presents the Deity through a resemblance. Since
it is caused by God, it shares in God’s being and not merely his intentions.
If God is absolute perfection, self-subsistent existence, the world expresses
this perfection in an inferior mode. On such a view, the world is a domain
of intrinsic value. Joy is linked to the perception of the world as enchanted
– a created domain and having its ground in a transcendent personal being,
rather than meaningless and impersonal.
Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ contained a great paean to
/a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of the setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man :
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of thought,
And rolls through all things. 30

It is the joy evoked by the sense of the spirit that ‘impels all thinking things
and rolls through all things’ that provides the parameters for any genuinely
religious theory of sacrifice. If personality is either a construction or a con-
tingent emergent property, and if the universe is an impersonal order, it is
very hard see the religious emotional reactions of love or gratitude as hav-
ing any meaning. This, rather than any crude do ut des provides the foun-
dation for Christian ethics. There is a view of sacrifice which a Christian
theist can welcome: embracing suffering within the good news of creation
and salvation. Parents make great sacrifices for children. This is, doubtless,
in part biology and attributable to certain psychological factors. The joy
that a child generates provides the parent with the energy and drive to sus-
tain the sleeplessness, anxiety and expense, etc. This joy is akin to wonder.
Fénelon and the Christian mystics tended to emphasise this joy which does
not expect reward.31
And Dante in Canto XI in the Purgatorio highlights even the sacrifice
of the will of the angels while praising God!
Come del suo voler li angeli tuoi
fan sacrificio a te, contando osanna,
cosı̀ facciano li uomini de’ suoi32

As Thine angels make sacrifice to Thee of their will, singing hosannas, so let men make of
theirs

30 William Wordsworth , ‘Tintern Abbey’, in: Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. by Thomas
Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 163.
31 See J. Le Brun, Le Pur amour: De Platon à Lacan (Paris: Seuil, 2002) on the ‘Querelle du Pur

Amour’ in Western thought. The analogies with Sufi thought are intriguing.
32 Dante, Purgatorio in The Divine Comedy, vol. 2, transl. by John D. Sinclair (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1939), 142.

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 For God’s sake: why Sacrifice? 315

This is not an isolated passage in the Commedia. There is a striking

parallel passage about the purgation of the soul in terms of a willing, even
joyful sacrifice of the will in the Purgatorio Canto XXIII with the words of
Forese Donati:
io dico pena, e dovria dir solazzo
che quella voglia all’arbore ci mena
che menò Cristo lieto a dire “Eli”,
quando ne liberò con la sua vena33

I say pain and ought to say solace,

for that will leads us to the tree which lead Christ say gladly to say Eli, when with his own
veins He freed us.

V. Conclusion

The problem of sacrifice raises the broader question of the religious

imagination, and in particular the nature of symbolic language. We should
not, I suggest, think of the symbolic as merely figurative or literalistic. The
language of sacrifice is important because is fuses different levels: the feast
with the god(s), the killing, renunciation of self-interest. Our language pre-
serves these layers of meaning from the ritual with the ethical and the re-
ligious in the highest sense of the sacrifice of the will depicted in Dante’s
Commedia. Pace Kierkegaard and Milbank, religion cannot be neatly dis-
tinguished from ethics and the image of sacrifice is a good case in point.
This is Vico’s profound point that myth suffuses the modern world; even in
apparently rational abstract ideas.
Milbank’s determination to target ‘sacrifice for the sake of’ as a distor-
tion of Christian ethics is the attempt, I think, to preserve the mythological
coherence of Christianity. He tends to use the term ‘narrative’ but let me
employ the more ancient term ‘mythos’. The threefold office of Christ as
Priest, Prophet and King is fluid. The images of Melchizedek and the Suf-
fering Servant are fused with the royal Davidic and the Prophetic images.
To separate one aspect, the suffering or the sacrificial, from the triumphant
Christus Victor of faith is a grave distortion. Christ’s death on the Cross is
both akin to, and unlike, myths of Divine dying and ritual Temple slaughter.
Yet it is surely more than a call to personal integration or a unique exem-
plification of sacrificial love. His voluntary death presupposes a view of the
real presence of evil in the world. Hence Augustine’s sombre view of the
world in De Civitate Dei as an arena of conflict between good and evil, and
the reinforcement of that in the classical reformers. Luther and Calvin are
utterly medieval in their acceptance of a forensic, objective theory of sac-
rificial atonement. The puzzle arises with the widespread tendency in the

33 Dante, Purgatorio (see above, n. 32), 300.

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316 Douglas H e d l e y

Modern period to spiritualise sacrifice, evident in e.g. Wagner, Ritschl or

Thomas Mann. The traditional substitutionary theory of atonement is too
crudely forensic and a mere exemplification theory of the cross too insipid.
But to attain the just balance between the subjective and objective dimen-
sion of sacrifice is difficult. The topic of sacrifice rests uneasily between the
crass and barbaric dimension of religion from the Aztecs to contemporary
Muslim ’martyrs’ on the one hand and the utter demythologizing and psy-
chologizing of religion on the other in ultra liberal Christianity, whereby
evil and wickedness become just the wounds and anxieties of the psyche. In
theological terms, this is the tension between the subjective and objective
views of atonement. As a great bard observes:
Then is there mirth in heaven
When earthly things made even
Atone together34

Milbank’s strict alternative between a ‘sacrifical economy’ colluding

with evil and the pure ‘resurrection sabbath’ of Christian ethics is ultimately,
I think, an unsatisfactory mixture of the Manichean and the Utopian. Jon-
kers is correct to occupy middle ground, where he can ask what is both
right and wrong about the ethics of sacrifice. The question of sacrifice raises
sharply the problem of demythologising religion. Is this a case of Mythos
versus Logos or Logos in Mythos? Let me try to come to a resolution of
(what I perceive as) the conflict between Milbank and Jonkers. Jonkers is
correct to emphasize the dimension of the logos in sacrifice, as the rationally
comprehensible ‘for the sake of.’ But Milbank, though he is excessively
rhetorical and zealous in his denial of ‘for the sake of’ in sacrifice, is right to
insight that specifically Christian ethics cannot be demythologised without
great loss.35

SUMMARY

Peter Jonkers’ paper ‘Justifying Sacrifice’ presents a subtle and nuanced defence of the
ethical paradigm of sacrifice as offering up ‘for the sake of’ another item or principle. He employs
Hegel and Levinas for this purpose. While Jonkers presents his position as in basic agreement with
the position of John Milbank in his paper ‘Midwinter Sacrifice’, I claim that the two positions are,
in fact, diametrically opposed. Milbank is proposing a radical critique of the ethical paradigm of
sacrifice as the product of, and in collusion with, secular nihilism. Thus there is no justification
of sacrifice ‘for the sake of’ for Milbank: certainly not in the forms presented by either Hegel
or Levinas. Milbank’s motive for such a strident rejection of such theories lies in his overarching
theory of the secular as itself an illegitimate alternative theology. I conclude, however, that Jonkers
can withstand the challenge of Milbank. Nevertheless, any adequate justification of the model of
sacrifice needs to be augmented by an account of both its metaphysical underpinning and its
symbolism.

34 William Shakespeare , As You Like It V 4.

35 A warm word of thanks to Russell Hillier, Vittorio Montemaggio and Jacob Sherman.

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 For God’s sake: why Sacrifice? 317

ZUSAMMENFASSUNG

Peter Jonkers Aufsatz »Justifying Sacrifice« bietet eine tiefgründige und nuancierte Vertei-
digung des ethischen Paradigmas des Opfers als das Hingeben »um eines anderen Gegenstandes
oder Prinzips willen«. Zu diesem Zweck verwendet Jonkers Hegel und Levinas. Während Jonkers
seine Position als im Wesentlichen übereinstimmend mit der Position John Milbanks in »Midwin-
ter Sacrifice« darstellt, behaupte ich, dass sich die beiden Positionen diametral gegenüberstehen.
Milbank schlägt eine radikale Kritik des ethischen Paradigmas des Opfers als Produkt des, und
im Einverständnis mit, dem säkularen Nihilismus vor. Es gibt also für Milbank keine Rechtferti-
gung des Opfers »um etw. willen«: auf jeden Fall nicht in den Formen, die Hegel oder Levinas
vorstellen. Milbanks Motiv für eine so scharfe Zurückweisung derartiger Theorien liegt in sei-
ner zugrunde liegenden Theorie des Säkularen selbst als illegitimer alternativer Theologie. Ich
komme dennoch zu dem Schluss, dass Jonkers der Herausforderung Milbanks standhalten kann.
Nichtsdestotrotz muss jede Rechtfertigung des Modells des Opfers um eine Darstellung erweitert
werden, die sowohl die metaphysischen Hintergründe als auch die verwendete Dimension des
Symbolischen mit bedenkt.

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