The End of Animal Sacrifice?

AbstractThis chapter surveys the place of animal sacrifice in later Christian and European culture. The first section concerns the scholarly tendency to treat animal sacrifice as a marker of primitive culture, starting with E. B. Tylor and William Robertson Smith and extending down to Walter Burkert and René Girard. The second section examines animal offerings within the Christian tradition, from late antiquity down to the present day, which are understood by those who make them as acts of charity rather than animal sacrifices. The third section analyzes some Christian transformations of sacrifice, including the ritual of the Eucharist, the conduct of a virtuous life, and the martyr’s death. These reconceptualizations completely remove the idea of sacrifice from the sphere of ritual and instead redefine it in relation to a person’s actions more generally. In recent centuries, they have become increasingly independent of a specifically Christian worldview, so that for many people in the contemporary world, the term “sacrifice” refers primarily to self-sacrifice, the action of a person who voluntarily gives up something of value for the sake of something else, whether an individual, a group, or a cause.