"Radical Sacrifice"

Praise be to God, who made sacrifice (kurban) eternal by making an experience, a trial, that Prophet Abraham went through into an example, and who has let us live one more remembrance of this experience. One way of not reducing sacrifice to the level of meat that is cut and distributed, and of making it a mere occasion of our servitude to God, is to be a contemporary of Abraham, to share his state, and of course, for that, above all to try to understand him.

Sacrifice is an event that confronts us everywhere and at all times throughout history. This being so, it is entirely natural that there are very different assessments of its source, causes, meaning and consequences. In fact, when revelation is not taken into account regarding its source, the explanations put forward ultimately cannot go beyond increasing the confusion all the more. For although sacrifice has existed everywhere and at all times throughout history, the meaning attributed to it has not been the same.

Many anthropologists or sociologists, and even many theologians who have fallen under their influence, have tried to explain this diversity by an evolution that the concept of sacrifice has undergone within itself.

The countless varieties of primitive sacrificial rituals, beginning with sacrificing people or animals as an exchange to appease the gods, to pay them a bribe or to buy a better future, and with burning animals in the belief that their smoke would reach the gods, have existed throughout history in yet different thoughts and forms. But over time, in parallel with the course of history on the road to becoming civilized, it takes on a form in which no blood is shed, far from sight. Up to the point at which Giorgio Agamben says "in the modern age, the principle of the sanctity of life is entirely purged of the ideology of sacrifice," although modernization could not entirely destroy the phenomenon of sacrifice, it looks for ways of removing it from view.

Terry Eagleton, one of the leading thinkers of Marxism, a theory and ideology of the modern age, regards the neglect displayed both in modernity and in Marxism toward sacrifice, a ritual that has existed everywhere and at all times in human history, as a great defect. While feeling obliged to explain his interest in this theological subject, which one would not expect of him as a Marxist, he sets about analyzing the meanings (as a phenomenon) in which sacrifice has manifested itself in different societies and religions from antiquity to the present.

In fact, from the idea of "radical sacrifice" that he tries to ground throughout the book, Eagleton makes an interesting attempt at a new kind of left theology. He tries to link radical sacrifice with a revolutionary politics, in a framework in which Christian theology, shaped around the event of the crucifixion of Jesus, Marxist ideology, semiotics and psychoanalysis are blended. If the crucifixion of Jesus is to be described as a sacrifice, this is at the same time the sacrificing of sacrifice, because by sacrificing himself on behalf of all people, he has in a way made unnecessary a sacrifice that would cost another life.

How has sacrifice turned into such a substitution? To whom, and how dedicated, will a revolutionary sacrifice effect the exchange of what? These emerge as the questions his book awakens.

Eagleton thinks that the ritual and tradition of sacrifice seen everywhere throughout history has no distinguishable essence. "It can be anything from a bribe to the heavens ("you give me this and I'll give you that") to the act of martyrdom in which a person gives his own death as a gift to others. Sacrifice is a very varied (polythetic) concept covering a range of activities that need not have any common feature. In different periods of history it has been seen as gift, gratitude, covenant, prayer, bargain, thanksgiving, atonement, adoration, deception, celebration, compensation, redress, blessing, appeasement, intimate conversation, friendship, purification and the fulfillment of a debt. It may involve a death that secures the forgiveness of sins, purification from evil, the refusal of death, a dialogue established with the deity, the restoration of the cosmic order, or a shrewd investment made to obtain a profitable return. Just as there are those who see sacrifice as an initiation rite or as the reinforcement of patriarchal power, there are also those who find in it a source of social harmony and those who approach it as the release of vital energies. Agamben sees sacrifice as a way of giving origin and foundation to a groundless social existence." (p. 19).

Eagleton lays out a very broad inventory of all the practices concerning sacrifice in Judaism, Christianity, ancient Greece and ancient cultures, with the philosophies lying behind them. From sacrifice offered as a way of appeasing the god or the wrath of the gods, in its meaning in ancient times, to cases in which sacrifice is understood as a substitution.

So much diversity says two things at once. First, the fact that sacrifice is so widespread together with its diversity points to a universal origin. That what is the same at the root acquires different meanings in different societies, and is distorted, is a typical situation. When revelation and divine knowledge are not taken into account, this universality remains merely a universality realized by repeating itself everywhere, as a form of relation produced by human nature alone. Of course, to that same extent it exhibits variability in both meaning and form.

Second, so much difference and variability can often appear as an act that people imitate by seeing it from one another and that has no valid meaning, or in the best case an act to which everyone attributes a meaning of his own.

In fact this is another doubt, beside the many doubts that have never left the tradition of sacrifice alone throughout history. Even in the Muslim world, despite the Qur'an's so many clear, plain and magnificent philosophical backgrounds, these whisperings (vesvese) about sacrifice are never lacking.

Yet this is something we have said before: the worship and tradition of sacrifice is never free from whisperings. There is no experience of sacrifice that did not pass through the steep pass, that was not subjected to Satan's whisperings trying to dissuade it from its path.

On his way to offering his sacrifice, Abraham was stopped at three points, by Satan at three scales (large, medium, small). All the questions and doubts that were tried to be put into his mind are in fact questions that can be categorized by being distributed over the diversity of sacrificial rituals that confront us throughout history and everywhere in the world.

To be continued later, in closing, let us note that although Eagleton speaks of all the traditions of sacrifice, he mentions Islam's tradition of sacrifice in only one place and with a very superficial passing over.

Yet perhaps it is there that he would find the radicalness he is looking for in relation to sacrifice, in a way that would perhaps also change his expectations.