Sacrifice Imagined Violence, Atonement, and the Sacred [Hardcover]

Sacrifice Imagined is an original exploration of the idea of sacrifice by one of the world's preeminent philosophers of religion.

Despisers of religion have poured scorn upon the idea of sacrifice 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 cult of sacrifice in numerous totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Yet sacrifice remains a part of our cultural and intellectual 'imaginary'. Hedley proposes good reasons to think that issues of global conflict and the ecological crisis highlight the continuing relevance of the topic of sacrifice for contemporary culture.

The subject of sacrifice has been decisively influenced by two books: Girard's The Violence and the Sacred and Burkert's Homo Necans. Both of these are theories of sacrifice as violence. Hedley's book challenges both of these highly influential theories and presents a theory of sacrifice as renunciation of the will. His guiding influences in this are the much misunderstood Joseph de Maistre and the Cambridge Platonists.

Prologue1. The Theophanic Imagination, Making Sacred' and the Sublime2. Costly Signalling or Hallowed Violence: explaining sacrifice?3. Failed Oblations and the Tragic Imagination4. Thraldom, Liberty and Licence: freedom and renunciation5. Immolation, Suffering and the Blood-stained Logos6. Responsibility, Atonement and Sacrifice transformed7. Metamorphosis and the pathetic Divine: Dionysus and the Crucified8. The Quire-Musick' of the Temple and the Heavenly BanquetEpilogueBibliographyIndex of subjectsIndex of names

Douglas Hedley is Reader in Hermeneutics and Metaphysics and Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge, UK. A past President of the European Society for the Philosophy of Religion, he has been visiting Professor at the Sorbonne and holder of the Alan Richardson lectureship at Durham University. He delivered the Teape Lectl3-