Abstract: “Poor Sacrifices of Our Enmity”: Corporeal Sacrifice, Social Reconciliation, and Transcendence

Bruce Young

As Stephen Greenblatt points out, Shakespeare always uses the words atone and atonement in a social sense, to mean the bringing together of divided parties. Yet, even without using these words, Shakespeare offers a host of allusions and images related to the religious doctrine of atonement: references to redemption and salvation, to Christ’s corporeal suffering and death, and to sacrifice—especially to bodily human sacrifice intended to purge sin, satisfy revenge, reconcile enemies, or achieve transcendence of some sort. Here I will focus on these references to and depictions of sacrifice and consider how material acts, especially ones involving bodily suffering and death, could be viewed as achieving social, psychological, and spiritual ends. This thread found repeatedly in Shakespeare’s plays is a telling example of the materiality of religious understanding and practice in the pre-Cartesian world—or rather, perhaps more accurately, an example of what John Polkinghorne has called “dual-aspect monism,” the view, which seems to me dominant among Shakespeare and his contemporaries, that the world, though ultimately constituting a single undividable reality, has two aspects, what can be roughly called material and spiritual. What this would mean for sacrifice is that the sacrificial event can be viewed simultaneously in two ways (if not more): it is an objective event involving material—palpable, visible, measurable, mutable—bodies, yet at the same time it is an event with psychological, social, and spiritual effects, experienced by what are in some sense conscious agents, including the sacrificial victims, the sacrificers, and others who participate in the sacrifice: entities capable of being acted upon but also endowed with motives, with the power to interpret and act, and with vital sensory, emotional, ethical, ideational, and relational experience.

Shakespeare presents a range of sacrificial events toward which the plays suggest a variety of contrasting attitudes. There are brief references to animal sacrifice (practiced by pagans of classical antiquity); in Titus Andronicus the ritual sacrifice of human beings satisfies some primal sense of honor and justice but sets in motion the horrific events of the play; Othello strives without complete success to view the murder of Desdemona as a ritual sacrifice. More ambiguously, the deaths of Romeo and Juliet are viewed as sacrifices—perhaps necessary, or perhaps tragically wasteful and avoidable—that reconcile the families. Lear views certain events, not clearly specified—perhaps his own willingness to give up power, perhaps Cordelia’s self-risking love—as “sacrifices” upon which “the gods themselves throw incense.” The word sacrifice literally means “to make sacred or holy,” a meaning fraught with ambiguity, as René Girard has noted, since “the sacred” can refer to a self-deceiving mystification of violence or to an ethical self-offering capable of achieving genuine, yet not simply otherworldly, transcendence.

A few suggested books:

Girard, René. The Girard Reader. Ed. James G. Williams. New York: Crossroad, 1996.

Polkinghorne, John. The Polkinghorne Reader: Science, Faith, and the Search for Meaning. Ed. Thomas Jay Oord. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2010.

Russell, Robert John, Philip Clayton, Kirk Wegter-McNelly, and John Polkinghorne, eds. Quantum Mechanics: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action Vol. 5. Vatican: Vatican Observatory & Center for Theology, 2002.

Sanders, John, ed. Atonement and Violence: A Theological Conversation. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2006.

Shuger, Debora Kuller.  The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity.  Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1994.

A bio:

Bruce Young has taught at Brigham Young University for over three decades. During that time he has also taught in London and Hawaii and spent time in Paris, Beijing, Guatemala, and other parts of the world. His areas of interest include Shakespeare, the English Renaissance, C. S. Lewis, and the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. He has written articles on these and other topics, as well as reviews, poetry, and personal essays. In 2009, he published the book Family Life in the Age of Shakespeare and is now at work on a book titled Shakespeare’s Dramas of Atonement.