The Classical World: Sacrifice, Philosophy, and Religion

Abstract

A longstanding positivist tendency in Western philosophy taught us to think of the classical world as an age of cheerful rationality, ethical moderation, and enlightened philosophical reflections far removed from the darkness of sacrificial practices. Sacrifice, we might still be inclined to think, is not a sacred but a “barbaric” act, in the etymological sense of βάρβαρος, not Greek, and thus not Western—and through this rationalist gesture of exclusion, we might still feel momentarily purified. Mimetic theory provides a correction to such ethnocentric reflexes by positing the horror of sacrificial violence at the origins of Western civilization.