La fin du sacrifice: Les mutations religieuses de l'antiquite tardive (review)

The immediate origin of this book is a series of four conferences that the author gave at the Collège de France in 2004 on the subject of religious change in late antiquity. In addition to the four talks, Stroumsa appends an earlier comparative study on spiritual direction in order to round out the general argumentation of the book.

The distant origin of the book, however, lies in the more than twenty years of thought that Stroumsa has devoted to the study of religious change in late antiquity. As a result, he is able to organize the more compelling insights of his work into a synthetic whole that provides the scaffolding for a better understanding of the dynamics of the Christian transformation of paganism in late antiquity. What is new and refreshing about this work is the fact that Stroumsa's outlook is thoroughly informed by the Jewish antecedents to this transformation, even as he recognizes the need to understand the foundation of those changes in the light of contemporary religious turmoil in the Middle East.

In searching for the unity in diverse religious traditions in late antiquity, Stroumsa rejects the conflation of unity and identity as well as teleological and ideological approaches to change. This refusal enables him to turn his attention to a comparative and evolutionary study of four common threads of religious mutation: the new concern with the self, the expansion of religions of the book, the transformation of ritual, and the movement from civic to communal religion. Taken together, these changes constitute a paradigm shift that requires the recognition of the Jewish contribution to the formation of Christian identity.

Chapter 1 revolves around Stroumsa's thesis that internal cultural change in the Greco-Roman world cannot account for the religious character of the anthropological transformation of late antiquity. Neither imperial religion nor the mystery cults provide an adequate explanation of the genesis of the Christian understanding of the inner self. Only the philosophers (the Platonists) and the Jews succeeded in generating the archetypes of the self that were eventually fused in the Christian conception of the soul. Though Stroumsa is mindful of the subtle and complex manner in which these ideas appear in pagan and patristic texts, for him the decisive difference between philosophers and Christians hinges on the fact that the Christian conception of the self reflects the Jewish emphasis on repentance, bodily resurrection, and prophecy. In both cases, in contrast to the philosophers, moral conversion trumps intellectual conversion.

The need to "read" the soul's inner movements, to provide an exegesis, so to speak, of the self's psychic content, constitutes the subject matter of chapter 2. The point of this chapter is to explore the role that the expansion of the religions of the book played in disseminating Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. Through its appropriation of the Jewish scriptures and its innovative use of the codex, Christianity transformed ancient oral culture into a textual culture of silent reading in which the ultimate goal was the ethical transformation of the self.

Chapter 3 interprets the preceding chapters through the lens of the central theme reflected in the title: the end of animal sacrifice in the ancient world. As in the previous two chapters, Stroumsa emphasizes the movement towards internalizing and privatizing religion. By tracing the roots of this change to the consequences of the destruction of the Temple, he is able to demonstrate the transition from the public cult of animal sacrifice to the inner, private observance of the moral law as the new locus of sacrificial offering. This background permits him to discern the continuity between the Christian remembrance of Christ's death on the cross and the Jewish memory of the sacrifices of the Temple.

Stroumsa expands this analysis in chapter 4 with reference to the transition from the public character of civil religion to the private nature of communal religion based upon individual conversion to, or...