Human sacrifice never quite went away. It persists in abstract forms as varied as sex trafficking to feed the porn industry’s meat grinder and judicial scapegoating which is becoming almost as prevalent in the hyper-fragile liberal secularism of the West as it is in the show trials of the Islamic world. Recent months have shown the resurgence of a deliberately disturbing trend within the broader phenomenon of human sacrifice, namely suicide by self-immolation. Brought to the attention of Western eyes as a means of protest in the 1960s by Thich Quang Duc, a Mahayana Buddhist monk who set himself alight to draw attention the persecution of Buddhists in South Vietnam, it is a tradition primarily rooted in arcane kabbalic corners of Buddhist and Hindu theology, although it was not unknown in Europe’s pre-Christian antiquity. Self-immolation is a gesture with immense semiotic weight and speaks either of a supreme interior power or a clawing, animal hopelessness.
Recently, we witnessed the horrific manifestations of this woeful act in the death of Maxwell ‘Max’ Azzarello, who set himself on fire outside Trump’s New York trial on April 19th to draw attention to a purported imminent, internationally orchestrated state of artificially generated totalitarian apocalypse. Similarly, in February we had the case of Aaron Bushnell, a young American serviceman who set himself ablaze outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, stating that he would not “participate in [the] genocide” he believed Israel to be conducting in Gaza. To suffer for a political cause is one thing, to die for it quite another. Without dissecting the precise political convictions of either man, it is worth noting that suicide for the sake of an agenda is essentially metaphysical and speaks of a search for some aim that transcends the jumbled scuffle of imperfect political schemes and the compromised regimes which attempt to realise them.
A fundamental crisis of masculinity has contributed to many younger men giving up on life, and one could argue that lads like Bushnell and Azzarello simply take the societally acquired premise of their looming obsolescence to its logical conclusion, imbuing their self-inflicted deaths with the meaning they struggled to attain in life. They are raging against a world grown immune to the human quest for purpose and heedless to men’s desire for self-sacrificial integration into a deeper sphere of meaning. No God to serve, no wife or children to love, no country to die for worth the polyester flag draped over the coffin …
In a way, self-immolation is the only recourse left for those whose other routes to authentic, enchanted, transfigured masculinity have been closed, leaving them to sear into their flesh the seraphic spiritual emptiness of our generation. If life does not give you meaning, you must create it. Generations of young men have been left to lead lives of quiet despair and resigned themselves to mute spiritual, social, and genetic suicide in the form of a retreat into the pixel-spun phantasy of video games and masturbation. Structures such as Church, along with the familial and fraternal communities that once afforded substance, have rapidly disintegrated and left the insatiable maw of individualist consumerism to gnaw at the carcass of the 21st century’s etiolated masculinity.
In this case, the problem lies in the extinction of sacrificial paradigms which once defined (Christian) manhood, but which are now in many respects redundant and even consciously denigrated as bigoted icons of the old regime. In particular, marriage and fatherhood stood as cornerstones of masculinity and fostered men’s urge to love, strive, and vanquish. However, amongst Millennial and Gen-Z men a growing trend of perpetual bachelordom stems from and serves to deepen their divorce from the societal ‘game’ which they feel is rigged against them. Today’s man is disinherited by collective structures which have come to negate his purpose as a sacrificial warrior-priest. No single factor can be blamed for Western menfolk’s quiet retreat, nor is there an easy fix that can heal their castrated souls; any amelioration of occidental men’s suicidal disaffection will require a fundamental shift in consciousness and their radical re-integration into contexts which enable natural and supernatural modes of authentic human life to flourish. Young men need to be engrafted into life-giving modes of being which provide a sense of purpose and participation in a reality beyond themselves if self-sacrifice is to vivify rather than putrify them.
As a Christian, it is easy for me to respond to the spiritual crisis that has led to these acts of auto-pyrothania with the glib assertion that Jesus is the answer. Indeed He is.
However, it should also be noted that the psycho-social prosperity gospel is built on as much of a lie as the financial one.
Many (would-be) Christians are sold a well-meaning but misguided message of easy lifestyle optimisation in Christ, only to find themselves no less beleaguered, atomised, and alienated after they come to Him. De-fanged, plant-based Christianity has largely failed to evangelise young men. To inspire them, the Church must nourish young men’s hunger for a spiritual challenge whilst treating their brokenness with infinite compassion and tenderness, and at the same time present a powerful vision of who they might become in Christ as they seek to have their iron sharpened by a keener metal than the degraded culture offers. Sacrifice must be at the heart of a reinvigorated paradigm. We have the opportunity to shape and mould heroic, cruciform masculinity, yet we culpably lack both the courage and capacity to do so. Only a radical reconfiguration of our spiritual ambitions and the re-enfranchisement of men as central to that vision will enable the instauration of a revived Western Christendom in this century. Conversion to Christianity may not cure young men’s drive to sacrifice, but it might transform it.
René Girard contended that the Passion of Jesus Christ ended the transactional chain of sacrificial scapegoating by being the ultimate oblation of the divine to Himself in His human person: perfect satisfaction. Christ offers a universally complete sacrifice of whose guilt He is innocent, which opens up a doorway for His followers to make sacrifices that are unnecessary and therefore luxuriantly purposeful. The necessity of Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross paradoxically enables a new, liberated sacrificial paradigm in those who follow Him precisely because it is the final, perfect oblation.
After the Crucifixion, no more sacrifice is required. Any sacrifice the Christian offers may be hallowed by its sublimation into His sacrifice, and because the Christian suffers voluntarily and without obligation. Having been restored by this beautiful agony, Christians are called to give their life as a living sacrifice, in what Eliot called “The greater torment / Of love satisfied.” The problem is that Christian forms of self-sacrifice only work when (you believe that) they have the power to redeem, to sanctify, to make divinity manifest. Martyrdom is the unwilled but undaunted handing over of oneself to the hope of eternity, not the irremediable commission of one’s defunct life to the dust.
Outside of redemptive sacrificial engrafting into Christ, the success of self-immolatory sacrifice must be measured pragmatically, according to its efficacy as an agent of its intended change in the world. From this vantage point, the man-made armageddon Azzerello sought to prevent seems inconceivable, even to the most cynical, and the “f*cking revolution” he incited is likely to choke on its umbilical cord. Peace in the slaughterhouse of the Middle East for which Bushnell died sounds like the memory of a pipe dream. I honour these men’s deaths and mourn their tragic waste, especially as I fear that their sacrifices have been reduced to horrific media spectacles in which two beautiful, mentally ill human beings are voyeuristically dehumanised by the novelty of their manifestation(s) and the theological untranslatability of their motives to the 21st century mind. Crucifixion without resurrection is a pointless death, and we will find no angels sitting at the head of these men’s catafalques, only history’s brutal silence.
These men leave us with a very real instantiation of Domenico’s speech in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. Domenico, masterfully brought to life by Erland Josephson, is a crazed schizophrenic who lugubriously immures his family inside their Italian farmhouse for seven years in a febrile apocalyptic vigil. Towards the end of the film, he makes a dramatic peroration calling humanity back to an authentic way of life, before burning himself to death beneath the statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline in an act of protest at the modern world’s barbarism. This gesture lies somewhere in the desiccated hinterland between insanity and true mystical insight. In him, I hear the voices of these men, to which, for all the madness of their end, I fear we must listen:
The eyes of all mankind are looking at the pit into which we are plunging … the so-called healthy have brought the world to the verge of catastrophe. Man, listen! WE’RE NOT MAD! WE’RE SERIOUS! In you (are) fire and then ashes. And the bones in the ashes …We must go back to the … foundations of life without dirtying the water … What kind of world is this, if a madman has to tell you ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves!’ while there is still time?
“And God said to Ezekiel, ‘Shall these bones live again?'”
