Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“Forms of sacrality, or hallowed sites, whether liturgical or secular in origin and character, would be the islands of transcendence framing and channeling those desires and resentments. Modernity emerges out of the crisis of the unified Christian world of the late medieval period, so it would be most economical to assume that modernity would best be understood to consist of overlapping revisions of the Christian revelation. The Christian revelation, in Gans’ account, is that anyone who insistently asserts and represents the universalization of the mode of reciprocity implicit in the Judaic revelation of “God as the declarative sentence” will thereby bring upon himself universal antagonism. Jesus’s would be the sacrifice to end all sacrifices: insofar as we recognize our own complicity in the crucifixion we would recoil from our tendency to seek out scapegoats to account for social crises, thereby liberating our capacity to construct institutions which reinforce solidarity. While the maintenance of Christianity would seem to depend upon the willingness of some to step forward as martyrs, as representatives of Christ and as defenders of the faith, for most people it is enough to acknowledge the sacrifice only in ritualized forms. A Christian society, then, would not be one in which everyone takes up the cross and literally imitates Christ, but one in which the ever-present possibility of doing so is explicitly acknowledged and instances of actually doing so are honored and remembered.”

— Eric Gans, The Esthetic, the Sacred, and Originary Modernity · Fall 2007 · Anthropoetics