Civil war and the world trade center: violence, sacrifice and sacred remembrance

Abstract

AbstractThe tenuous and difficult relationship between modernity and the sacred is examined in this paper through the use of two historical examples. One, the battle of Gettysburg, hallowed and assimilated into the American tradition, took place before the forces of capitalism and technology had transformed American Christianity and civic republicanism into psychotherapy and bureaucratic rationality. Lincoln's recasting the battle as a consecration crystallised a moral responsibility that permanently bound his nation over to the task of equality. The second example, the World Trade Center attack, is still raw in our memory. The violence and horror of that day returns us again to sacrifice as the path to the sacred. We are no longer merely “inward” focussed individuals working within rational rules or the marketplace because of that sacrifice. We experience ourselves as an identity, a destiny and a shared meaning. This comparison uncovers the disturbing presence of violence in the sacred. We use Georges Bataille's definition of sacred as sacrifice that ruptures an oppressive continuity establishing clarity and intimacy with the divine; the sacred is the unhealed wound that calls, perhaps unheeded, for redemption. Copyright © 2003 Whurr Publishers Ltd.