Copyright @ 1989 by William B.

Eerdmans Publishing Company

255 Jefferson Avenue SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49503
First British Edition 1989 by
Marshall Morgan and Scott Publications Ltd
Part of the Marshall Pickering Holdings group
Middlesex House, 34-42 Cleveland Street, London W1P 5FB UK

What I Believe
Jacques Ellul
translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved
Translated from the French Ce que je crois
@Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1987
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ellul, Jacques.
[Ce que je crois. English]
What I believe / Jacques Ellul; translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley.
p- cm.
Translation of: Ce que je crois.
ISBN 0-8028-3658-5
1. Ellul, Jacques. 2. Faith. 3. Christianity-20th century. 4. Civilization,
Modern-20th century. 5. Christian life-Reformed authors. 1. Title.
BX4827.E5A3 1989 230-dcI9
Marshall Morgan and Scott ISBN 0-551-01940-9
89-1623
CIP

INTRODUCTION

It would finally be much easier for me to say what I do not believe

than what I do believe. This initial statement might be attributed to a
negativism with which I am wrongly charged because I have repeatedly
said that the first duty of free people is to say no, or because I have often
taken up the Hegelian concept of the positive nature of the negative. But
it is a mistake to infer pessimism of negativity from this perspective, for no
one is at root more optimistic than I am. My ultimate vision is always
positive. Hasty reading allows of rash judgments.
For me the difference between what I do not believe and what I do
believe has a very different origin. What I do not believe is very clear and
precise. What I do believe is complex, diffuse-I might almost say
unconscious-and theoretical. It involves myself, whereas what I do not
believe can be at a distance. I can regard it as exterior and therefore
relatively well defined. It can be the object of a taxonomy. What I believe
finds me totally implicated personally. I can speak about it only as I do
about myself. I do not believe in an object but in a network of relations
which I cannot really expound because exposition demands a didactic
procedure, the dividing up of realities that belong to one another. I cannot
deal with everything at once. Persons of great talent might with a touch of
genius offer readers the whole complex of what they believe without
snapping the bonds and relations, authoring a great poetic text and also
giving readers the sense of a vibrant complex and the illuminating clarity
of a reality suddenly grasped. But I am not such a person. As an
industrious scholar I need to unravel the complexities,
1

WHAT I BELIEVE

to follow a lucid and rational path, to take up objects that I can examine
one after the other. I thus deprive things of their nature, I make patterned
planks of living things, I break up the relations between them. I can evoke
the complex but not reconstitute it for others. I put something definite and
bounded for something infinite.
Nothing, then, is more discouraging for me than to try to say what I
believe, for in so doing I give rise to all kinds of misconceptions. Yet I do
not know how else to proceed. To say what I do not believe is simple. I
do not believe in progress, or religion, or politics, or science as the final
answer. I do not believe that in society as it now is we can resolve in the
coming century either economic problems or the problems of the Third
World. What complicates things is that what I do not believe is closely
linked to what I do believe. The two cannot be dissociated in practice.
Yet they are not direct opposites: I would not say that if I do not believe in
progress it is because I believe in nonprogress. The relation is more
intimate and less logical. The two things depend on the taking of
positions to a higher, more definite, and more decisive hierarchical degree
or degree of abstraction. I have to go back to essential data in order to
see what will become what I believe and what I do not believe, the one
along with the other. I cannot say what I believe without implicitly tracing
a path in a flood of possibilities, choosing one and rejecting others that
are not necessarily contradictory but simply different. I cannot say quietly
that I do not believe in this without at the same time referring to an
implication of what I do believe. Thus we have to grasp the two together.
Yet the one can be clearly defined, whereas the other remains even for
me an object of constant deliberation and inquiry. In what becomes
didactically separate there is a need to retie the bonds, to bring the
themes together again, to play the subtle game of multiple relations. For
here as in each of us everything is connected with everything else-nothing
is isolated, without reference or referent. Yet only the reader can do what
is required, and to do so is not just a game or a matter of curiosity, but the
only path to understanding.
I also need to say something about the subject of belief itself.

INTROCUCTION

Two words call for notice, faith and belief.1 We have an annoying
tendency to confuse the two. Belief is an everyday matter and sets the
foundation for all that constitutes our existence. Everything depends on it;
all human relations rest on it. Unless I have good reasons to the contrary,
I believe spontaneously what people tell me: I have confidence in them a
priori. If this were not so, human relations would be impossible, as in the
kind of speech that only causes confusion or derision. I also believe
scientific truths. I believe that E = mc2 because I have been told it. The
whole educational system is based on belief. Students believe what their
teachers or their books say; they learn on a basis of belief. We also
believe spontaneously the witness of our senses, even when they are
disturbed. We believe similarly in certain words, such as the good, or
freedom, or justice, which we do not define plainly or consistently but to
which we cling firmly no matter what their content. A society could not
function if it did not rest on beliefs hidden in the deep recesses of each of
its members and producing coherent sentiments and actions. A society
without collective beliefs (which are, of course, individual in the eyes of
each member) would soon fall into lawlessness and enter a process of
dissolution. Beliefs are definitely the raison d' tre of society.
Faith is very different-it is addressed to God. But beliefs may also
be religious. There has always been an assimilation of belief to religion,
and there still is. Religious beliefs are part of the whole. Often (in a
debatable way) religio is connected with religare, "to tie. Religion binds
people together and binds them as a group to their god. It is precisely
this binding character that causes the problem, for it plunges us into a
sociological analysis of religion. It is finally for the sake of fellowship with
one another that people refer to a more lofty being or god that will serve
as a group guarantee and symbol. The objects of this religion may be
very different, whether one or more gods projected in heaven, or the
Universal. Other dimensions than the human can be apotheosized.
Reason can be deified, or science.

I have dealt with this theme, but rather differently, in Living Faith: Belief Doubt in
a Perilous World, trans. Peter Heinegg (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983).

WHAT I BELIEVE

Hitlerism made its own religion, as did Marxism-Leninism up to the 1970s.

The country can be regarded as divine. Progress has become a key term
in modern religion. Each cult has its own rites and myths and heretics
and believers and raison d' tre and believing potential. But the object of
religion is not necessarily God.
Faith in God-in a God who does not incarnate some natural force
or who is not the abstract and hypostatized projection of one of our own
desires or aspirations or values (Feuerbach), faith in a God who is
different from all that we can conceive or imagine-cannot be assimilated
to belief.
For this God cannot be assimilated to one of the
representations that we might easily multiply. If God is God, he is
inevitably different from all that polytheists call god. Each of those gods
can be described and defined; each has its own function and sphere of
action. But the God of faith is inaccessible and inassimilable. He is so
fundamentally other (if he were not, if he could be measured against one
of our values or beliefs, he would not be God) that we can neither define
nor contemplate him. The God of faith is totally inaccessible. The
affirmation of Feuerbach, that God is an absolutized value, was simplistic
and puerile. For one thing, we have no idea of what the absolute or the
infinite is. We cannot say anything about it or assimilate it. To talk about
an absolutized value might be to talk about God, but it is not possible for
human beings to absolutize anything.
In regard to the innumerable attacks made upon God, we may
simply say that those who make them do not know what they are talking
about. Often with just cause they are attacking the image of God that in a
given time and place people have made. But this is their own image of
God, made for convenience -it is not God. A commonly repeated formula
that is now accepted as self-evident is that we have made God in our own
image. But to say this is not to know what one is saying; it is childish
prattle. For if God is God, then all that we can say about him is just our
own approximation or perception, as when a child takes a pail of
seawater, stirs it until it foams, and then says he is carrying the ocean and
its waves. On our own we know nothing about God. Only when he
chooses to reveal a tiny part of his being do we achieve a tiny knowledge
and recognition.

INTROCUCTION

In this revelation God has to put himself on our level of apprehension, on

our cultural and intellectual level, if what he wants to communicate is to
be accessible. Thus there are variations, not because God is variable,
but because those whom he addresses are. He uses the most
appropriate means to establish communication with us - the word. When
he addresses himself to a person, it is always a very personal
interrelation.
The question arises, of course, why God chooses to give this
partial revelation. Why does he not keep an absolute distance? Why
does he not remain solitary, at work or at rest, and let us solve our own
problems on earth? The first answer is that no answer is possible. God
is unconditioned. If he were conditioned by anything else, he would not
be God. There is thus no "because" in his case. No prior reason can be
given for his decisions and acts. He decides to reveal himself in a way
that we can bear simply because he decides to reveal himself. But when
I look at what I am told about revelation in Judaism and Christianity, I can
give another answer which is not contradictory but complementary. As
Creator, God does not want to leave his creatures without relation or
reference, like a newborn infant cast out on the highway. In love God
cannot remain alone; love has to address itself to someone outside the
self. God is not solipsistic. He directs his love to creation, to his
creatures, and tells them what they need to know about him if they are to
survive and flourish.
We can see now the difference between faith in this God and all
beliefs. A belief that enables society to maintain itself is necessarily
collective. Apt at seizing on the fullness of its object, it is an uplifting force
that carries us above ourselves (even though it may do much mischief
when it pretends to be absolute and exclusive). Faith is at every point the
opposite. First of all it is a personal relation. It does not grasp the
fullness of him to whom it is directed. It is not useful to society; on the
contrary, it is a disturbing force, causing breaks in social ties. Above all, it
can arise only because it is God who comes down to us. This is the key
point. Belief always tries to mount up to what it regards as God. Faith
receives him who comes down from his transcendence to set himself on
the level of the child that he wishes to rejoin. No two things could be
more different.

WHAT I BELIEVE

Yet history shows that faith can turn into belief, though belief
cannot become faith. Faith undergoes this metamorphosis when it claims
to have full knowledge of the God to whom it is directed; when it brings
with it the establishment of institutions to conserve and transmit it; when it
tries to explain itself in radical formulas that serve to determine what is
true; when it pretends to embrace the whole of society (and at that
moment undoubtedly becomes the cement of this society); when it takes
fixed form in definitive and unchangeable affirmations; when it thinks it
can force people to recognize the truth of its God. Whenever any of these
things takes place, there is no more faith but belief and institutional
religion. But in this book, though the title refers ambiguously to believing
and I am forced to speak about believing I am also trying to say what faith
means for me.
I have not finished with belief, for if one aspect of belief is belief in
what I call absolute values, there is also a very different sense. Belief
means esteeming thinking, valuing. I believe what I regard as accurate,
what I accept in appraisals, though these might be irrational and
subjective. I believe that someone is my friend. I believe that it might be
useful to me to read a certain book. I believe that an event will take
place. I believe that such and such an act or decision will have such and
such consequences. This believing all takes place in a confluence of
things internal and things external, of things sensory and things
intellectual, of things imaginary and things experimental.
This believing can vary a great deal, but finally it stays the same.
The mystery of identity! What proves to me that I am myself? All my
bodily cells change every seven years. I become quite different, and yet I
have an invincible conviction that I am the same person I was some years
ago. I have seen my body deteriorate, yet I am always myself. Similarly,
those who have had organ transplants or significant prostheses are
convinced they are still the same persons. Beyond the different parts of
the body there is a sort of totality that changes and yet remains the same.
Elements in the system might be stilled but the system maintains its
identity and processes. Another and even deeper meaning of belief, then,
is that without any proof or guarantee I believe intensely that I am myself,
and that there is

INTROCUCTION 7

nothing more false or futile than for me to say that I am a different person.
If all that this means is that I never know myself completely, that there is a
good deal of shadow in all of us, and that perhaps a different person
resides there, that is a truism. But if it means that I am someone else and
not myself, that is a falsehood along the lines of all the attempts of
European intellectuals to destroy being, to unravel personality, to dilute
and weaken things. To this I oppose staunchly my belief that I am who I
am and not just a label that corresponds to nothing living. I realize that
what I have held to be true for some years is no certainty, yet also that my
belief is enriched by experiences and encounters and chances and
quests which have not given me certainty but which have made me
different and still the same.

decisions, people cannot believe it because they all support the actual
event that carries implications beyond their conception. It was thus with
Cuba, Vietnam, and Cambodia. It is thus with belief in the technological
society, with unemployment, and with the fatal evolution of a leftist
government in France.

Yet another point is that not wanting to believe, or refusing to do

so, has always been for me an important aspect of belief. One may look
at this aspect in two ways. An event takes place, clearly interweaving and
combining many factors, which I find horrible, unacceptable, and very
painful. I see the results of the acts and decisions of politicians. I see the
spread of foolish and disastrous opinions which engulf the masses under
the guidance of the mass media. For me there is here a tragic certainty;
the developments of the situation seem to be ineluctable. But while I may
be unable to change things, I refuse to believe them. I know they will be
fatal, and I will not believe it. I do not say that they will not happen, but
my feeble protest lies in the refusal to believe. I remember that in 1939,
one month before the declaration of war, I was walking along a road
outside Bordeaux, and the more I thought about the situation the more I
saw that war was inevitable. But in a revolt of my whole being I would not
believe what I knew to be certain. All my life I have in fact been torn in
this way between what are clearly the evil results of something and my
refusal to believe, a fragile obstacle which in my distress I try to put in the
way of things irresistible. The only thing I can do in such circumstances is
to utter warnings, telling others what is likely to happen so that they will be
on guard and refuse to believe that things will turn out well. Today, alas! I
am haunted by the terrible certainty of a nuclear war, but I do not want to
believe it. When I announce what is going to happen, what is the logical
result of actual

WHAT I BELIEVE

Regarding this leftist government, I wrote an article on the election

of Mr. Mitterand which caused much offense because I said that nothing
important had happened. It was clear to me that except for some
spectacular but futile gestures such as nationalization the Socialists would
be forced to enter the same path of technological progress as any other
government, that they might alter the rules of the political game with
mandates and political careerism but that they could not alter the
structures of society or the economic domination of multinational
corporations, and that like all other regimes they would have to take such
measures as circumstances demanded. All this seemed certain to me.
But I like the Socialists, I like the ideals of justice and freedom, and I could
wish that they would bring about a true Socialist revolution, as I have
often said. Thus I did not want to believe that things would happen as I
saw they would. I was charged with attacking the Socialists when I really
wanted to show them that the task was harder than they thought. It was
all in vain.
There is another and rather different aspect to my refusal to
believe. I see existing objects, whether political or economic; I see the
tendencies and irreducible elements in them. I see them as I might see a
rock. Yet I refuse to give them my adherence, I refuse to believe in their
excellence or value, I refuse to add my belief to their existence. I see the
modem state, or bureaucracy, or money, or technique2-they are what they
are. I just will not believe in them. They are self-sufficient, although in
fact they constantly solicit my adherence and even my veneration. I let
them be, but do not believe in their value or goodness

For Ellul technique means "the totality of methods rationally arrived at and
having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of
human activity" (The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson [New York:
Knopf, 19641, p. xxv). See also Jacques Ellul, Perspectives on Our Age, trans.
Joachim Neugroschel, ed. William H. Vanderburg (New York: Seabury, 1981),
pp. 32-33.-TRANS.

INTROCUCTION

or truth or utility or gratuitousness. Let them be content with their

existence. I myself am not, though I know very well that I cannot free
myself of them. What we see here is that human belief adds to such
objects an incomparable value. It at once makes them much more than
things; they acquire a human look. Marx often compared capitalism to the
legendary vampire. I think one might extend the comparison to all social,
political, and economic objects. They are only things, but they suddenly
become active, prominent, and incontestable. They have effects when
people begin to believe in them. They do not feed on blood like the
vampire but on belief that verges on confidence and even affection. I for
my part rule out belief of this kind.
These, then, are my clarifications of the simple word belief. Each
time it is a matter of what I believe. This is not psychoanalysis. There is
in fact no spontaneity or immediacy about belief, contrary to a common
sentiment! To find out what we believe and do not believe we have to
examine ourselves and reflect on ourselves. We are also challenged, for
the question arises whether it is legitimate for me to believe this or that.
To talk about belief is to inquire at the same time into its validity or truth.
It is to enter into a critical study that is not without danger. There is no
place for the facile skepticism that says it believes in nothing precisely
because it is blind to what it does believe in. We have to be serious
because our whole being is at stake here. When I ask what I believe in, I
am "searching my conscience," as they used to put it. I am passing
judgment on what I believe as this is brought to light. As one advances, a
double movement takes place which causes one constantly to come
across another belief that is often hidden but which also provides the
pause needed to move on to its criticism. "As one advances"-we either
have to advance here or be silent. I cannot say easily what I value or
think just now, what I regard as true. I have to do something more
difficult, which will undoubtedly involve some political evaluations, if I am
to try to bring the roots of my beliefs to light.

Chapter 1
LIFE HAS MEANING

PART I
VARIOUS BELIEFS

I believe that life has meaning. We are not on earth by chance; we

do not come from nowhere to go to nowhere. This is a statement; it
cannot be proved. Meaning implies both orientation and significance.
Not every event or act or word has meaning, but everything is set in that
orientation and signification. Orientation covers a series of chances that
push the race from the Paleolithic Age to the Neolithic Age and then to
the Bronze Age and the age of information. I am careful not to talk about
a philosophy of history or of agreement between this chance adventure
and a goal to be attained. I do not follow Teilhard de Chardin when he
talks about qualitative leaps to higher periods and a convergence in every
case.
But I reject absurdity. Here again I am making an arbitrary
statement. Absurdity does reign, of course; I find it everywhere. I am
convinced that human conduct is often absurd, and many events seem to
be irrational. But they seem to be so because we cannot put them in the
total context. It is absurd for the parents of an abnormal child, mongoloid
or mentally deficient, to want to bring up this child instead of turning it
over to a specialized institution. But when we consider the miracle of love
that this situation might represent, the mutation that it might cause in
those around the child, the human and psychological development that it
might carry with it for all concerned, the absurd act becomes a model of
humanity. I have seen this.
I have also known a man who, when his wife became a grave
hemiplegic and lost her voice, sold his business and devoted all his time
to daily care for her in her sickness. This
13

14

VARIOUS BELIEFS

care claimed his whole life from the time he was fifty. He came from a
humble background but he worked out a genuine philosophy of life. He
could say to me: "Life is good and wonderful. We all have a mission on
earth but we have to realize above all that life is always good. An absurd
act? A meaning of life? He moved on steadily to personal enrichment
and fulfillment instead of seeking petty comfort and happiness. He was
no believer and knew of no end beyond death. But this did not prevent
him from giving meaning to every moment in life. To find meaning we
have to look at an event in the complexity of human interrelations and in
the long term. What seems to make no sense to me now, what I am thus
disposed to ignore, can show itself tomorrow to be full of positive
implications and can give direction to a series of events that seem to be
inert.
But we need to make some distinctions to avoid ambiguity. The
statement that life has meaning might be taken in two ways. First, it might
mean that life has meaning intrinsically. In this case, no matter what our
attitude, all that happens has meaning. Meaning qualifies life itself. Our
task in this case is to find the meaning.1 This is the point of the
well-known dictum: History has meaning. For the successors of Marx the
meaning of history was unveiled by the discovery of the class struggle.
We need only apply this criterion to each situation, they said, and we find
its meaning (in the twofold sense of the term-significance and direction).
And whether we discover it or not, history

When he received the Nobel prize for literature in 1985, Claude Simon began his
speech by saying that he had nothing to say. He did not need to say this because
his novels demonstrate it. There is no truth anywhere. But more seriously, he
added that in all his life and after all his many experiences he had never found
any sense anywhere unless it was (as Barthes, he believed, said after
Shakespeare) that the world simply has the significance of existing. But not to
mean anything is not to denote anything but oneself, not to be the sign of anything
not to have any direction or value (but then why, for example, did Simon himself
escape from prison camp during World War II?), not to be able to conceive of any
truth. If one holds to the strict sense of these words, there is no meaning, there is
no point in living except as a mere pot that is there because it is there. And if
there is no point in living, why go on? I think that to say there is no meaning
brings us up against a final choice: either to go mad or to commit suicide. Unless
talking like that is just a way of talking a literary device. I believe that this was the
case with Simon, for if nothing makes sense, then his books make no sense
either, and in that case why write them?

LIFE HAS MEANING

15

goes its way and has its own meaning like a watch that ticks away
whether we look at it or not.
But, second, Marx also said that we make our own history. This is
not a simple matter. In one case all we have to do is to consider what act
or decision will enter into the meaning of history. In another case we
make independent decisions that can complicate the course of history
and apparently put it off track, or we might say that our specific calling is
to give sense to what takes place, that nothing has meaning on its own,
but that we can find the meaning, that doing so is the dignity of human
beings, who establish history and morality. On this view events are the
fruit of chance or the play of multiple neutral factors, and we rise up and
say: "This is what all this means, and this is what I am going to do now in
consequence."
I believe that in the long run both interpretations are correct. Life
has an orientation, a final end toward which everything moves. I realize,
however, that I can say this only because I am a Christian. I know that
the human adventure moves on to fulfillment, not in glory, but in a rupture
followed by a recreation which is the consummation of this whole history.
If I step outside this faith, the human adventure has no orientation of its
own. It is not true that history as such has meaning. It is not true that the
movement from the Paleolithic Age to the Neolithic Age and then to feudal
society and industrial society was logical and coherent. Human history is
in fact a tale told by an idiot. The Bible says as much when it depicts
history as the headlong gallop, without direction, route, or reason, of the
four horses of the Apocalypse: the horse of political and military power,
the horse of economic power, the horse of death with the cortege of its
causes, and the horse of the word, the Word of God. In a furious ride
they cover the whole earth, and it is the combination of their tracks that
we call history. History as such has neither goal nor meaning. Only in
retrospect can I lean upon it and give it meaning. The situation is such
that prior events lead to this point and therefore they have this orientation
and value. But a posteriori explanation does not help to throw light on
tomorrow. I do not know what to do in order to keep within the meaning
of history. There are too many factors and parameters. I make a chance
throw, convinced that I am

16

VARIOUS BELIEFS

doing what ought to be done. If I cannot find a logical and rational

sequence, I still attribute meaning symbolically and mythically. To do so
is not silly. It gives us a very rich and profoundly true bouquet of
meanings. Myth is the symbolical explication of the meaning that we
rightly attribute to what we see eternally, globally, and personally. Yet the
human adventure, realistically viewed, makes no global sense. I can give
it meaning for the sake of honor or coherence, and to fight futility, the
absurdity that is no proper climate for humanity. I cannot stand being
meaningless.
At the level of personal life, I am convinced that every event,
adventure, and encounter has its own meaning. Nothing in human
relationships lacks meaning: neither a chance meeting nor an illness that
attacks us. Everything makes sense because everything concerns these
strange beings that we call human and that are significant in themselves.
Each word and glance has meaning (in the twofold sense of the term).
Some things orient me to life and some to death. Some have for me a
signification that I must integrate into my life if I deserve to be called
human. If there is no meaning collectively in global history, our human
calling is to attribute meaning to it. (We may make mistakes but that is
not important; we survive them.) But in personal and interpersonal life
every event has meaning. Those who think human life is absurd have
only two replies, either suicide or the transformation of the absurd into the
proper meaning of existence (as definitively in Camus). Each of us must
ask about the meaning of what happens to us or of what we have tried to
do. This is the proper work, not of the intellect, but of the conscience.
For finding the meaning of life is not a mathematical problem that one can
solve by reasoning. It is a problem of life and responsibility.
The meaning-discovered, discerned, or merely glimpsed -needs to
be integrated into what, again, the living are called upon to live. The
meaning of yesterday's event is for me today's decision and helps me to
see the new meaning in what is now before me. Even apparently
insignificant things in life may be vital, and that means we must be on the
alert, on guard against routine and repetition so that we can discern in
what seems to be futile or fleeting something dazzling and determinative if

LIFE HAS MEANING

17

only we have eyes to see it, if only we are ready for it, if only we are
attentive to it and not diverted by distractions.
We live today in a strange and unsettling world in which we are
caught as in the clamps of a vice. On the one side we are claimed by
jobs that are repetitive and impersonal (whose model is the assembly
fine), or so swift and pressing that we can hardly see what is going on or
achieve the distance needed if we are to appreciate the significance and
orientation (the utility) of what we are doing. It seems as if the production
and utilization of all our vital forces are organized in such a way as to
prevent us from putting the question of meaning. This is indeed a
dangerous question, for if we find out that what we have to do makes no
sense, we will object. But this organization itself means that protests, for
example, by workers, leave on one side the things that really matter in
fife. They make superficial demands and miss reality (denying its
existence) because they never have the chance of putting the question of
meaning to what they are doing. I refer to laborers, but I might just as
well speak of all those who are engaged in the collective order of modem
work.
The other side of the vice, which often comes into play through
excess of information, might be defined as the refusal to put the question
of meaning. If our life in modem society and what we see of the world in
the media is so horrible and distressing and frantic and dangerous, I not
only refuse to be invaded by its horrors but also refuse to believe that it
can have any meaning. I refuse to seek any meaning. But I also refuse
to live in absurdity. Hence my only option is to turn aside and find
distraction. I escape from horror in play. This is an ancient attitude
illustrated in Boccaccio's Decameron. During the Black Death, some
young men and women fleeing the scourge took refuge in a
well-barricaded and well-provisioned castle, and while people were
stuffed in open carts outside they gave themselves up to pleasures and
games, telling the famous stories imagined by Boccaccio. The work of
horror and death makes no sense. I do not want to tire myself out trying
to discover what it might mean for me to attribute signification to it. In
face of the absurd and the horrible, it seems best to resort to play,
evasion, absence.
But what once a few privileged people could do, all of us can now
do. So that no one should put the disturbing question

VARIOUS BELIEFS
of meaning, a maternal society provides us today with scores of games
designed to claim our interest and attention. We also acquire the habit of
so watching television that the horrible news broadcast by it finally
becomes part of the game. The way the news is presented also helps us
to avoid the traumatism of meaning and questioning. After seeing a
famine in Sahel or the ruins of Beirut (in a mere three minutes) we pass at
once and in the same way to the oddities of modem fashion or to soothing
sports. No one must enter the labyrinth of meaning, where one risks
indeed an encounter with the Minotaur, until everything is explained and
determination is possible. I think however, that people are not yet totally
enslaved or robbed of all disquiet. Not yet! If ever they are, then in the
abundance and the play and the risk we shall witness the worst
regression of humanity since the Neolithic Age.
By way of final clarification, although I have tried to show the
difference between collective life and individual life in the matter of
meaning, it is life alone that can have meaning. There is no meaning in
the infinitely big or the infinitely little, nor in the banal matter of our daily
environment.
Neither the orbits of the planets nor corpuscular
movements correspond to any history (only people, not matter, have and
make history), and therefore they have no meaning. They have no
signification or orientation, for their changes and evolutions are directed to
no end. There is nothing ultimate about them from which we might
deduce such an end. This is why it seems so futile and unimportant to try
to find links between the stars and us (astrology) or to try to find in the
chances of the material world mysterious meanings or indications of the
way we should live or decide. All these things are neutral and blind. But I
am well acquainted with those who, coming up against some absurd and
unexpected event, a simple play of circumstances, begin at that moment
to examine their life and choices, so that if they do not find the meaning of
this chance event in itself, they do at least come across some truths about
the meaning of their own lives.

VARIOUS BELIEFS

Chapter 2
CHANCE, NECESSITY, ACCIDENT
Concerning matter, I accept the play of chance and necessity
demonstrated by Jacques Monod.1 In the initial situation nothing is
established in advance for matter. There is no unilinear causality or
finality to determine a course leading to a prescribed end. Millions of
combinations of millions of possible factors are possible, and these are
random combinations. Most of them fail and come to nothing. One, at
times, succeeds. But when it does, it imposes itself by force, takes its
place in the universe, and obeys at once not the joyful intoxication of
freedom but the law of necessity dictated to it by its own components and
its place in the universe. From the moment that the play of chance has
thrown up from millions of possible combinations one that is unique,
lasting, stable, and coherent, it obeys laws that enable it to persist but that
also prevent it from becoming anything else. This is the necessity that we
can know scientifically.
What stops me from accepting Monod's system in its totality is in
the first place the ambivalence of what he calls chance. At the outset he
puts us in a world of chance but never tells us what he is talking about.
Philosophers, mathematicians, and physicians offer us many definitions of
chance. The term is not clear or univocal. I have the impression that in
the course of his exposition Monod plays with different possible
meanings. A second and more serious objection relates to the fact that
Monod
19

See Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural

Philosophy of Modem Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Knopf,
1971). TRANS

20

wants to make of his presentation a kind of metaphysics or universal

system. Everything everywhere is reduced to the play of chance and
necessity. He thus becomes no less dogmatic than those whom he
criticizes constantly, for example, those who see a final goal. In
particular, he rejects the specificity of living things.
As for myself, with many modem scientists I accept the uniqueness
of living things. They cannot be reduced to the mechanistic play of cells
and molecules. Even if one could explain or even reproduce the
innumerable interrelations and interconnections of neurons, -one would
not achieve thought. I like Mumford's comparison of the brain and
thought to the disk and music. One can reproduce the disk but that is not
the music. The music existed before the disk. The play of neurons does
not produce thought in any systematic or original fashion; it simply makes
it possible. An additional, heterogeneous factor causes the extraordinary
combination that produces thought. To reject teleology is fine, but it is
obvious that the eye, for example, is truly inexplicable. Why should the
different and atypical cells that compose the eye, present in an embryo,
finally come together in a coherent way and form this organ? What leads
them to associate so as to bring about this result? How are we to explain
the attraction of one cell to another that produces the organized totality
that will be this organ? I refer to the eye precisely because it is made up
of cells that are not identical or repetitive. No answer can be given if we
simply look at the intrinsic features of each cell. I believe, then, that there
is something specific about living things that corresponds neither to
chance nor to necessity.
Nevertheless, unceasingly in the composition and reproduction of
this universe there are series of accidents. In what seems to be a very
fixed and closed game, an accident is possible, that is, the production of
something other than what might have been expected (and again one
might see chance here). Hence there is no clear evolutionism. Not only
are there apparently inexplicable leaps in evolution; there are also
qualitative changes. The implication is that no single system can explain
the reality of the world and that which constitutes it. There is no formula
of reality. Yet this is what we have been

21

CHANCE, NECESSITY, ACCIDENT

trying to achieve by the increasingly complex models that are now

presented, by the bringing into play of feedback (positive and negative),
by the importance attached to crystals and vapor, by allowance for an
ever greater complexity. The more we advance, the more the complexity
grows. As order comes out of disorder, so information grows out of
reports. Chance and necessity are not by a long way adequate to explain
things. Order growing out of disorder is a fine image, but the process is
as inexplicable as the mathematical transition from zero to one. Yet the
problem there is only intellectual, whereas here it is real and even
existential. We learn the measure of it from the enormous work of E.
Morin.2 In other words, with living reality we are placed before a complex
system that is set even further beyond our grasp by the possibility of new
phenomena appearing. Attempts have been made to make these new
things logical and accessible, but far too often at the expense of
rationalization, schematization, and reductionism.
In our own day, there are new things of a different kind. Up to now
one could talk of new things produced by the interaction of natural
elements themselves, and in some cases only as the prelude to a goal. It
seems to me that the supernovae are symbolical in this regard.
Astronomers see them appear suddenly. They are particularly bright and
dazzling stars, but we now know that the excess of light is simply a last
sign of termination and death. Now, however, we find different new things
on earth, artificial things humanly produced.
Human beings are
introducing new substances, chemical products that did not previously
exist, and new materials made of these products. They are introducing
new bacilli and new and unexpected disturbances of nature. They are not
just imitating nature (talking machines and active robots) or making things
like it. They are also upsetting nature by interventions no less traumatic
than earthquakes or typhoons. And there is a difference, for whereas the
latter are accidental and sporadic, our human interventions are
permanent and regular. We are killing off lakes and rivers. We are
destroying forests either by massive deforestation (the Amazon

See E. Morin, La mthode: Vol. 1: La nature de la nature (Paris: Seuil, 1977);

Vol. 11: La vie de la vie (Paris: Seuil, 1980).

VARIOUS BELIEFS

22

basin is a victim here) or by acid rain. We are depleting the level of

oxygen and raising that of C02, which lies in the atmosphere and will
lead, scientists think to either a warming or a cooling of the planet. We
are similarly increasing the level of radioactivity, and although this seems
to be negligible in comparison with natural radioactivity, it accumulates
indefinitely and is never lost. We keep producing materials that cannot be
broken down, though we are already swamped by them. These are not
the angry arguments of an ecologist. They are facts recognized by
scientists, with long-term results that we cannot calculate, producing a
new, irreducible factor through human activity, and altering the whole
ecosystem.
The situation becomes even more difficult if we adopt the
perspective of certain physicists such as d'Espagnat who espouse the
principle of nonseparability, that is, that no phenomenon in the universe
can be validly separated, scientifically, from any other, that all things
belong together, and that everything produced at one point has
repercussions upon everything else. This is simply a generalization of
what has been known for a long time from observations in microphysics,
namely, that even the presence of the observer modifies the phenomenon
observed. In a different sphere, that of systems, the same has been
given emphasis by the demonstration that in a closed system any
modification of one of the components can transform the whole system
and all the other components. The old certainties regarding fixed data,
limited causality, and the separability of factors (whether in history,
physics, or any other discipline) have all been called into question in what
one might truly call a crisis, not of science, but of the ideology of science
and its univocity. We live in a universe of both solidarity and contingency,
susceptible to what is new and unexpected.

24

Chapter 3
THE WORD
As human beings, we have to take this contingency and unity into
account. We can do so only by the word. I move here into one of the
commonplaces of our day. We are above all speaking beings. I will not
trace the great attention that has been paid for the last thirty years to
analyzing word, language, and discourse. From a much earlier date and
without the scientific apparatus, I myself have been gripped by the unique
and irreplaceable character of the word, but for very different reasons:
because God created the word, because he has revealed himself
uniquely by his Word, because the incarnate Word is the Word of the
eternal God, because the God in whom I believe is Word. Hence every
human word is for me decisive and irreplaceable. I have noted elsewhere
the radical antithesis between speaking and seeing.1 I will be brief about
this so as not to be redundant. We have to understand that both are
indispensable. They belong to different orders which we must not
confuse. They are complementary.
The word is of the order of truth; it is located in the sphere of truth.
It can also at the same time be falsehood if it does not speak this truth.
For me, this possibility results precisely from the fact that the human word
is a response to the Word of God. In this response it can lie. It is never
dictated by God's Word. It has its own autonomy as we ourselves do,
and thus it can say things different from what it hears in God's Word. Let
us not
23

See Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word, trans.

(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985).

Joyce Main Hanks

VARIOUS BELIEFS

engage in ridicule in this regard: I do not mean that one ought to reserve
the word only for chanting canticles or delivering sermons. I mean that
every word ought to carry the meaning that God has given to life (even
though it may never refer to God). It ought to carry joy, hope,
forgiveness, love, reconciliation, light, and peace in the order of truth. It
contributes to the elucidation of the meaning of life.
Seeing is of the order of reality and is indispensable if we are to
grasp the world. It sets us in the world and incites us to act in it. It does
not lead to truth,2 and it does not give meaning. The word is what can
give meaning to what we see. Seeing enables me to apprehend at a
stroke all that reality presents to us and that the word is ill-equipped to
describe. But the word (I am thinking of poetry), with reference to the
real, can bring out what is hidden in it. The two things cannot be
separated. Truth must incarnate itself in reality; reality is empty without
truth. If truth is the unfolding of meaning, this is the meaning of what we
see to be real and not phantom. This is how it is with us.
We have different temptations today, especially that of action. We
are immersed in a world of action, and the word seems to be incredibly
futile. We have all expressed or accepted the slogan: Actions speak
louder than words. Action is the decisive test, especially in politics.
Politicians are despised if they simply make speeches and do not act.
But I would say that their words may be classified as lies. Action does not
prove the validity of the word, nor is it more important. If we properly
consider what action signifies, we never find more than three answers.
First, it may be an affirmation of power, an expression of the will to
dominate. This is a daily experience. People act in order to succeed in
their undertakings, to crush rivals, to assert their nature, to triumph over
obstacles, to be hailed as great or illustrious. No matter whether the
opponents be individuals, nations, or natural forces, action always
denotes power. Dominating action takes many forms: money, science,
war (armed or padded by liberalism), technology, politics, publicity, and
many other means invented of an illusion or dream or

On religious visions and depictions see Jacques Ellul, Humiliation of the Word,
especially pp. 71-106, 237-54.

THE WORD

25

by people from the very beginning to overcome active or passive rivals.

I am not judging, for if human beings had not acted to conquer they would
not have survived. But we must make no mistake. Action is simply an
expression of a will to dominate which in itself is illimitable, and those who
win seldom have the wisdom to impose limits on themselves. It is the
word that will indicate the limits in the name of truth, but the word is weak,
and this is precisely why it is the servant of truth. All that we can do is
keep on repeating that this victorious action makes no sense and that it
will perish faster than it triumphed. What has been the good of all the
wars of this terrible 20th century? War, as action at its peak, is always
futile. What did 1918 achieve? Nothing but wind and storm. What did
1945 achieve? An extension of the gulag and a lot of mediocre talk.
What do wars of liberation achieve? Even worse dictatorships and misery
beyond anything previously known. But why continue with this balance
sheet of action? Elsewhere I have attempted similar analyses of
technique or revolution, and I have always concluded: Vanity of vanity, all
is vanity and a pursuit of wind (see Eccl. 1:14).3
The second and third answers relate to individuals, whose passion
for action may have two sources. The first is pleasure. By action people
hope to achieve enjoyment, to feel that they are alive and young and
vigorous at an elemental level. Games, sport, sex, creative work, the
intense pleasure of speed - a hundred other forms of action, but all
fleeting and momentary. Action here and now is a transitory thing that
can have only two results. Either we go back and reflect on what we have
done, and it is all dust and ashes; or else we keep on doing it, day after
day heaping up sensuous pleasures, ecstasies, and delights. In the
former case we have an Epicurean restraint that demands great discipline
and can be achieved only by the word. In the latter case we are in a
headlong flight like Don Juan, Mille etre, with a round of conquests, each
testifying that it is already over, and that there must be a search for new
pastures with

For example, on technique see Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans.
John Wilkinson (New York: Knopf, 1964); on revolution see Jacques Ellul,
Autopsy of Revolution, trans. Patricia Wolf (New York: Knopf, 1971). On the
theme in Ecclesiastes, see Jacques Ellul, La raison d'tre: Mditation sur
l'Ecclsiaste (Paris: Seuil, 1987).
(English translation forthcoming from
Eerdmans.) -TRANS

26

VARIOUS BELIEFS

increasing dissatisfaction. Action uses up action, and it uses us up even

more swiftly until the point is reached where there is only the sad
recollection of what was once action but has now become impossible.
The second point is that action serves as a substitute for truth. It is
the great intoxicant of society and individuals. We ask for no reason; we
plunge into action as into a party. Since action validates itself, we do not
ask about its why or wherefore. What we have here is the frenzy of
movement. We must not shut ourselves up in ourselves or in our rooms;
we must be on the move to something new in an illusion of renewal. We
must get out of ourselves in order to live only for entertainment, or we
must forget ourselves in highly qualitative actions, for example, in our
work or in deeds of charity, in the service of a cause or our country, in the
distraction of a hundred possible actions that are always open to us and
that are constantly renewed by an inventive technology that offers support
for all actions and that authorizes the greatest possible dispersion of our
being in its enterprises and fascinations. My acts allow me to escape the
haunting question: Who am I? Action suffices. Above all, when I have
gone to the edge of the world, when I have explored the most paradisal of
islands, I must not come back to myself and make the ridiculous
discovery that I am the same person as I was when I set out. Action
evades the word; indeed, that is one of its main functions.
The word is irreplaceable.
After many hesitations and
contradictions we have come back to the certainty that the word specifies
humanity. This was once believed; then people shrugged their shoulders.
On the one hand, discourse was reduced, thanks to a rigorous
systematics. Structural linguistics enabled us to elucidate the mysterious
elements in the word. Refined analyses brought to light the inconsistency
of belief in the unique character of the word. The new novel offered a
form of speech which came from nowhere and was going nowhere, which
had no content, no author or reader, no purpose, nothing to say, simply
being set there as an object. On the other hand, great discoveries were
made about animal language. We are not the only beings that can talk.
Linguistics has also taught us that animals have their own language and
can communicate with one another. At the same time the meaning of the
term

28
THE WORD
language was greatly extended.
television language, etc.

VARIOUS BELIEFS

27
We now hear about film language,

Yet the wheel always turns, and more swiftly today than ever.
Recent studies have tended to recover the unique character of spoken
human language. The fixed and stereotyped nature of the language of
bees and ants is especially contrasted with the fluidity and novelty and
openness of human language. It is the strength of language to be always
adaptive, though this is also its unavoidable weakness, for it allows of
uncertainties and ambiguities and internal contradictions. The plasticity of
human language that specifies us also places us in an indefinite world of
interpretation. This is precisely the situation that makes human beings
inventive and innovative. Our word is not just a simple game of
communication. The celebrated schema "sender-information -receiver" is
false as regards the word. So is the oversimple dichotomy of signifier and
signified. Two primary dimensions are now perceived. First, human
language takes on its value from what is not said and from the margins.
By itself, of course, what is not said says nothing. But it begins to be full
of meaning when it relates to a word that is said. The omitted, hidden,
avoided word that is hinted at is what enriches dialogue and makes it
human. The margins play the same role: to have a margin one must have
a text. And in these margins are all the glosses and additions and
interpretations that discourse leaves out.
There is more. We now know that language takes on meaning for
the interlocutor only because there exists a metalanguage. This concept
is taken in different ways. I will confine myself to one. If what is said is to
make sense, it must kindle a collection of images, feelings, recollections,
aspirations, judgments, etc. in the interlocutor. The word always refers to
something beyond it. A phrase apart from the speaker and hearer has no
meaning. What gives it value is the secret intention of the speaker and
the individuality of the hearer. In other words, language is never neutral.
We cannot analyze it objectively. It depends on the makeup of those in
dialogue, and it is inseparable from these persons. We can engage in as
many analyses as we like; the essential point escapes us. The whole
person speaks and the whole person receives. Even to try to put
ourselves on a purely conceptual plane does not help. Information

systems created by systems experts might serve as an example. In

order to work, the system has to be fed by human experts (without this
human input, no such system is possible). This input conveys part of the
experts' knowledge, and one can easily see that this knowledge, being
objectifiable, can be transmitted to a machine as it is. A more subtle point
is to see how the experts proceed. What are their methods, their savoirfaire? Being human, they have had to be in their line of work for a long
time to find the most effective method. Theoretical apprehension is not
enough. They have to have practical experience that they can analyze
and reduce to a minimal vocabulary in a domain of action and knowledge
that is easy to circumscribe.
But we come up against a limit here. For example, expertise on
works of art, especially paintings, cannot be programmed by a systems
expert. "In effect, though there are well-qualified experts in the field,
paintings offer a description of the world that can be reproduced only with
all the power and wealth of natural language."4 This is why there can
never be communication between computers and human beings.
Computers can understand human phrases relating to acts and limited
objectifiable concepts. They can give information and obey orders. But
this plainly has nothing whatever to do with the word or speech. The real
danger and serious risk that we run with the proliferation of computers
and robots is that being forced into relation with machines will slowly
reduce our word to the nonhuman, external, objective aspect, and this in
turn will make of the word something that is of use only for action. Once
this comes about, we will lose our human distinctiveness. Without what is
not said, without what is beyond itself, the word will simply be a utilitarian
cipher. Face to face with speaking robots, win we still know how to speak
in human fashion? This is one of the dangers of using computers in
schools. One may see already the incredible poverty of the vocabulary of
the young, their thirst for the inaudible word of rock music, the
replacement of meaning by rhythm, the lack of aptitude for any thought
that is not mathematical. The domination of the computer will complete
this work of mental destruction.

J.-G. Ganascia, "La conception des systmes-experts," La Recherche (October

1985).

VARIOUS BELIEFS

Chapter 4
DIALECTIC

We have not yet reached that stage. And here I am, expounding
the importance that I attribute to the word at the very time when I am
setting us in the nexus of chance, accident, and totality. I believe that,
voluntarily or not, we are led to think and express ourselves dialectically.
I must also try to bring out again the truth in the word dialectic, which is so
botched and overworked and despised today.
It might seem presumptuous for a nonphilosopher to embark on a
discussion of dialectic. But dialectic is so much a part of my way of
thinking and being that I am talking about myself and my studies rather
than about an academic mode of exposition or a philosophy outside
myself.
During the last few years I have been looking at comments,
criticisms, and reservations concerning my work, and I have profited by
them, as will be apparent in my future writings, if God wills. In saying this,
I am not saying that I will correct my mistakes. I have no thought of
reviewing my faults and listing them as a theologian once did.1 That
demands a great dose of humility but is not of great practical use.
Furthermore, there is another way of proceeding. In a dialogue, listeners
reconsider their own positions in the light of what they hear. They thus
reach a new stage. There is no need for self-criticism, for going back
over
29

*
An earlier, nearly identical version of this chapter was published as "On
Dialectic" (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley), in Jacques Ellul: Interpretive Essays,
ed. Clifford G. Christians and Jay M. Van Hook (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1981), pp. 291-308.-TRANS.
1
1. St. Augustine in his Retractions

what has been said and modifying what has been found to be wrong in it.
There is also no need for self-defense, for trying to show that the other
speaker is mistaken. Both these attitudes are sterile. We need to cross a
new threshold, taking two contrary positions into account and thus making
progress possible.
This brings us to dialectic. Dialectic allows me to explain some of
my "contradictions. Since my two intellectual origins are with Marx and
Barth, dialectic is central for me, and it might be useful if I explain this
theme more precisely.
1. General Sketch of Modern Dialectic
I am not attempting here to advance a general theory of dialectic.
Dialectic comes from the Greek dialogein, "to talk with," as in "dialogue.
But the dia also carries the sense of distance or contradiction. Dialectic
can be the art of dialogue, of developing thought by question and answer,
but it is also much more. The main problem in grasping what it is comes
from the fact that it is used and defined in scores of different ways. There
is the dialectic of Heraclitus, of Zeno, of Plato, of Aristotle, of Kant, and
also that of Hegel and Marx, who have given the term its modem
significance.
Let us begin at the simplest level. We are used to logical
reasoning in terms of cause and effect, to the sequence of algebraic
equations, to the linear expression of thought, and to the principle of
noncontradiction (black cannot be white). We are also used to a binary
system of alternatives (0 and 1, good and evil). We can accept
intermediary nuances, but we always find the one ruled out by the other.
True, the principle of causality has been seriously questioned by some
sciences, so that today scientists prefer to speak of groups of referents or
concomitants or more or less determinative factors. But this does not
greatly change the process of thought. The principle has also been
challenged by Marshall McLuhan, who relates it to writing and printing.
But the comprehensive mythical thinking that has developed with new
media and electronic transmission does not seem to me to be very
convincing. I myself stand in a different world.
The simplest comparison with which to begin is as follows.

DIALECTIC

32

31

VARIOUS BELIEFS

Put a positive charge with a negative charge and you have a

powerful flash. But the new phenomenon does not exclude either pole.
Are we sure, then, that positive and negative factors exclude one another
and that it is impossible in thought to uphold a no and a yes at the same
time? The two ways of posing the question illustrate the fact that there
are two sides to dialectic. There is a dialectic of ideas, but perhaps there
is also one of facts, of reality.

formation of the first two factors into a third that neither suppresses one or
the other of them, nor confuses them, nor adds to them. One might also
think of a living organism in which forces are constantly at work. Some of
them tend to keep the organism alive while others tend to break it down or
destroy it. At each moment there is a synthesis of the two groups of
forces which produces the state of the organism at that time.

In the first place, is dialectic merely a play of ideas functioning

according to the familiar classical schema of thesis, antithesis, synthesis?
Already in Plato we find a larger view than that: "The dialectician is the
one who sees the totality" (Republic VII). Dialectic, then, is not just a way
of reasoning by question and answer. It is an intellectual way of grasping
reality, which embraces the positive and the negative, white and black.
Descartes has an equally interesting remark to the effect that dialectic
teaches us how to handle all things, just as logic gives a demonstration of
all things ("Conversation with Bum-tan," in the Discourse on Method). In
other words, dialectic is not demonstrative reasoning or a system for the
formal deployment of thought. It claims always to be dealing with reality,
to be a means of taking account of reality. But reality includes positive
and negative things. It includes contradictory things that do not exclude
one another but coexist. Hence a system of vigorous thought ought to
take account of both the yes and the no without ruling out either, without
choosing between them, since every choice excludes one part of reality.
Hegel did not make dialectic a means of apprehending reality but a
means of expressing truth by the dialectic of ideas. From another angle,
how can we perceive the totality without also perceiving that it is in the
process of changing? This is why reference is often made to the dialectic
of Heraclitus, the philosopher of flux (panta rhei). Reality includes not
only contradictory elements but also a permanent process of change. If
we relate two elements, it is easy to see that the negative element acts on
the positive and that this action brings about a modification. In other
words, contradictory factors do not relate to one another in a way that is
inert or static. They are in interaction. The simple formula: thesis,
antithesis, synthesis, implies already the trans

The concept of time or history comes into the dialectical relation

here, and it is a decisive factor. Dialectic has often been viewed as a type
of reasoning or as the coexistence of contradictory elements. The
important point, however, is that the contradictory factors cannot exist
without eliminating one another unless they are correlative in a temporal
movement that leads to a new situation. On the one side, it is
coexistence that in real history rules out any idea of an inert and
immutable absolute, and hence that rules out metaphysical thinking. On
the other side, the manner of knowing must also be in evolution if it is to
keep up with the contradictions and evolution of reality, for even when I
begin to think, reality is in a process of change. Thus there is no fixed
state that I can impose on the object. The flux of time comes into
knowledge itself. This is why, for example, in Marx, there is reference to
the dialectic of history.
For Marx history proceeds dialectically, that is, by confrontation, by
the contradiction of historical factors that mutually negate one another yet
do not exclude one another, producing after a certain period of
contradiction and conflict a new historical situation. Thus we can
conceive of history only in terms of conflict. Each actual situation is made
up of tensions. In every social and political context we have to discern
the contradictory forces and interpret their present relations in such a way
as to foresee their possible evolution. In a sense one might appeal to the
celebrated interpretation of Toynbee that each civilization evolves thanks
to the challenges it meets, surviving only as each time it finds an answer
to the challenge hurled against it. This is true, and there is something
here that corresponds to a dialectical view of history, although Toynbee's
own thinking was not strictly dialectical.
If we want to understand the historical process successfully, we
obviously must not make any mistake regarding the

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contradictory factors. In every society there are hundreds of contradictory

forces. Most of them are irrelevant-they have no dialectical value-but
some constitute the dialectical process. One of these is the familiar
contradiction that Marx perceived between the forces of production
(technological and economic) and the social relationships of production
(which organize society).
To make it clear how dialectic has been an influence for me, I must
now explain two points. In a well-known formula I Hegel talked about the
positivity of negativity. Negativity is essential, for if the positive remains
alone, it is unchanged, stable, and inert. A positive element, for example,
an unchallenged society, a force without counterforce, a person engaged
in no dialogue, an unstimulated professor, a church without heretics, a
sole party with no rivals, is enclosed within the permanent repetition of its
own image. It will be satisfied with what it has done thus far and will see
no reason to change. Facts and circumstances and events that might be
contrary to it will be for it no more than tiresome inconveniences.
A contrary fact, be it noted, is not enough in itself to bring about
change in us. Often we obliterate it or disguise it. We interpret it in such
a way that we can fit it without harm into an understanding that has an
answer for everything. This is how we finish up with the sclerosis, the
paralysis, the redundant monologue of self-satisfaction and
auto-production. We find this in a totalitarian society (I say "society" and
not necessarily "power'). But to say this suggests also that there is never
any true innovation. There might be apparent innovations, formal
changes, but these will not produce any real mutation. The result is
increasing strain between the actual situation and the organization or
individual. The only thing, that can bring about change or evolution is
contradiction, challenge, the appearance of the negative, negativity. This
factor carries with it a transformation of the situation.
In the human condition it is not enough that the contradiction be
one of facts or events. There has to be an express contradiction made by
a contradicting subject. This is how negativity induces and provokes
innovation and the consequent history of the group or individual. One
thus sees clearly that negativity has a positive aspect. Where there is
transition from

34

VARIOUS BELIEFS

one state to another, we owe it to negativity. I am intentionally not

referring here to progress. I am not certain that transition or innovation
necessarily signifies progress. In this respect I differ totally from Hegel
and Marx. For them the new state has to be an advance on the previous
one; the synthesis (though Marx does not use the term) of the positive
and negative factors implies that the new state is better. I am not at all
sure about that, and in Hegel and Marx this conclusion rests purely on a
belief in progress or an ideology of progress. What I am sure about is
that life presupposes innovation, that humanity is a history that includes
negativity, and that to remain in a given state is to deny both life and
history, that is, to deny human distinctiveness, to try to arrest history and
in this way (perhaps) to enter the kingdom of God.
For me, negativity has a positive value even though I am not sure
that the product of the dialectical march of history will necessarily be
superior to the preceding state. There are always favorable and
unfavorable elements. The new state or synthesis -or, if one will,
equilibrium - gives rise unavoidably to a new negativity which will
reproduce the contradiction and ineluctable movement. But why should
this be better than a fixed order and repetitive organization? I will not
enter into a debate about entropy, about the total disorder that constitutes
ultimate stability. I will simply underline the fact that human life makes no
sense if there is no possibility of change of some kind, if we ourselves
have no role to play, if there is no history begun but not yet
consummated. It is in this respect that negativity comes to the fore. In
one of my books I thus adopted the well-known formula of Guhenno that
our first task as human beings is to say no.
To give greater precision to general considerations, we must think
about the question of crisis. When we talk about thesis, antithesis, and
synthesis, we cannot stop imagining the tranquil intellectual work of
philosophers in the study. Yet we know that a chemical synthesis
releases a great deal of energy and might bring about the dissolution of
the structure of the bodies brought into synthesis. We must not have any
illusions about intellectual synthesis. When we engage in minute
demonstrations and study the process of intellectual analysis, synthesis

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35

escapes us. When synthesis is achieved by a poet in a creative act, or by

a philosopher who suddenly arrives at a new understanding by intuition, it
is inexplicable. Creative synthesis is achieved only by explosions and
acts of destruction. This applies to the whole dialectical movement.
No temporal or historical transition is peaceful. None moves
self-evidently from a prior state (positive-negative) to a final state. To
reach the second state there has to be a crisis, a time of intense trouble,
of fire and explosion, in which the first elements are dissolved and
destroyed. In the historical and social field we call this crisis revolution, in
the spiritual field we call it conversion. If the dialectic is dealing with
reality, we see that neither conversion nor revolution is ever once and for
all. Both constantly have to begin again. Thus crisis in society or the
church or human experience is always a sign of confrontation with a
negativity that must be transcended to create a radically new state. What
we find here is undoubtedly the theme of challenge. Does this living
organism have adequate resources to meet the crisis and to achieve a
new equilibrium, or will it fall into neurosis, disorder, and incoherence?
The latter is always a possibility. Dialectic is not a machine which
automatically produces results.
It implies incontestable human
responsibility and hence a freedom of choice and decision.
II. Biblical Dialectic
A tradition among philosophers would have it that dialectic began
with the Greeks. Some propose Heraclitus at the end of the 6th century
B.C. In his theory of becoming, conflict is the origin of all things,
contrariety leading to concord. Others, following Aristotle, believe that
Zeno of Elea invented dialectic in the 5th century B.C. Even if he used
the word, however, he did not seem to go beyond the idea of
argumentation and the technique of discussion. Others would derive
dialectic from Plato. I for my part believe that long before these
intellectual formulations dialectic had arisen from as early as the 8th
century in Hebrew thought, and that the Old Testament as a whole
expresses ,I dialectic.

36

VARIOUS BELIEFS

I am not saying that the Hebrews had an express theory of dialectic, or

that they used the word, but that in the Old Testament we come up
against an original process of thought which bears the marks of what
would later be called dialectic (in the ontological sense and not merely in
that of the technique of discussion). I am completely opposed to the idea
that if a word is not present the thing itself cannot be there. On the
contrary, I believe that the reality comes first here and that the term
comes later only in an effort to understand a reality of which there has
already been experience. In other words, the Hebrews formulated divine
revelation dialectically without examining what they were doing
intellectually and without expounding the noetic aspect. I will offer five
examples of the dialectical process in the Bible, simply giving brief
remarks and referring to well known questions.
First, we have the global affirmation that God enters history and
accompanies the human race in its history. This fact is no less
astonishing than the incarnation of Jesus Christ. We are told that the one
God and Creator comes to be with his people; that a people bears his
glory, chosen to do so because it is the least of all peoples; that this God,
who is so different from the gods of Egypt and Greece which either
symbolize nature or have a kind of intrinsic temporality, enters into
relation with a people as the partner in a dialogue in such a way that all
that one can know of this God is by way of his people; and that all that his
people experiences is defined, though not foreordained, by this God. This
is dialectic precisely because the God in question is the contradictory pole
of all that is lived out by the people indissolubly bound to him.
The process represented by such terms as commandment,
disobedience, judgment, and reconciliation is precisely a process of total
dialectic. It is not a chance process. It is not that of a little story (as
among the Greek gods) that might have been different. We find the same
schema repeated at each stage in the people's history. Each time there
is a synthesis of the preceding factors (including disobedience) by way of
a crisis. The historical process does not allow the God who is thus
revealed to be a metaphysical God whom one may construct and know by
a metaphysical process. To define God as omniscient,

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37

omnipotent, impassible, imperturbable, eternal, etc., is not to have

understood the biblical revelation. These things might all be said of any
kind of God. The God of biblical revelation, however, enters time and
history, bears with the suffering and sin of the race, tolerates its initiatives,
and limits his own power. He repents, he revokes his judgments, etc. We
cannot have the one side of God without the other.
Is this a
contradiction? Precisely. It is logically insoluble. Yet it creates the
biblical dialectic which means that our relation to God is not a mere
repetition, a fixed thing, a ritual, an exact submission, but a permanent
invention, a new creation on both sides, a history of love, an adventure
whose outcome we cannot know in advance. It is all an incredible
revelation of the freedom of God.2 The one thing does not exclude the
other. The whole expresses the dialectical development of the relation in
revelation. One cannot understand this revelation unless one thinks
dialectically instead of thinking in terms of either-or as one is tempted to
do: Either God is omnipotent and we are slaves, or we are free and God
does not exist. Nor is this just a matter of philosophical formulation. At
issue is a new understanding of revelation such as there has never been
elsewhere, and that implies that if we are to attempt an intellectual
account of it we have to proceed dialectically.
A second aspect of this basic biblical dialectic, and one that brings
to light many others, is that which Moltmann has shown, for example, in
his Theology of Hope,3 namely, that throughout the Old Testament the
process of development leads from promise to fulfillment, and that the
fulfillment contains new promise leading to new fulfillment. We must not
simplify this movement, as many Christians do, by merely saying that all
the Old Testament promises have been fulfilled at one point in Jesus
Christ. This is no doubt true, but in saying it we must not leap over the
route that leads to Jesus Christ and that equally begins with him. For we,
too, live by a promise (the parousia of God and the kingdom). But this is
not a theoretical and global

I tried to show this in my commentary on Kings, The Politics of God and the
Politics of Man, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans' 1972).
3
Jrgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, trans. James W. Leitch (New York:
Harper & Row, 1975).

38

VARIOUS BELIEFS

promise. On the contrary, it multiplies in the course of the church's life

and our own in the form of partial promises and fulfillments which always
for us, as for the Jews, contain new promises and indicate a new way
ahead. This is how it is in the relations of grace, sin, and repentance. Is
grace given before repentance? Does repentance have priority over the
fact that salvation is free? To this insoluble biblical question Luther
replies with his famous formula that we are always at the same time
sinners and righteous and penitent. (We must not forget the third word.)
"At the same time" means each moment afresh.
One might quote innumerable biblical passages that express this
contradiction. Let us simply adduce Psalm 130, where we find the
astonishing affirmation: "There is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest
be feared" (v. 4). Forgiveness ought to bring with it love or gratitude.
Fear ought to be kindled by justice or wrath. But no, the biblical text puts
fear in relation to love and pardon. God is feared because he is the one
who forgives. He manifests his final greatness, not by refusing to pardon,
but by being the only one who can do so. The dialectic of forgiveness
and fear is essential.
Thus the whole deployment of the existence of the people of God
(the church) and individual Christians is dialectic in the constant renewal
of promise and fulfillment (or, in other words, of the already and the not
yet). The kingdom of heaven is among you, in the midst of you, or in you,
but it will also come at the end of the age. The God of Abraham is fully
revealed but not yet revealed except in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is
already the Lord of the world, but not yet, for he will be so at his parousia.
To all this we must not add words aiming at a logical reconciliation. We
must say neither that Jesus Christ is virtually or secretly Lord of the world,
nor that his lordship will be revealed in the last days. To take this course
is to relax the tension. It is to accept a hypothetical explanation instead of
living with the contradiction of what is fully accomplished yet obviously not
yet accomplished. The Christian life is lived in this contradiction.
If it is true-and we have shown that dialecticians believe so-that
historical life develops and evolves only by way of dialectical
contradiction, the same applies to the Christian life. If everything is
accomplished and we are content with that, then

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39

we have no useful or worthwhile life to live. All is in vain. If nothing is

accomplished, then no life is possible. Yet we must not mix up the two
things. Our job is not to accomplish what is not yet accomplished (a
regression to moralism). An actual fullness of accomplishments goes
hand in hand with an actual experience of total nonaccomplishment. This
is the indissoluble relation that makes the Christian life possible and gives
it meaning in its movement from crisis to crisis (as the historical life of the
church shows).
The third aspect of biblical revelation that I like to recall is that of
the relation between the whole and the remnant. On the one side
developments obviously lead to an apparent reduction of the election,
from the race to a people, from the people of Israel to a remnant, from the
remnant to an individual (Jesus). Yet on the other hand the proclamation
is in each case more universal until we come to the recapitulation of all
history, all nature, and all human works in the last days. The more the
elect remnant is reduced historically, the more real is universal election.
Thus the remnant represents the whole. At the same time, although this
is not the same thing, the process is dialectical in the sense that each
break or fracture results in the reintegration of the excluded whole with
the manifested remnant. The election of the chosen people implies the
reintegration of the human race, that of the remnant the reintegration of all
Israel, that of Jesus the reintegration of the remnant. From the standpoint
of the Bible, then, the development of judgment is never a mechanism to
separate the good from the bad (as though the latter were merely
rejected, eliminated, or excluded). It is an election of the bad achieved by
that of the good. Jesus is not just the mediator between God and us. He
signifies the salvation of all Israel and therefore of the human race and
therefore of all creation. Clearly this is not a fixed schema that one can
reduce to a formula; it presupposes historical development and constant
tension between opposing factors.
Having given these three examples, I want to point out the mistake
in a whole theological movement influenced by a certain type of Greek
philosophy. I have in mind the view that what is one is good, that every
break or fracture or division is bad, and that we are thus to seek
metaphysical unity (e.g., mystical

40

VARIOUS BELIEFS

fusion in a great totality). This obsession with the one, which has led
some to rejection of the Trinity, others to theism, and yet others to
pantheism, results in a complete misunderstanding of revelation and its
replacement by an explicative system (e.g., the pyramid of the one in
Gnosticism).4 The temptation to follow this path recurs constantly,
structuralism being a recent example.
The first three examples I have given come mainly from the Old
Testament. I will now give two specifically from the New Testament. We
undoubtedly find there the dialectic of the already and the not yet (in the
kingdom, as already shown). On another level we also find an essential
dialectic in the thinking of Paul. Thus at the center of his thinking we find
the statement that we are saved by grace through faith (Eph. 2:8). This
is clear and simple. We are familiar with the important developments of
this statement. But then the same Paul tells us to work out our salvation
with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12). This is an evident contradiction. If
we are saved by grace, there is no need to work out our salvation, and
vice versa. There is then a further contradiction in Philippians, for in 2:13
Paul tells us that it is God who works in us to will and to do of his good
pleasure. Now we must not try to reduce the contradiction by establishing
some sort of continuity.
On the contrary, the contradiction itself
constitutes life in Christ. As God works in us to will and to do, we have to
accept our responsibility as if5 we were without God and everything
depended on us. For God is at one and the same time both unknown
God and love. Thus there can be no place for a pietism that tries to
discover in every situation here and now the response and will of God. If
we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling and do the
impossible, then in the last resort we can only give glory to God, who has

In Political Theology and the Life of the Church, trans. John Bowden
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978), Andr Dumas has clearly shown the
inadequacy of monism and dualism. Dualism separates us from God. It is a
structure of distance, whereas the Bible is a history of covenant. Covenant, of
course, takes place only between beings that are distinct and separated but still
united.
5
I have often insisted on the "as if" in the life of Jesus. Jesus was no clown, but
the divine splendor was concealed beneath a humble appearance, and he was
ready to suffer and die as if he were not God.

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already saved us. But to think that this attitude means we need not work
is to misunderstand the incarnation, to despise salvation, and not really to
believe in salvation by grace.
The dialectical process in the individual Christian life consists of
unceasingly rediscovering what is meant by salvation by grace and by the
glory of God which shows us grace, but only by way of the crisis which
arises when in the very grace that is shown us we are summoned to
advance, accepting the judgment on all that we have done thus far. This
judgment pushes us toward the new situation of receiving, the receiving of
salvation by grace, and this alone can make us live without looking for a
guarantee of salvation. Thus all Christian ethics, all conduct in the
Christian life, can be thought of only on the basis of the dialectical relation
between the two opposing factors of salvation by grace and works.
I will now give as a final example history and the parousia. Linear
and logical thinking tends to say that history is a cocreation with God, that
it moves naturally toward the kingdom of God, that there is continuity
between the two, that history is a kind of beginning of progressive
evolution toward the kingdom. Some millennialists espouse a similar
ideology, believing that we are establishing the kingdom of God on earth
by social reforms, and then when we have finished the Messiah will
return. Roman Catholic theology says something similar, as when Pguy
calls carnal cities the image and commencement and body and sketch of
the house of God. Similar views are held by those who champion a
theology of liberation or revolution. From another angle the same linear
and logical thinking would say that everything is destroyed at the
judgment, that the kingdom of God is something absolutely new, a
gracious gift of God, that there will simply be new heavens and a new
earth where righteousness will reign, that all old things will be done away,
and that history and politics and so on have no meaning, value, or
interest.
In my judgment, both views are biblically incorrect precisely
because the Bible depicts a dialectical process. On the one side history
moves toward judgment and disaster, so that no continuity is possible.
But on the other side and at the same time history is extraordinarily
important. What shows it to be so, we

42

VARIOUS BELIEFS

might say, is the decision of God to write himself on the pages of history.
The note in Luke 2:1-2 regarding the decree of Caesar Augustus and
Quirinius the governor of Syria is enough to remind us that history is not
without importance for God.
What does all this mean? First, there is always one history, not two
(secular and sacred). In this one history we have the conjunction and
opposition of independent human work and God's "relational" work.
Every actual event in history expresses this twofold force. It is a product
of human activity. There is no progress in it but a multiplication of the
results and capacities or potentialities of the race. I am tempted to say
that history will not end until every possibility of combination between
human initiative and divine initiative is exhausted, or rather, until all
human initiatives are exhausted (for God's are eternal). I might take as
an illustration the musical theme and variations on it. Like a piece of
music, history will end when no further variation is possible. I believe that
this takes account of the relation between human invention and the basic
theme of covenant or promise. But all this moves, not toward the
kingdom of God, but toward the crisis triggered by the absolute
contradiction between vain human effort and God's exclusive novelty.
The crisis or judgment, however, does not mean the annulment or
insignificance of history. As in the dialectical crisis, no factor is
suppressed. The two are integrated in a synthesis. All human history,
then, will enter the new Jerusalem.6 The creation of the final city is the
obvious consummation, not the result, of all that we attempt in history.
Nothing in history (collective or individual) is lost, but everything is
qualitatively transformed. There is a natural body and there is a spiritual
body, but incontestably if there is no natural body there will be no spiritual
body. Hence we can understand the revelation of the kingdom only
dialectically.
These brief examples are perhaps enough to show that in my view
only dialectical thinking can do justice to the scriptural revelation, since
this revelation itself is fundamentally and intrinsically dialectical.

Cf. Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City, trans.

Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970); and also Part III below.

Dennis Pardee (Grand

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III. Dialectic in My Books

To discuss my own work may seem pretentious, and yet my books
constitute a totality conceived as such. To the extent that I have arrived
at the conviction that it is impossible to study modem society in its unity
without a spiritual reference, and also that it is impossible to engage in
theological study without reference to the world in which we live, I have
found myself faced from the outset with the need to find the link between
the two, and this link can be nothing other than the dialectical process.
I have found it impossible to join Christianity and the world into a
single whole. From my very first writings I have shown that there is no
such thing as a Christian politics that a Christian party can espouse, nor is
there a Christian economics, nor, epistemologically, a Christian history or
science, etc. In the first place, there could only be a kind of ideological
cloak, and in the second place, there would be a deformation of methods
and results. Naturally an ethics written by Christians can be a Christian
ethics, but only Christians can accept it. Similarly, Christians can study
history or biology, realizing (like all scholars) what their presuppositions
are and how they will affect their conclusions. Again, Christians may be
members of a union or a political party and play their own part in it, but
they will not pretend to be Christian politicians (something I have found by
experience to be impossible and untenable).7
From another angle, it seems no less certain to me that we cannot
think in a Christian way in isolation from the concrete reality of society.
Christians cannot live by eternal principles without reference to the real
world. It is idealistic and fanciful either to think that Christianity can
permeate or modify the structures of society (and here I come up against
the function of ideology according to Marx), or, conversely, to think that
Christianity ought to be adapted and modified according to the
necessities, exigencies, and orientations of the world. This has always
happened even to the point, politically, of French Christianity

I have written to this effect as early as 1937 and repeated it in 1944 in Foi et Vie
and Cahiers des Associations professionelles protestantes.

44

VARIOUS BELIEFS

being monarchist under Louis XIV, revolutionary in 1792, Napoleonic in

1800, republican in 1875, and in process of becoming socialist in 1950.
The theologies of liberation and revolution seem to me to be simple
attempts to adapt Christianity to circumstances. At the same time, it
seems to me to be impossible to proclaim that the world is lost and,
conversely, that the church is without significance.
Thus I have found myself forced to affirm both the independence of
analysis of contemporary society and the specificity of theology, to affirm
both the coherence and importance of the world in which we live and the
incomparable truth of revelation in Christ-two factors that are alien and yet
indissolubly linked. Thus the relation between the two factors can be only
a dialectical and critical one. Noetically we can only affirm two
contradictions, pressing contradiction to the limit. Actively, we can only
introduce the dimension of mutual criticism, the world criticizing the
church and science criticizing theology, the church (as we should not
forget) criticizing the world and theology criticizing science. Since the
synthesis, the negation of the negation, or the appearance in some form
of a new state can be only a product of history, there can be no question
of presenting this synthesis in some arbitrary intellectual fashion in a
study which will simply correspond to an appearance of response. I have
thus been led to work in two spheres, the one historical and sociological,
the other theological. This does not represent a dispersing of interest nor
does it express a twofold curiosity. It is the fruit of what is essentially
rigorous reflection. Each part of my work is of equal importance and each
is as free as possible from contamination by the other. As a sociologist, I
have to be realistic and scientific, using exact methods, though in this
regard I have fought methodological battles and had to contest certain
methods. As a theologian, I have to be equally intransigent, presenting
an interpretation of revelation which is as strict as possible, and making
no concession to the spirit of the age.
If the final result is a dialectic, however, the whole is not made up
of unrelated parts: there has to be correlation. The negative exists only in
relation to the positive, and the positive only in relation to the negative.
The two have reciprocal roles as in musical counterpoint. Hence it is
perfectly possible to think in

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45

terms of correspondence between apparently unrelated works. There is

counterpoint, for example, between The Political Illusion and The Politics
of God and the Politics of Man, just as The Ethics of Freedom is the exact
counterpoint of the two books on technique (The Technological Society
and The Technological System).8 I have worked out at one and the same
time a way of acquiring knowledge and a way of passing through the
crisis. The crisis may be seen in our society, in the political and economic
sphere and also in the sphere of Christianity and the church. But it
cannot lead to a positive result or escape incoherence and nonsense
unless there is a clear recognition of the two factors present in it. This is
what I have tried to contribute. In truth my attempt may seem to have
failed. People do not use my studies in correlation with one another so as
to get to the heart of the crisis with an awareness based on Christian
understanding. They continue to react at the level of reflex rather than
reflection, adopting Christian positions upon which they have not
reflected.
Having said that, I ought to note in conclusion that dialectic does
not simply operate between the two parts of my work but also functions as
a twofold element: on the one part as that which permits understanding of
some of my positions, and on the other as my very profound conviction
regarding the actual situation.
To illustrate the first element, I might say that it is a dialectical
attitude that leads us to consider that we are impotent in relation to
structures and necessities but that we ought to attempt what can be
attempted. The same attitude causes us to affirm constantly that as an
expression of determinism and as an exclusion of freedom, society must
be unceasingly attacked and yet that all our efforts will tend to maintain
this society, so that we must not give way to destructive anger but simply
try to keep society open. It also leads us to say that our human
enterprises are highly relative and represent no supreme value,

46

but that nevertheless they ought to be taken in hand with absolute

seriousness as if they had supreme value. It leads us to say, too, that
human values and the morality produced by human groups are not real
values, not natural or absolute morality, not the will of God, and yet that
we ought to defend and uphold and practice them (whatever they are)
because the groups in question (and hence the human race) cannot live
without them. Thus we have not to establish rivalry between such values
or morality and Christian truth, which is supposed to deliver us from the
errors inherent in other beliefs, nor between such values or morality and
an exclusively good Christian morality, which is supposed to take the
place of every other morality. If there is dialectical contradiction here, that
is healthy. If there is a judgmental attitude that wants to eliminate all else,
that is unacceptable.
The second element is my basic conviction regarding the actual
situation. I will sum up my conclusions briefly. If, as I think I have shown,
the technical system is a totalitarian one that embraces all other activities,
that has its own logic, and that progressively assimilates all other cultures,
there is no longer any dialectical factor in relation to it. It tends to become
a totality or unity. But if we believe that the dialectical process is
indispensable to life and history, it is absolutely necessary that this factor
exist. If the technical system is totalitarian, then this factor must exist
outside it. But only what is transcendent can be exterior to it. For me, in
the concrete situation in which technique has put us, the transcendent is
an essential condition of the continuation of life, the unfolding of history,
and the mere existence of human beings as such. But this transcendent
cannot be one that is self-sufficient and unknown. It has to be one that is
revealed to us if we are to be motivated and to launch ourselves into a
dialectical movement in spite of the autonomy and universality of
technique. In saying that, I am not engaging in any kind of apologetics. I
am simply pointing out what is the unavoidable result of the double
movement of my research, sociological on the one side and theological
on the other.9

Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion, trans. Konrad Kellen (New York: Knopf,
1967); The Politics of God and the Politics of Man, trans. Geoffrey W. BromiIey
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972); The Ethics of Freedom, trans. Geoffrey W.
Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976); The Technological Society, trans.
John Wilkinson (New York: Knopf, 1964); The Technological System, trans.
Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Continuum, 1980).

VARIOUS BELIEFS

We shall develop this point in Part III below.

48

Chapter 5
HARMONY
Bachelard has talked about this better than I can do, but I cannot
avoid it, for harmony is a reality that I maintain. Again, we must try to
understand one another. I do not believe in the existence of a natural or
cosmic harmony, which would be the expression of the free play of
chemical and physical laws. The cosmos whose harmony for a long time
commanded admiration is, as we now know, an immense battlefield. I do
not believe in an economic harmony such as liberalism imagines. I do not
believe in a harmony of evolution that ensures the survival of the fittest.
This survival is at the cost of the weak and that is not harmony but
massacre. Those who come off best are not better, and simply to talk of
some coming off best rules out harmony. I do not believe in a
spontaneous harmony between people, or in a society that is good from
the start. Wherever we go, no matter how far back, war reigns.
Heraclitus was right. Hence I have no hope that one day there will be
established a paradise of anarchy, or the paradise of Marx.
It is not the authority or domination of a minority that obstructs
harmony. The cause lies deeper. Undoubtedly the world as God created
it was harmonious. The human race had its place there without violence,
and the animals lived at peace with one another. All was very good, the
Creator said. But the world rested on the harmonious relation between
the Creator and his image or partner in an exchange of love. When this
correspondence was broken, disorder came, diversity became
exclusiveness, and plurality became competition. Human beings were no
longer in harmony with nature, which brings forth thorns, or
47

VARIOUS BELIEFS

with animals, which go in dread of them. They created fear and live
henceforth themselves in fear. There is no harmony in the world. There
is no harmony in nature. Left to itself, nature is the tragic scene of
complementary life and death-Iife thrives on death. But because death is
death, we cannot speak of harmony. What triumphs from a human
standpoint is death. This earth is our only possession. It is called a
garden. But is it a garden? We think of the constant disasters that afflict
us, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, fires, the terrible disorder,
the incredible waste, a thousand octopus eggs that hatch in order that
finally only one will live to adult age, a thousand butterflies that almost all
fall prey to birds, a profusion that simply moves on to destruction. Death
supports other life, but is this vast slaughterhouse a place of harmony?
We have to look elsewhere and not just rely on positive observation.
God created a garden called Eden in order to put Adam and Eve
there. In the midst of creation, in the midst of the stars and the cosmos,
he created Eden, a garden, whose very name denotes pleasure and
delights. The earth was our garden, our delight, conceived to give us
pleasure. Everything in it was good, beautiful, harmonious, and pure-all
there for our pleasure. But then discord came. This earth, our unique
home, was meant for correspondence and joy. If these are no longer
present, they must be restored. For this fragile and shattered earth is our
only place, our only home. We must rise up with all our force against the
absurd ambition of the human race to colonize the galaxy, to place
colonies on other planets, and to set up space stations in the universe.
Fiction is already anticipating human colonies set up on other planets in
flight from an earth made uninhabitable. I say no. I say no because it is a
matter of colonizing. Do we still not realize what this word means? Do
we still not realize it even after the colonizing of North Africa by Islam and
of the rest of Africa by Europe? After the colonizing of the Indians by the
American melting pot? After the colonizing of South America by the
Spaniards and the Portuguese? Do we still not realize that all colonizing
brings twofold disaster, both to those who colonize and to those who are
colonized? Do all these experiences count for nothing even though there
is not a single example of successful colonizing? We still want to colonize

HARMONY

49

space, but what do we begin to set up there? In reality, and above all, it
will be phenomenal war gadgetry. This is the point of space vehicles and
communication satellites -they are all devoted to war. Let us return to the
earth and try to make it humane, livable, and harmonious. This is our real
business. The earth is our only place. Let us rediscover joy in the earth.
Instead of hating it because of disasters and destroying it by the
senseless exploitation of agribusiness, mining, and hydrocarbons, instead
of squandering its riches that were slowly accumulated over millions of
years and that we scatter in a few decades, let us regard this home, this
garden, this place that was made for us, on its own terms. Let us
contemplate the wealth of the countryside, the grandeur of the mountains,
the majesty of the oceans, the mystery of the forests. This earth was
made for us. We have here all that we need to make us happy, as people
have been for centuries.
But this earth, having been ravaged, is no longer just a garden. It
is also a place of tragedies and disasters. Our task is to restore it to itself.
In placing us on it, God gave us only this command -to till it and keep it.
This is all that we have to do. We have to till it well and not to waste it, or
make it ugly or unnatural. We have to keep it, even against itself at times,
in such a way as to restore its lost harmony, and also against ourselves in
such a way as to find in it the limit and measure of our arrogance. No
doubt we human beings are the measure of all things. Yet the earth, our
garden, is also the measure of all things, of actions that are reasonable
and legitimate. We must cherish it, making it the object of our favor and
thus making it more amenable, more in conformity with the spirit of its
creation. Harmony is the issue.
But once again our perspective is radically mistaken. For the last
five hundred years our genius has been for conquest, exploitation, and
aggrandizement, when harmony was our real vocation. We have begun
to destroy for our own ends. We have accumulated possessions and in
the process destroyed and lost everything. We are breaking up the
garden, and if we continue to devour it as we are doing, the earth will
soon be no more than a pile of lifeless bones. The last traces of Eden are
on the point of disappearing. Is this an ecological discourse? I am afraid

50

VARIOUS BELIEFS

that it will be instead an elegy on the death of the earth, which was no
part of our human calling. As we vaguely sense, we were called to create
a harmony or balance or just equipoise of forces and means, an equitable
distribution of earth's bounty. But this concern has been snuffed out by
power. I might say the same about society, finding there the same battle
between harmony and power.
A harmonious society would be a utopia, dearly bought. What
would we not give to evoke this harmony, to arrive at the conviction that
we are living in the best of all possible worlds, or to close our eyes to the
reality of nature in order to trust in a system of laws in which nothing is
lost? But we now know that this is no longer true. There are constant
losses and unceasing conflicts. And yet harmony, like liberty and justice,
though it does not exist and we cannot define it, is something to which we
aspire with passion and despair. Again and again, in spite of the
challenges of reality, we dream of it and are obsessed by it. Because we
desire it in this way, I would say that it does exist. I reject the skeptical
and simplistic analysis which offers a rational explanation of the way in
which we have invented the thirst for harmony and justice, these being
unstable dreams which exist only in the psychological mechanisms of the
human constitution, and which therefore do not exist at all. But rational
explanations are not definitive. An opening always exists through which
this particular dream slips, and not another. What is created is harmony
and not something else. We may not know what we are talking about, but
we do know from what we suffer, and we thus know from time to time that
it is possible to live where harmony is at last a living reality. And when it
is there, we can know it. We want it to last, but it is fleeting. If it were to
last, it would mean the sudden stoppage of that which makes up life, the
appearance of a machine that repeats itself indefinitely and that would no
longer be harmonious. Or it would mean the great silence of absence
and nothingness. No one can define or delimit harmony. We can talk
about it only in parable and metaphor. Yet we know something about it
by experience.
Already a first misunderstanding arises in this regard. We have the
impression that harmony survives as a kind of miracle

HARMONY

51

independent of our will. The setting sun produces a sky which is as

dazzling and changing as an opal. Harmony is achieved for a few
minutes. It seems like chance. This chance concerns file, for I have to
see it. I have to be there to grasp the harmony and live with it. If there
were no one to do this, it would still take place, but I could not call it
harmony. It would be no more than a combination of light without
significance. There is harmony only when human beings are involved.
Face to face with a given situation, which has no significance of its own,
we human beings can catch the thrill of harmony. Thus I would say that it
is never there on its own. It does not exist apart from us, objectively, with
no one to recognize it. There is harmony for this person when there is
nothing for those who are not there. Harmony is not an indisputable,
objective datum.
This is why, I repeat, we cannot talk about a harmony of I he laws
of nature. We cannot talk about economic harmony, the free play of the
laws of the marketplace. Harmony is to be found when certain events
come together, but above all it is to be made, created, invented, and
produced. Harmony is our affair. This is why it is so important to destroy
the idea of an independent, established harmony that goes with the
package of the universe. This idea undermines human responsibility. I
believe that our vocation on earth is to establish a harmony that includes
all that we call justice, liberty, joy, peace, and truth. Our vocation is to set
up harmony between people, between earthly things, between the
elements that compose our universe. This is why all arrogance, all desire
for domination, and all attempts to exploit other things or beings run
contrary to our vocation. Yet this is I he way things go. Everything tends
spontaneously toward disorder, and we have to try to introduce a
harmonious order.
I have in mind the passage in Genesis in which God says that it is
not good for man to be alone (Gen. 2:18ff.). God brings .111 the animals
to him so that he may find a helpmeet, but also name them. We must not
forget the importance of the name in this Semitic world. The name
establishes the spiritual quality of that to which it is given and fixes its
place in the world's order. Thus when man gave names to an
innumerable host of animals, he did more than something useful or
utilitarian. He established harmony between himself and the animal
kingdom.

52

VARIOUS BELIEFS

But this parable brings out another aspect of harmony. Adam

acted by means of the word. There is nothing more fleeting or fragile or
transitory than the word. Once spoken, it is gone. It is not without effect,
but it is no longer there. Hence harmony set up by the word is not a fixed
thing like a butterfly pinned in a collector's case. It is a creation that
comes and lives and then tends to vanish as the effect of the word
decreases progressively. Harmony, being set up by the word, is also
fleeting. This is what I wanted to show when I spoke about the sunset. A
few moments, and then darkness falls. Perhaps there will be another
striking sunset tomorrow. But harmony does not last; it is not a fixture. It
is created. It lives for an instant. Afterward, there is only a happy and
illuminating memory (a happy memory perhaps being more true than
happiness on earth). Or else we may find only dust and ashes as we
dream of the great happiness that we have lost. I have in mind the
uplifting moment in a revolt when a group of people is gripped by the
certainty that at last a truly new world has come in which justice and
universal brotherhood are possible, and along with victory there unfolds
the rainbow of all the hopes so long built up. This joy lasts only a short
time and then the opposite of harmony returns quickly. It cannot last, for
harmony has always to be a new creation, a renewing, a fresh beginning.
The opposite of harmony is fixation or installation, the transformation of
the illuminating glory into an acquisition that we never want changed.
Fragility is undoubtedly a part of harmony, for if we could be sure of
finding it at any moment as long as the world lasts, it would say nothing to
us. In cold fixation it would cease to be "for us. As the poet says, it is
the law of nature to live on unceasingly, scorning like a goddess pilgrim
man who ought to be its king, but it is for us to love what we will never see
a second time.
I am saying in effect that when stability is achieved there is no
more harmony. It is pointless to argue that a work of art exists forever on
its own with its harmony. To be sure, the Piet is always the Piet. But
there has to be someone to see it if it is to be more than a block of marble
and if harmony is to be born. The stability of things or groups or relations
or labors works against life in harmony. What it brings is the ongoing
institution.

HARMONY

53

The magnificent exaltation of the moment of revolt produces a

society of blood and bitterness in which the revolution may undoubtedly
be successful but people lose themselves in the institution and society
loses itself in the repression of everything that will not accept the new
conformity.
This hostile installation of harmony may take two forms. There is
that which kills instantly. I have in mind the opposite of a glorious revolt,
that is, a planned revolution, calculated like clockwork, in which people
are mere pawns and strategy is dominant. Inhuman and barbarous, this
revolution has terrorism as its inevitable child. It thus sets us in a
permanent renewal of horror and a triumph of inhumanity. Terrorism is
the exact opposite of harmony. But the inversion of human creation is
more insidious and subterranean when it involves a simple
recommencement of what was once harmony, or when measures are
taken to ensure its permanence. Harmony is created when human beings
bring a certain order into society by setting up a morality that all feel to be
vital and joyous, or by establishing a law that is absolutely essential if life
in community is to be possible. Each of these is a creation of the word
and is so fragile that the morality easily changes into conformism and
insignificant commonplace, and the law into absurd and burdensome
constraint. As the world changes, the moment passes when there is
exact correspondence between the morality or law and the social
situation, the common aspiration, the shared values. Then the morality is
established and the law becomes mortal. We have to live the moment of
harmony intensely, but we cannot seize it. It is a state of grace. But we
cannot trade on this grace and think that it countenances all our mistakes.
I realize that what I have just said does not help my readers to see
what is definitive about harmony. There is no such thing as a hard and
fast definition. Harmony is not a matter of the intellect but of life. It is the
moment of birth. It is the feeling of fulfillment that we find in certain
human relations, or in certain places of special beauty (banal though it
may be, I recall my emotion on viewing the Parthenon), or in the past of
which we are heirs. It is the fulfillment of the joy of first love, or of the
absolute consolation that one might receive in the midst of great grief, or
of still being alive in a heavy bombardment.

54

VARIOUS BELIEFS

We experience such fulfillment in sparkling bursts when suddenly, without

being aware of it, we have the vital certainty that there is nothing to add,
that nothing can possibly be added to this moment of life, but that the
least that might be taken from it would destroy at once the miracle of what
we experience as an absolute accomplishment. Once again, it is
because I am there that harmony is there. It is an exact correspondence
of subject and object. It is an exact correspondence between three parts
of us that we irresistibly tend to sever: being, having, and doing.
I believe that here we come to a central aspect of harmony.
Philosophers since Gabriel Marcel have certainly had good cause to show
that having alone (which obsesses the people of our time) makes no
sense, and that we must give preeminence to being. Yet being can do
nothing without having. Having is undoubtedly secondary, yet asceticism,
by cutting out all having is a terrible danger that brings with it sclerosis
and aridity. Having does not enhance being (notwithstanding the stupid
ideology of our technicians), but there is no expanded being without some
having: the golden mean. Thus we read: "Give me neither poverty nor
riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full, and deny
thee, and say, 'Who is the Lord?' or lest I be poor, and steal, and profane
the name of my God" (Prov. 30:8-9). Being that is totally without having
cannot know harmony.
Similarly, being has to express itself in doing. The ideal would be
for doing fully to express being and being alone. This is a radical
challenge to our technological society, in which doing is completely
dominant, expelling being and circling in upon itself. But when dominant
being finds nourishment in having and keeps control of it, and when active
being expresses itself in a doing that does not go beyond it, then there is
harmony no matter what the circumstances are or the spheres in which it
applies. There will be, for example, the harmony of the couple when the
one is everything for the other, when there is no excess or lack on either
side, when possessions are equally shared, and harmony re-creates itself
each moment, whether passionately or patiently. This harmony is not the
fleeting instant of sentimental exaltation.

HARMONY

55

One might also refer to the harmony of art, to the exact

correspondence between the being of the painter or musician and that of
the spectator or listener. An artist has the gift of an invaluable having that
is suddenly grasped by someone else who finds nourishment and
lifeblood in it. The artist with his act gives something to the world, and the
spectator performs a corresponding act, for we must not delude
ourselves: if there is truly to be harmony in art, the spectator must also
act, taking hold of the proffered gift in order to make of it a new and living
work. This is why what we are offered as modern art in both painting and
music has nothing to do with art so far as I can see, for it does not carry
with it any possible harmony. It is wholly based on the refusal of
harmony, on disharmony, on fracture, on disorder, on incoherence, in
which there is neither being nor having, and at most only a mad doing
whose products slip through our fingers like dry sand. I think of the
difference between the admirable harmony of classical dance or ballet, of
which every element or pose is symbolical and ties into a perfection
without collisions, and the abominable dancing with which we are
incessantly presented today, in which the human body engages in
acrobatics, the face is devoid of expression, a mask of nothingness, and
the poses recall those of robots. People today no longer know what
harmony is. But the consequences are serious, for what this means is
that we can no longer achieve balance, and there are no longer all kinds
of possible openings for us.
Harmony in its fullness responds to two human desires, the desire
to discover and the desire to create, both in the world and in dealings with
others and the self, an equilibrium, a moment of equilibrium, when
contrary forces will coincide exactly, and many possibilities will open up.
In other words, it seems to me that harmony is the opposite of fatality, of
rude causality, of the closing of possibilities (which is why old age is the
great enemy of harmony). With harmony many possibilities present
themselves among which we can choose. In politics, for example,
constraint often rules. Things become necessary because the economic,
electoral, and sociological possibilities are such that they rigorously
dictate decisions. But then there are fleeting moments of harmony when,
as Hugo would say, destiny

56

VARIOUS BELIEFS

hesitates. That is to say, situations are fluid. There have been breaks in
the framework. Action has not yet begun. There are mass movements
that have not been fabricated. Parties are in flux. Alliances have broken
up or are not yet made. Economic data are not yet in. There are
moments when human decisions can really shape what will soon happen.
These are what I would call the harmonious moments in politics in
contrast to what people usually have in mind, that is, the vision of a
perfect society in which there is no play and everything is regulated. That
is destiny, not harmony.

58

Chapter 6

VARIOUS BELIEFS

evil is simply to say that in almost all our actions we do evil to what is
around us.
EVIL AND THETHIRST FOR GOOD
Evil does not come on its own. It is not the product of a
combination of uncertain and irresponsible events. Human beings bring
it. They are fundamentally evil. This statement might seem to contradict
what I have just said. Not at all! Our vocation is to establish harmony in
the world. If harmony does not rule, that is our doing. The obstacle is
that we are evil. But we must be more precise. I am not making a moral
judgment here. I am not talking about moral or metaphysical evil. I am
not talking theology. I do not want to say that we are sinful. The idea of
sin is not what I have in view when I say that we are evil. To talk in that
way would be a serious theological error, for sin has been taken away by
the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. We have not become good, but before God
all the sin of the world has been carried by Jesus Christ, and
consequently, although we are still wicked, we are no longer sinners
eschatologically before God. Reconciliation has been effected. It is true
that we are always sinners (semper peccator et justus), but this does not
carry with it the concrete consequences of sin. When we do evil, we
rediscover the lived out reality of sin. We rejoin it. Sin is no longer the
cause of our wickedness. Hence I do not take up an ethical or a
theological position when I declare that human beings are evil. The
statement is to be taken in the simplest and most unobtrusive and
elemental sense. We do evil. We all do evil. We do it to neighbors,
spouses, prisoners, enemies, and the natural environment. To say that
we human beings are fundamentally
57

I do not want to make a hard and fast generalization. I am talking

today in the world we know. It may be there is some exemplary Indian
tribe in which such monstrosities as war and adultery and similar follies do
not hold sway. There might have been some privileged epoch in world
history that knew no hatred or exploitation or egoism. I know of none and
have records of none. In all the civilizations of which we have accounts I
find wars and massacres and religious sacrifices and slavery and deceit
and duplicity and oppression.
But there is no need to consult the witness of history. We have
only to look around us today. Is there a single country where evil does
not reign? Not only does evil exist everywhere; it also affects everything.
It affects policies and economic actions. It affects propaganda and
information (which, unfortunately, increasingly serves the ends of
propaganda). We live in a warring world. In Western lands everything is
geared to preparation for the next war. To pretend that this does not
reveal human wickedness seems to be cowardice to me. For if I prepare
for war with ever more powerful weapons, it is because I am convinced
that the other is wicked, and this very conviction brings to light my own
wickedness, for I judge the other only by myself and my own feelings. If I
think that the other is wicked, it is because I judge that I am wicked
myself. There are wars in preparation and there are also wars through
intermediaries. The latter are those in peripheral countries related to the
two blocs and stirred up by them, for example, Iraq and Iran, Ethiopia and
Somalia, Afghanistan, Libya, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Angola. There is
also the worst of all wars, the holy war. This is the worst because it is
insatiable. It allows of no peace. No treaty can be arranged. The holy
war is absolute war, waged without declaration of war, by every means,
by people made mad by fanaticism, aiming only to destroy the
non-Islamic adversary. Newly proclaimed in our world, the holy war
brings to light the horror of unbounded wickedness.
Evil reigns
everywhere. The drama in Cambodia offered a new version of Hitler's
genocide. Can we really say that the adherents of Pol Pot were not
fundamentally bad?
We recall also the many lands that have
concentration camps or labor

EVIL AND THE THIRST FOR GOOD

59

camps or retraining camps, from Vietnam to Cuba, from China to the

dictatorships of South America.
And what are we to say about torture? We know that this, too, is
used more or less universally. On the eve of the German attack in 1940
there were innumerable discussions and analyses of the astounding and
almost incredible fact of torture. How could we have come back to this
evil? But far from being effaced by the victory over Hitler, the Nazi model
has spread across the globe. Now, the political system plays a role in
torture, yet those who do the torturing are not just simple cogs in a
machine. They are also people engaging in this act and taking pleasure
in it. They are giving free rein to their will for absolute domination, to
controlled ferocity. They are themselves fundamentally wicked.
Why recite facts that we all know? I do so because all nations
without exception engage in these things. We all engage in them. Every
so often, of course, we take part in a collective process of
psychoanalytical purification. We collectively select a scapegoat upon
which to place all the world's wickedness. Forty years ago it was Israel,
now it is South Africa. By the massive and crushing propaganda of all the
media, people have to be convinced that this is where all evil resides, so
that we ourselves can have a good conscience and clean hands. For we
are not involved in apartheid. South Africa wipes out the fact of the
refugee camps of Cambodia, the boat people, the terrorism of the Shiite
militia. The unique guilt of South Africa purifies it all. For years now we
have been playing this scapegoat game. It has a profound source, as
Girard has recalled, but the possibility of universalizing it is the exclusive
work of television, the radio, and the press. These attach the label and
thereby justify whole nations and each and every individual.
Individuals unceasingly do evil to others. We must not forget the
individual act: aggression, interpersonal violence, drugs, automobiles that
claim far more victims than terrorists. (I am told that the driver means no
harm. What a mistake! The desire to pass, to go faster, to make more
noise, the liberation of instincts of power, scorn for the pedestrian or the
quiet driver, all these are an expression of evil.) This is a well-worn
refrain, too well-worn, yet it needs to be repeated. For people are afraid
to say that this act, too, is an expression of human wickedness

60

VARIOUS BELIEFS

in keeping with the lawlessness of our society. The brave attempts to free
people (even children) from all taboos and prohibitions and principles
-liberty, cherished liberty!-have led finally only to a lawless society,
without rule or law, in which people are plainly shown up for what they are
with neither fear nor limit, that is, evil.
We are experiencing the democratization of evil. This statement
will shock people. Naturally, I do not mean at all that democracy is evil.
Quite the contrary! Nor do I mean by evil moral evil. I simply mean the
evil that we do when we cut loose, or the evil that we do to our neighbors
when we overwhelm them with the noise of our amplifiers. Evil has many
dimensions. But there is value in using the same word for this very
concrete and material evil and for moral evil, for in effect the material evil
that we do to others very often proceeds from the moral evil that is in us.
The general idea is very simple. An increasing number of people among
us is acquiring instruments that can hurt our neighbors or unknown
people who, whether we like it or not, are close to us. This is the
democratization of evil. Means that were once reserved for the powerful,
for the rich, for aristocrats, and which constituted their privilege, are now
within the reach of all of us. These means were always means of power
by which the rich and mighty could ensure their domination and do wrong
to the rest. It is very important to realize that these privileged means are
now within the reach of all of us. This seems quite natural to us, for it is a
democratization of comfort, of well-being, of a higher standard of living.
From this optimistic standpoint it is good. But it is also a democratization
of the evil that one can do to oneself and others. Previously only the rich
had horses and carriages and could sometimes cause accidents to
pedestrians and, as seventeenth and eighteenth-century reports tell us,
do minor damage, splashing mud, scattering stalls, and breaking
windows. But such things were not numerous, and they were disliked
mostly because they were disdainful rather than harmful acts. Today
most people have automobiles. And it has often been noted what a
change comes over gentle and polite people when they begin driving
powerful vehicles. Relations between drivers are always relations of
vanity, scorn, competition, and anger ex

EVIL AND THE THIRST FOR GOOD

61

pressed in insults and finally leading to fatal accidents. I could multiply

examples of the same order in almost every sphere.
The democratization of evil involves two things. First, the more
people reach a higher standard of living, the more they have means to
provoke disagreements with others. Second, the use of more potent and
efficient means of action demands people who are not only competent but
who also have control of themselves, who have respect for others and
take into account the effects of what they undertake. In other words, what
we need are more moral people. To be sure, people in our society are no
worse than those in past centuries. But they are also no better, and they
now have more powerful agents at their disposal. At a very simple level,
those who hated their neighbors might once have attacked them with a
stick but they would have done so far less effectively than if they had a
submachine gun. But everybody today in many different areas has the
equivalent of a submachine gun. Think solely of noise. Extreme noise,
as we all know, is dangerous from many angles. In the 18th century,
however, the means of making noise were very limited. But today we can
all swamp our neighbors with noise. People in the West seem to need an
affirmation of their power in this way. In default of other means of
satisfaction, they need to overwhelm their neighbors with noise.
We might refer as well to other areas of life. Pollution and
accidents are the result of power placed in the hands of almost all citizens
and their irresponsible or aggressive handling of it. The other day I saw
an outboard vessel weaving between boats in a highly dangerous
manner. A wave had diverted it slightly, and it struck a boat, damaging
the hull, but it did not stop. We have to think of such possibilities which
arise when drugs are readily available. Years ago they could be had only
by the wealthy, by artists, and by half-mad intellectuals. Now they have
been democratized and they recruit their victims among the people. This
is the democratization of evil. We might also mention the ease with which
explosives are obtained. A century ago attacks with explosives were
difficult and dangerous. Nihilists were heroes who were ready to die with
their bombs or dynamite. In fact we now find plastic and other explosives
everywhere, and attacks, the taking of hostages, and the seizing of
airplanes occur all the time.

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VARIOUS BELIEFS

The great writers of the 18th century who demanded democracy

(Rousseau among them) all maintained that virtue must accompany it.
This is very true. To grant people freedom presupposes that they will act
reasonably, having regard for others and for the community as a whole,
and not abusing their liberty. Institutions have never been adequate to
make democracy work, to make people good, to prevent people from
doing evil. But if this is true of political democracy, it is a hundred times
truer of the democratization of technological means, their proliferation,
and their placing within the reach of all. If violence is mounting in
countries today, it is not because people are more violent. I believe they
are less so. It is because they have much simpler and easier means of
being violent. A weak impulse toward violence will produce very violent
effects when the means of violence are multiplied.
If we want to make society livable, people will have to improve
themselves.
Moral progress is necessary.
Political organization,
economic change, or psychology will not do it. The actual situation shows
us that contrary to what Marxism imagined, moral progress does not
result from raising standards of living or bettering economic conditions or
increasing the means placed at the disposal of all. On the contrary, these
things simply trigger a frenzy of evil. The urgent need is not to establish a
moral order, which cannot be done externally even by superior authority,
but to find the way of self-mastery, of respect for others, of a moderate
use of the powers at our disposal. This is the way of wisdom and
morality. Such words are not greatly valued by our age-so much the
worse for us! We have to consider that not taking this path will lead
ineluctably to the impossibility of living in concert, a situation far worse
than an economic crisis or war.
In rebuttal, one might appeal to many acts of kindness, generosity,
and solidarity: medical help, Mother Teresa, the many unknown people
who care for their neighbors, those who perform devoted acts at their own
peril to save what can be saved in a fire or earthquake. I am aware of all
this. But there is no comparison. Contrary to a familiar doctrine, there is
no balance between good and evil. Evil is a massive, global fact
embracing the crowd, the mob, the nation, and all who do harm

EVIL AND THE THIRST FOR GOOD

63

to others. Exceptional individuals show what good might be. There are,
of course, individual assassins, but what strikes me is the collective
nature of wickedness. In the mob people bluntly bring to light the ill that
they want to do to others and that they refrain from doing when they are
alone out of fear or shame. Yet do we not see generous impulses in
crowds as well? Not at all. Is not antiracism a sane and positive
reaction? No. It is inverse racism. The deep conviction is that the bad
people are the whites. To stress incessantly the racism of the whites, and
to point to all the crimes that Europe has committed through the world,
may well be good, but it leads to a global condemnation of everything
white. We see this in Rhodesia. When Rhodesia came under black rule,
whites who had always been well disposed to blacks were massacred
along with the rest.
The human wickedness that tends spontaneously to respect
nothing coincides with the collective imbecility of the race. The same
people who can be refined and intelligent and cultivated become
imbeciles when they are caught up in mass movements: Heidegger and
Nazism, Sartre and Stalinist communism,1 and how many others. I watch
hundreds of people

I have again and again asked myself how Sartre, whose quality as a writer I do
not deny, nor perhaps his worth as a philosopher, could have had the influence he
has had. When an intellectual cannot understand a monstrous phenomenon like
Stalinism, how can people have confidence in him? For it was not merely with the
Twenty-First Congress that Stalinism appeared in its true colors. The Moscow
trials of 1935 (which were decisively important for me), the massacre of anarchists
by communists during the Spanish Civil War (Franco had no better allies than the
communists), the pact between Germany and the Soviets, and the partition of
Poland by the USSR, were not these enough to show clearly what Stalinism was?
Sartre, however, showed neither knowledge nor understanding. He could not
draw the obvious conclusions. He had to be either ignorant or a fool. His efforts
to justify and reanimate Marxism expose his limitations. For him, Stalin never
existed. He stayed with the thinking of Marx. He wanted to give it a purer sense,
abstracting away from history. There is an illuminating sentence in Chapter I of
Book II of Critique of Dialectical Reason (trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, ed.
Jonathan Re [London: NLB, 1976]) to the effect that the dialectical intelligibility of
history can develop only in and by action, i.e, in the living and practical discussion
of one involved thinker with other equally involved thinkers. Not being places of
this kind of action, concentration camps did not exist. We also recall the spiteful
and angry attacks of Sartre on Kravchenko and on the first who had the audacity
in 1959 to talk about Soviet concentration camps, D. Rousset and P. Barton.

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VARIOUS BELIEFS

plunge into absurd and wicked causes. There was no reasoning with the
crowds that shouted for the liberation of Vietnam and Cambodia. We now
see the fruit of those liberations. Today the same ardor is shown in
attacks on South Africa. An unfathomable imbecility renders people
incapable of any judgment, appreciation, or nuance, of any reflection,
comparison, or prevision. The media undoubtedly bear much of the
blame for this imbecility by consolidating opinion. Imbecility is the other
side of the coin of wickedness. Such we are, and again this judgment is
neither pessimism nor the product of a religious conviction of sin: it is a
striking fact for any who wish to look carefully at what is taking place.
But I love people as they are. I love them in this evil, this
perversion, this cruelty. I love individuals. For twenty years I have
worked to prevent delinquency and social maladjustment. I have worked
on behalf of blacks, drug addicts, etc. I love them because in all the evil
that they do they are essentially unhappy and not just malefactors. I do
not say that they can be excused. The evil they do is still evil. I do not
advocate irresponsibility. That would be to dishonor them. No, they are
responsible. But they are also unhappy, and I consider this first rather
than their wickedness or their imbecility. There are no degrees. All are
guilty. But all are also unhappy, even the executioners of Auschwitz and
Pol Pot. As the poet puts it, it is no exaggeration when people say that
they are naked and that they tremble, that they are unhappy, that they are
under the stroke of death and cold, when they say that they shiver and
tremble, that they are wanderers with no refuge, that they are under the
stroke of man and God. I have devoted my whole life to making people
more aware, more free, more capable of judging themselves, of getting
out of the crowd, of choosing, and at the same time of avoiding
wickedness and imbecility. My books have never had any other goal. Of
all the people that I have met, no matter what they are, I can say that I
have tried to love them. I have lived my whole life in terms of the great
theological affirmation: "God so loved the world [the place of absolute evil]
that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should be saved
and have eternal life" (John 3:16).
Human beings are the most surprising beings imaginable,

EVIL AND THE THIRST FOR GOOD

65

for the very people who are so evil have a fundamental thirst for good.
They do evil but they aspire after good. They want a world of justice and
liberty. They are moved by the sight of the misery of starving people.
Even when they do ill to others, they always try to justify themselves. For
a long time I thought that such attempted justification merely redoubled
the evil. I said that I would accept what people did so long as they did not
look for excuses to show that they had good reason to do it. Undoubtedly
there is truth in this view. I still believe that excuses add hypocrisy to the
evil. At the same time, however, the attempt at self-justification is an
expression of the thirst for good. We cannot be content to do an evil that
is simply an evil and is recognized as such. We have to give ourselves a
certificate of good conduct. In other words we can never be purely and
simply cynical. When we come before the just Judge, we cannot look him
in the face and simply say: "All right, I did it, and that is all there is to it.
We always act as Adam did when first he fled and then he blamed
someone else (his wife), or as Cain did. We have to convince ourselves
that we have done good even when we have done evil. We are pursuing
such goods as liberty, happiness, equality, progress, country, truth, or
love. Millions of our neighbors are killed in the pursuit of such goods.
Convinced that there is good in what we have done, we have no remorse
precisely because of this thirst for good. We kill to save. Think of the
unheard-of action of the church when it burned heretics and witches, not
to punish them, but to save their souls. Such an act was called an
auto-da-f, an act of faith. I am not accusing anyone of hypocrisy. I
believe that this thirst for good is one of the deepest of human tendencies
even though we can only do evil, and if we could only be aware of what
we are doing we would agree at once with the statement of Paul:
"Wretched man that I am! I do not do the good I want, and I do the evil
that I hate" (see Rom. 7:15, 25). The essential difference is that Paul,
thanks to the light of the Holy Spirit, clearly perceives and takes note of
his situation, whereas those outside the Christian faith glory in doing evil,
convinced that it is for a greater good.

Chapter 7
LIFELONG LOVE
Since Western civilization achieved awareness of itself, no theme has
been more scrutinized in literature, and later in music, than love.
Everything has been said and written about it. Our own age is particularly
explosive on the subject. People discuss every aspect of it: homosexual
and heterosexual love, plural love, free love, transitory love, extrovert
love, trial love, love without limits. Everybody is concerned about it: the
psychoanalyst of course, the scientist, especially the geneticist, the
doctor, the psychologist, the moralist, the bishop, and the philosopher. All
have their own remedies and conceptions and proposed orientations. I
might adopt once again a formula I have used many times without ever
being refuted: "In a society which talks excessively about a human factor,
the point is that this factor does not exist. People talk excessively about
freedom when it is suppressed. This formula has always proved to be
true. I would thus apply it here as well. So many novels and essays and
studies and experiments and propositions are made precisely in order to
hide the basic absence of love. Love does not exist in our society. It is
no more than a word. Someone might object: "What does it matter what
an old man says about love; he no longer knows anything about it and
cannot do so; he is unaware of the beautiful blossoming of it all around
him. He is simply looking at the past. Nevertheless, I think I have
something to say on the matter, the fruit of long experience, something
that is not often put forward today. But I must begin by challenging
certain actual orientations under the heading of the disintegration of love.
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LIFELONG LOVE
In April 1985 an international conference on bioethics discussed the
various problems raised by genetic manipulations. What can we do, and
where is it all leading? Obviously when we intervene in the process of
birth, whether it is a matter of cloning, in vitro fertilization, artificial
insemination, chromosome mutation, or surrogate motherhood, a new
age has come and the customary morals are shoved aside. Two
positions regularly confront one another. The first is that of freedom (the
freedom of abortion, of the pill, or of having a child artificially), a view held
by progressivists and feminists.
The other position is that of a
pseudo-Christian traditional morality, which seems to be retrogressive
and reactionary.
Here I want to present another point of view. What we very generally call
love is the fruit of prolonged human evolution. Like all animals, human
beings at the very first coupled together as male and female, and we do
not know whether this coupling then took a permanent form. But the
earliest records available to us show that by that time it was not a matter
of a few minutes or of chance. There was a more complete union
between a man and a woman (or several women). The sexual act was
linked to a totality of life and of responsibilities. In relation to the woman
the man had certain functions, as had the woman in relation to the man.
This was not fleeting, temporary, or contingent coupling. The sexual
union was a lasting one. In every country and tribe it had become a
marriage with various taboos and with a prohibiting of adultery or incest.
The world of sex was integrated into a larger reality and regulated as one
of the most important factors in life. Man and woman had a totally
reciprocal life which included the sexual act, though this was neither
primary nor exalted. The sexual act normally resulted in the birth of
children. Ideas relating to the union developed; it came to be magnified; it
found expression; it became religious. Thus the stage of love arrived, the
express commitment of one person to another, a choice, and even by way
of prohibitions and taboos a sublimation. Love consisted of this
emotional, voluntary, reciprocal, and vital totality. And the love of the two
led to love of a third, the product of the union, when it came. If romantics
have fallen into idealistic excesses regarding incorporeal love, those who
deny the existence of total love

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fail to recognize the profound reality of human beings for at least five
thousand years. The corporeal and physiological aspects are indissolubly
related to the spiritual aspects, to the total relation.
But what we see today is the complete disintegration of this totality.
Already easy abortion breaks it open, though in a secondary way.1 But
what we are now seeing is the breaking apart of the constituents of total
love. Sexuality has been detached from the whole. To give people the
right to procreate freely without any personal relation either to the donor
or the recipient of sperm is to detach human love from one of its basic
functions. What becomes of total love if the husband gives his sperm to
some other woman, or the wife is pregnant by the sperm of another man?
Or if there is in vitro fertilization? It has been well said (by a scientist!)
that when a woman bears the seed of a man who is not her husband
there takes place real biological adultery. And when in the discussions of
the conference mentioned above someone asked what is meant after all
by a couple, he was referring to the breaking up of that total complex of
love. Procreation is no longer the fruit of a shared delight, a reciprocal
joy, a tenderness, and a venture. It is a purely mechanical and technical
act. Similarly, abortion as a merely practical and often invalid procedure
has become no more than a technical operation without good reason or
sense of responsibility for the life that is broken off.
The division of what was once love into a number of technical procedures,
the separation of the physiological from the psychological, the emotional,
and the relational, seems to be fundamentally very serious. This is not for
me a moral or religious matter. It is a matter of the negation of all that is
human. Do we not have to consider the totality of being human? Or do
we have to see the human merely as a collection of separate pieces, a
machine with many cogs that one can take apart and then put together
again in a different way? This is the issue in all the present-day genetic
operations. They imply a denial of human beings as persons, their
treatment as automatons or

I am not opposed to abortion as long as there are serious and wellconsidered reasons.

LIFELONG LOVE

69

robots the parts of which can be taken away or added on or replaced. But
if human beings are simply collections of detached pieces, if there is no
such thing as a couple, if love is unreal, then we should have the courage
to make the final inferences. Why should we respect this human
machine? Why should we not manipulate it even more than is proposed
here? If abortion is now given on demand, and if, as ministers say,
artificial insemination can be arranged with no therapeutic necessity and
simply for personal convenience, why all the grandiloquent talk about
human rights? Whose rights? The rights of this machine that one can
manipulate and of which one part has already been detached, namely,
love? And why ban experiments with toxic products (such as take place
in the USA)? But in this case are we not validating the medical
experiments of the Nazis? Are not these in order if human beings are no
more than machines? This is the real question in all its dimensions that
genetic advances raise. And why talk about freedom in this connection?
Whose freedom? Once again, that of beings that have been partly taken
apart and are negated as persons.
The final objection to my viewpoint is obvious: You are reactionary, you
cannot stop progress, we now know how to clone and graft, there is no
more room for discussion, the moral or humanistic criticisms are those of
the rearguard that has already been left behind. This is a fine argument.
What it amounts to is that we have no choice or decision to make, but
have to accept what technological progress makes possible and
necessary. Is this a triumph of freedom? In reality it is a triumph of
bondage, of the very opposite of freedom. As slaves of progress we have
to watch one of the main reasons for living, namely, love, being debased
and destroyed before our very eyes. This is the question. And this is why
we should pay heed to Monsignor Lustiger when he asks whether we
have adequately reflected on these matters.
All this is just a preamble. But I want to say how sad I am when I see
before me the thoughtlessness of many love affairs, and how
compassionate I feel when I note experiences that show such a
fundamental ignorance of love. When I witness the end of a marriage
because one of the spouses is gripped by a passion for someone else, I
am as sad as at the death of a child.

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VARIOUS BELIEFS

I am sad, too, when I see what is now the traditional confusion between
the sexual act and love. People are constantly talking about "making
love. But we do not "make" love. It is love perhaps that makes us by
edifying us. No one has ever been able to "make" love. At best we live it.
But this is another matter. For many people, however, love is no more
than making love. No matter with whom! And the partner is no longer
flesh of my flesh or bone of my bone or more myself than I am. The
partner is simply a partner in a game or in momentary pleasure. This is
what love has become. Am I a romantic? If so, then people five
thousand years before Jesus Christ were romantics. I am sad when
people enter into preliminary experiences to find out if they are sexually
compatible, for this shows that marriage is not a matter of love but of
putting the pieces together well, of constructing a good machine. I am
sad when I see a union in which there is no mutual commitment but only
an agreement to live together. For this means that it will last only so long
as it lasts.
But why am I sad and not scandalized? Why do I not judge and instruct?
I am sad because I realize that those who are living in this way do not
know what love is. They are missing a whole number of possibilities.
Throughout their lives they have no knowledge of the finest of human
creations. They are missing the truth, the only possible meaning of life, in
the name of theories and passions. From the very outset they are failing
to find the vital path of life.
I am sad, then, as before a life that has failed. Love is not fleeting or
experimental. It is not a child of Bohemia. It is a permanent thing and not
a butterfly flight dependent on those who feel it. It is made to last
because it is life. Life comes from it, and not life alone, but the only
possible relation to the other. We cannot live without this basic relation
that presupposes myself in the other and the other in myself. Love
cannot exist without this existential presence. But we need to find it again
and not view the other merely as an accidental instrument of my pleasure
or as an absolute stranger who has nothing in common with me apart
from habits and experiences. Love is not just a matter of the I-Thou that
one can have in a social relationship. Here is not just some other but the
other that is also

LIFELONG LOVE

71

myself, unique and not indeterminate. I am in this other as this other is in

me. The complete otherness comes to completion in an identity which
excludes mere selfhood. This is the most basic experience that we can
have in life. And in it alone the statement becomes true that love is
stronger than death (Cant. 8:6).
But the word love is full of ambiguities. We must give it its true
sharpness. At issue is simply the love of one human being for another.
To use the term to qualify feelings relating to abstractions like country or
humanity seems to me to be ridiculous. Love involves freedom. It is not
an emotional upsurge relating to something imaginary that simply
demands sacrifice. I have just referred to freedom. There is a close
relation between love and freedom. Yet it is a tragic confusion to speak of
free love. Free love has nothing whatever to do with real freedom except
as a caricature of it. In free love I take a person and then leave that
person. Nothing keeps us together. Nothing binds us. There is no love
here except in the sense of making love or sleeping together. Sleeping
together entails no life commitment and in it there is no need to talk about
freedom. There was certainly a time when free love could have an air of
truth in the battle against the tight and socially unassailable bond of
marriage, and of marriage without love. Those who protested against a
lasting tie where there was no longer any love had some reason on their
side. But even at the commencement of such marriages could one really
speak about love? And if there was love at the commencement, in what
name was it then challenged? In the name of a sudden new passion?
But was not this a romantic illusion?
In any case, in our own age the question no longer arises. Obviously in
free love each is "free" in relation to the other, for the other counts only to
the extent that he or she offers pleasure. Am I free then? In reality I am
merely following my impulses, the determinations of my glandular system,
in the name of freedom. If we are to be serious, let us talk about love and
freedom, but not about free love. To say love and freedom is easy.
There is no love without freedom nor freedom without love.2 We can

See Jacques Ellul, The Ethics of Freedom, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley

(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976).

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VARIOUS BELIEFS

not love under constraint. We can love only in the depths of personal
freedom. We have to be free to demonstrate love. We have to be free
either to initiate it or to respond to the love of another. No constraint,
whether moral, social, or contingent, can give rise to love or reciprocate it.
There is no imperative here. Love arises only on the path of freedom as
two freedoms meet.
But reciprocally, there is no freedom without love. This is less easily
acknowledged. We wrongly think that liberty means destroying some
despotic power or acting as we will without compulsion. This is by no
means negligible but it is often illusory and always inadequate. Freedom
that does not involve meaning and end is valueless. Freedom for the
mere sake of freedom is worth little. It is the mere freedom to go
anywhere or to do anything, no matter where or what. The "no matter"
that characterizes our society is simply absurd. But freedom is not
absurd. It involves meaning. To be itself it has to be oriented. Its human
orientation is the inaugurating, upbuilding, and maintaining of love. If
freedom loses this orientation it inevitably becomes either folly or the
oppression of others, who are now mere instruments of satisfaction (as in
the case of de Sade, who is simply a pale replica of our mad dictators; cf.
Bokassa). Freedom manifests itself in love. It is not good for man to be
alone (Gen. 2:18). A threefold cord is not quickly broken (Eccl. 4:12).
Freedom is respect for others in love. It is self-giving. It is expansion in
the joy of love. Without love there is no freedom. Perhaps this is what
the revolutionaries of 1790 clumsily perceived when they added fraternity
to freedom.
We thus have the image of a love that gives. Who of those who have had
a little spiritual or moral experience, or experience of a true human
relationship, do not know that it is in giving that we receive ourselves, that
we become greater in giving, that we find true freedom in giving? Love
that gives, that gives itself, expresses freedom. But love can also have
another and frightening side. The love that captures and dominates
seems to me to express itself in two main ways. The first is the absorbing
of the other in love. As often described in novels, there is the familiar love
of a mother enslaving and emasculating her son. An invasive love of this
kind eliminates the being and freedom of the other in a pretense of love.
This

LIFELONG LOVE

73

love insinuates itself like a cancer. We find it, not merely in mothers, but
also in some couples (cf. the Sapho of Daudet). The other does not even
need to love. The love of the one amply suffices for both. The one feeds
on the substance of the other. The second expression is the erotic one in
which the object of love is no more than an object that is used for the
private and unshared enjoyment of the one who controls it. I have
referred already to de Sade. Eros is dominant here again, but by
reducing the other to an object, by negating, utilizing, excluding, and
finally slaying the other. When I talk about love here, I mean the love that
gives and does not take. This love that gives is made to last, for it is life.
It is made to last for life, and has no reason to cease to be prior to death.
But if it necessarily lasts thus for the whole of life, it changes, taking new
forms and acquiring new and different powers. Instead of growing
weaker, it builds up little by little by means of experiences shared,
differences overcome, and breaks repaired. It uses different materials to
build itself up, and in fact it does build itself up instead of destroying itself.
What I want to recount here is the story of lifelong love.3
"I am sure of my love because I do not want you to die and know that you
will" (G. Thibon).
The first step is undoubtedly that of passion. This is the explosive
discovery of the other for whom I was waiting, who corresponds to all my
desires and hopes. There is no reason for this irresistible feeling for the
one who can fulfill all my deepest wishes. The other becomes my
universe. I see everything in and through the eyes of this other. But
there is no need for me to write about this enchantment. All the books
and novels that deal with love have presented it. This is love as passion,
as exaltation. It is the love that gives us a sense of transcendence, as the
novels have described it. Whether it is the emergence

Naturally I have unbounded contempt for writers like Lautaud and

Jouhandeau, who offer a false picture of love on every page and thus
secure the admiration of ninnies who misconstrue as nonconformism the
worst conformism, that of weakness in self-satisfaction.

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VARIOUS BELIEFS

of first love in the adolescent, or the marvel of a love that will change a life
mired in a marriage without love and that involves adultery, or the exalted
tension of the mature adult finding new youth in a love that seems to be
incomparable (and which is so because it will be the last), in each case it
is the passionate love to which people refer us as if it alone represented
the totality of love. And in a sense I can readily understand this, for this is
love that uplifts and gives promise of joy. It is love at its most visible and
thrilling, love that easily turns to obsession and invades the sphere of
conscience. This is the element in love that is easily confused with
sexuality, for it is true and good that in it human beings should find
fulfillment in sexual union. Sexuality is not separate from love. The one
we love, we also love sexually. Two beings become one flesh. That is
very good. For some time new aspects of the other will disclose
themselves as my eyes learn to see better. At the same time sexuality
will diversify by experimentation and refinement so as not to fall into
repetition.
But a first warning signal is flashed here. For as sexuality becomes more
subtle, there is a danger of being carried away with it and of going where
it goes. A desire then arises to change the sexuality by changing the
partner. From that moment sexuality achieves domination over love.
Passion is no longer exclusive. It is directed to others. And this again is
what most novels show us. Sexuality is no doubt a fulfillment of love, but
to confuse the two is to destroy love. Here is the first great temptation of
a couple, and our generation has made the astonishing discovery that
one can exchange partners or engage in round-robin sex in order to
satisfy diversity of taste but without breaking up the couple. Such things,
however, have nothing whatever to do with love. Soon a break comes
and this will shatter at least one of the two. I have known couples who
were at first agreed that both should retain their freedom, but after a time,
when one of them made excessive use of this freedom, it hurt the other
profoundly. The one who is thus hurt is naturally the weaker partner, that
is, the one who really loves. Here again Western novels in abundance tell
us how breakup, divorce, and shipwreck follow adultery. But all couples
do not have this experience. For after love as passion, after sexual

LIFELONG LOVE

75

illumination, after a summit, there is a descent (an apparent descent)

toward something else.4
If we are not to search indefinitely for a renewal of amorous prowess, then
we must look together for another way of love that I would call common
responsibility. There are children, there is a job, there are tasks to share.
Complementarity is not in sexuality alone but in the totality of life. Literary
works that venture into this field are very critical. They describe the reign
of habit which begins to take the place of adventure and freedom, the
reign of slippers and boredom. I do not agree at all. If we refrain from
assimilating love to sex, then at this point we find love again, and I would
say a much deeper love because it has already integrated other parts of
life. We do not enter into banality but into an encounter with life, an
encounter which in all its fullness; and difficulty we cannot go through if
we are alone. With the common task, bad days may well begin. mere is
a new battle for life. It is a common battle against weariness and
boredom. It is a battle to give new meaning to the union. This is a less
brilliant matter, but one that is very serious and profound. This love is not
flamboyant but it brings with it the test of truth. The question is the radical
one whether what one has said thus far is true. In the exaltation of an
amorous haze there can be no question of truth. It is all passion and
illusion. The acceptance of joint responsibility is the test of the veracity of
the love declared. The one was ready to die with and for the other. But it
may be revealed that this one was not ready to live with the other, to
undergo the test of everyday habit, the test of life, which is no picnic.
After passionate love must come responsible love (which is certainly not
boring or prosy but more subtle and refined).
A parenthesis is in order. In traditional sexual relations the woman was
responsible for not becoming pregnant. Hers was the risk of pleasure and
the burden of responsibility. She had to be responsible for what she did.
The man had no such

R. Barthes described it as a descent in A Lover's Discourse: Fragments,

trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979) when he called
the (act of love an episode with a beginning (the lightning stroke) and an
end (suicide, abandonment, disaffection, convent, or travel), and no
possible reconstitution of the initial experience.

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VARIOUS BELIEFS

responsibility unless he was willing to accept it.

He could act
irresponsibly, rejecting both woman and child. To do this was despicable.
But for him responsibility was a matter of choice. Now, thanks to the pill,
the woman has the same choice. This is hailed as freedom for the
woman. She can accept responsibility or refuse it. She can be
responsible for a child by choice. But most often, like the man, she
prefers irresponsibility, and this is strange in a society that is constantly
asking for responsible people, that sets a high value on responsibility,
while still heaping up means to permit human beings to flee it, for
example, the pill. We reach a higher stage of love, however, when it
integrates responsibility into life. Nevertheless, each stage of the creation
and development of love carries a danger with it. I have talked about the
common task. Perhaps it will become so demanding and consuming, or
so engaging and vital, that love will be transferred from the other to it.
Each will talk in a monologue about his or her own work and problems
and career, or about the education of the children (I say each, but in most
cases the mother raises the children; the father's interest is only
accidental). What ought to be a common responsibility for the richness of
love becomes a personal matter. Love tends to diminish. In the thinking
of both there is recollection of the first stage, of the passion which is
renewed from time to time by means of parties, vacations, and
anniversaries. Yet love made up of memories is not a vital love. It slips
back, and life resides only in the past. If, however, the couple overcomes
this temptation, if the work of the one is also of interest and concern to the
other, if there is co-responsibility, then the couple lives out a richer love
whose history is by no means at an end.
Far from being a time of habit, this second stage of love ought to be one
of awareness of all that separates me from the loved one. Not just sex or
character but different interests and activities, and perhaps a polarization
of life. The one may be working while the other takes care of the children.
We have to learn to love in such a way that the other is truly other for me:
not a sphinx, nor a praying mantis, nor an object, nor a lamb for the
slaughter, nor a spider lying in wait, nor a fly in my web, but the other
loved as bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh,

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77

yet the one to whom I can talk most honestly and intimately, who brings
me something that I am not, and with whom I have a true exchange
because love makes it possible and authentic. Growth comes with the
dispersing of the falsities and illusions that passionate love sometimes
brings.
A new stage of love comes that I would call the stage of recognition, the
moment when the one truly comes to know the other. This is perhaps
surprising, for it is finally clear that in the illumination of love there is
knowledge and recognition of the other. To believe that love is blind and
that lovers cannot see each other as they are was always a gross error. I
believe on the contrary that it is love alone that sees truly, and that when
a lover says: My wife is like this, then even if his judgment runs contrary
to that of neighbors and friends, it is he who is right. He is not blind to her
faults and limitations, but he finds in her (and she in him) what is really
there even though others cannot see it. It is the others who are blind.
Love can bring to light the truth of a person. To know someone, to know
a gift we have to love. Hatred, scorn, and irony do not know that to which
they refer. They know only their own caricature of it. Thus knowledge
seems to be there from the very first day of love.
What is meant, then, by this third stage of recognition? It seems to me
that a moment comes when one really knows the otherness of the other.
After passionate union and the responsibility of common tasks, a kind of
distance comes to a couple when each sees the specific otherness of the
other. We find this already in Adam's discovery of Eve. She is other in
spite of their unity, and he gives her her own different and special name,
Ishshah. She is truly different from me. She has feelings and thoughts
and instincts that are not mine. This recognition is an advance, for
continued recognition of otherness means enrichment of the one by the
other.
But as at other stages two paths are possible. The discovery of
otherness may separate. We are in truth very different, and as there is no
longer any passion we go our different ways. Or the recognition may
bring a new relation beyond habit and routine. I might use for this relation
the overworked word dialogue. We can really have dialogue only with
those who are truly different from us, and dialogue is basic in love. But
this dialogue

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VARIOUS BELIEFS

becomes more profound -it is not just a matter of conversation on

common or separate tasks, on everyday household matters. It is a matter
of dialogue on the depths of the being of each as perceived by the other,
and that they cannot be content to leave isolated in distinction. Dialogue
is vital for the couple, for each of the two within it, and for love itself.
Nothing is less easy, for this dialogue can bring out differences and even
stir up opposition that in a good household people try to hide as much as
possible by way of diversions. Some of these differences are essential
ones, so that if dialogue is to be possible, it is not enough merely to state
them, which may cause rupture by way of incomprehension. A basic rule
in life and speech is forgetfulness of self. In dialogue we have to bear in
mind that the one is made for the other. Thus I have to efface myself. I
have to listen without reacting at once or wanting to impose myself. The
important law in dialogue is not to try to be right over against the other,
and therefore, even if we are convinced that what we know or think is
right, to be silent and to accept all that the other says. To accept being
wrong in a dialogue, to do so against our own convictions, is not at all
easy. But it is necessary if the dialogue that is to promote the unity of a
couple in its otherness is not to become instead a sterile discussion. We
have to invert a common formula and say that we love truth, but we love
our spouse even more. In this way love will grow as the truths that we
surrender at once show themselves to be fertile. When we think some
months or years later of the bitter discussions that we have perhaps had
together, we see at once how useless and futile they were. But when we
recognize otherness in dialogue, a new epoch in the growth of love
begins.
We grow older, and love changes again and grows. Two inseparable
people, who see that they are different, but who cannot separate after
overcoming so many trials and differences, can no longer think of the one
without the other. This is the period when forgiveness covers over many
bickerings and faults. But it is not just habit that keeps the two together.
Again, this time of inseparability has its risks and temptations.
The first risk is in fact that of habit. I can no longer separate because the
other is so much a part of the customary scene that I would be ill at ease
alone, and my habits and fads would

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79

all change. Nothing could be worse than this. Love has to be always
fresh and vivid. It must not become a ritual of words and gestures.
Another danger is that of the absorbing of the one into the other. This is,
of course, a risk at every stage of love. That is why the period of the
recognition of otherness is so fundamental. It has often been said that in
a couple one partner is stronger, has more personality and authority, and
progressively absorbs the other. How many authors have used the
comparison of the praying mantis, of the female that devours the male
when he has done his work. The difference is that in a human couple it is
often the husband who absorbs and annihilates his wife, reducing her to
nothing. This is why, I repeat, the period of recognition of otherness is
decisive. After it, the two inseparables are safe within the equality of their
mutual love. But it may be that in spite of his age, or because of it, the
man experiences a new sexual passion. This does not break the
inseparability. But it is a severe crisis which can be overcome only by
truthful dialogue and by the law that I have already indicated, that is, that
of always, a priori, being ready to be in the wrong oneself.
A final deviation in this period of inseparability is that of love as friendship.
How often we are told that as couples grow older true love changes into
true friendship. The two travel life together like the best of friends. But
friendship is one thing and love another. We do not arrive at friendship
merely because there can be no more sex. I have had wonderful friends,
and I think I know what friendship is, but one aspect is independence. No
matter how close friends may be, they remain independent the one of the
other. Much of their life is lived outside the strong bond of friendship.
The friendship may remain a vital one even though their political opinions,
for example, are opposed, but friends also have separate families and
jobs, and times apart. They meet again with joy. In being together they
find a fulfillment and correspondence that are one of the most complete of
life's happinesses. But friendship is not love. Love orients the one totally
to the other. Every moment of life is devoted to the other. No interest
separates the two. No concerns are not common. Even though this love
of inseparables is no longer erotic or passionate, it is not friendship, for it
is the product of a long

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VARIOUS BELIEFS

history in which they have progressively conquered and integrated the

totality of what makes up a human life.
I thus arrive at what I consider to be the last stage of this venture and
development. I call it love as union. Union is not achieved the first day by
a lightning stroke, as is evident from the large number of separations and
divorces. If these are possible, it is because there is no union between
the two. To arrive at this union, it is not enough for a couple to go to bed
together or to play together. For a full and complete union there has to be
a growth of love. The two have to go through the stages that I have
sketched, to overcome the temptations, to accept the common
responsibilities, to recognize their otherness even while maintaining unity
in dialogue, to become progressively inseparable and not to be strangers
living side by side. Love as union accepts the impossibility of separation.
This is why it is also so tragic, for it is toward the end of life that this
inseparability is accepted, at the very moment when death threatens both
the one and the other. The frightening thing, that which causes the
greatest anguish, is not my own death but that of my partner. Love as
union presupposes intimate acquaintance with the whole life of the other.
There is no need to ask, or to ask oneself. We know what the other
suffers and fears. We know what gives the other pleasure or satisfaction.
We know what causes the other to bloom or to wilt. We know all this
because we have lived in the same way at the same time as the other.
The union has become such that the two are no longer strangers. After
so many years, then, the saying is really true: "This at last is bone of my
bones and flesh of my flesh. This does not mean that the man has
integrated the woman into himself. She has not become a part of him. I
dislike the expression 11 my better half. For the opposite is just as much
true. The wife has integrated her husband. He has become she. And
this is perhaps the point of the well-known story that is so often ridiculed,
namely, that God took a rib from Adam to make Eve. Eve integrated this
part of Adam into herself. In reality the one is the other with no question
of supremacy.

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81

find a common way out presupposes a kind of divination of the feelings

and thoughts and expectations and desires of the other. And I have
nothing more important to do in life than to respond to these expectations
and desires and feelings, and to enter into these thoughts. As at the first
flamboyant moment of love, the other becomes the most essential thing in
life. During the course of life, the grandiose statement that without the
one there is no one,5 which is true in early love as passion, seems to fade
somewhat and to be less certain. But now at the end it is full of truth. I
am nothing without her. If she is not there, there is no one.
In this union there also takes place a singular exchange which couples
who have arrived at this point know very well: the exchange of needed
strength. When the one grows ill or feeble, the other finds unsuspected
resources. Even though weak and with little power of resistance, this
other is suddenly endowed with unexpected forces, becoming weaker
again when the partner recovers. The relation is such that all that the one
needs, the other gives. And when the one needs to be defended, the
other is ready to defend. This is what counts. It is not good for man to be
alone. "Two are better than one. If they fall, the one lifts the other up. If
someone is stronger than one who is alone, two can resist" (Eccl.
4:9-12). This is the final stage of a whole life in love.
The circle is thus closed. With love as passion it was thought that love as
union was already achieved. Such is the experience of those who
discover with astonishment the fusion of two into one. Everything is in
fact already given, by grace I would say. But this is a fragile union that life
will test, and when the great rushes of affection die it will tend to weaken.
If we have seen that it is both beautiful and true, then we have to want it
and work at it. We have to guard the shining memory so as to go on to
what we do not yet know, though we have some presentiment of it as the
fulfillment of what was there at the first. We need much time and must go
through many aberrations and experiences to pass from the first radiance
to the

Naturally I am not saying that dialogue is no longer necessary. But there

is understanding beyond dialogue in true 11 sympathy- or "consolation.
To suffer with the other and to

Ellul is quoting the famous line of Lamartine: "Un seul tre vous manque
et tout est dpeupl."- TRANS.

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VARIOUS BELIEFS

sweet and peaceful light of the full moon. The moon is so attractive that
many peoples have treated it as divine. When union is fully achieved,
there is built up the complete human being which is the image of God.
Not otherwise: the masculine alone is never the image of God, nor the
feminine - only love as union. The basic responsibility of both men and
women is that the image of God should be present on earth. But nothing
lasts. And if in love as passion the union is menaced by life, at the end of
the road love as union is menaced by death.
Thus I believe that throughout life, in spite of descents and setbacks, only
one love resists the wasting of time and the diversity of our desires. How
poor and unhappy are those who have not been able to grasp it or to live
it out because they have not given their whole selves to this venture
which is so much more uplifting than all the foolish passions and
accommodations of sleeping around. Love of a single person is
marvelously exclusive. This is the point of God's statement in the
Decalogue: "I am a jealous God" (Exod. 20:5) -not through weakness or
in the sense of human jealousy, but because of his fullness which
includes all things in itself.
I am not saying that all this has been my own experience. Readers must
not think that I am telling my own story. I am not setting up myself as an
example. When I think about my own life, I have nothing to be proud of.
As love has developed to fulfillment, I have known all the temptations to
which I refer, and I have not been able to resist them all. I am human like
everyone else, and I have failed some of the tests of love and not met all
the challenges. I simply know what is true even though I have sometimes
lived out what is false.
The long march of love toward love carries with it some conclusions that
are not without value. The first is that lifelong love has to be for one
person. A couple is one and has to remain one even though it consists of
two. We cannot carry through this venture or construct this royal palace
with many partners or with an exchange of partners. If we change in
midcourse, we will not have the time to build the edifice of life. "What
does it matter?" someone will say. It certainly does matter. Love matters.
I would simply ask those who think otherwise not to use the word love.
Let them erase it from their

LIFELONG LOVE

83

vocabulary and talk about pleasure or enjoyment, or a liking for change,

or the need for new beginnings. I know that these things are part of our
"nature," but let us then cease this constant talk about love. For all such
people know are sterile beginnings that soon wilt. Once we change
partners we have to go on doing so. At once Don Juan is right. In the
same way love cannot be plural, whether polygamous or polyandrous. I
realize that in this area there are social customs and traditions, but we
always find them among peoples that do not know what love is. I am less
open to the idea that polygamy is natural because we find it among many
animals (and after all there are some animal species that give fine
examples of fidelity between a couple). We may indeed admit that people
act like animals, but again let us not talk about love in this connection.
For I cannot love two people at the same time. I cannot divide myself up.6
But supposing we have made a mistake the first time. Can we not rectify
it? This is the theme of innumerable novels. I cannot judge in the
abstract. Yet it must be said that we were not aware of any mistake at the
beginning. For union, there had to be that flame, that liking, that passion
(I am not talking about forced marriages or those arranged by the family)
which impelled the one to the other. Are we sure in these circumstances
that we were mistaken? Is it not the meeting with someone else that
suddenly makes the union seem to be dull, unsatisfying, peevish,
bad-tempered, etc.? It is an illusion that things will go better with
someone else, for the first experience will spoil in advance all those that
follow. I am not saying that there cannot be a happy second marriage. I
am simply saying that each experience renders the next more doubtful
and difficult. And it is almost always possible, if we forget ourselves, to
change -a limping marriage into one that involves joint responsibility and a
recognition of otherness.
I talk about marriage, not because I attach importance to the ceremony,
but because I value that which distinguishes marriage from concubinage
-quite simply, the intervention of

I do not like quoting authorities, but I would like to refer to Pascal when
he said that the aberration of loving in many places is just as monstrous
as injustice (Discours sur les passions de l'amour).

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VARIOUS BELIEFS

the word. Concubinage is a factual state which we can begin and end
without difficulty. Marriage is an act of the word, the word given, the word
exchanged, the word witnessed by others. For those who attach the
value to the word that in it the whole being is pledged, I would argue that
publicly saying yes is infinitely more of a responsible commitment than
moving in with someone. It is no mere matter of a legal tie or of making
divorce difficult. It is a matter of realizing that we are fully committed to
our word and that full seriousness is withheld so long as we do not give it.
No beginning has yet been made of the construction of love.
The evolution of love that I have tried to sketch gives us a better
appreciation of the fine saying that lovers are alone in the world. This is
rightly said about the passionate period. Lovers mock at what others
might say. They are alone in the face of society, neighbors, and parents.
They are self-sufficient. They need neither counsel nor encouragement.
Their passion protects them with a mighty wall of fire. They see only one
another eye to eye. They know only what interests each other. They are
exclusive, and no one can try to help them. Even when they run up
against obstacles and problems, no one can do anything for them. Yet
the story of a love that begins in this way is really that of a love which
progressively opens up to others to their enrichment. It ceases to be
exclusive and sets them in relationship. Lovers are no longer alone to the
degree that their love becomes adult and strong, like the tree in the
Gospel that grows so large that birds can nest in the branches. An
inseparable couple, a united couple, is an extraordinary force on behalf of
the lonely, the suffering, the deprived, those who need a comprehensive
and attentive love and who can draw strength from the venture made by
this couple, finding in it support, and confidence, and secret riches. This
story of love is the opposite of a narrow restriction, an extreme shutting
away, an egoism of two. In a joy that cannot be alone it makes room for
the welcoming and understanding of all.
In this regard I might make a final observation. In writing these pages I
have been aware that what might be said about a human couple might
also be said about the love between us and God. After the revelation of
divine truth, the ardent days

LIFELONG LOVE

85

when God's constant presence penetrates my whole being there comes

the time when it is no longer my own salvation that counts but the task
that must done on the basis of revelation. This is the time of
responsibility, of work of all kinds. It can also be the time of the
temptation to put works first, or to institutionalize, or to give the church
primacy in a progressive forgetting of the freedom of the Spirit. If we pass
this stage, we reach the time of the recognition of the otherness of the
other, of perhaps a vivid realization that God is the Wholly Other, and
there is now the danger of remoteness or even discouragement for lack of
sustained dialogue. Next comes the time of inseparability when the
Wholly Other is no nearer but I cannot think of myself without him. It is
not a matter of whether I am a Christian but of what would become of me
if he were not there. The last stage, then, is that of union, when I fully
accept the fact that my life is in Christ and that I can only die to self
because in fact the incarnation of Jesus Christ has achieved all that I
could hope for in terms of relationship with God. And this is true even in
routine, in the silence of God, in the nongranting of prayers, in exile, for
the whole history unfolds from the initial point where God was present
even if only once in my life, and I have to live the rest of my life on the
basis of this victory, preserving this memory that shapes my whole
existence. Similarly, at each stage of human love we have to preserve
the precious memory of the first period of ardent passion. It is always
present even when hidden. And if this parallel can be true, then, as I
have said, the human couple in its love is the only true image of God that
we can have among us.
I like the thought of Thibon that old age is the time when we need not be
careful or economical. What do we lose if we burn up quickly the time
that remains, the bit of dry and worm-eaten wood that is left? Age without
promise may be age without prudence. Undoubtedly an indifference is
associated with age, as we have all experienced. Yet fundamentally this
indifference is a refusal to prepare for death. It is a refusal to know at a
time when, it is true, none of us is worried about the experimental
knowledge which at other times we regard as wisdom, and which all of us,
when old, already have at root.
Old people grow harder, lose
relationships, and cover themselves with armor.

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VARIOUS BELIEFS

They do so also against their uselessness. For I contemplate the

dissolution of this body that ceases to obey me and that is no longer
myself. Great vitality is still attributed to me, but I sense within myself the
invasion of death. There is a difference between aging and the choice of
the spiritual life, when we are in full possession of our resources and
choose not to use them. In old age "it is not we who withdraw from the
flesh but the flesh that withdraws from us. Weakness takes the place of
renunciation. But is this weakness of the flesh really of benefit to the
soul? This is the problem of sickness and of old age."7 The summons of
Ecclesiastes is basic: "Remember also your Creator in the days of your
youth" (12:1). 1 know that people still expect something from me and I
fear that with loss of memory I can give only twaddle and empty
repetition. The future has no more promises, only threats. But I must live
one day at a time as though all things were to be given me. I must not
give up, for the hour that approaches is the hour of the truth of my life.

Some of my reflections here have been inspired by G. Thibon's fine

meditation on old age and death, Le Voile et le Masque (Paris: Fayard,
1985).

Chapter 8
CHANCES OF HISTORY

PART II
THE HUMAN
ADVENTURE

I must agree that it is intolerably presumptuous to try to present in a few

pages, not a description of the human adventure, but some reflections on
it that are neither history proper nor philosophy, but simply a framework
and hypothesis. All the intellectuals of our day, of course, are asking
what history is from their own perspective. I will here give my own
answer, the fruit of half a century of studies from a historical standpoint.
A twofold difficulty arises at the outset. (1) As I see it, there is no social,
political, or ideological evolution. There is no continuous current from one
epoch to another, from one civilized group to another. In a first approach
I would say that we can never grasp the current itself. When I taught the
history of institutions, I used to show my students that we really advance
by successive jumps. Thanks to documents, archives, testimonies, and
records, I know something about municipal institutions in southwest
France in the mid-14th century, and I can offer a different picture fifty
years later. I can see what changes took place, I can bring out the
differences, I can set the stage. But how did the transition take place?
How does an institution change when it seems so permanent? I have
never been able to discover this. Detailed studies enable me to note
some factors involved, but never in a complete way. There are always
blanks, points of rupture, and even of return. One can establish general
"causes" that bring about the overthrow of a whole society, but doing so
does not enable us to understand the transition from one institutional
state to another. To do this we would have to study every aspect, that of
official documents,
89

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THE HUMAN ADVENTURE

statutes, and judgments, but also that of the manners, beliefs, and
ideologies by which so often, under the facade of a stable institution, a
different state comes into being in a way that is much more vital than the
documents indicate. The, transition is never simple, and it never takes
place in the same way. If I grasp its outlines in one case, I can neither
generalize nor transfer them to another case. How many times we are
the victims of an optical illusion, flattening out time! When I find one
institution in the 4th century, and another that seems similar in the 8th or
9th, I am tempted to state with assurance that the second is the
offspring of the first. But in spite of the historical memory of peoples and
the latent permanence of institutions, I am always wrong to think that one
institution or custom can influence another some centuries later when
there are no traces of it in the intervening centuries. This is true even for
institutions like the Roman Catholic Church which are very conservative
and careful to preserve their records. There is thus no one current that
we can discern, but a great diversity of currents and inflections in the
course of time.
Thus it is evident that in the interface of the biosocial and the cultural
there is no single determinative factor. The two things are reciprocal and
cannot be confused. We all have our own genetic patrimony on which we
depend but which also gives us immense possibilities of different
combinations.
Individuals who are the actors in history are not
conditioned by their genes. We can find no individual or collective plan in
analysis of this genetic patrimony. No rigorous causality is at work.
Individuals are dealt many cards in the game. They have to play these
cards, but they can do so in very different ways and obtain very different
results.
I would say the same about the cultural environment. The conflict
between geneticists and culturalists seems to be a false debate. It is
clear that we grow up from birth in a certain milieu, and that there is thus
something beyond us that tends to impose itself on us. A modem fad
argues that to teach a language to a child is already intellectual terrorism
since it limits the child's capacity to learn anything else and cramps its
intelligence. This is absurd, for if the child does not learn this language it
will learn no language at all. It will be in no relation to

CHANCES OF HISTORY

91

others; it will be autistic. Hence we cannot avoid that factor which is

beyond us. Yet it no more conditions us totally than does the genetic
patrimony. For it is made up of very complex elements -ideas, manners,
habits, explications, beliefs, group relations, whether of sex or of
generations-and these elements can combine in different ways, so that
they are never the same from one generation to another. This is why I
am ill at ease with, for example, Bourdieu's La reproduction or Les
hritiers. For I find striking differences between generations (and if we do
not see it in ancient epochs, it is again because of the flattening out of
time). I cannot understand how these can occur if we apply very strictly
the concept of reproduction.
Similarly, I think that rigorous
determination-the taxonomy of Todd (La troisime plante) on forms of
the family -represents a mechanical view. Thus if we apply this type of
analysis to Rome, I cannot understand how there could be transition from
the clan to the agnatic family and then to the cognate family. In other
words, neither collectively nor individually can I see any possible
determinism. There is no system of the combinations of the genetic or
cultural patrimony. There is no single explanation. Instead we find
multiple adaptations.
Here again we have to be on guard against oversimplification, against a
simplistic pseudo-Darwinism. We must never say that the best adapted
survives. For we have to ask: The best adapted for what? There are for
us so many factors. There is adaptation to the natural milieu (e.g.,
climate), to demographic swings (as we now know, rapid increases or
decreases bring social, ideological, and other upsets), or to technological
change. We have to adapt to so many types of milieu. Nor is it true that
the best adapted survive. The best adapted might vanish first. For the
best adaptation to a milieu means the greatest sensitivity to any change in
the milieu. The best adapted are often the most fragile. Thus multiple
adaptations are an essential factor in understanding how the patrimony is
utilized, but on the condition of remaining elastic and open to new
possibilities. For every development involves a latitude that I find
impossible to explain and that allows for innovation or initiation. We have
to take into account three phenomena: the determinative factors, that is,
the social setting; the possibility that these factors can

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combine in different ways; and an imponderable element that intervenes

to bring something to view. Apart from these phenomena we cannot even
apprehend, let alone explain, the historical complexity of life.
(2) The difficulty is increased by the practical impossibility of defining
exactly a field of research. The history of institutions used to be called the
history of law. The explicit regulations of law were studied, along with
changes in them, without reference to the totality of social phenomena.
We now realize, however, that law has to be examined in its relation to
power, to economic and social structures, to ideologies. To this second
stage we now have to add the history of ideas, law being a perfect
expression of this or that orientation or conception. Thus we can no
longer study wills without referring to the ideas and beliefs of an epoch
concerning death. The terms used to define fields of study in the
humanities are also subject to wide variation. Social history is an
example. Is this the history of society? But this has no meaning -it is at
once everything and nothing. We might argue that social history is simply
a matter of the structures and evolutions of the family.
Some
anthropologists take this view. But if students of politics use the term
social history, they have in mind the complex relations of power and the
situation of many powers set in relation to one another. When I myself
taught social history, I thought of it as the history of labor and unionism,
and of the socioeconomic foundations on which these organizations and
practices were built up. We are thus forced to allow for a margin of
uncertainty in all these areas.
My most important thesis, then, is that we must eliminate univocal
explanations, that is, those which find in one social relation or one
phenomenon a guiding thread or a single dominant and determinative
factor in human history. I will offer some examples, recalling each time
that there is some truth in the contention, but that it is misapplied if the
chosen factor is given a privileged position.
Toward the middle of the 19th century historians were enthusiastic over
the idea of freedom. They wrote histories in which the guiding thread was
the achievement of freedom in the course of human history, and they tried
to explain historical phenomena in terms of this concern, this passion for
freedom.

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93

A little later this idea was replaced by that of the disengagement of the
individual from the group. In primitive times the group was supposedly
dominant (the class, tribe, people, genus, etc.). Within it people were not
individuals but interchangeable, with little awareness of distinctions. But
slowly and progressively the twofold fact emerged of the relaxation of
integration or group unity and the consciousness of individual will and
action. The group ceased to be a unit and gave place to the individual as
a unit. People ceased to be group molecules and the group became an
aggregate of individuals. These two closely related ideas were in fact
essentially dictated by European history. They were Europeocentric. We
now see that they cannot be generalized. As recent authors have shown
(the school of Durkheim. and Gurvitch), we can associate with them the
idea of the transition from status to contract. In primitive societies
individuals have a status, a definite, assigned place. They have certain
rights and duties set by the social body. Their relations to others in the
group are fixed, foreseen, normalized, and objectified. Nothing is left to
individual initiative. Everything is statutory, and in principle nothing can
be changed. But then - and this is the history of humanity - there comes
the transition to the stage of contract, which is (or was in 1900) the
modem, historical stage. In the constitution of the group, in the
organization of economic, legal, and political relations, a situation arose
where everything was regulated by voluntary agreements, by contracts.
Politically, this is democracy. This hypothesis is very seductive, and one
can certainly read history along these lines, but so many other readings
are possible that I cannot tie myself to it.
Less familiar but becoming fashionable is the idea that all history is
dominated by the man-woman conflict. On this view the first and
essential fact is sexual differentiation. How can this not be determinative
in the organization of social relations and the structuring of institutions?
German writers from the end of the 19th century have thought that at first
there was a matriarchate. The group was organized around and in terms
of the woman, who exercised authority in it. But man by various ways
was able to oust woman from her place and take over her authority. Thus
men have organized society, their essential objective

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being to keep women in a state of subordination, and institutions being

set up to keep women in a state of tutelage. But this led to a struggle for
independence; women wanted to gain equality, freedom, authority.
Feminists scan history for traces of this conflict, accepting the fact that
male domination is too obvious to stand in need of proof. Naturally this
explanation of history is mostly that of feminists who have retrieved
ancient records and testimonies (e.g., those concerning the Amazons).
But I will have occasion to show that human history is not so simple, and
that the male-female conflict is not its backbone.
I will finally recall the best known of attempts to explain history by a
dominant factor. I refer to the Marxist and post Marxist theory of class
conflict, which is simply a form of the dialectic of ruler and ruled. We are
all familiar today with what is essential in this vast fresco. In the 19th
century Marx argued that there are two antagonistic social groups whose
interests are the more incompatible insofar as the subjection of the one
makes possible the existence of the other. Their relation is represented
by the relation between capital and labor. The former makes possible the
purchase of the latter, which then gives the ruling class increasing power
in every sphere. The proletariat has no wealth apart from its labor, and it
has to sell this, but in so doing it enables those who acquire it to achieve
greater wealth and hence to augment the labor force. The proletariat has
no way out of its condition, and this exploited group thus becomes a
constitutive element of stability in this society. Once the capitalist system
is in place, to live in this society one has to belong to one or the other
group. Progressively the capitalist class reduces to a proletarian
condition all who do not belong to it. This society is organized in stable
groups that one might call social classes. (Marx was not the first to use
this term, since it appears already in Turgot.) These classes are
necessarily antagonistic, since the one can live only on the labor of the
other. But the latter cannot tolerate for long being deprived of its
substance, and when it sees what is happening, it can only revolt against
those who exploit it. Hence this society is totally dominated by the class
struggle. Having found this to be a fact in the 19th century, Marx thought
that he had found here the key to the history of societies and the meaning
of this history. He

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95

thus extended his analysis to all history, which in every society he thought
to be made up of the battle for liberation waged by the oppressed class
against the ruling class. Naturally Marx made the schema more complex
so as to be able to find in it an explanation for all social developments, but
the one explanatory factor was always the same. In reality, he had to
force the facts to fit into his schema, or even at times to ignore them. For
long periods of history there was in fact no trace at all of this division of
society into antagonistic classes (e.g., in the West from the 5th to the 10th
century). No historian (except perhaps in the USSR) really believes any
longer in this univocal schema.
From these historical studies over the last half-century we have to
conclude that there is no single explanation of history, which shows itself
to be extremely complex. Similarly, one cannot establish cause-effect
relations. It is better to talk about developmental factors. History knows
no direct or simple causality.
But I would go further. I would argue that there is no linear evolution in
which each period seems to be an advance on that which precedes and
in turn prepares for further advance by that which follows, inheriting the
ancient patrimony and augmenting it. This hypothesis coincides with that
of a progressive history of the race. I believe that it is totally wrong.
History knows both advance and recoil: societies that have reached a
high level collapse and are succeeded by "barbaric" societies, so that
many centuries are needed to get back to the level of the social body that
has vanished. But this is true not only on a global scale or for long
periods. I believe it is also true in specific detail. It will be said, for
example, that globally women have been moving from bondage to
freedom. This is absolutely untrue. In some periods women have been in
bondage, shut out, without rights or authority. But in other periods they
have known independence, equal rights, sometimes even a superior
status. One might refer to the final stage of Greek society, to Hellenism
under the Seleucids, or to Rome from the 1st century B.C. to the 4th
century A.D. As it was then said, "The senators direct the res publica, but
the matrons direct the senators. But then everything was lost again. In
regions invaded by the Arabs women were reduced to nothing. After the
Germanic invasions they lost their rights and status. In the first case their
losses were due to the application

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of Islamic teaching, in the second to the spread of violence throughout

society. Yet when feudalism reached its golden age, women were not
slaves, and it was not merely by way of compensation that the stories of
chivalry gave them an imperial place. Nor was it merely by way of
compensation that the cult of women developed as represented by the
Virgin Mary. To talk of ideological compensation that masks the true
reality is to fail to see the reality. Women could hold fiefs and serve as
lords of the manor. As in rural societies, they had their place and
participated in decisions. Nevertheless, it is true that their situation and
image declined in the 17th century, and especially in the 19th. There is
no need to give an account of middle-class women when hundreds of
novels have already done so, nor of working-class women, crushed by
misery. It was middle-class rule that shut out woman and made her an
inferior if expensive object. But we cannot conclude that because the
situation of women was bad in the 19th century it was worse in the 17th
and worse again in the 13th. Nothing is as simple as that
The same process of movement forward and back, of advance and recoil,
may be seen when we look at political power, and especially at the desire
to set up the strong, central, political power that we now call the state,
though it is wrong to use that term when we look at Greece, at Egypt, at
the Incas, or at the Muscovites. Centralized power that is strong and
organized does not have to take the form of the state if we take the state
to mean what we find in Western societies for the last three centuries.
There is no steady historical development from a society in which power
is splintered, decentralized, and divided toward a centralization,
concentration, and reinforcement of power to the detriment of local
structures. But periods when power becomes centralized and strong,
excludes rivals, and takes an authoritarian, violent, ritual, royal, or sacral
form, are periods when through an excess of power or concentration no
movement is possible (as in the case of Byzantium) or everything is
dislocated, so that the empire crumbles. Power then disperses into
different hands. This development may be internal or external (e.g, the
Aztecs). It may seem to be spontaneous. It may result from collective
disaffection (I think of the suicidal surrender of Rome to assassination by
the Germanic invasions).

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97

And it is always very hard to know why at a certain place and time the
concentration of political power will take place. Why does one type of
state arise in Benin or Dahomey and not in neighboring African
kingdoms? Hence in the course of history I do not find continuity or
accumulation but evolution-not spiral evolution, as people have been
accustomed to say for the last thirty years, but jagged evolution, with
alternating advance and recoil.
Admittedly, to talk of advance and recoil is already a value judgment. To
go back to the phenomenon of political power, I might look at it from the
standpoint of the modem state and say that there is advance every time I
note a concentration of power, and recoil or decline when I see it
scattered. But I would say the exact opposite if I looked at it from the
standpoint of decentralization. The point of view adopted depends in fact
on a value judgment. If I attach positive value to the state, I uphold it and
find centralization of power good or normal. But I might be a supporter of
decentralization, of federalism, of self-administration, and in this case my
judgment would be the opposite. There is in effect no such thing as
progress. There is an ideology, an illusion as Sorel would say, and it is
not unimportant that Marx gave himself up fully to this illusion, and that
Marxism as a whole lives on the illusion of human progress. As for
Teilhard de Chardin, the last to sing the praises of progress, he
constructed a theory that is stupefying in its candor. But an indignant
reader might say to me: "You cannot deny that we today are every way
superior to homo erectus. You cannot deny that we know more than he
did, that we have infinitely more developed and refined powers,
philosophies, techniques, and manners. You cannot deny that we live
much better. Granted, yet I am still not convinced. For we have also to
consider what we have lost in comparison with this prehistoric savage.
Who among us could tolerate the cold of the Ice Age? Who could attack
a bear or an auroch with a stone spear? Who could walk hundreds of
miles on foot? Who has the same physical strength or detailed
knowledge of nature or ability to scent wild animals? In other words, we
have lost many personal abilities in comparison with primitive people.
(Perhaps not intellectual abilities, but we know nothing about that.) A
mutation has taken place.
We have made fantastic progress in
organization and

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modes of action, but we have suffered disastrous regress in our senses

and physical powers.
It is impossible to measure progress. I might consider the countryside
when it was not yet industrialized. I might listen to townsfolk laughing at
farmers who come to town on market day and are clumsy and crude. But
I might also see how townsfolk out in the country are themselves clumsy
and frightened and ignorant. I might think of the scorn of country folk for
those who cannot tell one plant from another and do not know the phases
of the moon or the time to sow. In the course of history we have gained
much and lost much.
As for moral and intellectual quality, I am not sure that people today are
any better than the people of Athens in the middle of the 5th century B.C.
We have only to look at the horrors of the modern world, the violence, the
drugs, the wars, the torture, and it is obvious that humanity has made little
advance in these areas. But it is impossible to weigh what is gained
against what is lost, or what is lost against what is gained, for we have
here values and quantities that cannot be measured against one another.
We cannot measure; we have to choose.
If I move to another level, that of rapid change, I might get the same
illusion of progress. From one generation to another two situations are
possible. The one is that of fixity. Social norms are secure. One
generation follows another, repeating the same model. This situation
might seem impossible to us, but it functions in very strong traditional
societies. More often, however, each generation initiates its own history.
It is wrong to think that a generation that follows takes over the legacy of
that which precedes and then moves on from there. This relation is
conceivable in the scientific and technological spheres, but not in the
political, economic, moral, and aesthetic spheres. The generation that
comes may adopt some things from the preceding generation, but it may
also reject everything and begin its own history (which is often no more
than a recommencement). For twenty years I saw how impossible it is to
transmit experiences to young people so that they might profit by them.
Between 1930 and 1950 we made several experiments, we developed
many ideas and theories, and we went through

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99

many powerful experiences, in politics, economics, and sociology. I had

the vain hope that we could tell young people about our failures so that
they would not make the same mistakes or adopt the same approaches.
We could say to them: "Do not go this way, we know that it is a dead end.
Look what happened to us. That is an example. The same thing will
happen to you. But no one listened. The lesson of 1936 was useless in
1968. For my part, I am astounded when I see young people becoming
leftist. The Moscow trials, the German-Soviet pact, the Spanish Civil War,
the discovery of labor camps, repression in Hungary and Czechoslovakia,
the witness of countless intellectuals who enthusiastically joined the
Communist Party between 1945 and 1947 and then left the party
between 1956 and 1968 -these things count for nothing. In every
sphere young people begin again without paying heed to past experience.
In settled traditional societies older people had authority because they
could transmit to the young the concrete experiences they had had and
the lessons they had learned from them. But now the young want to go
their own way alone. This is all very well, but they do not realize that they
are repeating the same follies as their elders and running into the same
obstacles. There is repetition (each time with a new model), but not, as I
have said, in the sense of Bourdieu. There is progress in social and
personal life, in scientific and technological accumulation. But where is it
all leading us?
On the subject of the human adventure, I want to present a reasonably
comprehensive hypothesis with the idea of environment as a starting
point.1 By environment I do not simply mean the ecological niche, or,
more generally, the place where people live. It seems to me that
environment can be characterized by three relations, two of which are
apparently contradictory. On the one side, we find in our environment all
that we need to live. I say to live and not just to survive. We are set in it
and we adapt to it, but we also try to adapt it to us. There are in it natural
elements, the most rudimentary being air, water, and the plants that feed
us and provide for us. Also in relation

I am not falling into the error discussed above and making this the single
factor that lies behind evolution.

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CHANCES OF HISTORY

101

to the environment we have occasion to exercise one of the most basic

functions of life, that is, symbolism. The environment gives us the chance
to create symbols, and here are riches that spur us to development. The
environment sets up the conditions of human development and not
merely of human subsistence. This is simply one aspect of the
environment, and the one that we grant the most readily.

the ascent to history. Progressively the social group became the true
human environment. It was from the group that people now drew all their
possibilities of life and also of aggression. Between the original period
and the historical period there was the long development of what we call
the Neolithic Age. But in the last two centuries the social environment in
turn is being replaced by a new one, the technological environment.

But if we really want to understand the environment in its totality, we have

to take into account what I have called the contradictory factor. The
environment is what puts us in danger. It is both helpful and hostile.
When we die, it is always because of the environment. The danger may
be due to the absence of good things: no more water, no more game, etc.
But it may also be positive: wild beasts, snakes, etc. We also realize that
one of the main dangers may come from other people: war, tribal
conflicts, etc.
One might be tempted to say that two different
environments coexist, the natural on the one hand, the human on the
other. But I think that there is a succession rather than a coexistence of
environments. When we become a danger to those of another group, a
change of environment takes place from the purely natural environment to
a different one, the social environment.

Naturally, the transition from one environment to another takes place only
over a long period. Furthermore, the original milieu is not completely
effaced or annulled or destroyed. It simply becomes a second, indirect
environment. When society becomes our environment, it does not
exclude nature, but nature becomes less and less determinative, and the
dangers come from other people. Similarly, when we pass to the
technological environment, this does not mean that the social
environment ceases to exist, but it is increasingly mediated by technology
and dependent upon it. Thus the replaced and outdated environment
remains as a substratum of the new one. And since thinking is slow to
move and verbal forms are always a step behind reality, the older
environment serves as an ideological reference for those who have been
plunged into the new one. Thus when society becomes the dominant
environment, nature comes to be regarded as a model, a reference, or a
test. Law and morality must conform to nature (natural law, natural
morality). I have already shown the inanity of this elsewhere.2

The third feature that I discern in the environment is its immediacy. We

are set in a direct relation to a given environment. We immediately act
upon it (to feed ourselves, to defend ourselves, etc.). It also acts directly
on us. We have to adapt to it, to conform to it even as we transform ft.
The immediate presence of this environment is obviously our constant
concern and preoccupation. If the relation to the environment becomes
indirect, then it ceases to be our true environment. We are no longer
integrated into it. We are at a distance from it and there is no longer any
conjoint evolution. When the relation is indirect, we tend to act on the
environment as subjects where previously it enforced our adaptation.
As I look at the human adventure from this standpoint, I seem to see
three essential stages. The first is the stage when human beings were
directly linked to nature around them, to water, trees, plains, and
mountains, and when they were part of it. But gradually they formed into
groups and found means to act on this natural environment. This is the
long period of

It will also be said, however, that we are social animals. This, too, is our
nature in some way. But this is hardly an adequate formula. This trait
does not characterize us among animals. If what is meant is that we have
never lived alone, that is true. If what is meant is that there has always
been a human society, this does not correspond to what we can know. I
believe that for millennia people lived as though grafted upon the natural
environment, and that at that time they were not social animals. The
determinative environment was not really their own.

See Jacques Ellul, The Theological Foundation of Law, trans.

Marguerite Wieser (New York: Doubleday, 1960; repr. New York:
Seabury, 1969); To Will and To Do: An Ethical Research for Christians,
trans.
C.
Edward Hopkin (Philadelphia/Boston: Pilgrim Press,
1969).-TRANS.

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They are social as they seek to constitute for themselves a different

environment, one of their own in which they can be dominant and find
fulfillment. But an evolution of this kind is not ontological, nor is it
inscribed upon human nature. Yet there will be constant research into
what human nature really is. And it will finally be said conclusively that
the most constitutive factors of the social environment are really natural.
The phenomenon of the state is typical. Once the state is set up and
becomes dominant, it is thought without any doubt or embarrassment
that a kind of natural law has led to it, that it is in effect a natural reality.
The specific historical formation that the state governs is always
naturalized, and citizens all believe that the state that they live in is
natural.3 As we now move into the technological environment, we find
again that thinking lags behind. It is held that technology depends on
politics, that it is not only a specific form of society but also supposedly a
natural phenomenon, that it is simply a utilizing of nature. Such
statements lead to enormous errors of judgment and ridiculous
imbroglios. We do not know how to live in the new environment and so
we passionately act as though we were living in those that are outdated
and in part destroyed-a fervent concern for nature and a growing faith in
politics.
I must now deal with the final objection that this idea of our determination
by environment, our dependence upon it, and our transformation as we
change it, is simply a revival of Darwin and a purely materialistic reading
of history. I do not think so first because I refer to changes in
environment, whereas elsewhere the only environment that has been
considered is nature. For me, then, the relation between animals and the
natural environment is not the only one. The two other environments are
of our own creation. Human beings willed to live in society, organized
society, and gave it its form. Human beings want technology and its
multiplication. In the venture they miss the point that the society they
want and the technology they invent become the determinative
environment to which they must adapt. Their own work becomes their
global environment. They did not see this, and they did not will it. But

See J. Ziegler, Vive le pouvair.

CHANCES OF HISTORY

103

it is still their own work. Work alone is not what singles out human
beings. They are marked by their inventiveness, their creativity, but also
by the fact that they have to adapt to their own creation. This is not
materialistic determinism. There is nothing mechanical here. Human
history is always open and always has to be made, yet it is not simply the
product of the human will. Human beings have to make history along with
what is there and within the framework of what has become theirs by their
own works that have now slipped out of their control. I see nothing here
that runs contrary to what the biblical revelation can tell me about our
creation in the divine image. I find only the expression of what might
seem to be a formal contradiction between our freedom (in the freedom of
God) and our subjection to contingency and necessity even while
preserving autonomy. In our autonomy we constantly achieve a freedom
that again and again turns into a necessity and thrusts itself finally upon
us, annulling out freedom, and yet this freedom is not dead.

Chapter 9

THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD AND

THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT
I am not a prehistorian or an anthropologist. Yet I have some idea of what
went on prior to 3000 B.C, the date to which one may very generally trace
the beginning of "history. To talk about prehistory or protohistory is not to
imply, of course, that for 500,000 years people had no history. It is just that
we know nothing about it and can reconstitute vast tracts of time only by
means of habitat, bones, and tools. There is no documented history in the
European (and Chinese) sense.
Nevertheless, there were certain
phenomena that we can understand and comprehend as history. I do not
refer merely to the instrumental transition from the Paleolithic to the
Neolithic Age. The main phenomenon is the progressive transition from the
natural environment to the social environment. This is true history even
though it is not marked by events or precise dates. It seems to me that in
the Paleolithic Age, and even more so in the ages before that, the
population was much more scattered, groups were much less numerous,
and individuals were lost in an omnipotent nature over which they had no
control. They lived as parasites and predators, and they were exposed to
far more dangers than other animals, since they were finally less well
adapted, to specific environments, though capable of relative adaptation to
many different and opposing environments.
We now know there was a succession of hominoid types, homo erectus
(between 1,000,000 and 100,000 years B.C.), who knew fire, then homo
sapiens and homo sapiens-sapiens (100,000

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to 35,000), who used more techniques (stone, tools, perhaps boats,

improved hunting, use of skins, ritual burial). As Neirynck has well shown,
technology affected human physiology and vice versa. During this long
period, human groups did not make war. The bones of young people show
no trace of wounds. The low density of the population and the scattered
nature of the groups may explain this phenomenon.
Nevertheless, as population increased a major evolution took place with the
greater density of groups. Like Chaunu, I believe that the demographic
factor is a determinative one in history. In the historical period the centers
of civilization are those with a higher level of population. Depopulation
expresses itself in the collapse of social organization. Yet we have to make
allowance for nuances if we are not to fall victim to a logic of causality, as
though demographic movement were the cause of social or economic
phenomena. In reality we do not know the cause. Each element here is at
the same time both cause and effect. We cannot say what begins things.
Did demographic growth come first and technological, economic, and
political development follow? Or was demographic growth triggered by an
abundance of food, better weapons, or changes of climate? All these
things could play a part both ways. In any event, there was a certain
coincidence that produced more complex social grouping. What we find in
the historical era is sufficiently general and basic to allow us to transfer it to
the long prehistoric "night. I think, then, that as population grew larger
there was slow evolution in the relationship between the human group and
the natural environment. Able to make more efficient tools and weapons,
people also belonged to larger groups that could influence the natural
environment. This was perhaps between 8000 and 2500 B.C. There thus
began the long history in which the race ceased to be defensive in relation
to the environment and was able to utilize it, then to master it, and finally to
achieve total domination over it.
In the transition to the Neolithic Age, techniques multiplied. Agriculture
appeared around 8000 years ago in six different areas. Domestication and
breeding came at much the same time (sheep in Iraq ca. 9000 years ago).
Then came pottery, glass, Mid perhaps the first metallurgy around 6000
years ago. But

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along with the larger population and increased technology appeared the
utilization of nature and war, the first indication of political conflict and
transition to another environment.
A recent study of this subject is very interesting. 1 The archeologist D.
Vialon shows that 95 percent of the depictions that go back to the
Paleolithic Age represent animals. There are few human silhouettes, and
none with arms. In contrast, in Neolithic paintings human figures gradually
become dominant, along with many tools and weapons. The animal
increasingly becomes the hunted animal under human domination. This
development seems to me to be a vital one, for it shows what really counts
in the two epochs. The attention of people in the Paleolithic Age was
directed to animals. These were the dominant factors and constituted the
real environment, providing food but also creating the main dangers. But
when people and weapons replace them artistically, this indicates that the
human group (for the figures are mostly in groups) has become the main
focus of interest, a primary entourage that gradually becomes a new if as
yet fragile and threatened environment. It is with the group and its
instruments that people now have to do first. The group is the primary
entity around them. A turn is beginning to take place. It is only beginning.
In spite of the primacy of the group, nature is still dominant and constitutes
the true environment. Yet it has begun to be mediated through the group. I
am not saying that in the Paleolithic Age there could not be any form of
social organization. But we can say nothing about this except that it was
neither very complex nor enduring.
In the protohistoric world I believe that functional groups appeared
gradually which were determinative for social organization. We must not
oversimplify and say that these functional groups meant a division of labor
in the strict sense. The three functions brought to light by G. Dumzil,
which seem to me to be typical from the time of the Indo-Europeans, will
illustrate what I am trying to say. They form an excellent explanatory
model, though we must not apply them universally. In other words, the
original organization of the group was neither by tribe nor by family but by
function. Human divisions, formations of

THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD

coherent groups in global society, solidarities, along with taboos and cults,
came into being through the discharge of various functions in the group.
This runs contrary to most accepted theories but seems to me to be in
keeping with observable facts. We must not let ourselves become
obsessed with the sexual factor or the preeminence of force. I believe that
matrimonial relations and family structures were constituted on the basis of
the functions a family group was charged with in society. A family is
structured less by its sexual status than by the recognized assigning to it of
a specific function for which it is responsible.
This is not division of labor in the classical sense, first because the
functions do not necessarily correspond to a particular type of work then
because division of labor relates to individuals -one person is a hunter,
another a specialist in tools, and another in pictograms-whereas what I
have in mind is responsibility for functions discharged by the whole group.
Around the function cluster rituals and rites and the possibility or
impossibility of having relations. This carries with it a particularizing of
techniques and beliefs, but also their complementarity.
We now know fairly clearly that the Neolithic Age was not one of famine
during which the main preoccupation and activity would have had to be
finding something to eat. Sahlin has shown that abundance reigned except
for an occasional crisis. This relative profusion made a partition of
functions possible. It is plain that if we picture the people of this period as
famished creatures always on the hunt for food, no social organization or
division of functions would have been possible. Nevertheless, the assigned
function does not take up the whole time, and is not comparable with actual
work. At certain times and in certain places the function of a given group
becomes dominant and imperative. Everything must yield to its necessity,
which is that of the clan as a whole, since the special group fulfills its role in
order that the whole may survive. There are also long periods, however,
which are free and allow of reintegration into a common symbolism. Hence
I would not call the function an explanatory system covering all individuals
and
2

2
1

Denis Vialon, "Les images prhistoriques," La Recherche (May 1983).

107

Until recently abundance was common in traditional societies, e.g., in Cambodia

before Pol Pot, with easy and plentiful rice crops and good fishing.

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groups. But it does seem to me to be a structural factor with reference to

which the different elements in society are linked to one another. It is
certainly not a natural or spontaneous factor. Once again it is human
beings themselves that institute it, not by a clear and express decision, but
by a long process. And once effectively set in place (though constantly
perfected and revised), it tends to become in effect a factor that seems to
be self-evident. What all this amounts to, and the majority agrees on this
point, is that in the Neolithic Age at least there was no primitive sharing.
Everybody did not do everything or anything. There were express
assignments, as may be seen at such times as festivals and funerals.
This social organization, then, was not subject to chance or to primary
forces that a positivist realism often puts first. We now know that in
prehistoric art the drawing is neither realistic (not because the painters
were incompetent; on the contrary, they showed extraordinary skill) nor
random: the figures are not placed on the wall of a cave, or in relation to
one another, in any haphazard way. The figures are, in fact, signs, and one
might almost say that we have here abstract images with precise
symbolical value. In the same way, it seems to me that the social
organization is full of meaning for its members. All social organization
carries meaning. Without meaning it would not be legitimate and would
fade out, or at most survive only for a short time by violence. Historians of
law and positivist jurists generally forget this. An institution is not valid
merely because it exists. It must always be referred to something beyond
itself of which one might say that it is the sign. For a long time we have
wanted to refer law to a value like justice. This is not impossible. In our
own time we pretend that justice is the final point of reference. But this is
mere hypocrisy. For a period, and for a historical bloc of civilizations,
justice has in effect been the meaning attributed to the institution, that
which validates it and leads people to accept it. But this situation is neither
universal nor permanent. Other meanings can be valid and can be fully
accepted. Hence it is not just because an organization is regarded as
useful or effective that people are ready to come under it and obey it. It has
to carry meaning in their eyes, meaning for life, for death, for total being, for
the future, etc. Meaning

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109

assures us of our true identity and guarantees us a certain specificity.

When I consider the great variety of possible meanings, and the fact that in
known societies social organization survives only if it can provide us with
valid meaning, I have to believe that things were the same in prehistoric
societies, and therefore that division by function was accepted only if it also
had symbolical force, if it was not just rational organization but carried an
image in which people could recognize themselves (I would not say
individually, but as a group).
This hypothesis seems very likely to me, but it would not be unilateral or
uniform. For the factors of social organization in different groups are to my
knowledge very different and not at all comparable. In other words, I do not
believe that anything is universal. In history I have never found a universal
factor, whether for individuals or societies. I do not believe that there is a
given, fixed, and permanent human nature, not even general
characteristics. If we want to find universal factors in societies, we never
get beyond words. It is our practice to generalize extensively. We say that
people are religious, that there is religion in every traditional society, that
law is religious, or that social organization is religious. What do such
statements mean? To explain them in terms of Latin etymology (religare or
relegere) is dubious, for the religious facts do not correspond except in the
Christianized Greco-Latin sphere. What is religion? We would have to be
very clever to say what it is when we look at such different phenomena as
the Inca rites, the myths studied by Lvi-Strauss, Scandinavian beliefs,
Buddhism, Zen, Shamanism, etc. Religion as such does not exist in the
strict sense. I cannot group together all that is traditionally called religion.
The diversity is too great even on essential points: many gods, one god, or
no god, an afterlife or no afterlife, a goal or no goal, etc. To arrive at a
general concept of religion presupposes an abstract gymnastics that in no
way corresponds to the reality here and now of the actual situation. And
what applies to this universal factor applies to nearly all the terms that we
now use as if they were universals.
I must emphasize how smoothly we slip in our Western terms and
institutions. Thus among us the sexual relation between men and women
is organized as marriage. We describe as marriage every such relation in
every epoch and society. But

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with us marriage is a whole complex, and we measure other institutions by

our own. Again, among us the relation between people and things is
organized as one of property. We thus talk of property among the
Etruscans, Kanakas, etc. But this is not possible.
One example that has always seemed significant to me is that of slavery.
We talk about slaves among the Aztecs, the Egyptians, the Hebrews, etc,
and we project a certain model, either that of Roman slavery in the 2nd
century B.C, or slavery in the
Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries. But there is no real comparison.
The Hebrew slave had nothing in common with the Roman slave except the
existence of a master, though under such different terms that the word itself
meant nothing. In much the same way we misuse the word family. We say
that there is a group relation between man, woman, and child, and we give
this relation a name. But we ought not to understand the relation in terms
of what we mean by family. We ought to submit to the reality that is
proclaimed from within the society, to accept what the group says about
itself, and not to put it in a Western form or to translate it into our own
terms. In my view this is why typologies are so artificial. I do not believe in
concepts like patrilinear, matrilinear, etc. These are things we invent for the
purposes of our own classifying and reasoning, but always at the expense
of the unique features of a given group. As I see it, these unique features,
these special details, these oddities, these peculiar usages, are what
constitute the true character of an organization or institution. Looking at all
the constitutive features of an institution, we tend to pick out those that suit
ourselves, and we make of these our criteria of classification, but in so
doing we deform irrevocably the reality that we thus master. If we want to
make some advance in understanding (rather than rationalized or global
knowledge), then we must analyze the details. No universal form will
enable us to trace a global geography or history of the race. We have
referred already to the great diversity contained in a word like social. I
might decide to explain human history by the typology of families or of
power, but this would be an arbitrary decision. In the social as in the
biological sphere there is a tremendous proliferation of forms and
components, and we cannot impose upon

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111

them any hierarchy, but only note the successes and failures. It is
impossible to align them in such a way as to be able to trace a history in
them.
Nevertheless, even though there can be no coherent knowledge, we can
pick out certain features that are general enough to be comprehensive.
The first is that by all accounts human beings have been extremely
inventive in the creation of social forms in the natural environment into
which they were plunged. No single model corresponds to particular
features in human nature. There are instead many models that we must
not try to reduce to schemas. In all types of natural environment human
beings have been able to find the most adequate and effective social
structure. The problem was always the same, namely, how to survive in
this singular universe in which we are placed. The responses were not
stereotyped but appropriate. In other words, there was not just an
involuntary adaptation of the biological organism but a voluntary and
selected adaptation (I would not say calculated or conscious and
considered) of the adopted social form. The remarkable thing about this
adaptation is that it was chosen and not left to chance or to arise ex nihilo.
Perhaps it came by way of a series of trials and errors, but certainly on the
level of the intellect and judgment. We know that prehistoric people could
note their mistakes and probably profit by them and try to correct them.
There was thus a multiplicity of social forms. It might be objected that we
-know nothing explicit about these. That is true, yet given the diversity of
environments and the different forms of resistance that they demanded, we
are forced to assume that people responded differently according to
circumstances.
A second feature that seems to me to be fairly general is symbolization.
We have alluded to this feature already. Human beings were not content
merely to set up a type of family or functional group. They projected it in a
form that would explain and justify it. They symbolized it in order to give it
permanence, legitimacy, and meaning. At the same time they ritualized it.
In association with each social institution rites were created that permitted
individual identification and conformity. Rites guarantee social stability, and
no institution can evade this fact. An institution does not survive on its own.
It can exist only by

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way of either violence or the ritualization that guarantees conformity without

judgment. Symbolization is neither the expression of a religious feeling nor
a movement toward a divine universe. It is obligatory if the social body,
however small, is to survive. As I have said, symbolization offers a
guarantee of permanence. It opposes the tendency of all things to grow old
and break up and pass away. It makes possible an orientation to a system
of complex relations with the environment. Rites are a fixed frame to which
to refer for lack of natural stability. Natural stability does not exist, whether
in the nature around us or in the order of shifting human relations. The
elementary example of the man-woman relation shows this. A couple is
essentially unstable and may break up for any minor cause. The rite that
we call marriage has brought stability, so that the couple may stay together
in spite of every fluctuation.
Nevertheless, in apparent contradiction of what I have just said, I also
maintain that when a human group gives itself a form that implies the
existence of a power or authority, a process of compensation begins. This
is always true in history, and I have no hesitation in projecting it back into
prehistory. In society no force has ever been at work without giving rise to
a counterforce. There has always been white magic as well as black.3
Here again we must avoid two extremes. On the one hand, this creation is
not an organic, spontaneous, or automatic one, as though society secreted
its own antibodies. On the other hand, it is not the fruit of reflection, of
some philosophy or theory. Humanity stands between the two. There is
voluntary creation, but only as dictated by circumstances. This factor of
compensation seems to me to have played a decisive role. It prevents the
new force from increasing indefinitely. (We have seen that authoritarian
states cannot come into being except when the factor of compensation
disappears.) It has brought progress by constant criticism of power and
institutions. It has set limits to human action. It has given birth to what
would later be called ethics. I believe that it was present from the
appearance
3. We shall see this again in the next chapter; here I may simply refer to
one of the most remarkable institutional examples, that of Rome with its
consul but also the people's tribune as a counterforce limiting consular
"omnipotence."

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113

of the first social forms. It was so because of the conjoint appearance of

material power and symbolizing power.
Finally, two factors seem to me to be always linked and to work together in
every social form: a factor of complexificatian and one of simplification.
The former is obviously tied to refinement of adaptation on the one side and
on the other to the idea of function that I referred to earlier. The more a
group tends to grow, the more new problems arise, for example, securing
new food, extending territory, and relating to other groups. There thus
develops a trend toward more complexity. Division of functions and work
becomes more detailed, and the more developed use of tools poses a
demand for several specialists. Power always gives rise to various forms of
intervention and therefore to complexity. In fact, as we begin to get more
information about the groups called protohistoric, we find ourselves in the
presence of extraordinarily complex groups. We are far from the simplistic
concept of a communal society. From the beginning of the century
anthropology and ethnology have shown how complex primitive groups
were and how mistaken it is to equate the primitive with the simple.
Nevertheless, this complexification was accompanied by its opposite, by a
simplification of forms and systems. This often went hand in hand with the
attempt to give meaning to the social world. Myths might be complex, as
Lvi-Strauss has shown, but one aspect of them is that they give order to
reality. In this sense they simplify. By taking us to another and
representative world, they elucidate. Society expresses and orders itself
through the myths that it produces. With symbolization, then, there is in
society a tendency toward simplification.
It is hard to think of
complexification and simplification going together, and yet this is what
happens as society gains awareness of itself. In general, evolution is
understood as complexification. Primitive society is supposedly simple,
and the more it evolves, the more complex it becomes. But primitive
society is not simple.4
4. I note the same idea among exegetes, who in analyzing ancient
documents start with the hypothesis that the simplest document is the
oldest. They forget that evolution can go the other way, that the oldest
document may be very complex, and that there has been a later work of
simplification.

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There is also a tendency to purge out forms. That is to say, an awareness

develops that certain rites, organizations, or taboos are superfluous, and
there is thus a move to suppress them. Starting with a totality that is
complex and overdeveloped, people try to find more simple and effective
social forms that are better adapted to concrete situations. The purging of
social forms is an expression of progress and has played a part in every
epoch, though it has never, of course, been permanent. We need to
consider each case on its own merits, which I cannot do here.
In closing, I want to emphasize that I am only too well aware of the
objections that might be brought against these last pages. I have perhaps
illegitimately used the features of historical societies to explain the
phenomena of prehistoric societies. Yet to the extent that it seems to me
that there is continuity and not discontinuity between them, this does not
seem to be out of the question. I must state again that the main difference
relates to the fact of our knowledge or ignorance of this history, not to its
reality.

Chapter 10

116

THE HISTORICAL PERIOD AND

THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT
One might date the beginning of the historical period to around 3000 B.C.
The Xia Dynasty in China dates to around 2000 B.C., though an article in
La Recherche traces Chinese history back to 4000. The first Egyptian
dynasty (Menes) dates back to 3000, and the history of Kish, Ur, and Uruk
to 2700. In many parts of the world comparable phenomena appeared at
roughly the same time without any links among them. Transition is made
from the Neolithic Age to human groups of a new type whose features we
can better discern. I do not propose to trace their history here but to look at
the common aspects and determinative characteristics of these societies
from a sociological standpoint. Five features seem to me to apply both to
ancient historical societies and to our Western world, marking these
societies up to the radical change that has been taking place in the West
for the last two hundred years.
(1) The first significant feature is that with historical advance there is an
increasing transition to the voluntary and artificial, though naturally not
without periods of recoil, for, as we have seen, there is never unbroken
"progress. When I use the term artificial, I have in mind human
intervention in nature. This does not characterize the historical period
alone, for once homo faber came on the scene, the artificial modification of
the natural environment began. But an artificial environment was not
created all at once; the natural still permeated it. Historical societies
advanced slowly toward an artificial environment. I am not using
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the word artificial in a pejorative sense. I do not say that nature is good and
offers us a model that we must always follow. This would mean the
negation of all human history. In historical societies nature is not negated
but mediated. Society becomes our chief milieu. It is by society, and
thanks to it, that our basic needs are met. But it is also from society that
the greatest dangers come (e.g., wars). Certainly the natural environment
is still there, and from it society draws its primary resources. Sometimes
the natural environment can itself become dangerous, as in the case of
volcanoes, tornadoes, etc. But the primary resources have to be
exploited by the collective labor of the social body, and typhoons do far less
damage than tyrants.
What do I mean when I speak of a transition to the voluntary? The more
society evolves, the more it seems to be organized deliberately. First there
was a fairly spontaneous grouping with, as we have seen, norms and
taboos and prohibitions and functions and forms, all created by human
beings, but with little calculation or pretense at organization. This is shown
by the mythical reference to founding deities and the sense of belonging to
a sacral universe. From the beginning of the historical period rites and the
sacred have existed, of course, but their status declines, and there is a
trend toward autonomous organization without any necessary reference to
the transcendent. Little by little society in turn comes to be viewed as an
object to be fashioned. It ceases to be a mere collection of people. It takes
on a being of its own. Standing on its own, it can be contemplated as a
thing apart, as a foreign body. People distance themselves from it. They
can then impose upon it rules that are increasingly thought out and willed,
and less and less inspired and spontaneous. Family and function are no
longer rooted in the natural world but are subjected to regulations according
to conscious models.
Once it is seen that rules are created voluntarily, it is seen also that they
can be changed. For a long time an attempt is made to preserve them, to
guarantee them by reference to a religious model, or to affirm that they are
natural and sacrosanct, but this is finally impossible in face of the
awareness that one can set up new rules for the social game and that one
can also change them. Copying yields to reflection. This trend is rein

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117

forced by the appearance of writing, which is a tremendous factor in

laicizing society and making it artificial. Writing makes possible the
universalizing of a decision or insight. It strengthens leadership, since
leaders can now make their will known to wider groups. It makes the
composing and preserving of records possible. Above all, it makes
possible a type of transmission other than what I would call
proto-hereditary. It detaches knowledge from that of ancestors and
challenges the validity of what is ancient, that is, the idea that things are as
they are because oral lore passed down from one generation to another
says that this is how they have always been. A different kind of social
validity had now to be invented.
Another decisive factor was the invention of law as a means to change
society when rules ceased to be the revelation of the deity and became a
creation of power. Social organization was now the result of voluntary
intervention according to calculation, consent, and authority. Very quickly
in Egypt, at Ur, and in China this manipulated society found acceptance.
This possibility and concern gave birth to what would become the main
preoccupation in the historical period and for the social environment,
namely, politics in the larger sense. We have to realize that politics is an
activity that is linked to the existence of society as environment. If we
change the environment and society ceases to be the chief environment
(as is now happening), politics will disappear.
(2) In the transition to the voluntary and artificial there arose another
important phenomenon: the possibility not merely of relations but of the
influence of one group upon another, of one society upon another,
facilitated by writing. In the Prehistoric Age influence of this kind was
virtually impossible because groups were so dispersed and because their
organization and symbolical representation were so tied to their distinctive
entity, being an ontological part of it and therefore incapable of being
exported to other groups. Naturally, the change did not come about swiftly,
but progressively over the course of history influence and transfers became
possible. Institutions and even religions became gradually detachable from
a first group and as a result of conquest, travel, or commerce could be
imitated by other groups. Thus a multiplicity of possibilities was presented.

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There was more than one response to a given situation. Other groups
obviously responded in different ways. Discovery of this could lead to
hostility as well as imitation. Our inventive resources, however, are infinite.
As evolution becomes more precise, society becomes an artificial
environment.
This artificiality contains two elements.
On the one hand, group
organization is more a result of reflection and is not at the mercy of
inevitable natural factors, of the constraints and compulsions of the natural
environment. A new freedom is thus experienced, though this is at once
reduced by the existence of a social environment that becomes
increasingly obtrusive and demanding. On the other hand, there is a
multiplication of artifacts, of fabricated objects, of tools, of furnishings, of
pottery, and of weapons. Naturally the ongoing creation of useful objects
fashions a new human background, especially with the construction of
houses. All this leads to a genuinely new environment, that of the town. In
the town, which emerges around 3000 B.C, everything is in fact artificial.
This is the real symbol of the different environment, its features being
organization, proximity, and exclusion of the natural. The town is the
human universe or domain, surrounded by a universe that is not yet
mastered even though there is no longer total dependence on it, the
countryside close at hand and the forest at a distance. Special rites and
taboos exist for entry into this universe. The gods are no longer the same,
nor is the human attitude to them.
(3) Fairly soon after this first phenomenon comes social hierarchy. In
prehistoric society the group probably had a chief. But the existence of an
authority was not enough to create a social hierarchy. In such societies the
hunter was not superior to the picker or the sorcerer to the fisher.
Hierarchy demands a specification of groups along with a unitary
conception of society. There has to be some idea of the kind of
organization that is desired for this society. Hierarchy comes by way of
many criteria, such as sex, age, role, and especially descent. Often it is an
eponymous ancestor who makes possible the establishment of a hierarchy
and correlation among groups. I believe that the first major distinction was
between families that could claim an eponymous ancestor and those that
could not. The former constituted what would later be called the aristocracy
or Gallimard).

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119

nobility. What is it that distinguished them? The existence of a history.

The eponymous ancestor had an outstanding and memorable history. He
was a hero, a demigod. He was endowed with exceptional powers or in
some cases was the victim of an equally extraordinary destiny. He could
serve as a model of life and conduct for those who claimed him and were
supposed to repeat his noble deeds. The history of successive heroes was
passed down from generation to generation in these families, often in the
form of legends. Families, which had a history of this kind, were radically
different from families that did not, whose recollections went back at most
only to two generations. The former families came to constitute a ruling
caste, while the latter became the common people, within which there was
often a functional hierarchy as one function came to be viewed as more
noble than another.
The aristocratic families that preserved the memory of their history also had
another essential role. As a frame for the whole people, they carried in
effect the history of the whole society. Their history was the history of all.
They were truly the memory of the society. The existence of their
eponymous ancestors, their network of relations expressed in mythical
terms, ended up by constituting a network of correlations between the
different social groups. These groups tended to focus on this point in an
explicit and orderly way. They received definition and designation as a
result. Etymologically, definition means placing between boundaries,
having precise limits in relation to others. When one is set in one of such
groups, it is impossible in principle to leave it.1 Definition then takes on a
new form, that of law. At the same time, the group acquires a designation.
It carries a distinctive sign denoting its place in the city. This designation is
often mythical either by way of origin or of characterization, and this
process, even though it might seem primitive to us, still goes on today.
One has only to think of the mythical stereotyping of certain groups in our
own society, for example, Jews, communists, fascists, or Arabs.

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whereby it becomes increasingly human and complex, law comes on the

scene at the junction of artificial voluntarism and the development of social
hierarchy. As I see it, law is neither a reflection of the divine nor an
ideological reflection of economic relations. It is not at root natural and
ought not to try to express natural relations. It is entirely artificial. It is
simply the regulation that people judge to be useful if society is to be able
to function and relations between groups are to be stabilized. In talking
thus I will no doubt shock lawyers and please those who regard law as
unimportant. But I do not intend to disparage law when I describe it in this
way. It is enough to recall that if there are no rules one cannot play a
game. Without legal regulation one cannot play the game of society.
Law is a specific phenomenon the heart of which is found in different forms
in all societies. We have to remember, of course, that for us Westerners
law is closely tied to justice. Normally it is fashioned in such a way as to
establish or obtain justice. This link may be self-evident to us, but it is in
fact a special one. It has a Jewish origin, justice being the basis and law a
secondary phenomenon designed to achieve it.2 But it also has a Greek
origin, and here the issue is philosophical rather than theological. The
Romans made of law a structure which was complete, effective, and
concrete, but in which justice was of little importance; they assimilated the
problem of justice by way of Greek thought. For us, then, the link between
law and justice is both self-evident and inevitable, but in human history it is
simply an accidental and local fact. In other places the law created has a
different origin and significance. Individuals and groups were forced to
make law in response to a triple challenge: they very soon felt the
challenges of space, of time, and of relationships. (a) That of space
corresponds to what I have already emphasized regarding groups that
settle down, so that society becomes the true environment, though it is
always encircled by what is still a powerful natural environment. From the
very dawn of history the natural environment has always seemed to be
hostile and dangerous. Protection was needed

(4) In the midst of this creative evolution of a society

2
1

On all this see Louis Dumont's detailed study, Homo hierarchicus (Paris)

See Jacques Ellul, The Theological Foundation of Law, trans. Marguerite Wieser
(New York: Doubleday, 1960; repr. New York: Seabury, 1969).

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121

against it, and the rule of law was a means to this end. Thanks to law,
limits and boundaries have been drawn between the subdued civilized
world, the new environment made by and for people, and the ancient
external world. The whole of the human world is covered and controlled by
law. Brute force, a relationship of domination, can reign outside. A type of
regulated relationship that is quite different obtains inside. The same
distinction may be seen in the deities. City deities are civilized, and there
may be normalized (i.e., legal) relations with them. Outside deities are
savage, unknown, and unpredictable.
The word unpredictable brings us to the second original function of law. It
is a response to (b) the challenge of time. People soon saw that things
change quickly and that they are unpredictable. But it is impossible to live
in an uncertain and fluctuating universe. Since time cannot be mastered,
the thing to do was to establish in a number of areas a fiction of stability.
Law discharges this function of stability. Deciding to act as if things did not
change, people formulated laws that would remain in spite of social
reversals and changes in government. Law maintains social stability in
face of the uncertainties of the future. Between a husband and wife, a
lender and borrower, a tenant and landlord, things are always changing.
There are changes in feelings, in financial circumstances, in the economic
world. Lenders might claim back their money at any time, and those who
rent a house might act as if they owned it and refuse to move out. Law
regulates relationships of this kind, so that in principle they cannot vary
according to circumstances. Once a relationship becomes a legal one, the
parties agree to act as if the situation would remain the same even though
differences come with time. This is a way of making provision against the
uncertainty that the passage of time brings.
Finally, those who live in society face (c) a third challenge, the presence of
other people. When a group is small, all the members know each other
and there is thus no threat, for any that might arise is known in advance.
Only strangers are menacing and apriori hostile. But when the number of
people grows, the members of a society (even a micro society) cannot all
know each other. They cannot know one another's reactions. There is
inevitably relationship, but this spontaneous relationship may

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be dangerous. Law intervenes to regulate things. It mediates between

individuals or between families. It offers possibilities of action other than
direct action. It regulates means, so that one knows what to expect. It
assigns to each person a role. And once social roles are clear, we know
apriori what the other can or should do. When personal relations are good,
legal mediation is unnecessary. It becomes necessary when I do not know
the intentions of the other with whom I have dealings.
To explain the development and usefulness of law I have used the term
challenge. In so doing I have had in mind the theory of Toynbee. I know
that it has been criticized and that like all grand explanatory systems it has
now been abandoned and forgotten. Yet I believe that it is basically true.
Every society, like every individual, faces challenges and will evolve
according to its ability to take them up, to absorb them, or to neutralize
them. There are many kinds of challenges that confront a society. Some
are internal: economic, demographic, moral, or revolutionary. Some are
external: invasions, wars, disasters, epidemics, droughts, and climatic
changes. We can imagine all kinds of challenges which either immediately
or over the long haul trigger one or many reactions. A society faced with a
challenge may also respond in hundreds of ways according to its own
genius and its state of evolution. Sometimes there is a complete ignoring
of the challenge, as in the case of Byzantium when faced by the Arabs.
Either there is trust in one's own power, or there is no wish to face the
threat, and life goes on as if nothing had happened. Thus when Islam had
conquered almost all the provinces of the empire, and all that remained to
the emperor was the city of Constantinople with its outskirts and a couple of
islands, he continued to issue decrees and to sign them as the ruler of the
whole empire. Failing to see the real challenge, people sometimes defend
themselves against other things. The great challenge to Ethiopia was the
famine, but the government was preoccupied with the war in Eritrea. What
is in reality a challenge sometimes receives an enthusiastic welcome as
though it were a gift and blessing. This is the case today in Europe's
handling of Islam, which is the greatest threat to it since the great invasions
of the 7th to the 10th century.
In France I see not only an inability to respond to a challenge

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but a kind of death wish. It is ready to welcome that which will destroy it. It
opens its arms to it, whether it is American culture, the Americanizing of
food, games, morals, and the economy, or communism (though this has
lost its party), or, more seriously, Islamization, on the pretext that we have
to defend immigrant workers. Those whom he wills to destroy, Jupiter
makes mad. France is mad with affection for what win cut its throat. To
say anything against Islam is, of course, horrible sacrilege. We have to
help the poor immigrants who have come to give a lift to the economy of
France, and France has a lasting vocation as a welcoming country.3 In
reality, it is the whole of Europe that in face of the many challenges
confronting it is showing signs of an unconscious death wish. Though we
reject his arguments, we have to say that finally Spengler is proving right.
The various attitudes in face of challenges all testify to decline because of
the inability of the social group to find a response, or because of its failure
to see the danger. But the challenge is there, and it has often been shown
that when there is an adequate response and a parrying stroke is found,
the group is enriched and develops and becomes more complex. The
more challenges it meets, the more vitality it achieves. Challenges in
Toynbee's sense, of course, are not the only problems with which the group
has to deal.
Furthermore, when we talk about a "response" to the challenge, the term
may be misunderstood. We are not thinking on a global scale of the
mechanism that has been much used the last thirty years, that is,
psychophysiology or stimulus-response. The response I have in view is
never a reflex. It is never the unconscious result of physiological
adaptability. Decision, choice, and reflection play a big part, at least in a
response that is good enough to meet the challenge. This response will be
voluntary, calculated, and selected. But lack of response, failure to see the
challenge, passivity, and a death wish are all due to the absence of
reflection, energy, and social choice. I believe

I do not understand this argument, for while aliens who have come to France from
countries like Spain or Portugal are welcomed even though they are not refugees,
genuine refugees like the Vietnamese or Cambodians are not welcome in France

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that the close connection between a vital reaction and reflection, or

intelligent intervention, is a distinctive feature of human history. When we
study the historical threats that have menaced societies, we note that the
choice of responses is often greater than the challenge. The society under
attack does not simply repulse the aggression and return to its prior state.
The response entails a modification of the group. The challenge does not
simply evoke defense but brings to light hidden resources in the group and
results in social or economic improvements. Thus the challenge prevents
the society from reproducing itself in its identity.
(5) Another distinctive feature, then, is that an adequate response is much
more than a match for the challenge. We cannot know in advance how a
social body will react. Each group will find its own defenses and
adaptations according to its own nature. Here again we come across the
extraordinary inventive capacity of the human race. There is as much
diversity in collective responses to challenges throughout history as there
are institutional and technical creations. In looking at the reality of human
history, then, we cannot draw up a clinical table of human aptitude or
ineptitude. The very complexity prevents us from tracing a kind of flat
evolution, whether of a given society or even less of humanity as a whole.
This is the great temptation that is always present when historians attempt
great syntheses or general explanations (including that of Toynbee). The
creativity and inventiveness also stop us from drawing lessons from history,
let alone from postulating laws of historical evolution. We can analyze an
epoch and find similarities between it and our own, for example the Roman
empire in the 4th and 5th centuries. But this does not mean that we can
foresee what will happen in the next half-century. History does not teach
us how to understand our own time or to choose a solution. It is not without
value, but more as a spur to the creation of something new than as a
collection of ready-made remedies. Each historical situation is different
from all others. If we need to know others, it is in order to see how we have
reached the point where we are. History may help in diagnosis, but it offers
no cure, and even less does it cause us to bow to ineluctable necessity. If
we are convinced that the predictions of Nostradamus

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or the scientific laws of history hold in effect the future of society, then this
means that we lose our creative abilities, and hence that the society to
which we belong will not be able to come up with the new thing that is
needed.
Among the means of adaptation and response, I want to draw attention
particularly to the mechanisms of compensation.
It is these that permit a social body to maintain itself and to achieve
equilibrium. We shall see later that in all known societies and every known
epoch there is a permanent trend toward unlimited growth. In effect, a
developing historical society sees the coexistence of many tendencies,
institutions, and more or less competitive factors, which adjust more or less
well to one another, and which produce social movements of different
kinds. But little by little, in this play of forces, some tend to take the lead
over others and to secure power for themselves. Every movement (e.g,
toward the voluntary, the artificial, or the hierarchical) contains a totalitarian
impulse, seeking to become absolute and to exclude all others. It is
perhaps a human trait that there always has to be something more. We
shall see, however, that if this impulse has its way, it will bring with it many
disorders. But most often mechanisms of compensation come into play,
not to fight directly against the dominant tendency, but to make it bearable
to those subjected to it.
Thus, on the one hand, in a society in which power tends toward
absolutism, or the hierarchy is more static and strict, or law proliferates,
extending to all human activities and regulating without end, we find
increasing means of evasion. These might be of two types. First we have
an increase in holidays and sports. The members of this society find a form
of freedom here. It may be sterile and feeble, but it is satisfying in
appearance, and appearance is what counts for them. This is why we see
a multiplication of sports in societies that achieve strong integration. From
this angle we need to reflect on the societies of the free world with their
proliferation of sporting events, courses, television, information, etc. These
are an indication of the development of an authoritarian, crippling, and
omnidominant society. The second form of compensation is religious
evasion. Apparent escape from the severity of a totalitarian society is
found by looking to heaven and despising the things of the

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world. This is a very satisfying compensation so long as the religion is free

and spiritual, not institutional, since institutional religion is itself authoritarian
and hierarchical.
On the other hand, if in a society the dominant tendency is passion for a
freedom of incoherence, if this society has plunged into laxity and virtually
everything is allowed, if there is no respect for the rule of law, or for social
relations, or for moral norms, then we find compensation that again may be
of two types.
First, an organizing power comes on the scene.
Spontaneous social solidarity tends to disappear, but instead there arises
an external coherence imposed by an external power, for example, a
strong, centralized state. Naturally, this cannot create artificially a true
solidarity, but it can prevent disintegration and maintain for a time (for as
much time as the society needs to regain its balance) a coherence of
compensation. The second type of compensation, as in the first instance,
is religious. In this case, however, the religion will be strongly moralistic
and institutional, and it will set the social body in a network of constraints
desired and sanctioned by belief. The two types of compensatory
mechanisms are found in almost all societies and in all historical periods.
But I am not trying to explain them, nor am I saying that we find them in
every case. They are not the fruit of a conscious decision by one part of
society. They are not a product of wisdom and intelligence. They are also
not the expression of a kind of natural law of balance which spontaneously
produces in a society the counterforce it needs if it is to make good
headway. We would have to explain how such a law could arise, where it
would come from, and why it would seem to operate in some cases but not
in others.
I also believe in the working of what I have called the unbearable factor.
There are times and situations in society when things are intolerable, when
people can no longer stand them. They then react in a more or less
adequate manner-often with mistakes-in an attempt to make a society
livable again. They often find a way. In effect this reaction to the
unbearable does not simply produce the opposite of that to which they are
subjected. It is a strange one. People do not merely do the opposite of
what they find painful to them. Often they are not clear how the situation
has arisen. They merely want to be able to live in

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the social body, to make it livable. Thus they often produce something
new. (One of the great tragedies of the modem world is that once the
absolute revolution was achieved in the USSR in 1917, all protests, all
movements of liberation, all struggles against injustice and intolerability
were annexed and integrated into the one recognized and admitted
revolutionary current, i.e., Soviet communism.
We see here the
outstanding modem example of the sterilization of the human ability to
create something new in society and history.) These material or ideological
upsurges have thus far produced a situation which has again become
livable and tolerable. Thus it seems to me that the social evolution of
humanity is made up of the constant interplay of the organization of power
and the rise of an opposing power.
There is a major difference between the two. The first is voluntary,
considered, and organized. The second is (or was until communism
disturbed things) spontaneous and not thought out, becoming aware of its
indispensability only at a second stage. All exclusion of this opposing
force, or inability to produce it, incurs the penalty of social totalitarianism or
political arrogance. But we must not entertain false ideas of this
counterforce. It has to rise up from the depths of the people and not from a
small elite that is dedicated to organizing it, with the result that in effect it
will instead reproduce power itself. We have a good instance of this in
French syndicalism.
Between 1880 and 1914, impelled by
anarcho-syndicalists, this was a genuine counterforce. It engaged in
accurate criticism and initiated actions that gave workers, not so much an
amelioration of their condition, but rather a possibility of expressing
themselves and of exerting influence in innovative ways. But today
syndicalism is no longer a counterforce. It is simply a part of the power
game. It works through the usual political forms, playing the same game as
other groups. The unions no longer have any important role in making
society livable and stopping a plunge into politico-technological hubris. A
counterforce has to come from the grass roots. But I do not want to be
misunderstood. The grass roots, the people, cannot be said to have any
particular virtue, whether intelligence, inventiveness, or foresight. What we
have is simply a reaction to what is felt to be oppression. In other words, it
is because people are effectively

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oppressed that they look for a way to reduce the oppression and can thus
eventually become a counterforce. It is from the oppressed that there
comes the novelty that is needed if a society is to regain its meaning and
togetherness. But this creation is possible only if the oppressed are not
dragooned in advance, if a place is left for spontaneity, if the movement
they can launch is not at once taken over either by the ruling power itself or
by an organization identical to it. The existence of various methods of
compensation is the only guarantee that a society will have enough vitality
to go on.
There is, however, nothing necessary or automatic about this. The
development of a social tendency might not run into any counterforce or
counterbalance. Then there will be some complex results, and not merely
the simple historical event of the disintegration of the society. That will
happen only after long periods of trouble and rigidity. It seems to me that
one can think of many possibilities. First, there is what I would call the
accumulation of social problems. When some activity threatens a certain
aspect of life in society, there can be a reaction that tends to reestablish
equilibrium. Something is done about the cause of the problem, its origin,
in order to reduce or eliminate the problem itself. But sometimes today we
find a boomerang effect. The problem triggers action on its real cause, but
instead of checking the problem this action aggravates it. Thus problems
multiply and no way is seen to deal with them. For it is of the nature of
social problems that resist any efforts to deal with their effects. I will give
two simple examples.
The youth problem has many causes: idleness, poor lodgings, the breakup
of families, and also the publicity given to the exploits of motorcycle gangs,
etc. If we deal with this problem at the level of results, trying to fight against
drugs or stealing by repression, or if we merely try to deal with secondary
causes, providing proper housing or employment, we find that repression
severely aggravates the problem, and that it will now manifest itself in
resistance to the pseudo-remedies as young people mess up and degrade
their lodgings, refuse to go to work, and contribute to the greater
disintegration of their families. Reaction to the causes has the result of
making the effects even worse.

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We find the same in the case of the traffic problem. At a certain point the
increase of traffic and its speed makes life almost impossible in some
areas, causing serious inconvenience. Attempts have been made to
facilitate the flow by widening streets, providing underground parking, etc.
But again these efforts have only made things worse. As Gabriel Dupuy
has shown (and others, e.g., Ziv, for American cities), to make the flow of
traffic easier is to increase its volume. Open a new freeway and it is
immediately full of vehicles. People who have not been using their cars
begin to do so when the flow of traffic improves. Roads that are supposed
to relieve congestion become new points of congestion. And everything
becomes more complicated when the various phenomena intermesh, when
there develop in society problems that reciprocally affect each other.
This is not the only feature of social crises. When a certain tendency
enjoys unlimited development, two results are possible. The first is a break
in the society, a break in communication between its component elements
(a short circuit), a break within one of the components, a split into currents
so divergent that they cannot meet and combine again. Society then
plunges into disorder. But it is a totally unforeseeable and surprising
disorder, which does not correspond, therefore, to the necessary disorder,
the plunge into the "great age" of Mircea Eliade, into the chaos of origins in
which it can find new strength. That disorder is known in advance. It has
its place in the march of time. It is for a definite period. It gives new vigor
to the whole social body. But the incoherent disorder of unlimited growth
has a tendency to be impossible to foresee or arrest. If the absolute
monarch no longer has a jester as a counterpart, he ends up by being put
to death. This takes place through an uncalculated revolt in which society
takes a total risk but which is never a true preservation of social relations
nor the source of a new, acceptable society. The whole history of historical
societies, whether in Europe, in China, or among the Incas, is punctuated
by risks of collapse of this kind (and to talk about revolts against misery is
always far too simplistic).
But there is another possibility. Growing social power might finally reach
what Illich calls a threshold. At a certain point it might produce the opposite
of what it produced in the

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first period. In a reversal of direction the results are the reverse of what
was anticipated. The work of Illich on education and medicine is well
known. If we discount some exaggeration, and look in the right places, we
might say that he is right in the main. Overmuch education can work
against culture. Literacy among Africans and American Indians leads to a
radical destruction of local culture and gains nothing. People are taught to
read and write, but to what end? They have no access to Western culture,
and their own society is deprived of its culture. The same is true to some
extent in Europe, where it can be seen that formal education makes some
young people less adaptable, and prolonging their studies gives rise to all
kinds of behavior problems among adolescents.
Illich's thesis regarding too much medical care has run into heavy criticism.
Nevertheless, it is true that too many medications create new illnesses.
Many hospital beds are occupied by people who have overdosed
themselves. In other words, the effect of medications has been the
opposite of that intended. There is a similar threshold in law. In countries
like France there is an incredible proliferation of texts, decrees, orders,
circulars, and ministerial letters. I have often given the example of legal
regulations pertaining to schools and universities - six thousand pages of
texts. In other areas there are even more. No one in the world can
reasonably act on this deluge of texts, in which there is inevitably at times
disorder and contradiction. What is the point then? The aim is to order and
control everything minutely, analytically, and rigorously, down to the
smallest details, by legal texts which seek to foresee every possible
contingency. But no one can really make a synthesis of all these rules, or
even know them, so that everyone acts independently of them -I would not
say disobeying them, but simply ignoring them and applying some general
rules of good sense and insight. An excess of regulation can lead a society
into a situation of lawlessness. This is always the sign of a fundamental
crisis in society, the prelude to a crisis of authority.
In this sketch of certain crisis factors, I must recall Kondratiev's theory of
cycles, even though it is now contested. In the economy there is a system
of slow swings, higher prices alternating with lower prices, the latter being a
sign of the slowing

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down, the sluggishness, of economic life. These alternations come in

cycles of about thirty years (at least in Western society for the last two
centuries). They are normal, so that there is no need to worry about them.
The correct response of the social body will bring readjustment. Having
learned from previous cycles, economists can now deal better with
recessions. But if the cycles combine with a long-term general trend (e.g.,
a continued depression), then a cycle may bring on a true crisis; this occurs
when the cycle of upsurge and of economic recovery no longer
compensates the trend. This phenomenon manifests itself in a curve in the
form of an arch. Accelerated growth slows down when the economy
overheats. Then, having passed the top, it begins to decline slowly. But
instead of a correction, as in a cycle, the fall speeds up and leads to an
economic collapse which is a real crisis. Each such crisis is different from
all others, so that traditional remedies do not help. I will not attempt a
description or diagnosis of the present crisis. I will simply express my
agreement with those who think that it is not just an economic crisis but a
social crisis of global proportions. The economic crisis is simply the sign of
a crisis that is political, moral, social, and psychosociological, and that has
been developing over what many people were stupidly calling a glorious
period.
When a society notes the accumulation of the various factors that I have
recalled: the absence of a process of compensation, the unlimited growth of
a trend, the reversal of trends, the piling up of problems, the existence of a
trend toward economic depression, we are in the presence of a serious
crisis in which a society may explode, break up, or be absorbed into
another society. Such a society is on a razor's edge and its history may be
over. It may simply disappear like the Roman empire, the Byzantine
empire, the Ottoman empire, or the Aztec empire.4 The political and
economic cards may be redistributed among old and new groups, as in
Egypt's New Kingdom, in the Roman empire between the 1st and the 4th
centuries, and in China in the 14th century.

We must not think of a solid and glorious Aztec empire being destroyed by brutal
conquerors. It was surprisingly fragile and artificial

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But the crisis that we are approaching today is of yet another order. For it
entails the transition, not from one form of society and power to another,
but to a new environment. For approximately the last five thousand years
we have lived in the environment that I have just described, that of society,
in which politics plays the major role. Across the hazards of history human
beings have adapted very well to this environment and have made
remarkable progress. But everything is now changing. The present crisis
is not one that we can overcome by social, political, or economic
modifications. It has not arisen in these sectors. It has nothing in common
with previous historical crises. This is a total crisis triggered by transition to
a new and previously unknown environment, the technological
environment. There is only one comparable crisis, but we can draw no
lessons from it, for we know nothing about it. I mean the transition of the
Protohistorical period: the transition from nomads to agriculturalists, from
farmers to townspeople, from natural authorities to political authorities, and
the drawing of boundaries, etc. The present change of environment is
much more fundamental than anything that the race has experienced for
the last five thousand years.

134

Chapter 11
THE POSTHISTORICAL PERIOD AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL
ENVIRONMENT
What we are now experiencing is inaugurating the long crisis of insertion
into a new human environment and its organization-the technological
environment.
For the last two centuries industrialization has been
preparing the way for it, but it is only in the last thirty years that technology
has begun to impose itself everywhere, to change everything, to take over
all social activities and forms, and to become a true environment Now a
true environment has the following features: it enables us to live, it sets us
in danger, it is immediate to us, and it mediates all else. Technology fully
meets this description.1 In the first place, we moderns are unable to live
without our appliances and technical gadgets. We can survive neither in a
natural environment nor in a social environment without our technical
instruments. Our gadgets are as necessary to us as food. Even at the
elemental levels of food, lodging, and clothing, we consume the products of
technology. We could not go back to earlier forms of production and
consumption.
At the same time the technological environment creates very great dangers
for us. They are so great that they threaten
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to bring about the disappearance of the whole human race, something that
has not happened since Paleolithic times. In addition to nuclear risks there
are ecological risks in face of which human beings show incredible
thoughtlessness.
One example will suffice, namely, the worldwide
devastation of forests. In Europe we have acid rain, in Africa the clearing of
forests, and in Amazonia the stupefying attempt to remove the whole forest
block. If we continue along this path, in thirty years there will be no true
forests on earth. The elimination of forests will reduce the production of
oxygen in the oceans because of the expansion of oily layers. Then there
will not be enough oxygen, and at the same time the quantities of carbon in
the stratosphere will increase. We will then not have enough air to breathe.
Here is a first danger created by the technological environment.
This environment is also immediate. We are surrounded by technical
objects just as we were surrounded by natural objects in the first
environment. We have only to lift our hands and we come across a
technical object, whether in the home, on the street, or in public places.
Our relation to them is direct, with no screen, no distance, no reflection, no
awareness. This environment is just as evident as were forests and
torrents and mountains, then such representatives of power as rites, myths,
social imperatives, the family, etc. Conversely, all other relations are
mediated by technology. It forms a screen of means around all of us, and
we are in touch with nature or the social group by means of
communications: television, cinema, telephone, or photography. These
instruments make possible much more rapid and numerous relations. They
also keep us informed of all that is happening in the world and acquaint us
with many pseudo-natural milieux that we could not otherwise know.
The creation of the technological environment is achieving two main things.
First, it is progressively effacing the two previous environments. Of course,
nature and society still exist. But they are without power-they no longer
decide our future. There are still earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and
hurricanes. Famines and droughts still cause even greater distress, as in
Africa. But humanity is no longer helpless when faced with such disasters.
It has the technical means to respond, and it is only due to lack of will, of
political decision, and of a global mobilization

I will be very brief in this section because I have already shown how
technology has become the human environment in The Technological
System, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Continuum, 1980).

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135

of means that the scourge spreads. We can act, but we do not, and this is
why nature is always menacingly present as an environment that is
subordinate and no longer basic.
The same applies to society. It remains as a secondary environment. We
still have politicians and police and an administrative organization. But
each of these has to have technological gadgets that make it more efficient
and active. It has not yet been appreciated that this entry of technology
means control over all the persons involved, all the powers, all the
decisions and changes, and that technology imposes its own law on the
different social organizations, disturbing fundamentally what is thought to
be permanent (e.g, the family), and making politics totally futile.
Nevertheless, it will be said, politicians make the decisions. But politicians
can decide only what is technologically feasible. No decisions can be
made that run contrary to technological growth. All decisions are dictated
by the necessity of technological development. Nothing else matters. Like
every other social organization, politics continues to exist as a kind of
theater in which we play out the comedy of freedom. Culture does the
same in identical fashion. When politics tries to make decisions that run
against technology, it can do so only negatively, that is, by preventing
technology from doing certain positive things. We have here the same
process as when the social environment replaced the natural environment:
an attempt to show that there is alliance and partnership, the earlier values
being taken up into the new milieu.
Thus one of the great themes today is technological culture. We are
supposedly adding technological knowledge to our humanist legacy. At
least this is not an attempt to raise technology to the rank of a true culture,
to find in it a source of values, intelligence, a critical spirit, a universalism.
A technological culture is in fact impossible, for technology is the negation
of culture. We find a similar desire to show that technology becomes social
inasmuch as it simplifies and amplifies social actions, or that it creates a
new art. This is merely playing with words; there is no substance to it. The
art created by painters, sculptors, and musicians imitates what technology
alone proposes and permits and has nothing in common with what has
been produced as art, and called such up to about 1930, since

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Prehistoric times.2
People are always talking about humanizing
technology, but this talk has no effect whatever on its development. All
questioning of technology on basic grounds (e.g, by ecology and the
ecological movement in its early days) has either been ruthlessly dismissed
or integrated into the technological world. This world sometimes seems
capable of producing a counterforce, for in the period of transition from one
environment to another susceptibilities have to be taken into account. Thus
we find the concern for human relations in the 1950s and the movement of
technology assessment today. But these simply serve to allay disquiet and
thus to make development easier.
The second result of the domination of this environment is that human
beings have to adapt to it and accept total change. At issue here is not just
a slight modification or adaptation but an essential transformation. A first
aspect of this radical adaptation concerns the relation between human
beings and machines. If machines have to be perfectly adapted to us, the
reverse is unavoidable. We have to be exactly what is useful for machines,
their perfect complement. Human life is no longer merely a matter of
muscle and reflex. We now have to have our gadgets. We can see the
mutation very clearly and decisively in the academic world. The humanities
are now disparaged. Traditional culture is valueless relative to machines.
At the beginning of the 20th century, and again in 1930, people in the
industrial and commercial world began to ask what good such studies as
history and Greek are. How can they help us to make money or to forge
ahead economically? Today we are putting much the same question, but in
a new way: How do they serve the technological world? How do they make
us a proper complement for machines? This is why there is such an
incredible stress on information in our schools. The important thing is to
prepare young people to enter the world of information, able to handle
computers, but knowing only the reasoning, the language, the
combinations, and the connections between computers. This movement is
invading the whole intellectual domain and also that of conscience.

Cf Jacques Ellul, L'empire du non-sens (Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France, 1980).

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But this is not the only feature. Part of the human mutation is the
appearance and consecration of the human guinea pig in furtherance of
science and technology. Since science and technology are plainly
dominant, we have to test their effects and usefulness on people.
Experiments are becoming ever more numerous and varied. I was horrified
many years ago to learn that in the United States, for scientific reasons (to
study the evolution of the embryo), pregnant women were being paid to
have an abortion at a given stage, and we have gone much further than
that today. Remedies, pharmaceutical products, are being tested on
people for pay. There is experimentation in the field of what is everywhere
called genetic makeup. We are growing used to the idea that people are
simply guinea pigs upon whom it is quite legitimate to conduct scientific
experiments. "Humanity is our most precious resource" is a slogan that
has been taken up in many forms the last few years. But let us remember
that if humanity is only a resource, this implies that we may treat humanity
as simply a factor in economic production. Leases are taken out on
resources. In the genetic field there seems to be no limit to what can be
done (implants, test-tube babies, surrogate mothers, etc.). The imagination
has free rein. But genetic manipulation is designed to produce exactly the
type of people that we need. Much has been made of the book 1984, but
what is in prospect is really Huxley's Brave New World. From birth
individuals are to be adapted specially to perform various services in
society. They are to be so perfectly adapted physiologically that there will
be no maladjustment, no revolt, no looking elsewhere. The combination of
genetic makeup and educational specialization will make people adequate
to fulfill their technological functions.

that technology needs? People will no longer be a hindrance to proper

conduct. The more perfect technology becomes, the more refined and
complex and subtle and swift its processes, the more human conduct has
to be perfect. We can no longer dream or forget or have other centers of
interest. An instrument panel in an automated factory is no place for the
recalling of poetry. The technological environment demands a radical
transformation of humanity. Previously human adaptation followed the slow
rhythm of evolution from generation to generation. Only over centuries did
people become social, political, and urban. No one decided for them that
they had to follow this pattern. Today the technological environment is
coming upon us very quickly. Technology develops with ever increasing
speed. In every sector and in all directions the new environment is being
formed explosively. Hence human adaptation to it cannot be extended over
many centuries. We have to adjust rapidly.

Beyond that, American experiments directly on the brain have shown that
the implantation of minute electrodes (with the consent of the subject) might
induce specific impressions, desires, and pleasures, and effect obedience
to orders no matter who gives them and with no need for speech. At an
experimental stage this has caused no scandal. But is it not apparent that
this new form of intervention in human nature will finally suppress human
freedom altogether, will bring about complete obedience without choice,
and will result in the perfect adaptation

A problem arises, however. For a long time those who have been
genetically manipulated so as to conform to the technological model will be
a small minority. Most people will still be at the social stage or even the
natural stage. What will be the relations between these groups? They will
certainly not understand one another. There will be no more in common
between them than in the transition from the first to the second stage there
was between nomadic brigands and the first city merchants five thousand
years ago. On the one hand there will be a kind of aristocracy marked off
by its total and infallible adaptation

Examination of the last thirty years will be enough to demonstrate this

incredible rapidity. Technology cannot wait, for it soon becomes unusable.
Everything has to be done in a single generation. Nor can the adaptation
be spontaneous, following our physiological and intellectual rhythm. To
move quickly, we have to move by act of will. We cannot wait for
progressive and cumulative adaptations. We have to create at once the
kind of people that machines demand. Human language has already been
modified to become that of the computer. Some numbers and letters have
been modified so as to correspond exactly to the form that the computer
gives them. This is an almost unrecognizable occurrence, yet it is of major
importance.

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139

to technical gadgets and the technological system, and on the other hand
there will be a vast number of people who are outdated, who cannot use
the technology, who are powerless, who are still at the social stage but who
live in a technological environment for which they are totally unadapted.
In this respect I must make a final observation. When I talk about
adaptation, readers might think that I mean adjustment to various minor
differences in environment. Thus people in hot countries adjust their
clothes and habits and customs accordingly.
But the changes of
environment that I have in mind demand a total and fundamental mutation,
so that I am inclined to say that the Prehistoric people of the natural
environment had nothing in common with the historical people of the social
environment, and that we are now witnessing a mutation of the same order.
We have only to think how alien the bushmen or aborigines of Australia
were to all that the 19th century regarded as human nature. By a change
of environment what is regarded as human nature in one epoch is
transformed and a new model of humanity emerges. It might be argued
that I am exaggerating and that the environment cannot have this impact on
human nature. But that argument is a mere hypothesis based on the
conviction that there is such a thing as an inalienable and basically identical
human nature. For my part, I am not so sure. Furthermore, no one has
ever been able to say clearly what this human nature really is.
Nevertheless, I have still to answer a question of my own. Why have I
given this sketch of the development of three environments in a book
entitled What I Believe? It is true that at a first glance all that I have written
here seems to have nothing to do with my fundamental beliefs, with what is
fundamentally existential for me. Yet at root what I have presented is not a
scientific theory. I cannot prove the impact of the environment or the
relation of human beings to it. I do not pretend to be able to give strict
answers to the many questions that. confront anthropologists, ethnologists,
and historians. I have put forward a simple hypothesis. But all hypotheses
include a great deal of intuition and belief. Conversely, all beliefs finally
express themselves in hypotheses which will be more or less strict and
more or less daring, but which we have to take into account if we are

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to get the complete picture of an epoch. I would say in fact that this relation
of human beings to their environment and these changes of environment
do form part of what I believe. And if some disappointed readers are
tempted to say: "And is this all that Jacques Ellul believes?" I would reply
that what is at issue here is evaluating the danger of what might happen to
our humanity in the present half-century, and distinguishing between what
we want to keep and what we are ready to lose, between what we can
welcome as legitimate human development and what we should reject with
our last ounce of strength as dehumanization. I cannot think that choices of
this kind are unimportant. What I believe with this theory of three
environments has to do very definitely with the need to formulate what kind
of humanity we want and what kind we repudiate. The relevance of this
aspect of what I believe is by no means negligible.

INTRODUCTION
I believe in the secret presence of God.
I am not now composing a catechism. Nor am I trying to show the
compatibility of faith in God with modem rationalist and scientific thought.1 I
am simply suggesting that a secret God exists. Later I will try to say who
this God is for me, but for the moment I will simply present the possibility of
his secret presence in human life and history, from which we can never
break free. But here a first problem arises.

PART III
END WITHOUT END

When people do succeed in breaking free from belief in God, they simply
create another religious belief to replace it. We always assimilate religion
or God to a specific image, to specific rites or groups, to a specific
conception, and when we banish these (as the Catholic Church and the
Christian God were banished in France), we think that we have achieved
freedom of thought. But we then proceed to an apotheosis of reason or
science and we have new gods. When we think about God we run up
against innumerable questions and obstacles. First there is the great
diversity of gods that people have worshiped. If I am a Christian, it is by
accident of birth. The diversity suggests that our imagination simply
projects our desires on the sky, or that our fears create gods (which
consequently have no objective existence), or that we are simply
acknowledging in some way that something transcendent exists. In any
case, however, the gods are all equally false, though they reflect
143

There is an excellent discussion of Christianity and science in La

Recherche, 169 (September 1985), in a dialogue between P. Thuillier and
P. Valadier.

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a little something that may be true. One might also try to fuse what is
common to all beliefs and thus achieve a syncretism. But either way one
cannot say that one god is more true than another. For me to say that my
God is true is inadmissably presumptuous. One way out is to transform all
religious records into myths. Another way is to regard all religions as equal
without trying to distinguish between what is imagination and what is reality.
The next major obstacle is that of evil. If God were God and good, he
would not permit all the evil that takes place on the earth. Some of this evil
comes from natural events and disasters (for which God is responsible if he
is the Creator). Some of it comes from human actions, but if human beings
were made in the image of God, why is there wickedness in them? Why
could not God change them and make them good? Then there is death.
We can understand that death is a natural reality. When we study cells and
consider the laws of organisms, we see that death has its place. But if
creation derives from an act of will, how can the Creator tolerate death with
its train of sufferings both for those who die and for the bereaved who loved
them? Suffering and death are a scandal that cries to heaven and that we
cannot evade. We all know the famous dilemma of unbelief formulated by
Bakunin: Either God is omnipotent but bad, or good but impotent. To this
dilemma there seems to be no solution. Familiar, too, is another of the
same kind: Either God is absolutely perfect (in the etymological sense) and
he cannot be the Creator, for it is impossible to add anything at all (even a
nut, as Anatole France said) to perfection, or God is the Creator and he
cannot be perfect, for he was lacking something, and hence he cannot be
God. A very old heresy evaded this dilemma by stating that God is not the
Creator but that creation is the act of an inferior spirit (Yahweh) that is often
regarded as evil.
To this kind of reasoning we must add the findings of science. Historical
science unpacks the sacred texts to show that they are not inspired but
simply give us at best certain human opinions about God. Physics, biology,
and astronomy scrutinize matter and nowhere find even the slightest trace
of a beginning denoting the existence of anything other than matter.
Insofar as science succeeds in formulating scientific laws of matter and of

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145

the functioning of the human brain, there is no place for miracles. Miracle
as a transgression of the laws of nature is strictly impossible. Once a law is
there it admits of no exceptions. All stories of exceptions are legends or
musings. The main point, however, is that God cannot act. If he exists, he
is completely paralyzed.
Furthermore, the God of religions is radically incompatible with our reason.
Religious people talk about truth, the absolute, eternity, and omnipotence,
but what do such words mean? In reality, they mean nothing at all to our
intelligence and reason-they have literally no meaning whatsoever. They
have no content for reason, for science, or even for the imagination. The
proof is that when the sacred texts speak about such things, they have to
resort to anthropomorphisms. But what are gods that are angry, that
punish, that reward, that are jealous, that make war, or that repent? It is
easy to say that this is just a manner of speaking, but since we cannot
speak in any other way, is there any point in resorting to such a concept of
God? One important theological current, that of negative theology,
honestly recognizes that we can know nothing about God. God is hidden,
secret. We can speak about him only negatively. We can say what is not
God, or what God is not, but we can say nothing more. The Christian
religion seems particularly fragile with its supposedly legendary records and
its astounding belief that God could incarnate himself in a man. For
centuries theologians have tried to comprehend what this incarnation might
signify. They have invented various interpretative systems, but none is
satisfying. Thus theology has given up and abandoned the problem. The
usual surrender by Christians when they cannot answer questions is the
statement: "It is a mystery. Strictly speaking, for reasonable people, this is
saying nothing.
Another important factor in this whole process is what the gods have made
of people. In the name of religion people have waged cruel wars.
Convinced of the truth of their religion, they have tried to impose it on
others and overcome their errors. Religion has always caused division,
hatred, and misunderstanding. People of one religion cannot stand those
of another religion. This intolerance is not all in the past. In the name of
the communist religion millions of people are reduced to slavery

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and wars are waged (Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Ethiopia). In the name of
the Muslim religion other wars are shedding blood across the world (Iraq
and Iran, Lebanon, the Sudan) and an invasion of the whole world is in
preparation. Who can deny all this when the Christian religion, the religion
of love, has been as bad as the rest with its own wars and conquests, its
own suppression of heresy by force, its own intolerance and lack of
understanding? There can be no denying all this. And finally there is the
terrible impact that Christianity has had on the Western psyche.
Westerners have lived under terror of judgment by a terrifying God. They
have been made guilty by an idea of sin. They have wandered through a
world filled with prohibitions. They have run up against sexual taboos. All
this has brought disasters in its train, for they have sought
overcompensation in a drive to dominate, to conquer, and to expand.
Confronted by this monstrous process which has been going on since the
origins of Christianity, it would be absurd to reply with arguments or to
attempt apologetics. I will be content to make two kinds of remarks. First,
science, though more modem, is less certain. Second, this type of
objection rests on a strange misunderstanding to which, we have to admit,
Christians themselves are prone.2
Modern science is much less certain of itself because of its very advances,
which have opened up immense vistas but also posed increasingly difficult
riddles. To be brief, I will simply recall Heisenberg's uncertainty principle,
the challenge to Einstein's thesis that God does not play dice, the discovery
of complex systems and feedback, the principle of nonseparability, the
recognition of open systems, and the abandonment to a large extent of
something that was always regarded as fully established, the mechanism of
causality. All the sciences are now engaged in new researches and in
mounting uncertainty, biology as well as history, chemistry as well as
psychology. We have found out that pure science does not exist, that
science is never pure, not even mathematics. A great contemporary
mathematician

On Christian responsibility in this whole matter see Jacques Ellul, The

Subversion of Christianity, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1986).

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even wrote a book on the theme that pure mathematics does not exist.
Other scientists are venturing beyond the limits of science. All of them
seem to feel a need to state publicly their beliefs, their ethics, their views of
life and meaning. They are posing questions which science in its new form
seems to be raising again concerning God. Without going so far as the
dubious speculations of the gnosis of Princeton, I believe, for example, that
the commonly accepted theory of the big bang that started the universe
poses a problem. This universe did not always exist. At a single point
there was an unimaginable and incalculable concentration of energy which
exploded and at a stroke produced the matter of the galaxies. Where did
this energy come from? Attempts have been made to explain it by
permanent movement of concentration and deconcentration, a kind of
breathing, but this satisfies no one. A very different example is provided by
the physicist Bernard d'Espagnat with his theory of veiled reality which we
cannot know but without which reality cannot be explained and cannot
continue. Thus there is no longer any way forward that can preserve for
science its glorious certainties.
The other side of the change that is bringing correction has occurred in the
understanding of Christian revelation. Almost all the arguments that I
adduced are based on a mistaken understanding, on a metaphysical
elaboration that is alien to biblical revelation and that has been
superimposed on it. The God who has been thus presented is not the God
of the prophets or the God of Jesus Christ but the God of the philosophers.
Speculating on the divine nature, on the relation between God and the
world, on God as origin, these philosophers finally constructed a totally
intellectual image of God that derives from Greek philosophy, and it is this
image that the rationalists of the 18th and 19th centuries tore to pieces.
Theology also constructed a system which thought it could encompass and
explain everything (apart from the mysteries). But when this theological
explanation of natural phenomena collided with the scientific explanation,
instead of reflecting afresh on the sure data (of the Bible), theologians stuck
to their system and opposed reason and scientific experimentation. Some
of them thought they could solve the problem by postulating two

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spheres, the real world for science and the spiritual world for religion. But
this was another mistake. For the real can no more be separated from the
spiritual than the body can from the soul. The spiritual without body is a
vapor without substance.
The main problem with all this kind of thinking was that it ignored dialectic.
It was purely logical and linear and rational. During the last three-quarters
of a century, however, there has been considerable development.
Theology is no longer going with the times but has gone back directly to the
sources, and this will be enough to defuse many of the conflicts. We need
to see that science and revelation are not two different spheres but have
two different ends. The one is designed to give explanation, the other to
give meaning. But this meaning is inexhaustible, for it changes as that
changes to which meaning must be given, and it becomes more profound
as there is better understanding of the Scriptures through new
investigation.
This whole detour was necessary to make the point that the biblical God is
hidden and yet present. I believe in God's secret presence in the world.
God sometimes leaves us in silence, but he always tells us to remember.
That is, he recalls us to the word which he has spoken and which is always
new if we rebuild the path from the word written to the word lived out and
actualized. He is a God incognito who does not manifest himself in great
organ music or sublime ceremonies but who hides himself in the surprising
face of the poor, in suffering (as in Jesus Christ), in the neighbor I meet, in
fragility. We need to lay hold again of the elementary truth that God
reveals himself by the fleeting method of the word, and in an appearance of
weakness, because everything would be shattered if he revealed himself in
his power and glory and absoluteness, for nothing can contain him or
tolerate his presence. God cannot be known directly but only through that
which is within the realm of human possibilities. This is why imposing
ceremonies and ornate basilicas are absurd. Solomon recognized this in
his prayer at the dedication of the temple: "Behold, heaven and the highest
heaven cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have built!"
(1 Kgs. 8:27). There then follow the intercessions of Solomon for the poor,
for aliens, for the hungry, for sinners, and for suppliants. In all these
situations of our human weakness

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God comes to us. But we can be sure that in our situations of wealth and
power and domination and expansion and high technology and unlimited
growth God is not present. He tells the rich that they have their reward;
why then should they have God as well? This is why God is silent in our
Western world of opulence and technology. He is certainly present, as in
the rest of the universe. But he is present incognito and in secret. He is
present as he was when the serpent spoke to Eve and she was enlightened
about the tree and took the fruit in order to be as God. He is present
incognito and has enough respect to allow the creature to choose its own
destiny after issuing a warning. But is not all that I am going to say about
this secret God pure imagination on my part?
I find striking confirmation of it in the life of Jesus Christ himself.
Twenty years ago, when there was a debate about nonviolence, I was the
first to stress that what characterized the action of Jesus in his life on earth
was not nonviolence. Indeed, we all know how his indignation boiled over
against the merchants in the temple. From this incident some theologians
even inferred that he did not reprove revolutionary violence, so that they
were ready to direct the action of the poor against wealthy merchants. We
are also all aware of the violent charges Jesus hurled against the scribes
and hypocritical Pharisees, against the rich, against Chorazin and
Bethsaida, etc. What constantly marked the life of Jesus was not
nonviolence but in every situation the choice not to use power. This is
infinitely different. Not using power is not weakness. Weakness means
inability to do what I would like to do or ought to do. Not using power is a
choice. I can, but I will not. It is renunciation. This general and specific
decision not to use power does not rule out occasional acts of violence.
But this violence is an expression of brutal conflict, whereas the nonuse of
power is a permanent orientation in every choice and circumstance. Power
is there, but one refuses to use it. This is the example set by Jesus. The
consideration that the omnipotent God, in coming among us, decides not to
use power, is one of the most revolutionary imaginable. We do not yet see
it at the moment of Jesus' birth, for then the child that God has chosen to
be the Messiah is weak.

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At this moment God strips himself of power and presents himself to us as a

little child delivered up to us. That is not a problem for Jesus. The nonuse
of power as a way of life may be seen in his messianic career from its
beginning to its end. It may be seen when he asks John the Baptist to
baptize him, renouncing the possibility of a baptism of fire. It may be seen
when he is three times tempted to manifest his divine power and three
times refuses. It is not necessary that an obvious intervention of God
should show at the level of power that he is the Son of God. The
temptation is ongoing.
We know that Jesus sometimes refused to work miracles. These were
miracles that people wanted as proof that he was the Messiah. In these
circumstances he refused the request. He never performed miracles
except as a sign of his love. The clearest example, because in this case
Jesus specifically expressed his choice and decision, was that of his arrest.
When Peter wanted to defend him with the sword, he stopped him and
said: "Do you not think that I could have twelve legions of angels that would
come to defend me?" (Matt. 26:53). He was able to mobilize celestial
forces, but did not choose to do so. Finally, on the cross, he refused to
work the miracle that they asked of him: "If you want us to believe in you,
come down from the cross" (Matt. 27:40). He did not come down. The
whole time, then, the extraordinary choice was operative not to take the
way of power as Messiah and Lord. Note in passing the radical difference
from Islam, which can think of relations with unbelievers only in terms of
power. The choice of Jesus was in line with many prophetic injunctions to
the effect that horses and chariots could not protect Jerusalem, that God
alone would defend them, that they should seek only his protection in
demonstration of their trust in him, that he was their wall, their shield, and
that they should renounce all others (cf. Isa. 31:1; Ezek. 17:15).
But this permanent orientation of Jesus, this express choice not to use
power, places us Christians in a very delicate situation. For we ought to
make the same choice, but we are set in a society whose only orientation
and objective criterion of truth is power. Science is no longer a search for
truth but a search for power. Technology is wholly and utterly an
instrument of

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power; there is nothing in technology other than power. Politics is not

concerned about well-being or justice or humanity but simply aims at
achieving or preserving power. Economics, being dedicated to a frenzied
search for national wealth, is also very definitely consecrated to power.
Our society is the very spirit of power. The main difference from previous
societies is that they also undoubtedly sought power but did not have the
means to achieve it. Our society now has the means to achieve unlimited
power. Thus we Christians today are placed in the most difficult of all
situations. We have to repudiate both the spirit of the age and the means
that it employs. If we do not, if we yield even a fraction to these forces, we
will betray Jesus Christ just as surely as if we committed some individual
and limited sin. For this is a choice for life (nonviolence being part of it),
and no other is possible. Pretending that we can express the Christian faith
in works of love (aid to the poor and sorrowing, etc.), or in revolutionary
acts to achieve justice, is treason if we engage thereby in the use of power.
For the last word of love is that never in any circumstances will it express or
indicate power in relation to others. Today only a nonuse of power has a
chance of saving the world.

Chapter 12
THE SEVENTH DAY
"And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day. Thus the
heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the
seventh day God finished his work which he had done, and he rested on
the seventh day from all his work which he had done. So God blessed the
seventh day, and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work
which he had done in creation" (Gen. 1:31-2:3). We may recall something
that is generally known, namely, that the number seven is the number of
perfection. The fact that everything is very good means that God's work is
complete, and the number seven expresses this completion. After finishing
his work, God rests. This divine rest is the crowning of creation. Rest, not
the creation of man and woman, is the final stage. God leaves his work
and rests. This rest is not divine leisure or recreation. It is infinitely more
than that-it is plenitude. Because God is love, he cannot let his love be
without object. He wants someone before him to love. Thus he creates.
He creates on his own scale, which we are learning day by day as we find
more and more galaxies. But love is happy only if the loved object
responds to love and loves in return. God's work is done when he sets in
this universe the tiny being that is capable of something that is beyond the
capacity of the rest of the universe, namely, love. Man and woman are
created for love, to show the love of God, to respond to it, to address to
God the love and adoration of all creation. With their creation, creation is
complete. Since God's love will no longer fall into the void and
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153

silence, he ceases to create. Created also to love one another, man and
woman are the image of the God who is love. They are the image of God
because they are wholly made for love. Thus God set his own image and
likeness in creation. He then had no more to do, and so he retired into the
rest which is the summit of life, the full achievement of everything. The
sabbath, which would later be a lesser symbol of this rest, is a decisive day
for us. As we read in the Zohar, the sabbath was not created because of
the six days but the six days were created with a view to the sabbath. This
rest was not one of idleness but of completeness, when everything was
very good. God rests; he ceases to act; he stops creating. But obviously
he does not stop being who he is, the Almighty and the Creator. He can
always be so afresh. He simply ceases to act.
The fundamental point here is that the biblical God is not a cause. Though
hundreds of theologians have thought so, he is not the supreme cause. In
effect a primary and universal cause that functions as such cannot stop. If
you think of physical mechanisms in which one thing causes another, the
first can never decide to stop. It functions until it wears out or breaks. A
cause cannot cease to be a cause without ceasing to be. It must produce
its effects to infinity. God is not a cause, then, for we are told that he
decides to rest. This divine decision, which takes into account that he had
made everything good and that it is all complete, implies his total freedom.
This point is not without importance, for if we are in the image of God, then
we have been created free. God shows us freedom by deciding to stop. In
this way he freely defines the sphere of his activity. But we are thrust into
this creation with a function that I would venture to call ontological. We are
called upon to love, and in freedom we have the possibility of doing so. But
if God decides to stop working, it is also so as not to impede or block the
freedom of his creature. This is basic, and it marks the distinction from all
other religions. God respects his creature to the point of not acting in order
to secure its freedom, including the freedom not to love, not to respond to
God's love. God retires in order to leave the field free for us. When the
break came between God and us, our pure freedom of love changed in
nature and became independence or autonomy.

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THE SEVENTH DAY

155

But God still did not suppress this feeble reflection of what had been
freedom.

at the end of the sixth day, constitute the seventh day), then all history is
set within the blessing of God, for God blessed the seventh day.

To continue, God enters into rest, leaving it to human beings to manage

their patrimony and make their own decisions. But this does not mean that
he became absent or indifferent. This was not a retreat into a Nirvana in
which the final stage is nothingness, nor was it fusion into some great All.
How could that be possible if God is love? God cannot cease to be
interested in what becomes of his work. This is why it is so essential that
God is not an abstraction or a force but a person. To say that God is a
person is not an anthropomorphism but an expression of the fact that God
decides and yet at the same time respects the being that is his image.
Certainly the statement that God is a person does not tell us clearly who
God is in himself. These stories are not trying to tell us who God is in
himself but merely to tell us what relation he sets up with us. Their purpose
is simply to teach us who God is for us, in relation to us, and with reference
to us. All gnosis, all knowledge of God merely for the sake of knowledge of
God, is ruled out. The first thing we have to learn is that God for us is a
person who gives us freedom and who has entered into his rest.

This changes our whole outlook. I maintain that neither history nor any
event within it makes sense as such, but that this setting of human history
within and under God's blessing changes everything. For he blessed this
day. He blessed all that takes place on it. We must not forget that blessing
means three things. It (1) is a good word, a word of reconciliation, of
pardon-good news. But this word also (2) brings salvation and (3) implies
an act of kneeling. In Revelation the adoration of the elders and the beasts
is accompanied by this same declaration that history is under God's
blessing. With all its many disasters and pitiless wars and the collapse of
civilizations and the difficulty of launching a new truth or making people
listen to words of peace and love, this history is included in the pardon, the
act of kneeling, and the salvation that were declared before it began. No
matter what might be the beginning or continuation! Hence we have to look
at this history in another way.

But this is not the end of the matter. After the seventh day there is certainly
nothing more. We see this clearly from the fact that at every stage of
creation we are told that there was an evening and a morning. But there is
no such statement about the seventh day. There is no eighth day. But this
means that the seventh day is not yet over. We thus live on the seventh
day. We are set in the rest of God. The whole human adventure that we
have tried to sketch, the whole of human history, takes place on the
seventh day. I would venture to say that the work of creation continues in
this human history. But a tremendous statement is made that might well
shake the foundation of many evaluations of human history: "God blessed
the seventh day. Let us leave on one side the superficial explanation of
exegetes who want to see here no more than a kind of justification of the
sabbath-an etiological myth. I believe that there is much more to the story
than that. If all human history takes place on the seventh day, if this day is
not yet over, if it is ongoing (with the implication that thousands of years of
human history, beginning

But this interpretation raises a serious theological difficulty. If all history

takes place on the seventh day, and this day is the day when God rests,
then God does not make history or himself continue his creation in this
history. He does not direct events. His creation is complete. To those who
insist that God is behind the events of history, I put the simple question:
Where do we place the totality of history? At the end of the sixth day? But
this was the day of our creation, of our debut. Between the sixth day and
the seventh? No, for the text presents the seventh day as already present,
already in being. It is solely in this present, in the reality of the seventh day,
that* all history takes place. Consequently, if God is at rest, then it is we
who have made history, we with our own intentions and possibilities and
abilities. History is not a product of God's action. But this seems to
challenge what is an almost unanimous idea of theologians: that of
providence. In his providence, we are told, God not only knows and
foresees all things but combines all things. Every life is directed totally by
this providence and every historical movement is in reality an act of God.
This idea seems to me to be inaccurate biblically and false theologically. It
is a target of anti

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Christian objections: If God does everything, then he does what is evil.

Why? If he does everything, he does it badly, for nature and history alike
proceed badly.
This idea of providence arises with the logical thinking that tries to establish
coherence on the basis of divine omnipotence. It robs human beings of
freedom and implicates the freedom of God in the whole venture of
creation. I do not believe in providence. If there is such a thing, then God's
win is necessarily done in every situation and his rule is incontestable. But
what then becomes of the teaching of Jesus that we should pray: "Thy
kingdom come, thy will be done"? Why pray for the kingdom to come if it is
present already in providence? Why pray that God's will should be done if
it is done already in virtue of providence? This prayer shows that God's will
is not done, that we seek it, that it is contingent, and that we cannot count
on God's intervention in every situation to change it. Praying for God's
kingdom and will shows that there is no such thing as providence. The
Bible never uses the word or anything equivalent. I know, of course, that
some texts suggest it, and we cannot evade them. In Matthew 10:29 we
read that not a single sparrow will die without the Father's will. This is the
usual translation. But the Greek says simply: "without your Father." It is to
make things plain that "will" has been added. But the addition changes the
meaning completely. In the one case, God wills the death of the sparrow,
in the other death does not take place without God being present. In other
words, death comes according to natural laws, but God lets nothing in his
creation die without being there, without being the comfort and strength and
hope and support of that which dies. At issue is the presence of God, not
his will.
Searching further, we come across the saying in Deuteronomy 32:39: "1 kill
and I make alive. I do not think that this makes every birth and every
death a specific act of God. I believe that this statement contains three
truths. (1) God is indeed the Lord of life and death because he is the
Creator of life and in the face of death he is the power of resurrection. (2)
To the degree that all creation plays the game of life and death, he is truly
the Lord of all creation. (3) We have here a proclamation of the free
omnipotence of God (which the whole passage is teaching),

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but the reference is to spiritual life and death, not detached from their
physical reality, but implying relationship with God. In keeping is the great
statement toward the end of Deuteronomy: "I have set before you this day
life and good, death and evil.... therefore choose life" (30:19). We have
here no vision of a providence which causes life or death, but of a free God
who does everything that we might live, who points out to us the way, and
who exhorts us to live by choosing the good. A final text is found in several
places, for example, Ecclesiastes 11:5: "God does all things. But Psalm
115:3 gives us the true meaning: "God does whatever he pleases. This is
obviously true. The same applies to the verse at the end of Job (42:2: "1
know that thou canst do all things'). The fact that God does all things does
not mean that he is the great clockmaker, the mechanic of the universe, nor
that his will is a totalitarian will that does not allow a place for any other will.
In Ecclesiastes the confession that God does all things is the confession of
one who has tried all things in life, who has made all kinds of experiments,
who has sought happiness and wisdom in every possible way, and who has
come to see that all that we do is vanity of vanity, so that like job he finally
confesses: "As for me, I have not been able to do it. God can do it. I have
been able to accomplish nothing, and it is God that does all things. That
has nothing to do with providence.
And now the other side of the matter in Scripture: How can we arrive at the
idea of providence when we read the story of the Hebrew people in the
Old Testament? There is no question here of a set divine plan that God
infallibly realizes. On the contrary, we have here a God who intervenes
occasionally, raising up a judge or a prophet to accomplish his will. This
God modifies his plans and projects according to human wills and
decisions. This God repents of the evil that he first meant to do. This God
lets himself be deflected by prayer. This God gives constant warnings to
the people that this is what will happen if they continue in the evil course
that they have adopted, but with the promise that it will all be changed if
they change their conduct. In other words, God accompanies us, imposing
nothing on us by force, and not doing everything. But we must not fall into
the opposite error and think that God is inconsistent,

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that he does not know what he wants, that he acts haphazardly. In reality
the telos, the goal, the end is truly fixed. What we are trying to bring to light
is simply God's patience. This patience is not just the fact that he waits for
the end of history, letting human beings make their mistakes, tolerating
their doing all kinds of things. His patience is an expression of the rest into
which he has entered.
God has entered into his rest. Hence he is not to be viewed as providence.
Yet he has not abandoned his creation. He does not let things develop and
unfold on their own. He is neither absent nor indifferent. Being love, he is
passionately linked to this creation which is his and from which he awaits
the response. If all had gone well, if human beings had remained wholly in
the image of God, if they had given God the assent and love of creation,
God's rest would have been complete and things could have gone on by
themselves. But with the breach there came about the extraordinary
situation that as human beings make their own history, with their folly and
pride and their desire to be as God, they trouble God's rest. God is in his
rest, but he is constantly disturbed and invoked and drawn in to salvage the
venture. God is in his rest, but the human history to which he cannot be
indifferent is in no sense a rest. Nothing in creation is rest. All was very
good, said God, but at once there began a venture that was not good.
The Bible sets before us God's intervention. He intervenes in this history in
two kinds of circumstances. He does so first when human evil reaches a
frenzied degree: evil directed against God (idolatry, pride, and
self-centeredness), and evil directed against others. When the cup
overflows, when humanity passes the limits of tolerable evil, whether
tolerable for others or for God, then God acts to set matters straight. The
tower of Babel offers the clearest example. God is in his rest, but the
building of the city and the tower of Babel is a twofold offense against God,
a repetition of the fall of Adam. Thus the text tells us that God "came down
to see" (Gen. 11:5). Several exegetes talk about anthropomorphism in this
connection, as though God did not know what was happening. But that is
not the point. The point is that God is in his rest, and he leaves his rest
(comes down) in order to intervene.

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He also intervenes, however, when human distress reaches a climax, when

misery is so great that the creature that God loves can no longer bear it,
and especially when there seems to be no human remedy for the evil, the
suffering, the unhappiness, and the distress, when no human means are at
hand to deal with it, and there is no hope. This intervention may also occur
when, even apart from suffering, people seem to be trapped by a kind of
necessity that marches on ineluctably, when they cannot control the power
of circumstances, when they are simply being conditioned, for God wants
the beings that are still his creatures to have at least enough independence
or freedom to be able to turn around and love him. Thus God intervenes,
whether to relieve suffering and respond to anguished questions (such as
that of job), or to solve a collective political situation for which there is no
human solution. In so doing, God upsets the historical facts in such a way
as to replace an implacable situation by a fluid situation in which people
can act. God does not reestablish the condition of Eden. He simply
enables us to live again. He is constantly waiting for us to recognize him,
to recognize him in his love. He thus intervenes occasionally, contingently,
and sporadically. Jesus states as much when he says that not all lepers
were healed by Elisha (Luke 4:25-27), and not all the blind were cured. He
himself certainly did not heal everybody. There is no return to the
beginning by a monumental act of God. (This would be to treat us as
nonresponsible objects.) Here, then, we have a first essential characteristic
of the divine action.
The second is no less important. God rarely acts directly. Events like
Babel or the Flood in which he himself intervenes in history are very rare.
Most often he sends a human being, one responsible for delivering his
word or, at times, displaying his power. This one may be a judge or a
prophet or sometimes a king. But it may be a foreign people that manifests
his wrath or his justice, or even a foreign king who manifests his kindness
and magnanimity, like Cyrus according to the well-known texts which call
him God's shepherd and anointed (Isa. 44:28; 45:1). But when God sends
a foreign people against Israel, he does not prescribe its acts. This people
is not a docile instrument in the hands of a God who organizes everything.
God

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announces that he will raise up the Chaldeans, a violent people that will
invade Israel. But he does not approve of this people, saying of them "their
own might is their god" (Hab. 1:6-11). We thus find the surprising
statement: "Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger, the staff of my fury ... against
the people of my wrath I command him ... but it is in his mind to destroy,
and to cut off nations not a few" (Isa. 10:5-7). Even nations that God uses
to punish Israel are under malediction (Damascus, Edom, and Moab -Amos
1) because they act atrociously, increasing evil and obeying the spirit of
power. Hatred and pride have seized hold of them and they have used
odious means. Thus, even though they are at first launched by God, God
lets them act in their own way, and then turns upon them because they
have been guilty of unheard-of wickedness.
God's intervention in human history is complex. Its aim is not that human
history should issue in the kingdom of God but that individuals or peoples
should recognize that Yahweh alone is God. The same is true on the
individual scale. God does not direct our lives. We have no providential
guardian angels. We have no direct line to God, and the Holy Spirit does
not dictate to us what we must do. But God is always there with us in the
silence, and it is a question of faith, knowing that he is present even when
we do not experience it, even when we are unhappy; knowing that God is
alongside us and for us, that we are not alone even though there is no
miracle in reply to deliver us; knowing at every moment that he can indeed
intervene when some disaster crushes us or when we are on the point of
doing something dreadfully wicked. God is not dumb, or blind, or deaf to
the cry of his creatures, though he is also not an automatic dispenser of the
graces and privileges and miracles that we demand. The teleology is the
same. When Jesus meets a man blind from birth, and his disciples ask him
why this man is handicapped in this way, and whether he or his parents
sinned that he should be so afflicted, Jesus answers: "It was not that this
man sinned, or his parents [the infirmity is not a punishment, it is a result of
natural circumstances], but that the work of God might be made manifest in
him" (John 9:3). In other words, God's work was not to make him blind but
to give him back his sight.

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This interpretation, which explains why we might feel abandoned, or

experience God's silence, or suffer his inaction, or not see why he seems to
be governing the world so badly, is confirmed in both Genesis and the
Gospel of John. In Genesis 2:1-3 we have what seems to be an
astonishing contradiction. The heavens and the earth were finished, "and
on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done, and he
rested on the seventh day from all his work. Everything is complete by the
seventh day, but it seems that there was still something to do, for we are
told that God finished his work on the seventh day. If everything was
finished, what need was there to say this? There is indeed duality here, for
on the seventh day, the same formula being used in each case, we read
that he both finished his work and rested from it. Everything is complete,
yet God still did something. God enters into his rest, but he still has
something to do. We can understand the contradiction if we accept the
contingent action of God whereby he lovingly continues his work (not a
work of creation, for creation is not continuous) even though he has entered
into his rest. The two facts revealed here are both true. God is no longer
the Creator doing new works of creation, but he is always attentive to the
doings of the exceptional creature that is called human and that he is able
to sanctify. It is precisely because he is resting that he may seem distant
(he is present only in Jesus Christ) and silent and perhaps even absent. It
looks as if he has abandoned the world, as if there is dereliction.
The relation between this rest of God and his occasional interventions
enables us to understand some sayings of Jesus. Thus he says: "The
Father who dwells in me does the works" (John 14:10). God's presence on
earth is actualized in the person of Jesus Christ. The Father does the
works of Jesus that are a witness ("believe at least because of the works
that I do'), but a localized and specific witness to God's presence, to his
intervention in the world. We also recall the enigmatic saying with which
Jesus answered the Jews when he had healed a paralytic and was
accused of breaking the sabbath: "My Father is working still, and I am
working.... The Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he
sees the Father doing; for whatever he does, that the Son does likewise....
As the Father

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raises the dead and gives them life, so the Son gives life to whom he will"
(John 5:17-21). Here we see clearly that God is not the One who does
everything, that there is no question of continuous creation, that he acts
only in some cases and at specific points. So, too, does the Son, for this
action of Jesus was a specific action, and yet he says that all that he sees
the Father do, he himself does. Undoubtedly when he says that "my Father
is working still" with regard to a single healing, he is not saying that his
Father is the supreme cause. He is saying that God works in human hearts
and seeks reconciliation, which is achieved in Jesus Christ.
Precisely in saying "reconciliation" (between God and us) we are saying
that human beings and their acts and history cease to disturb the rest of
God. We are saying that they rediscover their true being in God's image as
those who respond to God's love, and God can fully enjoy the rest to which
the text refers, when there is on the one side the healing of a sickness and
on the other side the reestablishment of the sabbath in its truth. Jesus
Christ has suppressed the two things that disturb God's rest. Human
history troubles God because it causes terrible human suffering to which
God cannot remain indifferent, and also because it engenders a terrible
misunderstanding of the being and will of God, which are love. Here are
two impossibilities which God cannot tolerate, and this is why he is still
working up to the time of Jesus. Why not beyond that time? Because
everything was to be restored in Jesus Christ and all misunderstanding was
to come to an end in him, since he is the Truth. After Jesus Christ God was
again to find untroubled rest. But the Truth has not enlightened all people,
and history has pursued its bloody and aberrant course. It is not that what
Jesus Christ accomplished has met with a setback. The point is that
human beings have found new ways to fight against God. What Jesus
Christ accomplished is forever: salvation, pardon, assurance of the love of
God, resurrection, and reconciliation. God finds his rest after himself
bearing all the demonization of societies, but the work has still to go on with
the action of Jesus Christ through those who take up this action and carry it
forward ("I am with you always, to the close of the age," Matt. 28:20), and
with the action of the Holy Spirit, who constantly

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begins again what we tear down. We are already in the seventh day, but if
everything has already been accomplished, everything has not yet been
consummated.
The rest of God-a rest which will not again be challenged or modified-has
already been achieved with the reconciliation that has been effected. But
oddly this reconciliation is unilateral. God is reconciled to all people, but all
people are not reconciled to him. In Christ reconciliation has been made,
but people still continue both to accuse God and not to accept that his will
is both perfect and benevolent. No matter what our denials may be, our
future is that of entering ourselves into this rest. We need to consult a
passage in Hebrews: "For we who have believed enter that rest, as he has
said: 'As I swore in my wrath, they shall never enter my rest' [referring to
Pa. 95:11, which has in view the revolt of the Hebrews after the Exodus
from Egypt], although his works were finished from the foundation of the
world ... for whoever enters God's rest ceases from his labors as God did
from his. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, that no one fall by the
same sort of disobedience" (4:3-11). This rest, which is acceptance of
reconciliation with God and salvation by faith, is promised to everyone, to
all creation, and to all humanity. History will reach its goal in this rest by a
way that we are completely unable to imagine.
But again we must not reverse things. This rest is not the rest of death.
There is much misunderstanding of the requiem that Roman Catholic
priests pronounce at funerals. At issue is not the rest of death that the
deceased find. Prayer is made that God will enable them to enter into his
rest, which is that of accomplishment. For God enters into his rest when he
finishes all his works and sees that they are very good. This rest is not a
sleep, not an inactivity. It is not passive-it is the fulfillment of love in virtue
of this accomplishment. It is not static-it is participation in perfection. What
is more, the promised rest is a transvaluation. God has worked, he has
created, he has produced a universe. Even if he did it by his word alone,
he acted (there being no difference in Hebrew between word and act). His
work being finished, the fullness of rest brings to light the primacy of being.
God is totally himself when he has created. Creation being finished, he
exists in the perfect unity of being.

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The promise made to us and our work and history is that of the same
transition from doing to being. In the course of our human venture,
individual, collective, and total, we have done a great deal. We pass our
time in doing. Entering into the rest of God is entering into the fullness of
being. Rest is not boredom or satiety. It is the discovery of love finally
achieved and realized. It is the amplitude of fulfilled being. This is the point
of the placing of all human history on the seventh day.
We do not yet have this rest even in faith, in spite of Hebrews. The fact
that faith has to show itself in works is the proof. Furthermore, faith is not
constant; it is not the permanent truth of my life. We are thrust into the
turmoil of all that there is to do. In order to give us respite from this turmoil,
God instituted a day that would enable us to know his own rest. It is a
prophetic day, the seventh, the sabbath. The sabbath is very important,
and we should not be surprised that the Jews gave it so important a place
in their faith and rites. The promised rest of God is actualized here at a
point in my life. But we have to receive this gift that is given us. As for
God, so for us the sabbath is not a vacation, a day of leisure, or a day of
indifference. One of the horrors of our society is to have made Saturday
and Sunday into a weekend for all kinds of purposes, and therefore into a
time of absence. At this time modem people are simply nonexistent,
though they have the impression of existing when they leave work. But true
existence comes only with entry into the rest of God. Any other use of the
sabbath is in fact the boomerang of a curse. When Saturday and Sunday
are used to get away, they become a repeated sign of the curse on Adam
when he was chased out of Eden, out of the rest of God.
On the other hand, we must not make of the sabbath a day of legal
restraint, of redoubled observance of the divine commandment. I have in
mind not merely the minute rules that were progressively created by later
Judaism but also the Calvinist understanding which makes Sunday a day of
tedium and constraints. I also have in mind the Roman Catholic rule that
has made it obligatory, under severe threats, to attend Mass on Sunday.
The sabbath is a gift of God to remind us that we are not constantly under
the burden of the toil that results from our break with God, and to remind us
also of the hope that we shall

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enter into his rest. It can be received and lived out only in faith. It cannot
be authentic otherwise. Either we believe in the truth that God is with us
and that he gives us the sign or firstfruits of the great reconciliation, so that
we can live out the sabbath in different ways but always in worship and
without constraint, or we evade or regulate, and then the sabbath is no
more than an inverse sign of what God has promised.
We have to live out the sabbath in all the richness of its meaning. For I do
not believe that the sabbath has been annulled by the resurrection. The
sabbath and the Lord's day belong together as the end of work and the
beginning of life. But to hold fast to the sabbath we need to keep it by
finding our own way of life, yet always having in ourselves its threefold
symbolical meaning. It tells us first that the condemnation represented by
the constraint of work is lifted for a day as it will be at last in eternity. We
are no longer under condemnation. Second, it is the promise that we shall
enter into the rest of God when history comes to an end with the end of
time as God decides. At the heart of our history this sign is set. The rest is
for us, and it awaits us. Third, it is the sign of the reconciliation promised
and effected in Jesus Christ. One is thus tempted to replace the sabbath
by the day of his resurrection. For what was promised has now become
reality in this resurrection. But if the fulfillment is real before God, history
still goes on and there is an ongoing need to recall the promise as such.
Furthermore, if God is reconciled with all of us, a vast majority still does not
know it. Thus we need to show them a visible sign of what is promised.
The celebration of the sabbath and the Lord's day is a sign to unbelievers,
inducing them to receive the promise for themselves. We recognize that
the two days have become solemn days for internal use by Jews and
Christians and that they do nothing to awaken the desire of unbelievers.
The sabbath in virtue of its three meanings, and the Lord's day in virtue of
the resurrection, ought to be marked by two attitudes: freedom and joy.
This is a day of great freedom. We are free for a day, and we should act as
free people, always in .1 spirit of adoration and also of joy. It is alarming to
see how gloomy Christians look when they worship. Joy ought to be a sign
held out to all people that on this day the burden of the

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world, the constraints of society, and boredom and anguish are all lifted.
This is a joy that leads, not to distractions, but to adoration. Are we full of
joy that we may worship the Savior in truth? This is our personal question.
If so, we can appreciate Jesus' teaching about the sabbath in the Gospels.
It is often said that he broke the sabbath laws. I do not believe that he
meant to break them. He wanted to make this day a day of joy and
freedom, a day of reconciliation and of the presence of God's love. Is not
this precisely what he showed us when he healed on the sabbath? Is it not
the sovereign freedom of fellowship with the Father that he showed us
when he let his disciples eat the ears of grain? "You shall enter into my
rest"-let us take this promise with full seriousness, living out the sabbath in
the joy of the rest which comes with resurrection and life.

Chapter 13
GOD FOR ME
What can I say? All has been said already, and we know better than other
generations that we cannot really talk about God, though believers can talk
to him. All that we say is inadequate, and what point is there in endlessly
trying to achieve an equation between the One who is and what I can say
about him. The very nature of such an undertaking seems to me to be
mistaken. I cannot attempt a philosophical discourse because I am not a
philosopher and have no philosophical instrument by means of which to
engage in a profound exploration. Nor is there any point in apologetics.
Why try to prove that God exists? Even if we managed to do so, who
would be led thereby to a knowledge of the living God? Why and for whom
should we engage in apologetics? What is the point? To prove that God
exists as some kind of object is simply to cause people to think of him
merely as an object. But surely we see that this is precisely what God is
not, at least the God to whom the Bible bears witness. I do not see how I
can present a defensive apologetics, or become an advocate for God,
justifying what he does. I know that it is God who justifies me and us. He
has no need of an advocate. He can defend himself very well. Nor can I
focus on my own experiences of God. I dislike talking about my relations
with the God in whom I believe. I find testimonies quite intolerable, since it
is finally the self that emerges as the hero of the exceptional experience. I
contrast firmly such outward displays with the reserve of Paul, who merely
alludes to his spiritual experiences and says little about his intimate relation
with the Savior, letting others do it for him. To make a parade of these
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experiences is ultimately to talk about oneself and not to bear witness to

God. Even St. Augustine did not avoid this.
I must say first that it is infinitely easier to say what God is not for me. He is
certainly not the being decked out with qualities the reverse of my own
nature: impassible, immutable, eternal, omnipotent, etc. All that is simply a
mirror image. Nor is he the being decked out with human qualities that I
value, but carried to the absolute. For one thing, I have no conception of
what "absolute" means. Absolutely righteous, holy, free, authentic-I do not
know at all what these things might mean. I am too much tied to history to
have any idea of the absolute, and what I know about justice or freedom
prevents me from tacking on to them the adverb "absolutely. It is not
anthropomorphism that restrains me here but the simple inability to
understand what I would be saying. Perhaps I am too much influenced by
Feuerbach, but a human image absolutized or invested with all that the
human cannot contain seems suspect to me. Above all, it does not interest
me, whether from a spiritual, an intellectual, or a human standpoint. It
makes no difference to me if God is impassible or absolutely righteous.
The traditional approach that finds in God a supreme cause or creative
force also leaves me in the same state of coldness and indifference. I am
not concerned about anything that has to do with the God of the
philosophers. To my great shame I admit that I have never been able to
read Spinoza. He does not interest me.
At the other extreme, God is not what mystical or sentimental exuberance
describes as love, life, spirit, etc. I certainly do not want to say that God is
not love for me, or that he is not the force behind life or that he is not spirit,
but I distrust any reversal of such statements. If we say that love is God,
we can hardly evade Cupid. During the past twenty years we have seen
among young people how incredibly dangerous such a formula can be.
Similarly, to say that life is God is to introduce a banal pantheism. Neither
the love that we know, nor life and its various forces, nor spirit as we can
lay hold of it in some form, can be equated with God. The God in whom I
believe assumes these things in fullness and totality but is not assimilated
to them. The love that I know in the world gives me a fleeting reflection of
him whom I call God, a parable, but only on the condition that

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I do not go on to make an identification. The same applies to the joy of a

birth or the wonder of a spiritual activity.
Finally, God is not the celebrated God of the gaps. On this view, when we
cannot explain certain phenomena, to satisfy ourselves we refer to God,
making him the explanation or cause or reason that we cannot find
elsewhere. God is thus an easy temporary replacement until we find the
real explanation, which will, of course, be scientific. This kind of procedure
is stupid. I see nothing of it in the Bible, absolutely nothing along these
lines. It is also presumptuous to think that science answers the questions
that people are asking when they talk about God. This is the attitude of an
ignorant and arrogant scientism, certainly not that of real scientists. An
interesting point to note is that at the very time when science is recognizing
its own limits, some theologians, a half-century behind as usual, are going
the way of scientific triumphalism, explaining that God's domain has been
terribly reduced as a result of the glorious progress of science. The
tendency here is to make of God no more than a vague spiritual essence,
or in any case something different from what science might eventually
come across. In other words, God is totally detached from the reality of the
world and reduced to an insubstantial vapor. To save him they repress
him. For me God is certainly not the God of the gaps.
In conclusion, I want to say that this whole undertaking is impossible as I
see it. For me God cannot be described or displayed or demonstrated.
Thus what can I say? Yet I have promised to attempt the impossible, and I
will present some reflections along two lines.
I
My first reflections revolve around the central conviction that I cannot have
a single coherent image of God. I cannot say at a given moment that God
is simply this or that for me. He is, but he is also other things at the same
time which may finally be the opposite. I cannot attempt a synthesis or
reconciliation between the different elements in what I believe I can
understand about God. I thus renounce here any attempt at intellectual
coherence.

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In my thinking there are three different levels. The first is that of what I
have learned intellectually about God, the result of the work of theologians
and the evolving consensus of the church. Jesus is the incarnation of God,
true God and true man. God is the Creator. God is Three and One. He
reveals himself progressively. He intervenes in history. He creates new
heavens and a new earth. There is nothing original here, but it
corresponds to a great truth. I am aware of the linguistic problems that
arise, but they do not trouble me. Most of the questions that are put on the
matter are false questions. As for the rest, we are wrong to think them
new. The problem of the adequacy of language has harassed theologians
from the very first, as we see from the debate between Eunomius and
Gregory of Nyssa or the dispute about universals. We have made few
innovations, and the formulation of the thinking of the church has gone on
in spite of all the difficulties. We cannot presume to set aside the
knowledge of God handed down by the church. Nor can we have the
feeling that it is of no direct concern to us today. Arguments that suggest
as much, for example, the anthropomorphism of its definitions, their strictly
cultural character (inasmuch as they express the beliefs of a given culture
that another culture cannot assimilate), or their dependence on this or that
philosophy, seem to me to be weak and superficial. Without going into
detail, I would simply say that after serious and profound study of all these
critical systems, I have concluded that none of them is convincing or can
sway my own convictions. To want to change a name or representation is
of little interest. To say that we must not think of God up there because he
is down here is simply to ask for a change of signpost. To talk of the
ultimate or the unconditioned (which seems to me to be exactly the same
thing as the classical ingenerate) is no doubt not incorrect, but it is also no
more true than to talk of the eternal or the absolute. I thus accept with little
difficulty the teaching of church fathers and theologians, at least those who
have produced the traditional teaching of the church.
But can I stop there and receive this deposit of the faith (in spite of the
scandal this formula represents today) as adequate and well packaged?
For two reasons I have to say, not that everyone was wrong up to the
present day, nor that this

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way of thinking about God is historically outdated, nor that it is idealistic and
hence does not concern us, but that I cannot stop there and merely accept
it. My first reason is simple: if God is God, he obviously cannot be totally
known or circumscribed or put into a human formula. There is always
something more to know and understand and receive. All theologies and
all knowledge of God will always fall short. It is a commonplace of theology
that the finite cannot contain the infinite. My second reason is different: if
God is the God of Jesus Christ, he demands of me a personal decision
because he has set up a personal relation. This personal decision
presupposes action on my part, including intellectual action. I cannot spare
myself the trouble of facing up to this revelation of God, of trying to express
in my own way what this personal relation to God entails. Not being wholly
satisfied with what the church's tradition teaches about God, I have to go
my own way and try to think out the question for myself.
Concerning the second level of reflection upon God, I am at once inhibited
by something that many theologians have come up against, and this is
perhaps because I belong to my age and setting. The point is that if God is
God, I cannot know anything about him on my own, and even less can I say
anything about him. God is the Wholly Other. If he were not, he would not
be God. If he is, I cannot even conceive of what is at issue. Since my
process of acquiring knowledge is tied to what is familiar, he is truly
unknowable. I have neither the right nor the ability to manipulate him in
such a way as to be able to know him. What I might say on the subject
does not concern God.
We are back to the problem of name. In his own revelation God reveals
himself as the One whom we cannot name. To be able to pronounce the
sacred tetragrammaton I vocalize it. This enables me to pronounce the
word, but the word is not really the name of God. It is just another thing of
which I am capable. A way which seems to me to be completely invalid is
the analogical way. Based on the declaration that we are made in God's
image, a whole theological trend has thought that we can infer God's own
reality from what may be said about us. This view is reinforced by the
statement that Jesus is the full, perfect, and sufficient image of God. Now
we should at least

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distinguish between these two statements. In the first, we run into a twofold
difficulty. On the one hand, there has after all been a break between God
and us. Does the image of God still remain after this break, or has the
break been so total that nothing remains intact and unscathed, so that we
cannot stride across the gulf and act as though there is analogy between
God and us? On the other hand, can we believe that everything in us is in
God's image, and if not, can we say what is? The insoluble nature of these
two questions invalidates all research based on an analogical method. But
this approach, common in the Middle Ages, has now been replaced by the
affirmation that Jesus is true God, that all that we can know about God is in
Jesus (he and the Father are one), and that we have only to look at Jesus
to know who God is.
From these true propositions the transition is smooth to the further
proposition that it is useless to talk about God or to pose the question of
God. God is not in the sky. He is nowhere except in Jesus. Jesus alone is
before us. At the same time, Jesus is reduced to an exemplary man. Now
if the statement that Jesus is God is basic for me, I can neither accept the
reduction to exemplary humanity nor be content with agnosticism
concerning the One whom Jesus calls his Father. For there again the
difficulty is insoluble. Jesus undoubtedly says that those who have seen
him have seen the Father, but in that very place and with those very words
he presupposes, not the suppression of the Father, but his distance from
us. He is not saying that there is no Father nor telling his disciples not to
bother about him but to remain peacefully agnostic on the subject. The
Father is he who fully reveals himself in Jesus, but it is a matter of his
revelation and not his replacement. The Father himself encounters us in
Jesus. The same Father has designated Jesus as the Messiah.
The difficulty that we cannot avoid is this: What does Jesus reveal of God?
Those for whom Jesus is simply a good man, a complete man, a politician,
a liberator of the people and the poor, simply suppress this difficulty. But in
so doing they suppress Christianity itself, for why should people
passionately attach themselves to this interesting historical personage
called Jesus? He was just one of the many religious heroes and no more.
In the Middle Ages scholars debated the difficulty in the

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form of the problem of the two natures. What is finally of God in Jesus?
This is just as unanswerable a question as the question: Who or what is
God? But Jesus teaches us at all events that God is the Father. Thus I
believe that we hold two links of the chain, even though it plunges down
into the darkness. On the one side God is indeed unknowable. He is
beyond anything that we can understand or be. He is completely hidden.
He is truly the Wholly Other about whom I can say nothing. But on the
other side he is the Father, and I can play here a Barthian game (which
after all I find very satisfying) and say that as the Wholly Other he is the
Father and as the Father he is the Wholly Other.
Nevertheless, a Christian who is accustomed to consulting the Bible cannot
stop there. For if the route of an intellectual return to God is closed, we are
nourished by the idea that this God who is hidden from our efforts, to whom
we have no access, still reveals himself to us. He discloses something
about himself when he intervenes. Certainly he is never known face-toface. He is never known except by his free decision to unveil himself here
and now. We never know his being or its depths. What we can grasp of
this revelation is never constant. God reveals himself here and now as the
need arises in a given human situation. There is thus no metaphysical
unveiling (we never grasp the being of God), nor can we add up the
fragments which God has revealed, now to one and now to another, and
which we can receive only as parts of a puzzle. We often try to put these
pieces together, but to do so shows that we have not understood the
revelation at all, for it means that we are again trying to grasp the being of
God when all that he has given us to see is simply his intervention. Moses
did not see God in the burning bush. He saw the burning bush and knew
that it was a sign that God was speaking to him. In revelation, then, we
recognize the signs that God is speaking to us, the works that he has done.
There is nothing more illuminating than this continually repeated situation.
When God is there, when he acts in our lives, our society, or our group, we
do not know or feel anything special. It is only afterward, when God's work
is done, that looking back we can say: "But it was God who was at work, it
was he who changed the situation, it was he who

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passed by," just as we read that Moses and Elijah saw God's back (cf.
Exod. 33:23; 1 Kgs. 19:11) when he had passed by.
Thus God in his revelation does not satisfy our intellectual curiosity. He
cannot be put together again in human knowledge on the basis of his
intervention. He is this or that to this or that person according to the
historical circumstances. Nothing can guarantee what he is in himself.
This is why we see him reveal himself in what seem to be contradictory
ways. Thus he is the God of thunder who makes the mountains tremble
when he comes down to the earth. But he is also an indescribably light
breath which passes by for Elijah after all the catastrophic events. He is
the Almighty who yet chooses the way of total weakness, the being that
elects to die. God does not reveal himself like an object that one might
unveil. He does so as the One who intervenes at the heart of our lives and
history. We cannot infer his being from this intervention.
Nevertheless, one has to move to another level. I have in mind the God of
Pascal whom we know in the heart. Incontestably, apart from the way of
intellectual knowledge, there is the God that I sense to be present in my
life, acting and revealing himself on another level than that of the intellect.
Is this mystical? I know nothing about that. What I know for certain is that
this God is not to be confused with a phantom, an imagination, an illusion, a
psychoanalytical projection. We feel God in the heart, but this God is
known in my concrete life and not in ecstasy. In my experience, then, it is
not a matter of ek-stasis but of the very opposite. This God does not make
me take leave of myself. He comes for a moment into the life that is mine
and modifies and reorients it. He produces what I certainly am not, but
what I may become in virtue of this intervention. Naturally God cannot be
reduced to my experience of God, and he certainly cannot be proved by my
experience. The formula of Frossard: "God exists, I have met him," is
stupid. I do not question Frossard's experience. But the meeting is strictly
ineffable and there is nothing else to back it up -no proof or demonstration.
We can testify only to what Scripture presents to us, not to our own
experience. It is possible to have an existential relation that is strictly
incommunicable. Yet we know also-this is the problem-that this God
speaks and that we are gripped by a word

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of God. If there is word, there is communication, and there is thus the

possibility of communicating the same word to others. Unfortunately, then,
we have to reject that simple proof.
The revelation is not for me a matter of mystical contemplation. It is more
like what many of us are familiar with; a word suddenly becomes so true to
us that we can no longer doubt it. We know well how astonishing this
experience can be. I read in the Bible texts that I have read a hundred
times, that I know by heart, that are part of my objective knowledge of the
biblical God, and suddenly the word that I know so well intellectually takes
on an unexpected significance, a blinding force that constrains me from
now on to accept it as truth, as a truth at once comprehensible, irrational,
and rigorously certain. At this moment I can do nothing to challenge or
reject it. It is suddenly placed at the core of my life. But I cannot transmit
this experience as such. I cannot tell how the biblical text has become truth
for me. I cannot offer any proof or guarantee. I do not know whether it is
God's plan that the same word should become truth for someone else. I
can bear witness only to what has happened. If I cannot communicate,
what is the significance of this word that God speaks and of the fact that
God himself is Word?
God is said to speak because in Hebrew the word is not distinct from the
deed, because it evokes and provokes and literally creates something new.
Thus the Word means more than it does for us today. It cannot be reduced
to mere discourse. It is not absorbed into oral language, though it also
adopts this language. This fact guarantees its absolute freedom, protecting
it against linguistic analysis and also ruling out any facile idea of a
translation of this Word into our words, any idea that we can hear it
according to the laws of discourse and thus put it into the same form. The
God in whom I believe is not the God who - to simplify - whispers words in
the ears of a prophet that the prophet then has to repeat aloud. He is
indeed the Word, the creative Word, always creating new situations, but he
is a Word that is not the prisoner of linguistics and has nothing in common
with our words. Human language can encircle this revelation on all sides
but it cannot exhaust it or give a strict account of it. The Word is the
designation of him who is unnamed.

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Here at once is contradiction. He who remains hidden speaks to my heart.

He convinces me and sets me in his new creation. Interpreting, I
understand the words of this new birth, but they are not my words. I can
tell only what God has done for me, not who or what he is. I can look back
on the way in which he has directed my life, but I cannot deduce from this
either his being or his future interventions. I see very well that he structures
what I know and that he himself does not enter into any structure. His
presence forces me out of my own categories. Undoubtedly, I cannot
remain silent, but if it is possible to witness directly to what God does in this
history and to what he enables me to discern in order to get beyond it, I
have to talk in an indirect way. I use myth or parable or poetry. I have to
adopt the dialectical method to be able to give an account of this
contradictory totality that reveals itself to me as God. My approach in
language can never be fixed. I can never stop at any moment and say:
"God is there," or: "God is this. The God whom I feel in my heart can
never be indicated except in parable or myth. He cannot be denoted in a
descriptive or intellectual way. Conversely, if I offer a parable, of what or of
whom is it a parable? Of the God who reveals himself to me in the totality
of my life, the God of Jesus Christ who is the same, the God whom Jesus
Christ shows to me in fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, the God
whom he shows to be in some sort the relation that exists between being,
love, life, and word, and all that this symbolizes of freedom, ineffability,
proximity, power, communication, and authenticity.
These three levels of apprehension that I have tried to sketch, the God
taught in the church's tradition, the God whom I try to understand and
whose revelation I try to hear, and the God whom I feel in my heart, are not
identical, and yet there is a certain relation among them, for it is the same
God who offers himself to me for adoration and who gives himself to my
incredulity as he puts to me the question of my life.
There is at this moment in France a big movement to bring together, to set
in dialogue, to assimilate, and finally to merge all monotheistic believers,
that is, Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It is stated emphatically that what
characterizes these three religions is that they are all in some sense locked
into one another

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in opposition to all the world's other religions, for they all refer to one single,
universal, and all-powerful God, the same God. The widespread view is
that they believe in the same God under different names, Adonai Elohim for
Jews, Theos-Christos for Christians, and Allah (which is close to Elohim)
for Muslims. God is finally the same, and therefore they should unite.
This analysis is wrong on every count. First, in regard to the exclusiveness
of monotheism1, these three religions do not have a monopoly of it. It has
often been noted that in what are called polytheistic religions, though the
gods take specific forms, there finally reigns an indefinite, unnamed, and
mysterious spirit. Among the Greeks, the powers above the gods are
Chronos, Ouranos, and then Fate (sometimes Ananke). Even more secret
is the power above the gods in Egyptian religion, the Unnamed with whom
no relations are possible but who seems to dominate all things. In many
religions of the North American Indians an indefinable spirit rules on whom
all things also depend.
One cannot say that these religions are
monotheistic, but we should perhaps moderate our pride in this matter. I do
not even mention Akhenaton's attempt at monotheism.
My second and even more serious point is this: Can we really say that
monotheism is the essential and central feature of the Christian revelation?
It is the great merit of Moltmann to have reminded us in this time of
theological confusion that Christianity is trinitarian before it is monotheistic.'
The Trinity is really the distinctive characteristic of Christianity. One God
indeed, but the great objection of Jews and Muslims to Christianity is that it
is not strictly monotheistic, since in their view Christians worship three
Gods. From the days of the church fathers theologians have debated
endlessly in an attempt to reconcile the oneness of God with the threeness
of the Trinity (one God in three Persons). But if we lay primary stress on
monotheism, we forget that the revelation in Christ is primarily trinitarian.
The stakes are serious, for to stress monotheism is to make Jesus Christ
secondary. But if we maintain that Jesus Christ alone reveals who God is,
that he alone teaches us the

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love of God, that he alone is the image of God, that he alone makes a
covenant between God and us, that he alone is our salvation through his
death, that he alone is our hope through his resurrection, that he alone is
the truth, then other monotheists regard us as polytheists. If we want to
engage in a pleasant dialogue, if we want to appear to be people of
goodwill, if we are ready for agreement on a common basis, we shall have
to set Jesus Christ aside. We shall just have to stop being Christians. The
Trinity is not a matter of theological accommodation to difficult problems. It
is not a human invention. It belongs to the very essence of the biblical
revelation. Creation by the Father, the incarnation of the Son, and
transfiguration by the Spirit are the architecture of revelation. Moltmann
was right when he even went so far as to say that monotheism engenders
authoritarianism and totalitarianism both ecclesiastically and politically.
Trinitarian thinking ensures at the same time both divine and human liberty.
These harsh statements do not necessarily involve a break with the Jews,
even though they naturally cannot recognize Jesus as the Messiah and the
Son of the Father. Although Jewish thought centers on the one God
("Hear, 0 Israel, Yahweh is one God, the only One"-Deut. 6:4), we also find
the Word of God. This God is Word. We find, too, the Wisdom of God and
the Spirit of God. In the relevant texts each seems to have its own
specificity. I am not saying that each is God, but each is in some sense
hypostatized. The Spirit of God breathes into the dead bodies in Ezekiel's
vision (Ezek. 37). The Word of God was scarce at certain times. Both
Word and Spirit are "of God," yet each has its own role and individuality,
and the two cannot be simply equated. Similarly, the Son is inseparable
from the Father ("I and the Father are one"-John 10:30), and the Spirit
proceeds from the Father and the Son, and yet they are one God. I am not
saying that everything is identical here. Indeed, some elements in the Old
Testament revelation might be cited in opposition. Nevertheless, there is at
least a possibility of understanding and cooperation between Jews and
Christians, for they believe in the same God.
The same thing is not possible with Islam. It is ridiculous to say that Islam
recognizes Jesus because it admits that he is

See Jrgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, trans. Margaret Kohl
(New York: Harper & Row, 1981).

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the last of the great prophets. The real question is whether he is the Son of
the Father, God of God, God incarnate in love. Muslims are self-consistent.
Such ideas are all unthinkable for them. There is no ground on which there
might be agreement and understanding. An even more important point is
that the God of Islam has nothing in common with the God of Jesus Christ.
Theologians no longer make this identification in their desire to accept
Islam and find points in common. Muslims have pushed to an extreme the
idea of exclusive monotheism: Allah is a radically and absolutely selfsufficient God. He is everything; he needs nothing; one can add nothing to
him. Creation is neither useful nor necessary. Allah is imperturbable and
immutable. He does his will with no consideration for anyone or anything.
Thus the only possible attitude in face of him is total submission. We
should never forget that Islam means submission -blind and unlimited
obedience. When something happens, the only human response is: "It is
written. Certainly, Allah is merciful, but we should not forget how much
abstract distance and sovereignty there is here. A dictator can be merciful
when he pardons those under condemnation.2 Allah is the direct opposite
of the God of Abraham and Jesus Christ, who is love above all things, and
to whom creation is indispensable because he is not content merely to love
himself. Undoubtedly this God is transcendent, but he is also present in all
human history to be with us. Because he is love, he hears our prayers and
joins with us in the adventure that I have sketched. Because he is love, he
suffers from our sin. We need to read the fine passages in Moltmann on
the passion of God, on the divine anxiety, on the tragedy of God, to see to
what extent God is devoted to us, is unable to think of being without us,
does not want to be able to be thought of as being without us. He has
nothing in common with the gods to whom he has often been assimilated,
the gods of total arbitrariness, supreme indifference, and cruelty. We
cannot bridge the gulf between the God of the Koran and the God of the
Bible.

It is strange that Christians who hate the term charity because it denotes
the distance and superiority of those who exercise it are the very ones who
want at all costs to reach an agreement with Muslims without seeing that
the merciful Allah is exercising "charity.

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My opposition to Islam does not relate to some peripheral matter. It relates

to the very cornerstone of the building. To want to make Jesus Christ the
greatest of the prophets is not to have understood the gospel at all. Jesus
cannot have been the prophet of Allah. In our monotheistic fraternization
we are making exactly the same blunder as we do when we translate
Elohim by Theos, which carries with it the whole of Greek mythology. At
this point we have to cry an absolute halt. We can engage in dialogue, but
we can make no concessions either on the deity of Jesus Christ or on the
nature of God as love.
II
I must now look at another aspect of my understanding or convictions. My
approach will be quite different from that which precedes. I will not be
talking about attempts at knowledge or about experience. I will be starting
with the situation, not my own but that of the world in which I live, of our
technological society and collective venture. How is the God of promise,
the God of the successive promises fulfilled and at the same time renewed
in Jesus Christ, how is this God present in this history? The question is
neither theological nor abstract, but existential. It is not a political problem
(God present through the poor or revolutionaries, for example). That
seems to me to be superficial and mechanistic, in spite of appearances. At
issue is a hypothesis on the basis of knowledge of our technological
society, that is, from the standpoint of the situation into which we have
come.
If we realize what the technological system is, then we have to think of it as
encompassing everything. On the one side it is a totality. On the other
side it grasps, modifies, and qualifies all aspects of human life, social,
political, and intellectual, all human relations including artistic research, and
it transforms them into something else. It finally absorbs, subsumes, and
assimilates all that arises outside it. All opposing acts and ideas finish up
being put in the service of the technological system and finding their place
in it. The technological system encompasses all things totally, ineluctably,
and invincibly.

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Now if spiritually, in "religion," we are ready to be brought solely into a

horizontal relation (along the lines of Feuerbach), this has some important
implications. First, we have no point of reference by which to pass
judgment on the system. We cannot refer to Jesus of Nazareth, for he was
a model only for a traditional society and not for a technological society
and has nothing in common with what we know. He cannot be a model or
a point of reference, nor can he be an inspiration to us. In its global
character, the technological system excludes what is prior to it, making it
completely unimportant and obsolete. In our day it absorbs everything
outside it, making it part of the system. This is what is happening to Third
World countries. This is their new form of slavery. No external reference
can exist, least of all the life and conduct of Christians.
Second, if we cling to the hypothesis of atheistic Christianity, there can be
no possibility of criticism. If no external point of reference is imaginable,
there can be no view of the system except from within. Hence one cannot
criticize it according to different criteria. All studies take place within the
system from the very outset. There is no possibility of criticism either in the
sense of questioning or in that of distancing oneself. To be able to criticize
one has to be outside what one criticizes. Self-criticism means obviously
that outward thinking affects one and forces one to put questions. There is
needed something to rest on, a scale of values, an instrument of external
analysis, to make criticism possible. A surgeon in diagnosing and treating
a tumor has to be outside the patient. But the technological system rules
out any other scale of values. Being global, it will not allow any other point
of view. It renders all such inoperable. It takes over the instruments of
analysis and criticism and advances the classical dilemma: Either you want
them to be effective, and if so they will have to be technological, being part
of the system and strengthening it even as they criticize, or they will be
nontechnological and for that very reason ineffective and useless.
The third consequence, if we continue to accept the theory of the death of
God, is that there is no exit or outcome for this world, whether in its
actuality or in its historicity. The only possibility is to take the technological
path. No other life is possible. The hippie experience is a recurrent
phenomenon with no other

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meaning. One cannot open up this world from within to something else.
Technology has subjugated everything and closes itself off progressively. It
becomes quite literally the equivalent of fate, of Ananke, of destiny: on the
one hand it allows no variation; on the other hand it seeks totality
indefinitely even in its contradictions (and there are, of course, thousands of
contradictions within it, but they all promote its progress). No future hope is
possible. Everything is determined by the play of the technological system.
I am not saying that this system functions well but that it alone functions. It
may lead to disaster, but nothing can stop it functioning. One can envision
only two eventualities. On the one side it functions badly, chaos ensues,
and everything is destroyed in practice because of the very globality of the
system. On the other side it functions well, and one can imagine the
equivalent of the best of all possible worlds, but with an equally disastrous
result, for what it produces will not be a kind of artificial paradise, stabilized
and normalized, but real entropy, which in turn leads to a second degree of
chaos. Both these consequences are tightly linked to the global character
of the technological system. There can be no other hope for the future.
Here, then, are the three implications of horizontal theology.
If hope is still possible, if there is a possibility of humanity continuing, if
there is any meaning in life, if there is an outcome other than suicide, if
there is a love that is not integrated into technique, if there is a truth that is
not useful to the system, if there is at least a taste, a passion, a desire for
freedom, and a hypothesis of freedom, then we have to realize that these
can have their basis only in the transcendent, and specifically in the
transcendent as it is disclosed in Christianity, that is, in the Transcendent
who reveals himself in such a way that human beings can comprehend and
receive him, the Transcendent who speaks in the Word but who is
nonetheless transcendent for so doing. A pure transcendent that cannot be
known, that is the object of negative theology, is nonexistent for us. Even if
such a transcendent intervenes it is only as a deus ex machina. But what
Jesus Christ reveals to us is not just the example of Jesus of Nazareth, or
his permanent presence among the poor, but the Transcendent who has
drawn near to us. Classical and commonplace

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theology? Certainly, but there is no other. All other theological discourse

is reduced to zero by technique. The Transcendent, however, is outside
and cannot be assimilated. Thus, no matter how far the technological
system extends, he alone can furnish us with a point of reference, a
viewpoint, a different critical apparatus. He alone can enable us to mount a
critical operation in relation to the system. He alone can prevent us from
being entangled in the dilemmas of technique on the one side and its moral
evaluations on the other. All this is not guaranteed, of course, nor is it
given in advance. It is not easy. At this level of analysis we cannot expect
the Transcendent to intervene as such. It is we that have to act. But there
is at least the possibility that our intervention may take place-the
intervention without which human action cannot be rescued from global
encirclement. At this level, then, the Transcendent does not act but is a
condition of our action to arrest global encirclement.
He is the
presupposition without which there can be no concept of anything external
to modem technique.
In effect we have to recall here what we said very summarily about
dialectic.
Dialectic expresses the movement of life itself and is
indispensable for history. But if technique becomes fully global and there is
no transcendent, no dialectic is possible. But if there is no dialectic, there is
no history, and thus human life will be no more than a meaningless passing
of time, and we shall finally be back in a cyclical system. We shall see later
why this is impossible in Christian thinking.
Those who from a
philosophical or theological standpoint hold the contrary view, or rather do
not in fact ask this question or see its important implications, simply show
that they have no conception of what the reality of the technological
environment is today.
It might be objected, however, that the God who is necessarily
transcendent in this situation is not very different from the gods of nature
when nature was our human environment. At that time, too, people needed
a transcendent deity that would enable them to combat nature, to have a
point of reference regarding it, and to achieve the certainty that they could
survive in this hostile world and master it. Two preliminary observations
must be made regarding this objection.
First, the technological
environment is an artificial one. It is abstract by design.

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Hence the transcendent God has to be consciously heard and clearly

recognized as such. He has also to be universal and not specific. Second,
the technological system, precisely as a human creation, comes from within
humanity; thus it demands heart allegiance and works out means of taking
inner possession, manipulating people from within as they were never
manipulated before in the whole course of history. Being part of the natural
world was spontaneous and direct, but today being part of the
technological world is produced by techniques of transformation, so that an
equivalent of the ancient gods of nature would not be adequate. What is
needed is a transcendent that is genuinely transcendent and is not just
believed to be so by us, a transcendent that is not the product of the human
brain or heart; otherwise, he would be no more than a reflection of the
technological system itself. The gods of nature, which were viewed as
transcendent, were themselves a reflection of the natural world. The God
of Israel was not. He was truly different from all the rest. This same God,
being transcendent, is not in the least coincident with the technological
environment either, because he is not the product (even a product
necessary and indispensable to human survival) of the human heart or
human thought. He alone can act to save us at this time.
But there is a second line of reflection.
We have said that the
Transcendent has also to be he who reveals himself, who gives himself to
be known. Thus we do not have here a transcendent hypothesis that we
ourselves set up in order to have an external point of reference from which
criticism is possible. It is not the case that, seeing criticism to be
necessary, we have given ourselves the means to achieve it in the same
way as the geometrician sets a point outside a figure in order to have a
point of reference (though it may be forgotten in such a comparison that the
geometrician is not actually in the figure).
On such a view, the
transcendent would be no more than a human hypothesis. But at the end
of the preceding discussion we noted that the transcendent, to play such a
role, cannot be a mere fiction or hypothesis that will fade from view once
the conclusion is known. Necessarily in the movement of revelation we are
in the presence of a transcendent that acts and yet that is also self-existent.
Because he reveals himself, this world can never be a

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closed reality. It cannot find fulfillment in itself or shut itself up in a total

system.
The technological system comes under the historical law of Babel. This
was a city meant to enclose the whole race and its gods. It was a universal
city. It had no place for the transcendent. The walls of Babel were meant
to shut out God, or to leave him only a gate. But just because God is the
God who reveals himself, he says: "Let us go down and see," and Babel
collapses. God opens it up from outside. In the same way, as without
choice we have to continue in a movement toward the perfecting and
developing and improving of the technological system, and as we therefore
have to continue closing up the system that holds us captive, finding no
opening, no break from within, behold, we receive the assurance from him
who cannot be swallowed up or assimilated that he will come down and
see. If we hear this word, and if we believe in the God of Jesus Christ, the
transcendent Father who has already come, we can find a hope and live
out a hope no matter what may be the situation of the world in which we
are. An opening is always possible. Thus meaning can be received,
discovered, and given. A different history is possible from that of
technicizing, of our immersion in the technological world. This will be a
history that is no longer automatic and necessary. It is one that we can
invent, and it will not issue in disaster of any kind. Because a transcendent
can effectively reverse the data, it is possible for us to make our own
history without being radically defined or circumscribed, without being
carried headlong by fate. This is the only guarantee and the only
possibility.
But is not this a deus ex machina that intervenes from outside to resolve
things? Is it not the God of the gaps that we set in this transcendent sphere
because we cannot solve our own problems, making it his job to solve them
for us? The equation is tempting but impossible. All theologies that refer
God back to this world are in reality ideologies conforming to this world's
sociology. Why is it that they find no place for the Father God, the
unheard-of Transcendent, the Creator, him who can intervene with miracles
and mighty works, and his vertical purpose? Exclusively (i.e., to the
exclusion of any other reason or ground) because the technological system
convinces us that there is

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nothing outside itself. This subject would involve us in another line of

research: What is the status, role, and function of theology in a
technological society? I have touched on this incidentally in some of my
books,3 but a systematic study is needed. It would show that this modem
theology is an exact reflection of technique, an ideological product which is
designed to help it fulfill itself, close itself off, perfect itself. To affirm a
transcendent over against technique is the way of nonconformity today, of
not being conformed to the present age. This is what is required of us.
A final point is that this Transcendent is not a deus ex machina. or a God
of the gaps because, as we well know, he reveals himself, he manifests
himself in sovereignty, by a free and in our view contingent action and not
one that is obligatory or under the constraint of any necessity. In other
words, even if we fully believe in this Transcendent, we have no guarantee
of his existence. No liberation intervenes automatically. He can intervene.
Moreover, all that we know of him in Jesus Christ is that he loves his
creation, his creatures, and that he comes to liberate and to save. We
believe that he will intervene, and if we live in this hope we ourselves are
moved to act in this love. Our own action is undoubtedly at issue; it is not
enough to have the purely subjective conviction about a transcendent. The
subjectivity of faith will not suffice. It cannot replace the objectivity of the
Transcendent. I will not enter into the debate between Barth and Bultmann.
This debate can go on forever at the philosophical level, but we are not
doing philosophy here.
I would like to take up the objection that Marx had against the young
Hegelians. He said that when they think that revolution by idea is
revolution, and attack private property on the philosophical level, they end
up with an idea of revolution and destroy an idea of property, but the
economic and legal reality of private property is untouched and the
condition of those who are exploited is not changed at all. In the same
way, we do not have here a phenomenon that is purely subjective. The
technological system is terribly objective and real and external to us.

See, e.g., Jacques Ellul, The New Demons, trans. C. Edward Hopkin
(New York: Seabury, 1975).

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This and not our idea of it is what we have to master or combat in a given
case. The idea of a transcendent reduced to my faith, of a risen Lord who
lives only in the heart of his disciples (and in ours), may give us a desire to
act but not the possibility of doing so. I will have an impression of being
liberated but no more. What is at issue here is a Transcendent who
intervenes objectively, effectively, and in person. But only the possibility is
at issue. He is not bound to intervene.
When we read the biblical account of the early stages of the liberation of
the people of Israel from Egypt, we see in fact that God was silent for many
centuries between Joseph and Moses, and many generations of his chosen
people had to weep and cry and pray and suffer, not understanding why
God did not come, but then one day God remembered, one day he turned
to Israel, one day -we do not know why. There is no historical certainty and
nothing mechanical about this decision. We are faced with our own
problems and struggles. But faith believes that God will finally make his
sovereign decision. It rests on knowledge of the fulfillment of his promises.
It rests on the reality of his presence in Jesus Christ (the presence of the
Transcendent in Jesus Christ, without which he would be no more than an
interesting example of a certain ideal of humanity). This kind of faith
enables us to live because the game is not yet over, and the game is not
yet over because the Transcendent himself may intervene. Into this
openness, this "play" between the pieces of the puzzle, I can insert myself
as a living person. Thus the Transcendent is the Creator of something new
within the technological system itself, and this new thing is the effective
hope that he generates. But this is in truth an external creative act. It is not
a spontaneous natural production of my belief and ideology. Those who do
not accept the Transcendent as the final reality beyond our knowledge and
experience have to admit that there is no future apart from technique's end,
in every sense of the term, and this includes the end of humanity, in the
sole sense of its termination.

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UNIVERSAL SALVATION

of it. I can say only what I believe, not pretending to teach it doctrinally as
the truth.

I am taking up here a basic theme that I have dealt with elsewhere but
which is so essential that I have no hesitation in repeating myself. It is the
recognition that all people from the beginning of time are saved by God in
Jesus Christ, that they have all been recipients of his grace no matter what
they have done. This is a scandalous proposition. It shocks our
spontaneous sense of justice. The guilty ought to be punished. How can
Hitler and Stalin be among the saved? The just ought to be recognized as
such and the wicked condemned. But in my view this is purely human logic
which simply shows that there is no understanding of salvation by grace or
of the meaning of the death of Jesus Christ.

I. God Is Love

The proposition also runs counter to the almost unanimous view of

theology. Some early theologians proclaimed universal salvation but
almost all the rest finally rejected it. Great debates have taken place about
foreknowledge and predestination, but in all of them it has been taken for
granted that reprobation is normal.

One might simply say that hell is merely nothingness. The damned are
those who are annihilated. But there is a difficulty here too. Nothingness
does not exist in the Bible. It is a philosophical and mathematical concept.
We can represent it only by a mathematical sign. God did not create ex
nihilo, out of nothing. Genesis 1:2 speaks of tohu wabohu ("desert and
wasteland"; RSV "formless and void) or of tehom ("the deep). This is not
nothing. Furthermore, the closest thing to nothingness seems to be death.
But the Bible speaks about enemies, that is, the great serpent, death, and
the abyss, which are aggressors against God's creation and are seeking to
destroy it. These are enemies against which God protects his creation. He
cannot allow that which he has created and called good to be destroyed,
disorganized, swallowed up, and slain. This creation of God cannot revert
to nothing. Death cannot issue in nothingness. This would be a negation
of God himself, and this is why the first aspect seems to me to be decisive.
Creation is under constant threat and is constantly upheld. How could God
himself surrender to nothingness and to the enemy that which he upholds
in face and in spite of everything? How could he allow a power of
destruction and annihilation in his creation? If he cannot withstand the
force of nothingness, then we have to resort to dualism (a good God and a
bad God in conflict and equal), to Zoroastrianism. Many are tempted to
dualism today. But if God is unique,

A third and the most serious objection to the thesis is posed by the biblical
texts themselves.
Many of these talk about condemnation, hell,
banishment into outer darkness, and the punishment of robbers,
fornicators, idolaters, etc. As we proceed we must overcome these
obstacles and examine the theological reasons which lead me to believe in
universal salvation, the texts that seem to be against it, and a possible
solution. But I want to stress that I am speaking about belief in universal
salvation. This is for me a matter of faith. I am not making a dogma or a
principle
188

My first simple thesis is that if God is God, the Almighty, the Creator of all
things, the Omnipresent, then we can think of no place or being whatever
outside him. If there were a place outside him, God would not be all in all,
the Creator of all things. How can we think of him creating a place or being
where he is not present? What, then, about hell? Either it is in God, in
which case he is not universally good, or it is outside him, hell having often
been defined as the place where God is not. But the latter is completely
unthinkable.

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if he alone has life in himself, he cannot permit this threat to the object of
his love.
But it is necessary that "the times be accomplished," the times when we are
driven into a comer and have to serve either the impotence of the God of
love or the power of the forces of destruction and annihilation. We have to
wait until humanity has completed its history and creation, and every
possibility has been explored. This does not merely imply, however, that at
the end of time the powers of destruction, death, the great serpent, Satan,
the devil, will be annihilated, but much more. How can we talk about
nothingness when we receive the revelation of this God who will be all in
all? "When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself also will be
subjected to him who put all things under him, that God may be all in all" (1
Cor. 15:28). If God is, he is all in all. There is no more place for
nothingness. The word is an empty one. For Christians it is just as empty
as what it is supposed to denote. Philosophers speak in vain about
something that they can only imagine or use as a building block, but which
has no reality of any kind.1
The second and equally essential factor is that after Jesus Christ we know
that God is love. This is the central revelation. How can we conceive of
him who is love ceasing to love one of his creatures? How can we think
that God can cease to love the creation that he has made in his own
image? This would be a contradiction in terms. God cannot cease to be
love. If we combine the two theses we see at once that nothing can exist
outside God's love, for God is all in all. It is unthinkable that there should
exist a place of suffering, of torment, of the domination of evil, of beings
that merely hate since their only function is to torture. It is astounding that
Christian theology should not have seen at a glance how impossible this
idea is. Being love, God cannot send to hell the creation which he so loved
that he gave his only Son for it. He cannot reject it because it is his
creation. This would be to cut off himself.
A whole theological trend advances the convenient solution that God is love
but also justice. He saves the elect to

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manifest his love and condemns the reprobate to manifest his justice. My
immediate fear is that this solution does not even correspond to our idea of
justice and that we are merely satisfying our desire that people we regard
as terrible should be punished in the next world. This view is part of the
mistaken theology which declares that the good are unhappy on earth but
will be happy in heaven, whereas the wicked are successful on earth but
will be punished in the next world. Unbelievers have every reason to
denounce this explanation as a subterfuge designed to make people accept
what happens on earth. The kingdom of God is not compensation for this
world.
Another difficulty is that we are asked to see God with two faces as though
he were a kind of Janus facing two ways. Such a God could not be the
God of Jesus Christ, who has only one face. Crucial texts strongly
condemn two-faced people who go two different ways. These are the ones
that Jesus Christ calls hypocrites. If God is double-minded, there is
duplicity in him. He is a hypocrite. We have to choose: He is either love or
he is justice. He is not both. If he is the just judge, the pitiless justiciar,
he is not the God that Jesus Christ has taught us to love.
Furthermore, this conception is a pure and simple denial of Jesus Christ.
For the doctrine is firm that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died and was
willing to die for human sin to redeem us all: "I, when I am lifted up from the
earth, will draw all men to myself' (John 12:32), satisfying divine justice. All
the evil done on earth from Adam's break with God undoubtedly has to be
judged and punished. But all our teaching about Jesus is there to remind
us that the wrath of God fell entirely on him, on God in the person of the
Son. God directs his justice upon himself; he has taken upon himself the
condemnation of our wickedness. What would be the point, then, of a
second condemnation of individuals? Was the judgment passed on Jesus
insufficient? Was the price that was paid -the punishment of the Son of
God -too low to meet the demands of God's justice? This justice is
satisfied in God and by God for us. From this point on, then, we know only
the face of the love of God.
This love is not sentimental acquiescence. "It is a fearful thing to fall into
the hands of the living God" (Heb. 10.31). God's love is demanding
"jealous," total, and indivisible. Love

This is why books like Sartre's Being and Nothingness and H. Carr's
Point d'appui pris sur le nant are so feeble

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has a stem face, not a soft one. Nevertheless, it is love. And in any case
this love excludes double predestination, some to salvation and others to
perdition. It is inconceivable that the God of Jesus Christ, who gives
himself in his Son to save us, should have created some people ordained
to evil and damnation. There is indeed a predestination, but it can be only
the one predestination to salvation. In and through Jesus Christ all people
are predestined to be saved. Our free choice is ruled out in this regard.
We have often said that God wants free people. He undoubtedly does,
except in relation to this last and definitive decision. We are not free to
decide and choose to be damned. To say that God presents us with the
good news of the gospel and then leaves the final issue to our free choice
either to accept it and be saved or to reject it and be lost is foolish. To take
this point of view is to make us arbiters of the situation. In this case it is we
who finally decide our own salvation. This view reverses a well-known
thesis and would have it that God proposes and man disposes.
Without question we all know of innumerable cases in which people reject
revelation. Swarms are doing so today. But have they any real knowledge
of revelation? If I look at countless presentations of the Word of God by the
churches, I can say that the churches have presented many ideas and
commandments that have nothing whatever to do with God's revelation.
Rejecting these things, human commandments, is not the same as
rejecting the truth. And even if the declaration or proclamation of the
gospel is faithful, it does not itself force a choice upon us. If people are to
recognize the truth, they must also have the inner witness of the Holy Spirit.
These two things are indispensable, the faithful declaration of the gospel,
the good news, by a human being and the inner witness in the hearer of the
Holy Spirit, who conveys the assurance that it is the truth of God. The one
does not suffice without the other. Thus when those who hear refuse our
message, we can never say that they have chosen to disobey God. The
human and divine acts are one and the same only in the Word of Jesus.
When he told his hearers not to be unbelieving but to believe, if they
refused then they were rejected. In our case, however, we cannot say that
there is an act of the Holy Spirit simultaneously with our

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proclamation. This may well be the point of the well-known text about the
one sin that cannot be pardoned, the sin against the Holy Spirit (cf. Matt.
12:31-32). But we can never know whether anyone has committed it.
However that may be, it is certain that being saved or lost does not depend
on our own free decision. I believe that all people are included in the grace
of God. I believe that all the theologies that have made a large place for
damnation and hell are unfaithful to a theology of grace. For if there is
predestination to perdition, there is no salvation by grace. Salvation by
grace is granted precisely to those who without grace would have been
lost. Jesus did not come to seek the righteous and the saints, but sinners.
He came to seek those who in strict justice ought to have been
condemned. A theology of grace implies universal salvation. What could
grace mean if it were granted only to some sinners and not to others
according to an arbitrary decree that is totally contrary to the nature of our
God? If grace is granted according to the greater or lesser number of sins,
it is no longer grace-it is just the opposite because of this accountancy.
Paul is the very one who reminds us that the enormity of the sin is no
obstacle to grace: "Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more"
(Rom. 5:20). This is the key statement. The greater the sin, the more
God's love reveals itself to be far beyond any judgment or evaluation of
ours. This grace covers all things. It is thus effectively universal. I do not
think that in regard to this grace we can make the Scholastic distinctions
between prevenient grace, expectant grace, conditional grace, etc. Such
adjectives weaken the thrust of the free grace of the absolute sovereign,
and they result only from our great difficulty in believing that God has done
everything. But this means that nothing in his creation is excluded or lost.
II. Biblical Texts
Yet we have to take into account the fact that many biblical texts refer to
hell, to eternal fire, to judgment, to the closing of the gates, to rejection, etc.
So far as I know, however, if many texts speak about condemnation, none
of them in either the Old

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Testament or the New speaks about damnation or the damned. I do not

pretend that I am engaging here in an exhaustive study of all the passages
that deal with condemnation. I will simply pick out a few that seem to me
significant.
I must begin with two preliminary observations. First, we must not do what
many do and confuse judgment and condemnation, as if every passage
that refers to judgment had condemnation in view. Judgment can end with
declaration of the innocence of those being tried. I can say without
hesitation that we will all come into judgment. But we cannot conclude
anything from that. We have to ask what the judgment consists of. My
second observation concerns the Old Testament passages. We have to
remember that the idea of survival after death or of a resurrection develops
only slowly in Hebrew theological thinking, so that this does not include the
idea of eternal punishment. Thus many texts that refer to condemnation
(often spoken against Israel) do not have damnation in view at all but
condemnation, on earth and in time. These are temporal and historical
condemnations that often take concrete forms (famine, drought, invasion by
enemies, deportation, etc.). We have thus no right to read them from
another angle and to make them texts about eternal judgment. Concerning
the proclamation of rejection in Gehenna, we must not forget that the Valley
of Hinnom served as a refuse dump for Jerusalem, so that this
proclamation meant: you are being put out with the garbage as an object
that was finished or broken or unusable. In this case the object became
unserviceable for God.
The worst fear or worst condemnation for Israelites was that God would
turn aside or hide his face from them. This expression relates to the
condition on earth, not to eternal judgment. We read constantly that God
does not reject forever. He "will not keep his anger forever" (Ps. 103:9;
Jer. 3:5, 12; Mic. 7:18). On the other hand, his mercy endures forever
(Ps. 106:1; 118:1; 136:1; etc.). These two great theological proclamations
rule out the idea of a God who damns, for that would mean that he keeps
his anger forever. Remembering these restrictions, we may now look at
some of the texts that speak about hell and damnation.
We must look first at many parables of Jesus in which he

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announces the threat of hell, of the fire that is not quenched, of rejection
from the marriage feast, of weeping and gnashing of teeth. But here, too,
we must make two preliminary observations. First, it has been recognized
for a long time that parables are designed to teach one particular point. We
cannot make dogmas out of all the details. In other words, the warnings
about hell do not mean that it actually exists. Even if we take a parable in
which hell plays a big part, that of Dives and Lazarus, this is not meant to
teach us what hell is like (Luke 16:19-31). Its aim is first of all to get us to
question riches and the relation between the rich and the poor, and then to
send us back to know the truth in Moses and the prophets.
To my knowledge there is only one parable in which hell and eternal
punishment are central, and that is the account of the judgment of the
nations in Matthew 25:31-46. The first lesson here has to do with the work
that even non-Christians can do in accordance with God's will, while the
second relates to the reality of eternal punishment. From this standpoint it
is embarrassing, and since I will have to say this again about some
passages in the Epistles, I will not try to avoid saying it. We have also to
observe, however, that these parables are meant to be heard and received
as a warning rather than a threat, as the means that Jesus employs to
make us face up to a decision that we must make. The parables are not
simple fables or pious discourses or a kind of catechism. Each contains
both a revelation of the will of God and a strict summons issued to each of
us with a view to decision. Evoking the punishment of hell, then, is one of
the means used in parables to show that we must choose. The mistake is
thinking that the choice has to be made under constraint. Jesus never tries
to gain followers by arousing fear, for he asks only for love. He does not try
to make people afraid but offers a parable, a representation of what the
world would be like without love. Such a world would be hell. And we
already experience this hell on earth.
We must now face up to the repeated statements in the Epistles. Here it is
incontestable that many passages speak as though God's consignment of
some people to eternal condemnation and hell were revealed teaching.
Once again we must make two preliminary observations. The first is that
there are

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many contradictory statements in the Epistles. We find teaching about

eternal rejection. We also find references to universal salvation. The same
Paul in the same letter (e.g, Romans) seems to state contradictory truths.
We will try to understand what this seeming contradiction means. Second,
the Epistles are addressed to Christians. The punishment announced (the
same is true in Revelation) relates to those who have heard God's Word,
who have received the revelation, who are part of the church, and who in
spite of that continue to live in an unworthy or scandalous fashion. In the
Epistles hell and condemnation do not concern others. It is true that Paul
specifically affirms the universality of sin in Romans: All are under the
dominion of sin, for they could have known God in his works but did not do
so. But when Paul tells believers not to associate with immoral and greedy
people or idolaters, he adds that he does not mean this in an absolute
sense, for that would mean going out of the world (which is made up of
people of this kind); they are not to associate with immoral and greedy and
idolatrous people who are in the church and who have heard God's truth (1
Cor. 5:9-10). Hence the admonition is given to Christians. They must not
spend time trying to find out whether others outside the faith ought to be
damned. That is God's affair. They simply know that the salvation in Jesus
Christ is for all.
In other words, what Christians learn about the possibility of hell and
perdition is that given the love of God and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ
there is no condemnation, but all sins (save one) are pardoned.
Nevertheless, they also need to know that there is what I would call,
adapting a phrase from Karl Barth, a possible impossibility. God being who
he is, hell is impossible. It is an impossibility. Nevertheless, you Christians
must realize that nothing is impossible for God. Hence the possibility
remains that he might decide for this punishment and penalty. You must
retain, though not as a dominating factor, a fear that God will make possible
that which according to his revelation is impossible.
Having made these introductory remarks, I must now listen to the texts. In
sum, they tell us that sinners will not inherit the kingdom of God. "Do not
be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor
homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the

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greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of
God" (1 Cor. 6:9-10). Paul encompasses every form of sin under the term
"immoral" (5:9). We find much the same list in Galatians (5:19-21), in
Ephesians (5:5), and in Hebrews (cf. 12:16-17). There is no possibility that
such sinners should inherit God's kingdom. Does this mean hell and
eternal fire? Nothing is less clear. Naturally, God's kingdom cannot
include evil, injustice, and hatred. All evil is diametrically opposed to it. All
that is stated is that people who are guilty of such things cannot participate
in God's kingdom. We must not too hastily cause confusion by reading in
other things.
A first point ought to give us our bearings. Paul says that sin dwells in him
(Rom. 7:14-24). This passage is very important: "But I am carnal, sold
under sin .... I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate. It is
no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that
nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I do not do the good I
want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want,
it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. . . Is Paul also
excluded, then, from God's kingdom, or is the intention to do good sufficient
for him to be saved? The passage concludes with a shout of victory: "Who
will deliver me from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through
Jesus Christ our Lord. In other words, Paul states that he is a sinner, that
he is tied to evil, that he is corrupt within, that his acts are wicked, but that
he can thank Jesus Christ for delivering him.
We must fink this passage to the statement in 1 Corinthians 15:50: "Flesh
and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. Now we have to remember
that the flesh is not the body or the total being. It is a general term for
human weakness and finitude, for the human tendency to do wrong, for
human solidarity with sin. It is not evil as such but the possibility of the evil
that people do and that cannot inherit God's kingdom. All the specific sins
listed in the more detailed passages are in reality an expression of the
flesh. But they are not the self. As one can say that committing a robbery
does not in itself make a person a robber, so the sins committed by the
flesh do not define the whole person. I realize that I am contradicting here
the passages

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that speak about immoral persons, adulterers, etc. as though the acts
contaminated the whole being. For the moment let us simply note the
contradiction but not forget the distinction between the flesh and the
person.
Now certain texts tell us that we shall be judged by our works. Revelation
20:12 reads: "And the dead were judged by what was written in the books,
by what they had done," and Romans 2:5-6 reads: "But by your hard and
impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath
when God's righteous judgment will be revealed. For he will render to
every man according to his works. (The passage does not say, however,
that those who are under God's wrath are damned and rejected-simply that
they are subject to God's wrath.) The term works is a complex one, for it
denotes acts but also relations, achievements, and attitudes. All the same,
ergon ("works is unquestionably not identical with psyche ("soul, person').
The person finds expression in works but is more than works.
Other passages tell us that words are decisive, expressing as they do
relations: "On the day of judgment men will render account for every
careless word they utter; for by your words you will be justified, and by your
words you will be condemned" (Matt. 12:36-37; cf. Jas. 3:2-12). Yet it is
not those who say "Lord, Lord" that will be saved, but those who do the will
of God (Matt. 7:21). Thus various expressions of the person ("for out of
the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks" - Matt. 12:34), whether
acts, words, or relations, will be a decisive test at the judgment, but does
this test imply a condemnation of the actual person, an eternal
condemnation, a definitive rejection and exclusion from grace?
We must come back unceasingly to grace. Receiving grace is not a matter
of good works or of being justified by one's words. Once again we recall
that Jesus did not come to seek the righteous but sinners. We have to take
this statement in all seriousness. When the president of a modern state
exercises his right of reprieve, this means that a person has been found
guilty and condemned but after the pronouncement of condemnation there
is a declaration of pardon. Grace is not exercised upon someone who is
not previously condemned. In other words, we must not confuse grace,
justification, and sanctification. Those

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199

who are justified by faith in Jesus Christ go on to live sanctified lives and do
works of righteousness that are worthy of salvation. They do not have to
be restored by grace. Strictly speaking, grace is not the act of God which
through the Holy Spirit reveals to people during their lifetime the salvation
that is in Christ Jesus. It is the act of God that will grant pardon to those
condemned at the judgment. We recall the parable of the lost sheep.
Jesus does not seek the good sheep that walks where it should, but the
sheep that is truly lost, the lostness being that, not of temporary straying
during the present life, but of eternal perdition. This is the one that the
risen Jesus goes to recover. We must not cut down the reach of God's
grace or limit the dimension of it to this life-it will last into eternity. Thus
God's grace has an unparalleled dimension and is universal as the
concrete expression of his love.
We now come to the well-known passage of Paul which is often used as a
basis for the doctrine of double predestination. Paul is interpreting Exodus
33:19, where God says to Moses: "I will have mercy on whom I have
mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. This
saying expresses the pure freedom of God, which we are not contesting.
Note that it does not say: "I will damn whom I damn. God has this
message for Pharaoh: "I have raised you up for the very purpose of
showing my power in you, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the
earth. So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens the
heart of whomever he wills. You will say to me then, 'Why does he still find
fault? For who can resist his will?' But who are you, a man, to answer back
to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, 'Why have you made me
thus?' Has the potter no right over the clay, to make of the same lump one
vessel for beauty and another for menial use? What if God, desiring to
show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much
patience the vessels of wrath made for destruction, in order to make known
the riches of his glory for the vessels of mercy, which he has prepared
beforehand for glory?" (Rom. 9:15-23).
At a first reading this passage seems to be very clear and very simple. But
it raises several questions. First, the fact that God hardened the heart of
Pharaoh so that he would not let

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the Hebrew people go does not mean that his eternal salvation was at
stake. He was in fact defeated on the human level, he and his army being
drowned. This is how Jewish thinking views the matter. The judgment
pronounced on Egypt was meant to make known, we are told, the wrath of
God. This intention is perfectly understandable, since Pharaoh did not
recognize in the words of Moses and Aaron the Word of the sovereign God.
God's wrath found expression in what happened at the Red Sea. Also to
be made known was the power of God, which came to expression in the
miracle of the crossing and the extermination of the Egyptians. The power
of God was indeed very evident in this event. But the justice of God was
not at issue, nor was this a matter of eternal judgment. Paul then explains
that God can make some vessels for beauty and some for menial use. But
again it is a matter of use, of what these vessels are made for during their
earthly existence. Some people are called to bear witness to the truth of
God, while others undoubtedly remain in humble circumstances and live
unimportant lives. It is evident that the latter might accuse God of having
made them for menial use and not given them a share in a life full of
meaning and greater joy. But here again salvation is not the issue.
The only troubling word that evokes the grave problem of reprobation is the
word destruction ("vessels of wrath made for destruction'). But we maintain
once more that this is not a matter of God's justice. As Maillot has noted,
both types of vessels are useful.2 This is why he prefers the term
destruction to perdition, which is sometimes the rendering. If we are going
to find here an exposition of the justice of God, then we must not forget that
the Savior God of justification includes the God of predestination, who is in
effect "subject" to him, God's wrath being only for a moment, while his
mercy endures forever. The justifying God is necessarily the predestinating
God. Maillot shows very clearly that the passage does not include double
predestination and is not intending to say that God has made vessels of
wrath in order to damn them.
Above all we ought to read the magnificent passage in

UNIVERSAL SALVATION

which Karl Barth forcefully shows that by manifesting God's power Pharaoh
renders God no less a service than does Moses:
The man that is hardened is the visible man , . . . who neither knows nor
practices repentance. The man to whom God shows mercy is the invisible
man , . . . the new-born man whose repentance is God's work. God must
be apprehended as the God of Jacob and of Esau. When He manifests
Himself to the men of this world as God, He must do so as the angry God
who is bound to make His power known.... And conversely, when men
receive His revelation, they cannot do so otherwise than as vessels of
wrath. Inasmuch as it is God who does reveal Himself to men, He
confronts creatureliness with the 'And Yet' of the Creator, the immensity of
human sin with the 'And Yet' . . . of His covering forgiveness. But what if
the process of the revelation of this one God moves always from time to
eternity, from rejection to election, from Esau to Jacob, and from Pharaoh
to Moses? What if the existence of -vessels of wrath which we all are in
time!-should declare the divine endurance and forbearance (iii.26), should
be the veil of the long-suffering of God (ii.4), behind which the vessels of
mercy-which we all are in Eternity! -are not lost, but merely hidden?3
But now we run into another passage that seems to be just as restrictive.
In John's Gospel we find the celebrated text: "For God so loved the world
that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish
but have everlasting life" (3:16). God so loved the world. The world, like
the flesh, is more than the body, the sociological or institutional reality of
human groups. It is the totality of the forces that indwell it and that are
responsible for the unhappiness, the hatred, the covetousness, and the
violence within it, namely, for all that makes it hateful and not lovable. It
never achieves good but always evil. This evil means suffering for us that
also causes suffering for God. It means unhappiness for us, an inability to
achieve happiness except at the cost of greater unhappiness, perhaps for
others too. God so loved this unlovable world in order to show the
unlimited greatness of his love. He loved it so much and in such a way as
to give himself in his Son in order to prevent it from

See Andr Maillot, L'ptre aux Romains (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1984).

201

See Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans, trans. E. C. Hoskyns, 6th ed.
(London: Oxford University, 1933), pp. 351ff.

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rushing headlong to the fate of death which is the outcome of evil.

But the text then goes on to say: "That whoever believes in him should not
perish but have everlasting life. Simple logic seems to force us to say that
those who do not believe in Jesus Christ will perish and will not have
everlasting life, and thus "be damned. But how, then, can we explain the
obvious contradiction? On the one hand, God loved the world, the whole
world without restriction, and made the total, incomparable, and absolute
sacrifice. On the other hand, there is the restriction that only those who
believe in Jesus Christ will not perish but "have everlasting life. This
restriction would leave out all those who lived before Jesus Christ and all
those who do not come within the sound of the preaching of the gospel.
Thus only a small fraction of humanity would profit by this tremendous act.
Yet all the rest belong to "the world" as well; the world is made up of them.
The same ambiguity seems to obtain in the verses that follow: "For God
sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world
might be saved through him. He who believes in him is not condemned; he
who does not believe is condemned already.... And this is the judgment,
that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than
light, because their deeds were evil. People at large prefer darkness. And
it is the world at large that Jesus saved. The two groups are identical.
I believe that we can solve the problem as follows. Jesus came to save the
world, and he could not fail to do his work, for he is the Son of God and he
did all that had to be done. But people prefer darkness to light because
they know that their deeds are evil. Thus they remain in darkness, not
knowing that they now belong to a world that is saved. Remaining in
darkness is their judgment. (Verse 19 is very clear: the judgment is that
they prefer the night to the light.) They do not want to repent, to bring their
works to the light. Those who believe act according to the truth. This does
not mean that their prior works were good but that they let the truth of their
life and works be brought to light, and in so doing they act in accordance
with God. They then learn that they are not condemned and that they have
received everlasting life. As for the rest, their judgment

does not mean their damnation. It means that for the whole of their lives
they are delivered up to the darkness that they have chosen. They will truly
experience all the tragedies and horrors of the world as judgment in
hopeless situations in which evil works will multiply and there will be no
meaning in what happens because they have rejected both meaning and
hope. They have no knowledge of everlasting life and each day are in a
situation of death.
Those who believe live in hope. They have already the first-fruits of eternal
life. They have within them that which will not perish, the Word of God.
They live a double life on earth; in this world which is saved in the eyes of
some and is terrifying in the eyes of the rest; on the earth on which some
have assurance of the resurrection and the rest only the certainty of death;
on the earth on which some see meaning in the human venture because
they have the light, and the rest wander in folly and "perdition" because
they cannot see the way. But this is a temporary situation of human life.
All are encompassed in "God so loved the world and Jesus came to save
the world. In the course of human history there are those who know
happiness and have the light, and those who are lost on a way with no exit.
But the latter are not lost to the heart of God, nor are they outside the love
of God. As has often been said, what we suffer here on earth is
punishment enough. Hell is on earth, as the Bible itself tells us.
If we take a further step, we find confirmation in the great event of
reconciliation. God reconciled the world to himself in Jesus Christ: "God
was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses
against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation" (2 Cor.
5:19; cf. Rom. 5:11). Paul insists on the fact that it is by Jesus Christ that
we have received reconciliation. The doctrine of reconciliation is basic, and
Paul does not discriminate. We were all wicked sinners, and God showed
his love by giving Christ his Son, who died for us. The "us" sets no limit. It
does not refer only to converts. All without exception were wicked sinners:
"If while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his
Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life"
(Rom. 5:10). This is a unilateral act of the God who in an

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extreme expression of his love decides to reconcile the world as a whole

even in all its rebellious, hostile, and autonomous power, saving sinners
without discrimination, for there are no greater or lesser sinners in the
presence of the holiness, perfection, and absolute justice of God. All are
sinners, and all as such have been assumed and reconciled to God by
Jesus Christ.
This divine decision that changes human destiny is of supreme importance.
In effect, whether individuals will be reconciled or not, whether they will
make their peace with God or not, whether they will be penitent or not, does
not in any way affect God's decision to reconcile the world to himself. It
might change the lives of those concerned but not their ordination to
salvation. From the very outset this reconciliation is for all (Muslims,
Buddhists, Nazis, Communists, etc.), and it will apply to them whether they
know it or not, whether they will it or not. God is reconciled to them even if
they are not reconciled to God. Jesus bore insults, unbelief, betrayal,
abandonment, misunderstanding, and temptation ("prove that you are the
Son of God"-cf. Matt. 27:40), but never for a single moment did he
condemn or reject or curse those who were guilty of such things. Instead,
he wept over them. He was in fact reconciled to all no matter what they
did.
This attitude of Jesus provides us with a model of the Father's
reconciliation with the world. People may deny his existence, betray his
revelation, and proclaim his death, but God remains the Reconciler. All that
we hear is this anguished plea of the Father: 'My people, what have I
done?" For from the very beginning the whole race is his people. The
reconciliation effected in Jesus Christ recalls and fulfills God's dealings with
Noah after the Flood when God set a rainbow in the sky and said:
"Whenever I want to punish the race again, I will look upon this bow and it
will be for me the sign of an everlasting covenant" (cf. Gen. 9:12ff.). That
reconciliation was still fragile, and a long history began under the sign of
that covenant, but from the very beginning God was reconciled to all of us
in virtue of the new covenant which cannot be broken, which encompasses
humanity as a whole, and which sets it in God's love rather than imposing a
law upon it. The reconciliation of God with the world, with all humanity,
rules out the possibility of

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205

damnation. I stress again that our human will or disposition can do nothing
to change what has been accomplished.
Yet we still find hell and the second death proclaimed in the book of
Revelation. Let us begin with hell. Some people are excluded from the
heavenly Jerusalem: "Outside are the dogs and the sorcerers and
fornicators and murderers and every one who loves and practices
falsehood" (Rev. 22:15). This description confirms what we find in some of
the parables, and it comes to fulfillment in the wellknown account of Gog
and Magog in 20:7-10. Satan seduces the nations and gathers them for
battle against God and Jesus Christ. But fire descends from heaven and
consumes them, and the devil who seduced them, who separated them
from God, will be thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast
and the false prophet are. We read that it is the devil, the beast (power),
and the false prophet (falsehood) that are thrown into the lake of fire, not
beings, let alone human beings, but the forces that from creation have
turned people aside from God and introduced absolute evil. It is these
rebellious spiritual forces that are in hell. They seduced the "nations. This
term is a collective one (ethne), and as I see it again concerns not people
but powers, for a nation is much more than the people who compose it.
Thus France is an entity that has a kind of reality of its own. We know to
what extent nations can be seduced and can regard themselves as gods.
Here again the idea is that the nation that sets itself up as a deity in
opposition to God is what is thrown outside.
We now come to the second death, and what we find is a parallel
statement: "Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is
the second death, the lake of fire" (Rev. 20:14). In other words, it is death
itself which is put to death (the death of death, according to d'Aubign).
And this accords well with the proclamation of Paul: "The last enemy to be
destroyed is death" (1 Cor. 15:26). Paul speaks about the absolute
triumph of Jesus Christ, to whom God gives his entire kingdom and power,
putting all enemies under his feet (Jesus does not consider human beings
his enemies), the last enemy to be overcome being death. The only
outcome for death is that it must disappear in the death that slays death.
Yet there is ambiguity in this passage in Revelation, for it

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UNIVERSAL SALVATION

207

also tells us that at the judgment the dead were judged according to their
works as these were written in the books that will be open to God at the
time of the resurrection. Another book was also opened, the book of life,
"and if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was
thrown into the lake of fire" (Rev. 20:15). On the basis of this idea of
books in which human works are written, Christian thinking gradually
worked out the concept of a great accounting system. Each of us has a
column of credits and a column of debits, and these will be balanced, good
works being added and bad works subtracted. Such an idea runs contrary
to the whole gospel and to the thinking of Paul, for whom salvation is never
attained by the works of the law. Furthermore, the idea seems to falsify
radically the picture of God that the whole Bible presents. The biblical God
is not an accountant. "No one is righteous, no, not one" (Rom. 3:10). No
one can bring before God works that are worthy of him. In other words, if
we were confined to an accounting balance, the result would always be a
deficit, the world would be condemned, and no one would be written in the
book of life.

Although I proclaim the truth of universal salvation, I cannot proclaim it as

an absolute truth. I cannot penetrate the secret of God. I cannot presume
upon a simple decision of the eternal Father. Hence I cannot proclaim this
truth as a dogmatic proposition which is scientifically demonstrated. In
proclaiming it, I am saying what I believe, what meditation on the biblical
texts leads me to believe. I do not teach universal salvation; I announce it.

My own view is that there is a distinction between "the books," which have
to do with our human life on earth, and "the book of life. There is only one
book of life (as distinct from the multitude of other books) because this is
the book of grace, and there is no accountancy here but simply the
proclamation that all are saved by grace in Christ. The books are those of
trial and judgment. But after the judgment comes the simple, universal
verdict. All are written in the book of life. Yet the verse that follows (Rev.
20:15) then gives us the solemn warning which is addressed to Christians
to make them take seriously the possible impossibility of which we spoke
earlier. God always reserves to himself the possibility of rejecting people,
and this is the secret of his freedom. If he is not an accountant, he is also
not tied ineluctably to a kind of global decision which makes the trial and
judgment derisory and fictitious. Clearly the book of life is the book of
Jesus Christ, who is incompatible with death and all that death is.4

Let us return, however, to the first part of the question. What is the
difference between Christians and non-Christians? For a long time the
emphasis has been on individual salvation. We have to convert people, to
lead them to faith, if they are to be saved. This is the goal of many
evangelistic campaigns and of much missionary work. But if we accept the
certainty of universal salvation, salvation cannot be the point of
communicating the gospel. What, then, is its value or significance? It rests
on three solid foundations. First, it is a matter of communicating
knowledge. All are saved, but only those who believe the gospel know it.
This is no small matter, for people are full of anguish and anxiety and fear,
fear of the future and of war and of death. They are delivered up to the
pain of a cruel disruption. They are desperate because they have lost their
loved ones, or think they have lived in vain, or see the world degraded and
nature violated and slowly plundered. They are doubly crushed because
they do not know that they are loved and accompanied and saved and
reunited and promised a future of truth, righteousness, and light. Not to
know this is the great tragedy of people today. Communicating the gospel
is passing on the

See further Jacques Ellul, Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation, trans.

George W. Schreiner (New York: Seabury, 1977).-TRANS.

I still have to reply to two elementary questions. First, if everyone is saved,

what is the difference between Christians and non-Christians? And what
good is it for Christians to lead lives that are godly, worthy, honest, moral,
etc.? Concerning the second point, we must be very firm. Living such a life
achieves nothing and in no way assures us of salvation. To lead a virtuous
life in order to be saved is completely mistaken from a biblical standpoint.
The evangelical view is that I lead a virtuous life because I know that I am
saved. It is because grace has been granted to me that I can live an
honest life before God. Salvation is not the result of virtue but its origin and
source.

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astonishing news that no matter what happens nothing is lost and we are
loved. "Good news is preached to the poor" (Luke 4:18). It is a matter of
the poor (all of us!) and of this good news.5
But passing on the gospel has a second meaning too, for those who hear
and receive this gospel henceforth become the servants of God. They are
given a mission, a vocation. This gospel is to be proclaimed on earth.
Believers become the servants of this proclamation. I will repeat what I
have often said before, namely, that being a Christian is neither a privilege
nor an advantage but a charge and a mission. Those who learn the good
news of salvation are under obligation to live a different life, to become
"saints" because they are now sanctified, and to make it their task to pass
on what they have been given. But they have also to become again the
image that God has made of himself, his counterpart.
We have said that there are three vital points. The third is our response to
the tragic and anguished question that Jesus poses: "When the Son of man
comes, will he find faith on earth?" (Luke 18:8). There is no guarantee of
the permanence or perpetuity of the gospel among us. Jesus gives us the
promise that he will be with us to the end of the age (Matt. 28:20), but
there may not be anyone with him. There may not be a single Christian, a
single bearer of the good news. This is a possibility that the question of
Jesus opens up for us, and we cannot treat it lightly. Again, if we are
charged to communicate this gospel, it is also for Jesus, so that he may not
have the further sorrow of having done everything but finding no one who
believes it or knows it. Thus service out of love for Jesus (the only service
that we can render him) ought to constrain us to evangelize all peoples and
all classes.
A final objection to universal salvation is that of the frivolous or worldly
person who says: "It is all very easy then.

We find an abominable travesty of this good news in some liberation

theologians who reduce the poor merely to the economically poor and
exploited, and the good news to news of the revolution, namely, that with
Jesus Christ the poor can rebel and liberate themselves from their masters.
Face-to-face with Jesus Christ, this is a pure and simple lie. See further
Jacques Ellul, Jesus and Marx: From Gospel to Ideology, trans. Joyce
Main Hanks (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988).

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209

I do not need to bother about it. I can live as I like. I am not under any
religious restraints. There is no need for works, as the Protestants have
shown. There is not even any need for faith, since even atheists and
pagans are saved. This kind of talk is the only kind that might bring people
into danger of damnation. For it is the talk of those to whom the good news
has been fully proclaimed, and they despise it. There is the rub. If people
refuse to believe in God and in Jesus Christ during a hard and serious
struggle, if they wrestle with God as Job did, then the God of Abraham and
Isaac and Jacob and Jesus knows and understands ("for he knows whereof
we are made"-cf. Ps. 103:14), and he finally grants his revelation. But
what is not tolerable, what cannot be pardoned, is that when the love of
God is known, when the full extent of his grace is understood, this grace
should be mocked. The unacceptable thing is not to be moved by this love
when it is known and recognized, not to respond to it, or rather to respond
with raillery: "It is all very convenient, we can simply profit from it. This is
the kind of hypocritical talk that makes a game of the truth. It involves a
corruption of the very being against which there rings out the terrible
warning: "God is not mocked" (Gal. 6:6).

Chapter 15

JUDGMENT

JUDGMENT

we should also note that the text refers to another way of living, another
type of relationship with God. There are two possible developments, and
the second is on a far grander scale than the first ("All things are yours ...
the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours; and you
are Christ's; and Christ is God's" (vv. 22-23).

In spite of all the explanations that have been given, I realize that there
remains a contradiction between the universal love of God and the
passages which describe sins that bring condemnation. Such passages
speak about the saved and the damned. I ask myself whether they have in
view living persons, the very beings that God has created and that
participate in his being as the living God even if only by the fact that they
have life. I win advance a hypothesis, though with some trepidation,
because I am aware how fragile it is. It came to me when I was reading a
passage in Paul: "According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled
master builder I laid a foundation, and another man is building upon it. Let
each man take care how he builds upon it. For no other foundation can any
one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any one builds
on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble
each man's work will become manifest.... If the work which any man has
built ... survives, he will receive a reward. If any man's work is burned up,
he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire"
(1 Cor. 3:10-15).
I realize that this passage has to do with the upbuilding of the church. It
follows a passage that tells us that one sows and another waters, but God
gives the increase. We are God's workers in the construction of the
church. Paul has laid the foundation, which is none other than Jesus
Christ. But the church might then be built in different ways. And the work
of building that each of us does will be judged. We shall talk about the
reward in the next chapter. Plainly it is not salvation. But

210

1 asked myself, however, whether this passage of Paul might not be given
an application beyond the sphere of the upbuilding of the church. Might it
not have in view the upbuilding of a life, which is finally a person's work?
Christians build up their lives on the only foundation, which is Jesus Christ.
But others build up their lives either on a relation to the Christ whom they
do not know but who is implicitly present in their lives (Matt. 25), or on a
knowledge of God (though there can be no question of constructing a
natural theology): "For what can be known about God is plain to them,
because God has made it known to them.... His invisible nature, namely,
his eternal power and deity, is clearly perceived in the creation of the world
when they see him in his works" (Rom. 1:19ff.). On this basis, they can
build up their lives, whether with hay and stubble, or with stone and wood.
But "they have gone astray in their thoughts and their senseless hearts
were darkened.... Therefore God gave them up to their passions.... They
worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator. Thus it is a
matter of how people construct their lives as work, of how they lead their
lives, on the basis of a certain knowledge of God. In the course of life, in
acts and works and involvements and words, some build a full and solid life
with gold or stone, but others build an empty and, for God, an insignificant
life with hay and stubble. Judgment consists of passing the work of this life
through fire. In the one case something remains, preserved by God, and
we shall see later what becomes of it. In the other case, the work goes up
in smoke and nothing is left. These people have lived in vain.
But Paul then has a statement which caused me a good deal of reflection:
"He himself will be saved, but only as through fire" (1 Cor. 3:15). In other
words, what this person did in life vanishes, but the work is not the whole
person. Even when we make a full tally of a person's passions,
intelligence, relations,

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involvements, occupations, and individual psyche, something is still left, a

surplus that is not exhausted, the self. I hesitate to use the word soul, for it
is too heavily freighted both philosophically and religiously; I refer to the
being, the self, from which passions and actions spring. It is this self that is
finally saved. The living self returns to the living God who created it. The
spirit returns to the God who gave it (Eccl. 12:7). 1 thus make a clear-cut
distinction between the being and what occupied it.
A first stage of judgment, we might say, is the vision that this being has of
what becomes of its life's work. Punishment consists, for example, of the
fact that nothing remains. God will not preserve anything of this whole life.
It is the bitter realization that one has lived totally in vain. Yet we must be
more precise, for no life's work is ever wholly evil. The most advanced
saints are forced to recognize the evil works they do, as we see from a
rereading of Augustine's Confessions, and the worst criminal can have in
his life a work of love. Thus God does not either accept or reject the whole
of life.
I have in mind here the text in Hebrews (4:12): "For the word of God is
living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the
division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts
and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all
are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do. The
issue here is undoubtedly judgment, but what is meant by this sword that
divides soul and spirit? judgment carries with it separation. The presence
of this sword is confirmed in Revelation in the description of the risen and
glorified Lord: "From his mouth issues a sharp sword," which represents
God's Word (19:15). But why a sword? Immediately after this passage
there really begins the judgment of the seven churches. If it were a matter
of separating good people from bad, there would be no need of a sword.
But the judgment of the seven churches describes in each case a
separation of what can be retained as righteous before God from what has
to be eliminated. Is not this exactly the judgment that each of us
undergoes? It is not a kind of accounting in which good works are
balanced against bad works with a view to the condemnation of the whole
being, but of separation, of separation within this being between that which
is

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pleasing to God and which he preserves, and that which is to be destroyed

and annihilated because it belongs to the devil and to Satan. Human
beings to whom God has given life and whom he loves do not go into
nothingness or hell, but their wicked and diabolical works do, sharing the
same fate as their father the devil. We are thus given a fuller picture of
judgment. We do not merely see the works of our lives burn up. We first
have to undergo this separation between our being and our evil works. The
reward will be to learn that some of our works are pleasing to God. This is
my hypothesis regarding the relation between universal salvation and those
works of people's lives that are condemned by God and destroyed. What is
destroyed is not God's creation but a construction of our own.

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all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body,
the church; he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in
everything he might be preeminent. For God willed all fullness [the pleroma
that corresponds to the totality of creation] to dwell in him, and through him
[he willed] to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven,
making peace by the blood of his cross" (Col. 1:17-20). We note the great
difference between this cosmic view of reconciliation and that of Irenaeus,
which entails only the recapitulation of humanity. Paul says much more.
All things subsist in Christ and all things are reconciled in him, both in
heaven and on earth. This does not mean that Christ has become as large
as creation but that he has become the head of all things, of this great body
which is not just the church or humanity, but the whole universe, both
material and spiritual. He is the head who directs and impels it, the one
from whom thoughts and volitions and decisions emanate. Reconciliation
issues in this recapitulation because for once, for the first time, the whole
will of God has been fully done with neither break nor hesitation and yet
with complete freedom. Jesus was never a serf or a robot. He was never a
being that was conditioned to do the will of a God who was a deus ex
machina. He did all things with full freedom of decision, choice, love, and
truth. He even interpreted freely the commandments that God had given to
the Jewish people, and it was thus that he was fully obedient. He was the
perfect image of God. For the first time since the fall of Adam God found
his image again, his counterpart, his free and creative partner in prayer and
decision. In this shattered universe it was enough that for once the will of
God was fully done. Order was then restored, reconciliation was made,
and recapitulation could take place.

The doctrine called recapitulation (anakephalaiosis) was studied closely by

the church fathers. Irenaeus of Lyons especially laid emphasis on this part
of Christian teaching. God became man because we could not arrive at
immortality and incorruptibility unless he who is essentially immortality and
incorruptibility joined himself to our nature and to the whole of humanity of
which we are a part, and recapitulated it in himself. In the 3rd century
Hippolytus insisted on the fact that all humanity (the millions of people that
compose it) is resumed, comprehended, and recapitulated in Jesus Christ.
The doctrine gradually became weaker and lost its importance, but it has a
basis in some passages in Paul. In Christ God accomplished "his plan for
the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on
earth" (Eph. 1:10). We have in this verse the Greek equivalent of the
word recapitulate. Paul is saying that Christ became man, not just to
regather all humanity in himself, but to recapitulate all things, all creation,
whether things in heaven or things on earth, for human beings do not
constitute the whole universe, and it is in this sense that we have to join
hands with orthodox theology in calling Christ pantocrator. Christ came not
merely to bring human beings to immortality but to bring back the original
harmony and unity of things, heeding at last the groaning of a crushed
creation. Human beings are saved by Christ, but all that was thrust into
disorder and rupture and incoherence is also saved.
This concept of recapitulation corresponds exactly to that of the
reconciliation that God effects with creation. "He is before

214

Naturally, the reader will think (like myself) that these are all dreams. Evil
still reigns, disorder is at a peak, humanity is more than ever the victim of
war and famine, and there is no trace of this great work in actual life. This
is basically true. Yet there are two dimensions. What has been done and
can never be erased is reconciliation. This has been effected; Jesus has
become the head of this creation. What has always been in effect is that
the universe is in God. What is not yet in effect is that the members of this
body are in accord with the

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head, that people follow the example of Jesus, that human freedom is
coincident with the will of God. This helps us to understand how Irenaeus
came to think as he did: the invisible virtues of immortality and
incorruptibility were gained for us in recapitulation; nothing else was
changed.
I have a different interpretation.
We have talked already about
reconciliation. A single whole has to be gathered under the authority of the
head. I will leave on one side the questions of things celestial and
terrestrial and concentrate on humanity, from which, as we have seen, God
awaits a free response to his love. In my view what seems to have been
missing in the doctrine of recapitulation is a concrete view of humanity. We
again come up against the problem of metaphysics. For Irenaeus what is
recapitulated is humanity in the abstract, the essence of humanity, the
permanent, immutable, unchanging nature of humanity.
There are
theoretically fallen beings and theoretically reconciled beings. There is a
humanity composed of millions of abstract beings gathered into a whole.
But completely forgotten are both the living, changing reality of mankind
and the fact that one cannot speak of humanity in a global sense.
For my part, I clash with both idealism and realism. In idealism, we have
only an idea of humanity, but an idea of humanity is not what is saved.
People who really exist are saved. They alone are sinners, and they alone
can repent and pray and receive grace and be converted. The whole Bible
is anti-idealist. Recapitulation is the gathering of all living people into a
totality that has never previously existed.
At the same time, the position of theologians like Irenaeus has to be
regarded as one of realism, not in the modem sense, but in that of the
debate between nominalism and realism. On this view, humanity is a
reality, a real entity and not an intellectual abstraction. On the one side
there are individual people and on the other a coherent whole which has its
own existence, which is different from the sum of individuals, which has its
own qualities and specificity, which is a "rational being" and "moral person,"
and it is this entity, already unified and real, that is assumed in
recapitulation. At different times I myself have already declared in favor of
nominalism. One can talk about humanity, but in itself it is merely a word,
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denoting the totality of people, and which serves well in reflection and
communication, but which is never anything more. The millions of
individuals do not constitute one real humanity. Nor is there one human
nature that is always identical and immutable and that one can find in each
individual. Nor is there any rational being that is the same through space
and time. For me, such things are mere names and no more.
The dimension that is obviously lacking is that of history. This humanity
has had a history. In recapitulation, does God take account of the
thousands of years of human history with its differences and mutations? In
the course of this history many works have been produced: artistic, cultural,
and technical, also literary, political, and legal. The same is true in the lives
of individuals. In the course of life we all produce many works. Our fives
are made up of works, not only great works, but daily activities, relations
with family and associates, words that we speak, decisions that we make in
politics or love. In recapitulation, does God take these works into
consideration? What is our life in abstraction from these works? We hinted
at this point earlier when we recalled that we are judged by our works and
words, and when we said that we might be saved in our being even though
our works were all destroyed by fire. Yet in every case some works
survive. Why not, then, those of the race as a whole from its origin, during
the long march of its history?
In my view this seems to be shown by the following conviction. God loves
us. He loves us fully. And when I say that, I am saying that he does not
love a kind of phantom, an evanescent and abstract being with a common
nature. Loving us, he loves us in the concreteness of our lives, with all that
makes up our lives, our jobs, our hobbies, our hopes, our fears, the things
we have created, the beings we have loved. God loves us in the totality of
our lives. Thus he does not save an abstract and interchangeable
phantom. He loves us in our individuality, that is, in our history with its
works. Saved people are not judged to be of value apart from their works.
The judgment would be terrible if God did not think that any of our works
deserved to be saved, conserved. A whole life lived in vain! The result of
so many hours and so much energy reduced to nothing! There are no
criteria by which to know what God will keep. We may

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think we have clear data regarding moral and spiritual works, which are
good, which conform to God's will, but we cannot evaluate our political and
technological works, and we will no doubt be surprised by what God keeps
and what he destroys.
But is there any biblical basis for what I have been suggesting? In effect, I
am convinced that it is biblical study that has led me to it.1 When planning
to write a biblical history of the city, I suddenly found dazzling evidence of
its vast significance along the following lines. In the beginning (Gen. 2)
God created a garden (Eden) in which he placed Adam and Eve, a perfect
place of riches and delight. Adam and Eve had everything there, trees that
produced fruit in abundance and four rivers flowing out of it. God planned
this garden as the ideal place for them. But a strange thing happened.
There was a break with God, and they could not stay in this place of
fellowship and intercourse with God. They were chased out of the garden
and began the long adventure of human history. But at the end of this
immense journey of "humanity," when both this world, whose elements are
to be dissolved (2 Pet. 3:10-12), and the development or the creations of
the race will come to an end, there will be a new creation by God, a new
place for us where God will be all in all. But this new place is not the same
as that at the beginning. This is odd, for in all the myths that talk about a
happy beginning for humanity, a golden age, a primal paradise, the end is
always a return to the beginning. Humanity finds again the happy place
that it lost. This corresponds to a cyclical view of time. At the end of
history, the circle is complete and we come back to the beginning.
We know, however, that in Hebrew thinking in spite of some recent
disagreement (e.g, Thibon's Le voile et le masque), time is rectilinear and
not circular. At the end of the course we do not come back to the
beginning. Naturally, there might have been identity between them. That is
to say, God might have created a new Eden, a garden, for that was his
original idea of what is best for us. He might have kept immutably to his
judgment and put us back in a garden. But this is precisely what the

For more on what follows see Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City,
trans. Dennis Pardee (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970).

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biblical texts do not say. In Revelation, what appears at the end of the age
is a city, the new Jerusalem that comes down from heaven, the holy city
(Rev. 21:10-27). Thus what is finally given us by God is a city. Nor is this
an isolated invention of the Revelation of John or of the apocalyptic
movement. In Isaiah the promise of the restoration of Jerusalem might
seem to have in view only the historical restoration of the earthly
Jerusalem, but the end of chapter 60 shows very clearly that we are now in
the age of the creation of a new world: "Violence shall no more be heard ...
you shall call your walls Salvation and your gates Praise. The sun shall no
more be your light by day, nor for brightness shall the moon give fight to
you by night; but the Lord will be your everlasting light.... Your sun shall no
more go down.... Your people shall all be righteous" (Isa. 60:18ff.). These
are undoubtedly eschatological promises. Even clearer is Ezekiel's vision
(ch. 40) of the new Jerusalem that comes down from heaven. Obviously
one might take the view that these prophetic texts relate only to the
historical Jerusalem and the renewal of the Hebrew people. But I believe
that if we read them plainly we are forced to agree that we have here
eschatological promises.
In other words, at the end of time God will place us not in a garden but in a
city. God has changed his plan. Why? Because in this new creation of his
he takes human history and human works into account. One might say
with some truth that the city is the chief human work. It was with the
appearance of the city that the true history of human development began.
The city is the focus of all invention and interchange and art; the city is the
birthplace of culture. I am not saying that there is no rural culture, but it
arises in symbiosis with urban culture. The city is indeed our primary
human creation. It is a uniquely human world. It is the symbol that we
have chosen, the place that we have invented and that we prefer.
But we must proceed with the biblical story. The city in the Bible (apart
from Jerusalem) was an invention of Cain. Condemned to wander across
the earth, Cain settled down, building a city. He had received from God a
protective mark, but he did not really trust it. He preferred to protect himself
and to do so he built city walls. From this first act which qualifies

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it, the city throughout its long history has always been the place that human
beings have chosen in opposition to God. It is the place from which they
have excluded God, as Babel did, or the place in which they have invented
many gods that God rejects, as Babylon did. The city is the place of
violence and war (Nineveh). It is the place of money and commerce, the
place of corruption (Sodom). The city always has a negative connotation in
the Bible. But we cannot change the fact that all human history has taken
place in the city. And now we find it beautifully revealed that as the new,
ideal, and perfect place that God will give us at the end of the age, God
chooses the city, the place of the revolt against him. In the new creation he
changes the negative sign into a positive one. Since the human race wants
the city, God wants it too. He listens to the prolonged request of humanity.
He responds to human expectations. But what he gives is a perfect city
from every standpoint, unlike the imperfect and intolerable cities with which
humanity has marked its history. What does this change mean if not that
God takes account of what humanity wants?
Thus the recapitulation to which Scripture refers. is not the synthesis of an
abstract humanity but the recapitulation of all human history. This is the
first implication of God's choice of the city as his new creation. Human
history is not in the least annulled by the gift of the new creation. It would
be horrible to think that at the end of thousands of years of effort, courage,
hope, work, hatred, tragedy, exaltation, creation, and aspiration, God in
fulfillment of his own will would wipe it all out as though it had never been,
and with no interest in what humanity has been doing through its long
history, paying no attention to it, blindly place us back in an abstract place.
No, God assumes all human history, as in his incarnation Jesus assumes
the legal injustice of Rome, the sacerdotal betrayal of Israel, and the hope
of the people. The heavenly Jerusalem is a kind of condensation of all that
human beings have created and wanted and instituted throughout the
history of the race. All of it is inscribed on the memory of God. I think that
this might well be the meaning of the "books" that Revelation mentions in
which all human works are written. Why should we think of these as merely
individual works? Why should not the great movements of history

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be conserved? Are not the great movements themselves always the

product of individual actions and decisions? This history, then, is now part
of God. But if nothing of ours is lost, if it must all come into judgment, the
works done in the course of history must also be taken up by God.
This is in effect the second point. In two verses Revelation tells us (21:24,
26) that into this heavenly Jerusalem the kings will bring their glory and the
nations their glory and honor, the kings being the leaders and the nations
consisting of people of every type. What they bring is their doxa, their
expectations, their hopes, their opinions, their beliefs, and also their renown
and glory. It is not a matter of their works in the strict sense. But when we
talk about beliefs and expectations, we are talking about a reality that
incarnates itself in acts and products. Furthermore, what is glory? We
obviously need to go back to the Hebrew, and there the word for glory
(kabod) carries first the idea of weight, of heaviness. In one sense it is
synonymous with the goods or wealth or fame or greatness of a being. It is
that which manifests a being. The glory of Yahweh is finally equivalent to
his revelation. Yahweh makes himself known in his works, in his creation,
in his judgments, and these things all express his glory. His glory is not just
his majesty but his revelation in his deeds and works. In other words, glory
is the expression of that which reveals being.
I know that I am now extrapolating-and some might regard this as
illegitimate-but I think that the word has the same sense when it refers to
us: the glory of a person is that which his works make visible. Our works
are the revelation of our being. Hence when this passage in Revelation
talks about -the human glory that comes into the new Jerusalem, this is not
the glory of a parade or procession or trumpets, etc. What enters in is that
which brings to light what the kings and the nations really are in God's truth
throughout the course of history. The kings and the nations bring in the
works which in God's eyes are true glory in history. If these works enter the
new Jerusalem, they are not to be put in a museum. These works are an
integral part of the new Jerusalem. That is to say, God takes these works
of the nations throughout history and uses them to build up (in part) this
actual city.

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And now I make a second extrapolation which some might find no less
scandalous than the first but which I will make just the same. The nations
are composed of individuals. They have no other existence, except it be
that which they give themselves in their pretensions to divinity. We are now
dealing, however, with nations whose exousia ("power, authority') has been
destroyed. They have been despoiled of their self-divinization. They can
no longer make a pretense of directing history. They have been
vanquished with Gog and Magog.

This is a stupendous thought, but not in the least incongruous. God has
granted us independence to lead our own lives, to undertake our own
works, to build up our own histories. This is a false independence in view
of the many determinations imposed by the orders to which we are subject,
yet God still grants it, and the more so if we turn to him, for then we receive
not merely independence but freedom. In this case we do works that are
our own, that God neither expects nor dictates, but that he does not
necessarily judge to be bad because they are independent. As speaking
beings we have been called upon to cooperate with God from the very
beginning of creation (for this is the point of Adam's naming of the animals
in Genesis). Even after the fall we have still been called upon to cooperate
with God (we are God's co-workers, says Paul - 1 Cor. 3:9). God issues
directives, gives signs, makes appeals, and sometimes intervenes, for he
always expects us to do his work. We finally cooperate with God in
erecting this perfect Jerusalem, for if it is exclusively God's work, he builds
it with the materials that we bring, materials of all kinds which, when
approved by God, reveal a certain human greatness which is our glory.

Their only reality is that of the people that constitute them. The realistic
Jewish thinking never conceives of a nation as such but only of a nation as
an assembly of people. Hence the glory is not that of an abstraction (e.g,
France or Greece) but that of individuals. Nation is a generic term to
denote the people in a specific group. Thus the works that come into the
new Jerusalem and form part of it are not just collective works (great
military triumphs or imposing monuments). They are the works that reveal
the individuals that constitute these nations. They include individual
actions. For me, then, the twofold statement of Revelation contains the
idea that God allows to be brought into his own work all the things in the
lives of all people which he judges to be worthy to be part of it. Our glory is
that a fragment of the work that we have done in life, of love, labor, church,
character, and relations, is found by God to be worthy. This is the true
meaning of the judgment of which we spoke. We have said that into each
of us comes the sword of the Word to separate the bad, which will vanish,
from the good, which God will finally conserve. What is thus conserved,
however, does not float off into the void but is used by God to build his city.
This is also the meaning of the reward, about which people sometimes ask.
The reward is not, salvation; that is a gift of grace. Nor is the reward the
granting of a place of honor in heaven. What would be the point of that?
Are not all equally close to God, who is all in all? When the disciples ask
for places of honor in his kingdom, the one on his right hand and the other
on his left, Jesus firmly rebuffs them. No, the reward is to see that
something we have done in life (perhaps only a single word) is conserved
by God for use in his holy city. We have brought something new to God
that he judges worthy of conservation.

This is what I firmly believe, and to the utmost of my power it has been the
meaning and motivation of all that I do.