The Subversion of Christianity

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SUBVERSION OF
CHRISTIANITY
| 8°CQUES ELLUL
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LYSE
THE SUBVERSION
_OF
CHRISTIANITY
by
Jacques Ellul
TRANSLATED BY
GEOFFREY W. BROMILEY
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN
Copyright © 1986 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
255 Jefferson Ave. S.E., Grand Rapids, Mich. 49503
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Translated from the French edition, La Subversion du Christianisme,

copyright © Editions du Seuil, janvier 1984
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ellul, Jacques.
The subversion of Christianity.
Translation of: La subversion du christianisme.
1. Christianity and culture. I. Title.
BR115.C8E4513 1986 270.8'2 86-19826
ISBN 0-8028-0049-1
CONTENTS
Chapter I. The Contradictions

Chapter II. The Chief Forms 19
Chapter III. Desacralization and Sacralization 52
Chapter IV. Moralism 69
Chapter V. The Influence of Islam 95
Chapter VI. Political Perversion 113
Chapter VII. Nihilism and Christianity 137
Chapter VIII. The Heart of the Problem 154
Chapter IX. Dominions and Powers 174
Chapter X. Eppur si muove! 191
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Christendom is an effort of the human race to go back to walking
on all fours, to get rid of Christianity, to do it knavishly under the
pretext that this is Christianity, claiming that it is Christianity
perfected.
The Christianity of Christendom . . . takes away from Christian
— ity the offense, the paradox, etc., and instead of that introduces
probability, the plainly comprehensible. That is, it transforms
Christianity into something entirely different from what it is in the
New Testament, yea, into exactly the opposite; and this is the
Christianity of Christendom, of us men.
In the Christianity of Christendom the Cross has become something
like the child’s hobby-horse and trumpet.
—KIERKEGAARD, “THE INSTANT” 5, 2-3
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Chapter I
THE CONTRADICTIONS
ke
The question that I want to sketch in this work is one that

troubles me most deeply. As I now see it, it seems to be insoluble
and assumes a serious character of historical oddness. It may be
put very simply: How has it come about that the development
of Christianity and the church has given birth to a society, a
civilization, a culture that are completely opposite to what we
read in the Bible, to what is indisputably the text of the law,
the prophets, Jesus, and Paul? I say advisedly “completely op-
posite.” There is not just contradiction on one point but on all
points. On the one hand, Christianity has been accused of a
whole list of faults, crimes, and deceptions that are nowhere to
be found in the original text and inspiration. On the other hand,
revelation has been progressively modeled and reinterpreted ac-
cording to the practice of Christianity and the church. Critics
have been unwilling to consider anything but this practice, this
concrete reality, absolutely refusing to refer to the truth of what
is said. There is not just deviation but radical and essential
contradiction, or real subversion.
This phenomenon is not at all the same as that which
exists between Marx and the Russia of the Gulags or between
the Koran and the fanatical adherents of Islam. It is not the
same because in these last two cases one may find the root of
the deviation in the text itself. I will leave aside the second case,
which would take us too far afield, and focus on the first. One
can trace back a path from Stalin to Lenin and from Lenin to
g
A THE SUBVERSION OF CHRISTIANITY
Marx. At each stage is an undeniable link between the one and

the other, so that one can easily see that there is deviation and
that the results are tragic, a contradiction of what Marx thought
and wished and hoped. In one respect there is thus an obvious
point of similarity between what takes place in Marxism and in
Christianity. Both have made practice the touchstone of truth
or authenticity. In other words, it is by practice that we have to
appreciate or not the intentions or purity of the doctrine, of the
truth of the origin or source.
The link between praxis and theory in Marx is well known.
One should not forget, however, that it is a circular link. This
means finally that false practice inevitably engenders false the-
ory, and one can see the falsity of practice not only from its
effects (judged by what standard? Marx would undoubtedly have
challenged humanistic or moral emotion in face of the enorm-
ities of Stalin, but he would surely have checked the aggravation
of the power of the state, the dissolution of the class struggle,
the increase of alienation, the practice being judged by the the-
ory that inspired it) but also by the new theory to which it gives
birth. All this was evident in the theoretical expression of the
end of Stalinism and the disappearance of theory among Soviet
leaders who have entered into the structure of the conflict of
states and their own imperialism. Christianity, too, judges itself
by practice. We thus confront a constant challenge in this regard.
The whole revelation of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob incessantly comes back to the point that those who keep
God’s commandments will live (cf. Lev. 18:5; Neh. 9:29; Ezek.
20:11). Practice the commandments; the Lord demands this (Deut.
25:16; 27:10). Similarly, evil and death are linked to failure to
practice the commandments or to practice of the usages of other
peoples, of abominable customs (Lev. 18:30). A radical distinc
tion arises between hearing and doing; there are those who hear
but do not do (Ezek. 33:31). Jesus takes up the decisive impor-
tance of practice in almost the same terms. True believers are
those who hear and practice what they hear (Luke 8:21). There
is a parable on the subject that we usually do not hear very well.
At the end of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 7:24-27) we
find the familiar parable of the man who builds his house either
on the rock or on the sand. The house on the rock is solid and
resists the tempest and torrent. The house on the sand collapses.
sy THE CONTRADICTIONS P|
It is generally said that the rock is Jesus himself. But this is not
the parable.
What Jesus says is that those who hear his words and do
them are like the one who builds on the rock. In other words,
the rock is hearing and doing. The second part, however, is
more restrictive. Those who hear the words he speaks and do
not do them are like the one who builds on the sand. Here
undoubtedly practice alone is at issue. We can thus say that it
is the decisive criterion of life and truth.
In the first Christian generation there is no doubt about
the matter. Paul, the theologian of salvation by grace, constantly
- recalls it with great force.! “It is not the hearers of the law who
are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be
justified. When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature
what the law requires . . . they show that what the law requires
is written on their hearts . . .” (Rom. 2:13-15). Some have ob-
stinately desired to pose a contradiction between Paul’s theology
of faith and James’s theology of works. But this is radically
mistaken.
Paul incessantly insists on the critical importance of prac-
tice. It is not for nothing that each of his epistles culminates in
a lengthy admonition showing that practice is the visible expres-
sion of faith, of fidelity to Jesus. He resolves the basic contra-
diction in a foundational passage in Ephesians: “By grace you
have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing,
it is the gift of God—not because of works, lest any man should
boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for
good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should
walk in them” (2:8-10).
The context is essential here. What is rejected and set
aside is self-justification; the glorification of self by self, self-
sufficiency in the conduct of life, the doing of good, etc. We are
saved by grace, not by works. Hence we cannot glorify works.
Yet doing them is indispensable, for they are prepared in advance
by God, they are in his “plan,” and we are created to do them.
God does not do them; we have this responsibility. In Paul,
1. In John, too, we have the fine statement of Jesus after showing his
disciples what it means to be a servant of others and reminding them that all
believers in him are servants: “If you know these things, blessed are you if you
do them” (13:17). Here again practice is the touchstone of salvation and love. |
6 THE SUBVERSION OF CHRISTIANITY
then, practice is the visible criterion that we have seriously re-

ceived grace and also that we have entered effectively into God’s
plan. For Paul, as for Jesus, practice is the touchstone of au-
thenticity. We are in the presence here of something that is
constant across the centuries.
Those who attack Christianity usually do it, then, by
pointing first to our disastrous practice. The attacks of Voltaire,
Holbach, Feuerbach, Marx, and Bakounine,? not to mention
those that concern us more directly, are justified. Instead of
defending ourselves against them and attempting a maladroit,
useless, and contemptible apologetic, we should listen to them
and take seriously what they say. For they demolish Christianity,
that is, the deviation to which Christian practice has subjected
God’s revelation.
We must not make this, as is often done, into opposition
between the pure message of Jesus and either the terrible God
of the Jews or the detestable Paul, a false interpreter. There is
complete coherence between what we know of Jesus the Christ
and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. There is also com-
plete coherence between the gospel of Christ in the Gospels and
the gospel about Christ, as in Paul among others.
To say that the Gospels themselves as we now have them
have been falsified by the first or second generation of Christians
to make Jesus coincide with their own message and proclamation
is possible only in the name of a Jesus who is refabricated by this
or that modern scholar in favor of a pet ideology, such as the
socialist Jesus, the monarchist Christ, the “historical” Jesus, the
proletarian Jesus, Jesus the gentle poet, Jesus the violent revo-
lutionary, or Jesus the clown—always deriving solely from in-
dividual invention. No, the attack of non-Christians is perfectly
valid and should be heeded as testimony to the terrible distance
that Christian practice has created from revelation.
The difficulty is precisely that one cannot say: “Certainly
our practice is poor, but consider the beauty, purity, and truth
of revelation.” We have insisted on the unity of the two. We
have to understand this. No recognizable revelation exists apart
from the life and witness of those who bear it. The life of Chris-
tians is what gives testimony to God and to the meaning of this
revelation. “See how they love one another”—this is where the
2. And, I might add, the profound and spiritually pertinent criticism

of B. Charbonneau.
ee THE CONTRADICTIONS qh
approach to the Revealed God begins. “If you devour one an-
other, you do not have the love of God in you,” etc. There is
no pure truth of God or Jesus Christ to which we can return,
washing our hands of what we ourselves do. If Christians are not
conformed in their lives to their truth, there is no truth. This
is why the accusers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
were right to infer the falsity of revelation itself from the practice
of the church. This makes us see that in not being what Christ
demands we render dll revelation false, illusory, ideological,
imaginary, and nonsalvific. We are thus forced to be Christians
or to recognize the falsity of what we believe. This is undeniable
proof of the need for correct practice.
We have to admit that there is an immeasurable distance
between all that we read in the Bible and the practice of the
church and of Christians. This is why I can speak validly of
perversion or subversion, for, as I shall show, practice has been
the total opposite of what is required of us. As I see it, this is
the unanswerable question that Kierkegaard faced in his day. He
replied to it in his own way. Today we must attempt something
different. We must follow a different path and take up again this
searching of conscience.
We have to avoid two errors. The first is that of rejecting
all the church’s past, of scorning and condemning all it has
done, of saying categorically, as is unceasingly said today in an
abominable fashion, that the church means obscurantism. On
this view Judeo-Christian thinking is the cause or origin of every
modern evil, of state absolutism, of capitalist alienation, of uni-
versal deception and hypocrisy, of Oedipus complexes or guilt,
of the subordination of women, of the enslaving of the Third
World, of the spoliation of nature. The medieval church is the
Inquisition, serfdom, the Crusades, theocracy, the forced con-
struction of cathedrals by a brutalized and terrorized people. A
little later it is Galileo, the origin of capitalism, the invasion
and subjugation of the whole world, the destruction of original
native cultures, the crushing of people under Christian dogma
and morality. All evils derive from the Judeo-Christian faith,
and alongside these fierce and simplistic accusations we find a
glorification of the pure and cheerful pagan, of a human and
3. Cf. J.-M. Benoist, Comment peut-on étre paien? (Paris: Albin Michel,
1981); Manuel de Dieguez, L’Idole monothéiste (Paris: PUF, 1981).
liberal polytheism, of a spiritual infancy that Christianity has

supposedly rendered abortive.
There is a little truth in all this—a very little—as regards
Christendom. But it needs exact historical examination, for there
is in it also a good deal of polemical exaggeration in the interests
of what are in reality totalitarian ideologies. There is not much
real fact. One day I will write a plea for the church’s past in face
of the absurdities that are served up to us. It is no less true,
however, that underlying such foolish accusations is the real
subversion of Christianity.
The other error is that of proclaiming that today things are
different, or indeed that there was another side to the Christian
history, that we have to remember that it included Saint Francis
or Las Casas, that there were at times fine revivals of truth (the
Synod of Barmen), that there have even been authentic popes,
and that incontestably there has always been individual and
hidden faith. All this is true, but it does not set aside the mas-
sive, exaggerated, and infantile accusations whose true objective
is to subject humanity to a new bondage.
Nor must Christians accept all the attacks on the church’s
past and then make the rejoinder: “Yes, but see how things have
changed today.” Yesterday the church was against the poor, to-
day it favors socialism, communism, and immigrant workers.
Yesterday it sponsored monarchy, today it is for democracy. Yes-
terday it supported patronage, today it favors the unions. Yes-
terday it claimed to have absolute truth and was dogmatic, today
it lets people believe what they like. Yesterday it championed a
fierce and rigid sexual morality, today it is for abortion, homo-
sexuality, etc. One might continue indefinitely. I have already
attacked elsewhere this plastic portrayal.* There is no progress
here. The church has simply adopted wholesale the ideas and
manners of modern society as it did those of past societies. Even
in defending the poor it is no more true today than it was one
hundred or two hundred years ago. The betrayal is exactly the
same. No truth is incarnate in this simple conformity to the
dominant trend in our society. We have precisely the same sub-
version of Christianity along with pride (we are the first finally
to understand the gospel, as the good F. Belo ingenuously pro-
4. J. Ellul, Fausse Présence au monde moderne (Paris: Editions de l’ERF,

1964); ET False Presence of the Kingdom (New York: Seabury, 1972).
a THE CONTRADICTIONS 9
claims)° and the hypocrisy of beating the breast of previous gen-

erations for Christian faults. I shall not return to this point.
We must also avoid simplistic explanations of the perver-
sion. I recall three. The first uses the famous formula of Loisy
that the early Christians awaited the immediate coming of God’s
kingdom, and what came was the church. All deviations are
supposedly due to the delay: the alleged falsifications of the Gos-
pel texts, the correlative hardening and weakening of faith and
hope, the contraction of love, the loss of a sense of community
origins, the creation of institutions and a hierarchy on the ground
that it was necessary to organize in order to endure the continued
waiting. I believe that all this is completely wrong. It consists
only of a dated, subjective, and relative interpretation of certain
texts that are picked out as the true ones. Nothing allows us to
think that the disciples of Jesus expected an immediate realiza-
tion of the kingdom of God. Nothing allows us to think that
the texts in which Jesus proclaims a long wait are false.
The disciples had to learn to live in the world. The world
had to become again the bearer of the possibility of love directed
to the true God. This was necessary not that there should be a
magical mutation but that a new history should begin. Similarly,
we do not have the elementary opposition of the distance be-
tween. an ideal and its realization. No, God’s action in Jesus
Christ, the divine revelation that began with Abraham, has
nothing whatever to do with an ideal. There is no ideal here in
the ordinary and banal sense of the term. Nor is there any phil-
osophical idealism. Belief that God created the world, that he
has revealed his will for humanity, and that he saves us from
death bears absolutely no relation either to Hegel’s Idea or to
the idealism of philosophers (which Marx attacks). The subver-
sion of Christianity is not due to the impossibility of living up
to such an ideal. For there is no such ideal.
From the very first we have full realism and full material-
ism. The idea of God does not exist. The philosophers of the
Death of God movement were right to destroy this idea that
completely blocks the meaning of the revelation. Finally, and
along similar lines, the issue is not the antithesis of the spiritual
(constantly taken up again by spiritual and millenarian move-
5. E. Belo, La Lecture matérialiste de l’Evangilede Marc (Paris: Editions du

Cerf, 1974).
ments) and the institutional. Once again, God’s revelation is

not just a spiritual matter. The Holy Spirit is not just spiritual.
These three elementary antitheses do, of course, have in each
case a modicum of truth; we shall see this as we go along.
The real essence of the subversion is indicated by the very
term “Christianity,” which gives to the matter the force of an
“ism.”* A word ending in “ism” denotes an ideological or doc-
trinal trend deriving from a philosophy. Thus we have positiv-
ism, socialism, republicanism, spiritualism, idealism, materialism,
etc. None of these words, however, denotes the philosophy itself.
In fact, it might be directly opposed to it. Marx and Kierkegaard
both tried to prevent their thinking from being reduced to an
ideological mechanism. But they could not stop their successors
from freezing their living thought into one (or many) systems,
and in this way an ideology arose. Even Sartre accepts the term
existentialism without seeing how it perverts what he is saying.
The moment the mutation takes place from existential thinking
to existentialism, a living stream is transformed into a more or
less regulated and stagnant irrigation channel, and as the thought
moves further and further away from the source it becomes banal
and familiar.
The suffix “ism” injects something new into a well-marked
and well-defined complex. As originality is eliminated and re-
placed by commonplaces, the life and thought lose their radical
and coherent character. The well-defined complex is now vague
and fluid. Passages are dug out in all directions. From the point
of departure various possibilities open up for exploitation, and
they are in fact utilized. There thus comes into being a curious
complex formed of many tendencies, often contradictory but all
covered by the relevant “ism.” In a final loosening of the original
knot of life and thought, which are generally united in the creator
and his immediate disciples, the “ism” sometimes takes the form
of a practical sociological trend, a type of organization or mass
movement, such as socialism, communism, royalism, or
republicanism.
At this point there is an even greater distance between the
rock of the first life and thought and the sandy wastes that now
engulf it. Marxism and what has been derived from it for a whole
century have nothing in common. It is the same whenever an
*The word translated throughout as Christianity is christianisme—Ed.

oe THE CONTRADICTIONS ll
“ism” is made in the name of some creator, such as Thomism,

Lutheranism, or Rousseauism. It seems that in each case the
deviation and subversion mentioned are typical of the Western
world. We need not go into that here. The only point is that
the “ism” aspect of Christianity is not peculiar to it. Similar
results occur in many other cases. Nevertheless, the perversion
or subversion here is much more vast and aberrant and incom-
prehensible than any of the others.
For Christians this poses an unanswerable question. We
have here more than a simple sociological movement. If we tried
to abolish the word Christianity, what would we have to say?
First, the revelation and work of God accomplished in Jesus
Christ, second, the being of the church as the body of Christ,
and third, the faith and life of Christians in truth and love.
Since we cannot keep repeating this long triple formula, we shall
now use X to denote these three aspects. We need keep the word
Christianity only for the ideological and sociological movement
which is its perversion.
To complete our sketch of what is for me so hard a question,
we have to take another factor into account. We have said, and
we shall show at length, that Christian practice has constantly
been a subversion of the truth in Christ. This ought not to have
been. Jesus tells us: I am with you to the world’s end. He also
promises to send us his Spirit. The church has seen in the Spirit
the third person of the Godhead, an integral part of the one
God.® If God is with his church, if he is present by his risen Son
and Spirit, if he guarantees in this way the permanence of his
work, how can it all have been finally perverted? And so quickly,
so constantly? I cannot accept the oversimple solution of saying
that there is distinction between what we see and the good and
beautiful things that God sees in his mysterious hiddenness, for
we know that the opposite is true. Nor am I content with the
6. One God in three persons. I will not take up the interminable theo-
logical discussion, which has always been astonishing to me, linked solely to
an essentialist and substantialist philosophy. After all, I have a body, thought,
feelings, and will, yet am I not still one, even though when I act materially
this differs from when | think and am plunged into reflection? Should we not
also recall that “person” comes from persona, the actor’s mask? In coming to
us God puts on different masks. He is Father and Creator, Son and loving
Savior, sanctifying Spirit. God assumes these modes of being so as to be grasped
by human weakness and ignorance.
facile argument that institutions and public acts do not count

but we should have regard to the devout and faithful lives of
individual Christians who are led by God and whom we cannot
see. Nor can I accept references to the invisible church, nor the
dissolution of God’s actions in human actions, so that we can
say with shame: “Well, after all, if the church has failed, it is
only the church . . . And God no longer speaks or comes through
the church, he identifies himself with human creations, express-
ing himself by revolution, by wars of liberation, by the taking
up of the cause of the poor, by the establishing of social jus-
tice”—the new version of constantly reviving natural theology,
the discerning of God’s revelation in what we humans do. To all
such things we need to say a resolute No. All this is antibiblical.
It runs counter to all that has been done by God in Jesus Christ.
The question remains all the same. If the Holy Spirit is
and has been with Christians and the churches, we should not
have seen the terrible subversion that has substituted the exact
opposite for Christianity, or rather for the X of God, replacing
it with a Christianity that is remodeled by the world. Are we to
believe, then, that God has withdrawn and is silent? I tried to
say something of the kind in my Espérance oubliée.7 Are we to
think that God has failed? But the failure of a Christianity that
expresses what we have made of revelation does not change at
all what God has accomplished. He became incarnate. Jesus
Christ, the Son, died (and our sins are pardoned). He is risen
(and death, chaos, and the devil are defeated). No matter what
may be the mischances of history or the errors and aberrations
of the human race, these things endure. What is done is done.
Irrespective of what we make of Christianity, God’s work and
accomplishment are complete, and they are inscribed in human
history.
The question, however, concerns what we have made of
them. Now by the Holy Spirit they have an impact in history.
But the Holy Spirit is no more dictatorial, authoritarian, auto-
matic, or autosufficient than the Word of God or Jesus Christ.
The Holy Spirit liberates. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there
is freedom. In other words, no constraint weighs on us to make
us do as God has decided. On the contrary, the Spirit is a power
7. J. Ellul, L’Espérance oubliée (Paris: Gallimard, 1972); ET Hope in Time

of Abandonment (New York: Seabury, 1973).
oo THE CONTRADICTIONS jis
that liberates us from every bondage and puts us in a situation

of freedom, choice, and open possibilities. He is a power of truth
illumining us and giving us a new and profound outlook on
himself and the world. He is a power that augments human
action when we choose to do God’s will. He is finally a power
of conscience showing us what God’s will is (the Spirit leads
into all truth), that is, preventing us, when we are converted
and illumined by the Holy Spirit, from seeking final refuge in
ignorance. He makes possible a full awareness of the value and
reach of our practice. He makes us fully responsible. This is the
result of the presence of the Holy Spirit.
In fabricating Christianity, therefore, Christians have
known what they were doing. They have freely chosen this
course. They have voluntarily forsaken revelation and the Lord.
They have opted for new bondage. They have not aspired to the
full gift of the Holy Spirit that would have enabled them to take
the new way that he opened up. They have made a different
choice and left the Holy Spirit unemployed, idle, present only
on sufferance. This is why the burning question is a purely hu-
man one: Why have Christians taken this contrary course? What
forces, mechanisms, stakes, strategies, or structures have induced
this subversion? For human aggrandizement and nothing else.
IL.
We need to formulate this global contradiction clearly, and

then we shall devote the rest of this study to its elucidation. X
is subversive in every respect, and Christianity has become con-
servative and antisubversive. X is subversive relative to every
kind of power. One kind is money, for Jesus called it mammon,
and no one can serve two masters. There is a radical incompat-
ibility between money and Christ. Jesus recommends to his dis-
ciples that they have none. Paul shows that it is there simply to
give away. James argues that the money heaped up by the wealthy
inevitably results from theft that victimizes the worker. Money
is in itself a force of deviation. It is one of the main objects of
covetousness, and covetousness is the root of all sins and evils.
Political power? It was not for nothing that the first Chris-
tians were attacked in the Roman Empire as dangerous anarch-
ists, as agents subverting Roman order. They had conscientous
objections against military service, against the administration,
and against the emperor. They stated that Christians ought not
to enter the imperial administration or hold office. Witnesses of
the period testify to the disquiet this caused. As the Christian
faith increased, functionaries decreased. Modern historians have
asked whether the dissolution of the empire was not due in large
part to this Christian attitude. Fewer Romans were recruited, so
that soldiers had to be recruited among the “barbarians.” An
avoidance of political and administrative responsibilities marked
the elite. I am not saying that this thesis is true. My point is
simply that this is how contemporaries viewed the Christians of
the second, third, and fourth centuries. This was the opinion
they had of them. And there had to be some basis for it.
We shall have to devote a special chapter to the texts that
lead us to suppose, from a biblical standpoint, that X had in fact
a politically subversive effect. But to avoid confusion, we must
say that we are not dealing with a program of political replace-
ment, with a desire to change political institutions or personnel,
with a preference for democracy rather than dictatorship, with
an attempt at social transformation (cf. slavery, which the early
Christians are accused of failing to abolish). The attitude in
question was the more radical one of a rejection of all such
things, a questioning not just of one power but of all power, a
desired transparency in human dealings that manifests itself in
bonds (including those of family) and relationships (including
social) of a completely new kind.
Subversion as regards all religions began with the Jews (as
did the contesting of royal power). The religious phenomenon
is contrary to the revelation of God to Abraham and Moses, to
the presence of Jesus among us. Here again we must refer to the
judgment of the contemporaries of the first Christians. The
Greeks and Romans regarded them as atheists and irreligious
people. They did so not merely in relation to the emperor cult,
which was both a political and a religious matter, but in relation
to all cults. When the emperor, seeing what he viewed as a new
religion growing in the empire, magnanimously offered to put
Chrestus in the pantheon among other gods, these strange peo-
ple refused. They were not at all liberal. This provoked the
emperor’s rage. It was not simply a matter of putting Christ
among the gods, or even of causing a superior religion to prevail
over inferior pagan religions. It was a matter of destroying reli-
gions and an infantile religious spirit. In this regard there is
= THE CONTRADICTIONS 15
complete continuity between Judaism and what was then taught

by Jesus and Paul.
Destruction even in morality. As the permanent action of
God is human liberty, true liberty and not just an autonomous
human will, a search for independence and incoherence, it is
impossible to support current moral orders, the philosophical,
naturalist, or sociological principles of a morality that establishes
good and evil.
From the beginning of Genesis we learn a stupefying fact
whose implications have seldom been grasped. What Adam and
Eve acquire when they take the fruit is the knowledge of good
and evil, that is, knowledge in the sense of the ability to state,
as God does, that this is good and that is bad. There is no good
and evil above God that even God is bound to apply. There is
no transcendent good and evil as we constantly think when we
judge that the Old Testament God is wrong when, for example,
he orders Abraham to sacrifice his son. To be like God is to be
able to declare that this is good and that is bad. This is what
Adam and Eve acquired, and this was the cause of the break,
for there is absolutely nothing to guarantee that our declaration
will correspond to God’s. Thus to establish morality is necessarily
to do wrong. This does not mean that a mere suppression of
morality (current, banal, social, etc.) will restore the good. God
himself frees us from morality and places us in the only true
ethical situation, that of personal choice, of responsibility, of
the invention and imagination that we must exercise if we are
to find the concrete form of obedience to our Father. Thus all
morality is annulled. The Old Testament commandments and
Paul’s admonitions are not in any sense morality. On the one
side they are the frontier between what brings life and what
brings death, on the other side they are examples, metaphors,
analogies, or parables that incite us to invention. When Jesus
consciously and deliberately breaks the commandments that have
become moral, when he makes of transgression a kind of con-
stant conduct that his disciples must adopt, and when Paul bru-
tally asks why we should keep commandments that have become
merely human commandments, they are aiming not just at the
Jewish law but at all morality.
Subversion of culture? This seems even more peculiar. Yet
it is precisely what the biblical text indicates. We know how far
both the Old Testament and the New are impregnated by the
cultures round about. We can find traces of Egyptian texts (Job

and many other books) and Assyrian-Chaldean texts throughout
the Hebrew Bible. Even in Ecclesiastes there is thinking of an
incontestably Greek or Egyptian origin. Everyone knows, too,
that Paul draws much inspiration from Stoicism in his moral
advice. But can we be sure that these cultural texts express God’s
revelation? Or might it be that revelation does not belong ex-
clusively to the Jews? Are there not manifestations of it among
other peoples? In my view, the crucial point in the borrowings
is the way in which the texts are treated. Never are Babylonian
or Iranian or Egyptian or Greek texts inserted just as they are,
in their own identity., They are used, and they are always used
polemically, that is, to show that the point of the text in question
is irrelevant and false.
Throughout the Bible, as regards surrounding cultures, there
is what situationists call reorientation. One of the forms of rev-
olutionary action that they have proposed is that of taking a text
and giving its objective sense a new turn so as to make it say
something else. This is exactly what the Jewish and Christian
writers did. They took a text and applied it to a different situ-
ation. They changed certain terms and put the text in a context
that altered its original sense.
Thus the Egyptian poem that is inserted into Job is radically
changed because it is related to the God of Israel. Again, the
stories in Genesis, as is recognized today, are constructed in a
polemic against Babylonian cosmogonies. Stoic morality ceases
to have its alleged meaning and (universal) reach when it is set
in the movement of death and resurrection, of justification and
sanctification; even though the phrases remain the same, the
meaning is radically broken.
This happens in many different ways. Humor is one of the
ways employed by the Hebrews. They take a word and by chang-
ing a letter give it a totally new sense. They modify the appli-
cation of a quotation (as Paul does, e.g., with the Cretan
proverb). They play on words in such a manner as to ridicule
the text or person or to achieve a very different effect. Some
examples are very familiar, such as calling the bull of Canaanite
worship a calf, making Baal into Bel-Zebub (the god of the flies),
etc. Thus the Hebrews are set in the midst of cultures: they do
not shut themselves off from them, they know and use them,
but they make them say other things. This is the subversion of
THE CONTRADICTIONS 17
culture. An interesting project that has never been undertaken

would be that of measuring the distance between an original text
and the same text as it is inserted in the Bible, or of analyzing
the process of reorientation that is used. (It would serve as a
model for what we should do with our own culture.)
We may be satisfied with these examples of the subversion
by X of all that constitutes the political, economic, and cultural
world. We shall have to look at the details in each case later.
But what has been the result? A Christianity that is itself
a religion. The best, it might be said, the peak of religious
history. (The bothersome thing is that Islam comes after it!) A
religion classed as monotheistic. A religion marked by all the
traits of religion: myths, legends, rites, holy things, beliefs, clergy,
etc. A Christianity that has fashioned a morality—and what a
morality!—the most strict, the most moralistic, the most debil-
itating, the one that most reduces adherents to infants and
renders them irresponsible, or, if |were to be malicious, I should
say the one that makes of them happy imbeciles, who are sure
of their salvation if they obey this morality, a morality that
consists of chastity, absolute obedience (which in unheard-of
fashions ends up as the supreme value in Christianity), sacrifice,
etc. A Christianity that has become totally conservative in every
domain—political, economic, social, etc.—which nothing can
budge or change. Political power, that is good. Whatever chal-
lenges or criticizes it, that is evil.®
Christians, for the sake of their consciences, have to obey
ruling powers. Not only that, they must actively support such
powers. They must fight against all that threatens these powers.
The same with the social and economic order. God has willed
the hierarchy. The poor are poor by God’s will, the rich are rich
for the same reason. To question this is to go against God’s will.
Christianity has become a constant force of antisubversion. It
has been put in the service of the state, for example, by Louis
XIV or Napoleon. It has been put in the service of capitalism
by the nineteenth-century middle class. It champions the moral
order... .
8. One might give many examples of these contradictions. Thus Kier-

kegaard justly underlines the remarkable practice, which has persisted in the
West for 1500 years, of administering oaths in court on the Bible and the Holy
Gospels when these expressly forbid the taking of oaths (Matt. 5:34).
We find exactly the same inversion in the cultural sphere.

Christianity imbibes cultures like a sponge. Dominated by Greco-
Roman culture, it became territorial and feudal (benefices) in
the feudal world with all the beliefs (as we shall see) that back
it. It then became bourgeois, urban, and argentiferous with the
capitalist system. It is now becoming socialist with the diffusion
of socialism. It helped to spread Western culture throughout the
world when the West was conquering and subjugating the world.
Today it is letting itself be permeated by the values of African,
Oriental, and American Indian cultures. Always quick to justify
itself, it claims to be on the side of the weak. Tomorrow we
might have adjustment to Islam as today we have adjustment to
Marxism. We now have a rationalist or liberal Christianity as we
used to have an Aristotelian or Platonic Christianity in a mock-
ery of being “all things to all men.”
Each generation thinks it has finally discovered the truth,
the key, the essential nub of Christianity by veneering itself with
the dominant influence or modeling itself on it. Christianity
becomes an empty bottle that the successive cultures fill with all
kinds of things. It is not because we are now discovering social-
ism or Islam that we are in some way more authentic before God
than were our predecessors, so full of kindly feelings toward the
poor savages that we have to bring them out of their misery,
ignorance, sin, etc. Christianity has always been as elastic with
cultures as with political regimes. I have said it a hundred times:
monarchist under a monarchy, republican under a republic, so-
cialist under communism. Everything goes. In this regard, too,
Christianity is the opposite of what we are shown by the reve-
lation of God in Jesus Christ. Such is our general sketch. Such
is also the dramatic question. Thus begins an inquiry that I will
press as far as I can, theme by theme.
Chapter II
THE CHIEF FORMS
We have considered a number of flagrant contradictions.

The question arises: How could they come about, how could
there be such a subversion, what are the causes, what is the
process, what are the stages of this perversion? Faced with this
question, we are tempted to leave everything to the theologians
and theology. At every point it was theologians who made the
mistakes. Undoubtedly the elaboration of rites, the religious
character attributed to the Christian faith, its inclusion among
great religious movements, the appearance of ideas totally alien
to the Bible such as purgatory,! the intercession of saints, the
multiplication of intercessors, penance, and auricular confes-
sion—all these things clearly have a theological origin. Church
leaders and theologians are present at the point of departure.
Yet two qualifications are necessary.
The first is that theologians never expressly desired or taught
ideas or dogmas directly contrary to revelation. Even heretics
were always seeking honestly to render an account of what they
took to be revelation. All that one can say is that originally the
teaching was almost completely in conformity with the truth of
God in Jesus Christ; almost, because for some reason or other,
whether intellectual or spiritual, there was a small addition, a
slippery interpretation, an elision, an overemphasis on a partic-
ular theme; yet always very close to a correct understanding of
the biblical text. This applies in such matters as the symbolism
1. See, e.g., Jacques le Goff, La Naissance du Purgatoire (Paris: PUF,

1981).
19
of the mass, purgatory, the picture-books of the unlearned, and

the honor paid to martyrs.
In the ensuing evolution, it is the mistake or elision, that
is, the wrong aspect, that achieves dominance. When there is
in theological thinking an element of error, a fragment of am-
biguity, some dreg of laxity or syncretism, these are the things
that capture attention and become the focus of interest. These
are the things that Christian people have retained and prized.
These have carried the day, increased in astonishing fashion,
corrupted everything else, and gained the loyalty of believers,
being adopted by them as though they were the truth of God.
We seem to have here a fulfillment of the prophecy of Jesus
that a little evil or error will corrupt the whole (like the leaven
of the Pharisees). The responsibility of the clergy is incontest-
able. It is even more evident when we consider that this is the
domain of faith, knowledge, and revelation, which, as we au-
tomatically transpose it for ourselves into thought, philosophy,
or doctrine (and the biblical texts themselves undoubtedly speak
about sound doctrine), becomes an intellectual matter. We are
so accustomed to thinking that conduct results from will or
knowledge, that morality is made up of precepts that we have
to apply, that quite spontaneously, when we confront such ab-
errations, such perversion, we attribute them to those who have
formulated doctrine or elaborated theology. Yet we can no longer
be content with this explanation, which has it that some theo-
logical mistake, however small, is the origin of every deviation
and perversion. There are innumerable examples that we might
analyze; let us take just a few in the present context.
First, and unquestionably, is an alliance with the powers.
This did not occur merely when the church received official
recognition from Constantine; nor is it just a matter of ongoing
“Constantinianism.” Christians and the church have wanted an
alliance with everything that represents power in the world. In
reality this rests on the conviction that thanks to the power of
the Holy Spirit the powers of this world have been vanquished
and set in the service of the gospel, the church, and mission.
We must use their forces in the interests of evangelism. Wealth
and various authorities receive recognition in this way and are
put in the church’s service.
But what happens is the exact opposite. The church and
mission are penetrated by the power and completely turned aside
THE CHIEF FORMS 21
from their truth by the corruption of power. When Jesus says

that his kingdom is not of this world, he says clearly what he
intends to say. He does not validate any worldly kingdom (even
if the ruler be a Christian). He puts us on guard against seeking
any authority other than that of the Holy Spirit. Reciprocity
has come into play, however, and a second set of factors has
been introduced. Evangelical proclamation was essentially sub-
versive. Put in danger by it, the forces of the social body have
teplied by integrating this power of negation, of challenge, by
absorbing it through so disguising themselves that Christians
thought there had been a social transformation. But this was in
fact a mere semblance. It concealed the persistence of the assim-
ilative force of a society that wanted to remain essentially the
same. In reality the social group that gave strong adherence to
Christianity (the political, social, and intellectual elite) brought
with them a social ritual that was the exact opposite of what
Jesus proclaimed. By way of simplification let us say that they
brought a legal spirit (Roman), a philosophical interpretation of
the world (Greek), a mode of action (political), and an aggregate
of interests.
Fundamentally one might say schematically that the social
body that had been effectively threatened by the diffusion of a
faith that bordered on anarchism, on a total lack of interest in
worldly matters (administration, commerce, etc.), on the pro-
motion of a new mode of fellowship, reacted in self-defense and
absorbed the foreign body, making it serve its own ends. Pro-
gressively, then, the church was led to see that it had to adapt
the truth of Jesus Christ to different cultures. It refused to enter
into open warfare with the religious, intellectual, and social
trends within the empire. It abandoned the radicalism of Jesus
and the prophets. It adapted its message to different cultures. It
modified the content of the Word entrusted to it. This was the
triumph of what signifies over what is signified.
From the fourth century onward, then, there took place
what some have called the paganizing of the church. It adopted
beliefs and customs alien to the gospel. It faced the hard question
of discerning whether political and social life were legitimate.
Seduced, surrounded, and penetrated by a kind of fifth column,
it finally pronounced them legitimate. It changed the pagan
emperor cult into a veritable Christian “cult,” chiefly at Byzan-
tium. It took in popular beliefs, adopted and christianized pagan
myths, confiscated pagan temples and made them into churches.

It did this without realizing at all that the secret but true result
would be the destruction of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.
And as the church still had very strongly the sense that it held
the one and only truth, and had a kind of obsession with unity—
a spiritual unity corresponding to the visible unity of the em-
pire—it could not tolerate diversity in the expression of faith.
It had to establish unity at all costs (hence the persecution of
heretics).
At the same time the church felt it incumbent to absorb
everything that seemed to be of intellectual or religious value in
past societies. This explains the tendency toward syncretism that
began in the third century and continues to this day in all the
churches. The ideal was to make a synthesis between Christian-
ity and what was strange, if not inimical, to it. These various
procedures led the church and Christians progressively to vali-
date the very opposite of what had been revealed by God and
of the impulse given by Jesus Christ.
Now the drama was as follows. It was impossible to erase
totally what Jesus had said and done. He had given a number
of models with unavoidable implications. Thus he had given a
new freedom, a new love, an expression of truth. . . . The odd
fact is, then, that a number of effects, consequences, and mo-
dalities of the Christian faith persisted even when the substance
of the faith had disappeared or had been completely adulterated.
Thus a new morality developed that no longer had any basis.
We find a new conception of the relation between authority and
subject, a new exploiting of nature, a new relation between the
ruler and God, the desire to go out into the whole world so as
to know it and convert it, etc. Things went so far that in the
long run, for example, the lay state, democracy, and socialism
could be regarded as normal expressions of Christianity—but of
a Christianity that bears no further relation to Jesus Christ or
to God. Feuerbach has fully explained all this.
We might consider that theology has been one of the fac-
tors in this perversion but not the cause. We enter here into a
whole complex of political, ideological, and sociological factors
that we can only unfold schematically in the present context.
We must begin with theology. We cannot go into detail or
discuss the value of the great systems. We cannot take up the
THE CHIEF FORMS 23
theology of Irenaeus, Ambrose, or Augustine, let alone the Greek

Fathers. I will not delve into the (very modern) quarrel between
the nominalists and the realists. We shall not investigate Thomas
Aquinas or Occam, and I will leave on one side Luther and
Calvin, Newman and King. We have in all these so many cor-
rect and true thoughts covering so many errors and deviations.
It seems to me that everything goes back to a phenomenal change
in the understanding of revelation, namely, the transition from
history to philosophy. I believe that all the errors in Christian
thought go back to this. I might say that all the theologians |
have named had correct thoughts, that their theology was true,
that there was not heresy in the one and orthodoxy in the other,
but that all of them are caught in the philosophical circle and
pose metaphysical problems. All seek an answer by way of on-
tological thinking. All regard the biblical text or known reve-
lation as points of departure for philosophy, whether by
translation into philosophical terms or as references of thought.
They had intellectual, metaphysical, and epistemological ques-
tions, etc., and they adduced the biblical text with a view to
providing a system of answers to their questions. They used the
biblical text to meet their own needs instead of listening to what
it really was (even Calvin, alas!).
In other words, once the transition was made from history
to philosophy, all that they said was completely correct and true.
They expressed a profound and authentic faith marked by a
concern for truth. Yet it was all completely falsified by the initial
transition. This is why the deviations were stronger than the
truth that they retained. Very soon they forgot the essential
point, that God does not reveal by means of a philosophical
system or a moral code or a metaphysical construction. He enters
human history and accompanies his people. The Hebrew Bible
(even in the wisdom books) is not a philosophical construction
or a system of knowledge. It is a series of stories that are not
myths intended to veil or unveil objective and abstract truths.
These stories are one history, the history of the people of God,
the history of God’s agreements and disagreements with this
people, the history of loyalty and disobedience. There is nothing
else but history, temporal (not eternal) history, lay (not sacred)
history, a history that tells us that God is with and for us, but
that does not speak about God in himself, or provide any theory
about God. Like all human histories, the Bible is a book that
is full of questions but never gives any answers. Or rather, the
answer, too, is included in the history, and it has to do with us.
Even the parts of the Hebrew Bible that seem more disem-
bodied, such as the law, the statutes, and the legal formulations,
still belong to the history. The law is never eternal or absolute.
It is always bound to a given history. This book offers us eternal
laws expressing the will of God, yet laws that are always histor-
ical. There is a central truth, which consists of the words, such
as the ten commandments; but these are not true in themselves
like objective and neutral scientific laws. No matter who teaches
them, scientific laws remain the same because they are external
and can be passed on like a parcel to those who listen. Biblical
law, however, is true only because it is God who speaks it. It
draws its truth from God.” If we detach it from the speaker, it
is no more than a subject for discussion with some acceptable
elements.
This is why this law does not fall from heaven like the
golden plates of the celebrated J. Smith. It is given in the course
of an election and liberation as the attestation of a covenant.
It cannot be separated from this series of events. The law is the
point of the covenant and the starting point of a new history.
It is never a sort of frozen code abstracted from existence. One
can never make of it a legal system apart from the living, moving,
and actual presence of him who calls himself the living God. But
life can never be made into scientific doctrine and knowledge.
This aspect continues and gains added emphasis with Jesus.
To do his work God does not send a book of metaphysics
or a sacred book of Gnostic revelations or a complete episte-
mological system or a perfected wisdom. He sends a man. In
relation to him stories are told again that constitute a history.
Even those who, like Paul and James, are more theoreticians
than historians carefully preserve the historical element as the
touchstone of authenticity. All that they write has to do exclu-
sively with the history of Jesus and of those whom he summons
to faith. The greatest theologian, John, in his Gospel as well as
in his Epistles and Revelation, always expresses his theology as
2. This is why B.-H. Lévy’s view is simply absurd when he exalts the
law and ignores God.
THE CHIEF FORMS 25
gaa
a history. In this regard the last book refers to a history that is

not the truth but the only possible framework in which to under-
stand and express the will of God. This is the mode that God
has chosen to reveal himself to us. But we seize it all and com-
pletely change the framework so as to bring in our own system
of questions and expressions. I am not saying that this was fated.
It was accidental.
Hebrew thought was sown in a field nourished by Greek
thought and Roman law.* There was a need to translate the
history into terms that the Greco-Roman world could under-
stand, that is, into philosophical and legal terms. The Torah
became the divine equivalent of the law of the Twelve Tables.
God’s revelation became the climax of the teaching of Socrates.
What resulted was of decisive importance. The Bible was inter-
preted by the intellectual tools of Greek philosophy. Instead of
3. He does perfectly one of the things we mentioned in the Introduc-

tion, using and reorienting Gnostic ideas in such a way as to rob them of their
pretension and make them serve to explicate God’s historical incarnation in
Jesus Christ.
4. A familiar example of the mutation to which revelation was actually
subjected is its contamination by the Greek idea of the immortality of the
soul. I will briefly recall it. In Jewish thought death is total. There is no
immortal soul, no division of body and soul. Paul’s thinking is Jewish in this
regard. The soul belongs to the “psychical” realm and is part of the flesh. The
body is the whole being. In death, there is no separation of body and soul.
The soul is as mortal as the body. But there is a resurrection. Out of the
nothingness that human life becomes, God creates anew the being that was
dead. This is a creation by grace; there is no immortal soul intrinsic to us.
Greek philosophy, however, introduces among theologians the idea of the
immortal soul. The belief was widespread in popular religion and it was inte-
grated into Christianity. But it is a total perversion. Everything is not now
dependent on the grace of God, and assurance of immortality comes to be
evaluated by virtues and works. All Christian thinking is led astray by this
initial mutation that comes through Greek philosophy and Near Eastern cults.
An ardent work brings to light this type of deformation. Louis Rougier, in his
L’Astronomie et Religion en Occident (Paris: PUF, 1980), shows how belief in the
soul’s celestial immortality arose in the second half of the fifth century B.C. on
the basis of astronomy. Pythagorean astronomy radically transformed the idea
of the destiny of the soul held by Mediterranean peoples. For the notion of a
vital breath that dissipates at death, for belief in a survival of shades wandering
about in the subterranean realm of the dead, it substitutes the notion of a soul
of celestial substance exiled in this world. This idea completely contaminates
biblical thinking, gradually replaces the affirmation of the resurrection, and
transforms the kingdom of the dead into the kingdom of God.
listening to the text as it was, theologians tried to draw from it

a coherent philosophical system. It was put in the framework of
a Platonic or an Aristotelian or any other system. Whether the
system came from Heraclitus or Epicurus made no difference. It
all came to the same thing. The biblical stories were treated as
myths from which one had to draw some abstract, universal
“thought.”
Some will tell me that we have no option but to use our
available tools of knowledge even to understand a history. This
is true. But I reply that Hebrew thought had its own tools of
knowledge that are fully set forth in the language. We should
bow and submit and convert to these instead of forcing God’s
revelation into the strait-jacket of Greco-Roman thinking, in-
stead of putting it on this bed of Procrustes, in this cage of tigers.
To convert! This great word has been diluted. The people
of the third century and later have been converted to Christian-
ity in morality and religion, but they have kept intact their mode
of thinking. Conversion is needed in the mode of thinking, too.
When Jesus, following the Old Testament commandment, said
that we must love God with all our mind, this must have con-
founded the philosophers. How do we love God with our mind?
How do we subordinate our thinking to a revelation of love, of
God’s love? This runs contrary to every objective and coherent
philosophical endeavor. There is nothing coherent about love
and life. This ought to have alerted the theologians sharply, but
they preferred to put love in their systems. Plato had already
done it. But how did they fail to see that if God had wanted to
give us a philosophy he would have given us a coherent book
and not the vital incoherence of the Bible? If he had put himself
in the domain of knowledge, he would have expressed his Word
scientifically.
Now metaphysics, ethics, and law have radically trans-
formed the meaning of revelation even though formally what is
advanced seems to be right, the exposition is faithful, and the
interpreters are serious and devout. The problem does not lie
with their faith or piety or intelligence but with an integral
falsity of meaning. Thus the liberator God of grace rapidly be-
comes the pater familias of Roman law. The Romans translate
Jesus’ “my Father” as pater, with the implication of the pater
familias, and family law and Roman myths enter by this open
door. Again in this world that Rome has contaminated with
THE CHIEF FORMS 27
legal thinking, not only is the method of reasoning of Greek

philosophy used, but the (clever and rigorous) method of exe-
gesis of the Roman jurists is also used in exposition of the biblical
texts and in elimination of their discordant elements. Instead of
the essentially a-theological (I do not say atheistic) presentation
of both the Old Testament and the gospel, we have science,
inquiry, validation, problematics, philosophy. The content of
revelation is inevitably thought of in an alien form. The “sig-
nifying” element is changed. A theology is elaborated.5 In my
view this is the first factor in subversion. But there are many
others.
Another factor of deformation was Christianity’s very suc-
cess. This success rested for its part on the Jewish dispersion. At
this time the Jewish people formed an important part of the
population of the empire. There was a Jewish colony in every
large town. It was in these colonies that the first Christian apos-
tles and missionaries worked. There they could spread the gospel
with success although also encountering opposition. We know
that the gospel was quickly received by the many poor, slaves,
urban proletariat, etc.® All the histories of the period stress the
existence of a great religious hunger in the empire. The tradi-
tional religions had collapsed, and the surge of changes in the
Mediterranean world necessitated a religion with a universal ten-
dency. The imperial cult could not offer an authentic or gen-
erally satisfying religion that would meet the need for all. It
succeeded politically, but that was not enough. Everywhere a
new type of religion was spreading in the form of the mystery
religions with their emblematic and metaphorical theology, their
celebration of rites of purification, their phenomena of ecstasy
5. I ask the reader not to make me say what I am not saying. I am not
setting theological thought, as bad, in antithesis to pietism or spontaneous
faith or a nonintellectual faith, as good. I like some theologians, and what
they have done is necessary. I am simply stressing the specific danger posed by
the entry of philosophy into Christianity, and the disasters that followed theo-
logical exuberance from the third to the sixteenth century.
6. It is also possible, in exceptional cases, that women in high society
were converted to Christianity. One might mention Pomponia Graecina under
Nero. This seems likely enough at a time of great religious curiosity in the
search for spiritual experiences. J. Zeiller has noted that the empire might
have had a Christian princeps in Flavius Clemens, the nephew of Flavia Dom-
itilla (who was certainly a Christian), and a cousin of Titus.
and visions. . . . Some see Near Eastern influence here, but I

take the opposite view. Near Eastern religions spread where this
need was present, this appeal, this search for spiritual and mys-
tical novelty, this abandoning of the ancient myths, this sense
of the inadequacy of ancient rites dating back some five or six
hundred years.
No longer believing in Jupiter, people were ready to open
themselves to Mithras, Orphism, Eleusis, the new Diana. Mith-
raism spread in an astonishing way among the military. A factor
here was that soldiers went throughout the empire from garrison
to garrison. Those who had lived in the Near East were bound
to have come under its influence and to be affected by these
new phenomena that were springing up on every hand. Chris-
tianity contributed its own impulse to this vast current. It was
yet another new religion. It was close enough to the mysteries.
It talked about the incarnation of a God, the resurrection of a
man, a millennial kingdom, purging by shed blood, baptism,
feeding on the deity. I am putting familiar things in the religious
vocabulary of the time. It was from this standpoint and in these
terms that Christianity was heard and understood by the thou-
sands who were in search of spiritual novelty, moral renewal,
and fusion with God.
Christianity, then, spread along with the mystery religions,
and by way of counteraction mystery gained an entry into Chris-
tian theology: The concept of mystery, whether as an inexpli-
cable reality or as effusion in God, is in the main alien to the
Jewish expression of revelation. We find it in Paul and especially
in Revelation, but to denote essentially either the hidden God
or the incarnation. In any case, it has nothing whatever to do
with mysteries that are celebrated. Ambiguity arose, however,
for mystery may denote both what is inexplicable and in its
pagan sense the celebration of an ecstatic if not orgiastic com-
munion. The two senses are easily confused. The mystery reli-
gions are essentially religions of escape, and Christianity was
undoubtedly received also as a religion of escape from the world,
as a religion of compensation (either in festivals or in the world
to come) that leaves the world to its fate, that involves with-
drawal from it (hence ascetic tendencies, the hermits, etc.), but
that also leads to an acceptance of one’s own lot, whatever it
may be, without any attempt to change it, since there is always
a way out, a way of escape.
- THE CHIEF FORMS 29
The opium of the people; Christianity was never this in its
origins, but it took on this significance and function when it
was contaminated by the many religions of this type under whose
umbrella it spread. A religion of escape, we said. Now an essen-
tial point here is that escaping means abandoning the other great
religious style, that of gathering and unifying (re-ligare, to bind,
according to one dubious derivation). The traditional religions
that were being abandoned were “civic” religions, religions of
the city, whose aim was not merely to ensure individual salvation
or gratification but to unite the city, to give it social cohesion,
to establish consensus.
With the movement from the first century to the second,
the empire passed from the one religious type to the other. Op-
posing the world and rejecting the imperial religion, Christianity
profited greatly by the change. It did so all the more because
there spread generally through the empire not only a hunger for
salvation (which the claim of the Ptolemies to be Soter could
not satisfy) but also a vague sense of fear (to which several
literary testimonies bear witness). What appears is a religion that
is not one of fear but of grace, of joy, of liberation, of hope.
There is no doubt that this is how the first generations of Chris-
tians preached it. And this explains its success, its gaining of
adherents, of converts. Later many good intellectuals also ac-
cepted this gospel, and by the third century educated circles,
worldly women, and some of the elite who were interested in
new things began to show some concern for this new teaching,
this philosophy.
I do not think I am dishonoring the martyrs if I say that
it was not their virtue or heroism or sanctity alone that converted
the masses. If this had been the case, the history of the devel-
opment of Christianity would have been one of admirable con-
versions through a true preaching of the Word and the holy
martyrs, and we would not have had the dreadful reaction that
we are trying to understand. Alas, the process was all too human.
An interest developed, a surprise at certain genuine novelties in
blasé circles that were convinced of the vanity and futility of life
and politics and that suddenly found themselves in the presence
of a possible meaning and an unexplored avenue. Obviously
there were authentic conversions even in imperial families. But
I believe it to be incontestable that the curiosity that was then
the fashion also had an impact.
At the end of the third century Christianity became fash-

ionable. But this presupposed a movement of elucidation, of
general response. In effect, theology, instead of being content
to expound revelation, began to be interested in questions of all
kinds and to do philosophy. Thus it wanted, for example, to
show a correspondence between Seneca and St. Paul, etc. Dis-
cussing problems of the day was the price of success. Success was
achieved, but there then came what seems to have been the
inevitable and tragic reaction that whereas the good news had
first been published for its own sake with no concern for success,
now ineluctably success brought, as always, a desire for it from
which Christians were not exempt. The only reproach that one
can bring against them is that they were not aware of what was
happening, namely, that society was inverting Christianity in-
stead of being subverted by it.
They soon acquired a taste for success. Not, of course, worldly
success, the success that brought benefices and honors. But since
a growing number of men and women were joining them, why
not attribute this success to the will of God, and why not feel
summoned to profit by it? Had not Paul said: “Woe is me if I do
not preach the gospel”? Evangelism had at first been rigorous
and scrupulous, but now the goal was numbers. It was no longer
a question of one-by-one conversion, of house churches, but of
large gatherings. Why resist the urge for mass evangelism? Why
bother about the authenticity of the faith of the converts? Mass
baptisms began to take place.
During the third century the decisive change came. In the
primitive church personal conversion brought entry and presup-
posed preparatory training. When the church became an affair
of the masses, it became impossible to be sure of the authenticity
of each convert. The process reversed itself. People entered the
church first and then received the religious instruction that would
guarantee the seriousness of their faith. Entry into the church
was followed by spiritual training and the acquiring of knowl-
edge. The net had to be cast wide so as to bring in as many as
possible. But success put Christianity on a slippery slope. For
fundamentally, why wait for deliberate entry into the church?
Was it not just as simple to bring everybody in and then see to
their education? One is, from that moment, on the road of the
compelle intrare that Augustine made famous but that was in fact
the practice before him. We are back to the relation between
7S THE CHIEF FORMS 31
the church and the imperial power. This was the way of success.
We have to recognize that it alone strangely perverted the first
expressions of the incarnation of Christ in the church.
Success brought Christianity to the imperial family and the
governing elite. Constantine was “converted.” ... We shall
have to examine later thé political consequences of this conver-
sion and the subversion of Christianity by politics. What I want
to show here is that by a definitive link the acceptance of one
power or authority, alliance with one secular power, leads inev-
itably to a combination with every social force. We cannot go
into details. Not only the political world was converted to Chris-
tianity. When we talk of the elite we have to think also of the
wealthy in this society who were converted. I do not think we
can see in their conversion either Machiavellianism or the ac-
ceptance of an ideology that would reinforce their power. We
have to allow that the conversions were in good faith and even
to true faith. But we also have to consider the countereffect.
The adherence of the wealthy of the empire to Christianity
brings another relation to the powers. Not only does the relation
to politics change, but so does the general outlook on every kind
of power.
The wealthy who are converted (and I want to stress again
what seems to me to be the basic point that we must presuppose
their good faith) take the Christian message seriously and begin
to give. They unquestionably have a concern for the poor. Tra-
ditional histories are happy to record the many foundations of
the period that under Christian auspices care for the sick, the
poor, and abandoned children. Large gifts are also given to the
church itself, and involuntarily (for it did not have as yet a thirst
for riches) the church itself became progressively wealthy. It
made investments. It built new and sumptuous churches. It set
up monuments commemorating holy places. It produced the
well-known works of art of the fifth and sixth centuries. Whether
or not it so willed, the church became a power in the world of
money. It said little about it. Theologians continued to talk
about poverty and some of them condemned riches. But there
was a great misunderstanding about ends and means.
Since the money that accumulates in the church’s treasur-
ies serves to glorify God and support the poor, is it not good and
sanctified? Is not the only problem that of good use? From the
fourth century this view began to have in every area the destruc-
tive effects that continue to the present day. By the very fact of
wealth and numbers the original forms of the church, namely,
community of life and goods, began to disappear; they could not
continue. The extreme differences between social strata made
them impossible. The church solidifies. The fact of numbers, of
money that has to be managed, and of the relation to power
inevitably leads to the institution.
There is no need to ask when bishops appeared, or what
were their powers, or whether there were changes in their priv-
ileges, for the important thing is the fact of the organization
that develops by necessity and by contamination with imperial
institutions (evidently with a hierarchy). The transformation of
the church into an institution is the main fact that corresponds
to its growing wealth. Now this set of events produces a series
of extraordinary mutations in the form of the reduction of love
and grace at the expense of works. It is all very understandable.
Wealth makes possible the doing of good works, the keeping of
the commands of the gospel, the rendering of service, the display
of generosity (all of which represent great social advances com-
pared to the inability and lack of concern of paganism in the
social field). Are they not the mark or expression or indubitable
visible sign of love?
In the fourth and fifth centuries, then, we see a slide away
from love and grace to service and “social action.” But this
completely changes the Christian perspective. And it correlates
with the rise of the institution, the break between a clergy of
priests and a laypeople, and the dominance within the church
of the rich and powerful. A break also comes between those who
show a concern for others, who render service, who give expres-
sion to charity, and those with whom they are concerned, who
are the occasion of charity, to whom they render service. This
was the real break in the church. How, under these conditions,
could it maintain a theology or even more so a practice of non-
power? Certainly everywhere in the church there are examples
of the rich who give up all things, who become poor for God.
They did exist. But in doing this, they either chose the hermit
life and withdrew from the life of the church, or they were
canonized and held up as miraculous instances of sanctity, that
is, they were excluded from the concrete life of the church, set
outside the church as “saints” whom, of course, there was no
question of ordinary people ever imitating.
af THE CHIEF FORMS 33
How could the church survive if everybody became poor?

These were obviously examples meant to be admired. The act
of canonization itself demonstrates that these are exceptions not
meant for ordinary believers. Ordinary believers should follow
a path that conforms to what is natural and normal. Hence
theology becomes increasingly a theology of nature and moves
further apart from a theology of grace. The hard question put by
Jesus: “What more are you doing than others?” is obscured. In
accord with society as a whole, theology enters into a search for
normality, for obedience to the “laws of nature.” The field had
been well prepared by prior trends. I do not say that there was
corruption of the first “ideal” of the church. There was a simple
flow, a clear play of minor changes that took place with no evil
intent. The leaders were not Machiavellian. The rich and well-
provided did not confiscate the Christian truth that belonged to
the poor. They were just as devout as the Magi kings. But when
riches are present, it is only with difficulty that the poor main-
tain their place.
We are familiar with a similar situation, where there is one
intellectual in a group of people who are not accustomed to
handling ideas. It is the intellectual who speaks and holds the
floor. Our only reproach against the church leaders and theo-
logians is that they set about justifying and legitimating the
powers by trying to show that there is no contradiction, partic-
ularly between wealth and Jesus Christ, using the (undeniable)
strand in the Old Testament that treats riches as a tangible proof
of divine blessing. The worm was in the fruit. The theological
betrayal consisted of demonstrating that this was not a worm.
But now it all held together. Once a stitch broke, however,
everything began to unravel. Once the poor were, of course, still
well received and supported and served in the church, but after
the manner we have said, all that represented weakness or in-
feriority (physical, social, etc.) was put in second place.
Women are the most spectacular instance of this. After a
period of independence that came with the spread of Christian-
ity, they were relegated to a lower order. This is all the more
interesting because the gospel and the first church were never
hostile to women nor treated them as minors, and the situation
of women in the Roman empire (particularly in the East) was
relatively favorable. In spite of this, when Christianity became
a power or authority, this worked against women. A strange
perversion, yet fully understandable when we allow that women

represent precisely the most innovative elements in Christianity:
grace, love, charity, a concern for living creatures, nonviolence,
an interest in little things, the hope of new beginnings—the
very elements that Christianity was setting aside in favor of glory
and success.
I do not think that this was based on the two or three texts
from Paul that are usually taken to be misogynist and antifem-
inist. Christianity took this course by reason of the mutation
that led it to adopt the values of conquest, power, and domi-
nation (in a good cause!). Since then, women have been de-
barred from participation in the spiritual life and in the truth of
Christ. Biblical texts (divorced from their context and above all
from counterbalancing passages) were then utilized to justify this
attitude. The choice of values did not result from a philosophical
attitude nor an ideological decision but from the material fact
of the acquisition of riches, which now directed the church at
its very heart. This led to a rereading of the situation, of the
vocation that revelation affirmed in relation to women.
This movement coincided with the extreme degradation of
manners. Demands increased as the church charged itself with
the moralization of the empire. Moral dissolution had in fact
proceeded apace, but rigor was all the greater in respect of women.
Setting aside the true message, the church looked for texts that
might justify moral rigor. The procedure was the more violent
as the freedom affirmed for women and the place accorded to
them were the higher. The masculine reaction took place on the
field of a rivalry of the sexes. Nevertheless—and it is here alone
that the traditional criticism is in place—the more feminine
liberty was suppressed, the more women were accused (of being
the temptresses of Genesis, etc.), the more they were reduced
to silence, and the more, reciprocally, their ideal role was ex-
alted, the model was achieved one time only. The cult of the
Virgin flourishes under the repression, veiling it and giving men
a good conscience. The cult of the Virgin does not prove that
women were placed too high. The exact opposite is the case. It
plays the role of an ideology and conceals the mechanism whereby
women are despoiled, treated as minors, and negated. The model
is perfect because it is unique. Because no other woman can
approximate it, all others, in the name of the Virgin’s excel-
lence, must be reduced to tutelage. Yet the cult of the Virgin
) THE CHIEF FORMS 65
serves to show in what high estimation woman as such is held.

We have here the well-known mechanism of the ideal whereby
the more perfect the model is, the more it authorizes the rejec-
tion of the concrete.
Success and the alliance with social categories of power
initiated a process whereby the church became an affair of the
masses. Jesus told his disciples that they were a little flock. All
his comparisons tend to show that the disciples will necessarily
be small in number and weak: the leaven in the dough, the salt
in the soup, the sheep among wolves, and many other meta-
phors. Jesus does not seem to have had a vision of a triumphant
and triumphal church encircling the globe. He always depicts
for us a secret force that modifies things from within, that acts
spiritually, that shows us community, unable to be anything else
but community.
The kingdom of heaven is the little grain, the seed buried
in the soil, the treasure hidden in a field. If as God’s kingdom
it is called upon to encircle the whole globe, this is not its
present role, nor that of the church on earth. But the situation
is now the very opposite. It is no longer possible to live in
community, not merely for the reasons adduced above, but sim-
ply because of the numbers involved. The little flock yields to
the masses. How can masses of this kind conceivably be orga-
nized as a community? How can they conceivably have a faith
that is personal, profound, militant, and enlightened? How can
they conceivably abandon their ancient prejudices and lifestyles
and beliefs?
I cannot refrain from referring here to a passage in Kier-
kegaard’s “Instant,” which is decisive in this regard.” For he
shows that the success which destroys the church has not just
a sociological root but an essential theological root. The state,
he argues, bears a direct relation to numbers. When a state
decays, numbers decline and the state disappears. The whole
concept of it is void. The relation of Christianity to numbers is
different. A single Christian gives it reality. Christianity bears
indeed an inverse relation to numbers. When all become Chris-
tians, the concept of Christianity is void. This concept is indeed
a polemical one. One can be a Christian only in opposition.
When opposition is suppressed, there is no more sense in saying
7. “The Instant,” 5,5.

“Christian.” Christendom has astutely abolished Christianity by

making us all Christians. The concept “Christian,” then, bears
an inverse relation to numbers, whereas that of the state bears
a direct relation. Nevertheless, the two concepts have been com-
bined, to the great advantage of nonsense and the priests. In
Christendom there is not the slightest idea of what Christianity
is. People cannot see or understand that Christianity has been
abolished by its propagation. Again, history probably does not
offer any other example of a religion being abolished by reason
of its prospering. (All of this from Kierkegaard.)
Now from the fourth century onward, belonging to Chris-
tianity became the main trend. The words and teachings of
priests and bishops were blindly accepted. People attempted to
live their lives in some conformity with the commands that were
given by the church and that very quickly became pure and
simple morality. All this is plain.® By way of comparison, I think
of the Trades Union movement when, in 1936, it was faced with
the sudden entry of two million new members. How to incor-
porate them? How to verify their seriousness? How to know the
level of their political education? How to be certain they were
truly militant? The situation was much the same as in the fourth-
century church. What was the result? A mode of church life was
undoubtedly found that was suitable for the reception of a grow-
ing number of believers. The church of the masses began.
Witness had to be borne that these people were truly Chris-
tians, and for this purpose the ceremony of baptism sufficed.
There might not have been a living, committed, personal faith,
but at root joining the church and following its way were an
adequate attestation of faith. In every sense it was impossible to
keep up the great movement of inner and outer freedom initiated
by Jesus. The proclamation “You are free through the Holy Spirit,”
and Paul’s statement “Everything is lawful,” were fine for a small,
elite group in which everyone knew everyone else. But when it
was a matter of thousands of new converts whose depth of faith
could not be known, how could they be told that they were
8. In this respect Christianity follows the same sociological path as

other elite movements when they begin to attract a great number of adherents
and to achieve public stability. One might cite Russian Communism or more
recently the Italian Red Brigades (see the illuminating articles by Philippe
Pons, “La faillite des Brigades rouges,” Le Monde, March 1982).
ee THE CHIEF FORMS oy
completely free to choose their way of life and decide their own
conduct? They had to be incorporated and put under the au-
thority of a head of each group, and the more numerous they
became, the more sacred and complex this authority had to be.
Hierarchy could not be avoided if only because the number of
priests officiating among the groups became so great. They could
not be trained seriously. The depth of their faith could not be
verified. Their aptitude for directing believers and teaching bib-
lical truth correctly remained in doubt. Ecclesiastical superiors
were thus necessary to supervise, control, and instruct the priests.
The glorious freedom that is in Christ could not be tolerated.
It was replaced by clear and strict commandments.
I am not enunciating here an abstract and theoretical view
of things. The danger lurking in that freedom had been fully
experienced and proved by the end of the second century. When
we look at the astonishing list of innovations that flourish in
Christian circles from that time onward, the most foolish lucu-
brations, the most absurd beliefs (of which there is an admirable
survey in Flaubert’s La Testament de sainte Antoine), the most
aberrant conduct on the basis of Paul’s statement, the wildest
interpretations of the gospel, all deriving from spiritual liberty
and the inner illumination of the Holy Spirit as a result of the
incursion of the masses who had already participated in the mys-
teries, we can fully understand why devout Christians reacted
with horror, appealed to authority, used the term “heretic”? for
those who could not truly call themselves Christians and were
thus excluded from the church, and preached morality in the
place of freedom.
In the same way, it became necessary to replace the out-
pouring of the Spirit for preaching, prayer, biblical study, and
the celebration of the eucharist according to well-established
rites. It became necessary to set up some kind of order in the
confusion by introducing liturgical prayers and reducing the place
of a free exposition of the Bible in favor of liturgies. The more
9. Those who accuse the church of being a machine for the production
of heretics, or who accuse it of condemning freedom of thought, have no idea
at all of the historical reality of the explosion of stupid, erotic, and frenzied
inventions in the church between the third and the tenth centuries. The worst
came under cover of the Holy Spirit. A level of horror was achieved that is
hard to reach. Prior to Christ, the Romans touched it, e.g., in the Bacchanalia.
ignorant the lower clergy were, the more necessary it was not to
allow them to speak freely but to make them the officiants of a
set cult created by others who had a better awareness of the faith
and were trying to live in a stricter fashion. Morality and ritual
are the great means of defense against the perversion of all order
that resulted from the new entry of the masses into the church
with no authenticity of faith.
No one considered that the remedy would provoke another
perversion of revelation, a subversion of established Christianity
into the very opposite of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.
Although it was the opposite of this revelation, the subversion
was not scandalous from a human standpoint, and it thus ap-
peared to be reasonable, reassuring, and acceptable by current
moral standards. It was agreed upon. But it also put an end to
everything scandalous, dangerous, revolutionary, and explosive
in the truth of Jesus Christ and the liberty of the Spirit. The
way chosen by the church authorities in their attempt to parry
perversion by the masses was that of regulation—when in fact
the more difficult course should have been taken, that of op-
posing the holy folly of the cross to the perverse waywardness
of heretics. The latter course would have involved risks too great
in view of the dullness of the mass of converts. If the number
of Christians had remained small, I think it might have been
possible. Masses, however, mean order and morality.
With this first result we have not exhausted the effects of
success. We have said that the masses entered the church with
what they were and believed. They did not put off deep and
often unconscious millennial beliefs at a stroke with their bap-
tism and “conversion.”!° Pagans came into the church with their
paganism. They had their own images of God; Zeus, Jupiter (the
father of the gods—how easy to make this transition), or
Odin... , and the abstraction of the God of Jesus Christ was
too difficult to handle. They furnished the God of Abraham and
Jesus, whose very name cannot be pronounced, with various
faces and representations that derived from paganism. There
took place what has been called the paganizing of the church.
10. We may recall the entry of fetishist beliefs into the African churches.
On the survival of pagan rites and festivals in Christianity, see Mircea Eliade,
Histoire des croyances et des idées religieuses (Paris: Payot, 1983), 3:304; this work
offers some little-known and striking examples.
iy) THE CHIEF FORMS 39
A well-known fact was the adoption by the church of little

local deities that could not be banished from everyday piety.
The saint known as Genis, Genies, or Genes is simply the local
Genius, the god of the place of habitation who gives daily pro-
tection. Hastily Christianized populations could not be per-
suaded to give up this deity. It was thought best to baptize him
and make him a saint recognized by the church. The same pro-
cess applied to many pagan beliefs and forms. As our example
shows, the multiplication of saints was practical. People were
not asked to renounce their beliefs. These beliefs were embodied
into the corpus of Christianity, which became a kind of recep-
tacle for different religions. This is not syncretism; we shall meet
- that further on. It is just that from every standpoint these saints,
or semideities, were useful as mediators. It was thought that
coming to faith in Jesus Christ would be easier by way of belief
in these baptized local gods. At the same time, the process dem-
onstrated the triumph of Christian truth over these lesser deities.
A crushing Christian triumphalism developed. Christians
took over pagan temples and turned them into churches, also
confiscating their endowments. Good pagans who were used to
going to a particular temple, such as that of Diana or Apollo,
could still go there, but now for celebration of the mass of Jesus
Christ. The change was probably not of major importance in
their eyes. Christianity also made its way by force. A statue of
St. Peter and a cross were placed on all the ancient monuments
of Rome. The countereffect was the paganizing of the church’s
Christianity. The apostles and prophets became priests in the
most sociologically religious sense of the term, that is, successors
of the pontiffs,!! the Salians, the Arvales, the sacrificing priests,
the vestals, the augurs, the flamens, etc. In the eyes of the
people they had the same functions. The church adapted itself
integrally to the pagan world. It accepted its forms and even its
morality.
This brought with it two serious consequences. First, Chris-
tianity became what one might call the structural ideology of
this particular society. It ceased to be an explosive ferment call-
ing everything into question in the name of the truth that is in
Jesus Christ, in the name of the incarnation. It gave a new basis
11. And the appalling adoption of the term sovereign pontiff marks the
juncture at which the clergy begins to follow directly the pagan priesthood.
and vitality to what was in difficulties in the empire. It restored

the taste for life and culture. The problem is not merely that of
the transformation of Christianity into a state religion but of the
diffusion of this faith that has stopped being a faith and has
become a collective ideology, a kind of manifestation of thought
that collects all the commonplaces, the legends, the miracles,
the “prophecies,” the apocalypses, the thaumaturgies, and for-
mulates for the people a facile, moralistic, and constructive set
of beliefs.
It serves as a framework and mold for individuals as well
as for institutions. It has structural force because the empire did
indeed need to gain its second wind and it found it here. But
by this very fact Christianity suffers a radical change of character.
Its prophetic proclamation, welcomed at first among the reli-
gions of escape, changes into a religion that gives cohesion to
society. When there was certainty that it could become this,
that it could take over the traditional role of religions, its victory
was assured over the ancient religions, which were decadent,
and over the mystery religions, which were taking their place.
Christianity thus became the most solid buttress of the Roman
world, and it was not at all abnormal that its main centers were
in the capital cities of the empire.
The second result of the entry of the masses was that when
Christianity became a religion of the masses, and the church
and the elite could be sure of keeping back the truth, the whole
population had to become Christian. I do not have forced con-
versions in mind here, but another aspect that has received less
attention. We have said that it was impossible to know the
truth, to fathom it and to discern it. Let us leave on one side
what was done about heretics; this was an intellectual matter,
not a matter of faith. What control could there be over those
who were not intellectuals? Only over their morals or lifestyle.
We can thus understand why importance was increasingly given
to confession, to auricular confession, then to a codification of
morality, of faults and penalties (as in the Irish Penitentials of
the sixth century, which enjoyed considerable success). Now
that Christianity had been transformed into a religion, a religion
that gives social cohesion, that is, a moral system, it was nec-
essary to see if those who had passed through baptism, but about
whose true relationship with God no assurance was possible,
THE CHIEF FORMS 4]
were conducting themselves in a manner that could now be

qualified as Christian.
We thus arrive at an astounding situation that has lasted
some fifteen centuries and is only just beginning to be ques-
tioned. People were being required to act as if they were true
Christians when very likely they were not. This is the very op-
posite of the biblical revelation. Here there is knowledge of the
revealed God, faith in his love, acceptance of his will; and only
on this basis is there an attempt to live in a way that corresponds
to the love of God and his will. But there is no formulation of
a “Christian” morality that is independent of faith. The Bible
decrees no universal morality. It summons to conversion, and it
- then postulates a desire to live in harmony with God. Constantly
in what became Christendom, however, an effort is made to
achieve objective conduct without reference to the spiritual life,
without the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ. Once this enor-
mity was invented, the next step was the intellectual construc-
tion of an identity between Christian morality and natural
morality. This was the extreme point in the perversion of rev-
elation. Such, in my view, are the consequences of trying to
induct the masses into a relationship with God that was possible
only for a little flock.!?
We now come to the final item in this general inquiry into
the subversion of X. Apart from intellectual, social, and political
influences, the revealed deposit contained within itself a number
of germs that could give birth to perversion. In a sense the issue
is a return to doctrine and theology. Very quickly the church
found intolerable and inapplicable features in what Jesus Christ
demanded and proclaimed. Let us simply take two themes. First,
he tells us to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. But
how can anyone take this impossibility seriously? How can we
accept the fact that from conversion, with the help of the Holy
Spirit, sin will disappear and perfection can be achieved? Again,
Jesus says: “Go, sell all your goods, give them to the poor, and
then come and follow me.” How are we to take this? All of us,
12. To avoid confusion, I may point out that in saying this, and in
saying that following Jesus can be only for the few, I am saying that faith in
X entails an elite, but not a social or political elite, as we see from the first
recruitment of the church and that of movements of return to revealed truth,
which have always recruited their members from the people.
when we read such statements by Jesus, recognize their impos-

sibility. There is a limit that we absolutely cannot pass, not even
the greatest saints. Jesus is the divine limit. Imitation of him is
not possible.
The way opens, then, for the sapping work of theologians
of all kinds, then of lawyers, in an attempt to explain that Jesus
wanted to say something other than what is written, or that
these commandments are meant only for a spiritual elite and are
simply counsels for others, or that the order given to the rich
young ruler was meant for him alone. In other words, the texts
have been wrested in all kinds of ways so that we should not be
driven into a corner or forced to recognize the distance between
God and us. The dispute about the lapsed illustrates this. He-
brews says that if we have received grace and then begin to sin
again, no salvation is possible; we face eternal damnation. Should
the church exclude all those who have committed only one sin?
Might there not be some accommodation? Should not a dis-
tinction be made between sin and sin? etc.
Freedom offers another example. Jesus and Paul tell us that
those who are led by the Spirit are completely free in every
respect.!> But in experience Paul was already attacking the Co-
rinthians for their terrible misuse of this freedom. The freedom
acquired in Christ presupposes perfect self-control, wisdom,
communion with God, and love. It is an absolutely superhuman
risk. 14 It devastates us by demanding the utmost in consecration.
Free, we are totally responsible. We constantly have to choose.
We are in constant danger of corruption. Freedom is indeed
intolerable. The work of expositors and moralists thus begins.
Freedom in Christ will very soon be forgotten. This is very re-
markable to me. They begin by analyzing and reducing freedom.
In the first centuries the intellectuals and theologians simply
pass it by in silence. They talk a lot about faith and love and
virtues. When Greek thought invades the church, they redis-
cover freedom in the terms of this philosophy but with no reference
to the great proclamation of the Bible. Among the Romans they
then begin to formulate it in legal terms.
They were right in their analyses to recognize that freedom
13. J. Ellul, L’Ethique de la liberté, vol. 1 (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1973);

ET The Ethics of Freedom (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976).
14. B. Charbonneau, Je fus (1980).
THE CHIEF FORMS 43
is not license, that it ends where the freedom of others begins,

that it is not meant to destroy or corrupt. Later we find it re-
appearing as the political or economic liberty of liberalism, and
there is always the metaphysical question, the theater of elegant
debates. But none of this has anything whatever to do with the
freedom of the Christian, the freedom of the Holy Spirit, the
freedom gained with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
This was intolerable; it was set aside, and when Luther resur-
rected it,!> it was soon enough banished, excluded, moralized,
and subdued by the churches of the reformation.
Perfect freedom, spiritual as well as political or social, free-
dom because liberation by God from new bondage is the supreme
mutation that was not just proclaimed or ideologized but achieved,
is accomplished in us by the death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ; in him fate ceases to exist and we are radically free. All
this is contained already in the first act of liberation from Egypt.
It is the constant promise of the God of Abraham. It is effected
in the incarnation. But it is strictly intolerable in the fullness
of its implications. It is psychologically unbearable. It carries
frightening social risks and is politically insulting to every form
of power. It was not possible. On every social level and in every
culture, people have found it impossible to take up this freedom
and accept its implications. This is the basic impossibility, the
unanimous refusal of all people, which has resulted in the rejec-
tion of Christian freedom.
A risk with no cover, a joyful and perilous acrobatic feat
with no net! It was not what we wanted. This is the pure and
simple reason for the rejection of freedom. But since it is at the
same time acquired, a tragic conflict develops between effective
freedom (transformed into an ideal or formula or so-called need)
and the refusal to accept the risk of it. This is the conflict that
gives rise to the incoherences of the Western world with its
unceasing oscillation between dictatorship and revolution. And
it was found in the very reality of God’s revelation itself.
Another germ of subversion took on a character that is in
essential contradiction with revelation. We have to recognize
that everything in revelation is formulated in antithetical fashion
(in a dialectical way from certain standpoints). It unites two
contrary truths that are truth only as they come together. I say
15. M. Luther, The Freedom of a Christian Man.

advisedly that everything that the Bible presents takes this form.
We never find a single, logically connected truth followed by
another truth deduced from it. There is no logic in the biblical
revelation. There is no “either-or,” only “both-and.” We find
this on every level.
Luther, for example, will express our human situation be-
fore God by the formula: Semper simul peccator et justus. Always
at the same time we are sinners and justified. There are not two
stages, first that of sinners, then that of the righteous by justi-
fication. Paul, too, says about salvation that we are saved by
grace through faith but we are then to work out our salvation
(and he gives various admonitions showing how the saved are
to live). This is contradictory. We are tempted to say that either
we are saved by grace and our efforts are worthless, or we are
saved by our works and we do not see how grace does anything.
Similarly, God is undoubtedly almighty and we are free.
Unbelievers can never understand this. If God is almighty, they
think, then we are not free. Or we are free and God is nothing.
I could give multiple examples of this kind, but will stop at just
one. God is absolutely transcendent. He is in heaven and we are
on earth. In a radical sense he is unknowable. No one can mount
up to heaven, no one can see him, no one can know anything
about him. Only a negative theology is possible. We can say
only what God is not. Nothing more. He is the Wholly Other
whom we cannot know. There is nothing in common between
him and his creation. He is sovereignly himself. He shares his
glory with no one. Yet at the very same time he is the God who
enters human history, who accompanies Abraham and Moses
and his people, who is very close and intimate, who speaks with
us, who imparts to us by revelation and love all that we can
bear. As Barth says, he is the hidden God precisely in that he
reveals himself. And he reveals himself as the hidden God. At
the extreme limit he incarnates himself wholly as man. He is
fully and totally present in this Jesus Christ. He is not somewhere
else. All that we can know of God is there. We do not find only
a bit of God in Jesus. Everything is there, vowed and devoted
to us. Humanity is the condition of God, in Vahanian’s phrase.
This is contradictory? We have to realize that everything in
the Bible is contradictory. Yet there is revelation only as the
contradictions are held together. God the Wholly Other is in-
carnate in a man. He is still the Wholly Other. And we have
is THE CHIEF FORMS 45
to understand—lI repeat this because it is essential—that the

truth is made up of the actual contradictions. Each aspect of
truth is true only because it is linked to its radical opposite. If
I say that God is transcendent and stop there, this is not the
biblical God. If I say only that Jesus Christ is God, this is not
the gospel. This way of speaking is basically contrary or contra-
dictory to the mind. I do not say the human mind, but at any
rate that of the Western world. From six centuries before Christ
we have been functioning in the mode of “either-or.” What is
black is not white. What is true is not false. What is act is not
thought, etc. We think analytically with an admirable rigor. We
sometimes forget great syntheses. But (I would say almost on-
tologically) we are unable to accept the existence of opposites
or to hold together two ends of a chain that are logically exclusive.
As, then, our mode of thinking has prevailed and been put
to work on the biblical text, from the second century A.D. we
have begun to divide, to separate, to put in small intellectual
compartments, to classify, and to order. On the sole pretext
of resolving contradictions we have enclosed ourselves in
impossibilities that the theological mind has sought to avoid
with unparalleled subtlety. Unconsciously but all the more se-
riously, in splitting the two aspects, we have rendered each part
false and deceptive.
If I say that God is transcendent, this is false. If I say that
God is Jesus (and there is no other), this is false. A first result
of this dissolution is the multiplication of heresies, that is, of
the condemnation of those who stand for one aspect by those
who stand for the other. But the general consequences have
been extreme and tragic for the Western world. The absolute
affirmation that God is the Wholly Other, that he is so tran-
scendent as to be a complete stranger to us, leads either to the
terror-stricken crushing of those who dare not even live before
God or to their total independence.
If God is in heaven and so distant that he is concerned
about nothing, then we who are on earth can do as we like. We
shall find this when we go on to speak about the desacralization
of nature and living creatures by Christianity, the placing of
everything religious and sacred in heaven so that nothing of it
remains on earth. The no less trenchant affirmation that Jesus
is everything, and the attempt to set the terrible God of the Old
Testament in the midst of primitive obscurantism, leads to the
different error of such banalities and familiarities as the “good

Lord,” “little Jesus,” the “heart of Jesus,” etc. Everything divine
is ruled out, and Jesus becomes the Big Brother, the Good Ex-
ample, the model of moral achievement, and nowadays the bril-
liant revolutionary who took irreplaceable action against the
ruling classes. All this is absurd. We thus perceive a conflict
between the mode of revelation and the most deep-seated ten-
dency of the Western mind to set everything in a clear light.
The subversion is the same as the preceding one. We cannot
accept the specificity of this revelation. We manipulate it so as
to make it acceptable and accessible. In so doing, we invert it.
Finally, I will take a third germ of subversion that at first
glance seems to be the opposite of the one we have just exam-
ined. We have a desire for unity. We try to reduce diversity to
the one. Here again we should perhaps go back to trends in
Greek philosophy. But they were no more than that. It seems
indeed that we face here a profound movement of the human
spirit that can tolerate only with difficulty diverse things that
cannot be classified. The same tendency comes to expression in
the Roman desire for material unification, the unity of the Med-
iterranean world.
There is here a kind of fundamental thrust that it is useless
to try to attribute to political imperialism or to a desire for
conquest or glory or to economic interests. All these are in-
volved, but they are secondary. There is obviously no point in
denying their importance. We are simply stressing the fact that
they are the result of a primordial obsession with unity: the
reduction of the diversity of the world to the one. The same
spirit (more than the hunger for gold) lies behind the explora-
tions that began in the fourteenth century: the hunger for the
one. Now it is an extraordinary fact that the Bible presents God
precisely as the One. This is wonderful. Even more wonderful
is that we begin to hear at the very same time the first cracks
in imperial unity.
To rule more conveniently over his vast empire, the em-
peror had to divide it into two (and into four, secondarily) with
Diocletian. But obsession with unity will remain. Failing an
absolute, intangible political unity, might it not be possible to
go to a religious unity willed by the God who is One? Mono-
theism is not religious progress but a unitarian adventure. Re-
ligion will ensure the unity of the empire, for the God who is
a THE CHIEF FORMS 47
One will work on its behalf. But differences in interpretation

now become inadmissible. If the religion of the God who is One
has this vocation, it has to be united. Heresy is no longer an
affair of narrow-minded theologians or hair-splitters. It concerns
existence itself, the possibility of the existence of unity, the unity
of the empire.
This is why in the fourth and fifth centuries the dramas of
the heresies are not played out in the churches or theological
centers but are of popular and collective interest. Little people
come to the support of the Donatists (the circumcellions), the
Priscillianists, and the Arians. They die for religious ideas. This
may seem ridiculous to us. It may seem to be religious obscur-
antism. But it is not. At issue for everyone was the possibility
or impossibility of unity—not merely the unity of the church,
but that of the empire as well.
This political obsession, based on religion, has reverbera-
tions throughout the Dark and Middle Ages in the form of an
image or formulation or ideology of universal empire (cf. the
empire of Charlemagne or the Holy Roman Empire). God is
always taken as a model; since God is One, human society ought
to be one also.
We have been subjected to the incredible consequences of
taking God as a model in this way throughout the centuries right
up to our own day. Thus some have argued that since God is a
sovereign monarch, absolute monarchy is the only acceptable
form of government, etc. But this is not my present thesis. The
desire for unity led Christianity on strange paths. Two contra-
dictory courses find their origin in this obsession: on the one
side is Christian totalitarianism, on the other side syncretism.
God, the model, is the All. Unity takes place precisely because
of this. We must achieve totality at all costs. Christianity must
recover it. Political, economic, and intellectual activities must
become Christian. A system of total unity is demanded. In the
same way, all the known world must become Christian.
There have been devout and daring missionaries who have
had a profound desire to convert the peoples for their own sal-
vation, but among church leaders there has also been the goal
that since God is the All and the One the whole world should
form a single unity, and this unity can be ensured by Christian-
ization. Hence global missions.
In this enterprise apparently insurmountable obstacles have
had to be tackled. Another solution that seems at first glance

to be satisfying but runs contrary to the first one is that of
syncretism. If unity cannot be attained by the destruction of
everything external, by the expansion of a pure Christianity,
perhaps combination and unification can be achieved by the
mutual accommodation of Christianity and that which resists it.
This is the great program that Christianity first adopted in re-
lation to Greek philosophy. But that is only one example. We
are familiar with all the early attempts at syncretism with the
various religions of the empire, ranging from exclusion to efforts
at assimilation. But now we find something that far exceeds
those attempts. Scandinavian legends, German Christmas trees,
the festival of light, and the meditations of Arab mystics all find
an entry into Christianity. Everything is considered. No truth
or beauty or religion cannot be integrated into Christianity. Our
task is not to deny or annul but contrariwise to produce unity
with everything that can be of service. Christianity adopts every-
thing, and the process has never ceased.
In the nineteenth century an attempt was made to assim-
ilate Buddhism (and on into the thirties I knew fervent advocates
of a merger of Christianity and Hinduism). Since 1945 exactly
the same syncretism has toyed with Marxism, and today, as in
the tenth century, the goal is once again syncretism with Islam.
Now it is surely clear that in this obsession with unity Chris-
tianity is moving further and further away from its source. Each
time a new falsehood intrudes into revelation. Syncretism is a
triumph of the prince of lies. In it neither the one side nor the
other is true or credible. The unity at all costs that will suppos-
edly lead to God is the ultimate subversion of revelation.
At certain points my view might seem close to that of Carl
Amery.!° In fact, I agree with his ecological concern, the ethical
perspectives that he opens up, his general objective, his way of
posing the ecological question, and his striking formula that
humanity has gone on from success to success, that all the series
of problems we now face are the result of this success, and that
in a word “total crisis is the immediate consequence of total
success.” Well put. Finally, as will be apparent, I agree with his
statement that Christianity is responsible for the crisis. But here
we begin to differ. For Amery, Christianity bears sole and total
16. La Fin de la Providence (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1976).

a THE CHIEF FORMS 49
responsibility for the whole of our present plight. We Christians

are the authors of the crisis that afflicts the world. For my part
I would say that Christianity is partly responsible, and it is the
subversion of Christianity, that is, anti-Christianity, that is the
cause. This is where we differ. Amery argues that Christianity
succeeded even beyond the claims of its official defenders. Its
success lay in its effective participation in the elaboration of an
apparatus of power that has markedly affected world history dur-
ing the last centuries. This apparatus developed in the geograph-
ical and historical sphere of Christianity, and it is obviously no
accident that its triumph led to the catastrophic curve in the
main index. There is no doubt here about the success or defeat
of the gospel of Jesus, and even less so of the churches and
Christian theology or morality. The political, economic, and
scientific fields in which Christianity has succeeded are precisely
those which by their very nature and methods neither could nor
should have interested the first Christians. How could they fail
to see in the world today anything but a total defeat, the final
victory of the Evil One. Amery is 1.0t interested in the revelation
of God in Jesus Christ but in the fact that a degenerate Chris-
tianity has succeeded; this is the proof of its subversion. My own
attempt is to show how and why this subversion could take
place. Amery sets out to consider the functions, not the values
(truth), of the message of the Old and New Testament, the
church, and theology. I do not reject this analysis, for this is
included. But I think that one cannot separate it from an ap-
preciation of the values nor abstract it from the truth-content
of the gospel. If in a very crass and superficial fashion one has
regard only to the functions of Christianity, one will find that
it was, as Amery put it, the driving force of a power play that
is more than aggressive, it is irresistible, and for centuries has
spread across the rest of the planet with its missionaries and
soldiers. I maintain that this is only partially true and comes
under the modern attacks on Christianity that promote the oc-
cult, deviation, and superficiality. | have several objections to
raise.
First, Amery constantly moves in a very facile way, as suits
him, from Christian practice to doctrine and vice versa. He
quotes a text from some theologian because it fits his thesis but
ignores texts that do not. He heaps up practical examples that
support him but not those that oppose him. He picks out what
his presuppositions demand. Second, he makes gross mistakes

regarding the dominant factor in Christianity. He thinks he can
show that everything bad that survives in our society is already
contained in germ in the biblical revelation. As above, he selects
whatever proves this and makes of it a powerful coefficient even
if there is nothing to justify it. He leaves on one side, however,
far more essential aspects of Judeo-Christian thought and prac-
tice that run contrary to his convictions.
Thus, for him the “heart of the message” is the election of
humanity alone within creation, the idea of a covenant that
gives humanity an absolute mandate to rule, the assurance of a
history of salvation that will triumph over the miseries of crea-
tion, and the assurance of an equilibrium in humanity’s favor.
God is simply the God of the elect, a God who gives humanity
sovereign control of creation: the possibility of unlimited ex-
ploitation, an unconditional mandate of sovereignty. These theses
are false for one thing, and for another the idea of creation, of
human supremacy, etc., did not play the central role that he
assigns to it in Jewish thought or in Christian thought and
practice.
I might point out many other mistakes. I will simply refer
to the strange idea that it is because of the delay in the parousia
and the rise in the number of the dead that salvation after death,
or individual salvation, becomes central. As if it were not al-
ready so in Paul and John! One merit of Amery is that he has
not also hit on the fact that monotheism is the source of all our
troubles, a commonplace these last few years. But this idea had
not yet seen the light of day when he wrote. Christianity is still
responsible for our modern problems, and it is so even in its first
version (apart from Jesus himself, who is exempt).
In this whole procedure there is a grievous lack of any
historical dimension. If the Jews had such mighty promises, why
did they not unleash the movement? Why were the Romans and
not Christians the ones who conquered and devastated the West-
ern world? Why in the tenth century was it the Arabs and not
the Christians who subjugated the known world? Why in the
twelfth century was China, which had nothing whatever to do
with the Christian revelation, the great military, technical, and
scientific power? Why, finally, if the profound driving force and
rationale behind the Western conquest of the world, the unlim-
ited exploitation, the voracity, and the domination were ele-
THE CHIEF FORMS 51
ments of Jewish thought, amplified by the New Testament, why

did its execution come only after some two thousand years? This
seems to me to be too long a period, and the causality is dubious.
Everything in Amery’s analysis rests ultimately on the twofold
belief that Jesus did not rise again (the resurrection being for
him the source of the total alteration of the message of Jesus)
and that the transcendent and incarnate God does not exist.
This is why he asks us to consider the functions of Christianity
and not its values. But it is in fact a choice of values (also to be
adopted, like the supreme value that enables him to judge Chris-
tianity, i.e., ecology) that in reality governs all his thinking.
Chapter III
DESACRALIZATION AND
SACRALIZATION
Mention of the sacred leads us into contested spheres in

which one has the impression that everything depends on which
definition we select. What are we saying when we use this word?
I will not try to advance a definition. I will simply say that in
every society there is an order of feelings, experiences, objects,
rites, and words to which people attribute a value that is not
directly utilitarian, which they believe to be determinative and
independent of their own powers, which they do not think they
can reduce to the everyday level or to rationality (like society),
but which seem to them to be charged with either a potential
of inexpressible energy or an explanatory potential. Explanation
proceeds from them, but they themselves remain inexplicable.
In human eyes, this order is relative to what is imposed
upon us, to our necessary condition. It at once confirms the
necessity and enables us to escape it. On the basis of this con-
firmation and possibility we find an order in the world. The
sacred allows us to discern an order in the multiplicity of ex-
perience, information, and occurrence. We can designate or
name this order. This order of extreme virtualities that I would
call the sacred is a generalization of what various peoples them-
selves call the sacred.
I want to be more precise on two points. In this fairly
subjective orientation I am not asking whether the sacred exists
in itself, if there really is such a thing. I am simply saying that
everything happens as if there were. I stay with what people
regard as sacred; whether it exists as such or is merely thought
to do so is a metaphysical problem that I have no intention of
22
_DESACRALIZATION AND SACRALIZATION 23
handling. The second point is that the sacred is not the same
thing as the religious. I would say schematically that to a large
extent the sacred overlaps religious phenomena and that the
religious is one possible version of the sacred.
It seems to me, then, that the sacred is relative to three
aspects of human life: space, time, and society. Finding ourselves
in an incoherent, menacing, and incomprehensible space, we
set up coordination points. Thanks to the sacred, we define or
maintain order in the world. We fix limits and directions. We
can establish a framework within which all activity takes place,
or fix a center, an ompalos, to which we orient everything. As
concerns time, there are sacred times that give meaning to time.
All days are not alike. In these two cases, the sacred establishes
differences that enable us to give order to life.
The third domain or function is relative to society or the
group. The sacred exists only as it is collective, as it is accepted
and lived out in common. It produces the integration of indi-
viduals into the group. It gives individuals an incontestable place.
Since the tremendum or the fascinans is always at issue, the sacred
is always incontestable. If it can be challenged, it is no longer
the sacred, and with it the whole order of the world disintegrates. !
I have no fixed opinion in the debate whether there is such
a thing as human nature. Yet it seems to me that there are at
least certain fairly well established constants. The sacred seems
to me to be one of these. In effect | maintain that at least in
historical societies—let us say for the last 5,000 years—the sa-
cred may not be identical or impregnable, but when it is ques-
tioned, criticized, and then destroyed in a society, another form
of it arises in that society. It is recreated, and although it has a
different character, it assumes the same functions.
If we are not content with generalities but try to understand
what is at issue in a given time and place, we see that the sacred
is not only variable but that it is also not of a fixed intensity.
There are periods when the sense of it is strong, and periods of
desacralization. But everything goes to show that we cannot live
1. I have dealt with these questions at length in Les Nouveaux Possédés

(Paris: Fayard, 1973); ET The New Demons (New York: Seabury, 1975); “Loi
et sacré. Droit et divin,” in Actes du Colloque sur le Sacré: Le sacré, Etudes et
Recherches (Paris: Aubier, 1974); Castelli et al., Prospettive sue sacro (Rome:
Instituto di studi filosofici, 1974).
in a desacralized universe, in a universe without established tran-

scendent structures, without religion. When such a situation
arises, there is tension resulting in the organization of a new
sacred.
It is not true that there was a “religious” period in human
history that has now gone. Oscillations have taken place before.
In the Rome of the first and second centuries A.D., for example,
or in the Middle Ages in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
there were powerful movements of desacralization. They were
followed by new sacralizations. Elsewhere I have shown that it
is almost certain historically that when there is a process of
desacralization, the very factor that produces it gives birth to a
new form of the sacred. It is as if we invest with the sacred the
very power that triumphs over the previous form of it. A more
powerful god is needed to overcome the older god, and it is thus
normal to recognize the conquering god as the true god. I regard
this as a veritable “law” of the sacred.
Finally, regarding our own epoch, we may say that my
analysis of the sacred shows that it revolves around the twofold
axis of “technology/sex” and “nation-state/revolution.”? We
should not forget that in reality the sacred is always ambivalent
and the axis around which it is grouped has two opposing poles.
I recall this, even though it is not directly related to my theme,
in order to emphasize that our modern Western society does not
escape the sacred. This is not just an academic question. It is
not a matter of mere scholarship but concerns us very concretely.
I. DESACRALIZATION BY CHRISTIANITY
For some twenty years theologians and sociologists have

been bringing to light the fact that early Christian thinking and
the Jewish thinking of the Bible before it were not in the first
instance religions that shared in the foreordained element of the
sacred. On the contrary, they were extremely critical in relation
to the whole pagan world of the sacred. It has been stressed, for
example, that there was no kind of religious rivalry here but a
desire to destroy the religious as such and a totally negative view
of the sacred. This may seem astonishing to the degree that we
2. Cf. Les Nouveaux Possédés, pp. 86-115.

DESACRALIZATION AND SACRALIZATION 55
are accustomed to think of Christianity in the category of tra-

ditional religions. It seems in effect to be part of the history of
religion, for we see clearly that it has produced sacred norms,
rites, taboos, etc., which give it a place within what is “nor-
mally” regarded as the sacred.
Nevertheless, the first analysis is not wrong. If in the church
we go back “to the sources”—for example, to the time of the
Reformation—we find that they take the form of a violent move-
ment of desacralization. The battle of the Reformation centered
almost completely on a desire to destroy the sacred element that
had invaded the medieval church. Above all we should consider
the accusations that were brought against the early Christians.
In the relevant Roman texts they are regarded not merely as
“enemies of the human race” but as atheists and destroyers of
religion. For the Romans nascent Christianity was not at all a
new religion. It was “antireligion.” This view was well founded.
What the first Christian generations were putting on trial was
not just the imperial religion, as is often said, but every religion
in the known world.
The question that I want to raise here is precisely how,
starting from this first, essentially critical position, the church
and Christians progressively reconstituted the sacred, set up re-
ligious forms, and resacralized the world. But first it will be useful
to show a little more fully what the desacralization involved.
It took place at two levels and in two different periods,
first in the thinking of Hebrew theology, then in its Christian
development. Everyone knows that in the Jewish Bible, whether
in the Pentateuch or the prophets, there is a violent attack on
the religions. Often this is viewed very simplistically as a battle
of religions. This is not at all the issue. In fact, the battle is
against the sacred. The gods that are resisted and rejected are
the gods of nature: the moon goddess, the god of reproduction,
the god of thunder, etc. It is a matter of regarding natural things
or forces as things or forces that have nothing sacred about them.
God is not in these realities; they are purely natural realities.
One of the features of the Hebrew text is that it abounds in
irony that is designed to show that the sacred powers of nature
do not exist.
3. J. Ellul, “Actualité de la Réforme,” in Le Protestantisme francais,

ed. Boegner (Paris: Plon, 1945).
We now know with some certainty that many texts must

be taken in a polemical sense. They are fighting against the
sacralization of natural forces. Things that happen on earth and
the stars in heaven have nothing religious or sacred about them.
They are just things and must be viewed as such. We do not
have to pay them any special respect. The battle is first of all
against the sacred in the religions of Canaan and Assyria, and
secondly—and further removed—against the religion of Egypt.
The issue is not in the first instance “monotheism” as opposed
to polytheism (although naturally this is part of it) but the con-
cept of creation as Genesis 1 and 2 formulate it. Everything is
purely and simply creation. That is to say, everything is simply
an object or thing. If it comes from the Creator, it contains
nothing of its divine origin, no mystery, no hidden power. The
wood is made of wood; it is not the home of Pan or of goddesses.
Water, the source of the ocean, is water—and nothing more.
The moon is a luminary by which to measure time.
Biblical creation is totally desacralizing because it is in no
sense a theodicy. It is not a story of the gods and their adventures
as they fight, as with some difficulty they fabricate worldly things,
and as they are constantly present in them. The fecund, creative
goddess of the waters is always in the waters. Over against this,
the polemical biblical story of the biblical creation has an effect
of total spoliation. God speaks his word, and things are. This
is all. What this means is that God is truly outside the world,
that he is totally transcendent. He is not enclosed in any part
of this creation. He is beyond it. He has established a Creator-
creature relation, but this is a relation of love, not a sacral or
religious relation. There is also a presence in this creation of the
one who responds to him: man, who is the only mediator of
creation to God and of God to creation.
Humanity alone is “sacred.” Human life is the only reality
that has a status above that of “created things.” This powerful
thought gives rise to the battle against calling natural things or
functions sacred. At the same time, the battle is against poly-
theism, for this exists only insofar as the gods are linked to
natural realities and have their abode in the world. If they are
numerous it is because of the diversity of natural functions,
forces, and objects. The god of the moon differs from the god
of the sun. Creation, however, presupposes only one God. It
does not accord superior value to any objects. God is truly out-
DESACRALIZATION AND SACRALIZATION oy
side the world, and this world is truly given a reality that con-
tains no mystery. This world is thus delivered up into human
hands. We can utilize it without worrying about offending this
or that sacred force.
This desacralization is accompanied by a stern battle be-
tween the visible and the word. The visible, the reality in which
we are, is multiple; it is the extreme diversity of things. Our
tendency is thus to make a visible image of the god who inhabits
things. One thus finds sacred statues, sacred places, etc. The
religious thinking of the Jews, however, totally rejects any de-
piction of God. This is understandable, for if God is totally
different from his creation, if there is no image of God in crea-
tion, if creation consists only of neutral objects, then no image
can do justice to God’s transcendence. God is absent from the
world. In place of the visible (which is always a form of the
sacred), the Bible sets the word as the only link with God.* God
speaks. We speak. That is all.
This radical position is the ultimate in desacralization. “No
one has ever seen God.” “You shall make no image of anything
on earth, in the sea, or in the sky; you shall not bow down to
it or worship it.” These two statements exclude the visible, and
with it the whole religious and sacral domain. Here again, of
course, polemical texts abound.
Finally, a strict distinction is made between the sacred and
the holy. Granted, this distinction exists in many religions (esp.
Greek and Roman).°* But the Jews do not use the same typology.
For one thing, as we have seen, there is for them no such thing
as the sacred. For another, the holy is that which “separates.”
God is holy, for he is radically distinct from all else. He is a
break. What is holy on earth is what God chooses and sets apart.
The saint is the person who is separate from the rest because
God separated him. This has nothing whatever to do with the
sanctus, for example, which is “sanctioned” by divine power, nor
with the sacer. Thus the spiritual work of the Hebrews is almost
completely one of desacralization.
Almost! For one learns from the facts that there is very
4. Cf. J. Ellul, La Parole humiliée (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981);

ET The Humiliation of the Word (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985).
5. On this question see the works of Dumézil, Benveniste, and Eliade.
quickly a return of the sacred. This takes place on two levels.

There is a sacred that is acknowledged, voluntary, and specific,
and there is a sacred that is involuntary, diffuse, and, as we
might say, contaminated. We find the voluntary kind in the
retention of priests and sacrifices. If the logic had been pressed,
the priesthood and sacrifices ought to have been terminated as
modes of mediation with God. There is here an intermediary
between creation and Creator, a world that participates in the
divine.
This differs, of course, from the sacred in the usual sense.
It is not a natural reality that becomes sacred but a man who is
invested with a function by the transcendent God. Yet the func-
tion is very soon regarded as sacred. The same applies to sacri-
fice. Its role is to acknowledge that God is the master of all
things. We offer him our firstfruits so as to display this acknowl-
edgment. But very quickly sacrifices take on a sacred character.
Everything is not yet purged. The logic of desacralization has
not been finally pressed. More important, however, is the infil-
tration of the sacred that is involuntary. Places become sacred,
especially mountains such as Carmel, Sinai, Gerazim, Horeb,
and Zion.
The mountain is a privileged place for meeting with God.
The place where God manifests himself is to be regarded as. . .
holy, it is said, but what is really meant is sacred. Now we know
that everywhere the mountain is traditionally a sacred habitation
of the gods. The prophets echo this investing of mountains with
sacral significance when they attack the cults of the “high places.”
The quarrel between the Samaritans and the Jews also concerns
sacred mountains. The Samaritans want to continue worshiping
God on the mountain, whereas the Jews worship him in the
temple.
Other places, too, become sacred. These are indeed the
“classical places,” such as a ford or a fountain, like the ford of
Jabbok where Jacob wrestled with the angel: God is there. The
sacred that is thus revived or continued in Israel is so by defor-
mation of the original intention (e.g., cultic objects in the tem-
ple acquiring sacred significance) or by contamination as, in
spite of every break with surrounding peoples, the sacred main-
tained by them either perpetuates itself within the faith of Israel
or invades the people anew. Thus there constantly reappears the
worship of the moon or of the power of reproduction in the form

of the bull (which the prophets derisively call a calf).
There is a constant struggle between the desire to de-
sacralize in the interests of the one and completely different God
and a revival of the sacred by a kind of spontaneous impulsion.
We may recall the importance of the Asherah, the planted
“stake,” which is not an idol since it is not sculpted, but which
seems to be a kind of means of focusing telluric forces, and which
the prophets are continually combating. We may finally recall
what seem to be magical practices (Urim and Thummim, the
ashes of the red heifer, etc.), practices that are totally incom-
patible with the transcendent God, but that express a full re-
lationship with the sacred.
Nascent Christianity not only enters completely into the
desacralizing process of Hebrew thought, the secularization of
the world, but carries it through to the limit. By way of example
we may recall that the doctrine of creation in Genesis 1 and 2,
while Jewish as we have said, does not seem to play any great
part in the development of Jewish thought. In contrast, it lies
wholly at the center of Christian thought. In Christianity this
doctrine of the Creator and creation takes on decisive impor-
tance and is pressed with all its implications. Similarly, Christian
thought radicalizes transcendence, the total break between God
and the world, which can be healed only by the incarnation,
on the basis of which no development of the sacred is possible.
The Christian God makes himself known in Jesus Christ and
not elsewhere. (I refer to what was affirmed in the first century,
in the first three or four Christian generations: primitive Chris-
tianity.) Outside Jesus Christ God is totally unknowable and
inaccessible. As I have said above, the only possible theology
relative to God is what much later (from the twelfth to the
fifteenth century) will be called negative theology, that is, de-
claring what God is not. There is no possibility of saying posi-
tively what he is. This means that the condemnation of the
visible in the religious domain receives emphasis. There can be
no demonstration of either the divine mystery or God’s revela-
tion. The Christian God is a hidden God. Nor can any image of
Jesus be preserved or imagined. We have here a religion of the
Word alone, and Jesus is himself the totality of the Word, living
and not ritualized.
Christianity also rejected all that remained of the sacred

in Judaism: sacrifices and the priesthood. There is only the one
unique sacrifice made in Jesus Christ. This not only annuls the
sacrificial ordinances of Judaism but rules out the practice of any
future sacrifices. Everything has already been done in this regard.
One cannot add to the sacrifice of Jesus. This is the theme of
the whole of Hebrews. Along with this we have the suppression
of a body of priests or mediators. The ministers who are necessary
to the church’s life, as Paul lists them, do not include priests.
When the New Testament uses the term it is saying that now
the whole company of believers has become a body of priests:
everyone, and hence no one.
Finally, the mysterious powers of the world are definitively
exorcized, eliminated, and vanquished. This is an essential
theme. The world contains spiritual powers variously described
as thrones, exousiai, and dominions, etc. Residing in the world,
these powers hide iin institutions, people, etc. But they have all
been destroyed and extirpated by the death and resurrection of
Jesus Christ. In this world, then, there is no longer anything
supernatural. There is no longer anything mysterious, no longer
any world beyond. Nor is there any longer a division or partition
of the world into the sacred on the one side and the profane on
the other. The Christian world is wholly secular. There are in
it no particularly sacred times or places, precisely because God
is absolutely the Wholly Other and nothing in the world comes
close to him or can be the bearer of value, meaning, energy, or
even order. The only new energy that Christianity recognizes is
the potential presence of God by the Holy Spirit. But the Spirit,
too, is incomprehensible, inaccessible, and unexploitable.
This secularization, desacralization, and laicization is the
most radical that has ever been achieved. The origins of science
and technology are often traced back to it, for if things are
simply things and nothing more, if there is in them no hidden
deity or mysterious power, then one can try to know them ab-
solutely and use them without limit. With this as the point of
departure, the historical and sociological question that arises is
how it could come about that in medieval Christianity, and up
to our own time, there should be a reconstitution of the sacred,
the production of a Christian form of the sacred, a society in
which the sacred has played a decisive role.
Il. THE SACRALIZATION OF CHRISTIANITY.

THE RESACRALIZATION OF NATURE AND SOCIETY
BY CHRISTIANITY
In reply to the above question, I might refer again to the

theoretical formulation that I gave at the beginning of this dis-
cussion. When Christianity defeated the other religions of the
Roman world and eliminated the traditional form of the sacred
among pagan populations, what belonged to the conquered was
transferred to the conqueror. People who were undoubtedly con-
verted (but from the fourth century largely by external means
and even by force) carried with them and into their Christianity
the convictions about the sacred that they held already. In the
two centuries after Constantine in which Christianity triumphed,
when the empire officially became Christian and the masses
entered the church for various reasons, it was not possible that
there should be the threefold mutation of a deep conversion to
the Christian faith, the reciprocal abandonment of all previous
beliefs, and the corresponding cultural transformation.
It is evident that when temples dedicated to the gods we
Greece and Rome were confiscated and baptized as Christian
churches, the very architectural structure would remind people
forcibly of the ancient religion, for example, by the division into
a sacred place and a “pro-fane” place (profanum, “before the
sanctuary”). If we consider concretely the situation of the new
converts, if we try to see into their minds, we shall understand
that unavoidably there was a strong survival of prior beliefs and
spontaneous judgments. I am not saying that the conversions
were false or hypocritical, except where they were for reasons of
self-interest, such as following the emperor® or by force. What
I am saying is that one cannot annul in an instant a prior mental
structure, basic ideological theses, or the grid within which life
and the world are interpreted. One of the permanent keys in all
this was the sacred, the distinction between the sacred and the
profane, the kind of relationship with deity that rests on rec-
ognition of the sacred, etc.
6. We see this in the conflicting currents that develop in Christian

thought in the fourth and fifth centuries, when the elite follow the emperor,
becoming Donatist or Arian when the emperor does, or orthodox when the
emperor is orthodox.
It is generally allowed that the expansion of Christianity

was much less rapid and general than nineteenth-century his-
torians stated. The rural areas remained more or less pagan. A
mixture thus developed between Christian and pagan beliefs,
corresponding to popular faith. It was not possible to eradicate
pagan beliefs. The church preferred to absorb them, baptizing
the local gods, fitting them into the global category of the saints,
as we have already seen. The little gods of the tree or fountain
were integrated in a general application of the same method.
Naturally we have to distinguish between the faith of hum-
ble people and the theological formulations of intellectuals. In
fact the latter do not really express the people’s beliefs. To achieve
a true picture of Christianity we must not stop at the history of
dogmas. Paganization is less important than sacralization. Once
recognition is accorded to little local deities, it has necessarily
to be admitted that certain places, the places dedicated to or by
deities, are special. The church undoubtedly fought against the
worship of trees and fountains, etc., but it was forced to rec-
ognize that certain places are different or separate from others,
principally the church itself, the place of cultic celebration. The
building becomes the object of a kind of consecration. It be-
comes a sacred place. If anything scandalous takes place in it,
it can no longer be used for divine service. It must be
reconsecrated.
The first Christians had no particular reverence for the
places where believers met and where they heard God’s Word
and celebrated the sacraments. But once such places became
splendid imperial buildings and the theology of the sacraments
changed (as we shall see later), these places, now radically dif-
ferent from others, were invested with the beliefs that apper-
tained to pagan temples. God was especially present in such places.
The sense of the sacred thus reappears. What is more, the church
is now divided into two parts like pagan temples. The more
profane part is for ordinary believers, the other part, where the
religious ceremony takes place, is for the priests. This is wholly
typical of the recognition once again that certain places are
particularly sacred.
To mark the fact that the church is a sacred place, people
had to make certain gestures on entering, such as covering them-
selves, genuflecting, or sprinkling themselves with holy water.
In such gestures we again see belief in the sacred. To approach
a sacred place one must observe a number of formalities and

precautions. When believers approach the sacred place, holy
water protects them against “contamination” (or, according to
another view, against God’s wrath). At the same time, certain
places become sacred in the strictest sense: the tombs of martyrs,
the places where miracles occur, the places where martyrs are
put to death, etc. People go on pilgrimages to such places and
even want to be buried close to the tombs of martyrs. Such
practices occurred very early in the church.
Literally, then, Judeo-Christian desacralization is cancelled
out. The Bible states that the earth is the Lord’s, all of it without
distinction, but now, in contrast, God is closer, more present,
more apprehensible, in certain places. Some places are sacred,
others are profane. This sacral adoration of certain places will
last throughout the church’s history and will embrace places
where there are beatific visions or healings (Lourdes, etc.). We
are here in the presence of the sacred in the pure sense. With
sacred places, sacred times also appear again.
Paul says expressly that we are not to respect particular
days or times. Human distinctions and ordinances in this regard
have no value. But very quickly some days of the week (Friday
as the day of the crucifixion or Sunday as the day of the resur-
rection) come to rank as sacred, and periods are also set aside
(Advent and Lent) when people may turn especially to God,
readying themselves for the celebration of Christmas and Easter,
preparing by a kind of purification for the meeting with God.
What we have here is a typical sacral attitude. In the Bible the
Easter communion is very open. It is not a sacral act. Hence
there has to be purification by way of a sacral approach.
The church was also led to use sacred periods in the polit-
ical context of the Middle Ages. It used them to limit feudal
wars. It laid down, and had it generally accepted for a period,
that one should not wage war on certain days of the week, Friday
and Sunday in the first instance. This is the Truce of God. All
fighting must stop on these days. The days were then extended,
for one could hardly kill one’s neighbor on the eve of taking
communion or on the day after. But as the period of the Truce
grew longer, it gradually ceased to be respected. The important
thing here, however, is to stress that certain days are separate;
they have the character of sacred times.
This is all obviously linked to an inner mutation in faith—
in particular, to the new interpretation of communion, of the

sacrament. Emphasizing the “sacrifice” of Jesus tended to lead
already in this direction. This sacrifice, as we have said, put an
end to all others and could not be reproduced. But this was not
to reckon with the sacral mentality, with the need for the sacred
among the masses. The need for the sacred comes to expression
in the need for sacrifice to establish the relationship with deity.
Remembrance of a sacrifice was not enough. Communion can-
not be a simple commemoration. Nor does communion satisfy
popular piety when it is purely spiritual. It has to be concrete.
The sacred demands concrete manifestation. Gradually, then,
the doctrine of transubstantiation evolves, piety directed to the
real presence of Christ himself, his material presence in the
consecrated bread.
Here we have the most radical transformation. Christ’s sac-
rifice is effectively renewed by the priest in a liturgy comprising
specific rites. Naturally the consecrated host is wholly sacred.
(This is determinative for sacred places and customs, such as we
have seen above.) It is Christ himself who is present.”
With this restoration of regular sacrifice a large element of
the sacred makes a massive entry into Christianity with two
important consequences. The first has to do with the opus
operatum. The sacrament works autonomously. It depends on
neither the celebrant, the recipient, nor God’s action. Com-
munion takes place with the reception of the host. The host
works autonomously. So does baptism. The water of baptism is
efficacious. The baptized are washed from original sin and theo-
logical virtues are infused into them once and for all. They
receive the indelible character of people who belong to Christ.
This is a purely sacral interpretation. The object has the power.
The host produces communion, the baptismal water produces
the effects. Faith is not decisive. What counts is not the be-
liever’s relationship of faith with God but the church’s ritual and
the object that has the sacred power of transformation.
The same applies to the holy water used on entering church,
or to the palms blessed on Palm Sunday, which are supposed to
7. It is important to stress that in the Gospels Jesus never presents

himself as a sacred or divine person and rejects all adoration of himself, referring
in every case to his Father.
guarantee the happiness of the houses in which they are placed,

or to protect them against evil. As always in the world of the
sacred, certain objects are supposed to have in themselves a
special sacred task. Along the same lines is the reappearance in
the church of the importance of the visible. It is impossible to
keep to the Word and to a God who is invisible and unknowable.
There is a need to link up again with a visible reality that will
make the sacred present. The reintroduction of the visible as a
sign of revelation (in direct opposition to the revelation itself)
is in every way fundamental for the restoration of the sacred in
the church.
Everything becomes visible. The truth of God is integrated
into things that belong to our reality. We find stained-glass win-
dows, the picture books of the unlearned that are supposed to
teach ignorant pagans the simplified rudiments of the sacred
story. Then we have statues. This is a gigantic step. Not statues
of God himself, of course, but of a whole world that has to do
with God, Jesus, the Virgin, and the saints. Piety is oriented to
the visible. We worship best when we see (in spite of the saying
of Jesus that those are blessed who do not see and yet still be-
lieve). We then have lights, special and distinct vestments for
the priests, the elevation of the host, etc. The visible that char-
acterizes the sacred makes a massive entry into the church, and
in this way believers unwittingly take the path of paganism. The
visible object is typical of the sacral world and very quickly
becomes sacred itself.
Finally, there is the icon, in which the fusion of revelation
and the image is almost fully accomplished, so that the icon is
the sacred object par excellence. The new awareness of the irre-
placeable importance of the visible (excluded by the religion of
the Word) is a decisive stage in the reinsertion of the sacred
into Christian thought, faith, life, and ritual. The importance
accorded to the visible forms part of the primacy of sacred ob-
jects. The force of the action is not the invisible force of God
that faith alone can apprehend. Rather, it is the force of objects
that we can see, handle, and use, that we have to respect. We
must also say that in Protestantism, which was an attempt to
desacralize and which profaned much of what Roman Catholi-
cism held to be sacred, identical processes may be seen. The
church has become in some sense a sacred place® and the Bible
has become materially a sacred book. I recall the time when it
was a scandalous matter to tear out one or more pages from a
Bible. Invincibly the sense of the sacred has invested again the
very thing that was destined to destroy it.
The second change brought about by the new view of sac-
rifice (a pagan view and not at all a Christian one) was to give
saving and propitiatory value to the sacrifice itself. If we want
to please God, we have to offer him something. We thus find
again the traditional idea that lies behind the throwing of a lamb
into the sea by the king who is too fortunate and who has to
sacrifice something so as not to lose everything. Once sacrifice
occupies its place again, something that one wants or loves has
to be sacrificed. Total renunciation is demanded. It becomes a
virtue to make the most difficult and painful offering. The ac-
ceptance of suffering is part of the sacrifice, and suffering is
exalted. All these are familiar trends in medieval Christianity
but they have nothing whatever to do with biblical thinking.
Now at the same time and in a corresponding manner,
reflection upon God, being led by Greek and Roman thought,
radically transformed what the Bible said about God. On the
one side it analyzed the attributes of God—a God, of course,
very different from the gods of polytheism, but still a God con-
structed by philosophy. Thus the idea of creation underwent a
radical change the moment omnipotence came to the fore. The
relation between God and the world now had nothing whatever
to do with what the first Christian generations believed. God
was tied to his creation, and ultimately the world itself contained
God. On this basis one could find the sacred everywhere. This
path led to the reappearance of persons typically connected with
the sacred, such as mediators or priests.
We have said that in the New Testament there were no
priests. There were deacons (to offer aid), prophets (to preach),
teachers (to give instruction), and bishops (to see to good order).
There were no priests because Jesus is the one unique mediator.
But once the sacred reappeared in Christianity, people were
8. French Protestants know what offense was caused by the tendency

from 1950 onward to treat the place of worship as an ordinary room where
common meals, fetes, and meetings might be held. People wanted a sacred
place.
needed who could carry and represent it, and who would also
serve as mediators. It was not to be thought that simple believers
could approach this God, the God of the new theology. Con-
secrated persons were required who would be dedicated to the
work of mediation, who would themselves be sacred, who would
be able to offer the holy sacrifices that were now being renewed.
Such persons came within the framework of the multiple me-
diations that are characteristic of the sacred (and that link up
with what we said about the integrating of minor deities). We
have the saints in mind. The priests and the saints are bearers
of the sacred. They serve as indispensable screens for ordinary
mortals who cannot approach the mysteries, who risk terrible
_ dangers if they enter into a direct relation with deity, if they
come unprotected into the world of the sacred. The sacred is
beneficent, but it has such power that if we are not equipped for
this relation, it becomes maleficent.
The priest has sacred functions that he alone can discharge.
We find again what was typical of the pagan priest regarding
role and mediation, regarding the separation of a class of spe-
cialists in the sacred who alone can deal with it, from a laos that
is confined to the world of the profane. Jesus had radically abol-
ished this distinction. With the appearance of those who rep-
resent the sacred in a positive sense, we naturally find the
appearance of those who represent it in a negative sense, such
as wizards or witches. Here again the mutation calls for notice.
Biblically, sorcerers are possessed with a spirit that faith
must expel. In the primitive church we find a remarkable view
that will persist for a long time and is very modern, namely, that
sorcery does not really exist. We must not believe in it. It is
pure imagination. We must root out from the minds of believers
any acceptance of the power of sorcerers. We must convince
them that sorcerers play on credulity. This idea appears again in
the nineteenth century. But what finally triumphs is belief in
the devil, in evil supernatural powers that act on earth as the
exact counterpart of the priest (the black mass being an inversion
of the mass). This is all logical, for once specialists appear who
represent the sacred in a positive sense, there have to be their
opposite numbers who represent it in a destructive sense. Thus
the traditional world of the sacred is almost completely recon-
structed. From this point onward one may say that Christianity
is one among the many expressions of the sacred and the religious.
The word sacred, which is almost never used in the New

Testament, also comes back into current use. We read of sacred
chants, sacred music, sacred art, sacred books, and sacred ves-
sels, and a sacred history is taught that differs and is distinct
from ordinary world history. This change of vocabulary typifies
the change in mentality, in religious conceptions. It marks the
reappearance of the sacred, which Jewish and Christian thought
had originally combated with living power. This monumental
historical setback seems to me to be one of the most flagrant
proofs that the sacred is integral to human existence, that the
active (I do not say objective) force that constantly leads us to
reconstitute a sacred universe is a permanent one. Apparently
we cannot live in the world unless it is thus constituted. Only
the sacred (and not the venture proposed by Christianity) re-
assures us and gives both stability to the universe and a solid and
objective meaning to life.
Chapter IV
MORALISM
In the minds of most of our contemporaries, Christianity

primarily means morality. The spiritual aspect is forgotten except
among a few, and the other aspect that calls for notice has to
do with the Christian festivals. It is typical that the questioning
of Christian truth arises mostly at the level of the conduct of
Christians, and the judgment that is passed is moral in character.
Anti-Christian films such as la Religieuse (based on Diderot), les
Sorciéres de Salem, or Meérette (Téléfilm 1982), mount their attack
on this plane. The arguments most commonly heard are that
Christians do not behave any differently from others, that so-
ciological investigations reveal no distinction in sexual conduct
or family life, that the morality that is rejected today is Christian
morality, etc.
We have to recognize that Christians themselves have done
all they can to create this confusion. God’s revelation has noth-
ing whatever to do with morality. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
This is not the place to prove this thesis, which I have done
elsewhere.! I will simply recall three essential propositions that
I will ask readers to accept as such, directing them to my other
books if they want supporting material.
First, in the Hebrew Bible the Torah is not a book of mo-
rality, whether as constructed by a moralist or as lived out by a
group. The Torah, as God’s Word, is God’s revelation about
himself. It lays down what separates life from death and sym-
1. Cf. J. Ellul, Le Vouloir et le Faire (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1977);

ET To Will and to Do (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1969).
69
bolizes the total sovereignty of God. Similarly, what Jesus says

in the Gospels is not morality. It has an existential character
and rests on a radical change of being. Again, what Paul says
in the exhortations in his letters is not morality but consists of
practical directions by way of example. Second, there is no moral
system in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. There are no
moral precepts that can exist independently in some way, that
can have universal validity, and that can serve the elaboration
of a moral system. Third, the revelation of God in Jesus Christ
is against morality. Not only is it honestly impossible to derive
a moral system from the Gospels and Epistles, but further, the
main keys in the gospel—the proclamation of grace, the dec-
laration of pardon, and the opening up of life to freedom—are
the direct opposite of morality. For they imply that all conduct,
including that of the devout, or the most moral, is wholly en-
gulfed in sin.
As Genesis shows us, the origin of sin in the world is not
knowledge, as is often said (as though God were interdicting our
intellectual development, which would be absurd); it is the
knowledge of good and evil. In this context knowledge means
decision. What is not acceptable to God is that we should decide
on our own what is good and what is evil. Biblically, the good
is in fact the will of God. That is all. What God decides, what-
ever it may be, is the good. If, then, we decide what the good
is, we substitute our own will for God’s. We construct a morality
when we say (and do) what is good, and it is then that we are
radically sinners. To elaborate a moral system is to show oneself
to be a sinner before God, not because the conduct is bad, but
because, even if it is good, another good is substituted for the
will of God.
This is why Jesus attacks the Pharisees so severely even
though they are the most moral of people, live the best lives,
and are perfectly obedient and virtuous. They have progressively
substituted their own morality for the living and actual Word of
God that can never be fixed in commandments. In the Gospels
Jesus constantly breaks religious precepts and moral rules. He
gives as his own commandment “Follow me,” not a list of things
to do or not to do. He shows us fully what it means to be a free
person with no morality, but simply obeying the ever-new Word
of God as it flashes forth. Similarly, Paul attacks what might
seem to be morality in Judaism, rules and precepts laid down by
MORALISM 71
men and not coming from God at all. The great mutation is
that we have been freed in Jesus Christ. The primary character-
istic of free people is that they are not bound to moral com-
mandments. “All things are lawful,” Paul twice proclaims.
“Nothing is impure,” he teaches. We find the same message in
Acts. We are as free as the Holy Spirit, who comes and goes as
he wills. This freedom does not mean doing anything at all. It
is the freedom of love. Love, which cannot be regulated, cate-
gorized, or analyzed into principles or commandments, takes the
place of law. The relationship with others is not one of duty but
of love.
When I say that the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is
against morality, I am not trying to say that it replaces one form
of morality with another. (How many times, alas, we read that
Christian morality is superior to all others. This is not even true.
We find honest and virtuous people, good husbands, fathers, and
children, scrupulous and truthful people outside Christianity,
and more perhaps than there are Christians.) Revelation is an
attack on all morality, as is wonderfully shown by the parables
of the kingdom of heaven, that of the prodigal son, that of the
talents, that of the eleventh-hour laborers, that of the unfaithful
steward, and many others. In all the parables the person who
serves as an example has not lived a moral life. The one who is
rejected is the one who has lived a moral life. Naturally this
does not mean that we are counseled to become robbers, mur-
derers, adulterers, etc. On the contrary, the behavior to which
we are summoned surpasses morality, all morality, which is shown
to be an obstacle to encounter with God.
Love obeys no morality and gives birth to no morality.
None of the great categories of revealed truth is relative to mo-
rality or can give birth to it; freedom, truth, light, Word, and
holiness do not belong at all to the order of morality. What they
evoke is a mode of being, a model of life that is very free, that
involves constant risks, that is constantly renewed. The Chris-
tian life is contrary to morality because it is not repetitive. No
fixed duty has to be done no matter what course life may take.
Morality always interdicts this mode of being. It is an obstacle
to it and implicitly condemns it, just as Jesus is inevitably con-
demned by moral people.
One of the basic dramas in the history of Christianity,
then, has been the transformation of this free Word into mo-
tality. This was the most decisive setback to the Christian mu-
tation. Here again it is very hard to see why it should have
happened. Obviously things to which we have already pointed
(especially mass conversions) provide some initial explanation.
The Christian masses naturally found it difficult to live in this
freedom of spirit and of love. Norms soon had to be imposed.
Duties had to be indicated. Every time there was a return to a
community that rejected morality so as to live, as was said,
according to the Spirit, this resulted concretely in disorder and
rapid human and spiritual deterioration (e.g., the community of
John of Leiden).
It seems, then, that we have a choice between three ori-
entations. First, we may live truly by the Spirit in a community
like that described in Acts; but if we do there will have to be
a small number of truly converted believers who are fully adult
both in their humanity and in their faith and can bear the risk
of freedom. A numerical limit will be imposed. This corresponds
to Jesus’ own dealings with his disciples (a maximum of seventy)
and his statement that they will always be a little flock. At issue
here is a true understanding and living out of revelation that has
nothing whatever to do with morality and that to moral persons
seem to run contrary to morality and defy it.
The second option is to convert the masses to Christianity,
to bring them into the church, but with no hope that these
thousands of people can live as if they were in the kingdom of
God. The presupposition, then, is that they will have to be
trained and their manner of life controlled. Christianity thus
becomes morality, the very opposite of what was intended by
Jesus and by revelation in Israel. And at every point this morality
more or less corresponds to the society of the day, not to what
might be taken, for example, from texts in Paul. Since many of
the directions given by Jesus himself (e.g., those in the Sermon
on the Mount) clash with this morality, a scandalous distinction
is made between “counsels” (e.g., the summons to go and sell
all one’s goods) that are valid only for the perfect, the saints,
advanced Christians, or the clergy, and precepts that are moral
duties obligatory for everyone (and are summed up in the
decalogue). This is the second possibility.
As for the third option, this involves an attempt at living
without morality, but in great numbers and hence as a more or
less institutional and organized social body. The sects adopt this
MORALISM 73
course. But very quickly the situation deteriorates, and either

relations of power and authority establish themselves or there is
complete moral degeneration. These are the three possibilities
that are open.
From the end of the second century the church inclined
to the second option. Hence it could not avoid multiplying
moral rules in antithesis to the gospel. As a result, conduct
conforming to a certain moral code became the criterion of the
Christian life; piety and prayer, etc., were transformed into moral
rules; Christianity took on the appearance of a moral system to
those outside it; and theology underwent profound modification
with the according of a new prominence to works. As everyone
knows, the Lutheran Reformation brought a break with this.
But the downward slope is so steep that immediately after the
first generation of Reformers had rediscovered Christian free-
dom, there was a return to moral rigidity, especially with Calvin,
and morality again achieved domination over “life in Christ.”
We have to be clear about the fact that the one inevitably ex-
cludes the other. If we “live in Christ,” as Paul puts it, there is
no morality. If we observe morality, no life in Christ is possible.
Yet the orientation adopted by the church was not the
result of numbers alone, of the churching of the masses. An
equally decisive factor was the prodigious immorality of the var-
ious societies in which the church found itself. As this immo-
rality was particularly flagrant in the sexual sphere, the moralizing
reaction came principally in this area. Women, as we have said,
were the chief victims of the reaction. Antifeminism is one of
the important points at which Christianity’s betrayal of God’s
revelation is apparent. We shall now examine this in more de-
tail, and then at the end return to the causes of the moralizing
reaction of the church.
It has become a commonplace today to affirm that Chris-
tianity has been antifeminist, that it has kept women in bond-
age, treated them as minors, etc. Many appeal to certain texts
in the Old Testament and in Paul. Some writers have tried to
portray Paul as the founder of antifeminism (at times seeking
psychological reasons, like the unspeakable Gilabert in his book
Colosse aux pieds d’argile, 2 which is a web of errors and gratuitous
2. Gilabert, Saint Paul, le colosse aux pieds d’argile (Montélimar: Méta-

noia, 1974).
assertions). Finally, we find those who have tried to justify the

Bible and Christians by saying that they were simply following
the patriarchal customs of the period. This excuse is in fact a
terrible condemnation, for it simply testifies to the lack of Chris-
tian freedom relative to the customs and ideologies of the age.
Our analysis must be more acute and exact than that.
First, it is true that there have been periods when a pa-
triarchal form of society has been dominant (e.g., in Judaism in
the third and second centuries B.C. and in Rome in the same
period), but it is absurd to describe all traditional societies as
patriarchal. As always, there have been variations. It can be
shown that Roman society in the first century A.D. was no longer
patriarchal in the strict sense. Women had equal rights with
men (except for voting in elections). They were not kept at
home to raise the children. Similarly, in the Seleucid empire in
the first century B.C. (and later) women were fully free. It has
been shown (e.g., by Volterra) that they were at work in all the
higher professions, as bankers, shipowners, business people, and
entrepreneurs of all descriptions, and that they freely handled
large sums of money. In the Germanic tribes that invaded Europe
women again had a fairly privileged status; they even took part
in battles (Tacitus) and had equal rights with men.
It is true that with the collapse of the empire the status of
women suffered a sudden decline. Probably the very dangerous
nature of the age and the constant military threat gave men
absolute preeminence and favored a return to patriarchal organ-
ization. From the twelfth century there were new movements
toward legal and economic equality between men and women.
Naturally I cannot go into detail here. Until the eighteenth
century, society is not patriarchal but the situation varies ac-
cording to time and place. One cannot generalize. The later
eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries see astonishing regres-
sion in the status of women in every field. The common mistake
of nonhistorians is to think that because this was the position
in the nineteenth century, it must have been worse in the six-
teenth, and worse again in the thirteenth, etc. They have a
naive belief in constant progress. In general, however, the thesis
of a patriarchal society is not a valid one.
The problem still remains, and is as follows. The biblical
texts themselves are very favorable to women or are at least
neutral, according to local circumstances. Nevertheless, in later
MORALISM 12
Judaism, in certain strands in Christianity, and in some orien-

tations that the church has given to society, these texts have
been taken in such a way as to become completely hostile to
women. This poses a serious difficulty. In any event, we must
not generalize and say that this is the orientation of X. On the
contrary, it is a deviation from it. In the Hebrew Bible, women
occupy an important place, as witness the political role of Esther,
Judith, and Rahab, the prophetic role of many prophetesses, the
tole of Rebekah, and the role of the female “judges” in Israel.
Such basic texts as the Song of Songs and Proverbs 31 may also
be cited as displaying the very essence of feminine symbolism.
More theologically, if we return to the Genesis text, we are
astonished at the usual misunderstandings: Eve is inferior, it is
said, because she is created after Adam. This superb logic makes
Adam inferior to the great Saurians after which he was created.
Creation is in fact an ascending act, and Eve, who is created
last, comes at the climax as its crown and completion. Again,
it is said that Eve is inferior because she is not made out of
primal clay but out of a part of Adam. This is equally absurd
reasoning, for Adam, who carries the name Earth, is made out
of inanimate matter, but Eve, who carries the name Life, is made
out of animate and hence superior matter.
There remains, of course, an argument that is repeated
again and again in later Judaism and some branches of Chris-
tianity. Eve, it is said, was the first to sin. She gave sin an entry
into the world. She is thus guilty and must be subject to her
husband. Again, this is absurd reasoning, for it is hard to see
how Adam can have any claim to superiority when in this test
he shows himself unable to rule his wife, falls into the simplest
of traps, and is in no way worthy to be the head. But was not
the woman tempted first? Indeed she was. And this leads to the
invoking of absurd arguments according to which she is less
intelligent, easier to seduce, weaker, etc.
There is in fact a better theological reason for her being
tempted first. If she is the supreme achievement and perfection
of creation, it is through her that the serpent must attack the
rest. She does not resist. But neither does the man. We may
simply recall the famous Chinese proverb that it is by the head
that the fish decays. We should consider this to get the point
of the story. But was she not also a temptress? Indeed she was.
But to understand and evaluate what this means, we ought to
refer to two other elements. In the first creation story there is

no distinction or hierarchy between the two who are two in one
or one in two. We do not have on the one side the female
temptress who is the source of evil, etc. No, we have only one
being, and if evil is done, it is done by this one being, no matter
by which aspect it commences. The woman is not without the
man, nor the man without the woman, as Paul reminds us.
The second basic truth is that the woman, as the same
Paul also reminds us, is the glory of the man? (1 Cor. 11:7).
This passage has often been misconstrued as teaching a hierarchy
from God to man and man to woman. But this is not its point
or purpose. The question is that of the relation between powers,
and of mediation. The text I want to focus on here is the one
about glory. Following Barth (and others), I have often recalled
that glory is revelation. God glorifies himself when he reveals
himself as he is. Jesus Christ glorifies God when he reveals him
to us as the God of love who is also the Father. We ourselves
are called upon to be the glory of God as we are his image, as
we show by what we are who is the God to whom we bear
witness. In this passage Paul then adds that the woman is the
glory of the man: she reveals him; she shows what a human
being truly is.
If we relate this to the temptation, we learn that by what
she says the woman brings to light the fundamental reality of
Adam. She shows him to be weak, undiscerning, fluctuating,
ambitious, desirous of equality with God, etc. She simply reveals
this. Both are equally at fault, and the condemnation (as com-
mentators and theologians should remember) is more severe for
the man, since he is given no hope, whereas the woman has a
double promise and carries a double hope, namely, that she will
transmit life,and that her posterity will crush the serpent. It may
be noted, too, that although the status of women is generally
positive in the Old Testament, a few texts, on which we need
not dwell, do arouse suspicion, such as those that relate to im-
3. Many modern versions, of course, do not use the word glory. They
always show a concern to attenuate and weaken the biblical text, making it
more banal. Thus they do not translate doxa here as glory but as reflection,
which is basically the very opposite theologically of the Hebrew conception
of glory.
MORALISM Td
purities. Yet we should not forget the many passages that also
deal with male impurities.
Insistence has often been placed on the positive attitude
of Jesus toward women. Jesus receives both men and women on
an equal footing. He cures sick women as well as men, and does
not repel the adulterous woman or Mary Magdalene.* Naturally
it has been noted that he chooses only men as his disciples. But
to this one may make the radical reply that he first reveals his
resurrection to women. Both in the Synoptists and in John
women are the first to receive this supreme revelation. Women
become the “evangelists” of this resurrection by carrying the
news of it to the disciples. Women receive the first witness to
eternal life. This is theologically consistent, for it is a fulfillment
of the name Eve and of the promise about the serpent. Compared
to this, all else is secondary.
It is important that Jesus affirmed monogamic marriage and
its indissolubility. But this pales in comparison with his complete
reversal of the judgment of his age concerning the transmission
of truth by women.* In this regard we should not forget the
decisive role of women in the primitive church. Women are its
founders and pillars. They act as missionaries, as Paul often
shows, and they bear responsibility for churches (Rom. 16;
Col. 4; Phil. 4). Externally we have curious testimony in the
famous letter of Pliny to Trajan in which he writes about female
ministers. We should also remember that women have spiritual
gifts, such as diaconate, prophecy, and speaking in tongues
(Acts 2; 12; 21). One may thus say that there is a clear-cut
accession to utterance and to equality with men. Paul, too,
recognizes that women have the gift of public prayer and proph-
ecy (1 Cor. 11:5). Finally, he affirms total equality when he says
that in Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female,
slave nor free. .
The opinion soon arose, however, that Paul is a frightful
4. Both in detail and in general, cf. in this regard J.-M. Aubert,

Antiféminisme et Christianisme, coll. La Femme (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1975).
5. This is why I do not agree with Aubert when he asks why Jesus did
not go further in solving the problem of women, when he argues that Jesus
did not reverse the social situation, and when he advances sociopolitical rea-
sons and explanations. This is all inadequate when we think of the revelation
of the resurrection, and the author is mistaken when he writes that the gospel
carries only the germ. No, the gospel has in fact said and done everything.
misogynist and that we should focus only on those other texts

in which he speaks about the obedience of women to their hus-
bands, their inferiority, and the need for reservations about them
in certain church affairs. We shall return to this, but first | want
to make a remark that will, I am sure, shock modern readers,
namely, that for people of that era the social problem, the place
one occupied in society, was not as essential or dramatic as it is
today. Once again we must not project our own ideas and images
and problems upon the past. Today an inferior situation is in-
tolerable. Social inequality is scandalous. It seems to us that
Paul is saying things that are unjust and unacceptable when he
does not radically condemn slavery (Philemon) as a global social
scandal, or when he admits the superiority of men in marriage
(and does not address it as a social issue). These things are unjust
only according to our view of justice and unacceptable only to
our mind. In those days they were not important questions, not
merely for the “dominant class” but for everyone. Hierarchy and
inequality were “normal.” We have also to consider that our
ideas about equality and the absence of hierarchy are not eter-
nally true and right and good; quite the contrary.
What Paul does, in complete agreement with the teaching
of Jesus, is to bring back the question to its spiritual root. The
mistake is (and has been) to make moral laws out of the passages
in which, for example, Paul speaks about the subordination of
the wife to her husband, to transform them from what they are
(an affirmation of real life) into the formulation of a norm or
duty. Cutting one’s hair is a sign of prostitution, and so Paul
tells Christian women not to do it, since they are not prostitutes.
But we must not make of this an imperative. The matter of
subordination is more important. When Paul speaks about hi-
erarchy, it is in the context of what Jesus himself said and showed,
namely, that the greater must be the servant of the lesser, that
the hierarchical superior must serve the hierarchical inferior,
that the stronger must not exercise power and authority but put
them, and put the self, at the disposition of the weaker.
Jesus expressly told his disciples not to act like the great
ones and leaders who ruled them. He gave an example by wash-
ing their feet. Thus the social hierarchy that (inevitably) exists
is spiritually reversed. This is why, in Paul’s well-known com-
parison in Ephesians that arouses so much criticism (in which
the woman is compared to the church or the body, and the man,
MORALISM 79
her husband, is the head and is compared to Christ), the text

that follows is regularly forgotten: Christ so loved the church
that he gave himself for it (the reference being to the crucifix-
ion); he nourishes the church and cares for it. Thus the husband
is not a macho. He is not a glorious, authoritarian male. He is
called upon to bear the cross (i.e., the condemnation) for the
wife. He has to be ready to give his life for her so that she may
live the better. Paul also says that it is the man who will leave
his father and mother so as to join his wife. The man must make
the sacrifice and uproot himself. There is no question of bringing
the wife into the patriarchal family.
One may thus distinguish the relations as follows. The hus-
band loves his wife absolutely, the wife respects her husband
(possibly with a reference to the disrespect that Michal showed
to David when he danced before the ark). In other words, we
totally misunderstand Paul’s theology when we retain only half
of his teaching and transform this half, in which he affirms a
fact, into a moral duty and a type of legal and social organization.
It is true, however, that this misunderstanding has oc-
curred, and has done so primarily in the church and among
Christians. Before asking why such a mistake could be made, we
should say something about its course. The deviation took place
rapidly but not completely. We must refer to Augustine’s saying
about human nature as it was made in the image of God; this
nature is in both sexes, so that we may not ignore the woman
when it is a matter of understanding what is the image of God
(On the Trinity, Book XII). Augustine also teaches the full equal-
ity of man and woman in their sex life. Each has a right to the
spouse’s body. Other texts in Augustine are ambiguous but should
not be misconstrued, as when he says that in the man (vir) there
is a perfect agreement of body and soul, a unity of the two in
which the body reflects the soul, but in the woman there is
duality, for the soul is spiritual and the body is inferior and
incomplete (oh, Freud!), and cannot do justice to the soul.
From this passage it has been argued that Augustine thinks
the woman is inferior. But we should ask which is really more
important for Augustine. Is the spiritual soul, which sets human
beings in relation to God, the true image of God, or is the body,
which enables them to participate in the world? It is true that
in the troubled and harassed world in which Augustine lived the
female body was less well adapted and less efficacious. But is not
the spiritual soul the essential thing? I think it is a mistake to

infer from these texts, as J.-M. Aubert does, that for Augustine
the man is the full image of God in all his being, both body and
soul, whereas the woman is the image of God only in her soul.
Do we want to say that Augustine thought of God as corporeal?
This is wholly improbable. The one certain point is that Au-
gustine thinks the woman should be subordinate to the man in
corporeal matters.
I have recalled this example of Augustine in order to show
that there has not been full agreement in the orientation and
opinion of great theologians. At few points have there been as
many differences as in the question posed by woman. Now if we
take the texts of the many Fathers who are hostile to women,
we can state fairly easily that they are usually constructed in two
stages. First comes the moral anathema. Here the question is
that of the immorality of women, their role in provoking sexual
sin, or as the occasion of it. Then comes a more or less biblical
and theological argument that is designed to justify and legiti-
mize a judgment that does not agree with the general line of Old
Testament revelation, nor with the attitude of Jesus Christ, nor
with the teaching of Paul. What has dictated the adoption of
this position by church fathers, theologians, and church au-
thorities, what has provoked Christian antifeminism (which is
not as serious as is made out), is essentially the fact of the
transition from the revelation of God to ecclesiastical or social
order, or from the spiritual field to the moral. That is the key.
But we must not make that mistake. I do not say that
women are more immoral than men, although some theologians
have taken this position. The real problem has been the im-
morality of society. Let us begin with the text of Paul over which
so much ink has flowed, which has had disastrous consequences,
and which all Christian antifeminists have used in their self-
vindication. I refer to the well-known passage in 1 Corinthians
(14:34-35) in which Paul forbids women to speak in the churches.
They must be submissively silent. They should not teach (1 Tim.
2:11), and when they do speak, they. should do so with their
heads covered (1 Cor. 11:5).
Two explanations have been advanced for the text. The
first would exclude women from all active participation in the
cultus, from exposition of the Bible, etc. This is the pure and
simple antifeminist position. Some people try to excuse Paul for
MORALISM 81
taking this position by saying that he was a Jew, that he was

necessarily influenced by the violent antifeminism of the Jewish
world around him. In other words, when Paul writes things that
are more or less critical of women, he is not really expressing
God’s revelation but the common opinion of his environment.
The more common tendency, however, is to regard verses of this
kind as an interpretation that does not come from Paul, essen-
tially because this strict prohibition contradicts almost all his
own teaching. Thus in chapter 11 of the same epistle Paul says
that when a woman prays or prophesies (in the church), she
should do so with her head covered. He can hardly have con-
tradicted himself in passages so close. Hence these texts do not
represent his own view.
I do not think that these explanations (the second being
a less than honorable defeat) are correct. We have to consider
the context in which the order is given. Paul is talking about
the gift of tongues. He explains that he fears that it is a source
of disorder and that people do not understand what is said. He
much prefers prophecy, which is clear and understandable. He
asks that when the church meets everything should be orderly,
and the prophets should speak in turn. God is not a God of
disorder. Cultic order is at issue. Now we must remember how
important women were in the many Greek and Near Eastern
cults, in celebrations of the mysteries, in possession by the divine
spirit, in trances, outbursts, ecstastic proclamations, etc. Most
of these cults were orgiastic. We are thus dealing with orgies.
Scores of witnesses prove that almost always this was the form
in which women expressed themselves.
What Paul is saying, then, is that in gatherings of the saints
things should not be as in these orgiastic cults. Everything must
be done in order. Those who speak should not cry out together,
and women, who are traditionally more “inspired,” should on
the contrary be silent, should not speak in tongues (this is the
issue in the text), and if they prophesy (this is no contradiction),
they should do so with their heads covered, the essential point
being to show that they are subject to an authority that controls
what they say. This corresponds exactly to the same recommen-
dation for men (14:31-32), namely, that “the spirits of the proph-
ets are subject to the prophets,” that is, that they should be
subject to an order, that they should speak in turn, that they
should control themselves, not becoming excited or being seized
by irrepressible tremblings, etc. In other words, Paul is not here

reflecting the spirit of the time, the antifeminism of society,
etc.; he is recommending that in their cultic practices believers
should not imitate what pagan cults are doing and that the
women should not have the same role as in such cults. In so
doing, he is, of course, moralizing.
In relating to the social current, Paul is influenced by the
cultural milieu at only one point, namely, when he says that
women should cover their heads because of the angels. This is
perhaps an allusion to the story in Genesis that tells how the
sons of God were seduced by human women. But here again |
think he has in mind that sudden inspiration by spirits that he
mistrusts. The veil is not a magical protection in itself but a
psychological barrier that is meant to remind women that in
inspiration they should be subject to one authority, not neces-
sarily that of men, but on the one side that of Jesus Christ, who
is above the angels, and on the other side the church’s order.
At issue here, then, is a belief in direct inspiration by the spirits.
Let us now resume our attempt at exposition. We must
begin by stating that the Jewish attitude toward women becomes
increasingly strict from the second century B.C. on. We have said
that in the biblical texts women play an essential part and oc-
cupy a choice place in creation. Evolution is against them. It is
marked materially by the fact that in the first temple at Jerusalem
(and also in the second) there is no separation between men
and women, both being admitted to all ceremonies and sacri-
fices. In the great temple of Herod, however, there is for the
first time separation. Women are kept outside. In the synagogues
of this period, too, women are put in a special place, which is
mostly inferior. From the same period, that is, the second cen-
tury B.C., also come prohibitions. Thus women are debarred from
meals when guests are present, etc.
It is absurd to say that these developments reflect patriar-
chal customs. For we find retrogression. Why was the situation
of women much better in texts from the eighth and the seventh
centuries, which are much closer to the famous period called
“patriarchal”? I believe that the situation is the very opposite of
patriarchal. In the second century Judaism was part of the Se-
leucid empire. Now the corruption of that empire, combining
Greek and Near Eastern corruption, was beyond all reason. In
every domain, especially that of sex, there was a complete ab-
MORALISM 83
sence of morality, respect, modesty, and decency. We see here

a society that was completely decadent, vicious, and perverted.
Human life was cheap. The condition of women was one of
almost total freedom and yet also absolute degradation. Women
were independent and yet also abandoned to every appetite and
engulfed in every luxury. They were no worse than men, but as
always in such situations they became the main victims of their
independence.
In face of this corruption, pious Jews reacted by opposing
the normal situation rather than imitating it. As society became
more lax, they became stricter. Their reaction was based on
horror at the immorality and a desire to remain faithful to God.
- But they put the debate on a moral plane, for moral questions
evoked it. They thus abandoned the spiritual view of the Bible
and instead formulated prohibitions and restraints. As regards
women, they were obviously trying to prevent the daughters of
Israel from behaving like all the women of the Hellenistic world.
The banning of women from meals when there were invited
guests is typical. Custom dictated that meals should end with
sex. In this rule, then, we have moralism rather than antifem-
inism. We also know very well that devout Jews were fiercely
hostile to the Herodians and their dynasty. This hostility, too,
had to do with the immorality that obtained at the court of the
Herods and is reflected in the story of Salome and the death of
John the Baptist. How could pious Jews tolerate such conduct
in their king? This was the problem.
The same situation constantly repeats itself in the history
of the church and Christendom. Without a doubt, devout and
moralistic Judaism had an influence on the first Christian gen-
erations. Paul is resisting this influence when he rejects, not the
law, but the moralizing interpretation that is imposed on it,
when he rejects what are in effect human commandments. I do
not think, then, that his teaching about women derives from
Judaism. He unceasingly tries to refer every question back to the
spiritual field of revelation and to relate every problem to the
incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He never
falls into morality, although if one picks out isolated texts, one
can make them into legal precepts, as is generally done.
This being said, I must now state that the influence of
Near Eastern corruption on the Roman empire begins to have
an effect from the first century B.C. Nor should we think that only
the wealthy sink into total immorality. The lower classes do so

as well through the medium of the slaves. The laments of Cato
and the sharp judgments of Pliny or Tacitus are not the work of
disappointed people but reflect the general manners of the time.
We find cruelty to slaves, a fabulous squandering of money and
goods, political corruption, swindling, polygamy, concubinage
with slaves, an astounding increase in divorces by mutual con-
sent (women having the right to repudiate their husbands),
wholesale prostitution, homosexuality, and pederasty, which ac-
cording to Suetonius is carried to inordinate lengths. So one
could go on; everything was acceptable in this Roman world,
and in spite of violent repression by Octavius Augustus, there
was no regress in immorality, which exploded the more violently
after the death of Augustus.
Nevertheless, one should also note that this immorality
developed within-a society of law and order. That is to say, it
did not bring any serious disorders, any insecurity, troubles, etc.
Roman society was well run and functioned well. Vice had the
attraction of an added spice, like the games were for the people.
All the same, it is understandable that Christians of the first
generations should be revolted by these modes of conduct to the
degree that they read the Hebrew Bible seriously and accepted
the gospel of Jesus Christ as an example. This is why in Paul,
or James, or Revelation we find blistering attacks on this con-
duct, which was so general and so “natural” that even Christians
were engaging in it, as we see from the beginning of Romans or
from 1 Corinthians.
Thus, although there is no Christian morality, although
the faith is against morality, following Jesus Christ has certain
implications for practical life. Living by the love of God and by
faith in his Word is incompatible with such vices and irregular-
ities. The essential point is that we have here the implications
of life in Christ and not the commandments of an external mo-
rality. There is clear opposition between fruits (produced by the
tree of faith) and works (produced by morality). But very quickly
the pendulum swings. From the second century on, church lead-
ers begin to focus primarily on moral conduct. This becomes the
criterion of all else. A Christian morality develops in opposition
to that of the world, and Christians rapidly try to apply it to
every issue. When they achieve power, they want to impose
their morality on all society. At this point we have the first step
MORALISM 85
in the direction of morality as such, and a concern develops to

ascertain its status, such as by elaborating on the idea of a natural
morality that conforms to nature and that finds its best expres-
sion in the law of God. This law, then, becomes a kind of
common base that is obligatory for everyone. But this is only
the beginning.
The second stage in the triumph of morality in the church
and Christianity comes with the Germanic “invasions,” when
a new wave of immorality submerges everything. This is the
period from the fourth to the seventh century. The remarkable
thing is that the “barbarians” themselves were fairly upright prior
to the upheaval. Everything changes when they invade, when
they occupy alien countries, when they become conquerors, and
when the foundations of the two social groups erode. The empire
sees the development of a new form of immorality in the fourth
century. This involves especially a general dishonesty, fraud, a
flight from responsibility, the breakup of family unity, swindling,
and extortion by innumerable functionaries. The barbarians ar-
rive with their violence, the spoliation of property, and a total
lack of restraint. They install themselves, take what they want,
live off the original inhabitants, and forcibly impose their own
modes of conduct. Obviously the violence and thieving were
favorable for a new wave of immorality that would be aggravated
in the barbarian kingdoms and reach its climax in that of the
Merovingians.
If we believe (as we may) the witnesses of the period (e.g.,
Gregory of Tours), we find at this period an incredible world of
force, arson, savage destruction of property, theft, and murder.
Human life has no value. All forms of killing are good in every
stratum of society. The most direct and simple form of theft is
common. The strong take what belongs to the weak. Armed
bands incessantly roam the countryside. A frightful terror de-
scends on this society. Immorality is not at al! the same as in
the Roman epoch. Its essential characteristic now is violence,
which sexually involves rape, violation, polygamy, and the ab-
ject subjugation of the weak, usually women. The background
is no longer an orderly world, but one that knows no law.
The well-known “barbarian laws” (e.g., those of the Bur-
gundians and Visigoths) offer evidence to this effect. They con-
tain immense lists of crimes of blood in every circumstance and
form, with the appropriate penalties. Obviously the absence of
any police force or judiciary makes it impossible to enforce these

laws. They are no more than symbols. Once again, then, the
church clearly has to fight the new wave of immorality. It under-
goes fresh moralization. It tries to soften morals, to establish
regular laws of conduct, to normalize them, and to protect the
weak. In these urgent circumstances, in this social and moral
disaster of which we have no conception even though we com-
plain about the violence and insecurity of our own society, the
church does more to set up an acceptable morality than to achieve
true and radical conversions from the heart to the gospel. It
again progressively transforms the faith into morality and reve-
lation into an ethical code.
Once again, this is not what the church wants. The im-
moral situation of the time demands it. Progressively the situa-
tion becomes more normal, and three centuries of comparative
happiness follow from the tenth century to the twelfth, when
social and moral life, in spite of the frightful descriptions of
feudalism and the Middle Ages that are so strong in our mem-
ories, are much more stable and satisfying. The church then
makes some effort to return to the gospel.
Nevertheless, what has been deformed remains deformed.
Christianity has become primarily morality. It is imposed as
such. It is a code of conduct. No question of freedom or
transgression arises. People are not told to love God and do as
they like. Faith is no longer the center from which all else
derives. No, that is too dangerous. It is too open. One must not
appeal to individual responsibility or initiative. The main virtue
that is everywhere developed in the name of the church is obe-
dience. Again, a wicked desire for domination on the church’s
part is not the reason for this. The church has to face a global
moral situation that is much more terrible than anything we can
imagine. After all, obedience is a fairly effective means of fight-
ing against absolute disorder and of establishing a limit for the
superiority of the strong.
Let us make a comparison. Torture is everywhere practiced
in our own world. If a recognized moral authority could eliminate
torture by establishing obedience, that is, the obedience of the
torturers to this moral authority, a strict obedience not to the
strong but to those who are protected by the institution, we
should be quite well satisfied. Obedience to an ordered authority
; MORALISM 87
replaces the violence of the more powerful. Here is obvious prog-

ress at the moral level.
Finally, the third great wave of immorality that the church
has to face (prior to our own) is that of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. Again, and even before the terrible period
of wars of religion, society as a whole is corrupted, and again in
a new way. Certainly feudal wars and violence continue. A vi-
olent world includes wars (like the Hundred Years’ War between
England and France), numerous bloody revolts (of which the
Jacqueries offer only one of many examples), and brigandage,
which far surpasses the banditry of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries as large and well-organized bands of brigands roam the
countryside. This violence results in a crazy insecurity. Yet with
it there is curiously mingled the immorality of an immediate
enjoyment of every kind of pleasure as people sense the menace
of death, enhanced by the great epidemics of the time, such as
the Black Death.
We have here a kind of frenzy of pleasure. Everything is
permitted since death is imminent (the Decameron, which be-
longs to this period, bears witness). Immediate and frantic en-
joyment of pleasure is sought in every form, even the most
vicious (Bluebeard also belongs to this period), as a response to
the imminence of death.
In this climate sorcery, magic, incantations, evocations of
the dead, black masses, the cult of Lucifer, etc., develop with
frightful rapidity. I am not saying, of course, that such things
did not exist in earlier centuries. But they did so only sporad-
ically and in individual cases. From the fourteenth century, how-
ever, we have a veritable epidemic in a mad world. And again
the church tries to discipline people, to moralize and institu-
tionalize. Instead of seeking to convert skilled sorcerers to the
pure gospel, it uses force and constraint; it threatens them with
the stake, and it develops the Inquisition as a permanent
institution.
The spiritual vacuum left by the church results in an ex-
plosion of mystics on the one side and heretics on the other.
The mystics are in some cases admirable and respectable people
who deserve our praise. But only too often dubious trances, a
mixture of repressed and unbridled sexuality, and ambiguous and
sometimes perverted practices come to expression in them. The
heretics? . . . Many of them, such as Wycliffe, Huss, and Sa-
vonarola, seem to be fighting for true faith, the purity of the

church, a return to the sources of the gospel, the affirmation of
freedom in Christ, and the primacy of love. But it was now too
late; the church had acquired the habit of reacting on the moral
and institutional level. It had ceased to be a faithful servant of
the Lord of the poor, of the Savior who gives us freedom in love.
It had taken up the cudgels for morality and order at all costs.
Obedience is now surpassed. We have an absolutizing of the
institution and a triumph of morality. Everything comes down
to this. The popes use laws to fight the corruption of the clergy.
The church uses organization in its fight for unity. It turns to an
increasingly stricter morality in its battle against the current
immorality.
The truth of the revelation of God in Christ is totally lost
because the church has missed its way in its desire to reply to
the challenge of immorality during these four periods. Instead
of tracking the perversion to its source, that is, in the spiritual
foundations, it tries to deal with the results, that is, the de-
moralization. Let it be understood that I am not saying that
paganism, or revivals of it, resulted in the low moral status. In
the fourth century B.C. Roman society was pagan and morally up-
right. A complex situation was the context of this universal
immorality: events (wars, invasions, an influx of gold and silver,
plague, etc.), the conflict of Christianity with the traditional
structures of society as a basic factor, the destruction of ancient
beliefs and religions by Christian preaching, the depriving of
people of all their references, traditions, and roots. Christianity
claims to be substituting love for order, fraternity for hierarchy,
freedom for law. Clearly this works for individuals, little groups,
a tiny minority, but not for society. Hence immorality (in the
Christian era) results from the clash between paganism and
Christian preaching. On this point Julian the Apostate was right.
Finally, the church’s reaction to the encounter with im-
morality, its immense attempt to enforce law and morality, and
its reply to loose conduct in the ethical and legal fields is closely
connected with the error of confusing the church and society.
The church embraces all society. It baptizes it officially as a
Christian society. It takes charge of political and social problems.
It seeks to establish social order and to apply Christian principles
in every sphere. Thus revelation becomes morality—the su-
preme betrayal of the prophets, of the gospel, and of the first
MORALISM 89
Christian generation. For the more this Christian (and official)

morality develops, the more hypocrisy and Pharisaism develop
also. This was inevitable.
To understand the process, we may take priestly celibacy
as an example. Certain people have a vocation to be celibate,
to dedicate themselves to God in this way, which is one possible
way of serving God, and to seek the priesthood. This is good.
But when celibacy is made a law or obligation or rule for all
priests, when (without any vocation) it is made a condition of
the priesthood, then one of two things happens. Either those
who have a true vocation to the priesthood but not to celibacy
are set aside, or inevitably there is a cover-up of falsehood and
hypocrisy. Here, as elsewhere, law is a bad thing. It is not I who
say this, but St. Paul.
The perversion, then, was that of making the gospel into
law in order to respond to the challenge offered to revelation by
the successive outbursts of immorality and ethical disorder. Nat-
urally Christians and the church could not fail to react to the
unleashing of violence and sexuality, to the many forms of cor-
ruption. The mistake was to deal with these on the moral and
legal plane instead of following the example of Paul, who always
works through the moral question to the spiritual question, gets
back to the essence of the revelation in Christ, and from this
derives some models of conduct that are consistent with faith
and love. The church did not do this. It thus set itself on the
same level as the world and treated moral matters on the moral
plane.
Theologians made exactly the same mistake in political
and social matters. Instead of taking the path indicated by Paul
(a faithful expositor of the work of Jesus), they put themselves
on the same level and in the same field as the world. A political
question, they thought, should be treated as a political question,
a social question as a social question, with the appropriate inter-
pretations and remedies. Again the gospel becomes morality.
The same mistake is made in the fourth century, the sixth, and
the seventh. The procedure is also the same, for once a moral,
political, or social solution is given, since it is Christians who
give it, they add a small whitewash of theological terms and
biblical references for anybody who wants them. Today, as under
Constantine, Christians do exactly the same. They first take up
political or moralistic positions and then toss in some theology
to justify themselves, to give themselves a good conscience, to

give validity to the use of the term Christian. In this way the
content of the faith becomes an ideology.®
We must now return to antifeminism. I believe that the
victory of the law over the gospel, of morality over love, is
probably the essential reason for the adoption of an antifeminist
stance. It is more so, I have said, than so-called patriarchal
influences (which are nonexistent) or Jewish influences (which
are less than supposed). This is what led theologians and the
church to reject women against all rhyme or reason. To support
this thesis is easy. One need only point to the fact that the same
theologians who are supremely and passionately concerned about
moral questions are also the most antifeminist (e.g., Tertullian).
Naturally, I am not saying that moralism leads to the exclusion
of women because they are more immoral than men or constitute
for them a trap into immorality. The reason is much deeper than
that. A moralistic attitude is essentially a masculine one. It is
an attitude of judgment, of stiffness, of rigidity, of the calculation
of debits and assets, of classification, of designation, of the es-
tablishment of what should and should not be done, etc. None
of this is by nature feminine.
To make it clear what I have in mind here, I must define
what I mean by masculine and feminine. I am not thinking solely
of man and woman as they are defined by gender. I do not think
there is a nature that is original to man and another that is
original to woman, that there are stereotypes that may be traced
back to genes, and that all men are masculine and all women
feminine. Very generally in most societies, however, there have
been divisions of roles that have resulted in different conduct,
feelings, and values, although these may take different forms in
different groups. We must not ignore the genetic heritage, but
this is not determinative and does not have to imply the assign-
ing of a particular role. Each is the product both of genetic
heritage and of cultural milieu in proportions that cannot be
fixed.” Because of their vocation as mothers, for example, women
6. One may see this in all the attempts to forge a Socialist theology or
to offer a Marxist interpretation of the gospel.
7. On this question, and on the mistake of trying to classify solely by
genetic legacy, see the remarkable study by A. Jacquard, Au péril de la science
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982).
MORALISM 91
incline to such values as life, an interest in small things, a con-

cern for the weak. But because of their exclusion from socio-
political functions, they have been led to develop many other
values, and to establish interhuman relationships on foundations
different from politics, competition, and force. To a large extent
material existence in primitive times and at the very beginnings
of history, when life was essentially very dangerous due to war,
wild beasts, and the hostility of nature, resulted in males taking
authority and domination and reducing females to a secondary
position. This fact helped to produce two orders of values, the
masculine values of force, rule, power, the seeking of big things,
a spirit of conquest, courage, order, etc., and the feminine values
of love, sensitiveness, the protection of the weak, imagination,
giving, etc.
Naturally, all men and all women are not like this. Some
men wonderfully embody feminine vaiues—Jesus Christ first of
all—and some women want only to act like men and embody
the masculine role. Unfortunately the latter is the tendency in
many feminist movements, which think that the only hope of
women is to be identical to men, to adopt the values of men,
and to fill the same role as men in society.
These brief explanations were necessary in order to make
it clear what I had in mind when I said that morality and law
are masculine values. To codify human relationships, to put them
in terms of clear and well-established duties, to introduce order
into conduct, to reduce life to law, to govern impulse by regu-
lation, to force people to do what is envisaged in an order sup-
posedly established by law (whether moral or juridical), to impose
sanctions on all transgression or disobedience, to put all conduct
in as tight a mesh as possible, to set up a scale of penalties for
faults and failings, to classify the whole person according to his
or her obedience to the rules—all this is very masculine, ex-
pressing as it does the spirit of power, the desire to order a society
that would otherwise be spontaneous, to clarify relationships
that would otherwise be obscure. Confronting social ills and
immorality, the masculine mind finds only the one solution, that
of making laws and setting up rules and sanctions. | repeat that
some women have this masculine mind, too. There are strict
and rigid women who support order and represent law. One need
only think of Hervé Bazin and Folcoche. Nevertheless, one
should not forget that at the end Folcoche is finally very different
and very feminine when she is old and hurt, when she no longer
has to embody duty, and when she shows that all her life she
has been assuming a role that is contrary to nature. Psycho-
analysts know very well that it is men who really embody law.
In the periods of vast immorality to which we refer, women
did not try to master all problems by moral and legal rules. They
tried to set up interhuman relationships on a basis of understand-
ing, love, toleration, flexibility, and the sheltering of the weak.
They obviously did not have immediate success. This response
was hardly adequate or strong enough for the brutality of the
age. Action along these lines undoubtedly had to be slow and
less obvious. Yet it was more basic and went to the heart of the
question.8
I do not deny that government must make laws or that we
need police and the courts. I am simply saying that this is a
makeshift that enables us to dam up the evil but that never
solves anything. What happened was that Christians and the
church adopted this attitude and took this course. All evangel-
ical teaching is against it. What one might have expected of
Christians and the church is that they would have replaced false
love with the true love that comes from God, that they would
have substituted the agape that serves for the conquering eros of
the Greeks, that they would have put the spirit of service in
place of the spirit of domination, that they would have rejected
pui.ctilious legalism in favor of an open and supple human re-
lationship, that they would have boosted the personal in place
of the social, that they would have exalted personal appreciation
in place of valid rules, that they would have looked on the heart
rather than external conduct, that they would have checked
sexual disorder by the triumph of true love between men and
women, that they would have maintained everywhere a living
flexibility in place of the rigidity of order; in short, that even at
the cost of unavoidable sacrifices and sufferings they would have
embodied and maintained feminine values in the bosom of this
kind of society.
The church chose the spirit of constraint and domination,
8. We find the same today in the matter of violence and juvenile de-
linquency. Repression and force are the masculine response. The slow work of
specialized prevention based on the understanding and acceptance of others
is the feminine response. In my view it is the only valid one.
MORALISM © 93
and rejected the gospel. It set up—we have seen how—the

primacy of law and morality over faith, hope, and love. By this
fact it essentially, if not exclusively, eliminated women, reduced
them to a secondary role, and submitted them as well to law and
moral judgments. The church’s most serious loss comes from this
substitution of morality for the gospel, which entails the rejec-
tion of women as living witnesses to the gospel. Once again the
law becomes an expression of evil, of the temptation of the
Garden of Eden. The church loses its central vocation when it
subjects women to the judgment of this moralism.
I think that we have here the explanation of the astonish-
ing change that makes women an object of repulsion and dis-
trust, and at the same time treats them as minors, even though
the biblical revelation puts them at the very center of God’s will
for the race. In itself the gospel is good news; it is grace, joy,
freedom, and love; in human relationships it means flexibility,
finesse, concern for the little, the protection of the weak, and
openness. Its transformation into a morality of duty and judg-
ment, provoked by the immorality of surrounding society, and
regarded as the only possible result and response—this is what
led to the exclusion of women from their place and vocation,
their rejection from circles of responsibility. Men were the ones
who carried out this operation, who tried to protect the group
in this way, as though they were threatened by violent military
aggression.
From this point on two things had to be done. Women had
to be neutralized and theological justification for this position
had to be found. For we must not forget that we are in the
church and a Christian setting. Neutralizing women was more
essential precisely because the revelation of God in Jesus Christ,
as it is given to us throughout the Bible, assigns to woman (the
Living One) all the values of life (and not of social well-being).
The church finds three ways in which to neutralize women—
ways that are familiar and have often been studied: 1) It imposes
on women silence, passivity, obedience, and self-effacement, as
though such things were valid for all women. 2) It makes the
status of virginity superior to all others (contrary to the rather
ambiguous teaching of Paul, who in certain cases and for certain
reasons thinks that virginity is superior to marriage, but who
elsewhere states that women are saved by becoming mothers,
clearly not with reference to individual situations but with ref-
erence to the promise given to Eve that her posterity will crush
the serpent). Virginity, however, excludes women not merely
from their social role but from their true nature as those who
bear and transmit life. 3) Finally, we have idealizing (an exten-
sion of virginity), especially of the Virgin Mary, who becomes
a model of submission (“Be it unto me”) as a model of hearing
and believing (which is rather a different matter!), and who
allows men to have a good conscience as they abase women by
exalting them all the more ideologically. This is the well-known
mechanism whereby one avoids a troublesome reality by projec-
tion into an ideal.
As the process of neutralization developed, theologians had
also to prove that the exclusion and abasement of women has
good biblical and theological foundations. There thus came into
being the vicious reading of Scripture that we have already de-
nounced and that is characterized by the avoidance of spiritual
passages about women, by the wresting of contrary texts from
their context, and by stressing favorable texts at the expense of
others. Finally, some passages are even read in an opposite sense,
as, for example, the putting of Eve’s creation last, or the state-
ment that she is taken from Adam’s side. All this is a tragic
result of the substitution of morality for revelation that for two
thousand years has been one of the aspects of the perversion of
the will of God.
Chapter V
THE INFLUENCE
OF ISLAM'
Stress has seldom been laid upon the influence of Islam on

Christianity, that is, on the deformation and subversion to which
God’s revelation in Jesus Christ is subjected. Yet this influence
was considerable between the ninth and eleventh centuries. We
have been brought up on the image of a strong and stable Chris-
tianity that was attacked and besieged in some sense by Islam.
Engaged in unlimited conquest, with a universal vocation similar
to that claimed by Christianity, Islam was expanding its empire
in three directions: to the south, especially along the coasts into
black Africa, and reaching as far as Zanzibar by the twelfth
century; to the northwest, with the conquest of Spain and the
invasion of France up to Lyons on the one side and Poitiers on
the other; and to the northeast into Asia Minor and as far as
Constantinople. With the Turks Islam would then continue in-
cessantly to threaten the Balkans, Austria, Hungary, etc. The
picture is a Manichean and warlike one; as it is hard to conceive
of profound contacts between warring enemies, how can Islam
have influenced Christianity in this permanent state of war?
The fine book by H. Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne, ? has
admirably shown what were the economic and political conse-
quences of this permanent military threat. But it has often been
1. See, among other works, D. Sourdel, L’Islam médiéval (Paris: PUF,

1979), and on Muslim mysticism M. Eliade, Histoire des croyances et des idées
religieuses (Paris: Payot, 1983), 3:283; Islam et Christianisme, a special issue of
Foi et Vie, 1983.
2. H. Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne (Paris: Payot, 1937).
95
emphasized that we lack any study of relationships. This is the

more surprising in that elsewhere, in the domain of philosophy,
we know perfectly well that Aristotle’s thought came into Europe
thanks to the translations and commentaries of the Arab phi-
losopher Averroes (twelfth century), and we can also point to
the influence of Avicenna from the eleventh century. It is also
recognized that Arab influence was great in scientific fields such
as mathematics, medicine, agronomy, astronomy, and physics.
All this is conceded and generally known.
A little later Arab influence may be seen incontestably in
the black arts, in magic, the various “-mancies,” alchemy, the
search for the philosopher’s stone, and also music (twelfth cen-
tury). It is also well understood that the Arabs had considerable
military influence (e.g., upon cavalry, etc.) and that some tech-
nical fields (irrigation) and architecture felt their impact. Fi-
nally, it is constantly stressed that through the Crusades and the
contacts of the Crusaders with the Arabs many changes came
about in various areas, such as the bringing of certain fruit trees
(cherries and apricots) into France. All this is very banal. But
it does at least tell us beyond a doubt that even between enemies
who are depicted as irreconcilable there were cultural and in-
tellectual relations. Exchanges took place and knowledge cir-
culated. In truth, knowledge seems to have circulated in only
one direction, coming from Islam and the Arab world to the
West, which was much more backward and “barbarian.”3
There are two areas that to my knowledge have not yet
been studied in such surveys, those of law and theology. But
how can we believe or admit or think that exchanges took place
in the intellectual, commercial, and economic fields without
affecting these disciplines in any way? It is recognized, for ex-
3. This has led some fervent supporters of Islam to regret that the Arabs
were finally defeated and repulsed. What a wonderfully civilized empire would
have been set up if all Europe had been invaded! This position, the opposite
of the prevailing one in history up to about 1950, leads people to forget the
horrors of Islam, the dreadful cruelty, the general use of torture, the slavery,
and the absolute intolerance notwithstanding zealous apostles who underline
Islam’s toleration. We shall come back to this. It is enough to point out that
wherever Islam gained a hold strong and vital churches like those of North
Africa and Asia Minor simply disappeared. And all native cultures that were
different, that the Romans and Germans had respected, were exterminated in
areas conquered by the Arabs.
THE INFLUENCE OF ISLAM 97
ample, that the bill of exchange was almost certainly invented

by the Arabs and then adopted in the West to facilitate maritime
trade. But other areas of law must have been influenced as well.
I am inclined to think, for example, that the law of serfdom is
a Western imitation of the Muslim dhimmi. Religious law is also
important. | am convinced that some parts of canon law have
their origin in Arab law. And this leads us, in effect, to
Christianity.
How can we imagine that there was a well-known and
admitted influence on philosophy that did not have theological
repercussions? Everyone knows that the problem solved by
Thomas Aquinas was precisely that of the confrontation between
classical theology and Aristotle’s philosophy. But the bridge is
by way of the Arabs. We speak of Greek philosophy and Chris-
tian theology. But this Greek philosophy was faithfully trans-
mitted by Arab interpreters. It was by way of Arab-Muslim
thinking that the problem came to be addressed at this time.
We can hardly think that the Arab influence was nil except in
matters concerning Aristotle.
Furthermore, it is readily perceived that Christianity and
Islam had certain obvious points in common or points of meet-
ing. Both were monotheistic and both were based on a book.
We should also note the importance that Islam accords to the
poor. Certainly Christians reject Allah because of the denial
that Jesus Christ is God’s Son, and they do not allow that the
Koran is divinely inspired. On the other hand, Muslims reject
the Trinity in the name of the unity, and they make the whole
Bible a mere preface or introduction to the Koran. At root,
Muslims do with the whole Bible what Christians do with the
Hebrew Bible. But on this common foundation there are nec-
essarily encounters and debates and discussions, and hence a
certain openness. Even where there is rejection and objection,
there can be no evading the question that is put.
It seems that the Muslim intellectuals and theologians were
much stronger than their Christian counterparts. It seems that
Islam had an influence, but not Christianity. Our interest here
is not in the philosophical problem or in theological formula-
tions, which were necessarily restricted to a small intellectual
circle, but in the way in which Islamic influences change prac-
tices, rites, beliefs, attitudes toward life, all that belongs to the
domain of moral or social belief or conduct, all that constitutes
Christendom. Here again, everyone knows that the Frankish

kingdom of Jerusalem, the French knights installed in Palestine,
rapidly adopted many manners and customs that originated in
Islam. But the exceptional case is not important. What counts
is what is imported into Europe. It is the fact of unwitting im-
itation. It is the fact of being situated on the chosen territory
and being delimited by those whom one wants to combat. I will
thus leave on one side theology in the pure sense, the difference
between Thomas Aquinas and biblical theology, and the influ-
ence of Aristotle. I will concern myself with other problems.
I believe that in every respect the spirit of Islam is contrary
to that of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. It is so in the
basic fact that the God of Islam cannot be incarnate. This God
can be only the sovereign judge who ordains all things as he
wills. Another point of antithesis lies in the absolute integration
of religious and political law. The expression of God’s will inev-
itably translates itself into law. No law is not religious, inspired
by God. Reciprocally, all God’s will must translate itself into
legal terms. Islam pushed to an extreme a tendency that is virtual
in the Hebrew Bible, but there it is symbolic of the spiritual and
is then transcended by Jesus Christ; with Islam we come back
to legal formulation as such.
I have shown elsewhere that the twofold formulation of
“having a law” and of “objective law” is contrary to revelation.
This can naturally be contested only by champions of natural
law and classical theology. My conviction is that this revelation
of love, seeking to set up a relationship of love (alone) among
us, and thus basing everything on grace and giving us a model
of exclusively gracious relationships, is in fact the exact opposite
of law, in which everything is measured by debits and credits
(the opposite of grace) and duties (the opposite of love).
To the extent that we are not in the kingdom of God, we
certainly cannot achieve this pure relation of love and grace,
this completely transparent relation. Hence law has a necessary
existence. Yet we have to view it merely as a matter of expe-
diency (because we cannot do better) and a necessary evil (which
is always an evil). This understanding has nothing in common
with that which contrariwise greatly exalts law, making it the
expression of God’s will and the legal formulation of the “reli-
gious” world. On this view law is a preeminent value. In taking
this approach Christians were greatly influenced by their Roman
background. They could not exclude or minimize the value of

Roman law, as we have seen. There then comes a great rebound
with the Arabs. We now have an intimate union between law
and the will of God.
The jurist is the theologian. Theology becomes no less legal
than philosophical. Life is set in law no less and even more than
in ethics. Everything religious becomes legal. Judges handle re-
ligious matters, and jurisprudence becomes theology. This gives
an enormous boost to the juridicizing of Christendom. Canon
law expands after the pattern found in Islam. If everything is
not included in it, it is because the feudal lords and monarchs
are very hostile to the growing power of the church and because
(lay) customs put up firm opposition to this sanctification. But
the legal spirit penetrates deeply into the church, and I maintain
that this is both under the influence of Islam and in response to
the religious law of Islam. The church had to follow suit.
Furthermore, law set up ecclesiastical courts and gave them
means of ruling. They would have liked to have seen everything
referred to canon law and their courts, as in the Muslim world.
The church would have liked sole power. But in Islam there was
an indissoluble correlation between religious law and political
power. In this field, too, what was introduced with Constanti-
nianism, as we have seen, received a new impulse from Islam.
Every political head in Islam is also the ruler of believers. There
is no separation between the church and political power. The
political head is the religious head. He is a representative of
Allah. His political and military acts, etc., are inspired.
Now this is all familiar in Europe. The king or emperor
does not merely claim to be the secular arm of the church but
the one who has spiritual power. He wants it to be recognized
that he personally is chosen by God, elected by the Almighty.
He needs a prophetic word and the power to work miracles. His
word and person have to be sacred.
Naturally some of this was already present prior to Islam.
It was not for nothing, however, that this theology, liturgy, and
imperial understanding developed first at Byzantium on the first
contact with Islam, and only later spread to the West. Royal
power becomes religious not merely in an alliance with the
church but under the influence of Islam, which was much more
of a theocracy than the West ever was: a theocracy in which
God is indeed the sole king, but the true representative of God
on earth is the political head, so that we have what has rightly

been called “lay theocracy” with no religious organization, no
clergy, no ecclesiastical institution—a situation in which to re-
joice, for it implies that only the political power is religious.
Islam does not know the duality of church and state with its
conflicts and also with the limitation that it entails for the po-
litical power.
We can thus understand perfectly the wish or desire or
temptation of Western kings and emperors to be themselves the
sole representatives of God on earth and thus to go much further |
than Constantine. The formula according to which the emperor
is “the bishop on the outside” did not suffice for them. I am
certain that the Islamic model acted in favor of the emancipation
of kings and their attempt from the fourteenth century to create
a church that would be wholly dependent on the political power.
Certainly in the big debate they were not able to advance this
argument. What an admission it would be to say that they were
taking those terrible unbelievers as a model!
In tandem with this great importance of the political power
there is, of course, the importance and glorification of war as a
means of spreading the faith. Such war is a duty for all Muslims.
Islam has to become universal. The true faith, not the power,
has to be taken to every people by every means, including by
military force. This makes the political power important, for it
is warlike by nature. The two things are closely related. The
political head wages war on behalf of the faith. He is thus the
religious head, and as the sole representative of God he must
fight to extend Islam. This enormous importance of war has
been totally obliterated today in intellectual circles that admire
Islam and want to take it afresh as a model. War is inherent in
Islam. It is inscribed in its teaching. It is a fact of its civilization
and also a religious fact; the two cannot be separated. It is co-
herent with its conception of the Dhar al ahrb, that the whole
world is destined to become Muslim by Arab conquests. The
proof of all this is not just theological; it is historical: hardly has
the Islamic faith been preached when an immediate military
conquest begins. From 632 to 651, in the twenty years after the
death of the prophet, we have a lightning war of conquest with
the invasion of Egypt and Cyrenaica to the west, Arabia in the
center, Armenia, Syria, and Persia to the east. In the following
century all North Africa and Spain are taken over, along with
India and Turkey to the east. The conquests are not achieved
by sanctity, but by war.
For three centuries Christianity spread by preaching, kind-
ness, example, morality, and encouragement of the poor. When
the empire became Christian, war was hardly tolerated by the
Christians. Even when waged by a Christian emperor it was a
dubious business and was assessed unfavorably. It was often con-
demned. Christians were accused of undermining the political
force and military might of the empire from within. In practice
Christians would remain critical of war until the flamboyant
image of the holy war came on the scene. In other words, no
matter what atrocities have been committed in wars waged by
so-called Christian nations, war has always been in essential
contradiction to the gospel. Christians have always been more
or less aware of this. They have judged war and questioned it.
In Islam, on the contrary, war was always just and consti-
tuted a sacred duty. The war that was meant to convert infidels
was just and legitimate, for, as Muslim thinking repeats, Islam
is the only religion that conforms perfectly to nature. In a natural
state we would all be Muslims. If we are not, it is because we
have been led astray and diverted from the true faith. In making
war to force people to become Muslims the faithful are bringing
them back to their true nature. Q.E.D. Furthermore, a war of
this kind is a jihad, a holy war. Let us make no mistake, the word
jihad has two complementary senses. It may denote a spiritual
war that is moral and inward. Muslims have to wage this war
within themselves in the fight against demons and evil forces,
in the effort to achieve better obedience to God’s will, in the
struggle for perfect submission. But at the same time and in a
wholly consistent way the jihad is also the war against external
demons. To spread the faith, it is necessary to destroy false re-
ligions. This war, then, is always a religious war, a holy war.
At this point we have two very strong direct influences
exerted by Islam on Christianity. Prior to the eighth century
Christianity hardly ever stated that revelation conforms to na-
ture. Tradition, based on the Bible, took the contrary view.
Nature is fallen, the flesh is wicked, people in themselves, in
their natural state, are sinners and unbelievers. Naturally I re-
alize that the church fathers had already run into the problem
of the contradiction between the biblical statements and, for
example, Greek philosophy, which in certain streams presents
nature as the model that one should follow. But nature was never
confused with the biblical revelation. Even those who allowed
some positive value to nature always had reservations about cor-
rupted nature. I believe that it is the Muslim identification of
nature and Islam that poses for Christians in an urgent way the
question whether one could let infidels get away with this,
whether one had not to say something similar.
As is well known, theologies from the eleventh century
onward tend to bring nature and revelation together, to find in
nature a source of revelation (as in the ambiguous statements of
Denis about light), to elaborate a “natural” theology, to show
that the Fall is not radical or total, and then to coordinate the
two in a nature completed by grace as supernature. Thus the
great deviation of Christian thought and theology from the bib-
lical revelation in this matter of nature has at least two sources:
the Greek and the Arab. The latter, in my opinion, is finally
the more important. This orientation leads at once to the same
conclusions we have noted in Islam. If there is a coincidence of
nature and revelation, then only damnable blindness leads to
the nonrecognition of God (the Christian God, of course!). For
one has only to open one’s eyes and look at nature to see God.
One has only to know oneself to discern the true religion. If one
will not do such simple things, one is culpable. As soon as
Christianity becomes a religion that conforms to nature, then
it becomes necessary to force people to become Christians. In
this way they will come back to their true nature. Forced con-
versions begin to take place.
The famous story of Charlemagne forcing the Saxons to be
converted on pain of death simply presents us with an imitation
of what Islam had been doing for two centuries. But if war now
has conversions to Christianity as its goal, we can see that very
quickly it takes on the aspect of a holy war. It is a war waged
against unbelievers and heretics (we know how pitiless was the
war that Islam waged against heretics in its midst). But the idea
of a holy war is a direct product of the Muslim jihad. If the latter
is a holy war, then obviously the fight against Muslims to defend
or save Christianity has also to be a holy war. The idea of a holy
war is not of Christian origin. Emperors never advanced the idea
prior to the appearance of Islam.
For half a century historians have been studying the Cru-
sades to find explanations other than the silly theory that was
previously held and conforms to addresses and sermons, that

claims their intention was to secure the holy places. It has been
shown that the Crusades had economic objectives, or that they
were stirred up by the popes for various political motives such
as that of securing papal preeminence by exhausting the king-
doms, or reforging the weakening unity of the church, or again
that they were a means whereby the kings ruined the barons who
were challenging their power, or again that the bankers of Genoa,
Florence, and Barcelona instigated them so as to be able to lend
money to the Crusaders and make fabulous profits, etc. One
fact, however, is a radical one, namely, that the Crusade is an
imitation of the jihad. Thus the Crusade includes a guarantee of
salvation. The one who dies in a holy war goes straight to Para-
dise, and the same applies to the one who takes part in a
Crusade. This is no coincidence; it is an exact equivalent.
The Crusades, which were once admired as an expression
of absolute faith, and which are now the subject of accusations
against the church and Christianity, are of Muslim, not Chris-
tian, origin. We find here a terrible consequence and confir-
mation of a vice that was eating into Christianity already, namely,
that of violence and the desire for power and domination. To
fight against a wicked foe with the same means and arms is
unavoidably to be identified with this foe. Evil means inevitably
corrupt a just cause. The nonviolence of Jesus Christ changes
into a war in conflict with that waged by the foe. Like that war,
this is now a holy war. Here we have one of the chief perversions
of faith in Jesus Christ and of the Christian life.
But we must take this a step further. Once the king is the
representative of God on earth and a war is holy, another ques-
tion necessarily arises. If a war is not holy, what is it? It seems
that the Christian emperors of Rome did not ask this question.
They had to defend the empire. That was all. Naturally it did
not arise in the period of the invasions and the Germanic king-
doms either. War was then a fact, a permanent state. No one
tried to justify it. But with the Muslim idea of a holy war the
idea is born that a war may be good even if it is not motivated
by religious intentions so long as it is waged by a legitimate king.
Gradually the view is accepted that political power has to engage
in war, and if this power is Christian, then a ruler has to obey
certain precepts, orientations, and criteria if he is to act as a
Christian ruler and to wage a just war. We thus embark on an
endless debate as to the conditions of a just war, from Gratian’s

decree to St. Thomas. All this derives from the first impulse
toward a holy war, and it was the Muslim example that finally
inspired this dreadful denial of which all Christendom becomes
guilty.
We have still to examine a very different subversion. It
concerns piety, the relation to God. We see in it an influence
that we have already mentioned in passing. Every infant is sup-
posedly born a Muslim, for Islam is perfect conformity to nature.
Scholars, then, argue that it is through a bad influence or the
“cultural” setting that this baby, who is by nature a Muslim,
deviates from the truth and becomes a Jew or a Christian or a
pagan. Evangelical thinking takes exactly the opposite view.
One becomes a Christian only by conversion. Our old being,
which is by nature corrupt, is changed by the action of the Holy
Spirit, who makes of us new beings. Conversion alone, conscious
and recognized, so that there is confession with the lips as well
as faith in the heart, produces the Christian. This new birth,
the opposite of natural birth, is confirmed by the outward sign
of baptism, which seems to imply an express acknowledgment
of faith. But progressively this strict view weakens. The church
fathers analyze the sacraments, and the tendency toward an opus
operatum understanding develops. The sacrament is intrinsically
efficacious. Baptism ceases to be a sign of converting grace and
becomes in itself an instrument of salvation. Hence, if we desire
that infants, who are naturally damned due to the transmission
of original sin, should be saved, we must baptize them imme-
diately at birth so as to avoid the risk of their dying first. Sal-
vation, then, comes almost at the moment of birth. At the same
time that we reevaluate nature, which is now not radically bad,
the conviction gains ground that the soul is “naturally” good and
saved, that there is only a hindrance, a flaw, and that original
sin is merely an obstacle that baptism overcomes.
Very quickly the formula spreads that the soul is by nature
Christian, which is the counterpart of the Muslim view. Now
the idea that faith is natural, that one is put in a Christian state
by heredity, that being a Christian is indeed a kind of status in
society, that it involves at the same time membership in both
the church and society (just as excommunication is exclusion
from both the church and society), is the very opposite of the
work of Jesus Christ. We have to insist that Christendom in this
sense is superimposed upon the church and that it duplicates

exactly what is taught by Islam. Once the theory of “the soul
by nature Christian” is accepted, society has to be made up of
Christians. There is no alternative. Already with the Christian
emperors there was a thrust in this direction. But it was the
Muslim example that proved decisive. Each time we find the
same refrain. There is a need to outdo Islam, and that means
imitating it.
Now we have to say that this is the very opposite of what
may be seen in the Gospels and in Paul. It negates the unique
redemptive worth of the death of Jesus Christ. If human nature
is not totally incapable of having access to God, if it is naturally
in harmony with the will of God, what is the point of the death
of Jesus Christ? It was not at all necessary that God should come
among us, that Jesus should obey his Father’s will even to the
point of accepting death by reason of the evil that holds sway
in the human race. The impossibility of our being able to be in
harmony with God is shown by the fact that we reject the holy
and the good, love and truth, in the person of Jesus. Unwittingly
the imitation of Islam robs the death of Jesus Christ of its ulti-
mate seriousness.
In this field of the relation to God, Christianity discloses
the influence of Islam at two other points as well: mysticism and
obedience. Mysticism is not essentially Christian. I would even
say that in its final form it is more anti-Christian. I know that
this will cause pain and anger in some circles. Yet when I look
at the Bible I find hardly any examples of mystics. Paul alludes
to his own experience; he knew a man who was lifted up to the
third* heaven, and he could not say whether this was with or
without the body. But he was not intentionally seeking union
with God. He did not engage in a movement of ascent. He was
caught up or taken up by an external force like the chariot of
fire that catches up Elijah or the hand of God that lifts up
Daniel. Nothing more. We find prophets in the Old Testament
and apostles in the New. In the enumeration of spiritual gifts
there is no mention of mystical gifts. We are told to imitate
Jesus Christ but not to achieve union with God by a mystical
ascent.
When the apostles are invested with spiritual power, it is
*Ellul (p. 125) mistakenly has “seventh.” —Tr.

by tongues of flame that come down from heaven. There is no

question of union with God. Jesus alone is in total union with
God. Such union is brought about by the fact that God comes
(down) to us, not by our spiritual intensity or psychological
action or by any attempt to climb up to him. The idea of a
possible union with God is ruled out by the revelation of cher-
ubim guarding against any return to Paradise. As I have often
said, there is no possible ascent to God, or access to him. But
this is what mystics passionately seek. They want union with
God. They have a discipline. They follow a path to the inner
void where the soul is filled by the Holy Spirit and access opens
up to God. This is the exact opposite of what the Bible teaches.
The antithesis is even more radical if one accepts the com-
mon etymology whereby “mystic” comes from muein, to be mute
or speechless. How can this be when God’s work is wholly that
of the Word? God himself speaks, and he calls upon us to bear
witness by the Word. There could hardly be a greater contra-
diction. In fact all mystical experiences are ineffable, and Paul
is totally against anything of this kind. If we follow Jesus, it is
not a matter of looking up to heaven (“Why do you look up to
heaven?” etc.) but of being on earth and concretely living out
the will of God that was done in Jesus Christ.
But mysticism is a fundamental aspect of the Muslim reli-
gion. There is undoubtedly some correlation with the Orient
here. We know to what extent people seek ecstatic and mystical
phenomena, using drugs and somatic techniques to achieve this
abstract knowledge, this fusion with God. Fasts, exhausting
dances, absolute silence, hashish, etc.—all things are good that
lead to merger with God. Great Muslim mystics abound. Once
again, prior to the relation with Islam, one may perceive certain
mystical tendencies in Christianity, especially the trend that
derives from Gnosticism and neo-Platonism. But this trend was
regarded with suspicion and did not form any glorious part of
the Christian life or the church. In contrast, mysticism is directly
linked with Islam; it forms part of its spiritual development. Let
us make no mistake; when I speak about the desire to mount up
to God, this does not mean pride and conquest, for mystics view
themselves as objects that are annihilated in God. But here
again the biblical orientation is very different. Furthermore, I
am not saying that the influence of Islam is the only one in this
regard. My point is that it was decisive in the development of

mysticism as an expression of Christian faith.
The second aspect seems to me to be the essential one,
and it is not at all alien to the first. Islam means submission (to
God’s will). Just as mystics negate themselves to give place to
God, so Muslims have the same religious orientation. Not just
obedience but submission is involved. At a first glance this seems
to be in full conformity with the biblical revelation. We know
how important a role is played in current piety by the formula
mektoub, it was written. We have to submit to the sovereign,
preexistent, eternal, and immutable will of God. All history, all
the events of history, all the things that come to pass in each
individual life have already been decreed and fixed in advance
and written by God. In reality this is the very reverse of what
we are told about the biblical God, who opens up freedom for
us, who lets us make our own history, who goes with us on the
more or less unheard-of adventures that we concoct. This God
is not “providence” (which is never a biblical word). He is never
a determinative cause or an irreducible conductor of events. The
biblical God is he who unceasingly reestablishes our human lib-
erty when we keep falling into bondage. He unceasingly enters
into dialogue with us, but only so as to warn us about what is
good, to set us on guard, to associate us with his will; never to
force us. Here again the tendency to believe in a God who
because he is omnipotent is also omniscient (which presupposes
that everything is already said) was already present in Christian
thinking when it was invaded by certain elements in Greek
thought. Yet at first the themes of salvation and love were always
dominant. I believe that it was the strictness of Muslim piety
that really led Christians along this path.
If we make God’s omnipotence dominant over his love and
autonomy, his transcendence over the incarnation and libera-
tion, then we think of his omniscience as an inscribing of history
and events in a nexus of events that has already been established,
that is unchangeable and immutable, and that all takes place at
a stroke. Then we do not have to enter into a dialogue with
God, or into a monologue that, like Job’s, demands a response
from God, but simply have to submit to the unchanging and,
in a true sense, inhuman will of God. The whole Bible, whether
in the Old Testament or the Gospels, tells us that there is no
such thing as destiny or fate. All this is replaced by love, and
hence the joyful freedom that the first Christians experienced.

But gradually, and insidiously, fate stages a comeback.
I admit that here again popular beliefs perpetuated the
Roman idea of fatum and that the idea of liberation from destiny
had hard work making its way. I also admit that philosophical
thought inclined theologians toward problems of this type: If
God is omnipotent, it is he who does all things (cf. the error in
translating Matt. 10:29), he is not just the causa sw but the
cause of causes . . . and the future as well as the past is before
him. Hence our future is already there for God. We live out
nothing, construct nothing, and can change nothing. It must
be understood, however, that these are logical questions that
have nothing whatever to do with what the Bible reveals to us.
This logic tends to assimilate the biblical God to Roman ideas
of God. To unite the relics of popular belief and philosophical
deductions only some new input was needed, and | think that
Islam supplied this with its specific conception of the omnipo-
tent God who retains only one aspect of the Hebrew God and
absolutizes it.
From now on destiny and divine omniscience are con-
joined. Believers can live in perfect peace because they know
that everything was written in advance and they can change
nothing. The very formula “It was written” could come only
from a religion of the book. Yet the Hebrew Bible and the Gos-
pels never use such a formula. Thanks to it, the idea of predes-
tination that was already haunting philosophical and Christian
thinking received confirmation, forcibly established itself, and
came to include double predestination (in Calvin), which,
whether we want it or not, transforms the biblical God into
destiny, Ananke, etc. And this derives from Muslim thinking.
For it is not just historical events that were written in advance;
it is also eternal salvation (or rejection). Ultimately this con-
viction came to dominate a good part of Christendom, and pa-
ganism rejoins it with its belief in the god of fate.
Finally, we have to take into account some rather different
contributions of Islam, not directly in the theological field but
with reference to some social implications of belief that are at
ever) point inconsistent with Christian ethics. We have already
met one of these: the holy war. A second on which I shall not
expand, having studied it already, is the status of women. An-
other difficulty that arises in Islam in this regard is that modern
Muslims claim that women are in every way equal to men and
completely free, that Islam has been a movement of feminine
emancipation. Yet one can go so far as to say that nowhere have
women been more fully subject than on Muslim territory.4 Mar-
riages are arranged for young girls, women are reduced to being
the slaves of men in poor families and are put in the harems of
the wealthy; women have no rights, having no property—all
this is beyond dispute. Furthermore, the well-known question
whether women have souls (the church has run into trouble for
asking this question, and some have wrongly alleged that in the
eleventh and twelfth centuries it said women had no souls) is a
question that was in reality posed by Muslim theologians. Before
Arab theologians raised the issue, no one in the Christian world
had any doubts about the matter. Indeed, in spite of the anti-
Christian fable that is spread abroad with such satisfaction, the
famous Council of Macon in particular (585), to which refer-
ence is often made, did not deal with the matter, as H. Leclercq
has shown incontrovertibly in his article in the Dictionnaire
d archéologie chrétienne (5:1349). The polemical legend rests solely
on some misunderstood lines of Gregory of Tours on the subject,
in which the question is a purely grammatical one, namely,
whether the word homo is a generic term that may also apply to
women (the answer being in the affirmative), and not a theo-
logical one, whether women are human beings furnished with
souls. Neither Christianity nor the church ever denied that
women have souls. Furthermore, it was certainly only in those
Western lands subject to Muslim domination that the position
of women deteriorated. A detailed study is impossible, but an
answer to the question would have to be along the lines that I
have indicated.
I have to admit that Christian history took an incredibly
sad turn in two other areas. The first concerns slavery. Not all
at once but progressively under Christian influence (and not
because of technical improvements, as is often stated today),
slavery disappeared in the Roman empire. It persisted, however,
in remote corners of the Carolingian empire. We may note,
meanwhile, two currents: the one from the North (the Slavs),
4. Cf. the fine study by G. Bousquet, L’Ethique sexuelle de l’Islam (Paris:

Maisonneuve, 1966). The prophet’s own practice was also not particularly
edifying for women, and Muslims are told to copy him in all things.
the other from the Mediterranean. Yet the incidence of this is

negligible and episodic. The general thesis that there was no
more slavery in Christendom is true. Thus the proclamation that
“everyone in the kingdom of France is free” was correct, and it
was even allowed (although perhaps theoretically) that the mo-
ment slaves arrived in France, the mere fact of setting foot on
French soil made them free. This was wholly in keeping with
Christian thinking.
Nevertheless, from the fifteenth century, with the devel-
opment of a knowledge of Africa, and then especially in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we have the familiar and
dreadful history of the enslaving of Africans, who were torn from
their own country and transported to America. What accusa-
tions have been made against “Christianity” and Western civi-
lization! And rightly so! How lightly the revelation in Christ
was taken, which would have totally and radically and unre-
servedly forbidden slavery. In the Middle Ages the traffic in
slaves would undoubtedly have led to excommunication. It is a
curious fact, however, that apart from some conscientious his-
torians no one has put the elementary question how it was that
a few Western navigators could round up thousands of slaves
from among peoples who were by no means sheeplike. Could a
hundred French sailors, even though armed with muskets, attack
a tribe of several hundred hardy warriors and seize a cargo of
slaves? Such an idea is pure fiction. For centuries the Muslims
had regularly cropped the black continent for slaves. Seizing
Africans as slaves was a Muslim practice from at least the tenth
century. The African tribes were in this case attacked by con-
siderable armies, in veritable invasions, of which we shall have
to speak later.5
The Muslims carried off to the East far more black slaves
than the Westerners ever did. In the eleventh century fifteen
great slave markets were set up by the Arabs in black Africa. In
the east they extended as far as across from Madagascar [present-
day Mozambique], and in the west as far as the Niger [present-
day Guinea River]. Slaves were the main item in Muslim trade
5. Apart from the wars, we also find brutal expeditions that were mounted
solely to seize prisoners as slaves or to carry off herds and women. For these
the word is razzia, a good Arab term.
from the tenth century to the fifteenth. Furthermore, the Mus-

lims began to use political methods by which the Western mer-
chants profited. They played off the African chiefs against one
another in such a way that a chief would take prisoners from
neighboring tribes and then sell them to the Arab merchants.
It was by following this practice, which had been established for
many centuries, that the Western sailors obtained slaves so eas-
ily. Naturally, the reality itself is terrible and anti-Christian, but
we see here the direct influence of Islam on the practice of
Westerners who were Christian only in name. One should also
remember, as the United Nations has pointed out, that trading
in black slaves by Arab merchants still goes on in countries
around the gulf of Oman.
Finally, a last point: colonizing. Here again, for the last
thirty years some have attacked Christianity for instigating co-
lonialism. Christians are accused of invading the whole world
and justifying the capitalist system. It has become a traditional
belief that missionaries pioneered the way for merchants. Un-
doubtedly there is some truth in all this. Undoubtedly serious
and conscientious Christians should never have acquiesced in
the invasion of “Third World” peoples, in the seizing of their
lands, in their reduction to semislavery (or their extermination),
in the destruction of their cultures. The judgment against us is
a crushing one. Las Casas is entirely right. But who invented
colonizing? Islam. Incontestably so!
I will not discuss again the question of war or the estab-
lishment in Africa of kingdoms dominated by the Arabs. My
theme is colonizing, the penetration by other than military
means, the reduction of subject peoples by a sort of treaty that
makes them do exactly as the rulers want. In Islam we find two
methods of penetration, commercial and religious. Things are
exactly the same as they will be among the Westerners five
centuries later. Muslim missionaries convert the Africans to Is-
lam by every possible means. Nor can one deny that their in-
tervention has just the same effects as that of Christian
missionaries: the destruction of the independent religions and
cultures of the African tribes and kingdoms. Nor must we back
the stupid argument that it was an internal affair of the African
world. The Muslims came into the north by conquest, and the
Arabs are white. Muslim missionaries went as far as Zanzibar,
and in Angola they brought within the Muslim orbit African

peoples that had not been conquered or subjugated.
The other method is that of commerce. The Arab mer-
chants go much further afield than the soldiers. They do much
the same as the Westerners will do five centuries later. They set
up trading posts and barter with the local tribes. It is not without
interest that one of the commodities they were seeking in the
tenth and eleventh centuries was gold. Trading in gold by the
Arabs took place in Ghana, to the south of the Niger, and on
the east coast down toward Zanzibar. When it is said that the
desire for gold prompted the Westerners in the fifteenth century,
they were simply following in the footsteps of Islam. Thus the
Arab mechanism of colonizing serves as a model for the
Europeans.
In conclusion, let me make it clear that | have not been
trying to excuse what the Europeans did. I have not been trying
to shift the “blame,” to say that the Muslims, not the Christians,
were the guilty party. My purpose is to try to explain certain
perversions in Christian conduct. | have found a model for them
in Islam. Christians did not invent the holy war or the slave
trade. Their great fault was to imitate Islam. Sometimes this was
direct imitation by following the example of Islam. Sometimes
it was inverse imitation by doing the same thing in order to
combat Islam, as in the Crusades. Either way, the tragedy was
that the church completely forgot the truth of the gospel. It
turned Christian ethics upside down in favor of what seemed to
be very obviously a much more effective mode of action, for in
the twelfth century and later the Muslim world offered a dazzling
example of civilization. The church forgot the authenticity of
the revelation in Christ in order to launch out in pursuit of the
same mirage.
Chapter VI
POLITICAL PERVERSION
I. THE STARTING POINT
Since there are so many misunderstandings on this subject,

it will perhaps be worth our while to recall the main outlines of
biblical and evangelical thinking on state politics. This whole
teaching has been massively obscured by the attempt to justify
or validate political power. In Israel this has its beginning with
David, and in Christendom with Paul’s much too celebrated
statement that all authority is from God. Naturally, I cannot
review all that the Bible teaches about power and politics; I have
written too much on the issue to start all over again. I will
simply recall my main theses and for the rest refer the reader to
my many writings on the question.!
The central thought is that already in the Old Testament,
in spite of Israel’s existence as a nation, but especially in the
New, where the church, the “new Israel,” is not a state, the
biblical view is not just apolitical but antipolitical in the sense
that it refuses to confer any value on political power, or in the
sense that it regards political power as idolatrous, inevitably en-
tailing idolatry. Christianity offers no justification for political
1. See, among others, Les Chrétiens et Etat (Mame, 1967); “Anarchie

et Christianisme,” Contrepoint (1974); ET “Anarchism and Christianity,” Ka-
tallagete 7 (1980); “La politique, mal absolu,” La Foi au prix du doute (Paris:
Hachette, 1980); ET Living Faith (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983);
“Aliénation et Temporalité dans le droit,” Temporalité et Aliénation (Paris: Au-
bier, 1975); “Les origines de la monarchie en Israél,” Meélanges Brethes de la
Gressaye (1970); L’Idéologie marxiste-chrétienne (Paris: Le Centurion, 1979).
113
power; on the contrary, it radically questions it. I recall three

factors that I will simply enumerate. In the Old Testament the
tule of the “judges” is apolitical. God is the sole king and the
judge, chosen directly by God, is raised up for a time of crisis.
The rule is nonstatist; there is no perennial power-organization.
Second, we have the origin of the monarchy. The Hebrew peo-
ple want a king, contrary to God’s will (1 Sam. 8). Monarchical
organization is formally condemned with ad hoc arguments that
are always valid.2 Third, we have the strange evaluation of the
kings of Israel and Samaria in Kings (and Chronicles), where
kings who are great from a worldly standpoint—who are victo-
rious, magnificent, and wealthy—are constantly said to be bad
kings before God. Conversely, defeated kings who suffer only
setbacks are described as faithful and devout.* The blistering
assessment in Ecclesiastes demonstrates in a terrible way the
uselessness, futility, and insignificance of political power.
The Gospels offer further facts by way of orientation, which
I will again simply enumerate.
In one of the temptations Satan offers to give Jesus all the
kingdoms of the world, that is, the kingdoms and the related
political power, which Jesus does not contest.
Jesus refuses to answer the question about the tax. His
“render unto Caesar” does not imply that there are two king-
doms, but that everything belongs to God. If Caesar undertakes
to manufacture certain things like pieces of money, we should
give them back to him; such things are of no interest or
importance.
Jesus pays the (political) temple tax with two coins taken
from the mouth of a fish. This absurd miracle expresses simple
derision and shows once again that such matters are of no im-
portance. Jesus similarly refuses to arbitrate between two men
who are contesting an inheritance. He has not come to deal
with legal problems. He has nothing whatever to do with law.
His relations with the Zealots make the same point. At least
2. We are not here opposing the divinely willed splendor of David, for
God chose David. He chose him in spite of the monarchy and made him a
witness in spite of politics, as I have explained at length elsewhere.
3. To avoid misunderstanding, I may point out that these kings are not
called good and right because they are defeated and miserable. The correlation
is the simple one that they are devout and good before God, and they then
prove to be poor kings who enjoy no political success.
POLITICAL PERVERSION 115
two Zealots follow him, but he “neutralizes” them. He does not

enter into their political struggle nor support them. Quite the
contrary. This tallies with his refusal to offer resistance when he
is arrested, and with his order to Peter not to defend him.*
Similarly Jesus finds the same mistake in both the Saddu-
cees and the Pharisees, both those who collaborate with the
Romans and those who oppose them. In the eyes of Jesus they
are both wrong. He will not play any part in the political drama.
If he calls Zealots to himself, he also calls those who collaborate
with the invaders (the tax-collectors). His proclamation: “My
kingdom is not of this world,” implies that it is indeed a kingdom
but that it bears no relation to political kingdoms; our one great
concern must be to seek the kingdom of heaven and its right-
eousness> (which does, of course, come to expression on earth),
and all the rest will then be added to us. Political action and
things that concern the state are without interest.
Finally, we have the answer to Pilate: “You would have no
power over me if it were not given to you from above.” Strangely,
this text has been read as a validation of Pilate’s power by Jesus,
as though “from above” were a reference to God. This inference
is strange when one puts the saying in the context of the dealings
of Jesus with Pilate. For it is followed by the statement that the
one who has handed over Jesus to Pilate is the more at fault.
Who has done this? Judas? Caiaphas? Such ideas would be trivial
in a relationship of this intensity. Jesus can hardly have regarded
Judas as more guilty than Pilate. He was hardly that important.
I believe that the only link between the two statements is es-
tablished if the “from above” does not denote either God or the
emperor but the exousia of political power, which is a rebel ex-
ousia, an angel in revolt against God. How else can we reconcile
this statement (from which some would infer that according to
Jesus, Pilate derives his power from God) with Jesus’ general
attitude, which is one of indifference and rejection, involving
4, The question whether the disciples have any swords and the reply
that two are enough are surely derisive. To infer that the disciples had a stock
of arms and that Jesus was on the point of revolt is absurd and contradicts the
accounts. Jesus is mocking the defensive measures that his disciples have in
mind.
5. We may recall the ignoble perversion of this saying at the ecumenical
council in 1960 when one delegate concluded his address with the words,
“Seek first the political kingdom, and all the rest will be added to you.”
silence as he three times refuses to answer Pilate’s questions, irony

(Are you a king? It is you that say it), and twofold decentralizing
(Are you a king? My kingdom is not of this world; Are you a
king? I have come to bear witness to the truth). No better way
could be found of bamboozling authority. And after all that, are
we to think that Jesus would say that the authority comes from
God? The whole idea is plainly mistaken.
We may finally recall the astonishing suggestion that by
submitting to Pilate’s authority to judge, Jesus validates that
authority and shows that he acknowledges it. One is astounded
that great theologians could support such a thesis. There are two
objections to it. First, Jesus would be validating an authority
that is unjust in its exercise, for this exercise involves a renun-
ciation of power (Pilate gives in to the crowd) and condemns
an innocent person. Second, we should have to extend the ar-
gument, for Jesus lets himself be arrested by the soldiers, and
this would imply the validation of the police and the military
organization, which is rather too much to ask. In general, I am
thus obliged to say that Jesus’ attitude is not just apolitical but
is effectively antistatist and antipolitical.
In this enumeration (and I am only enumerating, recalling,
and surveying), one should also mention Revelation.® Here po-
litical power is assimilated to war and the sword (the red horse)
and its destruction is firmly announced. Babylon, which sym-
bolizes Rome, forms the focus of all earthly evil in the form of
political power. Over against this unanimous and constant wit-
ness, what weight is carried by the two texts from Paul (which
need to be put in context) and the ambiguous one from 1 Peter?”
I believe that the biblical teaching is clear. It always contests
political power. It incites to “counterpower,” to “positive” crit-
icism, to an irreducible dialogue (like that between king and
prophet in Israel), to antistatism, to a decentralizing of the re-
lation, to an extreme relativizing of everything political, to an
anti-ideology, to a questioning of all that claims either power or
6. Cf. J. Ellul, L’Apocalypse, architecture en mouvement (Paris: Desclée de

Brouwer, 1975); ET Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation (New York: Seabury,
vey
7. This text is ambiguous because it does not refer to the emperor or
lord but to the king, who can hardly be the Roman emperor, since the emperor
never bore this title.
POLITICAL PERVERSION 17,
dominion (in other words, of all things political), and finally,

if we may use a modern term, to a kind of “anarchism” (so long
as we do not relate the term to the anarchist teaching of the
nineteenth century).
We cannot stop, however, at this brief review. We must at
least investigate a question that I have not dealt with elsewhere,
that of the text of the Gospels. A common approach of histo-
rians of the period of Jesus and of New Testament specialists is
that not only did Paul pervert the message of Jesus (a common
view from as early as the fourth century) but the Evangelists
themselves also betrayed him. Jesus was supposedly a very real-
istic person, who came from a background of poverty and had
few “spiritual” concerns, focusing instead on the political ques-
tions of his day. In the first instance his message was social and
political. This is what disturbed the Romans, who had to deal
with constant riots or movements of revolt. According to these
authors, we must set Jesus in the context of the class conflict or
of an anti-Roman struggle. The first Christian community was
supposedly of the same type. Later came “spiritualization,” and
the message of Jesus was disembodied and slipped into the reli-
gious and spiritual field.
The trouble is that there is very little in the text and noth-
ing outside it to support this thesis. How can we prove this
orientation of Jesus from the texts the Evangelists worked over?
A few sayings and actions are picked out: the two swords, Jesus
chasing out the merchants with a whip, Jesus cursing the rich,
the Zealots among the disciples. Or else a decision is made be-
tween two versions. The best example of this is the Beatitudes,
where Luke has it that the economically or financially poor are
blessed, but Matthew softens this to the poor in spirit. This
alteration supposedly proves that the disciples spiritualized the
message of Jesus by robbing it of its revolutionary force and
dematerializing it.
I have to say that this kind of exposition makes me furious.
Why is it that Luke (whom many scholars place after Matthew)
is the one who gives us the original version? Is it not conceded
that Luke is often influenced by Paul, who bears much of the
guilt for the transition to a more religious form of Jesus’ message?
By what criterion is the material version judged to be primary
and the other a softening that does not come from Jesus? The
arguments that I have come across are weak. Let us recall some
of them. “It is evident” that our first concern is for food and
material life. Religion comes later. It is no less evident that the
disciples were afraid after the condemnation of Jesus. They re-
nounced political agitation and changed the message into a re-
ligious one so as to avoid political repression. It is evident again
that what is spiritual is not very important, that it represents a
weakening or softening. Finally, according to the clever and vital
formula of Loisy (which is often treated publicly with conde-
scension!) people were expecting the kingdom of God and what
came was the church. The good disciples, who did not under-
stand Jesus at all, installed themselves in the world when the
kingdom of God did not come. Encysted in the religious sphere,
they changed what Jesus said, although in their stupidity and as
it were by oversight they left a few traces of the original message.
They were in effect perverted enough to deviate so profoundly
from what the Master said that their lack of understanding is
obvious. The Gospel of John bears the palm here by showing
that every time Jesus speaks, his words are taken materially and
concretely, and Jesus at once corrects this as a mistake, showing
that all his sayings must be given a spiritual sense. In other
words, the subtle perversion of this first and second generation
consists of a reversal of the mistake. Real wresting was needed
to achieve this result.
I believe that the political and militant interpretation of
the Gospels, although advanced by good and honest exegetes,
is itself a falsification. In exegesis there is in fact no purely
scientific procedure; there is a choice of values. Our Western
specialists disclose their own personalities. In their discussions
they regard the material as more important than the spiritual.
They think that earlier generations were interested only in ques-
tions of power, property, and consumption. To their modern eyes
religion is accessory. To say that the poor in spirit are blessed is
less serious and explosive than to say that the financially poor
are blessed. Those who say this show how immersed they are in
the economic mentality of their age and how strongly they ad-
here to the ideology of class conflict. They fabricate a political
Jesus because in their view politics is the most important reality.
They explain that the Evangelists “spiritualized” because this is
what they would have done had they found themselves in the
same situation.
Jesus, they say, was strongly preoccupied with the class

conflict and the struggle against the Romans, that is, with po-
litical battles, because in his place they themselves would have
been. To justify their thesis they would have to resolve a number
of riddles that they never consider. First, it is well known that
Jesus was often very close to the Essenes, if not one of them.
But recent studies show that socially and politically, contrary to
what was thought earlier, the Essenes belonged to the middle
class, were fairly well off, and favored cooperation with the Ro-
mans, or at least were not their political opponents. Well, let
us assume that Jesus had nothing whatever to do with the Es-
senes, difficult though this is, and pass on to the next question.
The experience of all revolutionary groups, the maquis, parti-
sans, and guerillas, is that once the leader is put to death every-
thing collapses and the movement evaporates. In every case
when there is a strong organization, structure, or institution,
and the party lasts (as in the case of the Leninists), it is because
the leader is a charismatic personality; at his death, nothing is
left (the example of Che Guevara is repeated a hundred times).
How is it that when Jesus was put to death, his little group of
supposed political guerillas survived? Put in these terms, the fact
is inexplicable. The answer given is that it survived by becoming
religious. But this does not answer the question why the disciples
would even want to survive when deprived of their head, espe-
cially as no other charismatic leader appears to replace Jesus for
some fifteen years or so.
A third question is this: What was the purpose of Paul and
the Evangelists in carrying out this process of depoliticizing and
spiritualizing? This question constantly arises for me when I read
that Paul deformed everything, that he invented a false Jesus,
etc. What was his objective or incentive? Did he want to be the
leader of a Jewish sect or a great philosopher? But his teaching
was ridiculed by professional philosophers. His faith in Christ
forced him to break with his background, family, and culture,
to sever his roots. What did he want at such cost? Did he want
to found a religion? But why then did he put the crucified Jesus
at the center instead of himself? And why, among so many
thaumaturges, prophets, and rebels, did he select a defeated
wretch of twenty-five years back, and then, instead of echoing
his teaching, make of it something totally different? In other
words, so long as no one can show me what was Paul’s interest

or motive in this manipulation, I shall regard academic disser-
tations on the subject, concocted by scholars and exegetes, as
simple fables, scientific perhaps, but lacking any objective con-
tent. At least we must admit that Paul was no mere idiot; his
letters in particular rule out any such judgment.
A fourth question is this: If the Evangelists and disciples
and first Christian groups softened the message of Jesus, if they
took it out of the serious and dangerous political realm and put
it in the unimportant and safe religious sphere so as to avoid
persecution and Caesar’s police, they do not seem to have had
much success. For how do we then explain the persecutions and
martyrdoms? Can we really believe that the first Christians who
braved martyrdom in conditions well known to us really changed
the message of Jesus in an attempt to escape it? This is not just
absurd; it reveals a typical misunderstanding of the age. In those
days a religious crime was more important than political rebel-
lion. It was so not only in Jewish eyes but in Roman eyes too
when it was a supreme religious matter touching Caesar imper-
ator. Christians rejected the imperial cult—an offense hard to
pardon. A writing like Revelation is clear enough in this respect.
At a pinch it might be said that to give themselves courage
believers invented or attested to the resurrection and fabricated
phrases suggesting a later realization of the kingdom of God.
But this is in no sense a spiritualizing of the message of Jesus.
It is not an elaboration of the theology of the church in terms
of delay, hope, and waiting. In other words, | believe that here
again scholarly exegetes assess the matter with the mentality of
rationalistic intellectuals on the one hand and of nineteenth-
century men on the other.
The final and most difficult question is as follows: If this
group of first Christians after Jesus Christ had really wanted to
modify or manipulate his message, how would they have done
8. In a work I am now writing, my Ethique de la saintete, I shall bring

out on the one side the difference between the (present) kingdom of heaven
and the (future) kingdom of God, and show on the other side that it is a
mistake to think that Jesus announced the immediate coming and realization
of the kingdom of God. The message of waiting and watching is not a supple-
ment, a secondary aspect added to the teaching of Jesus; on the contrary, it
is a decisive axis.
we
it? They were in an atmosphere of endemic revolt against Rome.

They were stirred up by the death of their head. By their preach-
ing they had primarily reached people who were poor and en-
slaved and defeated. If their group had not dissolved at the first
shock, which is most probable (see above), what changes would
it have made? All the evidence suggests that any transformation
would have been political. In those conditions they would most
likely have done the very opposite of what is suggested. They
would have changed what was the spiritual and charismatic in
Jesus into a political and revolutionary organization. Since, as
we have seen, they did not fear martyrdom, they should have
been led at once to politicize their movement. If the preaching
of Jesus had not turned them away from politics to the spiritual
sphere, they would inevitably have been steered into the course
of Jewish revolt against Rome, to politicizing, into the forming
of a party, into conspiracies, into an Eastern alliance with Rome’s
very close and dangerous enemy, the kingdom of Parthia. It
would have been stupid to think of turning to Greece and Rome.
In other words, the normal and spontaneous sociological move-
ment of a group of this kind would not have been to spiritualize
the sayings of Jesus but, on the contrary, to politicize them, to
insist heavily on the “Blessed are the financially poor” when
addressing slaves and the poor, not to change the first Beatitude
into “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” “God is with you,” which
would be of no relevance to them.
In reality the current interpretation is dominated by the
thinking of Marx about the “opium of the people.” The addition
“in spirit” is supposed to have been for the purpose of preventing
the poor from revolting. But what might make sense as the
declaration of a dominant class or state apparatus or institutional
church is ridiculous as the declaration of a poor and powerless
group addressing others who are poor. Thus this politicizing
interpretation of the gospel, no matter how we arrive at it, is
wrong. We must uphold the sure and certain fact that the Bible
brings us a message that is against power, against the state, and
against politics.?
9. I repeat again that this does not mean that the message is apolitical
or purely spiritual, that it is an evasion, that it merely teaches a self-enclosed
religion of piety.
II. SUBVERSION BY POWER?°®
For the last thirty years, in Protestant churches, “Constan-

tinianism” has been accused of being the source and cause of all
the errors and deviations in Christianity, as though it were the
author of all evil. This assessment reverses the traditional glor-
ification whereby Constantine, miraculously converted, brings
the true faith to triumph against paganism and heresy and en-
ables Christianity to expand in every area with freedom to preach
throughout the empire and no fear of further persecution like
the most recent one under Diocletian, which was the fiercest of
all for Christians. Historians have rightly scrutinized this sup-
posed “conversion” of Constantine. It is not being anti-Christian
to question seriously the truth of this conversion, like that of
Clovis later.
It has been shown quite impartially that such conversions
accord so well with skillful politics that one may find political
as well as religious motives for them. A need existed to rally as
many supporters as possible, and the Catholic church repre-
sented a considerable body of people. It was a shaper of opinion.
Who carried the most weight in the army—the provinces? Pa-
gans? Heretics? Catholics? Constantine gambled on the Catholic
church and won. All this is very probable but it has no direct
bearing on our own inquiry. For we have to place ourselves within
the church and the faith. We are not asking whether Constan-
tine’s conversion was sincere but how it resulted in a perversion
of Christian truth. This leads us to the actual story of the con-
version, the famous vision of the cross in the sky, with the
celebrated words In hoc signo vinces, and the command of Christ
to make a special flag, the labarum,''! bearing the sign of the
cross. All this took place before the battle of the Milvian Bridge
against Maxentius in 312.
It is futile to refer to Constantine’s past, to his exceptional
cruelty in war (e.g., the atrocities in the war against the Goths),
to his readiness to put even his father-in-law to death. This was
all in line with current practice, and after all it is not saints that
10. Cf. Michel Clevenot, Nouvelle Histoire du christianisme, vol. 2, Les

chrétiens et le pouvoir (Paris: Cerf, 1982). This is an interesting work, but should
be read with caution given the deliberately “materialistic” views of the author.
11. On all this cf. J.-M. Hornus, Evangile et labarum (Geneva: Labor et
Fides, 1966).
God converts. The conversion might have been authentic even

admitting such things. But the actual story of the conversion
bears witness to the profound corruption of the gospel. Much of
the perversion has taken place already. For how is it that the
cross, an instrument of punishment, especially for slaves, and
the sign of a historical defeat for Jesus on the human level, can
now be presented as a sign of political and military victory? The
cross signifies salvation by attesting to the love of God going
even to death for us. It has this meaning and no other. It cannot
possibly be a sign of military victory. Above all, it cannot be a
sign given by a powerful political leader. What the cross signifies
is the weakness and humility of God.
Throughout the Old Testament we see God choosing what
is weak and humble to represent him (the stammering Moses,
the infant Samuel, Saul from an insignificant family, David con-
fronting Goliath, etc.). Paul tells us that God chooses the weak
things of the world to confound the mighty. Here, however, we
have a striking contradiction. In Constantine God is supposedly
choosing an Augustus, a triumphant military leader. This vision
and this miracle are totally impossible. But they are not impos-
sible in the context of a Christianity that is already off the rails,
that thinks of God as the one who directs history and is the
motive power in politics. Superficially this might seem to be in
line with the Old Testament, where we do see God intervening
in historical events and supervising the monarchical succession.
Much might be said on this point. In the Jewish Bible, however,
God is never shown intervening in history except with reference
to his people, the people of Israel. What we are told is that he
leads his people. But he also gives them considerable latitude
and real possibilities of autonomy. The God of history is no more
the engineer of history than of nature. He does not drive history
as a chauffeur drives a car. We are never told that Chinese or
Aztec history is manipulated by this God of Israel. Such a view
is seen to be the more mistaken when we think of the declaration
of Jesus that his kingdom is not of this world. Here, in Con-
stantine’s vision, the God of Jesus contradicts this whole reve-
lation. The kingdom of Jesus is of this world. It has to be set up
by political power. In has to be installed by a military victory.
This is quite unheard of. A political and propaganda campaign
is now under way. But the result is a disaster for the church and
the faith. From the standpoint of revelation we have every reason
to cast doubt on the whole “miracle” of Constantine.
After his victory at the Milvian Bridge, faithful to his

promise, Constantine favors the church from which he has re-
ceived support. Catholic Christianity becomes the state religion
and an exchange takes place: the church is invested with polit-
ical power, and it invests the emperor with religious power. We
have here the same perversion, for how can Jesus manifest him-
self in the power of domination and constraint? We have to say
very forcefully that we see here the perversion of revelation by
participation in politics,!* by the seeking of power. The church
lets itself be seduced, invaded, dominated by the ease with which
it can now spread the gospel by force (another force than that of
God) and use its influence to make the state, too, Christian. It
is great acquiescence to the temptation Jesus himself resisted,
for when Satan offers to give him all the kingdoms of earth,
Jesus refuses, but the church accepts, not realizing from whom
it is receiving the kingdoms.
I do not suspect at all the excellent motives and sincerity
and faith of the church leaders who forged these alliances. They
undoubtedly thought they were doing the right thing, !> but they
did not consult the light of revelation. The consequences showed
up almost immediately and would last for almost five hundred
years. Christianity became the state religion, and the combi-
nation of Christian truth and political power led to the creation
of the complex that we know so well. The state represents the
truth. The church exerts power. The emperor endows the church
handsomely, helps it in all that it does, aids it in its “mission.”
The church supports the emperor’s legitimacy and assures him
that he is God’s representative on earth. Paul’s incidental verse
in Romans 13 becomes the absolute text regarding the state and
is rendered into Latin as omnis potestas a Deo.'4 The emperor
12. J. Ellul, “La politique, mal absolu,” in La Foi au prix du doute (Paris:
Hachette, 1980); ET Living Faith (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983).
13. As we do today when we use the means of power in our own society
with a good conscience. Thus we use television to spread the gospel. This is
Constantinianism, with what are also its positive implications.
14. It is astonishing that theologians did not reflect on this formula,
for omnis potestas can cover all kinds of violence and domination. Thus the
conqueror in war is a potestas. Does he therefore represent God? This, alas, is
what is finally conceded. In spite of all the discussions about the mode of
gaining power or the quality of its exercise, such matters are all secondary once
a formula of this kind is made into an absolute principle.
then begins to hunt down pagans and to confiscate their temples

so as to give them to the church.
It is frightening to see how easily the church accepts all
this. Hardly had it emerged from persecution before it itself
began to persecute. Hardly had it achieved peace before it was
corrupted by power. It lived constantly on the image of its mar-
tyrs and saints. But it also produced martyrs on the other side.
Since truth had to be one as the guarantee of imperial power,
it commenced the prosecution of heretics, and primarily, of
course, those who contested the truth and validity of this alli-
ance of empire and church. The great debate centered on this
issue (cf. the circumcellions).
Constantly in the Christian world there would be tenden-
cies toward anarchism, rejection of the political alliance, but
these were at once condemned. The emperor needed the church’s
unity to ensure that of the empire. He used the church as an
instrument of state propaganda that would diffuse simultaneously
the good news of Christianity and the will of God expressed by
Caesar. The church does not see how this contradicts the life
and person of Jesus. Undeniably subversion by the exercise of
power is what takes place with the kings and emperors. It has
sad and ridiculous consequences. The church is a political power
but it is always at the service of the political power that is either
in place or in course of being installed. It goes on to serve the
Holy Roman Empire but also the kings of France who split off
from it. It will bless all the monarchs who seize power in ways
that are tragic, tempestuous, and often bloody and unjust. It
legitimizes everything. This is logical once it associates itself
with the existing power.
It will be republican! under a republic as it is monarchist
under a monarchy. Irrefutable theological arguments are always
found. A monarchical regime reflects the monarchical unity of
God. A republic reflects the people that God elects for himself
on earth. Democracy shows that God associates himself with the
will of the peoples. The tradition was already well established
when in the sixth century the idea was formulated that the acts
of God in history were performed through the Franks (the gesta
15. It may be said that such a transition is slow, but this is no argument,
for time is always needed to adapt and to find theological support. Alliance
with the empire could be achieved only after some years.
Dei per Francos). The church could then become National So-
cialist (the German Christians) when Hitler came to power. It
could become communist (with notorious figures like Bereczki
and Hromadka) in communist countries. Each time it develops
a theological argument to show that the power that has been set
up is good. The church’s shifts and turns are not the scandalous
thing. They simply represent an expression of human weakness,
showing that Christians like other people are always ready to
adapt to whatever may come. Once the church is ready to as-
sociate with instituted power it is obliged to associate with all
and sundry forms of the state. The scandal is that each time the
church seeks to justify both its adaptation and the existing power.
It continues to legitimize the state and to be an instrument of
its propaganda.
It will even serve a communist state. One should not forget
that in the USSR in 1943 Stalin began to use the Orthodox
church on behalf of his propaganda, especially with the launch-
ing of his famous war loan. How could the church refuse to
cooperate in a work so eminently patriotic? Is not the state
willed by God? The theological theme of the state serves many
purposes. When the church becomes socialist in support of a
socialist regime, it may stress the theological themes of poverty
and justice. We must bear in mind that such truths are true for
us only because the reigning power is socialist. They are not
recognized in the fifth century or the seventeenth. Contrariwise,
the theme of a reflection of divine monarchy so prominent at
that time has been effaced now that monarchy has virtually
disappeared.
The church’s fault is to be found in the process of justifying
political power and action. I maintain that we find the same
attitude and mistake in the theologies of revolution. These, too,
are Constantinianism. I know the reply: Revolution is not yet
installed power; it has not yet succeeded; it is in opposition to
power. One must recognize, however, that the church has often
gambled on rising power over against existing power when this
is about to be dislodged. We see this already in the case of
Constantine, who did not yet enjoy power when the Catholic
church supported him. We see the same with Luther when he
joined the German nobility against the emperor. Calvin, too,
associated with the rising middle class against the nobility and
various monarchs. In any case, the mistake is to try to justify a
a
political regime theologically, to try to give it a Christian label.

This implies that the church will receive authority and many
advantages in return. The theology of revolution is a mechanism
whereby to justify political movements that have a great chance
of succeeding and setting up tomorrow’s dictatorships.
I know that in reply I will be told: a) that the church
cannot be purely spiritual and not have any interest in politics,
and b) that not all political regimes are the same, that “not all
cats are gray,” as Karl Barth forcefully put it.
The facts are as follows. Since 1935 I have stated inces-
santly that the church should express itself politically and that
choices have to be made. But there are two radical differences
regarding the options. The first is that in its political orientations
the church should find another way. It should not conform to the
present age. Nothing is more false than to say: “Society presents
us with three or four options, which should we choose?” In
reality the church ought to invent and innovate. It ought to
propose something new. It should never serve as an instrument
of propaganda. It should never seek to justify any political force.
The second difference is that if political regimes are not the
same, Christians may choose that which suits them best for
purely human reasons. Democracy seems to me to be preferable
to dictatorship. I like socialism better than capitalism. But strictly
speaking, God has nothing to do with such things. Or perhaps
he does, but I know nothing about it. The Bible does not enable
me in any way to declare that a given regime is in conformity
with God’s will. It is not my job as a Christian to identify history
with God’s will. We do not have to think that because such and
such a power is set up it is God who has set it up.
The scandal is that the church tries to use political power
to ensure its own authority and to secure advantages. What was
pure grace is thus radically subverted into a politics of give and
take. The church buys the possibility of maintaining itself at the
price of concessions (e.g., to the regimes of Hitler or of the
Soviets). In so doing it disavows its martyrs. Martyrs are not
agitators or obstinate people. They are primarily dedicated to
God. They want to obey God, not men. But the church trades
its support for advantages, honors, titles, and money. It comes
under the rule of mammon. Finally, it lets itself be bought so as
to gain facilities for its celebrations, its evangelism, its good
works, its preaching of the good Word. But Satan rejoices at all
this, for this gospel is not based on the cornerstone, on Jesus

Christ, but on the power of the world thanks to which it is
propagated. There is nothing here that the prince of this world
need fear. Even today the church can never be challenged too
much about this twofold scandal.
The results of this alienation of revelation in and on behalf
of political power are many. We shall consider three of them.
First is the astounding fact that the church itself becomes
a state. The pope becomes a head of state. He does so with the
well-known pseudodonation of Constantine (and the forged de-
cretals). In fact, the first lands that are given not merely as
private property to support the papacy but as political territory
come from the Carolingians (perhaps from Pepin the Short to
Stephen II). To seal the alliance between the papacy and the
Carolingian dynasty and to legitimize the latter, the papacy re-
ceives first the Pentapolis and the twenty-two cities of the ex-
archy of Ravenna. Here is a plain example of political bargaining.
What an incredible contradiction of the whole of the Old Tes-
tament and the New! Once the pope becomes a head of state,
he is forced to act as a political ruler. He keeps trying to extend
his domain, and one cannot truly say that this is to the greater
glory of God. Successively, until the thirteenth century, the
papal states come to include new areas. They embrace a fourth
part of Italy. War is made on Florence in an effort to annex it.
Throughout this period the pope acts in exactly the same way
as other kings. In such circumstances, need we be surprised that
the same faults are to be found in the papal court as in other
Italian courts? Wealth, sexuality, poisonings, patronage of the
arts, struggles for power, etc. As regards Christianity, a main
result is that when the pope speaks to other heads of state he is
inevitably heard as though he were just another foreign king.!®
When the pope acts as a head of state, this unavoidably reflects
on his position as the pope. He can never break this demonic
tie. The better popes, the purest and most authentically Chris-
tian, like the saintly Pierre de Moron (Celestine V), have only
one wish, namely, to abdicate.
A second result of this politicization was a rapid breakup
16. This justifies the resistance of French and English kings when they
reject the ecclesiastical intervention of the pope, a foreign ruler, in, for ex-
ample, the nomination of bishops.
a POLITICAL PERVERSION 129
into nations. When the Western world was dominated by feu-

dalism, when the frontiers between kingdoms were neither clear
nor constant, when the essential political structure was the
manor, when there was a fiction of European unity under the
Holy Roman Empire, then people could have an image of one
Christendom that had one head at Rome and was coincident
with an unfragmented church, catholic and universal. From the
fourteenth century, however, the kings try to set up political
units different from the manor. They form the manors into larger
and qualitatively different complexes (the kingdoms), and
strangely there begins to develop almost everywhere what one
has to call a new sense, that of nationality. Incontestably this
national sense appears in France, England, Ireland, Poland,
Sweden, Denmark, and Bohemia.
When the church itself was politicized up to the hilt, how
in these circumstances could it still claim to be united and uni-
versal, transcending all boundaries and standing above all polit-
ical conflicts? The political and religious alliance meant that the
church itself broke up into national units and that the national
churches were subject to the political authorities. The pope
wanted to be a head of state. Little by little he was excluded
from the direction of the national churches in other states, the
Anglican church, the Gallican church, etc. These breaks find
a counterpart in the papacy itself at the time of the Great Schism
when the nations pick their own pope. The national character
of the church with its political entanglements continues indef-
initely up to the point where the church no longer pretends to
be a religious organism and the state claims that it must serve
political ends.
Precisely because the church had abandoned its first anti-
political and antistatist message, it no longer found it enough
to be merely spiritual. It now had to make a choice. It might
enter into the inner conflicts of a nation, for example by de-
fending the political right or by using its spiritual authority to
give instructions about voting. It would then become a church
of coups d’état, a church of the middle class, as today it is a
church of the unions and the working class. On the other hand,
it might assimilate itself to the national cause and make a reli-
gious and Christian value out of patriotism (as in the curious use
of Joan of Arc in France).
Under the cover of spirituality this brings about a grotesque
division in the church. It cannot achieve unanimity. Within a

single nation we might have both a church of the left and a
church of the right, a church of the unions and a church of
order and hierarchy, a church for contraception and a church
against it, etc. Again, we might have a church that sings the Te
Deum to celebrate national victories that are supposedly given
by God, who is at one and the same time both Gott mit uns for
the Germans and an obviously French God for the French. Such
are the grotesque results that the political carnival means for the
church. Such is the very serious cost of politics for the church
when it fails to obey its calling to demythologize politics, to
desacralize it, to reduce it in status.
Legal and administrative contagion is the third result. Pol-
itics produces law. Contaminated by politics, the church in turn
is led to make the law, to organize itself on the administrative
model of the states, to validate the law made by political powers,
which is presented as in conformity with the will of God. Cer-
tainly, all this could have a positive side. It has often been shown
that in the fourth and fifth centuries Roman law was changed
for the better under Christian influence: the protection of slaves,
the elevation of the legal status of women, new legal perspectives
on marriage and the family, the softening of criminal law, and
many other things. Biondo Biondi has written volumes on chris-
tianized law. All this is true. But the whole problem is always
to know what finally these legal improvements cost the church
when it ceased to be a messenger of God’s Word in order to
organize a less unsatisfactory human society. The church is un-
ceasingly led to do what Jesus expressly refused to do, namely,
to serve as a judge between legal parties. In so doing, it comes
to serve various interests. How can it avoid this? Rights mean
interests. Soon, then, it is led to serve the most powerful group.
It may want to defend the weak (which is good), but it cannot
do this without being in relation with those in power. If the
bishops can defend little people, it is because they themselves
are seen to be strong by the authorities. Again, when the con-
flict was relatively simple (e.g., between the lord of the manor
and the peasants), the church could make clear choices. But
when a more complex socioeconomic organization comes into
being with the middle class, the church may find itself on the
side of the powerful (the rich, the rulers, etc.) without even
desiring it. Intricately involved in the social fabric, it is thus
ee POLITICAL PERVERSION 131
used in many cases without its knowledge. An ethic of work,

service, humility, and the value of poverty can all be used by
the middle class, for all this is a true evangelical message, but
it is only a half or a quarter of this message.
Thus the fourth-century bishops become defensores civitatis,
an admirable function, since it means protecting the cities against
the abuses of the imperial authorities and protecting humbler
folk against the powerful. All this is very good. Yet Augustine,
for example, complains that as Bishop of Hippo he has so many
administrative duties that he cannot materially do his proper
work as a bishop or discharge the task of preaching. Now this
use of bishops for administrative tasks may always be justified
spiritually. Doing good is always a function for Christ’s represen-
tatives. For the authorities, however, the church is only one of
many expressions of power. It has always been thus in the course
of history, although it has rarely been acknowledged with Na-
poleon’s cynicism when he stated that the clergy held the people,
the bishops the clergy, and himself the bishops.
The other side of this legal and administrative contami-
nation is that reciprocally the church itself becomes a legal and
administrative organization. It organizes itself on the model of
the state, fashions its own law in imitation of Roman law, and
carefully sets up an institution and hierarchy. It does all this
better than the state does. Its law becomes a model; canon law
is so perfected that it will last much longer than any other. The
same is true of its administrative organization. But the question
is to know whether it is the church’s job to make rules, whether
its life is referred to codes, whether it has the divine aim of
providing an administrative model for the world. In reality the
church has preferred law to the fugitive and nontemporal truth
of Jesus Christ. At every turn it introduces law (e.g., instead of
radically rejecting violence it works out the doctrine of the just
war). It is constantly tempted (as in the fourteenth, fifteenth,
and sixteenth centuries) to resolve spiritual and religious crises
by elaborating legal texts and by better administrative organi-
zation. The perversion of revelation by politics could hardly go
further.
Naturally what I have just written expresses only one part
of the church’s life. There have always been spiritual resources
as well. We shall have to look at these in the last chapter. The
church has been many other things, too. But regarding the
church’s reactions, we have two remarks to make. First, the

church has often been, as it were, double-faced. A common
accusation is that the church presents a face of peace and tol-
eration but hides repression and intolerance, and that it can
always justify itself by showing now one side and now the other,
that in its excellent stocks something that shows its virtue will
always be found. Second, the church does not have to take the
side of existing power. We have already said that sometimes it
has sided with a rising power, with the person who has the best
political chances. Sometimes, too, it has been violently against
existing power. The tradition of the primitive church has never
completely faded. Violent anchorites have come down to break
statues and signs of idolatry, as in the fourth and fifth centuries.
There have always been millenarian groups causing political and
social trouble. The ruling institutional church might adjudge
them heretical, but it cannot easily eradicate them. We do not
have on the one side authentic Christian believers faithful to
the institutional church (whose perversion by politics we have
rightly been scrutinizing), and on the other side vague and un-
certain spiritual and revolutionary currents that do not represent
faith in Jesus Christ.
We have to take into account the fact that the church of
Jesus Christ is not limited by legal and dogmatic barriers. It has
both a spiritual and an institutional constitution. It includes not
only the papacy but also Joachim de Fiore, not only Luther but
also Minzer, not only strict Lutherans but also the Wittenberg
spirituals, not only the implacably rigorous Calvin but also the
prophets of the Cevennes. In other words, the church in the
spiritual and theological sense always contains a current that is
hostile to political power, that is revolutionary and anarchical.
But this is not the current that society as a whole, and especially
the political authorities, recognize as the church. If these many
movements have failed, it is primarily because of their intrinsic
nature. Spiritual currents cannot last. When they attack polit-
ical power, this power attacks them in return and proclaims that
the true church is that which is in alliance with it. Here is the
good, solid, institutional church with which one can make con-
tracts and have a coherent policy. This church is officially the
only possible church, the only admissible and acknowledged
church. The others are condemned both by the state and by the
official church.
Sometimes when the authorities go too far even this church

is forced into opposition, as in the case of the recusant priests
in 1790 during the French Revolution, or the Confessing Church
at the Synod of Barmen in 1934 against Hitler, or Cardinal
Wyszynski and the Polish church in 1953 against communism.
But these revolts are only incidental. Once accord is possible,
the resisting church renounces its resistance to the authorities
as the latter change or become reasonable. It is generally ex-
plained that the church should recognize and support political
power except when this becomes idolatrous or heretical and per-
secutes the church. This principle is recognized by both Roman
Catholic and Calvinist churches. Even if the collusion of church
and state has not been constant or unanimous, the corruption
of revelation by association with politics has been continual and
decisive.
In sum, what the recognition of the state and the entry of
Christians and the church into politics have produced is a mu-
tation that amounts to subversion. Revelation inevitably meant
a break in the human order, in society, in power. Jesus came to
cast a fire on the earth. He did not come to bring peace but a
sword. He brought division between members of the same house-
hold. He is the occasion of a break and a fall for many. If the
world hates his disciples, they must know that it hated him first.
Just as conversion always means a break in individual life, so the
intervention of revelation means a break in the whole group, in
all society, and it unavoidably challenges the institution and
established power, no matter what form this may take.!? But
adulteration by political power has changed all this. Christianity
has become a religion of conformity, of integration into the
social body. It has come to be regarded as useful for social cohe-
sion (the exact opposite of what it is in its source and truth).
Alternatively, it has become a flight from political or concrete
reality, a flight into the spiritual world, into the cultivation of
the inner life, into mysticism, and hence an evasion of the pres-
ent world. The two perversions are complementary. Theologi-
cally they negate the incarnation by separating the physical (to
which one submits) and the Spirit (who enables one to veil one’s
17. Note that it is not a matter of whether the regime is an unjust one,
or a materialistic one, or a regime of the right. The theology of revolution is
totally off the mark in this regard.
face from the physical). Sociologically they are the result of

political action regarding the church and the church's accep-
tance of it.
A book to which one might refer, and whose analyses are
similar to my own, is V. Cosmao’s Changer le monde (Paris: Edi-
tions du Cerf, 1981). This work, too, speaks about the “perver-
sion of Christianity.” Its point of view is different, for it is
concerned about action in the Third World, and Cosmao is a
“liberation theologian.” Yet he has to ask why the church has
finally betrayed the prophetic and evangelical message. His gen-
eral thesis is that societies obey two “sociological laws” (I agree
with this) according to which, when left to their own inertia,
they “structure inequality” and “fabricate gods that become their
masters.” God’s revelation in Jesus Christ expressly contradicts
these two laws and should produce equality and destroy false
gods. The author contends, however, that Christianity has taken
on the role of a “civil religion” and has thus become Christen-
dom. Once it is recognized by the secular power, it structures
and organizes itself on the basis of a system fashioned by the
administration.
In both its secular and regular forms, Cosmao argues, the
church structures itself in systems patterned on the organization
of the Roman Empire. When the empire collapses, the church
is the only cohesive factor. Instead of resisting unequal struc-
turing, the church sacralizes societies that organize themselves
unequally. As the official religion, Christianity becomes the ref-
erence point of which all civil power must take account and on
which it must depend for its installation. The image of the em-
pire (the antithesis of widespread disorder) fixes on the papacy.
The pope claims to be the successor of the Western emperors.
God is the protector of the order. During the period of disorder
from the fifth to the eleventh century, security becomes a first
concern. To further the development of new political structures,
the church sacralizes them. Since only warriors can grant a group
any relative security, it gives them primary social ranking. In
this situation of insecurity and cumulative evils, however, only
eternal life brings any real security.
The religion of eternal life is the counterpart of the sa-
cralization of the social system in which, in principle, the princes
are subject to the priests but the priests are in forced alliance
with the princes. Christianity becomes an organized society:
Christendom. In this society the church has both a perverse and
2 POLITICAL PERVERSION 135
a benevolent role: perverse inasmuch as it sacralizes society, be-

nevolent inasmuch as it protects the poor and the weak. Thus
constituted and instituted, Christianity becomes the world’s “civil
religion.”
All this becomes a hindrance when the Western world finds
itself engaged in global expansion in the fifteenth century. With
European conquest, the link between conquerors and priests be-
comes apparent. Here is a new and interesting point in Cosmao’s
work. The imposition of the structures of Christendom is a con-
stitutive feature of colonization. The peoples are dependent in
every area, and the church contributes to cultural and ideolog-
ical dependence. But the churches created in, say, Latin Amer-
ica are churches of the poor with a native origin. Existing on
the periphery of the mother church, they carry a primary evan-
gelical truth. There is in them, he thinks, a revival of experi-
enced revelation. The poor of Latin America discover that the
God of the gospel is the Liberator—long before the theologians
do. The persecution of these “new Christians” by powers in-
vested with the defense of “Christian civilization” is a sign of
the continuity of their confession of faith with that of the first
Christians. They challenge the equation of maintaining the ex-
isting order with defending the “rights of God.” These witnesses
to X were finally overcome in the sixteenth century. The God
of Jesus becomes the keystone of the new empire. Such, in brief,
is Cosmao’s account of this perversion of Christianity.
To what we have already indicated, he adds on the one
hand the church’s role in the sacralization of established powers
and on the other the global extension of the system of Chris-
tendom, with the final setback when Christianity is instituted
as a civil religion. Naturally, as in Amery, this (true) analysis
serves as a basis for examination of ways to change the world.
The central problem is thought to be underdevelopment. The
first condition for changing this is that when God is changed
into the guardian of order and power atheism is a condition of
social change and the atheistic wave is thus a blessing. God and
the church cease to protect an unjust order. We must desacralize
and dechristianize the system. To bear witness to the truth of
God, we must renounce Christian society and fight for social
justice, that is, combat the natural tendency of societies to con-
stitute themselves in unequal fashion. On the basis of atheism
a more just structure of society is possible. Atheism gives re-
vealed truth a chance to rediscover itself. “The criticism of re-
ligion will prove to be the most beneficent historical incident

in the history of Christianity since it became Christendom.” “A
historical necessity, atheism might prepare the way for a return
of God which will be just as promising for the equilibrium of
societies as the negation of a God who has become the guardian
of established disorder.” But this leads to obvious ambiguity.
If we can follow Cosmao when he says that since the world
is structured in sin, participation in its transformation is a con-
dition of conversion to God in Jesus Christ, it seems to me less
evident that when people liberate themselves (by their own ef-
forts) from bondage (what bondage?) they will find that God is
their Liberator and Creator, and also that humanity (a somewhat
uncertain entity) is the one collective subject of history to which
the earth is committed with goods that are meant for all. Cosmao
sees clearly when he analyzes the perversion of Christianity, but
he is vague and uncertain when he looks at the outcome. The
struggle for justice (?), he thinks, must precede the hearing of
God’s Word. He takes no position toward communism, but one
senses his sympathy, which can hardly be based on ignorance.
He makes the mistake of equating revolutions with a presence
of God. He does not specify what tyrants must be cast down.
When he says that we must read the gospel from the stand-
point of the people, he leaves out the Holy Spirit. He constantly
restores human initiative and possibility (being a traditional Ro-
man Catholic theologian in this regard). Thus when he writes
that “God summons us to make ourselves exist in his image”
(it depends on us to be God’s image), he adds that “we are
demiurges by vocation, giving ourselves existence as we organize
the world.” Finally, in classic fashion, justice (undefined) is for
him the one recognized value that expresses the Christian faith.
This changing of the world is not a matter of freedom or truth.
He traces everything back to human conduct and practice.
Without naming them, he rejects a deductive theology in favor
of an inductive theology when he says that theology’s role is to
assess the practice of the faith. This seems to me to be unac-
ceptable. The book is an essential one, however, if we are to
gain new insight into the errors of Christendom. If we ignore a
certain socializing ideology and some ambiguities, it can help us
to achieve a true grasp of the claim of revelation upon the whole
of human life (including the political aspect).
Chapter VII
NIHILISM AND CHRISTIANITY
Let us say at once that we are not trying to deal with the
problems of theoretical or philosophical nihilism. What interests
us is living nihilism, not the narrow practice, like that of the
Russian nihilists at the end of the nineteenth century, but a
certain attitude toward life. Moreover, my concern is not with
the lasting question of an inherent nihilism that comes to new
expression in every epoch, but with a specific contemporary form
of nihilism, or, more precisely, with the progressive rise of ni-
hilism, with the way in which it has slowly taken root in the
Western world and then come to full flower. If the question
arises, it is because we now see nihilism everywhere expanding
and triumphant. In practice, from the time of Nazi nihilism,
there has been a kind of polymorphic development of global
nihilism.
This development is undoubtedly due on the one hand to
the fact that our society no longer offers any meaning or value
that makes life worth living. Everything that makes up our world
is exposed to radical doubt. This applies to all the things that
we have painfully built up so as to arrive at some meaning (e.g.,
religion) and to all the things that the West in particular has
instituted (e.g., such values as justice and truth, or beauty in
art). Finally, no dominant or adequate value has been found in
the self. The development is due on the other hand to the fact
that we no longer have the force, the vigor, the energy, the
resolution, the conviction, to set up new values, to make our
own, to institute a new framework of life, a new possibility of
meaning, given the fact that such things can be done not by an
YA
arbitrary individual decision but only in such a way that values

are believed and accepted by all.
We thus face the astonishing phenomenon of a whole so-
ciety that is nihilist. There have been such societies before.
Every society, when at its end and about to vanish, denies its
own values. But this has usually gone hand in hand with dis-
integration. The odd thing about our society is that its nihilism
is associated with power. It does not presage collapse. It does not
challenge the rigid structures of our economy or technology. It
seems to be an exact double or inverse replica of our productivity,
consumption, and efficiency. The living nihilism provoked by
the nonacceptance of this society is not explicit, nor is it taken
up by certain acknowledged leaders.
Our writers, of course, express it, albeit involuntarily. We
find the most striking marks of it in them. But they do not
initiate it. Intellectuals and novelists who (sometimes involun-
tarily) formulate it (e.g., Henry Miller) are read and adopted
only insofar as they express the common sentiment and reflect
their time, not as they invent and initiate. Furthermore, this
nihilism plays a role only as it relates to existing values, whether
of the present century or traditional. Thus when artists state
that art is made neither for beauty, nor meaning, nor harmony,
nor joy, they are led to the total nihilism of absolute nonwork.
But this is a game. When the nihilism into which people are
plunged is not a game, the absurdity of life is what sticks in their
throat. In artists there is a nihilism that consists of destroying
and rejecting all that might risk not being nihilist (cf. films like
la Grande Bouffe or la Derniére Femme).
The nihilism of such artists is that of the subject or author
or hero. There is no subject or hero to depict. There are only
onomatopoeic sounds or colors. People have vanished. This is
the problem, and it comes to expression both in structuralism
(playing with structures) and in Foucault (in his famous saying
that announces the end of humanity as simply an accident). The
subject is hated. It is eliminated. The object triumphs. Above
all, nothing triumphs. The nihilism is ultimately that of meaning.
Nothing makes sense, neither the work nor the written page. To
look for meaning is a sign of weakness, of intellectual deficiency.
Structural linguistics comes in here. Yet this is not just an affair
of intellectuals and novelists. There is also a political nihilism
that is characterized less by extreme doctrines (e.g., Nazism)
: NIHILISM AND CHRISTIANITY 139
than by weakness in the extreme density of means and by a

radical inadequacy regarding the real. The weakness of paralysis
shows up in the extremes of power, rigor, absolutism, and control.
Since politics functions outside reality by way of abstrac-
tion, ideology, seduction, and the hypnosis unleashed by power,
this blocks the political apprehension of the real and rules out
any possibility of finding a different form. Such nihilism is the
same in Nazis, liberals, and communists. But it would be un-
important were there not, as we have said, a correspondence
between these orientations and general practice as seen in the
flight from meaning juxtaposed with the impossibility of living
without it, suicidal conduct either in outline or carried to a
conclusion (especially among the young), terrorism, and radical
pessimism regarding the social structure. More deeply, nihilism
means a refusal to consider the real at any level, and especially
in one’s own actions. For fifty years the nihilism of communists
has kept them from viewing reality lest it overturn an idealistic
and doctrinaire system. The inability to create values is inevit-
ably doubled by the refusal to face reality no matter what it may
be.
Having given this brief sketch of nihilism, I want to tackle
its relation to Christianity. Without going into theological ques-
tions, we see at once two orientations. The first is the collective,
sociological, historical dimension denoted by the “ism” aspect.
Christianity has had a social role and this has not corresponded
to what one might have hoped for, to what the premises of the
faith might have led us to hope for. Over against this is the
reality of the Christian message, the biblical revelation, which
becomes the truth for those who adhere to it by faith, and which
must be regarded as such. The difficulty is that we cannot clearly
set the two aspects in antithesis to one another. Christianity is
represented not only by the church’s authorities but also by hid-
den currents and secret actions. Again, authentic believers are
not alone but by the very fact of their faith they are inserted
into a certain community of believers and thus come under the
judgment that may be passed on its historical-social behavior.
They become part of a historical continuity.
My personal adherence to the faith makes me a participant
in a historical stream with a sociological and political dimension.
I have no right to say that I am true, authentic, and pure, and
to condemn all that my predecessors have done. | cannot reject
the church of past ages. I am part of it in virtue of “the com-

munion of the saints.” Now it might seem at a first glance that
Christianity is the very opposite of nihilism, but alas, things are
not as simple as that, and Christianity is in fact at the root of
all the historical évil)of modern nihilism. !
<=
I. THE RESPONSIBILITY
It seems to me that Christianity’s responsibility for the rise

of nihilism leads us to three themes: absolute transcendence,
desacralization, and sin.
The Judeo-Christian God, affirmed to be the Wholly Other,
absolute, and transcendent, is no longer on earth (notwithstand-
ing the incarnation). Moreover he is refined, abstract, and hid-
den. Conversely, we ourselves are dispossessed, allotted to a
terrestrial dimension, and abased. God is pure and inaccessible
in heaven, and we are left with no reference. It is not that if
God is dead everything is possible, but that if God is the eternal
God, we are on our own. This does not occur without some
secondary results. The divine absoluteness reduces lowly human
values to nothing. Such relative things as our simple needs, our
norms, and our actions of respect and obedience are devalued.
It is either God’s absoluteness or nothing. No doubt I am ex-
aggerating. Yet the intolerable element in this revelation has
been so strongly felt that generations of theologians have strug-
gled to reinstate human values—social, moral, political, etc. —
and to find syntheses between revelation and all the things that
seem to be indispensable to human life.
Similar efforts have been made to validate art or law, to
establish continuity between the divine absoluteness and what
is necessary, a continuity that is often setup by way of the
mediation of nature. Nevertheless, Christianity has everywhere
introduced the negation of what it affirms. In the last resort it
cannot reject this God whose name is not to be uttered, who
cannot be assimilated to other gods or to human values, who is
thus a permanent factor that can be neither reduced nor erased.
This is the extraneous dimension that cannot be utilized, so that
\
1. There is, of course, no need to recall that Christianity is not the
only factor and does not bear sole responsibility for modern nihilism.
NIHILISM AND CHRISTIANITY 141
ce
even in the cleverest reconstructions it is an incomprehensible

factor that immediately calls all else into question. Thus tran-
scendence is on the one hand a removing of God from the world,
a reduction of the latter to its mere reality with no purpose, no
signification, no third dimension. It is also on the other hand
the Telativization of everything in this world, and ultimately its
total devaluation. It leaves us literally alone and defenseless. We
had invented the sacred. We had sacralized things in order to
protect ourselves and give ourselves meaning. But Christianity
with the absoluteness of its revelation Mestroyed the sacred)and
put nothing in its place. “Only those who have faith can live.
As for the rest . Similarly, Christianity destroyed the reli-
~ gions that Seabled oat to live with the moral and psycholog-
ical courage that they give, and it put nothing in their place,
for it is not a religion. It does not meet our religious needs. In
,
its essence and truth it contradicts them.
Christianity claims not to be a religion that is superior to
others, but to be an antireligion that refutes all the religions
that link us with a divine universe. No doubt Christianity con-
stantly becomes a religion, but for religion as for syntheses of
values it carries with it an irreducible criticism. The Christian
religion itself is constantly called into question by the absolute
that is revealed in Jesus Christ. And we are thus left to ourselves,
poorer and more naked than when we lived in our religious
universe.
We see the same process in the moral sphere. Recognized
moral systems, accepted by the social body, have been produced.
But the biblical God totally negates them all. His commandment
is the truth. No morality can be built on this hic et nunc (here
and now). In spite of all the efforts to construct one, there is no
Christian morality. Destroyed at once by the reception of rev-
elation, every morality that is called Christian is denied in prin-
ciple and its realization is negated by the radicalism of the Holy
Spirit. But what, then, remains to us? Something has to replace
all this, and what does so is the authority of the church confis-
cating the Holy Spirit. The God of Israel and of Jesus Christ is
an absolute without compromise, and this shatters the order of
the world, the cosmic equilibrium, and the order and equilibrium
of society. No combination of heaven and earth is possible. To
be radical, this revelation casts us down to earth, but to an earth
with no gods, with no meaning, with nothing sacred. The sacred
with which nature is invested guarantees the environment against

excessive human encroachment. It provokes respect. But now,
through the desacralization provoked by Christianity, the natural
world is simply made up of things. No further limit exists. We
are implicitly authorized fto do as we like with this world that
has no soul\No obstacle prevents us apart from that of our own
imagination and the means available. As these increase, so does
our unbounded use of the capital of nature, and so do our
depredations.
There is no longer any taboo. No domain is off limits. No
concern exists for the balance between the spiritual and the
material. Anything may be utilized, anything done. It makes no
difference whether we act in one sense or another. The only
criteria are those of immediate usefulness. This is, of course, the
very opposite of the spirit of Christianity, and yet it is one of
the results of the Christianizing of the world when Christianity
is laicized. Cast down to the earth by the radicalism of tran-
scendence, we can no longer find there any meaning or value.
This process is doubled at once by a criticism of Christian-
ity itself, which is intrinsic to it, which cannot fail to issue from
the very fact of critical transcendence. When Christianity assim-
ilates or annihilates values and social practices, as we have seen,
the rejection of Christianity leads to nihilism. This includes a
nihilism of social and political practices. What this implies is
the possibility of adopting orientations without measure and of
pushing them to extremes because there is no longer any external
criterion by which to contest the excess. Means become a law
unto themselves. This nihilism disguises itself as freedom. Fool-
ish people today never stop wanting to overcome the taboos of
morality and law. They simply do not realize that they are in-
dwelt by the spirit of nihilism, of which Hitler was an exemplary
model.
The final factor in the development of nihilism on the
basis of Christian conviction is undoubtedly the importance of
sin. Roman Catholicism certainly perceived the danger and for
this reason lessened the gravity of sin and created various human
means whereby we might avoid being crushed by it. But radical
Christianity and the Reformation have always stressed this hu-
man condition. Whatever we do comes under its law. We can
accomplish nothing on our own. We can achieve nothing good
or beautiful or true. Everything is rotted and falsified from the
intention on. All acts and decisions and projects express the
basic state of sin. We are set in unceasing evil, and from the
very moment that we separate ourselves from God, whatever we
do leads to it. We are effectively separated from God. Undoubt-
edly Christianity sets us in grace. We shall come back to this.
But two things happen that deform everything and upset the
balance of revelation. First, evangelistic preaching emphasizes
the state of sin. A whole line of preachers in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, mostly Protestant, thundered against sin-
ners and announced eternal perdition. Christian generations
heard nothing else. Then we have, as before, the laicizing of
Christianity. Losing the reference to God as Savior, this contin-
~ ues to uphold the view that we are wicked and totally corrupt.
(Rousseau as well as Marx might be cited in this regard.) In
these circumstances, one can see that all this might lead to
nihilism, to the conviction that nothing good is to be hoped of
us who are set in such radical pessimism, and that it might finally
lead on the individual level to suicide, since there is neither
remedy, solution, nor compensation.
These various orientations that result from Christianity are
not the fruit of revelation but historically are its products and
have found historical incarnation. We need hardly insist on the
well-known fact that desacralization has permitted the devel-
opment of technology and the unlimited exploitation of the
world. In our very nihilism we have believed that everything is
legitimate, and Christians have tried to support this possibility
from Genesis, arguing that God has appointed the human race
to exploit the earth (we are left “free” to do as we like with it,
even to destroy it!), or that creation is simply a rough outline
and it is up to us to develop it. Very quickly the two currents
merge. We have full freedom to exploit the earth to death. We
are even appointed by God to do so, and whatever we do is
right. But we are also fundamentally sinful. We have a convic-
tion of absolute wickedness. This does not interfere with our
activity but it takes away our joy, our reason for living. Thus the
negation of the world combines with the negation of the self,
and the exploitation of (sinful) people links up with that of the
(subjected) world in a sombre duty, a sinister power, and an
obsession with the end.
Because of sin all the works of civilization are marked by
the infamy of their origin. All that issues from society is evil and
ought to be destroyed. Christian convictions have prepared the

ground for terrorist outrages. These convictions may have been
set aside and forgotten, but they are there deep within us. The
destruction of the sacred has yielded nihilism toward nature; and
the conviction of sin, nihilism toward people and society. A
question undoubtedly remains, for the laicization or seculariza-
tion of Christianity to which I have often referred ought surely
to have disappeared too. We come across a strange phenomenon
here, for what did disappear was the deity of Jesus Christ, the
fact that God is the Father, grace, pardon, the plan of salvation,
liberation by the divine action, the fact that the world in which
we dwell is creation, providence, promise, the resurrection, the
meaning of history in orientation to the new creation. This
message is what is challenged in the process of secularization, in
the scientific negation (as in such sciences as psychoanalysis,
history, psychology, etc.), the political negation, plain common
sense, the aggression of Marxist materialism, etc. The rest, how-
ever, is carefully and scrupulously preserved.
Undoubtedly modern philosophy, psychology, and psycho-
analysis have firmly contested the idea of human sin, guilt, or
responsibility in an effort to “liberate” us. A strange thing has
happened, then, for we have ended up by being convinced that
sin (especially original sin) no longer counts, that there is no
responsibility, that we can do as we like with no limits, and the
result is not conduct that is open to the good or liberated for it,
but frantic egoism, scorn for others, a desire for aggrandizement
and domination. Once we begin to attain to the conviction that
we are not sinners, what do we see around us? What is brought
to us by the thousands of pictures transmitted by television?
Epidemics, famines, massacres, genocides, revolutions every-
where leading to innumerable executions even when the inten-
tions are of the best, the installation of bloody and capricious
dictatorships, socialism transformed into an instrument of
oppression, of murder, and of hatred, the spoliation of the planet
by technology. Pictures of hell are set before our eyes every day.
To be sure, we no longer put all this in terms of sin. But
how can we fail to reach the conviction that the race is evil? If
we will not, then it is the political regime, the organization, the
institution that is evil. Obviously, then, we should destroy them.
What we see, when it is grafted onto ancient Christian images
that may be stifled and hidden but still exist, leads to the belief
a NIHILISM AND CHRISTIANITY 145
that this absolute evil that cannot be remedied (only God might
meet the situation, but there is no God, as our present crisis
proves abundantly) ought to lead to annihilation. A vertigo of
death seizes even the most rational of people when they see what
is happening. Periodically the judgment passed on the world on
the basis of the conviction of sin has caused fanatics of destruc-
tion to appear, the monks and cenobites of Alexandria, the
circumcellions, the millenarians, the horsemen of the Apoca-
lypse, etc. And now the concrete vision of invading evil grafts
itself onto this ancient trunk. One must destroy as quickly as
possible this society that is hell. We thus confront the wide-
spread temptation of a nihilist vertigo of this type, perhaps pro-
- voked, or at least nourished, by the existence of the possibility
of collective suicide, of powerful weapons putting an end to the
race and its history.
The way has thus led from Christianity to nihilism. Noth-
ing now remains in our hands. Christianity has destroyed every-
thing else, and it has had within it the contradiction that has
destroyed it, too, in turn. All that we have are enormous weap-
ons of destruction and means full of promise that in turn, when
applied, lead to disaster in every field. The responsibility of
Christianity cannot be denied.
Il. THE CONTRADICTION
The mysterious problem that we still face is how all this

can have happened. How can there have been this total inver-
sion and radical perversion not only of the true message of the
Christian revelation but also of the Christian life itself, of which
the only legitimate and effective example is the life of Jesus, in
relation to which no negation is tenable? The question is always
the same: How can the pure gold have become base lead? How
can socialism, with its vision of human goodness and freedom,
have become Stalinism or Marxism, pitiless dictatorships? Does
the devil really exist? But let us keep to Christianity. For ulti-
mately there is no more total negation of nihilism than Chris-
tianity, the Christian revelation.
We must now meet an objection: “No matter what this
revelation or the life of Jesus may say, the only thing that counts
is what Christians have done in the course of history, what they
have produced by way of a trend or type of civilization, and on
the individual level, what they have been in the economic sphere
(capitalists!) There might have been some devout Christians,
but they do not count. . . .” The implied question is a serious
but mistaken one. The first error is to think that a state or
society can be made Christian. Christianity has always been a
personal mutation on the basis of faith in the revelation. It is
not a collective thing. There is no plurality except in the church,
a specific body that is not a society and even less a power. The
second error is to judge Christianity by collective works that
carry the whole socioeconomic magma with some intermingled
fragments of Christian ideology. But is this not what is finally
called Christendom? Is it not to this that Christians have
appealed?
The Christian faith is in fact an antinihilism. The Bible
in its basic structure rules out all nihilism. I will recall three
points.
First we have creation. This is obviously not described in
terms of a concrete reality in the Genesis story. The aim is not
to explain existing things. Here is no myth of origins. The de-
cisive thing is the presence of the Creator and the relation to
this Creator, namely, the existence of a decision that expresses
a will to achieve something new, an arche. This will is neither
arbitrary nor negative. It is positive and integrated with love.
Love is its expression. The existing world exists only in virtue
of this will and with reference to it. No pessimism or nihilism,
then, is possible. Even when there is (on our part) a refusal and
a break, this will, which does not force us, remains unchanged
in its truth, changing only in its expressions, in its “ways and
means.”
The relationship to the Creator implies that we are free
but not autonomous, that we cannot positively but only nega-
tively be a law to ourselves arid the world. From the beginning
we are made responsible, but only responsible, no more. Our
conduct is not dictated or predetermined. Calling God Creator
means that, being love, he respects the decision and even the
independence of his creation when we want to seize indepen-
dence relative to him. But because the Creator is being itself,
there can be no nihilism. We can question all things, but in
spite of all our grandiloquent statements about the death of God,
we cannot touch our Creator. The last word is with him. Noth-
ing depends on historical chance. Circumstantial events ob-
viously have their importance, for in them we express our

relationship (positive or negative) with the Creator and open
up, or close off, the possibility of something new. But because
the world is creation, it rests on the divine love, not on human
decisions. When we think of it as creation, we cannot put forth
our omnipotence in exploitation or destruction. Our means are
limited by the very fact that we have to do with creation and
not just nature or any kind of milieu.
A second aspect of the radical contradiction between
Christian revelation and nihilism relates to the fact that history
is given a meaning, that it does not have this intrinsically (for
then we might destroy it), but it receives it. There is fresh cause
‘for astonishment here. In effect Israel is the first to put the
problem of the relation with nature and God in terms of history
rather than philosophy. God is God in history. (Later, in Jesus,
he is Immanuel.) He writes his acts on history. He takes a his-
torical way with us. If history has a meaning, it is not a meta-
physical or metahistorical meaning. The singularity of the Judeo-
Christian faith is that in it history does not have an intrinsic
meaning in itself nor a meaning that comes to it from an outside
factor that is incommensurable and unknown. God’s presence
in human events is what gives it a meaning as it unfolds. Each
situation or train of events thus has a sense that we need to read
off. It leads to a positive outcome. For this reason we must reject
the usual interpretations that are offered today, such as endless
repetition, or unceasing progress, or inevitable entropy, or an
ineluctable advance toward socialism, or history as sound and
fury, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.
Such interpretations are unacceptable to Christian thought,
life, and faith. They are false, for as history is made it is infused
by a relationship that develops in a particular way, that is pos-
itive but indescribable, in which the Creator gives us the assur-
ance that the end is not chaos or nothingness nor a pure and
simple repetition of the best of worlds. If the positive end is
sure, the way to it, being left to our initiative, is indefinite and
flexible. The final work depends on successive realizations of the
humanity that God receives, saves, assumes, and takes up. In
other words, two tendencies are rejected in the biblical revela-
tion. The first is that God does everything, that we are left with
nothing to do, that our work is nothing, or, even worse, that
God does all the good and we do all the bad. The second is that
we do everything, that we are solely responsible for the meaning

and the end of history, that if we fail, the result is universal
disaster and defeat. But the astonishment to which I alluded is
due to the fact that from this perfectly clear and perspicuous
teaching of revelation there could be derived a theology of tran-
scendentalism that leaves us to muddle our way through the
world without guidance, hope, or presence, as if we really were
alone in the world. We shall come back to this.
In the course of the history or process that is presented to
us as our relationship with God there is interplay between prom-
ise and fulfillment, hope and actualization. In a specific situation
we are under a precise and limited promise from God. After a
longer or shorter delay we then receive the fulfillment or accom-
plishment of this promise. Every fulfilled promise gives birth to
a new promise. There is a rebounding toward another horizon
that is both historical and eternal, for what is historical has
value only because it is shot through with the promise of the
eternal. The combination of the fulfillment of an old promise
and the appearance of a new one means that we are summoned
to live out the actual situation in hope. This leads to action.
Action is not in vain. No matter how small it may be, it is not
futile for us to get involved. For the fulfillment of God’s promise
is always a combination of commandments, imperatives, and
interventions (rot constraining or final) coming from God and
from our initiatives, which may be aberrant or negative but are
never ultimate or irreparable, never fall into the nothingness of
the past, are not destined for hell, and are taken up by God in
constantly new situations until the last and truly new situation
comes—the novum that God accomplishes as the recapitulation
of all human enterprises as they reach at last their transcendent
consummation.
In the course of history, on the basis of the granting of the
promises for those who have eyes to see it, hope is possible,
namely, the affirmation that in spite of every human calculation
or estimation or evaluation of the probable future, and dark and
tragic though the situation may be, a truth still exists; there are
still, even yet, people to hold it, and we still have a history that
is open to the future. This is all of the order of decision or
affirmation, both on the individual level and on the collective.
But it is not an insubstantial and gratuitous affirmation, an act
of absurd, unreasonable, and unrealistic faith. On the contrary,
it is an affirmation that is made on the basis of a known, re-

membered, and conserved reality, a personal and collective real-
ity that is experienced historically and cannot in fact be reduced
to any other factor.
We thus affirm that in both its profound truth and its
experience Christianity is at the deepest level an antinihilism.
The nihil, death, and nothingness, and correlatively the death-
instinct, non-sense, despair, scorn, and anguish are the precise
opposite of what God in his action and being in Jesus Christ has
revealed about his relationship with us, the opposite that, we
must know, has already been transcended, vanquished, and out-
dated. Nihilism is a retrograde attitude whose time has passed.
Ill. THE INVERSION
The question, then, is how there can have been an up-

turning or inversion of such a truth. Certainly what we have just
briefly described as antinihilism has always been present. It has
always been preserved in some trends and places within the
Christian world. It has always been restated, repeated, rediscov-
ered. It has always known revivals. But finally and essentially
there has always been the opposite about which we spoke under
the first section. We must try to understand how revelation could
be so inverted as to become a source of contemporary nihilism.
It seems to me that we can discern three processes: the trans-
forming of a living movement of relationship into an achieved
and definite situation; objectifying; and dissociating. At root the
mutation is the same as that which we have constantly asserted
in the shift from history to metaphysics. An attempt is made to
seize a momentary thing in such a way as to explain it absolutely
and to freeze it. This was the mistake of the disciples when they
saw the transfiguration and proposed to set up tents so that they
could remain in the ineffable light in company with Moses and
Elijah. It is the mistake of an attempt to solidify in an arrested,
comprehensible, and explicable system that which is in unfore-
seeable movement toward some outcome. It leads to efforts to
find harmonies in what is momentary and to bring what is ir-
reconcilable into lasting accord, such as time and eternity, or
the absolute and the relative, or Christ’s human and divine na-
tures. It leads to the attempt to change what is living explicitly
and implicitly into something fixed. It leads to the establishing
of powers (e.g., in the church) and power relationships. From

this point on we are plunged into contradictory and inextricable
situations, into insoluble difficulties, where only negation, total
rejection, and derision seem to grant us freedom. But this is a
mortal freedom that finally subjects us to delusion and nothing-
ness. This has been our experience in the West since the eigh-
teenth century.
The second mistake, which is very close to the first, is that
of objectifying, that is, changing the truth of revelation that the
Creator gives in a personal relationship in such a way that as an
arrested and frozen text it becomes an objective law, a closed
revelation, a text that has its own validity. Whether we are
dealing with the law, the Sermon on the Mount, or the Beati-
tudes, the process is always the same. The received Word takes
on its own worth. It has to be studied for its own sake. It is true
in the letter and content. It may thus be generalized, applied
everywhere and to all. It has its own significant structure. It is
objective; it is endowed with “scientific” objectivity. Once this
attitude is adopted, the contradiction obviously arises at once
in an effort to show that this text is uncertain, that it is not
objective, that it rests on dubious testimonies, that it is relative
to its finite cultural setting, etc. When this happens, all that
remains is replacement, but we have seen that after Christianity
replacement is impossible. Whatever appears is a Christian sub-
stitute for a rejected Christianity. Thus communism is a reedited
Christianity, but it cannot be sustained precisely because of its
claim to objectivity. Nihilism is the only way out.
Finally, I maintain that the third movement by which
Christians become responsible for nihilism is dissociation. Al-
ready the process of objectification is also one of dissociation.
It breaks the link between the Word and him who speaks it,
between person and proclamation (e.g., the fact that the word
of Jesus is true only because it is he who speaks it). There is also
another dissociation, however, within the world of revelation
contained in the Bible. Revelation does not hold up and is not
antinihilist unless one holds all the elements together in indis-
soluble fashion, unless the transcendent God is also he who
incarnates himself in our history, unless the hidden God is also
he who reveals himself—and reciprocally the revealed God is
also the hidden God—unless holiness (separation) is the con-
dition of love (and vice versa), unless faith produces works and
works are necessarily the product of faith, unless everything is

done by God and yet we have also to do everything, unless God
is sovereignly free and we are free also (not conditioned in any
way in spite of foreknowledge and predestination), unless sal-
vation is granted by pure grace and works are useless, and yet
works are strictly indispensable before God. . . .
I might enlarge this list of examples of apparent contradic-
tions in the biblical revelation. The contradictions are rationally
insoluble. But what can reason say when it is the absolute, tran-
scendent, and wholly other God who enters into relationship
with us? When we accept the whole of this revelation in a
coherent and vital way, then it leads us in and toward life. When
we dissociate, when we choose (a text, an aspect, or a truth),
trying to construct a rational and noncontradictory system, we
plunge tragically into nihilism. An example is provided by sin,
whose importance we have seen for the birth of Western nihil-
ism. The mistake has been to divide sin into original and per-
sonal sin, to describe ourselves as intrinsically sinners, as though
we were without God? (but how can we be without God if God
is God?). There has thus arisen the disastrous and ridiculous
debate whether sin has brought total corruption, or whether
there is still anything sound left in us, as Roman Catholics be-
lieve but Protestants do not. Sin becomes a category of its own.
Sin becomes our human nature, etc. What is forgotten here is
simply that the Bible does not describe sin and sinners in this
way. We learn about sin only on the basis of the proclamation
of grace and pardon. It is when we take God’s Word with ab-
solute seriousness that we find that we are sinners, we and not
others, not people as such, not objectively, but I myself as I hear
this Word. It is when I believe in Christ crucified that I learn
the depth of my sin. It is as one who is pardoned that I see
myself as a sinner. It is we ourselves who have restored what
seems to us to be the logical order, that first we are objectively
sinners, and then God pardons us; for in our logic we pardon a
child only when it has first disobeyed.
From this logic of ours we derive a general law and for-
mulate the universality of human sin. We begin with an abstract
2. A minor point: I believe that the reconstruction of Pascal’s Pensées

with a section devoted to “Man Without God” is wrong; Pascal was too good
a theologian ever to have written that!
and collective message about sinners, with the proclamation of

sin. But biblically we have only a proclamation of grace and a
preaching of pardon. The biblical revelation about sin proceeds
in retroactive fashion, whereas we set up a progressive method
where, once pardon is no longer heard and people are no longer
conscious of grace, only the residue of sin remains. Christianity
then falls justly under the charge of having crushed people with
guilt and chained them to evil. To get out, to escape this evil,
there is then negation of God’s will for us, of the law, of all
morality, etc. There is thus an entry into nihilism. The same
danger is run, the same illusion fostered, by the tendency to
make of Jesus and the gospel a political message, to select from
revelation only the part that concerns the poor, revolution, etc.
In these last three cases what disappears is the active, ac-
tualized, living, and changing presence of the being who gives
meaning. This is what leads to our nihilism either by way of our
absolute dominion over nature (because we are no longer re-
sponsible), or by way of our sin (which is not pardoned and is
thus inexpiable). We have to ask, then, why in revelation it is
always the new and living part that finally disappears. The an-
swer is that in revelation it is precisely this part that cannot be
fixed or grasped, that is not rational or objectifiable, so that it
always seems to us that when we come upon a reality of this type
we can be sure of nothing. Always—and today more than ever—
we like things that we can count on, obvious certainties, a secure
future, simple duties, a clearcut line of conduct. The uncertainty
of fluctuating things like love and grace horrifies us. Saying that
God loves us grants us no reassurance. We would prefer it if he
gave us fifty things to do, so that when we had done them we
could be at peace. We do not want an ongoing relationship with
God. We prefer a rule. It does not satisfy us that God shows
grace to us or frees us. We prefer to bind him by our virtues and
to be sure that he has no freedom to do with us as he chooses.
Thus we have unceasingly tried to objectify our relationship
with God. We have built up the idea of a nature that is a point
of reference for us since it is created by God. To be in conformity
with nature ought to be enough. We have set up sovereignties
(ecclesiastical or political) that represent God on earth and with
which we can have a clear relationship. We have overvalued
law, making it an expression of God’s will. We have replaced
the sovereignty of love with that of politics, and liberty with
duties. But it is precisely this whole construction that opens the

door to nihilism. For none of this can resist the simple question,
which is smothered and pushed under the lid during the period
when social control is adequate but cannot be suppressed indef-
initely, the question: Why? Why should we obey law or the
state? Why should we accept this morality? No one can give any
answer. Once this question surfaces, we see clearly the absence
of meaning in what we are called upon to do. Action is merely
for the sake of action, power for the sake of power, fulfillment
for the sake of fulfillment, growth for the sake of growth. These
things simply fill the void left by the situation that has arisen
because we have an inactive God. None of them can finally
satisfy us. Destruction, futility, and chance tempt us, and lead
us on to the nothingness, which seems at last to be the only
outcome, a fatal and ineluctable destiny to which we must sub-
mit and which we must hasten, putting a speedy end to this
human adventure that has become absurd now that there is no
longer any love.?
3. The best recent witness to our present condition is the book by

Romain Gary, Les Clowns lyriques (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), which both de-
scribes nihilism and is a desperate protest against it.
Chapter VIII
THE HEART OF
THE PROBLEM
If we grant that what the New Testament means by Chris-

tianity and being a Christian merely conforms to human ideas
and pleases and flatters us as though it were all our own inven-
tion and teaching springing up from within ourselves, then there
is no problem. There is, however, a “but,” a difficulty, for what
the New Testament really means by being a Christian is the very
opposite of what is natural to us. It is thus a scandal. We have
either to revolt against it or at all costs to find cunning ways of
avoiding the problem, such as by the trickery of calling Chris-
tianity what is in fact its exact antithesis, and then giving thanks
to God for the great favor of being Christians. As Kierkegaard
says, nothing displeases or revolts us more than New Testament
Christianity when it is properly proclaimed. It can neither win
millions of Christians nor bring revenues and earthly profits.
Confusion results. If people are to agree, what is proclaimed to
them must be to their taste and must seduce them. Here is the
difficulty: it is not at all that of showing that official Christianity
is not the Christianity of the New Testament, but that of show-
ing that New Testament Christianity and what it implies to be
a Christian are profoundly disagreeable to us (“Instant,” p. 167).
Never—no more today than in the year 30—can Christian rev-
elation please us: in the depths of our hearts Christianity has
always been a mortal enemy. History bears witness that in gen-
eration after generation there has been a highly respected social
class (that of priests) whose task is to make of Christianity the
very opposite of what it really is (p. 240).
Up to this point we have been tracing the contours of this
154
THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM 155
subversion. We have looked at history. But we have not yet

come to the heart of the problem: it is not the question of “how”
but of “why.” So far we have been trying to answer analytically
the question “how” the revelation of the God of Abraham, Isaac,
and Jesus Christ—that is, how the Gospels—could produce a
Christianity that is so far and so different from its origin. In
effect explanations of a sociological order could not take us be-
yond this “how.” Within the course of the history there is no
point where one can fix on the “why.” One might suspect that
at the heart of the sociological movement there is some sinister
machination, some invisible hand, some hidden demon. Noth-
ing enables us to answer unless we pass to another plane, the
spiritual plane to which we shall in fact return. For the moment,
however, we must keep to what can be established. If we ask
why things happened as they did, we cannot give a global or
collective answer. We have to consider the relation between
revelation and the ordinary folk to whom it is addressed. A
tragic chord is struck.
We might have had the impression that the X of which we
spoke at the outset has been the victim of a frightful conspiracy,
that all the world’s powers and seductive forces have united to
transform this revelation, this work of God, into a banal, con-
formist, and vulnerable Christianity. We might have been sur-
prised that it did not put up more resistance. This is the point
at which to say that if it did not react more vigorously, if the
Holy Spirit did not manifest himself in all his grandeur and
radiance, if Christians and the church seem to have given in so
easily, it is because X was in itself so totally unacceptable, in-
tolerable, unsupportable, and unlivable, and this not merely in
the intellectual sphere, as when Paul arouses mockery by an-
nouncing the resurrection to the philosophers of Athens. No,
the problem is not that there is difficulty in explaining this
revelation, that it contains such mysteries as the virgin birth,
the miracles, or the resurrection. Quite the contrary: such fac-
tors as these are positive, and are fully acceptable to average
people. Religion and miracle are excellent things. In every age
we want religious peace, the assurance of eternal life, pious con-
solation. We believe in magicians and soothsayers. Miracles do
not repel us. Only the nineteenth century, and the fifties of our
own century, took the simplistic view that the age of science has
made us rational, that we have “come of age,” as they put it, so
that there is no point in talking to us about miracles or resur-

rections, and demythologizing is called for. What ignorance on
Bultmann’s part! What childishness! The race is always credu-
lous (as is shown by the enormous success of Nostradamus in
July 1981). The race is always ready to take mysterious paths
(as is shown by the success of the most ridiculous sects during
the last twenty years).
If revelation is intolerable, it is not because of its mythical
or legendary dress. On the contrary, this is what risks constantly
becoming more acceptable, but by changing its nature, taking
it as the sacred, the supernatural, and as religion. The intoler-
able element is deeper than that. As the first point in our reply
we shall simply refer again to our earlier study of the process of
desacralization that produces a resacralization of the very thing
that brings about the desacralization. This gives us a clue, so
that without repeating ourselves we may simply say that this
movement shows us that it is completely intolerable for us to
live in a religiously deserted universe, in a desacralized world.
We need a religion. We thus rush to the victorious conqueror
of the Medusa that we worshiped yesterday. We refashion God’s
revelation as a religion with its own legends, myths, mysteries,
ecstasies, and religiosity. | need not go into this again.
Similarly, another aspect need not detain us long, for we
have dealt with this, too, in the preceding chapters. In essence,
X, when it comes to us, cannot be organized. We can have
neither stability, routine, collective permanence, association,
nor group cohesion if we want to live by revelation, if we put
X at the center as the sole truth. It cannot be lived out socially.
When we are told that the Holy Spirit constituted the church
at Pentecost, we like that. But when we learn that the Holy
Spirit is like the wind that blows when and where it wills and
we do not know where it comes from or where it is going, we
do not like it. The church may say that it has the Holy Spirit,
but if it does it betrays its truth and legitimacy. When we are
told that the church consists of those whom God calls, we ap-
plaud, but who are they? Who can trace the boundaries? We
may say that the church has a center, Jesus Christ, but it has no
circumference. We can give assurance to none and exclude none.
We may believe that we have found a solution in baptism. Church
members are baptized, and the baptized are the church. Well
and good. But unfortunately the New Testament very clearly
distinguishes between the baptism of water and the baptism of

the Spirit. The two do not coincide (except when the church
falsely decides that they do!). We are thus back in the same
difficulty. .
When we are told that the church has ministers, and its
life is organized around them, well and good. But at once we
have to remember that these ministries are a gift of the Holy
Spirit and not a permanent or organized thing. This leads us to
invert the biblical movement. We set up pastoral positions or
benefices with rectors and bishops, etc. We then fill these posts
with people we think are suitable. But this is the opposite of the
movement presented in the Epistles, in which the Holy Spirit
gives to the church people who have the gifts of love or the
word or teaching, and the church has to find a place for them
even if it had not anticipated doing so. If, after a while, the
Holy Spirit does not give someone who has the spirit of prophecy
but gives someone who has the gift of miracles, then the church
must change its form and habits!
No doubt some will reply that God is not a God of disorder,
incoherence, or abitrariness, but a God of order. Of course he
is. Unfortunately the whole of the Old Testament shows us that
God’s order is not that which we conceive and desire. God’s
order is not organization and institution (cf. the difference be-
tween judges and kings). It is not the same in every time and
place. It is not a matter of repetition and habit. On the contrary,
it resides in the fact that it constantly posits something new, a
new beginning. Our God is a God of beginnings. There is in
him no redundancy or circularity. Thus, if his church wants to
be faithful to his revelation, it will be completely mobile, fluid,
renascent, bubbling, creative, inventive, adventurous, and imag-
inative. It will never be perennial, and can never be organized
or institutionalized. If the gates of death are not going to prevail
against it, this is not because it is a good, solid, well-organized
fortress, but because it is alive; it is Life—that is, as mobile,
changing, and surprising as life. If it becomes a powerful fortified
organization, it is because death has prevailed. Thus even on
the humble level of the church, revelation cannot be organized
or experienced socially. How much less so when Christians sud-
denly find themselves in charge of “society”!
If the true church cannot be organized because of the truth
of Christ, how much less can a whole society. What the Bible
tells us is of no use to a society. It is a break that cannot be

contained. One can normalize atomic disintegration but not the
disintegration produced by the gospel. If we think we have done
so, then quite simply the gospel is no longer there. We have
fabricated a religion, Christianity, which has nothing whatever
to do with Jesus Christ. If X is taken seriously, it is impossible
to make a society function. It is impossible to coordinate conduct
in a permanent fashion. It is impossible to put the work of X on
a social scale.
Let it be understood that I am not saying that society and
the state are evil. What I am saying is that they function by
their own laws, principles, and demands. All this is useful to us;
we cannot live without society and organization. I am also saying
that this has nothing whatever to do with the X of revelation.
This X must permeate the social body and become an active,
life-giving, critical, disturbing, inadequate, or stimulating factor,
but never an institution belonging to the social body, never a
principle by which to organize it. Take, for example, the incar-
nation. The body of Jesus is undoubtedly a human body like any
other. His blood circulation and digestion obey normal physio-
logical laws. This is not affected by his divine sonship. He knows
hunger and fatigue. He suffers, etc., as all others do. Yet in and
under all this, with no bodily change, the Holy Spirit intervenes,
God himself in his totality.
The relation between the revealed X and the social body
is the same. X does not change either the structure or the func-
tioning of the state or politics. It sets up a relationship of con-
flict. This is exhausting. It is wearing on both sides. It is
intolerable. Here is what I have called the social intolerability
of revelation. A more practical course is to make a gentlemen’s
agreement. It is more satisfying for Christians to build up an
organized church, Christian institutions, a Christian society and
politics. Subversion takes place, not because society is wicked,
but because revelation is socially intolerable.
The worst thing is that the intolerable element cuts deeper.
It directly affects the human heart. All that the gospel declares
is intolerable, unacceptable. Real people in any society, flesh
and blood people, cannot swallow it. Let us survey some of the
great evangelical verities.
Grace. Do you think it is acceptable? To learn that we are
the recipients of grace. It does not depend on me; I can do
nothing. “It is not of him that wills or runs.” Grace is odious to

us. There is nothing pleasurable in finding out that we are like
people condemned by nature to whom a kind prince generously
grants life for no apparent reason, for no realistic motive that
we can understand. It is all so arbitrary: I will be gracious to
whom I will be gracious, and merciful to whom I will be merciful.
How can we seize or force or constrain God? No sacrifice, cere-
mony, rite, or prayer can earn grace, precisely because it is
purely and totally gracious and gratuitous. Am I happy about
this? Not at all, for the whole principle of gift and counter-gift,
of exchanging presents, is punctured by gratuitous, prevenient,
sanctifying grace. If we are to believe the specialists, this mech-
anism of gift and counter-gift is truly decisive in human relations
and human “nature.” Grace, then, is totally unacceptable from
this standpoint.
Furthermore, grace excludes sacrifice. Girard is quite right
when he shows how basic sacrifice is to humanity. There can be
no accepted life or social relation without sacrifice. But gracious
grace rejects the validity of all human sacrifice. It ruins a basic
element in human psychology. Revelation is essentially contrary.
It does not satisfy religious needs. It satisfies none of our needs
or great aspirations or great assurances, such as the need for self-
justification. We are possessed by an obsessional desire to justify
ourselves, to declare that we are righteous, to be righteous in
our own eyes, to seem to be righteous in the eyes of others, of
neighbors and acquaintances, and finally to be declared righ-
teous by the whole group to which we belong. In human conduct
and sociological movements this thirst for self-justification is
constant and fundamental. The need for justification and ra-
tionalization is being better recognized today, since it is in this
way that we see ourselves to be consistent.! It is now known
that those who are forced to adopt a party by superior authority
inevitably come to justify what they do by presenting it as a free
choice. Thus they also legitimize the power that constrains them.
A society can have no stability if its members are not just
and justified by belonging to it. But the revelation of God at
Sinai and the revelation of Jesus Christ come inexorably to con-
tradict and contest and exclude this passionate desire and irre-
1. Cf. J.-L. Beauvois and R. Joule, Soumission et Idéologies. Psychologie

de la rationalisation (Paris: PUF, 1981).
ducible need. No, we are never righteous. We will never do what

God requires. No matter what may be our passion or love for
the law, our scruples and virtues, it is never enough. Before God
we are always sinners, always in debt, always fundamentally un-
righteous. The rich young ruler who comes to Jesus, undoubtedly
a good Pharisee, tells him that he has done all these things, all
the law with its host of detailed statutes, and he asks what more
he should do. Here is the whole situation. I have done all, yet
I know that there is more to do. But what? Go, sell all your
goods, and give to the poor. There is reason for despair, and
Jesus aggravates the situation, first by affirming that no yod of
the law need not be fulfilled, then by spiritualizing the law.
(“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adul-
tery.’ But I say unto you that every one who looks at a woman
lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”)
Then finally, by his life and death, he shows that those who
cannot be justified before God are in fact justified by grace and
the love of God.
Note well that “we are justified.” The worst possible injury
is done to us. We are dispossessed of grandeur, autonomy, and
the faculty of justice. Someone (in our anger God becomes a
someone) justifies us from outside. A sovereign prince grants
grace to subjects who are prostrate before him in filth and ab-
jection that they cannot cast off on their own. We cannot give
ourselves this righteousness. We cannot even say of what it con-
sists. We cannot appropriate either the virtue of righteousness
or the glory of justifying ourselves (a glory that is so important
that many tales and legends finally come to a climax in it, as
the hero triumphs through a thousand tests and then at the last
receives the supreme reward that he has won, that always cor-
responds to either absolute love or absolute purity, that is, the
righteousness obtained at the cost of so many trials in a conquest
that is strictly anti-Christian, the quest for the Grail and the
Lancelot cycle being a mere parody of revelation). The decla-
ration that we are justified by grace, by the sovereign love of
God manifested in the death of Jesus, dispossesses us of some-
thing that we regard as essential, namely, that we should fashion
our own righteousness.
To come to the point of putting ourselves in God’s hands
for justification goes against the grain and causes us to bristle.
A thousand times we have heard the indignant objection: “But
what are you doing with our human dignity?” Indeed, we have
to admit that there is no place for human dignity in the Bible.
The one condition for coming to the eucharist is the admission
that we are not worthy.
Nietzsche was right. He expressed the natural and normal
thinking of natural and normal people. He was not a demonic
destroyer of Christianity. He was not a philosophical genius. He
was simply a natural human being taking seriously what the Bible
says and as energetically as possible rejecting it as unacceptable.
The same situation arises with sanctification or liberation. Such
things take place outside us. The decision is not ours, for it
arises out of God’s free grace. God comes to sanctify us (which,
we must not forget, does not mean making little angels out of
us but setting us apart for the service that he expects of us) and
to free us, to liberate us. Once we were slaves, and a third party
(not our ancient master) comes to set us free.
Am I an object, then, a puppet to whom God attributes
righteousness, holiness, and freedom? Not at all! Before God I
am a human being (or else he would not have undergone the
terrible pain of dying in his Son). But I am caught in a situation
from which there is truly and radically no escape, in a spider’s
web I cannot break. If I am to continue to be a living human
being, someone must come to free me. In other words, God is
not trying to humiliate me. What is mortally affronted in this
situation is not my humanity or my dignity. It is my pride, the
vainglorious declaration that I can do it all myself. This we
cannot accept. In our own eyes we have to declare ourselves to
be righteous and free.* We do not want grace. Fundamentally
what we want is self-justification. There thus commences the
patient work of reinterpreting revelation so as to make of it a
Christianity that will glorify humanity and in which humanity
will be able to take credit for its own righteousness.
Not only am I not the author of the righteousness that is
assigned to me from outside, but even worse, | do not possess it.
2. Regarding the desire to be free on one’s own, I had an amusing little

experience recently. My book on art, L’Empire du non-sens (Paris: PUF, 1980),
was a complete failure. A friend in the artistic world told me that this was not
surprising because I committed the unpardonable sin, in the eyes of modern
artists, of showing that they were not free, that they did not in any way
incarnate freedom. This was enough to cause the book to be rejected.
I am not its owner. It is not an intrinsic quality of my nature.

The same holds good for all the elements of the Christian life.
Faith? It does not belong to me. It is given. It makes me alive.
It is at the heart of all my acts and thoughts. It is not an object
that I can take and set aside as I please. It comes down on me
like a hawk. It grasps me and takes me, possibly where I do not
want to go. And this is unacceptable to me, as the traditional
formula testifies that speaks of “having or not having faith.” I
absolutely want to have and to hold faith. I want it to be mine.
I want to have the choice of taking it or leaving it. The totally
anti-Christian character of this formula is something that I have
shown elsewhere.
But “having” plays a role in every domain. It applies to
salvation, too. I absolutely want to be its master and owner. I
am saved by grace, agreed. But once this is done, it is done, is
it not? I enter into a stable, solid state that is foreseeable and
unchangeable. But lo! in salvation as in faith or freedom, I do
not enter a fixed state. Salvation is not a finished thing. I never
hold it. I never own it. It is not an acquired situation. I may
lose it (Paul himself tells us so). Nothing is ever finished with
God. I am never installed.
We need stability, certitude, and constancy. We are all
jurists before God. But grace is not a juridical matter. We have
an absolute need to be owners.* I am not going to launch out
into an attack on private property. This is not a matter of eco-
nomics. We need to be owners of our lives. How glorious to be
able to say that our body is ours, that we own our qualities and
destiny. I need to be on solid ground and to have acquired rights.
But grace in its movement goes against this pretension. It re-
minds us, sometimes harshly, sometimes humorously, that all
3. La Foi au prix du doute (Paris: Hachette, 1980); ET Living Faith (San

Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983).
4. For an anecdotal and to some extent amusing proof that we absolutely
need to possess everything, including immortality, one might read the book by
Jean Charron, Mort voici ta défaite (Paris: Albin Michel, 1979). As the “im-
mortal soul” no longer suits us too well, biophysics is introduced. The electrons
that form part of our bodies are eternal. They enclose a space and time different
from those to which we are accustomed. This space-time possesses spiritual
qualities. It memorizes past events and orders them as the brain does. Our
whole spirit is contained in these thinking electrons. Hence we ourselves are
immortal.
such pretensions are no more than rodomontade. Our body is

ours, but seriously, after sixty years we shall have to ask if it still
belongs to us or to rheumatism. We want a fixed state, but how
can we forget that all things are in flux? We want to be owners,
then we should reread Michaux’s fine work Mes propriétés. I have
intentionally used non-Christian gifts as examples. What this
grace gives you is a new state, an opening onto a life that has
nothing whatever to do with your petty pretensions, but that
truly does not come from you. You are not the owner. Yet you
try to transform it into your property. Christianity (as a kind of
“ism”) expresses the human property instinct.
Now let us turn to something quite different. Jesus calls
God Father. This plunges us into another conflict or contradic-
tion at the heart of our being. I will be brief, since this is not
my field. Stupidly we have seen great progress in the fact that
God can now be thought of as Father and not as terrible Judge
or distant Creator or impersonal and eternal Absolute. He is a
close and tender and kindly Father. This is what Jesus seems to
be saying in his comparison: “What father among you, if his son
asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he
asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are
evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much
more will the heavenly Father. . .” (Luke 11:11-13).
But alas! we have learned that things are not that simple.
Already in that saying the term to give is suspect, is it not? We
have learned that the relation between fathers and sons is not
one of pure love and unlimited affection with no ulterior motives
or jealousy or calculation. We have learned that the father is
not the reassuring, protective, and tender figure, and that the
son is not one on whom the father lavishes all his affection. No,
no, all that is pure imagination. The profound reality is very
different. There is such a thing as the Oedipus complex. The
father is an obstacle, the son a rival. Relations go sour, love is
false, murderous hatred reigns. The son has to kill the father.
The father has to devour the son. How far we are today from
the remarkable harmony that Péguy celebrated in his Un homme
avait deux fils, or in his admirable ode on the Lord’s Prayer in
which he argues that when Jesus teaches us to call God our
Father, he disarms the wrath of God, since God can no longer
take any action against those who call upon him thus.
I do not actually believe that psychoanalysis has lied or
falsified reality by unveiling what it has. It has unveiled it. As

a result, revelation has placed us in a terrible and contradictory
situation. On the one hand Jesus is right. But we should not
forget that he adds: “who are evil.” On the other hand the
tivalry and hostility between fathers and sons is real. Moreover,
the movement is not that we first know how wonderful is the
love between father and son, and then we are reassured when
we learn that God is for us a Father, which guarantees his love
(as we spontaneously think). On the contrary, since God is
the Father and loves you with no ulterior motive, with no self-
interest, giving himself as the total expression of the love that
gives and never possesses the other; since he is God as Father
and Father as God, you also know fathers like him and sons like
his Son. We have here an appeal for the transformation of this
vitiated and vicious relationship that is—alas!—basic to us.
Again the revelation of X contradicts our beliefs and at-
titudes. One need only think of two well-known examples. What
is the result of the view of God as Father? In the Middle Ages
and our own epoch it is an exacerbated absolutism of paternal
power. Naturally this is not what was expected of Christianity.
We recall the Roman patria potestas. Yet Christianity reinforced
paternal (and also monarchical) authoritarianism. Fathers (and
monarchs) insisted on being treated as God! Revelation was
inverted, but along the lines indicated by psychoanalysis. To
attack paternal authority, as Moliére did, was to challenge
“religion.”
The second example is modern. How many theologians in
the last fifty years have we heard stating that one can no longer
refer to God as Father? This “image” was a good one for times
of intellectual obscurantism but today science has opened our
eyes. It has taught us that the father-son relationship is a vicious
one. Hence we must drop the comparison. In the Gospels the
term Father is simply an image for God, and like all images it is
false. God is not in fact a Father. It is only through linguistic
accommodation or ignorance that he is styled thus. All that we
have is an image and not a living, existential reality. We must
now be rid of the image. We must destroy it, along with all
others. One may thus see how revelation contradicts our knowl-
edge and wisdom and to what extent it is insupportable.
And what about another concept that seems to be essential
in the life of Jesus Christ, that of weakness, which is linked with
antipolitics? What can be more the opposite of what we are? Is

not the spirit of power at the heart of all our actions? I concede
that it may not exist among some so-called primitive peoples in
tribes that know no violence and seek no domination. But these
are such an exception that we certainly cannot take them as a
natural example of what humanity is in general—if there is such
a thing as “humanity in general.”
If we look only at historical peoples, what do we see? Wars,
conquests, aggrandizement, the crushing of the vanquished, the
magnifying of power, the quest for greatness. Let us not say that
this applies only to the West! That it all comes from Rome! For
what did Egypt do for two thousand years but conquer and dom-
inate and assert its power? And the Assyrians and Chaldeans?
Is the flower of Greek civilization held up against us (apart from
Lacedaemon)? But at Athens what were games in the arena but
glorifications of competitive force? And who but the Greeks
founded colonies, and gradually invaded the eastern Mediter-
ranean, often by devious paths? And what about Alexander?
It might be objected that I am speaking about the spirit of
violence and power only with reference to the Mediterranean
basin. Let us look further afield. The Aztecs? Were they not
dominated by the same spirit of conquest and violence, possibly
inspired by fear? The Eastern world? Where did those terrible,
successive waves come from, the Huns, Hungarians, Genghis
Khan, Tamburlaine, the Turks who periodically overwhelmed
Europe? Did they not come from the very same Asia that many
people want to depict today as wise and devoid of any spirit of
violence? And within this continent frightful wars ravaged India
periodically for two thousand years, not to speak of the Manchu
and Mongolian invasions that spilled across China. China itself
until the thirteenth century was a colonizing and imperialistic
power. I have spoken already about the Arab and Moslem world.
Let no one say that Europe alone was characterized by the spirit
of power.
Within all societies without exception has there not been
equally a split between a small number of rich people and a large
number of poor people? Does not this include Buddhist society,
which is said to be pacific and nonviolent? The domination of
the rich is everywhere the same. It expresses everywhere the
same spirit of violence and repression. Capitalism did not en-
gender it. Everywhere it has been institutionalized, and partic-
ularly in Indian society, where the hierarchical caste system

consecrates and solidifies this supremacy of the powerful. In the
same way, we find slavery almost everywhere. I admit again that
in a small “primitive” group there has not been any slavery,
although sometimes this was only because they ate prisoners. In
any case, a group of this kind is not of great significance for
“humanity” at large, seeing that we find various forms of slavery,
of the absolute exploitation of some people by others, in all
historical societies. One might truly say that the desire to dom-
inate, to crush, to use others, is a general one and admits of
hardly any exceptions. One might refer to the Greek glorifica-
tion of conquering Eros, which enslaves and possesses for its own
satisfaction. One might quote also the way in which conquerors
called themselves the “scourge of God.” Truly the spirit of power
lies deep in the human heart.
How truly intolerable, then, is a message, and even more
so a life, that centers on weakness. Not sacrifice on behalf of a
cause that one wants to bring to success, but in all truth love
for nothing, faith for nothing, giving for nothing, service for
nothing. Putting others above oneself. In all things seeking the
interests of others. When dragged before courts, not attempting
any defense but leaving it to the Holy Spirit. The renunciation
of power is infinitely broader and harder than nonviolence (which
it includes). For nonviolence allows of a social theory, and in
general it has an objective. The same is not true of nonpower.
Thus the revelation of X cannot but repel fundamentally people
of all ages and all cultures.
There is also another element that is intolerable for differ-
ent reasons, namely, freedom. It is true that people claim to
want freedom. In good faith attempts are made to set up political
freedom. People also proclaim metaphysical freedom. They
struggle to free slaves. They make liberty a supreme value. The
loss of freedom by imprisonment is a punishment that is hard to
bear. Liberty is cherished. How many crimes, too, are committed
in its name? Impressive Greek myths tell the story of human
freedom triumphing over the gods. In one interpretation of Gen-
esis 3 Adam is praised as one who made a bold stroke for free-
dom, asserting his independence in face of a malignant,
authoritarian, tormenting God who imposed prohibitions so as
to prevent his child from doing wrong.
Adam was bold enough to act as a free man before God,
disobeying him and transgressing. In so doing he inaugurated

human history, which is in truth the history of freedom. How
beautiful all this is! But this fervor, passion, desire, and teaching
are all false. It is not true that people want to be free. They
want the advantages of independence without the duties or dif-
ficulties of freedom.* Freedom is hard to live with. It is terrible.
It is a venture. It devours and demands. It is a constant battle,
for around us there are always traps to rob us of it. But in
particular freedom itself allows us no rest. It requires incessant
emulation and questioning. It presupposes alert attention, ruling
out habit or institution. It demands that I be always fresh, always
ready, never hiding behind precedents or past defeats. It brings
breaks and conflicts. It yields to no constraint and exercises no
constraint. For there is freedom only in permanent self-control
and in love of neighbor.
Love presupposes freedom and freedom expands only in
love.® This is why de Sade is the supreme liar of the ages. What
he showed and taught others is the way of slavery under the
banner of freedom. Freedom can never exert power. There is full
coincidence between weakness and freedom. Similarly, freedom
can never mean possession. There is exact coincidence between
freedom and nonpossession. Freedom, then, is not merely a
merry childish romp in a garden of flowers. It is this too, for it
generates great waves of joy, but these cannot be separated from
severe asceticism, conflict, and the absence of arms and con-
quests. This is why those who suddenly find themselves in a
situation of freedom lose their heads or soon want to return to
bondage.
An ancient story: Exodus tells us several times that when
the Hebrew people were delivered from bondage in Egypt, when
faced with the problems of living in freedom they wanted to go
back. They had no reserve provisions. The way was uncertain.
The future was unknown. The strange will of their Liberator
God was incomprehensible. Better slavery with a guaranteed
minimum wage! This experience has often been repeated. On
at least two occasions in the course of history we have seen the
5. The only basic books on freedom are those by B. Charbonneau,

especially Je fus (1980).
6. See J. Ellul, Ethique de la liberté, 2 vols. (Geneva: Labor et Fides,
1973, 1975); ET Ethics of Freedom (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976).
reaction of slaves who have been freed suddenly and are afraid
of their freedom. During the American Civil War, when the
North had proclaimed the liberation of Southern slaves, many
testimonies show us that the slaves were not happy and relaxed,
but timorous and trembling, many of them going back to their
old masters to resume their former place. The same happened
when Italy, victorious in Ethiopia, proclaimed the liberty of
those whom the tribes had traditionally enslaved. These slaves
quickly joined the lowest ranks of the proletariat and wandered
about hungry, missing their former state. We can understand
this. Slaves have no liberty. They are subject to the whims of
their owners (although these are generally much less cruel and
ferocious than democratic propaganda depicts). In exchange they
are fed, lodged, and supported. They are sure of their food.
Above all, they are freed from having to take charge of their
own lives, which is worse than obeying someone else.
What people want when they talk about freedom is not
being subject to others, being able to have their own dreams or
go where they want to go. Hardly more. They definitely do not
want to have to take charge of their own lives and be responsible
for what they do. This means that they do not really want free-
dom. We have a new and explosive example of this today. It is
not true at all that the French really want freedom. Primarily
they want comfort and security in every area: police security,
safety on the roads, security from sickness, unemployment, lone-
liness, and old age, security from children (for birth control
really belongs to the area of security rather than to that of free-
dom). All this in exchange for freedom. In effect freedom can
give us everything except security by demanding that we be.
Security is always inevitably bought at the cost of freedom no
matter whether it be granted by a private master, by an insurance
company (a capitalist power), by an organism like Social Se-
curity (which through its information network becomes a general
and total controlling agent), or by the state, which enlarges and
bureaucratizes itself through the various forms of protection that
we ask from it (e.g., in the case of natural disasters).
There is an exact equilibrium. The more security and guar-
antees we want against things, the less free we are. Tyrants are
not to be feared today, but our own frantic need of security is.
Freedom inevitably means insecurity and responsibility. But we
moderns seek above all to be responsible for nothing. Yet we
want an air of freedom, an appearance of liberty. We want to

vote. We want a party system. We want to travel. We want to
choose doctors and schools. In relation to such trivialities we
dare to talk of freedom.
Naturally I am not saying that those things are unimpor-
tant. Just as in the age of de-Stalinization, when | said that
nothing had changed (see my article “Le corps de César,” Le
Monde, May 25, 1956), I was not saying that it was unimportant
that most of the political arrests had ceased. My point is that
for such things one should not have the audacity to talk about
freedom. It is undoubtedly better for a dog in a kennel to have
a chain of two yards than one foot, but this is not the freedom
‘of La Fontaine’s wolf, and his fable is always true. What we want
is a semblance of freedom, not its reality. What we want is what
Charbonneau calls the illusion of freedom.
We are very skillful at camouflaging our bondage by calling
it freedom or by describing some counterfeit as freedom. We talk
about national liberty and sovereignty (if you belong to a free
country—ergo .. .). We institutionalize liberty and we then
have economic liberalism (which is today denounced as a sham
because it profits only the powerful), or political liberalism (whose
formal character Marx denounced, for even though formal lib-
erties are better than nothing, we should not really talk about
freedom!), or anarchism (which loses itself in the hazy hypoth-
esis of human goodness and the natural state of liberty), or the
long road of “inner” beauty, or liberty of thought, which is un-
doubtedly the very beautiful illusion of idealists, intellectuals,
and Christians.
Freedom is indivisible. Freedom of thought means freedom
of action. Inner freedom means choice of conduct, an ethic
specific to myself. People use a score of means to declare that
they are free and at the same time to escape true freedom. If this
is our human condition, one can understand why the revelation
of X is quite unacceptable when it rests on the twofold formula
that in breaking with God we acquire independence or autonomy
but never freedom, for God alone is free and a relationship with
him grants the only possibility of becoming free. The first offense
is to learn that the break with God has brought bondage and
subjection to the determinisms and necessities that progressively
change into destiny. The second revulsion comes from learning
that God risks launching us into the venture of freedom that we
do not want at any price. He thus unmasks at the same time

the illusion of what we call freedom, the hypocrisy of a life in
which we falsely pretend to be free. He proposes that we take
the absolute risk of living lives that are absolutely free (“All
things are lawful,” Paul says) without any restrictions, but we
do not want it. This Christian freedom is intolerable.
Let us finally take another example that shows how this
revelation is so intolerable for us. We need to go back to some-
thing we have heard already, the Beatitudes. In themselves, if
taken seriously, these are absurd and unacceptable. It is not true
at all that the earth belongs to the meek. What the Beatitudes
say is against all reality. This alone makes them unacceptable to
sensible people. Above all, we have to recognize that their “spir-
itualization” makes an additional demand, imposes a heavier
burden. The whole of the Sermon on the Mount is unacceptable
if it is taken seriously. The preferred interpretation finds in it
the sweet folly of a good and generous prophet who did not really
know what he was talking about. Or else this teaching is reserved
for the saints, the perfect, not for the world at large. Or else
each piece is detached so as to prove exegetically that it does
not really mean what it seems to on a first reading.
We are just as clever at evading the demands of Jesus as at
evading the demands of freedom. We have seen already that
Jesus’ spiritualizing of the law is a terrible aggravation. It is im-
possible to live that way. I should like to counteract here all
those expositors who think that spiritualization smoothed things
over for the church (as when the materially poor become the
poor in spirit). On the contrary, we have to consider that spir-
itualization makes Christ unacceptable. I repeat that we are in
the presence of terrible nonsense if we think that there was a
first age of revolutionary material proclamation and that the
church fell back on spiritual positions only out of timidity and
cowardice. If the disciples had wanted their preaching to be
effective, to recruit good people, to move the crowds, to launch
a movement, they would have made the message more material.
They would have formulated material goals in the economic,
social, and political spheres. This would have stirred people up;
this would have been the easy way. To declare, however, that
the kingdom is not of this world, that freedom is not achieved
by revolt, that rebellion serves no purpose, that there neither is
nor will be any paradise on earth, that there is no social justice,
that the only justice resides in God and comes from him, that
we are not to look for responsibility and culpability in others but
first in ourselves, all this is to ask for defeat, for it is to say
intolerable things. It is indeed intolerable to think that peace
and justice and the end of poverty cannot take place on earth.
For people of the first century as for those of the twentieth, such
things are strictly unacceptable. Yet Jesus himself says such things.
Of course, the great argument of Marx, Nietzsche, and all
the rest is that this is demobilization. In saying such things we
demobilize by putting happiness in paradise and justice in the
coming kingdom of God. We sterilize the energies that ought to
be transforming society. After a century we now see the glorious
results of the mobilization that the liquidation of the heart of
Christianity has permitted. This shows, however, what is un-
acceptable in the preaching and example of Christ. For he does
not say: “Since my kingdom is not of this world, do nothing and
submit.” On the contrary, he says: “My kingdom is not of this
world, so act in every way possible to make this world livable
and to share with all people the joy of salvation, but with no
illusions as to what you will accomplish. This is very little. (Well
done, good and faithful servant, you have been faithful in little
things . . . or: When you have done all that you have to do,
say, | am an unprofitable servant. . . .) You will not achieve
liberty, peace, justice, equality, goodness, or truth. Each time
you think you have achieved them, you will have set up only an
illusion or lie.”
Now this is what we can neither hear nor accept. When
we act, we want our action to serve some end, to succeed, to
bring progress. We want to do it all ourselves. -In this regard the
word of Christ does indeed demobilize; but this is not due to the
truth, rather, it is due to our human indolence and pride and
stupidity. What since Marx (and since the thinking of Marx has
in effect penetrated our unconscious for the last half-century)
has been called spiritual evasion, the opium of the people, or
the Machiavellian means used by the dominant class to deflect
the poor, oppressed, and afflicted, all this that we know so well
ought to be divided into two (as the New Testament shows).
It is effectively before God the condemnation of the rich
and powerful who use God’s truth to their own profit. We see
this when Jesus speaks out against the hypocritical scribes and
Pharisees who lay on others burdens too heavy to be borne but
do not lift a finger themselves. Jesus is not attacking the law.

The law is still good and true. He is condemning the way that
leaders use this law in their own interests. We see the same
thing here. Revealed truth spiritualizes all conditions and situ-
ations. By this fact it makes everything more radical, bringing it
before a final court. Everything, and hence all political, social,
economic, and philosophical questions, and all the means that
we use—everything becomes more radical. At the same time,
however, this radicalness demands that we leave what we claim
to have, including political instruments and collective means.
(Go, sell all that you have . . . not just real estate and jewels!)
We can then begin to be and to act in a new way, to recognize
another form of efficacy.
To proclaim the class conflict and the “classical” revolu-
tionary struggle is to stop at the same point as those who defend
their goods and organizations. This may be useful socially but it
is not at all Christian in spite of the disconcerting efforts of
theologies of revolution. Revelation demands this renuncia-
tion—the renunciation of illusions, of historic hopes, of refer-
ences to our own abilities or numbers or sense of justice. We are
to tell people and thus to increase their awareness (the offense of
the ruling classes is that of trying to blind and deaden the aware-
ness of those whom they dominate). Renounce everything in
order to be everything. Trust in no human means, for God will
provide (we cannot say where, when, or how). Have confidence
in his Word and not in a rational program. Enter on a way on
which you will gradually find answers but with no guaranteed
substance. All this is difficult, much more so than recruiting
guerillas, instigating terrorism, or stirring up the masses. And
this is why the gospel is so intolerable, intolerable for myself as
I speak, as I say all this to myself and others, intolerable for
readers, who can only shrug their shoulders.
Grace is intolerable, the Father is unbearable, weakness is
discouraging, freedom is unlivable, spiritualization is deceptive.
This is our judgment, and humanly speaking it is well founded
and inevitable. This is one of the first reasons for the rejection
of the proclamation of God in Jesus Christ. And because we do
not want to seem to reject it, perversion and subversion take
place. All these judgments and actions are based on good sense,
reason, experience, and science, that is, on our ordinary means
of judgment, on what all people think and believe. But it is pre-
cisely heré that we fall down. Jesus tells us plainly that if we

simply do as the world does, we can expect no thanks, for we
are doing nothing out of the ordinary. What we are summoned to
do is something out of the ordinary. We are to be perfect as our
Father in heaven is perfect. No less. All else is perversion.
Chapter IX
DOMINIONS AND POWERS
Our concern is with the human sphere. But perhaps we

should enter a more hazardous area in which every possible her-
esy and aberration arises. Perhaps, if there has been this per-
version of revealed X, it is not just the willing or unwitting
action of human agents but also that of spiritual powers that
belong to another sphere—another and yet still the same, for
these powers are nothing by themselves. They have nothing
whatever to do with a principle of evil. There is no Manichean-
ism in the Bible. They have no connection with a personifica-
tion, a devil that may be painted or depicted, existing “some-
where,” and intervening from outside on or in human affairs.
They have no specific aspect and no role in reality. What we
know is that they exist only in and by their relation to us.
It is when we are there that Satan or falsehood finds mani-
festation and expression. Different from us, these do not exist
apart from us. The serpent is a fine inoffensive animal among
other animals, open and clever, no more. It would never think
of biting an ass to kill it, or tempting a cow to disobey God.
Only when humans appear do such things become possible and
interesting. Only then does the serpent reveal what it is, not
before or otherwise. I think it is essential to make this clear so
as not to make nonsense out of what I am going to say. In other
words, we are not possessed by something that is intrinsically
evil. We are possessed by something that uses what is already
ours. Paul is not mistaken in this regard. At the same time, if
left to ourselves, we would not do “this.” The combination is
174
DOMINIONS AND POWERS 175
what is harmful and affects not only our being but all that con-
cerns us.
The powers add a “plus” and a “different” factor to our
history. This is why we speak about exousia relative to some
expressions of human activity. This is also why Paul puts us
firmly on guard against being deceived by the enemy. We recall
that the state is an exousia. There is in it a plus that has to be
taken into account after every sociological or political study. We
certainly have to analyze the phenomenon of the state, of po-
litical power, etc. But when all is said, we perceive a residue, a
kind of impregnable core, an inexplicable hardness. Why, after
all, does one obey the state? Beyond factors that may be under-
stood and analyzed, not everything can be accounted for, as in
the case of the soul that the scalpel cannot find no matter how
close the analysis. The residue is a spiritual power, an exousia,
that inhabits the body of the state.
The same applies to money.! Once we have demonstrated
the mechanisms and explained finance and the economy, there
is a strange irreducible residue. Why is money so seductive? Here
again we have an exousia, which Jesus personalizes by calling it
Mammon, the Mammon of wickedness. As for Paul, his warning
is clear: It is not against flesh and blood that you have to fight,
but against thrones, powers, dominions, authorities (exousiai),
against the princes of this world of darkness, against wicked
spirits that dwell in heavenly places (this last feature is the
strangest of all).
We can, of course, shrug our shoulders and say that the
poor man was a victim of the illusions of his age and was rather
feeble-minded to speak of such things. We, strong and intelli-
gent, have shown by fighting on the level of reality to what
extent we have succeeded in making people better and society
livable, just, reasonable, and fraternal, etc. We constantly need
to recall the formula that the last snare of the devil is to convince
us that he does not exist. On the other hand, once we get into
this area, all kinds of illusions are allowed and all kinds of frenzies
are close at hand. Readers will know enough about this to see
1. I have dealt with these two points at length in Présence au monde

moderne (Geneva: Roulet, 1948); ET The Presence of the Kingdom (Philadelphia:
Westminster, 1951) and L’Homme et l’Argent (Paris: Delachaux, 1953; rev. ed.
1979).
that I am not embarking upon Gnostic fancies or heaped up

inventions, that I am not referring to diabolical universes or the
esoteric secrets of celestial organizations, whether literary after
the pattern of Barbey or visionary after that of Swedenborg. Nor,
finally, am I referring to the general religious basis for specula-
tions about the spirit world.
With wise limitation, I am keeping to the Bible, which
seems to me to be both coherent and satisfying, and which |
believe to be inspired and therefore true. Now the Bible offers
us many constant and solid data on this subject. It is not a
question of mixing with these other worlds or imaginations. In
particular, contrary to a tenacious belief, there can be no ques-
tion of Lucifer, who is an invention of the end of the Romantic
age, nor of detailed infernal powers, which are assimilated into
Christianity from pagan legends. The Bible refers to six evil
powers: Mammon, the prince of this world, the prince of lies,
Satan, the devil, and death. This is enough. Concerning these
six, one might remark that if we compare them we find that
they are all characterized by their functions: money, power, de-
ception, accusation, division, and destruction. In other words,
they are not a kind of reality of their own. They do not exist as
people do with their infinite complexity, multiple applications,
evolutions and diversities, relations and inner mystery. What
seems to me to be important in this vision of anticreation is
precisely that there is no mystery about it, no opening up of a
further world of evil. There is no infernal world or hierarchy of
fallen angels with superimposed eons. There is nothing behind
it. We are told about powers that are concretely at work in the
human world and have no other reality or mystery. They are
certainly powers in heavenly places but they exist only in rela-
tion to us. It is understandable that for preference they attack
what God has made, for they are expressions of chaos, of the
void God put to work for his creation. They exist only as this
chaos. They are a force for disorder. Not all chaos has been
absorbed in creation. Creation is under constant threat. The
relation between humanity, the climax of creation, and the Crea-
tor is one that is constantly disturbed, although not by an
antigod or an evil principle. There is no evil principle in the
metaphysical or religious sense. There are ungodly and anti-
Christian forces but (except in the symbolical text of Revelation)
these are at work only on earth and with reference only to us.
They select as their primary target those whom God elects

and sets apart (saints), those to whom God reveals his love in
Jesus Christ (Christians), and the fellowship of such people (the
church). The efforts of evil powers (I call them such for con-
venience, although I repeat that they are not powers in them-
selves nor evil as the antithesis of a good God) focus on the
place where God’s grace and love are best expressed. They deploy
their full strength on Jesus Christ. They concentrate all the
forces of evil on Christians.2 According to an old medieval
Christian tradition, which I think is right, the majority of people
hold little interest for the devil (the legends say that he already
owns them, but this is false). He brings all his efforts to bear
against those who carry grace and love in the world. For his
problem is not to bring people to eternal loss or to carry them
off to hell, but to prevent God’s love from being present in the
world. The essential purpose of evil powers is not to lead people
to hell. I have already explained elsewhere that in this regard
their total defeat is already secured, for all are saved in Christ
and nothing can alter this. What the vanquished powers can
always do is dramatize the situation on earth, make human life
intolerable, destroy faith and mutual trust, make people suffer,
kill off love, and prevent the birth of hope. In other words, what
seems to me to be biblically certain is that the evil powers make
earth a hell, and that there is no hell but this earth of ours that
is said to be a delightful garden. What they do is precisely this:
they destroy all that Jesus came to bring. In so doing, they
disrupt our relations with God and others, especially the rela-
tions created by Jesus Christ. Misery, not perdition, is the issue.
Their grand work is to produce in those who have received the
mark of the Lord the opposite of what God expects. We should
not be surprised, then, at what has happened in the church. It
is the normal outcome of this ongoing revolt. Behind all that
we have described is “the devil’s hand.” Nothing less.
Mammon is money imposing itself as a law of relationship:
exchange, buying and selling, nothing for nothing, everything
to be bought and sold. This is integrally and totally contrary to
grace (see L’Homme et l’Argent). The spirit of it has made its way
into the church, where sometimes grace has been put on sale,
or the church has become a center of rapine and self-enrichment,
2. Bernanos and Dostoyevski saw this excellently.

or (like the French Reformed Church today) it is so obsessed

with its financial problems that all its other concerns and func-
tions take second place. In a hundred ways money has effectively
corrupted the church. But what we see here is not just the world
of money itself or our subjective desire for it. It is in truth a
demonic power that has given money the ability to change every-
thing that ought to be free and open grace into bitter conquest,
possession, and obsession. The Book of Acts and some of Paul’s
Epistles show how things ought to have been and to have con-
tinued to be—why not? Giving is the general rule in all rela-
tionships. It conforms perfectly to the application of grace. The
holding of goods in common by the community is the normal
result of the disparaging of money. But this does not last.
The traditional theory is that these first believers were con-
structing an “eschatological” community, that they believed that
the end of the world was imminent, that they could thus live in
common and spend their time in prayer, not working but living
off what others had made. But when these resources were ex-
hausted, what then? They had to come back into line, working
like the rest, earning their keep. This rather highfalutin story
of a community of goods then has to come to an end. I am not
satisfied at all, however, with this type of explanation, which is
marked by such flat banality and gross common sense. In the
course of the church’s history there have been periodic repeti-
tions of such communities, and I know of some today. The real
question is a different one. When the spiritual tone, or intensity,
if one will, is strong and faith is vital and brotherly love is
resurgent, money is no problem. Money becomes dominant only
when men and women really cease to hope or believe and enter
into routines and conformities. The Christian life is not a matter
of having but of being spiritual in Christ. When this is weak,
having immediately becomes dominant. Mammon sets up its law
in the church precisely to the degree that the church loses its
relationship with Jesus Christ. But Mammon is a power that
waits patiently for faith to fail. In its abundance it prevents faith
from coming to birth. The logic is implacable. What use is faith
or hope when we have everything and need only a little more
to spend? Mammon with its satisfactions (everything may be
bought) and its law (nothing for nothing, or no free lunch)
builds up around us an impenetrability to grace. Christians have
experienced this in every age.
The prince of this world; yes, one must admit that this
world belongs to that prince. It is the Lord’s only by the dis-
cernment of faith and at a distance. A legal distinction might
explain this double ownership. One who possesses and holds title
to a property is its true owner. It is his (or hers) by right. But
if the legal owner is absent or far away, the place belongs to
“squatters” who are actually on the property. They are, one
might say, the apparent owners. They are utilizing it, but they
have no real rights to it. When the true owner finally comes,
they cannot chase him (or her) off. The property is obviously
the owner’s to use as he (or she) decides and with no need to
render an account to anyone. Think of the number of parables
_in which this comparison figures: the king on a journey, the
distant bridegroom, the absent owner, the master who leaves his
vineyard with the workers, etc. In each case God is absent and
says nothing. Jesus leaves us and goes back to heaven. During
the interim, who are the owners of the world? We are, as is the
prince of this world who, as we have seen, has all the kingdoms
of the earth at his disposal.
The idea that the social hierarchy, or the law, or the au-
thority of the state or of owners rests on the will of God is thus
at one and the same time both true and false. It is false inasmuch
as all these things indubitably express the active, present power
of the prince of this world. It is true inasmuch as they are also
means to limit the ultimate consequences of evil. This is what
constitutes the whole ambiguity of their situation. Yet I reject
the common theory that they are creations that conform to
God’s will (the state, law) but have been deflected from their
true and valid purpose by the wicked action of Satan. No expres-
sion of power or dominion either is or can be willed by the God
of Jesus Christ. Nor does the spirit of power come only from
within us. It is the spirit of the prince of this world. Every
expression of power on earth and in the course of human history
belongs to his domain. (This is why Jesus worked so few miracles
of power in the Gospels; in truth there is only one, the stilling
of the storm.)
On the other hand, these products of the spirit of power
can be deflected from what the prince of this world expects of
them and can be used for other ends. The state can become a
servant and law an instrument of justice when they are per-
meated by grace and evangelical truth. But this is the exception.
Similarly money can be deflected from the use intended by Mam-

mon and used for giving, that is, for grace. This is a sign (and
perhaps can be no more) that God has not given us up to the
prince of this world.
I will not take up the debate about the world and its “na-
ture,” nor about the fact that we are in the world but not of it.
I have dealt with these matters many times. I will simply recall
that the subversion of Christianity has come through its letting
itself be penetrated and seduced and led by the prince of this
world.
When the church has been seduced by the ruling classes,
becoming a power or being obsessed with politics, this is tan-
tamount to its possession by the prince of this world himself. Yet
is all lost? Is the church totally perverted? No. For alongside the
church there is also the mysterious kingdom of heaven, which,
as we are shown in the parables, is in this world; hidden, im-
perceptible, but still present and at work. Against it, the prince
of this world can do nothing. He does not even know it. He
knows only what is visible, apparent, and formalized—the
“world.” In this world we see clearly enough that he attacks
those who might seem to human eyes to be an escape, another
way or form, that is, the church. Although the church is not of
this world and does not belong to it, it is precisely the point
where the power of the prince of this world is brought to bear
most strongly and is bound to have victories, dazzling if also
fleeting. We need not be surprised at these reverses the church
suffers. Constantly it is brought to the point where it seems to
belong purely and simply to the world. As we shall see, however,
it never totally falls into it. The prince of this world is defeated,
although he remains the prince of this world with power over
everything that is in it.
The prince of lies is the third power. This one transforms
truth into a thing, idea, opinion, or dogma, into philosophy,
science, experience, or reality, and reality into apparent truth.3
In the New Testament lying has a very precise sense. It bears no
connection with our petty everyday untruths, with the denials
of the guilty who do not want to own their deeds, with mistakes,
3. On the relation between reality and truth, see J. Ellul, La Parole

humiliée (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981); ET The Humiliation of the Word (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985).
with the camouflaging of data, with all that we call falsehood

in general. Jesus puts an end to all such things when he tells us
to swear by nothing but simply to let our yes be yes and our no
‘be no. In other words, we ourselves are to be whole in our words.
But this is not the problem of lying. It refers to Jesus’ own
person. Lying in the New Testament is the ascribing of a false
identity to Jesus. He himself is the truth in person. The unique
truth.
Hence lying takes three forms.
The first form is the transforming of Jesus into an idea. It
is a lie when we invent a gnosis that refines or uses the person
of Jesus in a metaphysical system, or makes him part (even the
_ main part) of a closed dogmatics or philosophy, or inserts him
into some practice such as politics, or evaporates him in a divine
paradise, or treats him merely as the theme of a dissertation, or
thinks that the idea of truth is the essential thing.
The second form of lying is the transforming of Jesus into
an idol. We might worship him magically (I cannot help think-
ing of those terrible Spanish crucifixions). We might try to ob-
tain from him earthly benefits, small everyday miracles, etc. We
might disguise him. Let us take note of such disguises. After
Pilate asked What is truth? the first lie was the way in which
the soldiers put on him a purple robe and a crown imitating that
of Caesar, and he was then presented to the people with the
words: Behold the man. This is the first disguise to which Jesus
is subjected, the first reply that we give to ourselves, to our
question What is truth? with reference to the person of Jesus.
But how many times since have we disguised him? The baby
Jesus, Jesus king of the nations, Christ pantocrator, Jesus the so-
cialist, Jesus the clown, Jesus enthroned on our human tribunals,
Jesus guaranteeing law and order, Jesus the revolutionary. When-
ever we use Jesus Christ in our human schemes to ground, justify,
and explain ourselves, then inevitably we disguise him, and the
result is a lie. We must be careful, for even such titles as Son of
God, Christ, and Messiah (in which I deeply believe), if they
are simply taken in themselves, can in turn become lies about
Jesus, for they very quickly cause us not to receive him as the
living one, the total truth in person, but once again as an object,
an idol.
The third form of lying is that of referring Jesus back to the
church. Lies always latch on to an initial point of truth. We
firmly believe that the church is the body of Christ. What a

temptation it is for the church, then, to assimilate Jesus Christ,
to claim to have the whole truth and to speak the whole truth,
so that the church’s word is no more and no less than the word
of truth. Since only faith in Jesus Christ ensures salvation, what
a temptation it is for the church to proclaim that there is no
salvation outside the church. The church certainly is the body
of Christ, but this truth, instead of being received as a fleeting
and ever-new grace, is regarded as an acquisition, a possession,
a state: a fixed, objective, unchangeable reality. As we have
said, every error in the church’s history is a truth that has been
taken over and reoriented.
These, then, are the three falsehoods that we may perceive
in the relation between the Bible and the church’s history. All
human falsehoods— intellectual, psychological, and moral—de-
rive in some way or other from one of these three. Conversely,
if the lies inspired by the prince of lies relate to Jesus Christ,
and to him alone, then to seek or pursue a truth that has no
reference to this revelation is not a lie. To investigate Buddhism,
or to seek truth in and by science, psychoanalysis, etc., may all
be an error, but it is not a lie so long as we do not mix in Jesus
Christ. This being so, we can understand why the prince of lies
attacks the church first. This is his main target. This is where
he establishes his stronghold. Outside we simply have flashes of
light by which the prince of lies leads the enlightened astray.
“I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning,” Jesus tells us.
This is basic. Let us recall again that Satan is not a person.
(There is no real need to use a capital; the term is a common
one.) He is not Satan but the accuser, or even the accusation.
We have to say that wherever in any form or for any motive an
accusation is made (including true and justified accusations),
there is satan. Satan is then at work, is present, and becomes
a person. The process (as for the devil) is clear-cut. The accu-
sation crystallizes in some way, and it results in the development
of a personalized accusing presence. We are familiar with the
process in the development of accusations, for example, collec-
tive accusations. Jesus tells us that satan is no longer in heaven.
What he means is clear. There is no longer any personified
accusation before God (as in Job) now that Jesus the Son of God
has come to pardon us. To use the patristic image, an advocate,
not an accuser, now stands at the side of God.
God does not hear, does not want to hear, will not listen
to the accusations that assail him from every side. But if accu-
sations are no longer in heaven, if they no longer emanate from
heaven, if God is not himself an accuser in any matter, then not
only is accusation still on earth but it is also flourishing there.
It is developing to the same degree as it is banished from heaven.
That which no longer explodes as hatred and accusation in
heaven is condensed on earth. This is one reason why Jesus does
not foresee for the future an idyllic progression toward a pro-
gressively organized paradise but instead sees a terrible growth
of individual or collective conflicts. There is full agreement be-
tween proclamation and this historical perspective.*
: Thus satan, accusation, proliferates in our world. But here
again the drama is that the accuser first uses the church. The
church becomes the origin, the perfecting, and finally the model
of all accusations and all systems of inquisition. It has brought
the mechanisms of accusation out of the individual and private
domain and into the collective and institutionalized domain. |
do not want to overemphasize the Inquisition but it is still true
that this was a prodigious perversion of revelation. A totality
based on pardon became a totality based on inquisition. The
drama did not consist of the mere existence of a tribunal. It
began much earlier with the development of the practice of
individual auricular confession of sin. Instead of letting grace
and pardon rule, and admitting that the worst sinner who re-
pents before God receives pardon from God, the church interposed
confession to a priest, who because he is a priest is no less a man
on the one side and a representative of the institution on the
other. The astonishing situation developed in which, to pardon,
the priest had to know the sin (although in fact only God really
knows it). Searching out the sin thus became the main thing,
the dominant and constant thing, the thing on which the church
insisted. The subsequent pardon became a kind of formality.
Nor is this just a matter of external guilt, of actual faults.
4. If critical exegetes had had even the slightest glimmerings of theo-

logical understanding they would have perceived this agreement and would
never have said that Jesus was announcing the installation of God’s kingdom
on earth and that his intimation of the last times carried this reference. They
would also not have surmised that texts which proclaim disasters (e.g., Matt.
24) must be very late and cannot have come from Jesus himself.
A psychoethical investigation develops. We have a surgery of

movements of the soul, of desires, tendencies, dreams, even the
unconscious. The fault has become spiritual. It must be tracked
down in what is not said, in the merest impulse, in the spiritual
sphere. Everything becomes suspect. Everything can be inter-
preted as a fault. This has been the great mistake of the church
as it has obeyed satan and perverted revealed truth. The law
had really become spiritual and inward in order that God might
be immediately present to the heart and pardon might abound.
But because satan came to lodge in the church’s heart, the
church itself became the great mistress of accusation and trans-
formed itself into an invading cancer, crushing us without end.
Alas, this development of accusation characterizes Chris-
tendom and then moves into secular movements. If our actual
world is a world of insatiable accusation—political, social, in-
tellectual, and moral—it is because of this mistaken switch on
the church’s part, under satan’s influence. Satan made the church
his special prey so that by means of it as his intermediary he
might make the world truly mad.
Then we have the devil, the diabolos, the divider. Regarding
the devil we make the same observation made regarding satan.
The devil is not a person or individual but the reality of a fact,
namely, division. We should not use a capital letter. The devil
is present wherever there is division, conflict, disruption, com-
petition, combat, discord, disharmony, divorce, exclusion, mal-
adjustment (and we need to take each of these words very
seriously in its full sense). As in the case of satan, the church
is the favorite prey of the devil, and the occasion of many dis-
ruptions in the world. Certainly there were wars and conflicts
and divisions prior to Christianity. But I believe that the church
has been an aggravating factor in the “natural” situation. What
might have been simply a psychological or political or sociolog-
ical matter has now become a spiritual matter. Divisions are
aggravated because they have spiritual roots. We now find holy
wars, crusades, heresies, and sorceries, etc.
Wars of religion are more implacable than all other wars;
this has been said hundreds of times. Such wars typically result
from the cross-breeding of the devil and the church, or the use
by the devil of the truth held by the church. As in the case of
accusation, the drama has been that of contamination. The con-
tagion has spread from the church to society and to the world
as a whole. Our political wars and conflicts are so frightful be-
cause they are now wars of religion and spiritual combats. It is
no good appealing to the fact that ours is a century of secular
religions, and that the wars stirred up by Hitlerism or commu-
nism are in their own way wars of religion, as all revolutionary
movements are also religious movements. They are not this by
nature; the church, characterizing them by its presence, has
made them religious. Even with the secularization of society,
there has remained in our Western world a strange sacralization
of social things. The church sacralized the state. As the power
of the church has waned, the state has remained sacred. Simi-
- larly the search for “truth” in Christian politics led to a sacral-
izing of political conflicts, and they have retained this character
even with the church’s decline. The church declared that its
adversary was heretical and an incarnation of absolute evil. This
idea has persisted in the world. Every enemy has now become,
not a human adversary, but a demonic being. If we want finally
to achieve justice, peace, liberty, etc., we must absolutely and
completely eliminate the adversary. Such, then, is the devil.
Such is the spiritual power that has produced this perversion of
revelation in and by the church.
When we think of all the spiritual attacks on the church,
in which it has often prevailed and become itself again but in
which it has often suffered defeat, and when we think of what
are usually the better intentions of the world, we realize that as
the chief sign of the end of the world Jesus gives that which
comes between and links the two parts of his prophecy in Mat-
thew: “When you see the abomination of desolation . . . stand-
ing in the holy place. . .” (24:15). Prior to this he has been
announcing afflictions, seductions, false prophets, injustices.
Afterward follow the order to flee and warnings about the com-
ings of false Christs and cosmic disasters. Between these two lies
this strange phrase, which is translated in many different ways:
“the baseness of devastation” (Pernot), “the devastating horror”
(Chouraqui), “the odious devastator” (TOB). In the oldest
manuscripts what we read is simply: “When you see the sign of
devastation.” Commentators usually refer it to the historical
event of the capture of Jerusalem by the Romans and the placing
of their eagles in the temple.* A historical reference is certainly

possible, but I believe that ambivalence characterizes these pas-
sages. A deeper and more decisive reference lies behind the his-
torical one. Don’t the disciples realize that more is at stake here
than the future of Jerusalem and its temple? Do they remain so
Jewish that what happens to the temple in A.D. 70 seems to them
to be a sign of the end of the world? Even after the specific
teaching that Jesus has given them, do they not understand that
more is at stake?
I am convinced that we arbitrarily reduce the text if we
give it only a historical and local dimension. I believe that it
applies to the whole historical duration of the church. The
abomination of desolation seems to me to have two possible
meanings. On the one side a terrible spiritual fact brings dev-
astation, destroys totally, and renders the earth void. But isn’t
this exactly what we have shown to have happened with Chris-
tianity? It has shattered ancient beliefs, religions, values, and
cultures, replacing them with the sole truth of God in Jesus
Christ. But when this truth is undermined and destroyed, when
God is said to be dead, when Jesus is no longer Redeemer, Sav-
ior, and Lord, there is veritable devastation, a “wasteland.” Hu-
manity has nothing more to latch on to. The other aspect comes
out when we take note of the genitive: the abomination of des-
olation. At issue here is despair, total despair, which plunges us
into a horrible situation of complete solitude. Both these senses
are possible. When devastation occurs in the holy place, the
church, and when despair and solitude take hold in the church,
we have the final demonic and infernal action that the powers
can mount.
The powers are spiritual. What happens is not a matter of
chance. Our inquiry into how this perversion could take place,
how pure gold could be changed into base lead, finds an answer
here. We are dealing with political facts and sociological phe-
nomena. Things and institutions have their say. Comparison is
possible with what has happened to the socialism of Marx or the
democratic vision of Rousseau. In such cases the “how” is iden-
5. The text is undoubtedly referring to the similar formula in Dan. 8:13;

9:27; 11:31; 12:11, which has in view the signs that Antiochus Epiphanes set
up in the temple at Jerusalem. Most scholars, then, relate it to the Roman
eagles (the vexillum) that were set up in the temple in A.D. 70.
= DOMINIONS AND POWERS 187
tical to the “why.” If we stop there, we might think that things

could have been different. There is no ineluctability or necessity
about such subversions. Nothing demanded the degradation of
the thinking of Marx, Lenin, or Stalin, or the transition from
Rousseau to the formal capitalist democracy of America. Simi-
larly one might think that the revelation of Jesus Christ might
have incarnated itself fully and maintained its integrity. If we do
not insist on the view that human nature is fallen and cannot
find a place for civic virtue or libertarian anarchism, we have to
admit that these generous ideas can be lived out and therefore
that the truth lived out by Jesus Christ and revealed in him
could also have been accepted.
. On this view people could have been converted and the
subversion of Christianity averted. Only a combination of un-
fortunate chances, an alliance of irresponsible forces, led to the
subversion. In fact, however, this revelation of truth in and of
and by love is not at all the same thing as the thinking of
Rousseau or Marx, and in no sense does it fallaciously lead us
into the hazy concept of ideology. With Jesus Christ we have an
all or nothing. Here is a peremptory historical affirmation that
uniquely combines life, love, and freedom. We cannot be con-
tent with the natural aspect of the events that we have tried to
analyze, for the events do not carry sufficient weight to offer an
explanation. Nor can we be content with the theological reply
that points to the dialectic of an Already and a Not Yet. If
things have happened as they have in the human and historical
sphere, it is because spiritual powers are mobilized. The fight is
not on the moral or social plane. What Jesus Christ inaugurated
is the very thing that has to be, not attacked and destroyed, but
deflected, captured, and used.
What has been done has not tended to constrain or destroy
by force the might of these powers, but to reduce them to what
they really are. What might have seemed to be impossible has
happened. When the Gadarene demons asked Jesus not to de-
stroy them, he let them enter the swine, which were then seized
with madness (the demons show themselves in their true colors)
and drown themselves. The demons are powers of death that
drive on to death without dying themselves. What they have to
do is to take over the cross of Jesus, to use his truth and righ-
teousness. Nothing else interests them. All other doctrines, ideas,
virtues, and philosophies can be left intact, for they never effect
any decisive change either individually or socially. Everything

seems to go on as usual. But not with the cross of Jesus Christ,
not with the resurrection and the new body of Christ. To ensure
their domination over us, the powers could not remain as they
had been. They had to feed on what had been planted in these
things. For these spiritual forces it was truly a matter of life or
death. Either they would fail to take over evangelical truth, and
then money, the state, and the masses would become mere ob-
jects of no great interest, or else, notwithstanding the Holy
Spirit and converted believers, they would succeed in plucking
fruit from the tree of the cross, and they would thus become not
only more powerful and terrifying but definitively seductive. In-
stead of acting by means of terror and questioning, they would
now carry the white mantle of justice and truth.
Spiritual liberty had to enter politics for the state to become
the coldest of cold monsters. There had to be free grace for
money to produce capitalism. Love had to be experienced for
the anonymous masses to take on the abstract face of invisible
humanity. The spirit of nonpower was needed for dominating
technology to seize the world and put everything to its own use.
Revealed truth had to be present for science to become the final
authority in the absolute. These powers, says Paul, were nailed
to the cross with Christ. They were so for all eternity. But now
that Christ is risen, we are always their prey, and more so than
ever, for they are now invested with what they have deflected,
although in human eyes it is still attached to Jesus.
Non-Christians will say that I am romancing. Very well.
It is a matter of faith. Christians will be scandalized because
what I write signifies the defeat of the Holy Spirit. But isn’t all
of it also intimated in Matthew 24 (and perhaps, too, in Jesus’
parable about the spirit that is driven out but returns, when the
house is set to rights, with seven other demons, so that the last
state is worse than the first!)? Isn’t all this exactly what we have
seen in the last two thousand years (and isn’t it impossible to
reduce it all to the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70)? Seduction
by many saviors of all types, the growth of wars, the development
of rumors about wars and disasters, increased famines in every
place, hatred of the truth and of those who preach Christ (and
let us not forget that this hatred was found in medieval Chris-
tianity), treachery and injustice springing up everywhere, the
loss of love (I restrict myself to mentioning only the things found
es DOMINIONS AND POWERS 189
in that chapter), mass miracles multiplying, often striking signs

and very wonderful things (do we not talk today about miracles
of medicine or astronautics, etc?). And always seduction. Se-
duction by everything that happens, by false promises, by false
Christs (supposedly sent by God), by false rights, and by false
liberties. It is all there. The fabulous growth of the strength of
these powers is expressly set forth for us.°®
But this extreme strength of the powers is possible only
through the subversion of Christianity. It is no historical acci-
dent, then, that things happened as they did. The incarnate
powers could not accept it that the truth should illumine the
world, that things should all be in place, that seductions should
be stripped of their masks. The light has come into the world,
and the darkness has not received it. It has become all the darker
because there is this light. Truth has been the food of that which
has become the disintegration and destruction of intelligence
and virtue. This work of the powers, this spiritualization of our
proofs, this plight to which people have found themselves re-
duced for two thousand years wherever Christianity has spread,
is a kind of terrible demonstration both that Jesus was indeed
the Christ and that what he revealed to us is indeed true.
Does it mean, then, the defeat of the Holy Spirit? We must
be very strict. As regards success in the world and the manifes-
tation of power, yes, it does. And why not? Is God the Holy
Spirit different from God the Father or God as Jesus Christ? In
the Old Testament we constantly see God’s plan defeated, for
God does not force or mechanize us. There are setbacks with
Adam, Cain, Noah, Joseph, Moses, the kings,. and the prophets.
Each time, God makes a new beginning and employs a new
pedagogy. With Jesus Christ we have the defeat of voluntary
weakness. For, since the resurrection is true only for faith, the
6. We must not disdainfully ignore these indications on the ground that

they correspond to millenarian teaching, that there is nothing original about
them, that they are a traditional trend that is purely sociological in nature,
final disasters preceding either the establishment of an idyllic kingdom on
earth or access to the kingdom of God. All these things are well known but
seem not to be relevant since all the forms of messianism and millenarianism
that are really known (and not just conjectured) are rooted in these biblical
texts, which are the true source of many later and mistaken anticipations and
interpretations.
story of Jesus is historically one of defeat. What about the Holy

Spirit then?
Things are not different with the Holy Spirit. He is the
Spirit of light, truth, etc.—yes, for faith. He is not a historical
force that makes people obey God and that changes the course
of history.”? The Holy Spirit gives hope where all is despair, the
strength to endure in the midst of disaster, perspicacity not to
fall victim to seduction, the ability to subvert in turn all the
powers that are involved. Believers, then, are those who have
the wisdom and strength to rob material realities of their seduc-
tive power, to unmask them for what they are, no more, and to
put them in the service of God, diverting them totally from their
own law.
But there is never any imperial triumph. No head of state
is inspired by the Holy Spirit. No capitalist achieves success by
the Holy Spirit. Science and technology do not develop under
the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The success of the powers, then,
is the direct opposite. They have achieved an explosive victory,
using the very truth of Christ to advance their own grandeur.
7. See my study of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, L’ Apocalypse,

architecture en mouvement (Paris: Desclée de Prouwer, 1976); ET Apocalypse
(New York: Seabury, 1977).
a Chapter X
EPPUR SI MUOVE!
Nevertheless, Christ is there. The cross that is planted at

the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. The
risen Christ is with us to the end of the world. The Holy Spirit
acts in secret and with infinite patience. There is a church that
is constantly born and reborn.
I believe that I have honestly examined the subversion of
revelation, the transformation of God’s movement toward us,
the many betrayals. I have not made things easy. I have not
tried to attentuate, to excuse, or to minimize whatever there is
of perversion of Christianity, whatever there is of falsehood in
relation to Jesus Christ, whatever there is of violence and oppres-
sion. On the other hand, I have not accepted what have become
the traditional accusations. For they are as false, misleading, and
exaggerated as the saintly, pure, and pious account of the church
that we find in nineteenth-century apologies. They are also
spiteful.
Of all that is said against the church or Jewish monotheism
or Paul or the normal conduct of Christians, not everything,
not by a long way, is true. Some people no longer want to find
anything in the church and its history but violence, intolerance,
repression, censure, and hypocrisy. That is a false picture. We
should not forget that the popular opinion is made up of an
accumulation of accusations that are mostly untrue. These ac-
cusations began at the time of the Reformation. The Reformers
accused the Roman Catholic Church of every possible horror,
of avarice, immorality, idolatry, violence, etc. They did not go
into details but passed universal judgment. This offered a good
191
model for the following period. Non-Christians had simply to

follow the example of what passed between Roman Catholics
and Protestants. They took this good path, and in the eighteenth
century the great offensive of the Enlightenment was launched.
It involves many falsehoods and much propaganda about
the church and evangelical truth. The Inquisition becomes a
kind of permanent and universal model of what the church has
been (although in fact it was always restricted and localized and
far from murderous except in relation to the Cathari). The case
of Galileo is intentionally falsified so as to make him a martyr
for science and to prove the absolute intolerance, ignorance,
and obscurantism of the church. The Crusades are changed into
a matter of money, power, and the desire for conquest. All mis-
sionaries are accused of being terrible hypocrites, serving purely
and simply to magnify the power of the West or of capitalism.
Monotheism is seen as the source of all political repression and
dictatorship. By way of impudent generalization the immoral-
ity of certain countries or religions becomes the general rule.
Diderot’s La Religieuse exemplifies every nun, and Moliére’s Tartuffe
every priest. Protestantism becomes the driving force of capital-
ism and is thus accused of every kind of injustice, exploitation,
and alienation. It is explained in learned fashion that the clergy
have constantly exploited and pressured the poor and that the
church’s taxes have ruined the whole world. The Middle Ages,
when Christianity was dominant, are presented as a time of
violence and intellectual darkness. It is suggested that the ca-
thedrals were built only by the forcing, threatening, repressing,
and requisitioning of poor unfortunates who did not dare resist.
It is explained without qualification that it was the church that
subjected women to a state of total subordination and defined
sex as the absolute sin (the point being forgotten that there was
considerable sexual freedom in the Middle Ages). And how
many other stupidities have been believed without reservation,
absorbed as though they were good nourishment, taught in the
schools, and accepted as the truth!
Now all these things are falsehoods emanating from the
prince of lies and meant only for propaganda. But as in the case
of all falsehoods, there is always a core of truth, a justifiable
starting point. We have only to get to this core, and that is
enough to raise the question of the perversion of Christianity.
But we must reject the rest. Two points should not be neglected.
EPPUR SI MUOVE! 193
First, most of the violent attacks are true enough relative to

what the church became in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, especially under the influence of the middle class. I should
say that when the church is taken over by the middle class it
becomes this force of conservatism, this ideology of exploitation
and expansion, issuing what are often inhuman rules and prin-
ciples (e.g., with regard to women and money). This is a prob-
lem more of the middle class than of the Christian faith. The
perversion is that the middle class has used Christianity as an
ideology of power. But the mistake and the propaganda have
consisted of projecting on all the church’s history what happened
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The thinking has been as follows. If the gospel was sub-
jected thus, with little fervor and little human ferment (Lam-
menais, Lacordaire . . .), this is how it has always been. If the
church was purely worldly in the eighteenth century, if abbots
at court and cardinal ministers have made us forget the curé of
Ars and the saint of Lumbres, this is how it has always been.
This demonic shadow, which one part of the church has cast,
has been projected on the church as a whole, on all its history,
and on the gospel.
The second point has to do with the way in which the
church has faced this general application, this attack, these his-
torical condemnations. The attitude that seems to me to be
evangelical is to recognize what is true in the denunciations, to
repent, to enter into dialogue with the accusers, to open up
oneself to a return to evangelical purity, to initiate reforms, to
listen, and to seek the truth. One has to say that instead the
churches have dealt with the accusations very loftily. They have
resisted intellectual and scientific research, falling back on an-
cient dogmas. They have anchored themselves in a general at-
titude of refusal of all change (although they have sometimes
shown great ability in modulating temporal novelty with spiritual
renovation), for example, in relation to democracy, socialism,
feminism, etc.
Finally, we find an ancient and traditional orientation, that
of trusting to the right, to authority, to the institution, for the
general reform of the church. The only outcome of individual
orientation is a disembodied spirituality, a purely personal piety,
with Bernadette Soubirous or Thérése de Lisieux as examples.
This proud defensive attitude derives both from a failure to
understand what is happening and from forgetfulness of the con-

stantly new power of the gospel (God himself being eternal and
therefore young). It would finally lead to the disaster of the
period from 1945 to 1970, when, after resistance to the very
limit, the rigid dam broke. Carried off by the flood, Christians
suddenly found themselves to be scientists, communists, and
revolutionaries, and hypercritical of their churches. They did
not consider that they were doing exactly the same thing that
they accused the church of doing. It is absolutely essential, then,
that we should pick out what is true in the falsehoods, in the
accusations. It is also essential that we should listen to every-
thing and retain what is correct in an effort to retrieve the truth
of our own vocation and the unshakeable element in revelation.
Nevertheless, in this process, as we have seen, our churches
still seem to be guilty of so many falsehoods and mistakes that
we really have the feeling that there is no longer any Holy Spirit.
The promise of Jesus that he will be with us to the world’s end
seems to be an empty one. If Jesus is truly with us, things should
not have taken the turn they have. If the Holy Spirit is with his
church, how has its history been as it has? The Spirit is the
Spirit of light, truth, freedom, love, and power. He multiplies
the little that we can do. If so, how have things been able to
degenerate as they have? We cannot evade this question. It is
an agonizing, traumatizing question. For if Jesus is not with us,
if the Holy Spirit is not in the church, what are we doing when
we continue to believe that word, to pray, to wait, and some-
times to express the love of God? If God is silent as I have tried
to say elsewhere,! how can we still speak about him and in his
name? If everything has been a great mistake and a great be-
trayal, why should we persevere? At least if the promise has not
been kept and the Holy Spirit has been finally defeated?
Eppur si muove. And yet the dismantled, divided, false,
and treacherous church still exists, and does so not merely as an
institution or organization, but in spite of that it still exists as the
body of Christ, as the true church. Even now the gospel, the
revelation, although betrayed, scoffed at, confiscated, deflected,
and perverted, still exists as the revelation of the one God, the
1. J. Ellul, L’Esperance oubliée (Paris: Gallimard, 1977); ET Hope in Time

of Abandonment (New York: Seabury, 1973).
EPPUR SI MUOVE! 195
Father of Jestis Christ. It still continues to transmit the truth.

It still continues to inspire lives that God recognizes to be true.
I do not want in turn to launch out into an apologetics.
I am not going to try to show that the church is not as bad as
all that, and that there is right on its side. I am not going to
rewrite the church’s history in positive terms and to set this over
against all that I have already said. Nevertheless, I shall be led
to adduce some historical cases or facts, not apologetically, but
to show that there is another dimension that we cannot ignore.
I shall not enter into the unending debate about revelation. |
shall not make the vain attempt to break out of the vicious
circles in which victorious unbelievers constantly think they
have enclosed revelation, such as the two celebrated aphorisms:
1) Either God exists and the moment he creates all things, the
evil that is done on earth devolves upon him and is set to his
account, or else evil has another source but God is not omnip-
otent and hence he does not exist; and 2) the Bible is the Word
of God because God speaks in it, but I know God because the
Bible is the Word of God. Such things are totally uninteresting
and inadequate. If I believe that the Holy Spirit is present in
the church, in every Christian life, and if I believe that he acts
through us, then it seems to me that the Bible gives him three
characteristics. First, he marks a limit, a stopping-point. Second,
he is very discreet and secret; he cannot be seized, but is like
the wind, which we hear but cannot say where it comes from
or where it goes to. Finally, this leads us to treat him as a
trespasser.
First, the limit. There is a demonic and infernal power that
seeks to destroy creation, namely, death. We shall not try to
write a biblical history of death nor to construct a theology of
death. It will be enough to recall that the Bible calls it the king
of terrors (Job) and the last enemy (Revelation). It is indeed
final and ultimate, for its work is not just to destroy what is
living but to make us believe that there is nothing beyond. It
is the barrier for all life. It is the final point. We should not let
ourselves be lulled by philosophical sophisms (death is nothing,
even as | think of it I am alive, when I am dead I do not know
that I am dead) nor by the pseudoscientific detachment that
proves that death exists only because we call it that, whereas in
fact it is really a simple dissolution of an organism, some of
whose cells in any case remain alive. What a fine thing (!) to
find oneself again as mold or putrefaction.
What matters to us, as we have every reason to believe, is
the “I” that death destroys. There is no point in seeking escape
either in a hazy universalism or in classical religious consola-
tions. Biblically, death is a terrible thing. More so than we
imagine, for it is the power of evil (I set before you life and good,
death and evil). It is the power that undoes God’s work of crea-
tion. It is always there to swallow up this work of the God who
is the living God and whose work is life. By its power, by the
terror that it justly inspires in us, it causes us to lose confidence
in God. It convinces us that there is no future, that there is
nothing beyond itself, that there is no God, no Creator, no
Savior. In addition to the destruction of life, it brings a loss of
confidence in the possibility of a Creator. This is death. This is
why Revelation depicts it as the fourth power in history, the
result of the gallop of the four horsemen, of which the last is
death itself and the place of the dead.
Already here we have encountered a basic biblical truth.
Contrary to our human impressions, the power of death in his-
tory has come up against a limit. The fourth horseman is given
power to destroy a quarter of the human race. Death cannot
appropriate more power than God accords to it in history. The
reference here is to history. We are speaking about the church.
We may turn to a passage that carries the same message but is
much closer to us because it is no longer a matter of “statistics.”
It occurs in Job. When satan comes before God to throw doubt
on Job’s faith, on the freedom of his love for God, suggesting
that he loves God only because God has heaped riches and
happiness upon him, God hands Job over to him, but forbids
him to touch his person. Job remains faithful. So satan returns.
He admits that Job has resisted the loss of his goods and hap-
piness. But let me attack his person, he says, and you will see
him fall. God then delivers up Job’s person to satan, his physical
health and eventually his psychological or moral or even spiritual
health as well. But satan is not to touch his life. Job is preserved
from death. The misery is so great that Job concludes by thinking
of death as a refuge, a blessing, a place of rest, the happy end
of sufferings. But death is stopped at this point.
This great passage finds a continuation in Jesus’ procla-
mation, in connection with the building of his church on Peter’s
EPPUR SI MUOVE! 197
confession, that the gates of hell (lit. “the gates of Hades”) will
not prevail against it (Matt. 16:18). This may carry two senses.
First, death will not come to destroy the church, to force it to
enter the place of the dead. Second, the gates of this place
cannot resist the might of the church. We must think of these
two senses reciprocally. The second is possible, however, only
from the standpoint of the resurrection. Death cannot hold the
Son of the living God. This Son will bring with him his whole
church. The church inevitably has the promise of the resurrec-
tion. The gates of hell cannot be closed for it.?
The first sense is the one that concerns us in this inquiry,
and it corresponds to what we find in Job and Revelation. Spir-
itually and historically the power of death is limited relative to
the church as well as to all humanity. All evil spiritual powers
may fall upon the church. They may dismember it, quarter it,
lead it astray, make it conform, lead it into all kinds of temp-
tations, make it commit enormous moral, spiritual, historical,
and human errors, but they cannot destroy it. A remnant of the
truth of the church,* however tiny, always remains, for the
church continues to live. No matter what the church does, what
may be its errors, what comes upon it, it cannot be separated
from God (who is the living God) and annihilated.
The story of the church is a very strange one, just as as-
tonishing as that of the people of Israel, which goes on in spite
of everything and even in spite of its apparent refusal to exist as
the chosen people. Both Israel and the church continue to exist
in history in defiance of all appearances and every probability.
And here and now in the eighties a kind of hope and truth are
heard and invoked afresh. But if this is so, it is not because of
some natural goodness of the church, some intrinsic being, some
immortal soul. Not at all. It is solely because God remains faith-
ful to his promise. What he has promised to his people, he does
not revoke. Nor is it simply a matter of the text that we have
quoted from Matthew’s Gospel. It is fundamentally a matter of
2. I realize, of course, that the saying in Matthew may not be an original

logos of Jesus. But it was formulated early, following the disciples’ experience
of the resurrection, and it is thus the Word of God.
3. We may recall how Calvin, in the middle of his vituperations against
the pope and the Roman church, still recognizes that in spite of every error
there is in it a “remnant of the church.”
the truth that because individual and collective resurrection is

assured and promised and certain, then in the course of history,
which is the visible, concrete expression of this resurrection,
there is this astonishing survival of the church, the perceptible
sign of the communion of saints.
In the diaspora, or in Israel, the chosen people remain the
chosen people because God is faithful, and as the living God he
wills to bear witness to his power to create and to re-create both
to the end of time and through history. The same applies to the
church. Concentrated or dispersed, faithful or unfaithful, planted
in East or West, united or divided, the church is always the
church of the living God. It has been ensnared again and again.
Revelation, as we have said at length, has been transformed into
the “ism” of Christianity. The body of Christ has become a
sociological institution. Yet the church is still Christ’s. church.
It cannot die. We see it die. Yet still it manifests itself in another
place and form. The first churches founded by the apostles and
Paul, the wonderful churches of the Middle East, disappeared
with the Arab invasions. At that very time the church comes
to birth in Gaul, Ireland, and Spain. The extensive and fruitful
churches of North Africa are annihilated by the Germanic in-
vaders and then by the Arabs. At the same time the church
comes to birth in England and Germany. Perhaps our Western
church is condemned, but we see the church growing in Asia
and Africa and we also see a remarkable revival of Christian
truth in the USSR. The same applies to spiritual life, to the life
of truth in the church. It is extinguished and it comes to birth
elsewhere or in some other way. The subversion of Christianity
cannot entail the death of the body of Christ or the invisible
church. God has imposed this limit to the subversion of his
revelation. Now that we have tried to elucidate the how and
the why of this perversion on every level, we have another his-
tory to write of which we can give only the first indications: the
history of the truth and faithfulness that on each occasion kindle
new life from the ashes of the dead wood and that in an incom-
prehensible way bear witness that the Word of God is still alive
and surges through the ancient despairing organism. This Word
of God is itself the burning bush that is not consumed even
though the errors and sins and falsehoods and crimes of the
church and of Christians seem to have completely destroyed it.
Death is stopped at this limit, and no matter what may be the
EPPUR SI MUOVE! 199
subversion of Christianity, the last word lies with restored life

and with the Word that expresses and brings it.
We have been following a theological course, but we can-
not neglect history. Bernanos is right when he says that the
church lives by its saints. We recall that the saints are not nec-
essarily those that are officially recognized, listed, canonized,
and put on the official calendar. Such a procedure corresponds
to a view of sainthood that is either close to magic or contam-
inated by morality. The saints may be completely ignored or
known only to God. The striking thing in the church’s history
is that through the tremendous perversion, when everything
seems to be eaten up by termites, there have always been resur-
gences of truth. Naturally I am not trying to develop an apol-
‘ogetic argument from this persistence of the church through the
vicissitudes of two millennia. That is not my purpose. My con-
cern is with the fact of rebirth, rediscovery, and reinterpretation
almost ex nihilo. I believe we can consider this reappearance of
truth, of Christian life, and of faith on three different levels:
that of theologians and great mystics; that of popular movements
that crystallize, take historical form, and come to expression;
and that of the hidden mystery of the truly humble in the church.
We cannot simply say that the sustaining of the church
through its every error is proved by the periodic appearance of
theologians who restore everything when everything seems to be
corrupted. Certainly there is truth in this, but it is not wholly
satisfying. The important thing, it seems to me, is less the cor-
rectness of the theology than its association with a certain in-
carnation in the life of the man and those around him. The
remarkable thing is that such events punctuate the life of the
church and show that perversions are constantly redressed. The
surprising thing is the appearance of Francis of Assisi, Pope
Celestine V, John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila, Luther, Munzer,
Las Casas,* Kierkegaard, Kagawa, Karl Barth, and a hundred
others.
4. Naturally detractors have tried to show that Las Casas was not what
he was believed to be because he championed the peopling of Latin America
with working blacks. This is true, but he did not have in mind the slavery
that was actually practiced. And when he saw what happened, he reproved it
strongly and repented of the error before his death. Las Casas’s mistake was
sharpened in the attack on the Christian faith so as to focus only on the
Each time revelation was lost at a given time or place, or

Christendom was established, or faith became a religious custom,
or the ecclesiastical authorities took the worst possible course;
each time the power of the world invaded the church and felt
strong enough to claim to have completely obliterated the faith
of Jesus Christ, these men and women provoked a kind of elec-
tric shock in this clergy or people, coming back to a truth or
seeking again the meaning of life in Scripture. Naturally they
could not justify the rest of the church nor enable us to think
that all was well because they had come. But we must be aston-
ished that they did in fact come whenever they were needed.
This does not solve anything. For after the awakening the
sorry tendency to sink into the swamp is seen again. After
St. Francis comes the miserable quarrel about the Fraticelli, after
Luther the appearance of a new religion just as formal and secular
as the old. Or else, in the modern phrase that may not always
express the reality, the awakening is said to have had its day.
The theological renewal associated with Karl Barth? It has had
its day. We now live in the post-Barth era. What this means
in reality is that we are really living as if it were fifty years before
Barth. The writings of current leaders show this. These men and
women, therefore, are not the solution. There is no solution. We
do not have here a “problem” for which one may find a solution.
But when the evangelical message or the prophetic revelation
seems to be definitively shut out or eliminated, when it seems
to be bemired in interminable scholastic quarrels, formulated in
dead institutional dogmas, or robbed of its content by worldly
philosophy or wisdom, suddenly a kind of star appears that gives
the whole firmament a new dimension. A kind of light comes
that lights up the old texts and suddenly gives them new life.
They speak afresh, and at the same time human hearts and
negative side. A writer as little suspect as Cosmao speaks about a “dark legend”
in this regard and puts the spotlight on the general worth of Las Casas, who
did all he could to proclaim the liberating gospel, who said he preferred a
pagan Indian alive to a Christian Indian dead, who set out the basis of human
rights, and who instigated the first break with the system of Christendom. If
Las Casas, his colleagues and companions (for he was not alone), and the work
of the Jesuits (especially in Paraguay) have been eliminated and concealed for
centuries, this is because they so opposed the merging of revelation into the
system of Christendom that they could not be tolerated either by the church
or by anti-Christians.
EPPUR SI MUOVE! 201
minds are illumined and open themselves to receive this truth

that has been the same for some three thousand years and has
suddenly become so fresh again.
Now I want to make it clear that this does not follow the
current model of sects or religious renewals such as we also find
in Islam or Buddhism. If we may cite the Reformation, others
remained in the church without seeking to create any different
trend or break or disruption. On the contrary, the astonishing
thing is that St. Francis deeply moves Catholic people while
remaining loyal and without being condemned. So, too, Las
Casas. Each responds to the central question of the day: a ques-
tion both spiritual and “political.” Each responds by returning
to biblical authenticity, as I have no hesitation in saying. They
did not simply do religious works or display a kind heart. They
lived out biblical theology. We see the same on the Protestant
side in Kierkegaard (within a rigid, normalized, civilized Lu-
theran church in which the preaching of the gospel was no
longer scandalizing) and in Karl Barth.
Barth responded to a twofold challenge: that of Hitlerism
and that of the nibbling away of revealed truth by a liberalism
that desperately wanted to harmonize the evangelical message
with current scientific thinking. Barth pronounced a radical stop
to the compromise with Nazism for theological, not political,
reasons—the first time this had happened in the Western world.
In contrast, he acted with great flexibility and perspicacity in
the matter of science and Protestant liberalism (which is not
unlike Roman Catholic modernism). He was thus able to bypass
the inflexible and hopeless debate between the orthodox and
the liberals. He posed scientific questions in a rigorous way and
made clear the limits and temporality of some of these affirma-
tions. He also put questions to science, not content simply to
receive questions from it. For one or more generations of Chris-
tians he was thus able to provide an authentically biblical think-
ing, a possibility of renewal of faith, an opening for advance in
history and the truth.
Now I could easily multiply these examples and write an-
other whole history of the church that would move from “light-
house” to “lighthouse” (Baudelaire). Nor should anyone say that
it would simply be an intellectual history for the chosen few,
etc. That is false. Each of these “lighthouses” brought a profound
change to the church. They did not, of course, change the whole
church, nor all its thinking, nor the institutions, nor the world
at large. But it serves my purpose that they raise the possibility
that the Holy Spirit has not been defeated, that he is still at
work, and that the Bible is always alive, always ready to bring
a new springtime if we will only take it seriously.*
Nor is it only a matter of great figures, important thinkers,
great mystics, and theologians. We have also to take into ac-
count popular movements that surge up we know not whence,
often, indeed, crystallized around an individual or small group,
but different from those already mentioned, expressing a popular
mood, often mixed up with politics, often impure in our eyes,
often regarded as heretical, yet as I see it, representing a tem-
porary and fleeting expression of the Holy Spirit that sometimes
changes history. Not all messianic movements are good or true
according to the Savior. But we cannot condemn them en bloc.
If some, like the Adamites, are highly suspect, others, like the
Anabaptists, the Waldensians, the Lollards, the Hussites (even
though highly involved politically), and the important social
movement of Fra Dolcino, which all belong to the same general
epoch, seem to be fundamentally true and strongly biblical.
5. Amery, in La Fin de la Providence, rejects absolutely all that I have

adduced. On the one hand Christians who have tried to uphold some truth
in artistic or literary expression, inspired by the faith and generally critical of
the world, are for him dreamers, “enlightened conservators,” who have no
points of reference, who choose heroes of medieval purity outside their own
time, whose inspiration is archaic and romantic, as in the case of Bloy, Ber-
nanos, Claudel, Péguy, Chesterton, Eliot, Ball, or Greene. They focus on
vanished forms of existence. They disturb ordinary Christians who seek only
the kingdom here below. They are betrayed and ignored by the church because
the church is necessarily the most deceptive partner of every form of historical
existence. Later, when he refers to the “fervent souls of Judaism and Chris-
tianity,” to those who “announce justice and love across the centuries,” he
says that he respects and honors their “deep convictions” but does not think
“debate with them can produce any useful discussion.” In both cases he has
found an easy way out of an embarrassing situation. It is almost ridiculous.
Dismissing them thus serves no useful purpose. And when Amery says that it
is not a matter of their dreams and wishes for improvement, but of the relation
between cause and effect or results, I should say that the relation of cause and
effect is an arbitrary construction of Amery’s, and the declaration that the
whole business of modern power is a sole and direct result of Christianity is
just a declaration and no more. I have always admitted that Christianity had
a hand in this, but only to the extent that it was not revelation. The real
question is how it comes about that revelation still exists in its truth today.
EPPUR SI MUOVE! 203
These successful renewals may be temporary, but they are firmly

anchored in the heart of the people (and when I say that I do
not mean the proletariat alone, but the middle class as well as
the artisans and peasants). When I consider this history of the
church (for these movements, too, are the church, not just the
princes, bishops, councils, and synods lording it over a brutish
people), I see that there have been popular renewals in every
age. Whether it be through the Quakers or through Wesley and
the Awakening, the church constantly moves and changes. It
does not fit at all the set model or historical role that the dog-
matics of Marx or Weber assigns to it.
Today I would say that in Latin America the corresponding
_ movement is that of the theologies of liberation and revolution.
Here we have a popular awakening or movement raised up by
the Spirit. But we might also take as an excellent example of
a basically Christian popular movement Lech Walesa’s “Solidar-
ity’ in Poland. When people state that the church no longer
exists, that it is always conservative, that there is no longer any
popular faith, they should consider such things as this. I think
it merits slightly longer treatment, for retrospectively it may help
6. I need to clear up some confusion on this issue. I have often been

criticized in relation to these theologies. | must make the summary point of
denying absolutely that these are real theologies at all. They are the barely
formulated expression of a popular movement that needs to be rerooted spir-
itually and biblically. But this is not theology. It is pastoralia. It is a hic et nunc
incarnation of a Christian truth. One need only look at the poverty of the
texts that have been issued, although I am persuaded that in the community
they may seem to be rich and good. It also seems clear to me that Christian
movements that are relative to a given social, economic, and political situation
cannot be transported to the West. Their problems are in no sense ours. They
are not even those of immigrant workers or the unemployed. There is no more
a common denominator than if there had been a desire in 1792 to adapt
French republican institutions to the Ottoman empire or in 1900 to bring the
Boxer rebellion to France. Extensions of this kind are absurd. Revolutionary
Christian movements in Nicaragua may remind us that Christianity is revo-
lutionary, but no more. And even less on the theological plane. The pseudo-
theologies of revolution produced by American and German writers (e.g.,
D. Solle or Moltmann in his “political” works) have not the least value in our
eyes. Finally, the piety expressed may be good, but the reference to Marxism
is inadequate and fallacious. In particular the movement that seeks to begin
with this American Indian Christianity and to lead on from it to a Marxist
reinterpretation of the Bible or a “materialistic reading” of the Gospels seems
to be a futile and dishonest misappropriation of an expression of the faith.
us to see what I have been trying to say when I speak about

popular movements that express in history the ongoing action
of the Holy Spirit both outside and inside the church.
The Polish affair of 1980-1981 offers a good example. In
the eyes of many Protestants, Roman Catholicism in Poland is
marked by credulity, oversimplicity, and even paganism. It is a
religion of miracles and adoration of the Virgin. It is full of
sentimentality, etc. To a great extent it resembles medieval Ca-
tholicism, for it seems to us to be much too sociological as it
expresses a specific form of society, a specific social attitude, a
collective cultural tradition, rather than a clear, conscious, and
enlightened personal faith. Now if Walesa has been able to lead
the extraordinary party that he has, it is by resting on this very
faith. The odd thing during these eighteen months was the ab-
sence of violence, the respect of the very authorities it was de-
cided to bring to compliance, the understanding of all the
militants for the finesse of a game that would constantly go to
the very limit of pressure and then the knowledge of how to
withdraw at the very moment when there was the risk of vio-
lence, the ability to retreat when retreat seemed to be necessary.”
We should also mention the constant readiness to negoti-
ate, that is, to keep up dialogue, not to regard the police or the
communist party as an enemy to be struck down but as an ad-
versary with whom dialogue is always possible, and to do every-
thing to make it possible. In all this the really extraordinary
thing was not just the true tactical genius of Walesa but the
ability of his followers among the working classes and peasants
not to go beyond their leader and yet to retain their real auton-
omy and not simply to obey him automatically. We did not see
here a mass of people galvanized or automatized by a charismatic
head who had to be obeyed blindly. At the same time, a very
large group of people was organized in small, active units, able
to understand the strategy, knowing how to pick the right mo-
ment to join in the general movement, and never going too far
in the direction of violence or maximal pressure.
Now we know how hard it is, when a movement of this
size is launched, for the rank and file not to outrun the leaders.
The revolutions of 1789, 1848, 1917, and 1968 are examples.
7. For an analysis of the evolution of Walesa see my article “La victoire

de Lech Walesa,” Katallagete, Nov. 1982 (Special Issue).
EPPUR SI MUOVE! 205
A crowd, an organization set up during social agitation or a

revolutionary movement, that never resorts to violence, that
knows how to show force without hatred, that can make its
points without exacting vengeance, that can stop and even give
up some things without being discouraged—here is a real mir-
acle. I think this is the first time in history we have seen such
wisdom when the masses are launched into action. Lenin said
that in long-range revolutionary tactics (before the final moment
of assault) the period of recoil is the most difficult. In Poland
they have known when recoil was necessary without losing cour-
age. Finally, another extraordinary element is that Walesa and
his supporters avoided swinging over to the other side and ac-
_ cepting capitalist aid. They also steered clear of the way of the
putsch.
I think that these three factors, which are in my view
exemplary, are explained by the Christian faith of the people.
Walesa has acted consistently as a confirmed Christian. He has
consistently appealed to the faith of the workers and peasants
he has addressed. I believe that the wisdom of the masses, their
ability to understand the reality of the action and not to demand
more than seemed to be possible, is based upon their faith. An
understanding and mastery of this kind can express only an en-
lightened and conscious faith. How do we explain this?
It seems to me that the explanation is as follows. In reality,
as Christians are in the banal situations of ordinary life, of the
global mediocrity of society, of everyday problems of no great
interest, of constant diversion, faith burns low, makes no great
responses, expresses nothing, produces no exemplary conduct.
The banal and the everyday are the worst destroyers, because
they express tepidity. Nevertheless, among “sociological Chris-
tians” there still remains an element of truth, the smoking flax
that is not quenched (Isaiah), little faith that still persists (Rev-
elation). Hence when the moment of decision comes, the mo-
ment of the back to the wall, of the radical proof, of the tempest,
then there is always the possibility that the wick will flare up
and set the whole alight again, just as there is also the possibility
that it will go out altogether. I would say that traditional and
superstitious believers can give birth all at once to confessors of
the faith, to martyrs, to people who know that in a crisis Chris-
tians may be summoned to be such in the full sense.
To this first conclusion I need to add two others. The first
is that the movement of Lech Walesa, which becomes a kind of

spiritual revival on a traditionalist basis, does not develop within
the church but in relation to the world. This means that in my
view all attempts to make believers more faithful and serious
Christians within the church are sterile. There can be revival
only in relation to the world (and in practice all the examples
given above were oriented to the world), that is, to society or
politics. But that does not imply membership in a given group,
nor participation in the action arranged by a non-Christian group.
What it implies is that Christians should work out their own
original approach to a given social situation. I can never insist
enough on the need for specificity in every Christian venture in
the world. My final conclusion is that if the Polish people could
remain a people that was “officially,” formally, and innocently
enough Christian, at a level that we might easily regard as not
very testing or interesting (although it gave Solidarity its char-
acteristics), this is due to the exemplary resistance of Cardinal
Wyszynsky. This was essential, for we see here the contact with
the official church. The cardinal primate of Poland was able to
say a radical No to Soviet communism. He avoided all dealings
with the devil. He was insulted, arrested, imprisoned, accused
of treason and of being in the pay of capitalism and of America,
etc. He held firm. This was the more meritorious inasmuch as
he was misjudged in Christian circles. Take the press (Réforme,
le Monde, Témoignage chrétien) from 1947 to 1955, and you will
find him portrayed as a reactionary, unable to adapt to his age,
the representative of a medieval faith, not understanding the
beauty of socialism, etc. He held firm, and for that reason the
humble, traditional, and ritualistic Christians of Poland also
preserved their little faith, simplistic and not very devout though
it might be. This is what made possible the astonishing enter-
prise and, I would say, the success of Walesa.
In contrast, where theologians and church leaders like
Hromadka in Czechoslovakia or Bereczki in Hungary had deal-
ings with the devil® the only result has been the collapse of
popular faith and the debasement of the church. Yet these men
have been praised to the skies and cited as examples of open-
8. I am not suggesting, of course, that communism as such is the devil

but that in these political conditions it plays the precise role that the Bible
assigns to the devil.
EPPUR SI MUOVE! 207
minded Christians who see at last the usefulness of the socialist

transformation (identified with the cause of the poor and with
justice) and of good and just cooperation with the new state,
etc. The World Council of Churches has been especially enthu-
siastic about those two poor unwitting political innocents.? They
destroyed in their two countries all possibility that the Christian
churches would contribute anything new, would break free from
conformity, would participate in the work of transformation. In
fact, in the astonishing movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968,
the church did nothing.
In modern times, however, there has not only been this
astonishing event that has restored the church to its real truth.
_ There has also been a recovery, a rebirth of faith in the USSR,
with the appearance of new Christian forms. It might have been
thought that in the USSR the religious question had been settled
with the closing of churches, the strongly materialistic education
given to children, the enrollment of young people in the Kom-
somol, the interdiction of the possession of Christian books, the
creation of an Orthodox church that received authorization to
celebrate the mass in exchange for complete political submission
and a strict avoidance of public issues, the prohibition of the
catechizing of children, etc. In fact it might have been thought
that Christianity had practically disappeared by 1940. Only older
people continued to go to the Orthodox services and the official
clergy were directly and narrowly under orders from the Kremlin.
The astonishing twofold event, however, was the rise and very
rapid spread of a new Christian orientation with the Baptists.
Practically speaking, there were no Baptists in the USSR
in 1914. By 1944 there were some Baptist groups, and the re-
markable thing is that they began to multiply in spite of inter-
dictions and condemnations. It is hard to see how this has been
possible, how the authorities have been able to tolerate their
spread, for the Baptists are not liberals, nor are they lukewarm
or silent Christians; they are for the most part bold witnesses,
9. I emphasize that I have not been looking for a chance to attack these
two men. Challenges may already be found in Présence au monde moderne
(Geneva: Roulet, 1948); ET The Presence of the Kingdom (Philadelphia: West-
minster, 1951) and Fausse Présence au monde modeme (Paris: ERF, 1964); ET
False Presence of the Kingdom (New York: Seabury, 1972). This exaltation by
the World Council was one of the many reasons that radically separated me
from that fine institution. One has no right to fool oneself all the time!
and on social and political matters they take up strong positions

that go directly contrary to what the Soviet state desires. The
history of these Baptist missions has still to be written. It is
estimated that there are now approximately two million Baptists
in the USSR. Since these are “converts,” we may be sure that
they are not indifferent, traditional, or neutral Christians.
The second and no less astonishing fact is the sudden in-
crease in Christian intellectuals. Solzhenitsyn is the favorite ex-
ample, but there are many others (e.g., Maximov) whom one
may claim as Christians. This seems to me to be tied in first
with the persecution of the Jews. Intellectuals have taken up the
cause of the Jews, and while not becoming Jews themselves have
found spiritual kinship with them and thus moved on toward
Christianity. But each instance is different and therefore each
route is different. We do not have here Christians from the old
regime (like Bulgakov or Pasternak) but young and new Chris-
tians. This means that we have a renewed Christianity. Most of
the intellectuals do not belong to the Orthodox church but live
out a fairly personal Christianity inspired directly by the Bible.
They are scientists and authors who in the name of the faith
combat the regime to the profit of all. Some people want to
think that they or their groups form such a minority that they
ultimately have no influence, but I believe that when intellec-
tuals do not servilely obey the authorities they make a real im-
pact and their use of samizdat is very important. Most of those
who say that they oppose the regime are Christians.
What characterizes movements of this type is precisely that
the renewal of the church takes place in conditions in which
the church is forced back to its origins. That is to say, it is on
the one side confronted by a society that no longer claims to be
Christian in any sense, and on the other side it is subjected to
challenge and even persecution. In these conditions the au-
thenticity of faith, attentive listening to God’s Word, the in-
forming of everyday life by the Christian spirit, and boldness of
witness become once more the true face of revelation. Again
and again in the course of history it is in these conditions that
we have seen the truth reappear unchanged, caught up by the
revelation, caught up again, incarnated, carried not by heroes
but by humble and devout people of all kinds who do not leave
their names to posterity. In closing I must recall these people
whom no one will ever know, whose names are not written in
EPPUR SI MUOVE! 209
any historical movement, in any genealogy, in any story of the

propagation of the faith, these men and women who are content
simply to be true and pious unknown Christians.
Once when in my early youth I was complaining to P. Maury
of the great number of old people in a church that I wanted to
be dynamic, youthful, and open to the world, he said to me:
“I knew a parish once whose whole life depended on the silent
prayers of an old woman.” Since then, I have acquired similar
knowledge. Let it not be said that all this is an illusion. I have
seen in my own life (to my profit) the efficacy of the prayers of
an old woman. Let no one tell me that this is paltry and me-
diocre consolation, that the force and truth of the church do
- not reside here, that since all this makes no big splash on the
world scene it proves nothing. It is a spiritual reality that evades
social or political measurement. Certainly we must not make of
it a pillow of indolence and say that since unknown humble
Christians exist, all is well. No, not all is well, and yet we have
no right to discount their existence. For we are in a domain that
lies outside rational control or evaluation. And I for my part am
persuaded that if the church is not dead, if the Christian church
is always—in spite of everything—alive, if God’s Word can still
be preached and is still significant today, this is undoubtedly due
in the first instance to the presence of the Holy Spirit, to the
faithfulness of Christ, but humanly speaking it is due to the
simple faith of humble people whose names and works no one
knows save God and yet who are among the saints on earth.
Having adduced concrete historical examples of the resur-
gence of Christian truth, of revelation restored to activity and
life, I want to close with a rather more theoretical consideration.
We state definitively that the robbing of the gospel of its signif-
icance is linked always with the appropriation of God’s Word by
the theologian, the ecclesiastic, or the church. The process of
subversion that we have examined from many angles always
seems to me to imply and to be clearly linked with the treason
of God’s representatives on earth, who put their own law in the
place of God’s law, who impose their own norms, who organize
the divine enterprise as though it were an affair of human history.
There is thus misappropriation on the one side and transgression
on the other. This is wholly in keeping with Dostoyevski’s ac-
count in the legend of the Grand Inquisitor. But when this
happens (and it happens again and again, I repeat, throughout

the history of Christianity), we always see a twofold response.
First, this Word of God becomes in their hands dust and
ashes, empty and insignificant. Once people think they can lay
hold of this living Word, it becomes literally nonexistent. It
cannot be believed or heard or spoken. It is nothing. And this
often produces the misunderstanding that it is limited and
bounded. It is null in its effects when people think they can use
it as they please in their own personal or collective interests.
Here we come up against what I might call a basic law in the
mode of being of God’s Word. Let us not be deceived; whenever
we think we can make it a basis of philosophy or politics, or a
structure of society, or a guarantee of our own action, our auto-
justification, or an object of objective knowledge, or the super-
structure of some decisive infrastructure, or the necessary com-
plement of defective nature, it becomes nonexistent in the
strictest sense. It does so precisely because it is God’s Word and
no one else’s. But we must not fail to realize that it still retains
its full potentiality. Precisely because it is Word, it can be spoken
afresh at any time. And then everything begins again.
The other aspect of the same situation is that the subver-
sion of Christianity always means the transgression of what God
has posited. Now every ecclesiastical organization, every social
institution founded by the church, every Christian morality is
inevitably a transgression of the new order posited by God in his
Son, Jesus Christ, the order of the kingdom of heaven. I am not
in the least saying that the church ought to refrain from such
action, that it ought to remain unorganized or retain its primitive
structure in a sort of fetal state. It is the mistake of the Adamites
to think that we can return to Eden and live as if we were there,
or of the millennialists to think that we can move on directly
to the kingdom of God and live as if we were there. No, we
cannot bypass organization, institution, or ethics. But we have
to be aware that no matter how honest and scrupulous may be
those who create and direct them, they cannot fail to be a
transgression, such as the order of the Beatitudes or the parables
of the kingdom of heaven. What then? What results from the
examples that we have recalled is a basic fact that explains the
process of the relation between the will of God and human
organization. The process is not one of destruction, of pure ne-
gation. But precisely as all these commandments, precepts, in-
EPPUR SI MUOVE! 211
stitutions, and ceremonies are set up in transgression of the

Word of God, when the Word of God makes itself heard again
and is newly grasped again (my God has convinced me, and I
remain convinced, that the two are indispensable and correla-
tive), then there is a transgression of the transgression. This is
the secret of the continual coming and going of which Jesus
gives us a model when he so often, and indeed so constantly,
transgresses the religious system that has progressively prolifer-
ated around God's revelation.
There is no conflict, but there is an origin or derivation
by transgression, a return to the sense of origin, a transgression
of the transgression with an astonishing exactitude. The cases
we have adduced, then, need to be properly understood. We do
not merely have exceptional facts or accidents that survive by
chance. Nor do we simply have duality or duplicity in the church
as it sometimes presents one face and sometimes another. Nor
is the church a collection of bric-a-brac in which all kinds of
things and their opposites may be found. Absolutely not. Prop-
aganda, or a vain and superficial view, may portray it thus. The
truth lies in that movement in which the tempos are strictly
relative to one another. Hence, when we talk about the subver-
sion of Christianity, each time the truth also emerges as it is
grasped again in the Word of God. There is a subversion of the
subversion, manifested by the reappearance of the X to which
we referred at the outset.
Thus when all Christianity is reduced to the temporal, the
insertion of the eternal into the temporal has the last word,
producing inversion by a reconquest of the eternal that decisively
overturns the temporal. The reconquest of the eternal, however,
is by the eternal itself. In other words, the church never reforms
itself. Experience shows a hundred times that the honest and
scrupulous search for better institutions, reform by the legal route
of regimentation, and the serious search for more authentic means
of inner and outer evangelization are all futile and will inevitably
fail. There is in the church no association, according to the
usual formula, whereby a sociological institution may also be the
body of Christ, or the body of Christ may be forcibly put in
sociological forms.
Once the church organizes and clericalizes itself, it is in-
trinsically a transgression of God’s order, and yet it produces
within itself that which breaks forth as transgression of the
ZZ THE SUBVERSION OF CHRISTIANITY
transgression. It is progressively reduced to the temporal, and

yet it secretes within itself a reconquest of the eternal by the
eternal. This does not just take place “spiritually” or in an easy,
agreeable, intellectual, and pious fashion. It always does so by
way of severe tests and terrible upheavals. Transformation of the
church does not begin at its human head but with an explosion
originating with those on the fringe. Thus when we consider the
history of Christendom, and the contradictions that we have
spoken about in the preceding chapters, if we regard the whole
of the church’s history, if we regard the gallop of the white horse
through human history as it also makes this history, if we look
at the venture of the Christian people, we shall take into account
the fact that nothing is ever closed or definitive or complete.
We have no right to pass final judgment on anything. This
judgment will be that of the eternal Father, as Revelation calls
him. And this means that nothing is ever lost. Because of the
very rigor of the fact that transgression ineluctably carries within
itself its own transgression, I insist on this. The reduction to the
temporal and to power excludes meaning, and this leaves a large,
gaping hole that we try in vain to fill, that cries out unceasingly
until the eternal comes to fill it. In the course of history, then,
nothing is ever lost. Christianity never carries the day decisively
against Christ. Christ may sometimes rest, even for long periods,
as he was hidden in the body of that little Jewish man. When
we realize that, we can read the history of the church with other
eyes, and at the same time we can begin to master the specific
logic of the kingdom of heaven!® that penetrates and overthrows
the various forms of worldly logic.
10. I recall briefly that the kingdom of heaven in Matthew is not the
same as the kingdom of God but is an entity within history, temporality, and
the world, in which it produces a different logic and a specific movement.
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“%
“Jacques Ellul’s fortieth book is certain to be regarded as one
of his most important and provocative works—and this from
an author who specializes in provocation of both the world and
the church!
“The Subversion of Christianity provides a sober, challeng-
ing examination of many misguided appropriations of the
world into the Church. It stands as a formidable contribution to
our contemporary quest for ways of thought and life that are
faithful to Jesus Christ...
—DAVID W. GILL
in Fides et Historia
(from a review of the French edition)
Pointing to the many contradictions between the Bible and

the practice of the church, Jacques Ellul asserts in this provoca-
tive and stimulating book that what we today call Christianity
is actually far removed from the revelation of God.
Successive generations have reinterpreted Scripture and
modeled it after their own cultures, thus moving society fur-
ther from the truth of the original gospel. The church also
perverted the gospel message, for instead of simply doing
away with pagan practice and belief, it reconstituted the
sacred, set up its own religious forms, and thus resacralized
the world.
Ellul develops several areas in which this perversion is most
obvious, including the church’s emphasis on moralism and its
teaching in the political sphere. The heart of the problem, he
says, is that we have not accepted the fact that Christianity is a
scandal; we attempt to make it acceptable and easy—and thus
pervert its true message.
Ultimately, however, Ellul remains hopeful. For, in spite of
all that has been done to subvert the message of God, the Holy
Spirit continues to move in the world. “Christianity,” writes
Ellul, “never carries the day decisively against Christ.”
JACQUES ELLUL, recently retired from his position as Pro-

fessor of Law and the Sociology and History of Institutions at
the University 0” ns g 1 ;
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Grand Rapids, Michigan ISBN 0-8028-0049-1

The Subversion of Christianity

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The Subversion of Christianity

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aint

1325 North College Avenue

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Translated from the French edition, La Subversion du Christianisme,

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chapter I. The Contradictions

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The question that I want to sketch in this work is one that

Marx. At each stage is an undeniable link between the one and

then, practice is the visible criterion that we have seriously re-

2. And, I might add, the profound and spiritually pertinent criticism

liberal polytheism, of a spiritual infancy that Christianity has

4. J. Ellul, Fausse Présence au monde moderne (Paris: Editions de l’ERF,

claims)° and the hypocrisy of beating the breast of previous gen-

5. E. Belo, La Lecture matérialiste de l’Evangilede Marc (Paris: Editions du

ments) and the institutional. Once again, God’s revelation is

*The word translated throughout as Christianity is christianisme—Ed.

“ism” is made in the name of some creator, such as Thomism,

facile argument that institutions and public acts do not count

7. J. Ellul, L’Espérance oubliée (Paris: Gallimard, 1972); ET Hope in Time

that liberates us from every bondage and puts us in a situation

We need to formulate this global contradiction clearly, and

complete continuity between Judaism and what was then taught

cultures round about. We can find traces of Egyptian texts (Job

culture. An interesting project that has never been undertaken

8. One might give many examples of these contradictions. Thus Kier-

We find exactly the same inversion in the cultural sphere.

THE CHIEF FORMS

We have considered a number of flagrant contradictions.

1. See, e.g., Jacques le Goff, La Naissance du Purgatoire (Paris: PUF,

of the mass, purgatory, the picture-books of the unlearned, and

from their truth by the corruption of power. When Jesus says

myths, confiscated pagan temples and made them into churches.

theology of Irenaeus, Ambrose, or Augustine, let alone the Greek

a history. In this regard the last book refers to a history that is

3. He does perfectly one of the things we mentioned in the Introduc-

listening to the text as it was, theologians tried to draw from it

legal thinking, not only is the method of reasoning of Greek

and visions. . . . Some see Near Eastern influence here, but I

At the end of the third century Christianity became fash-

How could the church survive if everybody became poor?

perversion, yet fully understandable when we allow that women

serves to show in what high estimation woman as such is held.

7. “The Instant,” 5,5.

“Christian.” Christendom has astutely abolished Christianity by

8. In this respect Christianity follows the same sociological path as

A well-known fact was the adoption by the church of little

and vitality to what was in difficulties in the empire. It restored

were conducting themselves in a manner that could now be

when we read such statements by Jesus, recognize their impos-

13. J. Ellul, L’Ethique de la liberté, vol. 1 (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1973);

is not license, that it ends where the freedom of others begins,

15. M. Luther, The Freedom of a Christian Man.

to understand—lI repeat this because it is essential—that the

different error of such banalities and familiarities as the “good

One will work on its behalf. But differences in interpretation

had to be tackled. Another solution that seems at first glance

16. La Fin de la Providence (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1976).

responsibility for the whole of our present plight. We Christians

his presuppositions demand. Second, he makes gross mistakes

ments of Jewish thought, amplified by the New Testament, why