Jacques Ellul on Violence, Resistance, and War

Jeffrey M. Shaw, Timothy J. Demy, Shaw, Demy

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781498278904
• eBook ISBN: 9781498278898
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The last few decades seem to have ushered in new levels of violence, challenging the notion that our globalized, interconnected world offers increased prospects for cooperation and peace. Many philosophers and theologians have offered various reasons for why this might be so, but none has come so close as the French philosopher Jacques Ellul to providing a comprehensive explanation for many of the pitfalls inherent in increasing levels of technological advance. The chapters in this book explore the phenomena of violence, terrorism, and war through the lens of Ellul's thought. Readers unfamiliar with Ellul will find as much to consider in these chapters as those who have studied Ellul extensively, and for both the novice and the expert, this book offers an opportunity to both evaluate and reevaluate Ellul's extensive thought on matters of importance to contemporary society.

Chapter 1

Jacques Ellul on Living in a Violent World¹

David Gill

The English version of Jacques Ellul’s book, Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective, was first published in 1969. Such was the intense interest in Ellul’s thought in that time period that the English translation was actually published three years in advance of the French original which was titled Contre les violents, literally “against the violent” or “against violence,” which is a bit stronger title than “reflections on violence.” Forty years later, is it possible to discern any measurable impact of Ellul’s essay on the level of violence in our world? I don’t think so, since it’s worse than ever. And is it possible forty years later to discern any significant impact of Ellul’s essay on the way Christians in the Francophone or Anglophone worlds view violence? Again, I don’t think so. The militaristic and violent attitudes of many Christians today are shocking, to say the least. The words embarrassing, dangerous, ignorant, faithless, and worldly are some of the other terms that come to mind. Other “religious” peoples have certainly also exhibited penchants for violence, the severity of which Ellul could scarcely have imagined. Of course, this is not Ellul’s fault—except in the sense that he might have written more clearly and persuasively, but this is a charge that could be leveled at many great thinkers in our field and in many other fields as well.

In this centenary year of Jacques Ellul’s birth (January 6, 1912—May 19, 1994) I am among those suggesting that the twentieth-century polymath of Bordeaux deserves a renewed and serious hearing in our troubled twenty-first century. Certainly on topics such as technology, politics, communications, religion, and ethics such attention is warranted. But on the specific problem of violence he has a great deal to say to us as well. Two preliminary ideas will set the stage for a discussion of his views on violence.

The first preliminary has to do with the context in which and from which Ellul wrote about violence. His childhood unfolded in France during the Great War which embroiled France and all of Europe. The Russian Revolution occurred when he was seven years old and loomed over Europe much more intensely than it did a distant USA. From 1936 to 1939 Ellul and many of his friends were close observers and in some cases actual participants in the Spanish Civil War (Bordeaux lies not far north of the Spanish border). During the Second World War, Nazi Germany occupied France, including Bordeaux in the Southwest. Ellul was fired from his university post for disloyalty to the collaborating Vichy government and spent the next four years of the occupation living and working on a farm outside of Bordeaux and as an active participant/leader in the Resistance. He says he did not personally engage in violence against the German forces but he knew of their activity rounding up the local Jewish population and sending them off to Auschwitz. His own elderly father was arrested and sent to a prison near the Swiss border where he became ill and died within a year. Ellul and his friends helped to hide Jewish men and women and provide them with false identity papers. In the 1950s, Ellul was among those urging the early decolonization of Algeria to avoid bloodshed. Their voices were ignored with horrible, violent consequences. And in the West itself after 1945, Ellul often decried the triumph of the spirit and weapons of war over the victors themselves, not just over the vanquished. Finally, on the local level, Ellul was for many years in the fifties and sixties a leader in a local juvenile gang “prevention club,” working with street gang members and their families to help them find another way, often also acting as their legal advocate in courtroom settings. During the 1968 French university student strikes and the violence which followed, Ellul was a faculty sympathizer and student advocate. There is no need to review the world situation from the sixties to the nineties since it is so well known. But it is important to understand that when Ellul writes about violence, he is anything but an ivory tower theorist unfamiliar with actual conflict.

The second preliminary note has to do with Ellul’s vocation as an intellectual and how this relates to our understanding of his writings on violence or any other topic. In short, Ellul is a prophet, a dialectician, and an existentialist. Expecting him to be anything else will lead to great misunderstanding and disappointment. He is a prophet rather than a teacher in the sense that he brings a specific message, a word, from outside a given topic or situation that can illuminate something that has been missing or overlooked. He upsets and challenges conventions and assumptions and standard ways of thinking and seeing. He is strange and uncomfortable. He is not the systematic, constructive teacher but the troubling critic. He is a dialectician in that he fundamentally believes that we understand reality by grasping the simultaneous truth of what appear to be opposites and contradictions, paradoxes, anomalies. This is for Ellul as fundamental to the Bible and theology as it is to sociology and history. Thus, Jesus is divine and human, God is three and one, the state is Babylon and Jerusalem, violence is necessary and unacceptable. There is no resolution of such dialectic intellectually or rationally—the resolution, or the synthesis, happens in life, in being and in acting. In other words we can live with the contradictions of violence, theology, etc., but we cannot iron them out in our theories and explanations. And this is where the existentialist label comes in. Ellul is an heir of Sōren Kierkegaard. He is relentlessly anti-Modern. He cares nothing for comprehensive systems and theories and everything for life at this moment in this context. All of this may be unsatisfying to readers of Ellul who want something other than what he has to give. But what Ellul has to offer if taken for what it is, is a great gift to our thinking and conversation; it is not an adequate final destination, but a valuable part of the journey.

One other comment on Ellul’s approach: in his classic two-volume Maincurrents in Sociological Thought, Raymond Aron summarizes a basic difference between the continental European sociologists like Max Weber and Emile Durkheim and those of the American tradition. The continental types tended to create descriptive models, inviting us to reflect on their explanatory power, while the Americans tend to generalize based on statistical, empirical research. This is helpful in understanding Ellul’s approach in this and other works. There is a vast research behind his work but it is not statistics so much as history and culture. Readers seeking social scientific research in that quantitative mode will almost always find Ellul frustrating and unpersuasive. With regard to violence, Ellul creates a model to try to explain it; in the old metaphor of shoes and feet, his explanatory model is like a shoe. It is for us to try it on, and to see if it fits as we live out our own reflection and experience, and as we walk in it.

So let me review briefly Ellul’s discussion of violence, sticking fairly closely to his 1969 book, Violence. Ellul first reviews how he sees the historical traditions in the Christian church—from the virtual pacifism (partly principled, partly by default) of the first three centuries when Christianity was excluded from power to the epoch of Christendom when from St. Augustine to Martin Luther the theologians approved the just use of force and violence internally and just wars externally. He then moves to the post-Christendom world which ranges from the advocates of pacifism and non-violent resistance on the one hand to the theology of revolution on the other and everything in between.

Ellul concludes his review of this history by saying those who seek a Christian theory for the appropriate use of violence

try to formulate a compromise between the demands of the Christ and the necessities of the world, to work out a quantitative determination, a balance of factors that will bring in a viable social order . . . [they] cherish the hope that the various elements involved can be brought into accord. They forget that this is the world that has absolutely rejected Jesus Christ, that there can be no accord between the values, the bases, the stoikea of the world and those of the revelation . . . [T]he attempt to assimilate world and faith to each other is one mistake, and the attempt to separate them radically is another . . . If the Incarnation has a meaning it can only be that God came into the most abominable of places (and he did not, by his coming, either validate or change that place). . . So we must stand at a distance from our society, its tendencies and movements, but we must never break with it, for the Incarnation has taken place. We are invited to take part in a dialectic, to be in the world but not of it, and thus to seek out a particular, a specifically Christian position. It is from this point of view that we shall consider this problem of violence, which is so urgent and tragic today.2

Ellul argues that we need much more realism in our understanding of violence. Violence is endemic to human history; it is found everywhere and at all times. In this, Ellul agrees with Thomas Hobbes. This is the state of nature. Theologically, biblical revelation shows the same thing: violence is of the order of the fall; from Cain killing Abel to the world crucifying Jesus to the apocalyptic conflict of Armageddon, violence is the condition of humanity. Politically, all states are based on violence and there is no fundamental difference between violence and force.

Even as moral and Christian-influenced a nation as the USA, Ellul argues that free market competition, such as that which supports the US economy, can represent a kind of economic violence and coercion no different than what one would find in a system based on centralized planning. Violence is about coercing and attacking others, forcing their acquiescence, dominating and imposing your will upon them. This can be done physically, of course, but it is still violence if the coercion is psychological, economic, ideological, or otherwise. It is the opposite of inviting or allowing a free choice or response by the other.

Violence, Ellul argues, is the natural condition of humanity; it is part of the order of necessity. Some violent acts may seem like they are the free, reckless striking out against others. But whether premeditated and planned or not, violence in its various forms i...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Jacques Ellul on Living in a Violent World
• Chapter 2: Calvin, Barth, Ellul, and the Powers That Be
• Chapter 3: Ellul on Violence and Just War
• Chapter 4: Police, Technique, and Ellulian Critique: Evaluating Just Policing
• Chapter 5: Cultural Interpretation of Cyberterrorism and Cybersecurity in Everyday Life
• Chapter 6: The Nigerian Government’s War Against Boko Haram and Terrorism: An Ellulian Communicative Perspective
• Chapter 7: Ellul, Machiavelli, and Autonomous Technique
• Chapter 8: Two Views of Propaganda as a Form of Violence
• Chapter 9: Propaganda as Psychic Violence
• Chapter 10: Technology and Perpetual War: The Boundary of No Boundary
• Chapter 11: My Conversion to Christian Pacifism: Reading Jacques Ellul in War-Ravaged Central America
• Appendix: Book Reviews