Quotes from Jacques Ellul

Select Quotes from Jacques Ellul

The quotes in the first section are from _In Season Out Of Season_, trans. Lani Niles, Harper & Row, 1982

On my side, I had always lived it [Christianity] in a dramatic and fluctuating style, with extreme highs and lows, knowing every possible doubt and criticism. p.27

... for when I encounter individuals in total despair, crushed by misfortune, by the lack of a future, by injustice or loneliness, I must transmit to them the reason I myself have found to hope and to live. In other words, the message is no longer, "Be converted or I will kill you," but rather, "You want to kill yourself; be converted to escape from killing yourself." p. 76

In any case, it seemed impossible to me to live without a meaning to life. I definitely had to find one. Even if there is no intrinsic meaning. [...] Because I have a realistic and active nature, meaning lay in action. But it is obvious that, for me, action itself does not embody meaning. Action more or less gives witness to meaning, expresses it to me or to others. But the most basic meaning is beyond all action. As Ricoeur said: "There is a surplus of meaning.' And I live on this surplus. p. 83

There are moments when history is flexible, and that is when we must put ourselves inside to move the works. But when the atomic bomb is dropped, it is no longer the moment to attach a parachute to it. It's all over. I don't believe in a permanent determinism, in the inexorable course of nature. Fate operates when people give up; when the structures of and the relationships between groups, special interests, coalitions, and ideologies are not yet rigid; when new facts appear that change the rules of the game; then at these moments we can make decisions that direct history, but very quickly everything becomes rigid and mechanical, and then nothing more can be done. One of my greatest disappointments is the extreme incapacity of Christians to intervene when situations are fluid and their habit of passionately taking sides when it is too late for anything but fate to operate. They are pushing the wheel of a vehicle that is already rolling downhill by itself. p. 106-7

I dramatise much less than thirty years ago because the adults of this age and, even more so the young people, are without hope. p. 224

Quotes following are from _What I Believe_, Geoffrey W. Bromiley, trans. Eerdmans, 1989

... it is life alone that can have meaning. There is no meaning in the infinitely big or the infinitely little, nor in the banal matter of our daily environment. Neither the orbits of the planets nor corpuscular movements correspond to any history (only people, not matter, have and make history), and therefore they have no meaning. They have no signification or orientation, for their changes and evolutions are directed to no end. There is nothing ultimate about them from which we might deduce such an end. This is why it seems so futile and unimportant to try to find links between the stars and us (astrology) or to try to find in the chances of the material world mysterious meanings or indications of the way we should live or decide. All these things are neutral and blind. But I am well acquainted with those who, coming up against some absurd and unexpected event, a simple play of circumstances, begin at that moment to examine their life and choices, so that if they do not find the meaning of this chance event in itself, they do at least come across some truths about the meaning of their own lives. p. 18

It seems to me that the supernovae are symbolical in this regard. Astronomers see them appear suddenly. They are particularly bright and dazzling stars, but we now know the excess of light is simply a last sign of termination and death. p.21

... French Christianity being monarchist under Louis XIV, revolutionary in 1792, Napoleonic in 1800, republican in 1875, and in process of becoming socialist in 1950. The theologies of liberation and revolution seem to me to be simple attempts to adapt Christianity to circumstances. p.44

In a society which talks excessively about a human factor, the point is that this factor does not exist. People talk excessively about freedom when it is surpressed. [referring to love] p. 66

What constantly marked the life of Jesus was not nonviolence but in every situation the choice not to use power. This is infinitely different. p. 149