In 1940, Jacques Ellul was a young professor of Roman law at the University of Strasbourg who took the bold step of openly renouncing Nazism and Marshal Petain’s government at Vichy. Ellul had been from an early age a close and passionate reader of Marx, but had also undergone in early adulthood a dramatic conversion to Christianity—surprising his family, who had raised him in functional unbelief (he described his father as a Voltairean), and also himself. The two halves of his intellectual inheritance joined in repudiating the Nazis and their servants, but there was a price to be paid for his public stance: the Petain government declared that since his father had been born in English-ruled Malta, Ellul was a potential traitor and therefore ineligible to teach. He was forced to retire with his wife to the countryside and try to live off the land.
During those years of exile, in the countryside of southwestern France, Ellul worked steadily for the Resistance. His home became a safe place for other members of the Resistance, escaped prisoners of war, refugees from Spain, and French Jews. On several occasions, Ellul and his family hid Jews, helped them to acquire forged papers, and in some cases escorted them to safety. In 2001, seven years after his death, Jacques Ellul was recognized by Vad Yashem as one of the Righteous among the Nations.
During this time, Ellul also—demonstrating a level of energy comparable to that of Simone Weil—studied for his agrégation (an examination-based award for French university professors, granted to him in 1943, though he was forbidden to teach), pastored a small Protestant church, and studied theology. When France was liberated, he became deputy mayor of Bordeaux and began to speak widely to Christian groups.
In 1989, Ellul recalled the circumstances in which his first book had been written: Presence in the Modern World, or, in its original French, Presence au monde moderne: Problèmes de la civilization post-chretienne.1 The question Ellul faced in writing that book, in the immediate aftermath of the war, was this: in what way or mode or form are Christians to be “present” in the post-chretienne monde moderne in which they live? He recalled that this question had been forced upon him and his fellow Christians first by the war and then by the postwar challenges of rebuilding France and indeed all of Europe.
After all, everyone was in a sense starting over. This was felt with particular intensity in Germany, of course, given the horrific destruction that had been visited on that country and the need for its government to be reconstituted from scratch. The moment that the Nazi government capitulated to the Allies came to be known in Germany as Stunde Null—zero hour—the moment that all the clocks got reset. So began the Nachkriegszeit, the time after the war. But throughout Western Europe, in France and England almost as much as in Germany, there was a similar sense of having to begin anew. And Ellul’s book asks the question: what does faithful presence look like at the moment the clocks are all reset? What do Christians say, and do, at Stunde Null?2
Ellul suggests that during the war the question of the proper Christian role had been more complex for Catholics than for Protestants such as himself. After all, “Marshal Petain was a great Catholic who privileged the Catholic Church, and the ‘values’ that he proposed for France’s motto, ‘Work, Family, Homeland,’ corresponded well to Catholic values.” This formulation may seem rather condescending toward French Catholics, but Ellul (a great student of propaganda, about which he wrote one of his most interesting books) was surely correct in perceiving that Vichy France had certain propagandist strategies available to them when trying to win over those who assumed that France was a Catholic nation that would not have influenced those Protestants who had always known themselves to be dissenters from that dominant national self-understanding. It was simply easier for French Protestants, habituated for centuries to outsider status, to see that Hitlerism and all its appurtenances had to be resisted altogether and extirpated root and branch.
But after the war’s end, all French Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike, found themselves in the same boat. Upon the Liberation, “On the one side were those for whom the important thing was to return to theology and building up the church. On the other were those who had a passion for politics and no longer thought about anything else (even in their pastoral ministry).”3 For Ellul, neither of these options was valid. “Christians and the church could not hold themselves aloof from human beings, but neither could they become assimilated into one of the political currents”—most likely, in the circles Ellul knew, communism. The problem then had to be reformulated and reconsidered, and in 1945 Ellul began to put together his ideas, which he then articulated for an audience at the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey, Switzerland in 1946. Those lectures, revised, would become Presence in the Modern World.4
Already, in 1945 and 1946, Ellul discerned that Christians, though rightly committed to the reconstruction and preservation of society, were going astray—were not being fully and authentically present in the way appointed for them: “When the problem of reconstruction has arisen, many Christians, even the best ones, . . . urge people along the path that the world has chosen. They say that the United Nations is an admirable institution and the way of the future, that what matters most is producing material goods, and that prefabricated housing is the solution for everything.” For Ellul there is certainly nothing wrong with the United Nations, and prefabricated housing can be very useful indeed. But the world does not need Christians to say so. “Christians participate truly in the world’s preservation not by acting like others and laboring at the world’s technical tasks but by fulfilling their specific role.”5 And what is that role?
Ellul thinks that this question was not widely asked during the war years. (Perhaps, had he known about Finkelstein’s Conference and Oldham’s Moot, he would have seen the right issues being asked among those people.) Had the right question been asked, he says, then Christians would have realized that, while summoning armies to fight against Hitler was certainly necessary, the first and most vital task of Christians in time of war was prayer. But Christians, while they certainly did pray, failed to give prayer the priority and centrality they were required to give it. Had they done so, then “perhaps the result would not have been this horrifying triumph of the Hitlerian spirit that we now see throughout the world.”
Here at Nachkriegszeit, Ellul is saying what we heard others say when war first arrived. As these figures had feared, so Ellul believed it had come to pass that the Western democracies had won the war but were some considerable way along the path to losing the peace. “Materially triumphant, we are spiritually vanquished”—“And today we are witnessing the same error with reconstruction.” The root cause of the failure may be identified and explained with reference to a phrase, quoted above: “the world’s technical tasks.”
Ellul of course does not believe that Christians should eschew “technical tasks” altogether, confining themselves to prayer.
This does not mean that technical work should not be done, or that it is useless. No, the point is that everyone does this kind of work, and it has no meaning if it is not guided, accompanied, and sustained by another work, one that Christians alone can do and yet often do not. For the world must be preserved by the ways of God and not by the technique of human beings (although technique can enter into the ways of God if we take care to hold it under judgment and submission).
But Christians often fail to keep technique under such judgment and submission. And technique, Ellul argues, has, in part as a result of the war, entered into and come to dominate not only the material realm but thought itself. Indeed, “Technique has overtaken the realm of intellect just as it has every other realm of activity . . . . It could be said in fact that technique is today the sole route that intellect uses to truly express itself.”6 This can be seen most obviously in the sciences: “an entomologist will no longer proceed like Fabre”—that is, Jean-Henri Fabre, the great autodidact who produced, from the 1870s to the first decade of the twentieth century, a vividly written and immensely popular series of Souvenirs entomologiques. But Ellul discerns the same tendency in the arts, for instance in the way that “modern painting . . . is conditioned by its obsession to stake out ground and differentiate itself from photography.” In le monde moderne, la civilization post-chretienne, “intellect is tied to its technical expression and intellectuals tend to become technicians”; the result is that even as “technical possibilities seem to increase,” intellectuals’ “scope of action becomes singularly restricted.” The very success of technique leads to a diminished ability to imagine nontechnical action and thought.7
But what precisely does Ellul mean by “technique”? Soon after completing Presence in the Modern World, he would write the longest and most ambitious of his many books, and the only one still widely read today: The Technological Society. Here again the original French title is illuminating: La technique, ou, l’enjeu du siècle. Here the key word is l’enjeu, which can mean “stake” or “challenge,” but also “outlook” or “worldview”—something like the German Weltbild. Technique then is not technology or the employment of technology: it “does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end.” It is, rather, the characteristic mode of thought of the twentieth century but also what that century staked its future on, its challenge to the world—and therefore to us. And Ellul believes that this outlook, this Weltbild, depends on two essential commitments: to efficiency, and to objectivity. Technique is “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity”; “[t]echnique is a means of apprehending reality, of acting on the world, which allows us to neglect all individual differences, all subjectivity. Technique alone is rigorously objective.”8 If a person cares about values other than efficiency and objectivity, and therefore fails to flourish under the sovereignty of technique—as happens to many people—then the regime has means of dealing with her: technical means, of course. Thus the rise of what Ellul calls psychotechnique: “Technique, in the form of psychotechnique, aspires to take over the individual, that is, to transform the qualitative into the quantitative. It knows only two possible solutions: the transformation or annihilation of the qualitative.”9 And it effects such transformation or annihilation through the mediation of psychotechnicians, who are the regime’s instruments.
All human beings under technique are instruments of something—are technicians—and Ellul argues that the primary function of education within this regime is to use psychotechnique to create those technicians: “Education no longer has a humanist end or any value in itself; it has only one goal, to create technicians.” And the educational system is vital to the sustenance and extension of technique: “It is the findings of thousands of educators which ceaselessly nourish the improvement of technique.” The people whom Eliot called “educationists” are very proud of the efficiency and objectivity of their system; but for Ellul, “What looks like the apex of humanism is in fact the pinnacle of human submission: children are educated to become precisely what society expects of them.”10 As Maritain would put it, technique is intrinsically antipersonalist.
In short, Ellul sees, in the years immediately following the war, the complete victory of what Auden called “the children of Apollo” over “the sons of Hermes.” It is, then, easy to see why The Technological Society is seen as such a profoundly pessimistic book, and has been so influential on so many later techno-pessimists, most notably Neil Postman.11 But Ellul did not mean for the book to be read in isolation from his other works, and writing a foreword to an American edition of the book strongly denied that he was a pessimist. Rather, he claimed, he was in The Technological Society undertaking a “sociological analysis,” and a sociological analysis—being to some degree implicated itself in the regime of technique—rules out certain possibilities, among them the intervention of God in human affairs.12 Those who had read Ellul’s other books would have been aware that he possessed a specifically theological hope based on his belief that God loves Creation and is therefore active in history—though not in ways that can be accounted for by technique.
Such hope forbids pessimism, but Ellul strongly implies, nonetheless, that his Christian elders—a category that, taken literally, would include all of the writers studied here: Ellul was three years younger than Weil—had failed to discern the rise of the regime of technique and had not addressed it constructively until it was already secure on its throne. His emphasis on the possibility of a dramatic divine intervention—“God may work a miracle”13—suggests that he doubts the power of Christianity to oppose technique by its usual habits and practices. Christians had failed to be truly present in le monde moderne, and the whole of that world was now paying the price.
At the end of his traversal of biblical narrative in For the Time Being, Auden’s narrator returns to “the moderate Aristotelian city / Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry / And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,” and finds that world—le monde moderne, the regime of technique—smaller and drabber than he had remembered. “To those who have seen the Child . . . / The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.”14 But its challenge must be faced. For every Christian there remains “the Time Being to redeem / From insignificance.”15
Auden borrows the notion of redeeming the time from the apostle Paul, who twice, in Ephesians 5:15 and Colossians 4:5, commands Christians to redeem the time. Most modern translations render this as “make the most of every opportunity” or something similar, but the Greek reads kairon eksagorázōmenoi, with eksagorázōmenoi being the same word Paul uses to describe Christ’s work of redemption. It literally means to buy back, or buy out of bondage, including the bondage of slavery. Also, the word for time here, kairon, means not clock time—that would be chromos—but rather the opportune or decisive moment. We might further add that Simone Weil would surely have noted that the whole of Colossians 4:5 reads, “Walk in wisdom towards those who are outside, redeeming the time.”
Jacques Ellul knew all this, which is why, perhaps, his critique of Christians for failing to be truly present in the world is succeeded by this very command. “It seems to me,” he writes, that a genuine Christian “participation” in the world, “which is both real and specific for the world’s preservation, can lead to the idea of redeeming the time.” “To redeem the time is both a work of preservation . . . and a work of salvation . . . . The situation of Christians in the world appears then as singularly charged with meaning, if we consider that it is on their behavior and preaching (or simply on their witness) that the redemption of time depends.”16
A genuine Christian presence is what calls the world toward the achievement of meaning—in much the way that Maritain had argued for the secret inspiration of the Gospel raising up a secular commitment to human rights—and therefore is the very means by which the time is to be redeemed, not just for Christians but for “those outside.” But it must be said that there is something belated about this recognition, wise though it may well be.
When, in “Little Gidding,” Eliot meets “some dead master” and receives from him the stern account of “the gifts reserved for age,” the encounter ends thus: “In the disfigured street / He left me, with a kind of valediction, / And faded on the blowing of the horn”—the horn being the all-clear signal. From a numinous nighttime encounter with something eternal Eliot is returned to the workaday world, which continues to make its quotidian demands even in the midst of war. Similarly, in the last book Lewis wrote during the war, The Great Divorce, a long encounter with Lewis’s own “dead master,” George MacDonald, ends thus:
“The morning! The morning!” I cried, “I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost.” But it was too late. The light, like solid blocks, intolerable of edge and weight, came thundering on my head. Next moment the folds of my Teacher’s garment were only the folds of the old ink-stained cloth on my study table which I had pulled down with me as I fell from my chair. The blocks of light were only the books which I had pulled off with it, falling about my head. I awoke in a cold room, hunched on the floor beside a black and empty grate, the clock striking three, and the siren howling overhead.17
Even when the sirens fell permanently silent, because the screaming was no longer coming across the sky, and the world was no longer as cold and disfigured, but was merely the “moderate Aristotelian city,” the awakening from dreams saturated with meaning and coherence was a painful one. And it was painful largely because the circumstances of the war, and the events leading up to the war, had generated a body of reflection that—while genuinely deep and rich, as I think has been seen throughout this book—came about too late to have any of the social effects that its authors hoped and prayed for. “The owl of Minerva flies only at night,” as we are told (with perhaps pardonable inaccuracy) Hegel said, and it flew for these thinkers, for Maritain and Eliot and Lewis and Auden and Weil, when the wisdom it brought could no longer find its best use. It is then no wonder that after having spent the years of the war narrating, dramatizing, and arguing for a richly humane model of personal and cultural formation, they all—save Weil, lying in her grave in Kent—turned to other matters: Maritain to his human-rights work and then to aesthetics, Eliot to the theater, Lewis to the children’s books that would win him his greatest and most lasting fame, Auden to his theology of the inarticulate human body and his hopes of becoming “a minor Atlantic Goethe.”18 In some ways the opportune time, the kairos moment for Christian cultural renewal, had passed. When the clocks were reset to Stunde Null, it was technique that proved adequate to that challenge.
This state of affairs can be seen especially clearly in the work of Ellul, which is why I chose to end this account by introducing this younger thinker. The book by which he is known today, The Technological Society, could only have been written after Presence in the Modern World, because it was only in light of the failures of Christendom that disfigured modernity—and that were especially evident in the wars of the twentieth century—that the functional absence of Christians from le monde moderne could be clearly seen, and its causes diagnosed. The Technological Society is not quite a postmortem of Christian society, but it very nearly is: the patient is on his deathbed, which is why Ellul can but hope for a special divine intervention, a miracle.
Each of the writers I have studied here worked with astonishing energy to rescue their world for a deeply thoughtful, culturally rich Christianity, and to rescue that Christianity for their world. They put forth every effort to redeem the time. But on the sounding of the war’s last siren, they awoke and found that the problem they all had to face was “what to make of a diminished thing.”19 Their diagnostic powers were great indeed: they saw with uncanny clarity and exposed with incisive intelligence the means by which technocracy had arisen and the damage it had inflicted, and would continue to inflict, on human persons. Few subsequent critiques of “the technological society” rival theirs in imagination or moral seriousness. But their prescriptions were never implemented, and could never have been: they came perhaps a century too late, after the reign of technocracy had become so complete that none can foresee the end of it while this world lasts. Ellul was more realistic to choose the simple hope for miraculous deliverance. If ever again there arises a body of thinkers eager to renew Christian humanism, they should take great pains to learn from those we have studied here: both what they agreed upon and what divided them. But may those future thinkers also be quickly alert to the signs of the times.