Ellul on Praxis

Practice against sentimentalism

It's a joyous exercise in sternness to revisit the works of Jacques Ellul. Against the his brash and bold ironical objectivising investigations into sociology and through the passionately disorienting explorations within theology, he stands firm as the grumpy mad of the continentalist school, the indignant schoolboy who refuses to accept the dutiful smudging of sloppy thought by way of turning it inside outside through his razor-sharp perception of such-and-such an assertion from authority towards some particular end or other—and often by cloaking it in such a way that the opportunistic interpreter would launch at it like with vampiric lustfulness, only to discover the ironic misdirection that awaited them like a punchline. In that sense, he did carry the mantle that S. K. had laid down in death better than any other interpreter then or since.

And this, of course, was most brutally realised against those “left-facing” theologians and philosophers, the intellectuals of France's heady academic heights, who had, through their intellectualising and nit-picking, lazily picked up enough of the great theories to fulfill their desires and cast away the rest with a flick of the wrist—not realising that the carcass of the beast is there to provide support to the structure, not merely deliver the meat to the one who consumes.

As was so often the case with Ellul’s curious and almost schizophrenic oeuvre, the short piece that has most recently grabbed my attention was one that first rose up in defence of Karl Marx against the consumptive habits of the intellectually desperate, shortly before turning back against the German to both critique from within and through him. In this way, we discover a way to act Christianly by way of abusing both the liberal opportunist and the Marxist theorist—much as Paul had abused his Greek interlocutors in antiquity.

“Irony differs from humour in calling for collective support. While irony can make fun of the world, humour makes fun, privately, of what will save it.”¹

Marxian Praxis

If you have spent any amount of time amongst Marxists, anarchists, or social democrats², you will doubtless have heard those most ready to raise their voices about the swell of the crowd float this word around with great impunity: praxis. After the first or second time, when one can be forgiven for mistaking this rhetoric for the radicalism of the great theorists of history, this term might become a better signifier of the ones to avoid than a sign of some theoretical and practical wayfinder.

And this problem isn't new: indeed, Ellul himself had seen the abuse of the particularly Marxian term praxis through overly literal translations and overly hasty application of those overly literal translations. Ellul took aim at Belo, the confused Stalinist theologian who still finds praise today³:

Similarly, Belo offers an astonishing definition for practice, taken over from Althusser, but after eliminating its economic aspect. Marx’s “praxis” is identical with this “practice”; but the fact that Marx held to the term “praxis” shows that he meant something quite different from mere practice. Belo reduces Marx’s “praxis,” a difficult and rigorous concept, to “any process of transformation of a determinate given raw material into a determinate product, a transformation effected by a determinate human labour, using determinate means” (p. 7). Thus Belo enlarges Marx’s concept beyond the economic sphere and the production of value.

On the contrary, in Marx, praxis, related to theory, is the means of transforming the world and of making history, through work of a technical and economic sort. Once Belo has redefined “practice” so vaguely, he can speak blithely about “political practice” or “ideological practice.” These terms mean something in ordinary and journalistic language, but not within the rigorous sphere of Marx’s thought. We can say the same for Belo’s “messianic practice” and “subversive practice.”⁴

Firstly, I advise that you read Ellul’s prophetic critique of Belo—along with the broad Marxist and “Christian” Marxist milieu of the period. However, my interest is in the fine point that Ellul criticises Belo for not recognising as a Marxist conception nor as a matter of importance for Christianity. In that sense, against the overeager syncretist, I suggest a point of contact for Christ and Marx: in the emphasis on praxis proper.

Understanding praxis

Ellul notes here that praxis is not merely another word for “practice”—despite Belo’s abuse, mirrored by ardent and lackadaisical Marxists alike since the conceptual genesis—but rather the mode by which one is “transforming the world” and “making history”, i.e., engaging in class struggle which actually brings about some change, even if that change is only slight. For the Marxian, there will be various types of actions which can be gestured to here, e.g., assembling the crowd under the guise of the party, seizing the national crown of power, reorganising the economy towards proletarian concerns, etc. What these mean, of course, my reader, is always a point of contention, a matter for the clerics of the new messianism who strike us as an almost charming fragment of history that has refused to disappear—and we will not waste our time with these things. We shall leave the cloistered scholars to the “chatter” on their balcony, where their stomping sounds rather dull from the hubbub of the road.

What is interesting, though, is that in a world where all actions are possible to us, Marx understood that some actions and only some actions are helpful and edifying. While we can while away the days imagining some beautiful utopia that serves us every desire that we could possibly long for or performatively sabre-rattle when engaging in the most basic of human actions, Marx, much like Christ, had realised that a proper approach must be one that to understood to continue this “unfolding” of history, a continuation of the journey into which we are thrown, where we are forged in the fire of intersubjective responsibility, where we simply live life⁵.

To believe the forgiveness of one’s sins is the decisive crisis whereby a human being becomes spirit; one who does not believe this is not spirit. Maturity of the spirit means that immediacy is completely lost, that a person is not only capable of nothing by himself but is capable only of injury to himself. But how many in truth come in a wholly personal way to understand of themselves that one is brought to this extremity. (Here lies the absurd, offense, the paradox, forgiveness of sins.)

Most people never become spirit, never experience becoming spirit. The stages—child, youth, adult, oldster—they pass, to their shame, through these with no credit to themselves; it is none of their doing, for it is a vegetative or vegetative-animal process. But they never experience becoming spirit.⁶

“...S. K. was saying precisely that a peson needs to become individuum, undivided, at one with himself, and not that he should cut himself off from the race.”⁷

Marxian thought generally suffers, when put under pressure, due to a rather apparent teleology which sits possibly unjustifiably and certainly romantically at the heart of Karl Marx’s musings. When an agent—or, more appropriately, the collective of agents tied together by “The Party”—engages in a particular kind of activity, this activity allows for the progressive change in the process of production and reproduction which constitutes the Marxian conception of “History”. While not necessarily inevitable, Marx certainly did argue himself into a corner by suggesting that there were non-humanist values that hang high over society, which can become realised by the strength of humanist struggles alone.⁸ In this sense, praxis unfolds through action in the world when we seize upon history and drive the humdrum of production and reproduction in a particular direction—which, of course, has certainly appealed to many theorists, Christian and non-Christian alike, since its conception.

However, this “march of history” seems almost foolish to us today—in a world gripped by pessimism-cum-nihilism, where the only permitted principles handed by down the world are the valuing of a long, unremarkable life and the self-abstraction of party politics, to discuss the now infamous illustrate of history proceeding from the lower to the higher sounds more like superstition than critical analysis. “The myth of progress”, liberalism par excellence, haunts Marx’s writings and the hopeless hopefulness of each and every student strongarmed into selling newspapers in the name of “The Revolution”. As characterised in the foreword to Ellul’s The Technological Society, Merton characterised this self-abstraction and faithfulness not as the bold march of those who peer into the fires of tomorrow, but rather “the systematic dehumanisation of humanity”⁹ appropriated as liberatory language.

But, for S. K., this was no problem—at least in the sense of it being a theoretical problem. As a practical problem, it was the very cauldron in which we find all life occurring and, as such, the most difficult thing each of us will ever do. By way of identifying the need to “become human” in a sense where we are not reduced to merely the one who reflects our ability to produce, S. K. opened up the possibility for a concrete conception of the self: we both are ourselves and ought to be ourselves. Dalfreth, framing S. K.’s conception of liberation, drags us back to the Christ-centred and God-centred epistemology that S. K. clarified to us in an effort to undermine all idealisms:

“...we cannot be a potential self without having been created as such by the one whom Christians call ‘God,’ so we cannot become true selves without being changed from a sinful self-centeredness to a liberated God-centeredness by the same God.”¹⁰

In that sense, Christian praxis is concerned with destroying Christendom, paganism, secularism, and all other “isms”¹¹ that would hang over the free expression of faith which is both possible and edifying. The phrase “we are closer to salvation now than when we become believers” becomes meaningless as the task of situating oneself in relation to salvation hasn’t begun; Christendom—or any other reinvention of the messianism which is subverted and turned-around by the one who would wield it towards their own ends—tricks us out of both finding “where we are” and where we should go¹². Contrary to the impositional idealism of the Marxian or the rootless helplessness of the Sartrean¹³, S. K. delivers us with the task of becoming a human self in the context of other human selves—but limited to neither a subjective nor an objective teleology which would allow us to slip into received patterns and mechanical processes which undermine our task to both be and become ourselves. In this particular world, where I am a particular individual within a particular context and standing at the precipice of a particular collection of particular possibilities, all things are possible, but not all things are edifying. And what does it mean to become a human self? What form can we apply to all human “endeavours without collapsing into the pagan dictatorialism of old? Of course, grins S. K., it is in the neighbour:

The individual must become a neighbour to the neighbour: “The one to whom I have a duty is my neighbour, and when I fulfill my duty I show that I am a neighbour. Christ does not speak about knowing the neighbour but about becoming a neighbour oneself, about showing oneself to be a neighbour just as the Samaritan showed it by his mercy.”¹⁴

Like Marx, who saw through the attractive veneer of the liberal promise that we both can and ought to live however we want, S. K. finds himself posed against the conception of freedom which merely reduces the individual to a choice amongst choices—or, more often, a series of choices, each attempt an effort to find the “authentic” and the “true” and attempting to correct the now apparent inauthenticity and untruth of the proximally prior choice—that attempts to stand against life itself solely by way of identifying a point of contradiction to wall up in. But, unlike the Marxians, who place “the march of history” into the hands of an idea, an imagined proletariat that takes up the academic musings of the intellectuals like hungry dogs that steal from the table and promise—authentically! class consciously!—to die in their place, S. K. reasserts his place in history and his place in his society that makes the hands of the “Small Way”¹⁵ the only mode by which history shall unfold: by way of that individual amongst other individuals, completely dissimilar and completely similar to him, taking up the mantle that drives one necessarily against the way of the world, even if that world has been all too ready to take the language of the disjunct and turn it towards its own purposes:

“That means for Kierkegaard the task of introducing the radical disjunction between the eschatologically oriented secrets of salvation history (Heilsgeschichte) and the profane order of the world-historical politics (Weltgeschichte): Christendom “reduces sacred history to profane history.””¹⁶

In that sense, we find the Christian notion of praxis is not all that dissimilar to the “chatter” of the Marxians. However, Christianity, in its eternally offensive breaking-through of the very source of Goodness itself, would never allow the individual to escape into the crowd, to surrender the gift of one’s power over oneself.¹⁷ No, the Christian finds freedom, as that individual, to escape the impositional authority—whether clerical, monarchial, bourgeois, or proletarian—of the gnashing jaws of world-historical politics by way of neighbour-love.

From this point, I find myself at an impasse, my reader—there is a temptation, having pulled the world’s trousers down when it reinvents the Nuremberg rally, to begin “politicsing” again. Having discovered the Christian promise is a promise of freedom from the oppression of the world in all its capitalist, activist, moralist, fascist, warist rhetoric, the danger would be to assume that now is the time for the “presumption”¹⁸ of a Christian ethics, a Christian sociology, or—perish the thought—a Christian economics, this would indeed be simply a variation of a world theme which seizes the freedom and power of the Law by reducing it to just another human idea amongst other human ideas (II John 9). In that sense, I leave this open-ended—open for you, my reader, to discover what you are and ought to be at once within the particularity of your life in your reality. However, as some helpful notes, we return to Ellul, first on “necessity” and then exploring it through the world’s favourite necessity—violence:

Christian realism leads to the conclusion that violence is natural and normal to man and society, that violence is a kind of necessity imposed on governors and governed, on rich and poor. If this realism scandalizes Christians, it is because they make the great mistake of thinking that what is natural is good and what is necessary is legitimate. I am aware that the reader will answer at once: “You have shown that violence is inevitable and necessary in undertakings of any kind; therefore violence, is legitimate, it must be used.” This is anti-Christian reasoning par excellence. What Christ does for us is above all to make us free. Man becomes free through the Spirit of God, through conversion to and communion with the Lord. This is the one way to true freedom. But to have true freedom is to escape necessity or, rather, to be free to struggle against necessity. Therefore I say that only one line of action is open to the Christian who is free in Christ. He must struggle against violence precisely because, apart from Christ, violence is the form that human relations normally and necessarily take. In other words, the more completely violence seems to be of the order of necessity, the greater is the obligation of believers in Christ’s Lordship to overcome it by challenging necessity.

This is the fixed, the immutable, and the radical basis of the Christian option in relation to violence. For the order of necessity is the order of separation from God.

…

In the Old Testament, man shatters the necessity of eating by fasting, the necessity of toil by keeping the Sabbath; and when he fasts or keeps the Sabbath he recovers his real freedom, because he has been found again by the God who has re-established communion with him. The institution of the order of Levites likewise shatters the normal institutional order of ownership, duty, provision for the future, etc. And this freedom is fully accomplished by and through Jesus Christ. For Christ, even death ceases to be a necessity: “I give my life for my sheep; it is not taken from me, I give it.” And the constant stress on the importance of giving signifies a breaking away from the necessity of money.

Violence is inevitable, but so far as concerns society it has the same character as the universally prevailing law of gravitation, which is not in any way an expression of God’s love in Christ or of Christian vocation. When I stumble over an obstacle and fall, I am obeying the law of gravitation, which has nothing to do with Christian faith or the Christian life. We must realize that violence belongs to the same order of things. And so far as we understand that the whole of Christ’s work is a work of liberation—of our liberation from sin, death, concupiscence, fatality (and from ourselves)—we shall see that violence is not simply an ethical option for us to take or leave. Either we accept the order of necessity, acquiesce in and obey it—and this has nothing at all to do with the work of God or obedience to God, however serious and compelling the reasons that move us—or else we accept the order of Christ; but then we must reject violence root and branch.¹⁹

1. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Crumbs, p. xvi-xvii, [J. Climacus], introduction by A. Hannay

2. For the sake of clarity, I have presented social democracy as a perspective independent of liberalism. This should not be understood as an affirmation of social democracy as meaningfully different from liberalism or, by extension, as an affirmation of social democracy and liberalism as meaningfully different from conservatism or fascism.

3. E.g., Binding The Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, p. 8, C. Myers

4. Jesus and Marx, p. 101-102, J. Ellul; reference within from the original text, concerning Belo’s A Materialistic Reading of the Gospel of Mark

5. Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, p. 28, ed.[V. Eremita]; Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship, p. 107 V. Eller

6. JP I 67(i)

7. Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship, p. 105, V. Eller

8. This is not an insurmountable challenge for the Marxian, of course, my reader, but it is a curious problem that is often left out of the evangelism missions which populate the lecture halls and the campus campaigns of the world—but rather rarely the workplace of modernity, it seems.

9. “Foreword”, R. K. Merton, from The Technological Society, p. viii, J. Ellul

10. The Passion of Possibility: Studies on Kierkegaard‘s Post-metaphysical Theology, p. 14, I. U. Dalferth

11. The Technological Society, p. 98, J. Ellul

12. “Thoughts That Wound From Behind - For Upbuilding: Christian Addresses” in Christian Discourses, p. 216, S. Kierkegaard

13. And, it should be noted here, my reader, that Sartre was correct on the cross-over point between Marx and Kierkegaard—but not for the reasons he presented. In his abusive reformulation of S. K.’s thought into secularised existentialism, he reduced the powerful Christological insights of his Danish inspiration to a mere “radical choice amongst radical choices”, a decisionism that bore more in common with the fascist insights of Carl Schmitt than the theonomic liberation of St. Søren. And, from this point, the skillfully hidden humanism of both Sartre and Marx slotted into one another as a scholarly sleight-of-hand—the election of “the salaried work” (the category of the proletariat proper had long been discarded in favour of a less rigorous understanding, of course) as the saviour of the cocktail-supping bourgeois academic, allowing for the poor application of Marxian thought which justifies, e.g., the slaughter of the innocent in the fallout of the Algerian revolution as all very historically progressive, as all very dialectical as an example praxis, etc. etc.

14. “Loving the Ones We See: Kierkegaard’s Neighbor-Love and the Politics of Pluralism”, J. E. Veninga, from Kierkegaard and Political Theology, p. 110, edited by R. Sirvent and S. Morgan

15. Dorothy Day: An Introduction to Her Life and Thought, p. 59, T. C. Wright, referencing St. Thérèse of Lisieux

16. “Destitution of Sovereignty: The Political Theology of Søren Kierkegaard”, S. Brata Das, from Kierkegaard and Political Theology, p. 11, edited by R. Sirvent and S. Morgan

17. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments: A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Composition - An Existential Contribution, p. 165, J. Climacus, tr. D. F. Swenson, ed. W. Lowrie

18. Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth, l. 2955, A. J. Torrance & A. B. Torrance

19. Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective, p. 127-129, J. Ellul