I
first found out that my teacher, mentor and friend, Gabriel Vahanian,
had died when David Gill, President of the International Jacques
Ellul Society, emailed me a few days ago. Knowing Gabriel Vahanian's
age, I knew this day would come, and yet the news stuns me. I want to
share a few thoughts on this great scholar and dear friend.
Gabriel
Vahanian was born and educated in France and received his
baccalaureate from the Lycee
de Valence.
He then came to the United States in 1948 on a fellowship to
Princeton Theological Seminary where he earned his M.A. and then
completed his Ph.D. in 1958. In that year he joined the religion
faculty at Syracuse University. Gabriel Vahanian's rising star was
lit when, in 1965, Time
magazine
published an issue on The
Death of God. The
article featured his book by that title, published in 1961, and
offered it as a prime example of a new theological movement that
included others like William Hamilton and Thomas Altizer. When The
Death of God
first came out, the great New Testament scholar, Rudolf Bultmann,
compared it to Karl Barth's Commentary
on Romans
in its revolutionary significance for contemporary theology. It was a
masterful cultural analysis of what Vahanian described as "the
cultural incapacity for God of our post-Christian era." It led
him to suggest that we Wait
Without
Idols
(1964) and have No
Other
God
(1966) until we could find an authentic language with which to speak
of God again.
Gabriel
Vahanian began to explore such a new language in his 1976 book Dieu
et L'Utopie
translated in 1977 as God
and Utopia, The Church in a Technological Civilization. It
launched his experiment in a new poetics of the word that was
continued in L'utopie
Chretienne
and Dieu
Anonyme;
also his Kierkegaardian meditations La
foi,une fois pour toutes and
his book on
Tillich and the New Religious Paradigm. Most
recently, in 2008, Praise
of the Secular
appeared. Moreover, there is at least one more book to be released
with the working title: Figures
of Christ: From Incarnation to Cloning.
In
addition to being a prolific author who lectured throughout Europe,
Asia and America, Gabriel Vahanian was a member of the founding board
of the American Academy of Religion (1964). The Academy inaugurated
the promotion and professionalization of the academic study of
religion in private secular and public state universities in the
United States. Then in 1968 he became the founding Director of
Graduate Studies in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University
in Syracuse, New York. During his tenure at Syracuse University
(1958-1983), he held the Eliphalet Remington Chair and then the
Jeanette KittridgeWatson Chair. In 1983 he accepted an invitation
from the Protestant faculty of the University of Strasbourg and
returned to France for the remainder of his career.
Rudolf
Bultmann, who so glowingly praised The
Death of God,
was no doubt a major influence in persuading Gabriel Vahanian of the
need for such a book. For in Jesus
Christ and Mythology
(1958) Bultmann argued that the Gospel had become irrelevant to
modern persons because it was couched in a three-storied mythological
worldview that had no relation to a world in which one lighted one's
dwelling by flipping the switch on an electric light bulb. Hence, he
said, the Gospel needs to be demythologized by being translated into
a more contemporary language. Bultmann chose existentialism as that
language and argued the Gospel called us to a new self-understanding.
The argument was persuasive to many, but it succeeded at the cost of
shrinking the cosmic-societal dimensions of the Gospel down to the
individual transformation of consciousness. There was the potential
for an almost Gnostic disengagement from the larger world in which
the human drama is lived out.
Between
the publication of The
Death of God
in 1961 and God
and Utopia
in 1976/77, there occurred a major incubation period which gave
birth to Gabriel Vahanian's utopian poetics of faith. This poetics
addressed the Bultmannian call for a new language of faith, but in a
way that was more adequate to the cosmic-societal dimension of human
life than existentialism.
I
came to Syracuse University in 1969, the second year of its new
graduate program and witnessed that poetics being formed in the
seminars I took with Gabriel Vahanian over the next few years. In
that period I saw Vahanian's interest in Bultmann's reflectons about
light bulbs and faith transformed into a poetics of technique as the
linguistic essence of a technological society. In his seminars on
technology and theology, especially, it became clear that Jacques
Ellul's sociology and theology of the technological society were
becoming a major influence on Gabriel Vahanian's thinking. Following
Ellul, he came to see the language of technique as creating a new,
all-encompassing environment that replaced the ancient world's
language and poetics of nature. Technique as the linguistic
expression of our capacity to imagine and create new worlds offers a
new and more adequate self-understanding, one that could take one
beyond the limits of existentialism into the biblical-eschatological
language of new creation -- a language that embraces societal and
cosmic transformation.
For
Vahanian, if the ideological language of the technological
civilization was utopian, as Ellul argued, this was so only because
of the Gospel's transformation of Western civilization through an
eschatological poetics of new creation -- a "worlding of the
word" as Vahanian later called it. Existentialism still
suggested the dilemma of the classical world in which nature is one's
fate. Each person is a "useless passion" in rebellion
against his or her natural facticity. Jacques Ellul came to
understand technological society as our "new nature"
promising us liberation from the classical understanding nature as
the realm of fate. Yet this "new nature" too became our
fate, he argued, imposing efficiency as a necessity upon us. In
Ellul's view, it was the utopian promise of technological society to
fulfill all our desires through the use of efficient techniques (in
all areas of human endeavor) that induced us to treat technology with
a sacred awe, and so surrender to the necessity of efficiency.
Gabriel
Vahanian agreed with this analysis, but argued that this utopian
ideology was itself possible only because of the eschatological
poetics of new creation unleashed by the Gospel. For the Stoics,
nature was man's fate but for Paul, all of creation is groaning and
giving birth to a new creation, the transformative body of Christ in
the world. In Vahanian's view, Ellul saw the negative side of
utopianism as ideology but he failed to see, at first, that
desacralizing this ideological utopianism was the equivalent of
releasing the Gospel's genuine utopianism of new creation.
A
post-Christian civilization, Vahanian argued, is closer to the Gospel
than classical civilization ever was. Utopian hope is possible
because a technological civilization is no longer shaped by classic
presuppositions of nature as our fate but by the eschatological
utopianism of the Gospel. The poetics of the Gospel can redeem the
language of utopia and the utopianism of language. The poetics of the
holy can redeem the poetics of the sacred to create a world that is
rendered secular by the iconoclastic ecclesiology of the church as
the body of Christ; a church whose task of continuing desacralization
or secularization makes the continual renewal of the world possible.
The Gospel is not about changing worlds but about changing the world,
utopia is not a destination but an "eschatic" source of
continuing renewal. For Gabriel Vahanian, the Gospel is not about
taking us out of the world but taking us into the world to be its
"salt." It is significant that Vahanian's book, Anonymous
God,
is dedicated to Rudolph Bultmann and devoted to a trinitarian
reflection on God and the utopian iconoclasm of language.
Although
Vahanian and Ellul were known for their occasional theological
sparing, I know from my conversations with both that they were very
good friends. Both subscribed to Ellul's distinction of the sacred
and the holy. In most of Ellul's work, he tended to see utopianism as
an expression of the sacred, an ideology that justifies the world as
it is -- making it impossible to change it. In most of Vahanian's
work, he tended to see apocalyptic language as an expression of the
sacred, inviting escape from this world rather than commitment to
changing it. But both of these terms, "apocalypse" and
"utopia," can be desacralized and so understood
alternatively as expressions of the holy, and when they are, the two
terms - "apocalypse" and "utopia" - converge.
Ellul's book Apocalypse:
The Book of Revelation,
for instance, turns out not to be about changing worlds but changing
the world. Ellul views the language of the Book
of Revelation
as a poetic mirror reflecting on the present situation, calling the
church to introduce an apocalyptic transformation into this time and
place. In his book, Ideology
and Utopia
(1929, revised in 1936) Karl Mannheim argued that apocalyptic
language can be either ideological or utopian. In the first case, it
justifies the status
quo,
in the second case it initiates a social transformation of society by
breaking with the conventional view of society. It is the second
where Ellul and Vahanian's views converge and apocalypse becomes
utopian.
A
Personal Reflection
Gabriel
Vahanian entered my life in 1967 when I was on the student
undergraduate committee that invited him to speak on "The Death
of God" at the University of Minnesota. I was so taken with him
as a person and a scholar that I ended up entering the Syracuse
University Department of Religion graduate program in the Fall of
1969. Over the next several years I eagerly took every one of his
seminars, struggling at first to understand what he was doing and
then when the light finally came on, I was astonished and
exhilarated. Those lectures were a dazzling, transforming experience.
As my doctoral advisor, he became the midwife of my doctoral
dissertation on Jacques Ellul which I defended in 1978 ( later
published as The
Thought of Jacques Ellul, 1981).
Gabriel Vahanian convinced me to do my dissertation on Jacques
Ellul, by telling me that in doing so I would be standing on the
shoulders of a giant. Ellul laughed when I told him this (being not
much over five feet tall) and said "a small giant." Gabriel
Vahanian was about the same height. By the time I published my book
on Ellul, I realized I was standing on the shoulders of two giants.
That book opened doors for me and in 1982 I accepted an offer to join
the Religious Studies Faculty at The University of South Florida in
Tampa. A decade later, I dedicated my most ambitious work to Gabriel
Vahanian -- The
Ethical Challenge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Apocalypse or
Utopia?(1993)
-- saying in the Preface that my book was possible because "I
learned that which can only be absorbed by studying with a master. I
learned to think theologically."
The
bond I formed with Gabriel Vahanian while I was writing my doctoral
dissertation under his direction turned into a lifelong friendship. I
had Gaby speak at the University of South Florida many times and he
who would usually come to visit me and my wife a couple of times a
year in Tampa, only an hour and a half from Winter Haven, Florida,
where he had a second home he used when he flew in from France.
Indeed, I just had a visit from him this Spring and we talked of
seeing each other again at the Ellul Centennial Conference in Weaton
Illinois this July. In the intervening time I was hospitalized in
intensive care for internal bleeding that almost led to my own
demise. Upon release, I ended up emailing him that death was stalking
me and was making me too weak to travel. We never had that "last"
planned meeting. The unfolding events since then remind me that death
stalks us all.
Typically,
when Gaby came for a visit he would make it a point to arrive on a
Thursday in order to be able to join "the breakfast club"
for discussion on Friday morning. The club is a group of five --
scholars, ministers, even a lawyer. We meet every Friday to discuss
the events of the week, the events of our lives, and, yes, even
theology. Gaby loved this forum and reveled in the discussion. He
always looked forward to it when he came. He had astonishing energy
and would keep me up until midnight on Thursday discussing theology
and then be fresh to begin again in the morning. By the time he left
to return to Winter Haven on Friday afternoon, I would be both
exhilarated and exhausted. He was 17 years my senior and I couldn't
keep up with him. I will miss his visits but he will always be a
presence in my life.
A
Meditation on Language, Time and Eternity
from
The
Confessions
of Augustine:
Suppose, I am
about to recite a psalm which I know. Before I begin my expectation
... is extended over the whole psalm. But once I have begun, whatever
I pluck off from it and let fall into the past enters the province of
my memory .... As I proceed further and further with my recitation,
so the expectation grows shorter and the memory grows longer, until
all the expectation is finished at the point when the whole of this
action is over and has passed into memory. And what is true of the
whole psalm is also true of every part of the psalm and of every
syllable in it. The same holds good for any longer action, of which
the psalm may be only a part. It is true also of the whole of a man's
life, of which all of his actions are parts. And it is true of the
whole of the history of humanity, of which the lives of all men are
parts. (The Confessions of
Augustine, XI,28,282, Rex Warner translation,
New American Library, 1963)
May God remember his faithful servant,
Gabriel Vahanian, whose life is whole and complete.
Three
Final Notes:
1.
Gabriel Vahanian is survived by his wife Barbara, his son Paul Michel
and his daughter Noelle. Noelle Vahanian, holds a Ph.D. from Syracuse
University and teaches at Lebanon Valley College, 101 N. College
Ave., Annville, PA 17003-1400. Her email is: Vahanian@lvc.edu
2.
An extensive bibliography of Gabriel Vahanian's work can be found
at:
http://gabrielvahanian.blogspot.com/p/ouvrages-de-gabriel-vahanian.html
3.
Those wishing to donate to honor Gabriel Vahanian's memory might
consider a donation to the GabrielVahanian Endowed Graduate Support Fund,
Department of Religion, Syracuse University, Syracuse New York, 13244
4.
A memorial service was held for Gabriel Vahanian on Friday, September
7, 2012 at Saint Paul's Reformed Church in Strasbourg.
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