The Event

Excerpt from Presence in the Modern World by Jacques Ellul

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Those who believe in the trivial news item and interpret it through myth no longer believe in the event, which is to say, in a fact’s intervention in the course of life, history, and development that brings with it a modifying character, that encompasses within itself the meaning of all this past development, and that entails a significance for the future. The event is the opposite of the trivial piece of news, because it is charged with experience and grasps human beings as a whole. The event is also the opposite of the modern myth, because it carries its meaning within itself and the adherence that it demands is personal and brings the individual to a personal decision.

But to believe in the event is to have a certain conception of history, such that the event can come to pass. Now, at the present time, not only do the material conditions that I have described tend to make us treat the event with complete contempt, but even the prevailing conceptions, of history as much as of individual life, drive us to repudiate it. When I said several times that modern people live in a dream, and that even when they fight for their bread and butter they do not encounter material reality but abstractions, this assertion can be expressed in another way: None of the facts that occur, in the world or in personal life, have any longer for the individual any personal or independent significance, none produce an experience and a decision, but are always presented instead as the product of a mass power, a sociological action. Yet if there is no event, faith is not possible. There is only the artificial myth. This is the attitude toward life that explains, at one and the same time, the modern success of political myths and the disaffection for the Christian faith. It is the result, on the “religious” level, of the impossibility of grasping the present world’s reality.

Besides, if there is no event, neither can human beings take any personal and voluntary action in history and in their life. The only thing possible then is universal capitulation. Now the problem is twofold. We need to know if there is objectively the possibility of the event in history, and if there is an event in the life of each human being.

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