Ignacio Ellacuría: Essays on History, Liberation, and Salvation ed. by Michael E. Lee (review)

This book collects essays written by Spanish theologian and philosopher Ignacio Ellacuría over a period from the mid 1970s until 1989, the year of his death. Ellacuría is best known for the dramatic event of his assassination, which is the starting point for the introduction to this volume. Ellacuría was killed because of his outspoken political voice, but he deserves to be known as well for his theological and philosophical writings. This book is invaluable as an introduction and overview to the major themes, perspectives, and arguments he employed. The introduction by Michael Lee offers a review of Ellacuría’s eventful life and of the issues, philosophers, and theories on which his academic work focused.

While Lee properly highlights the influence of Spanish philosopher Xavier Zubiri and German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, the most formative influence on Ellacuría’s thought was perhaps El Salvador itself. Ellacuría first visited the country soon after joining the Jesuits in 1947 and spent most of the rest of his life there. Along with his administrative duties with the Society of Jesus and the Jesuit-run Central American University, he was a productive scholar and writer.

While Ellacuría wrote many popular pieces, this volume highlights his philosophical and theological work. The first of its three sections, “The Reality of History Through Latin American Eyes,” is the most philosophical in the volume, and some essays are probably of interest primarily to readers with specialized training. One of the most important pieces in this section is the essay “On Liberation,” which argues that liberation is both personal and historical, individual and collective. Different forms of oppression, he insists, “are sin and the fruit of sin” and thus constitute religious and not just political problems (p. 61).

This theme is the focus of the next section, titled “Liberation: The Christian and the Historical.” The four essays here are more theologically driven than those in the first section, however. They focus on the relationship between personal salvation and historical-political liberation. The first essay in this section may be of special interest to many readers, because it examines “The Christian Challenge of Liberation Theology.” Here Ellacuría echoes themes from the earlier section, especially the importance of thinking about faith and history together (p. 124). Ellacuría affirms central themes of liberation theology, such as the preferential option for the poor, as central to Roman Catholic teaching generally. Other essays in this section probe (and perhaps exacerbate) the tension between liberation theology and the church’s institutional position and interests. Liberation theology represents, for Ellacuría, both a sharp critique of the church and an affirmation of the church’s core teachings.

The third section, “Saving History,” is the most theological—sometimes even spiritual and pastoral—in tone and content. It is also the most accessible, overall, to a non-specialist audience. In particular, lay readers will enjoy the short final essay in the book, on Archbishop Oscar Romero, a close colleague of Ellacuría. The two men, undoubtedly the most prominent religious and intellectual voices in El Salvador, had enormous influence on each other. In Romero, Ellacuría saw “the dazzling truth of a priest who had dedicated himself to evangelizing the poor, a priest who, in that evangelization, had encouraged the poor to historicize salvation, to give historical flesh to the eternally new word of God. For that reason,” the essay continues, “he was assassinated by those who felt threatened by that evangelizing word” (p. 288). The same could be said, certainly, of Ellacuría himself. When I interviewed Salvadoran lay people shortly after his assassination, many insisted that he had been killed “for telling the truth.” This book is a valuable record of the intellectual development of that truth.