Lluís Duch

Lluís Duch Álvarez
1936-2018
(source: La Casa de la Paraula)
no copyright infringement intended

Lluís Duch passed away, with the same discretion that had accompanied him for all his life. A Benedictine monk at the Abbey of Montserrat, he was a theologian and anthropologist, a profound and courageous thinker, not afraid to arrive at paradoxical conclusions. For him there was a clear distinction between religion (as a structural reality), and Christianity (as a historical reality): the same distinction was made by Paul Tillich, between God and God's image in culture - cultures come and pass, as historical phenomenons, and each culture carries its image of God, while God is immanent. Maybe when Nietzsche was proclaiming the death of God, he was referring to the death of a certain culture.

Lluís Duch was deeply interested in the Protestant theology and particularly in Thomas Müntzer, the radical Reformer and revolutionary who had made even Luther look just a very okay guy. And to have an idea of how far Lluís Duch went in his thinking, here is an expression that was very dear to him: the best thing about religion is that it creates heretics (it was coined actually by one of his friends, the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch).

It remain from Lluís Duch about fifty books, about theology, and anthropology, about phenomenology, and culture, myth and symbol, and about the intricate links among them. One of them is Mircea Eliade. The Return of Ulysses to Ithaca.

Lluís Duch, pensador heterodoxo https://t.co/EPtjCKpCAs via @el_pais

— Pierre Radulescu (@pierreradulescu) November 22, 2018

(Psalter)

(Una Vida Entre Libros)