The Depth of God:

Yves Raguin, A life between Eastern spiritualities and Christianity

Abstract

In May 19681, Yves Raguin returned to Paris, the city where he studied as a young man. There he witnessed the boisterous street demonstrations by large crowds of young people. The French missionary was coming from Taiwan, where he was a well-known scholar on Chinese culture and spiritualities. The Paris youngsters boldly stated that God was dead. Raguin, however, thought that the youth rejected a God different from the one he had come to know better in the East. It is not God who is dead, Raguin thought, but rather the abstraction that they call God. Eastern spiritualities, which seek the divine in the depths of the human, could have helped the youth of Paris to know God from a different point of view. “While travelling through France, I became deeply aware of whom I was, after twenty years in the East. I somewhat understood that Chinese humanism was two thousand years ahead of the West. And I wanted to state that, even if I did not know how” (Raguin, 1975a, pp. 5-6).