Joxé Azurmendi: saying and being
I come to express, my dear Joxé, my long-standing, silent gratitude and admiration.
You possessed extraordinary qualities: you were a sharp thinker, a brilliant speaker, and a prolific writer. A spur to reflection, an inspiration for action, a tactful companion of the flesh-and-blood human being full of contradictions, a spirited promoter of a society made up of pulsating life and suffocating institutions. Always attentive, always searching, always on the move. Always willing and approachable. Congratulations and thank you, Joxé, for the legacy you have left us: in equal measure copious and critical, provocative and beneficial.
You defined yourself with one word: Basque. That is what you were thorough and through and you cultivated it in body and soul. You made it your mission to embody the soul of the Basque language in your being and in your practice, and you dedicated yourself, fully and exclusively in Basque, to creating culture, country, society and peace. To create “Basqueness”.
However, if anyone had thought that “Basqueness” had led you to turn inwards on yourself, they would have been sorely mistaken. One has only to look at your biographical, bibliographical, geographical and linguistic track record. “Basqueness” pushed you towards the world’s peoples and languages, to cross borders, to be cosmopolitan like few others, to make other languages (Spanish, Italian, French, English, German, etc.) your own (and so competently!). You were Basque born and bred and it was your Basque roots that turned you into a universal citizen. You chose to write exclusively in Basque, not because you despised other languages, but because Basque was your root and breath, and because Basque is a crushed language. You opted for the root, for breath, for liberation, in support of all the oppressed and defeated. It is indeed the breath and the roots that bring us together in the shared air, on the shared earth belonging to everyone.
You were an enlightened man, astonishingly enlightened in learning and wisdom, in knowledge and intelligence. An awakened man of the Enlightenment, and from a very young age freed of superstitious beliefs, taboos, and antiquated ecclesiastical and state systems. But you erected no altar to modern Enlightenment. You were guided by critical reason, but you never forgot that reason, however enlightened it may be, is also made up of many springs and paths, like the springs and paths of Arantzazu, and, to the same extent, of Athens, Paris or Cologne; you never forgot that reason is not “pure” reason, nor is it the only source and its own master, nor is it entirely its own master, but that it is always reason derived and en route, derived from somewhere and en route somewhere, and that en route it is not only illuminated by pure mathematics and laboratory-tested verifications, but also by myth and pathos, the arts, music and poetry, the ineffable and silence.
You knew full well that even the light that keeps us alive at all times, the light that burst forth as a spark at the “beginning” of this universe and of all the others –before all beginning, it is not yet known exactly how–, such subtle light that continues to burst forth in the heart of every star and every leaf, is also rooted in the eternal matrix matter. That like all beings, we “human animals” do not subsist entirely in ourselves, we are inseparably creators of all that is, and at the same time creatures of all that is, illuminators of all and at the same time illuminated by all. We always have roots beyond. Joxé, you were enlightened and deeply-rooted in equal measure. As deeply-rooted as the Aizkorri mountain, the beech trees of Beunde, the slopes and the hawthorn of Arantzazu. As deeply-rooted as the language that inhabited you, as the country you breathed. As deeply-rooted as the rotating Mother Earth deeply-rooted in the air. Having been so deeply-rooted and enlightened made you so humble and straightforward.
You were an admirable creator with words. Creator of words and creator through words. Saying and being. You knew very well the repeated refrain of the mythological poem of the creation in the book of Genesis: “And God said (…) and it was so”. Just like the sentence of the Gnostic-mystical poem with which the Gospel of John opens: “The word became flesh”. In you I see both poems of creation incarnated, one Jewish, the other Christian, both universal in their respective particularity, as are all poems, just as you yourself have been, so special and so universal.
Thank you, Joxé, for your reflection on the religious phenomenon. The critical incisiveness of light and the serene breath of deep roots that shine through it. You confessed to being “a man of faith without faith”. In other words, a man of faith without beliefs or dogmas. You did not believe in any objectified absolute or categorical truth. But you had faith in the dawn light on the horizon every morning and in the beauty that moved you. You had faith in the human being, “Argonaut on a rickety ship”, in the pilgrim who comes to the temples in search of refuge, in the compassionate neighbour who approaches the wounded. In words, in monologues and in dialogues, in listening and in responding. You had faith in truth honestly sought and good done, beyond any ideology and orthodoxy, any creed and system, religious or secular, pre-modern, modern or post-modern. You were in tune with the critique directed at religion by Feuerbach, Marx and Freud, but without ever claiming that religion is nothing but pure alienation, the pure and simple result of so much ignorance, illusions, miseries and individual and collective pseudo-projections from which human beings suffer. Thales of Miletus, Heraclitus, Pythagoras and Socrates, Confucius, Laozi and the Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth and the Poverello brother Francis of Assisi were inspirations and companions along your path. And Nietzsche. You drank from all springs, both old and new.
You also had faith, or admiration and wonder, in the endless depths of the infinite universe. Deep down such was your “God”, like that of Spinoza, the forerunner: the inexhaustible creativity of the eternal cosmos, the creativity that calls all that is into being, and is called into being by all that is. Traditional theism seemed to you as absurd as the atheism prevailing among us, an atheism that does not allow itself to be moved by wonder at the infinitely small and the infinitely large, an atheism that too lightly disregards the yearnings and questionings of human beings.
In the same sense, it seems to me, you also understood death and what we call “post-death”. You had long since outgrown the ancient Hindu, Platonic and Judeo-Christian myths –beliefs in reincarnation, the immortal soul and resurrection– but you did not cease to ask yourself and everyone whether the faintest vestige of each of us, made one with all, would not remain eternally in the eternal universe, in the memory of all that is.
So you have passed beyond this world of our coordinates. You are now free, we remain fellow travellers on your journey. You leave us a beautiful crop of words and being, and the furrows marked in the field for us to continue being and sowing. Rest in the eternal present. And us, sailors on a rickety ship, receive us with you in the origin of the word and of being, beyond time, competition and weariness. We too will carry you in our memory for the short time we have left, until the passing of death unites us with you and with everything. Farewell.
José Arregi, Aizarna (Basque Country), 11 July, 2025
Joxe Azurmendi – brief chronology
- Born in Zegama (Gipuzkoa, Basque Country) in 1941. Passed away in Donostia-San Sebastián on 1 July 2025 (at the age of 84).
• 1950: entered the Franciscan Seminary of Arantzazu (3 years); from there to Forua (2 years), to Zarautz (novitiate 1 year), to Olite (3 years, Philosophy), to Arantzazu (4 years, theology: 1959-1964). Ordained to the priesthood.
• 1959: he joined the JAKIN group.
• 1964: teacher of Latin and Basque at the Seminary of Forua.
• 1965-1978: he lived in Germany. He devoted himself to his studies, teaching and writing. Travelled all over Europe.
• From 1978 onwards: between Donostia-San Sebastian and Germany.
• 1981: He left the Franciscan Order and the priesthood.
• 1981-2014: Lecturer at the University of the Basque Country (EHU).
• He published 42 books and over 600 papers.
Translated by Sarah J. Turtle