Apology for a Long Absence

I have been away for a long time, but Rosenstock 's insights and inspirations continue to form a substratum of my thoughts. In considering this current election season, for example, it occurred to me that Hillary Rodham Clinton represents such a "black hole" of criminality, arrogance, deception, egotism and manipulative ability (I am reluctant even to use that word) that it is as if morality itself had entirely disappeared. "Morality" has gone unconscious. It has sunk beneath the waves of modernity, each wave representing a successive attack on tradition, manners, ethics, religion, common sense, and even language itself.


There is an excellent article on "The New Dictatress" in today's Lew Rockwell.com website--excellent. About the Clinton Crime Family.


Well, the reader may well ask, is Donald Trump any better? In order to understand this problem, I go back to something the spiritual philosopher Rene Guenon  (1886-1951) wrote in his master treatise,  The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. He is talking about the decline of the transcendent Intellect -- which in Rosenstockian terms, would be akin to the developed faculty of grammar -- into 'rationalism,' materialism, mechanism, etc. -- in other words, the decline of Quality into Quantity. It is a movement perceivable throughout human history, according to Guenon, but it has accelerated since the so-called  "enlightenment." We perceive a deterioration of the ability to grasp moral realities; the moral in a sense becomes the repressed, the put-aside.  Guenon remarks, if I remember correctly, conceivably the process of deterioration or entropy could proceed forever, but that the real energy of negative beings--devils, if you will, would demand steps beyond mere deterioration. There, he says, you find not just deterioration: not merely the fall from a moral-spiritual-and physical whole, but an actual inversion. It is what the Christian revelation calls the anti-Christ.


I don't know if Hillary Clinton is actually anti-Christ, or a version of same. But I dare to call her an inverted soul, a soul from which all that is simple, moral and good has been expelled. Donald Trump has certain characteristics of deteriorated or careless thinking at times. But he is human, recognizably so. And he is persevering and not to be intimidated, which I think is all to the good.


We are being challenged to refine our concepts and perceptions of the bad, of evil. It is not merely 'one thing," but has gradations and levels. But we will not be allowed to wallow in the freedom of choice for very long. Already this election is a sign that the United States has been ignoring moral imperatives for far too long.


We are at the brink. In my stark view, if Hillary Clinton is elected, we may never be able to choose anything ever again.

Birthdays, Death Days...or, 'Biographical Resonances'

Professor Rosenstock-Huessy often called attention to calendars and to names. Animals have languages, but only man bestows proper names. It is interesting that in the Russian language a birthday is called a name-day. And calendars-- the commemoration of days, holidays, festivals – these were also of great interest to Rosenstock’s view of language and grammar.  Our language is the result of great crises and social upheavals, which come about in many cases through the inability to speak. Not-speaking can be the prelude to a revolution, catastrophe and suffering. Not being able to speak the right word at the right time bodes ill and an incapacity to create the future.

 

 

 

 

    Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

 These Rosenstockian ideas become second nature to one accustomed to pondering them, rereading their quotes and arguments, and taking stock of the current events in our western world, which seems to have become a laboratory of deteriorated speech. The question of what can be the right word for our time is too big a question for me to tackle at the present moment.  It will have to wait for a better time and a better mind.  Instead, I want to take a little detour into the interesting territory of names and dates—that is, human incarnations. Contemporaries, or rather people whose birthdays match though hundreds of years may intervene. The three people I want to talk about are Eugen Rosenstock, St. Thomas More, and the Russian philosopher and student of law, Valentin Tomberg.

                                   Their dates: 

Rosenstock-Huessy:  July 6, 1888 --- February 24, 1973

Thomas More:  February 7, 1478---July 6, 1535

Valentin Tomberg—February 27, 1900---February 24, 1973

 Now let us imagine God as the Supreme Symphony Conductor. The human world is spread before him, in all the glorious instruments and variations of sounds and color. The cosmos resounds with the music of individual being. Dark and bright tones converge in harmonic resonances, creating new combinations, new variations—fugues, interludes, concertos, songs, improvisations and unfinished symphonies.  It is a wondrous thought that when human beings emerge in their seasons of birth, certain kinships or ‘resonances’ may be blended in the time and that one can cultivate a feeling for this – perhaps an ‘ear’ for it would be the better phrase—a kind of ‘incarnational music.’

 Some students of the work of Rudolf Steiner (see the article on this blog, "Autobiographical Restart") have taken this thought and built a cosmology of reincarnation and of astrological significance.[See note 1.] For instance, I believe that Robert Powell, one of these students of Rudolf Steiner’s esoteric teachings,  has called attention to the death-date of one individual and the birth-date of a subsequent one, as a possible indicator of reincarnation. It is an interesting idea, and certainly in the case of St. Thomas More and Eugen Rosenstock, it can even be compelling. Both were lawyers and Latinists and extraordinary men of conscience.

 But no. My purpose is not to argue the case for reincarnation. I hardly know what to think of it myself. I am convinced that there are mysteries of human birth and genetics (and geography, gender, timing and disposition) of which we have only the slightest real understanding. But the usual polarity between ‘esoteric’ knowledge and the conventional religious attitude toward the spirit is not adequate to the complexity of the issue. Rosenstock’s work has an intimacy and participatory urgency with respect to history that one would think arises from a reincarnationist perspective—but without reincarnation. Rudolf Steiner, by contrast, teaches reincarnation, but his view of history lacks that deep sense of belonging, being, transforming it.[See note 2.]The evolution of consciousness idea which is so deeply a part of Steiner’s Anthroposophy sometimes borders on the idea of inevitability, of “it had to be,” such as the notion that the “I”-consciousness had to become isolated and apart (the “spectator-consciousness”)  in order to achieve its freedom.  In Rosenstock’s view of language and history, there is no place or justification for lack of participation. His view is apocalyptic in the original sense of Christianity: we are always at the last moment or the Last Day, and no excuses to think human development is going to happen automatically. Answer the call!—no matter what our state or condition.   It’s a refreshing change from esotericism, which in my experience dopes people up—makes them ‘sleepy’ in history.

 

St. Thomas More (by Hans Holbein the Younger)

 My purpose in this post is not to argue for or against reincarnation, but merely to bring up intriguing parallels and resonances in the thought of these three thinkers.  In reading Peter Ackroyd’s Life of Thomas More (Doubleday, 1998) I was struck by certain themes which re-emerge in Rosenstock-Huessy’s work. I would like to review some of these themes, and also with Tomberg later. I will just be quoting from some of the notes I took on reading these books. 

To begin: a contemporary described More’s genius at understanding the meanings of words from their position in sentences, especially in translating from Greek. His intelligence  “is more than human,” said another source. More said, in reference to rhetoric and public debate,  “there is no such thing as private truth.”  The sensus communis, or common sense, was important to More.  In scholastic philosophy it refers to “that faculty through which instinct and memory were able to make random sense impressions cohere.” According to Ackroyd, it takes further emphasis in More’s writings of a common or universal understanding, implying a shared and traditional substance of belief.  This is strikingly similar to Rosenstock’s insight that common sense is the residue in society of formal language and of ritual.  

More had “an abiding respect for the practice, and a deep admiration for, the principles of law.”  And poetry for him was a particularly affecting form of grammar. To Erasmus, More was ‘a man for all seasons;’ this above all may well remind us of the Cross of Reality. But the phrase could also mean that More was reluctant to reveal himself as the author of his own works. A curious detachment was noted by his son-in-law, who remarked that More “never showed of what mind himself was therein.”

 

Religion and law were, to More, two sides of the same coin—or sword. This is why, according to Ackroyd, More “understood at once the nature of Martin Luther’s heresy, when the German monk spoke of judgment ‘according to love…without any law books.’” More was the first English writer to use the term anarchos, and his most bitter accusation against Luther and his followers was that they “incited disorder.” He believed that the Lutheran attacks on the Pope imperiled the civilization of a thousand years, and he noted sadly that “the festivals and holy days of the ritual year now seem inconceivably remote, so thoroughly has the work of the reformation been done.”  More was a Latinist and wrote a Latin grammar for children in 1497, Lac puerorum, or Milk for Children.  At age nineteen he said that “the declensions of Latin nouns was sometimes compared to the declensions of the soul into the body.”  Amidst the Christian humanists of the Netherlands, “More felt certain of his position in attacking the Scholastic dialectic and reaffirming the importance of rhetoric and grammar for the progress of human understanding.”  

I understand that Rosenstock-Huessy became a Lutheran when he converted to Christianity, but I don’t recall reading anything in his works that addresses Lutheranism in particular, nor why he chose that particular denomination. In one sense, Rosenstock was very much a man of the Reformation – although he spoke highly of Catholicism too.

Valentin Tomberg was born of Lutheran parents in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1900. In 1920 the family fled to Estonia. Tomberg’s mother was killed by revolutionaries – she had left the house, and Valentin found his mother and the family dog tied to a tree, where they had been shot. After this terrible event Tomberg found his way to Europe where he discovered the work  and teaching of Rudolf Steiner. In 1925 he became a member of the Anthroposophical Society, the name that Steiner had given to his body of work. He married a Polish Catholic woman and the couple became the parents of one son, Alexis.  At the end of the Second World War, Tomberg received his Ph.D. in jurisprudence. The title of his thesis was “Degeneration and Regeneration in the Science of Law.”   Tomberg continued to produce original and unusual contributions of spiritual thought and research, a fact which sometimes grated on the Anthroposophical Society leaders. He was asked to leave the Society in 1940. He became a convert to Roman Catholicism. This would further alienate many of the convinced anthroposophists, some of whom had a horror for the ‘exoteric’ Church. But one of Tomberg’s main contentions was that ‘esoteric’ and ‘exoteric’ cannot be separated, for “the spiritual world is essentially moral.”

 

  Valentin Tomberg

 I propose to discuss some of the ideas found in Tomberg’s book, Covenant of the Heart (Element Books).  Tomberg made a comment about Luther: he said that Luther failed to realize that Catholic Christianity brings with it the resurrection of timeless values, that is, philosophical thinking. In Scholasticism (which Luther abhorred) the basic conviction was that a thinking directed toward the world (classical philosophy) and thinking directed toward revelation (Christian) could not contradict one another. “The logic which reveals itself in and through the world can be none other than Logos.” My notes are inadequate here. This point had to await Rosenstock-Huessy for its full articulation as the ‘Grammatical Method.’ Indeed it is quite evident to me that Rosenstock-Huessy’s writings make concrete and utterly ‘present’ what some of the anthroposophical or spiritual thinkers were often trying to express.

 

For example, “the law of repeated awakenings” is revealed in the story of the raising of Lazarus, says Tomberg. For Rosenstock-Huessy, this law is Christianity itself: that death precedes birth. “Spiritual-cultural history” appears for Tomberg as a cross formed out of causality (the horizontal plane) and miracles (the vertical plane).  The miracle appears in the causal sphere and comes from the realm of pure morality, transcending causally conditioned things, i.e., out of the realm of freedom. “For the realm of causality, every miracle is fundamentally an immaculate conception—a conception for which the  Father, the procreator, as effective cause, is not on ‘earth’ but in ‘heaven.’ The immaculate conception and the virgin motherhood of Mary … is like an archetypal phenomenon of all miracles. For it reveals, in the most essential and concise form imaginable, the intrinsic nature of a miracle as a vertical cause in the sphere of horizontally linked cause and effect.”

This is a long way from Rosenstock’s Cross of Reality, but it does have the sense of the fourfold direction and intersecting planes of action. The essence of a miracle is “the reality of the moral world order working down into the reality of the mechanical causal world order—the mystery of ‘becoming.’” In the Creed is the avowal of the miracles of creation, redemption and sanctification of the world.  Faith he defines as “the recognition of the moral world-order and conviction of its primacy over and against the mechanical, causal world-order.” Christianity is not an “ideological superstructure” but a revelation of the moral world order amidst the mechanical-causal world order.

Tomberg believed that the strong movement in the Church for ‘this world’ – to be in the time, with the time, progressive—subjected the Church to the laws of time, indeed, inevitable degeneration, decline, death. This movement came to the fore right after the Second Vatican Council. The “second Pentecostal miracle” hoped and prayed for by the Holy Father was replaced by a policy of keeping in step with the times. The Council became a sort of religious Parliament – not the effect of the Church on the world but that of the world on the Church. Failure to guard the portal which leads to death – Hades – the “way of the world.”

Resurrection is the appearance of the transfigured past, that is, the past that has eternal value. The truth and love of the apostolic era was resurrected and transfigured the religion of Israel and preserved what was of universal value (Catholic).  The second great epoch of Christendom was an impulse foreign to Israel, specifically, renunciation of the world, the solitude of the Desert Fathers. This resurrected what was eternally valid in Eastern religions and yoga.

 My notes do not encompass what could be the third great epoch in Christian history, and I do not recall whether Tomberg addressed this in his book. Perhaps that is the great question of our era, to which we have yet to develop the definitive answer. What will be our synthesis – of Christianity and anti-Christianity (Enlightenment), of imperialism, revolution, technology and modern information sciences?

 I have not been considering grand answers but of births and deaths. Somehow, the answer may lie there: that man is a procreated being, and our appearance on this earth is marked in the succession of generations. Somehow, that answer is so simple, so secret, and yet so open, that it may lie beyond the diabolical plans of Western man to genetically create humans without parents. The question of whether there is to be an answer and whether there is to be a future have become, in effect, a single question.

 Will western humanity renounce the diabolism that currently afflicts our science, our foreign policy, our economic arrangements, and our general outlook towards our life and culture?  To me, that seems to be the question now—not yesterday’s question, nor tomorrow’s—but now. And somehow, I think we must learn how to die in the right way before we can learn to be good stewards again. And I don’t mean by “dying in the right way”  that of allowing our culture to be overrun by immigrants or the moral practices of generations to be trashed. “Dying in the right way” must mean standing up for what is good and just and right. For by doing this we renounce grandiose possibilities and say, “I don’t want it all, I can’t have everything and every choice.” For I am here, now, a particular, limited person and being on a land with limits, traditions, constraints. And this is what I defend. This is the imperative.[See note 3.] That seems to me the “right way of dying” and we need it if Christianity is ever again to transform death into life. 

 

 

---

[1] Reincarnation is mentioned in the New Testament, most notably in connection with John the Baptist, ‘who was Elijah.’  The Western concept of reincarnation has nothing in common with Eastern views, that may include animal incarnations. Most anthroposophical or other ‘esoteric’ writers that I have read simply state that it was not the mission of Jesus Christ to teach reincarnation, but to stress the importance of this life. Thus has the subject been shelved.

[2] I don’t want to be unfair. This is a superficial statement, I realize. Transformation (and self-transformation) is an important part of Anthroposophy. But its significance is blurred, perhaps, because the emphasis in Anthroposophy is on the spiritual world, the Hierarchies (Angels, Archangels, etc) whom Steiner believed to be the real inspirers of history. This supernatural dimension is not present in Rosenstock’s grammatical philosophy, at least not in the same way. The whole sense of impetus is therefore different.

[3] I believe that our imperative demands that we confront the modern ‘gnostic’ doctrine of limitlessness – whether of unlimited immigration, unlimited energy, unlimited military operations, unlimited economic exploitation of earth and resources, unlimited and non-defined gender delusions. This evil doctrine has infected America as with a toxic virus.

You Must Listen

Speech Meditation One

The speech that is being spoken now is crippled. A sick man who limps.  It is a half-full speech, an imitation speech. Men speak but they do not know why they speak. Rather, it is from habit.  They speak because it is customary to speak, to have a gripe or a complaint or an opinion or because they want to shake off the feeling of duty, obligation, unrelieved feelings. Speech runs everywhere, it runs errands, it compares things, it says what, why, how many, how often. Sometimes it even sings songs.

 

But never-- almost never, does a man stand upright by his speech and  say: "This word has made me. I have spoken. And now I must listen."

 

Perhaps only those who keep on  making mistakes in speech -- I don't mean grammar or spelling, I mean they say things that nobody want to hear, things that nobody will credit them for,  they say things that people would rather shun and avoid -- perhaps only those will fully stand alongside their speech and  take the blows that such speech inevitably elicits.

 

Man is formed for speech, formed by speech. But when he no longer forms his speech he begin to lose the outline of his humanity.  He kills the father. 

 

Forming speech, formal speech, alone, cannot save humanity. But its absence threatens  humanity with liquefaction, a merging with matter. It is as if the belly of humanity yawned, glistening, watching itself crawling away into the slime.

 

 

On the Necessity of Formal Speech

In his The Origin of Speech, Rosenstock-Huessy took the question of language out of the province of linguistics and put it squarely in the lap of history—of time, of community-building, of the founding of cities, nations, institutions. Speech is formative, he says, and formal speech is the energy behind the founding of nations, constitutions, cities. It can transform a situation of speechlessness – of  chaos, disorder, trouble, muteness, paralysis, confusion – into a new path to the future. Such speech restores us to ourselves. It renews our faith. It gives us hope. Words matter for the reason that they are neither “natural” nor “instinctive.” If speech were purely an “instinct,” there would never be an elegy, a rite, a liturgy, an initiation. It is thanks to the power of formal speech that man liberates himself from nature and commemorates the important stages of his life: death, birth, baptism, marriage, initiation, commencements, memorials. 

I have been aware of the claims of formal speech for many years, in connection with the writing of poetry. Formal poetry, like formal speech in general, has become nearly extinct. Along with the extinction of poetic form has comes a massive increase in “subjectivist” or “personalist” poetry. Why should there be a correlation between the disappearance of strict form and the rise of a poetry which seems to have less and less to do with public events, history, shared experiences and social facts?  

The answer: because informal speech depends upon formal speech. If there is a deficit of formal speech in society, that would mean that people, missing the public, shared dimension of life, are thrown back into themselves. Issues relating to public memory, social discipline, historical continuity, national community—all of these would be affected by the decline of what used to be known as public speaking.   “We must forget our informal habits when we wish to understand the sublimity, elation, exultation, gravity and precariousness which it takes to speak formally,” says Rosenstock. Such speaking demands risk.  But in a  time when  slogans, clichés, jokes, advertisement ditties, and casual and trivial speech is so prevalent, what’s the risk? “Let it all hang out” and “anything goes” and “whatever”  make a more measured and thoughtful approach seem  antiquated and irrelevant.   

The draining-away of formal speech can be seen in a small example. A friend of mine, a priest, remarked to me that he had called a restaurant to order a pizza. He placed the order and thanked the fellow, who answered, “No problem.” We can ask: how is “no problem”  a substitute for “You’re welcome”? As an alternate, it is confusing, for why would there be any difficulty about ordering a pizza from a pizza restaurant? Wouldn’t one assume that taking orders from customers would be the primary desire of the pizza restaurant?  This incident is a good illustration of Rosenstock’s contention that informal speech depends upon formal speech. “No problem” descended from “You’re welcome”—though the line of descent, as we have said, is unclear, and the meaning, at least in this case,  self-contradictory. But, as Rosenstock put it, “It’s a great day!” depends upon “The heavens declare the glory of God.”  And not the other way around.  

How is formal language called forth? Rosenstock examines pre-linguistic situations that demand to become articulate. “We shall have a science of speech when we have penetrated the hell of non-speech,” he says. And: “…new speech is not created by thinkers or poets but by great and massive political calamities and religious upheavals.” Always, he brings us back to the role of speech in forging a tribe, a nation, a political constitution.  Mankind exists under the perpetual threat of war, crisis, decay and revolution. The breakdown of speech, the inadequacy of speech, the cessation of speech: all of these things portend social upheaval. Faith and credit can only be restored when men stand by their words and act accordingly.  

Some people are beginning to notice that we are not tending to the traditions which the formal language of America’s founding brought into being.  In “A Colossal Wreck: The State of our Presidential Politics,”  DwightLongenecker writes—“Our nation…is broken, battered, and weather-beaten. Why? … if we do not preserve what is best from the past we should not be surprised if the future is even worse. For the better part of the past half-century we have demolished and distorted the morality, the law, the principles, and the faith of our fathers. Now the past being abandoned and broken, the present is our curse.”  

It might be argued, by some, “Well, you are just talking words.” When something is just words, we are not talking about transformative speech. Speech has the power to change us when we have the power to mean what we say and stand by our words and act according to them.  In one of his most beautiful statements,  Rosenstock wrote—“Speech was established to call forth life.”  This is the greater life into which we are born, or rather, initiated.   Rosenstock stresses that the facts of prehistory and anthropology  agree that speech served the function of  bridging the span between the death of one generation and the initiation of the next.  Speech told of predecessors, appointed successors, and  told the story of the tribe. Speech brought man into time, delivering him from being altogether bound to the present moment. Speech is not “natural” in the sense that: the grave = the cradle =  the coffin (e.g. of initiation) =  the altar (e.g. of worship).   Burial, birth, tomb, ritual: all become revealed  through the time-processes of speech. We are human beings because we have knowledge of our predecessors. To the extent that we are willing to become successors, we can play our part in passing on the culture. 

Finally – last but not least – Rosenstock draws attention to the link between formal  speech, the founding and sustenance of the tribal/political community, and what we call “common sense.” Common sense, he says, is what is “precipitated” out of the high speech or “super-sense” of the community. This is a remarkable insight, simple and compelling like his original distinction between formal and informal speech. Truly, the Rosenstockian “speech-thinking” becomes the key to a new sociology, one no longer prone to abstractions, and verifiable and experiential in its nearness and aptness.  For the insight concerning common sense rings true.  One would expect in a frayed community like the United States, that various forms of unbalance, bizarre behaviors,  arbitrary crazes, and the like, would increase.  One could call these kinds of actions a-temporal: they lack the creativity of being in a line of predecessors and successors. It is this breakage in the fabric of historical consciousness which seems so characteristic of life in our “advanced” nation.

But sadly, sometimes it seems that all that’s advancing is the decay.

                                                                  * * * 

Quite amazing, all these insights in just the first forty pages or so of The Origin of Speech.
I intend to go through this book step by step, and will be reporting on my responses in this blog.

 

 

 

Autobiographical Restart

(Originally posted November 26, 2014, on the original "Speech-Singer" website, which has been discontinued. I have renewed the Speech Singer site as a place for poetry. I have added the Comments from the original post to this essay.

I have come to the "speech-thinking"  of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973)  after a long sojourn in other realms, and I want to describe some of these other realms, which continue to be a part of my life. The difference now is that I look at them with the new understandings I have gained through the studying the writings of this remarkable thinker and teacher.  I am now in the process of integrating these insights and elaborating what I have learned into my own version of the Rosenstock work, which I call “speech-singing.” It fits for me not only because I like to sing and do it a lot, but more precisely when and how this singing came to play a part of my life.

My biography begins in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1947. I am grateful for having grown up in Birmingham during the civil rights era. It forms an important part of my book, Stewards of History (Rose Dog Books, 2011). Writing that book was, I felt, my spiritual task. I tell the story of how I came to write it in the book, but it was only later that I understood that task as an imperative of my life. Once I fulfilled it, I could sing. This is what happened.

My Southern background is an important strand of my destiny, and I have often quoted the old saying—“American by birth, Southern by grace of God.” Tracing the spiritual heritage of the South was another theme of my book. A whole history, tradition, and architecture of the Old South, and the social duties incumbent upon this aristocratic tradition, came through my grandparents. This heritage was complicated and challenged by the liberalism of my father, who had graduated from Harvard (1930) and embraced the new gospel of racial equality that was stirring in the South in those days.

I tell  this story in Stewards of History. I did not receive much religious or spiritual instruction from my parents or my environment. My parents went to the Unitarian Church and my father disclaimed any relationship with “Christian supernaturalism.” Yet on a heart level he would speak feelingly of Jesus, and give the blessing at the family dinner table with  simple and genuine conviction.

We are all bundles of contradictions. My father’s one drop of Christianity was sufficient, apparently,  to impel me, years later, into anthroposophy (1972) and still, even later (2006) into Catholicism.

Concerning the first of these: Anthroposophy, or Spiritual Science, is the name given to  the work of

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) and claims to be a path from the spiritual in man to the spiritual in the universe. Steiner believed in the centrality of Jesus Christ and left a creative legacy in many fields, especially education, arts, and agriculture. Rosenstock-Huessy met Rudolf Steiner in 1919. According to Wayne Cristaudo, who wrote me that  

“Rosenstock-Huessy has a few pages on Steiner in Die Hochzeit des Kriegs und der Revolution  (The Wedding of War and Revolution) – perhaps the key sentence is : ‘he is still only a man of spirit/ mind (Geistesmensch)’ and his spirit is a  German/ Goethean  one, a little later he writes for Steiner ‘the more universal one is, the more German’ .  He also says  ‘Steiner is himself a symptom of the disease he wishes to cure.’” [From an email to CJ, Nov. 11, 2014] 

Rosenstock seized upon the chief flaw in Anthroposophy, which is, to my mind, heavy philosophical  Idealism and a tendency to a  lofty and inflated speech that lacks concrete and relational quality. Concerning the German Idealism tradition in philosophy, Rudolf Steiner once remarked, in his Autobiography possibly, although I don’t recall the source—that when he was starting out his mission he was ‘approached’ by an Initiate who told him to cast his teachings in the form of philosophical idealism. Statements of this kind occur frequently in Rudolf Steiner’s works. The claim is made that an initiate, or Higher Being, or member of the Angelic Hierarchies, suggested or dictated a course of action. This makes any argument about it or questioning very difficult. But the fact that there were other philosophical traditions in Germany at the time is attested by the work of Rosenstock-Huessy. And as for casting one’s spiritual research in that form, I can only paraphrase that wonderful and lucid Spaniard, Ortega y Gasset, himself a student of German philosophy of many years’ standing, when he said the main task of philosophy in the 20^th century was the overcoming of idealism.

Despite these flaws of Anthroposophy, I appreciated Rudolf Steiner’s books and lectures about Christianity, which drew me towards a study of the Bible and the Gospels. I published a book on “Biblical epistemology,” actually a study of Genesis, in 2000—Consecrated Venom: The Serpent and the Tree of Knowledge.  In that book I said that there were “two streams” of human development, the genealogical and the metaphysical. We need two legs to walk and both of these streams are inherent and necessary to our life—biology and biography. The genealogical stream is the biological task, the inheritance, which is often intermingled with spiritual and metaphysical elements. My “genealogical” task was fulfilled through my marriage with a man I had met in the Waldorf School movement, a fellow-student of the work of Rudolf Steiner. We became the parents of two wonderful sons. My “metaphysical” task seems to have been the writing of Stewards of History, which was the response to an imperative. Indeed, this interchange between genealogy and metaphysics is characteristic of our ability to walk upright, where the two legs ultimately fuse into the single trunk.

The 'two legs’ of human walking give me an entry point to approach  the Rosenstock idea of the  “Cross of Reality,” which he considered to be the basic paradigm of grammatical man and  which he believed could form the basis for a new sociology.  In my terms,“genealogy” would refer to the past (narrative, narrational), and “metaphysics” the future (imperative).  Rosenstock’s  diagram of the Cross of Reality adds to the “spatial” dimensions of subject-object the temporal dimensions of past- future: 

In his book Practical Knowledge of the Soul, Rosenstock comments that occult and idealist philosophies that posit “mind” as the creative force of the universe “…recognize no ethical constraints as a necessity."   It was this lack in Steiner’s philosophy which was, for me, a continual vexation—a word, I like to think, that carries more soul-force than “objection.” In any case, I objected to it. That, and the need to affirm a Christian community, presence and ritual in my life eventually led me to the Catholic Church. 

I should mention, too, that Anthroposophy has a parallel Christian movement, the Christian Community,  which came about when some Lutheran minister approached Steiner with questions about the renewal of Christianity. The Christian Community Press, Floris Books, published my book on Genesis, and I was inspired by several books on Christianity by Emil Bock notably his The Three Years: The Life of Christ Between Baptism and Ascension and The Genesis of History. Our sons were baptized in the Christian Community. Nevertheless, where worship is concerned, I remain a conservative and traditionalist at heart, and believe that the strength, broad numbers and historical endurance of Catholicism is essential in order to effect some kind of Christian leverage upon society. 

What is essential is to maintain a vital community over time. Certainly Catholicism has been historically tempted by political power, and never more than in the present day, when so-called “free market neoliberalism” has lured many Catholics into betraying the social and economic teachings of the Church. That, and the warmongering neoconservatives and the  ultra-left sexual liberationists—these groups have nearly done in the Church. But I believe it holds the secret of death and resurrection still. I see no other force in society with even a hope of restraining a State that has lost all restraint and constitutionalism. 

So I entered the Catholic church in 2006, maybe because, in moving to Philadelphia from Birmingham in 2002, I came to a city that yet possessed something of a residual Catholic culture. When I first moved here, I was occupied by Quakerism, that archetypal symbol of Philadelphia. But I left when I realized that Quakerism, while it might be good for adults, did not seem able to pass on a culture to the children. The question of the passing on of the culture was foremost in my mind in those days, when I still had some hopes of the paleoconservative wing of the Republican party—anti-war, anti-Empire, anti-abortion, etc. Alas, like so many other hopes, paleoconservatism died when Russell Kirk died.  His clear-sighted warnings about excessive American involvement with Israel have been swept under the rug by the people today who consider themselves ‘conservative.’ Sometimes, these are the most rabid Zionists.

So here I am: knocking at the door of Rosenstock-Huessy’s legacy, the community that stands to guard and extend his work, and his insights. I realize that, on some issues, I am not in agreement with Rosenstock-Huessy or some of his followers. So my motto might be:
I go my own way, but I come to you. It expresses, to me, the need for unconditional liberty of thought along with the equally absolute need for community and trust and love.

Additional Notes:

The Cross of Reality: Clinton Gardner sums up very eloquently the significance of the Rosenstockian Cross of Reality: “…it is the method of speech that is made visible  on the Cross of Reality. Indeed, that cross is best understood as a dynamic model of just how speech works in us. It shows us that we live in an infinitely richer realm than that described to us by natural science or by most traditional theology. We are neither the cold observers of the world outside us nor the faithful children of a God above. Instead, we live at the heart of reality. We are the agents for the evolution as well as the revolution of matter and spirit…spirit is audible; it is the higher kind of human speech. And such speech does not have an infinite variety of forms. . . there are only four basic kinds of speech, and they move us through the four stages of any significant experience: Imperative…Subjective…Narrative…Objective… Those four stages of any memorable experience are universal and inevitable for all of us. As we move through them, we are conjugated into those four different grammatical persons: thou (you), I, we, he or she.” (Beyond Belief: Discovering Christianity’s New Paradigm, White River Press, 2008, pp. 57-58.

Question: Why is the overcoming of philosophical idealism important? Part of the problem is the word ‘ideal’ means not only ‘pertaining to ideas, thinking’ but also ‘best’ or ‘of highest quality.’ This bias in our language is very telling, suggesting that the world of thinking and ideas is better than the living and actual world. Idealism tends to equate Reality with thinking. Or as Ortega y Gasset puts it, in his What Is Philosophy?(1960)---“In the idealist thesis the ‘I,’ the self, the subject, swallows the outside world, In this process of ingurgitation the self has swollen. The idealist self has become a tumor; we must operate on it…[For] idealism has reached the point where it smothers the sources of vital energies and weakens the springs of living…[it is] an insistent pedagogue trying to make it quite clear to us that to live spontaneously was to suffer an error, an optical illusion.” This last sentence perfectly describes many anthroposophists I have known. I met one of them at a conference. He came whistling up the road, and later apologized for his “spontaneous” act.

 

A little thinking is sufficient to perceive what unlimited tyranny is wielded by  what may first appear clothed in the most innocent philosophy. At the very least it tends to stifle feelings of gratitude for nature and the institutions of society as they have existed and come down to us. So far, the environmental movement has pushed back against some of the assumptions which give fuel to the mania of redesigning organisms and natural systems.  But society and social customs remain firmly in the grip of those who would abolish the customs and constraints of manners and law in the name of “liberty.” It is good to recall Edmund Burke’s warning against such do-gooders (virtue-crusaders): “The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: We ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints.” (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, p. 91)

_____________________________________

And....Ortega’s comment that “time is quite literally a task, a mission, an innovation,” is quite close to Rosenstock’s imperative. Thus “the superseding of idealism is the great intellectual task, the high historic mission of our era, the ‘theme of our time.’ …To try to move beyond idealism is by no means a frivolous idea; on the contrary it is to accept the problem of our time, to accept our destiny.” 

Finally, a Latin motto! Friends of ERH may apply to Edward Casey for an appropriate translation, should they come up with a suitable personal motto. I am grateful now to have a Latin motto for my crest: Viam propriam prosequar sed ad vos versus—‘I go my own way, but I come to you!’

Additional Postscript (February 26, 2016) Rosenstock-Huessy came to the United States from Germany in 1933. He had a teaching post at Harvard. That formidable institution didn't know what to make of the man-- someone who believed in the power of God in history! What an outrage to secular sensibility. They moved him from philosophy or sociology, or whatever he was hired to teach,  into Theology. In any case, he didn't stay long.  Rosenstock left Harvard after two years, having gained an appointment at Dartmouth where he had a long and distinguished career.  

My father graduated from Harvard in 1930. What if he had encountered Eugen Rosenstock back in his Harvard years?  They only missed being there at the same time by a few years. What if, in some philosophy class,  he had encountered Rosenstock's vital Christianity, about the capacity to step into a new future? Would it have made a difference to the later aloneness he felt as the civil rights movement unfolded in Birmingham---and the aftermath of all that, which left him even more isolated and self-doubting?

 "What-if" stories can remind us that history, biography, the course of events are, after all, human creations. I sometimes think that one's sense of "what-is"-- the realistic attitude--can best be developed by also cultivating "What-if"--the courage to imagine, to cherish uncommon vision.

The Grammar of Morality

 

It is always an interesting exercise to read things written in the world which in some manner either anticipate  Rosenstock’s grammatical perspective, or could be made immensely more fruitful by the study of same. Philip Gorski, a professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale, has published a review, “Where do morals come from?” -- the book, by Webb Keane,  is entitled Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social History (Princeton, 2015).  The book argues that “the basic structures of human interaction” provide a variety of what he calls “ethical affordances.” This is a fancy term for 2^nd and 3^rd person perspectives. In other words, grammatical language provides the context for two or more persons to engage in “joint attention,” that is, share interest and activity in something.  “As a linguistic anthropologist, Keane is especially interested in the ethical affordances created by human language,” comments Gorski. Language, he thinks, “probably first evolved as a means of coordinating action, rather than labeling things.”

 

So far so good. At least we are in the realm of action and social relations. But then academic-speak takes over when Keane “puts particular stress on abstraction and generalization,”  a capacity which can be used “to formulate rules, maxims and codes of behavior.” 

Somehow it is hard for me to picture our cave-man ancestors sitting around formulating rules and codes of behavior.  And  there is nothing that approaches Rosenstock’s striking distinction between formal and informal language, which in my view is the sine que non of any further progress in the field of language. Apparently Keane does acknowledge that most of our repertory of moral response is shaped by emotions, gestures, rituals, etc.  But then these concessions to reality are stated, in Gorski’s review, in the context of a politically-correct discussion of homosexuality and feminism. It seems almost impossible nowadays to escape this kind of harangue disguised as academic reporting. It is especially unfortunate because Gorski’s review, and what I gather of Keane’s book as well, both contain many potential links to Rosenstock’s great insights on language and culture, as described in his book The Origin of Speech.  

The question of reductionism is also hard to avoid. Keane has an interesting fourfold-theory of society, which Gorski describes as:

 

physiological

 psychological

 sociological

anthropological

 

Gorski comments that “each emerges out of the other.” But then he appears to contradict this, when he says that “contra the current rage for reduction, in which all action is bottom-up, Keane assumes that higher levels can exert ‘downward causation’ on lower ones.”  But how is this possible, if all levels emerge from the lowest one? 

 

And, dear Reader, what, pray, is once more placed before our minds as an example?  I hate to say it, but it is feminism.  How I amaze, being such an anti-feminist female. Nevertheless I would argue that feminism has virtually nothing to do with ethical transformation, being the result of the propaganda of cultural Marxism, and therefore representing cultural regress. More precisely, to the extent that feminism was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, which in effect destroyed the home and women's important economic role, it was both needed and understandable. But modern feminism has long since lost its bearings of home and family. It became a pawn in the hands of cultural Marxism--ironically to the furtherance of capitalism and the economization of all of society.

 

(An aside to the reader: my anti-feminism is based upon my perception that feminism is actually anti-woman, not to mention anti-male and anti-family. It is an ideology for atoms, not for human beings. I am inclined to agree with Ferdinand Lundberg’s remark, in his  Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, that “Psychologically, feminism had a single objective: the achievement of maleness by the female, or the nearest possible approach to it.”  I am a disciple of strong, gentle and confident womanhood. I make this detour for the sake of attempting to mollify the two academic gentlemen, since I would like them both to know of my (generally positive) response to Keane’s book and Gorski’s  review of it.)  

Another example of Keane’s almost-hitting-the-Rosenstockian-target can be found in his “three moments” of the ethical life: “I,” “thou,” and “me.”  Gorski describes these three moments as follows: 

“The ‘I’ moment is unthinking action where consciousness is submerged in doing. The ‘thou’ moment is empathic projection where ego imagines the perspectives of alter. And the ‘me’ moment is critical observation of the self where ego looks at herself through eyes of the generalized other. Perhaps we should also add a fourth moment, a historical moment in which ego considers past actions, interactions, and selves as a prelude to further action. We could call that ‘we.’”  

Ah—the Cross of Reality!—almost. But one is tempted to say that a miss is a good as a mile. Modern self-centeredness intrudes in the doubling of the first person, and there is no inkling of the imperative, the true significance of ‘thou’ or ‘you,’ and indeed the engine and motive-force of all action.  But there is, nevertheless, the seed of the Cross of Reality struggling out of this embryonic confusion, and that much is in itself remarkable.

 ________________________________

Note:  see essay, “Speech as Our Matrix: Discovering the Cross of Reality,” by Clinton C. Gardner, to be posted to this blog with the permission of Mr. Gardner. This essay is an excellent introduction to the work of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. A brief excerpt from Mr. Gardner's essay: 

“. . . the Cross of Reality is not some elaborate metaphysical concept but simply a commonsense way to interpret any experience. In fact, a person who uses common sense already interprets his or her life and history this way, from the four perspectives that the cross shows us. In other words, the cross simply codifies common sense. Unfortunately, huge numbers of people, probably the great majority—be they ideologues, fascists, or communists (all stuck on the “glorious future” front), fundamentalists (stuck on the past front), sentimentalists and pietists (stuck on the subjective front), or even rationalists (stuck on the objective front)—are not guided by common sense.”

Postscript February 22, 2016

I sent email notification of this piece to both Professor Gorski and Professor Keane. Professor Keane sent me back a “Thank you.” I appreciated hearing from him and I began to think that my little piece had done his book an injustice, and I wrote him back

“–Dear Mr. Keane, It was nice of you to write. I did not do justice to your book at all. I ask you to forgive my half-assed effort. I will want to read your book as I believe it contains genuine insights. Kind regards …”

I can see how my reaction against feminism prejudiced my view of his book. Yet in re-reading Gorski’s review,  I see that Gorski cites Keane himself who deployed the model of “feminist consciousness-raising” to describe ethical transformation. In that sense, if I objected to feminism, I objected to something the author of the book himself was promoting. 

We need a new concept for “time decay.” Something like this is used in the vocabulary of atomic explosion, fission, “half-life.” Time decay might be thought of as the disparity between the justification for a creed or an ideology and its lapse into toxic decay. There was a justification for a woman’s movement as a result of the Industrial Revolution, when the home was stripped of its economic function. Am I saying that women belong in the home? Not at all. There was a need for creative thinking about work outside the home, but in such a way to maintain the roles of parents and families. None of this “social thinking” was done. The home was wrecked, children were de-parented or became wards of the state. Are not World Wars one and two the fruit of this social chaos—that and other things?
Quite possibly.[1]  

No doubt I could have done better.  So it was good I apologized. Nevertheless, my reaction had something  good about it as well.  Toxic things need to be fumigated. And there is no good holding on to them when their time is expired. The ability to act and react decisively is given to those for whom “the time presses” –those who perceive the nature of the crisis in which we live.

 

 

 

 

 

---

.
[1] Rosenstock put the matter somewhat differently in his Out of Revolution (1938) where he speaks of the incoherence of modern knowledge-- history, nature, physics, theology-- "nothing but a breakdown of civilization could be expected from a kingdom so terribly divided against itself.'  Elsewhere, more cogently to my point, he says: "Capitalism can make profits only so long as it can escape the cost of reproducing the political and social order." It is this "reproduction" of the social order that had been the especial province of women, and which modern women have abandoned largely thanks to feminism.
 

Speech As Our Matrix (Parts 1 - 2)

Reprinted to this blog with the permission of Mr. Gardner. There may be some slight editing for space considerations.

 

SPEECH AS OUR MATRIX:

Discovering the Cross of Reality

 

Clinton C. Gardner

 

I. INTRODUCTION

Beloved by many generations of Dartmouth students, who recorded and published his lectures, and also kept his books in print, the social philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973), has yet to be welcomed by the academic establishment. He himself predicted that it would be 30 years or more, after his death, before this might occur. I have often thought of him as a latter-day Kierkegaard (1813-1855), who was “discovered” and celebrated as the father of existentialism in the 1920s, some 70 years after his death.
 
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973), has yet to be welcomed by the academic establishment. He himself predicted that it would be 30 years or more, after his death, before this might occur. I have often thought of him as a latter-day Kierkegaard (1813-1855), who was “discovered” and celebrated as the father of existentialism in the 1920s, some 70 years after his death.

This essay will introduce the reader to what I consider the heart of Rosenstock-Huessy’s work: his “discovery” of what he called “the Cross of Reality,” and the related disclosure that “spirit,” which has usually been thought of as ethereal, can now be recognized as our gift of speech.

Born into a Jewish banker’s family in Berlin, Rosenstock-Huessy became a Christian at age 18. Indeed, he became a remarkably-engaged Christian, as we shall see.

Martin Marty, the prominent US historian of religion, has long hailed Rosenstock-Huessy’s work. In a Christian Century book review, Marty described Rosenstock-Huessy as a thinker “ahead of his time,” one who managed to write about Christianity “without old-line appeal to transcendence.”

The poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973) wrote a foreword for one of Rosenstock-Huessy’s books, saying “I have read everything by him that I could lay my hands on,” and closed by citing Rosenstock-Huessy’s motto, Respondeo etsi mutabor (I respond although I will be changed), then adding, “Speaking for myself, I can only say that, by listening to Rosenstock-Huessy, I have been changed.”

The distinguished Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965) wrote: “The historical nature of man is the aspect of reality about which we have been basically and emphatically instructed in the epoch of thought beginning with Hegel....Rosenstock-Huessy has concretized this teaching in so living a way as no other thinker before him has done.”

Other prominent thinkers who have admired Rosenstock-Huessy’s work include the theologians Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Harvey Cox, as well as the sociologist David Riesman and the social critic Lewis Mumford.

   A likely reason for Rosenstock-Huessy’s long-delayed recognition by academe is that his work bridged so many different disciplines. He was a social philosopher and sociologist, a historian and a religious thinker, yet a scholar whose longest book, Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts (The Speech of Humankind) was on the origins and meaning of language. As if that were not enough, he described Academe as the enemy—and urged that it get out of its ivory tower. To do that, he suggested that higher education should incorporate a year of service within its four-year term. Finally, a likely reason for his obscurity is that his “new version of Christianity,” a Christianity that was this-worldly, even secular, kept intruding into his historical and sociological works.

In this essay I will attempt to explicate and applaud those intrusions—because they serve Rosenstock-Huessy’s  goal of presenting our reality “whole” again, before it was divided into the several realms of the hard sciences, the social sciences,  the humanities, and religion. In other words, I will show how he pursued his aim of “realigning” all our fields of knowledge—so that natural science would no longer seem their base, as it has seemed since Descartes (1596-1650).

 Specifically, I will describe what Rosenstock-Huessy called “the Cross of Reality,” an image which shows us how all our knowledge—from the most material of physics to the most spiritual of religion—can be seen as related and forming a whole. Thus, I will be challenging the current trend in intellectual life, in which knowledge has seemed to become increasingly fragmented. I will be arguing that our experience of speech is the glue which holds us together—and that this experience can be seen as the action of spirit in us, in both the secular and religious senses. In sum, speech is our matrix, and the Cross of Reality depicts that matrix.

As if that were not enough for a shortish essay I will endeavor to show how the Cross of Reality points us to a new method for the social sciences, a more universal method than the one disclosed, for the natural sciences, by Descartes and Galileo (1564-1642).  

Before I begin that task, I should introduce myself. I was one of those Dartmouth students who have worked to preserve Rosenstock-Huessy’s legacy. In fact, I have written introductions to two of his books, as well as three books about his work. With his blessing. I founded a little company, Argo Books, which published many of his unpublished manuscripts—and kept all his English works in print. From the outset, I operated Argo Books with the support of Rosenstock-Huessy’s distinguished friend Freya von Moltke.

The text which follows first saw the light of day at a June 2014 conference held at Renison University College, Waterloo, Ontario. Canada. Most of it was drawn from my several books on Rosenstock-Huessy’s work. As of October 2014, it still needs an appended section of notes.

II. THE CROSS OF REALITY 

Ever since he introduced the Cross of Reality, in his 1925 Soziologie, Rosenstock-Huessy has kept that image central to his varied works on history, society, and religion. It is important to note that this cross is not a religious image; it is not the Cross of Christ. Rosenstock-Huessy’s Dartmouth classes made clear that the Cross of Reality was grounded in our everyday experience of secular life. This is evident in my classroom note, from the spring of 1941, which follows:

                                                            

Rosenstock-Huessy says we are all crucified in a Cross of Reality on which we have to face backward to the past, forward to the future, inward toward our selves, and outward toward the world. He brings this cross image to life, not as an abstract idea, not as his idea, but as a new model of the human reality, a model which he invites us to discover with him. When he diagrams the cross on a blackboard, he makes a horizontal line for its time axis, then a vertical line to represent the space axis. This visual depiction becomes an icon for all his students, an icon of our human predicament—and our potential.

Since each of us lives at the center of this cross, our lives are crucial, not only for ourselves but for all humankind. We are constantly torn between the need to be true to the achievements of past time and the need to respond to the new callings of the future. Similarly, on the space axis of our lives, we are constantly trying to relate our personal, subjective inner space to the objective demands of the outer world, the space around us.

     This model applies not only to each person but to any group, even to a nation.

   The Cross of Reality, showing that times are as important as spaces, corrects the scientific subject-object model of reality, the Cartesian model (cogito ergo sum), which is merely spatial, and enlarges on its limited method. All these relationships become clear when Rosenstock-Huessy diagrams the cross on the blackboard:  

                                                             

                                                 

      When the social sciences were born, through Auguste Comte (1798-1857), to make themselves respectable, they adopted the objective methodology of the natural sciences. Measurements and statistics became their tools, just as they had been for the natural sciences.  Rosenstock-Huessy does not suggest that the social sciences abandon measurements and statistics; rather that objectivity should become only one of the four ways we investigate any question that involves the human being in society. In other words, the Cross of Reality is a model that can be turned into a method for sociology—and all the human sciences     

      A few months after I wrote that note, in June of 1941 I found myself in Tunbridge, Vermont as a member of Camp William James, a project which had begun through the efforts of Rosenstock-Huessy students. With the endorsement of President Roosevelt, the camp had started as an experimental camp within the Civilian Conservation Corps, with about 15 members from the regular CCC and about 10 recent graduates of Dartmouth and Harvard. In my diary, I wrote the following note which explained the camp in terms of the four fronts shown on the Cross of Reality—future time, the inner space of the self, past time, and the outer world:     

                                                                                                                                                        

First, we came to Camp William James because we heard a calling toward the future. We wanted to create a new institution, a period of all-out service as part of all young people’s education. It would be the CCC plus Dartmouth and Harvard, an entirely new combination. It’s a breaking-away from the ivory tower of academe into the problems and life of a real community. We heard another calling toward the future when we sent a group to Mexico to help rebuild the town of Colima—recently flattened in an earthquake. This second calling makes clearer that we’re engaged in a “moral equivalent of war,” not just planting trees or helping some farmers. Second, we’re creating our own inner space within the farm building, our headquarters. Of course, it’s also the inner space of our group, the community we have formed here. Third, we have the experience of being connected with past time, with the ongoing life of a rural town whose roots go back for many generations. We go to square dances where the calling is in an Elizabethan style that’s died out in England. Quite a contrast with the rootless suburbs of New York or the slums of New Haven, both places where many of us grew up. Fourth, we are getting national publicity through stories in the Boston Globe and the New York Times. This makes our little inner group known to the outer world, objectively, with both good and bad consequences. It has helped recruiting, but it’s also what led to our losing federal funding. In Congress we were attacked as just another New Deal boondoggle—and had to close our CCC “side-camp” in Sharon. To sum up, the camp has provided each of us with a more intense experience of life, a more crucial experience, than we’d get in any ordinary college year. We have come to see that a period of such service, when integrated into one’s education, would show its participants how we all live historically, drawn toward the past and the future.




I think this note about the camp makes clear that the Cross of Reality is not some elaborate metaphysical concept but simply a commonsense way to interpret any experience. In fact, a person who uses common sense already interprets his or her life and history this way, from the four perspectives that the cross shows us. In other words, the cross simply codifies common sense. Unfortunately, huge numbers of people, probably the great majority—be they ideologues, fascists, or communists (all stuck on the “glorious future” front), fundamentalists (stuck on the past front), sentimentalists and pietists (stuck on the subjective front), or even rationalists (stuck on the objective front)—are not guided by common sense.









In 1942 I’d left Camp William James to serve four years in the army. Returning to Dartmouth in 1946, I majored in Philosophy because I wanted to concentrate on Rosenstock-Huessy’s work. The note below is from a course in which he described how humankind had been formed by four quite different kinds of speech, as portrayed on the Cross of Reality:


Universal History

During some 40,000 years before Christ, tribal speech, with its totems and taboos, had oriented us to our ancestors, to the narrative of our past.

Then, in the great empires, such as China and Egypt, already flourishing by 3000 BC, the speech of the temple oriented us to the stars, the rivers, and the fields, the universe of nature, the world outside us.

By 600 BC Greek speech had begun to orient us to our inner selves, through poetry and philosophy.

During that same millennium before Christ, the speech of Israel emerged, orienting us to our future by way of prayer and prophecy.

With the coming of the Christian era, those four ancient modes of speech were fused. After Christ we no longer felt bound by a single orientation. We were no longer simply Greek or Jew, Egyptian or tribesman. For 2,000 years now, we have been moving steadily toward spiritual unity, as we have become increasingly able to articulate all four forms of speech.

Four great types of civilization had reached dead ends at Year Zero of our common era. Christ and his apostles came at the right time. They translated those dead ends into new beginnings, becoming in effect the narrow part of the tube in the hourglass of history. Since that center-time, human history has become one story.

                                                          

            Another course of Rosenstock-Huessy’s was based on his magnum opus Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man. Here he was not explicit about the Cross of Reality orientations, but it seemed clear to me that they undergirded his message. Thus, my summary of the book was as follows:

      Western History         

Just as he tells pre-Christian history in terms of four kinds of speech, so Rosenstock-Huessy sees these four kinds of speech given different emphases in each of the great Western revolutions. The imperatives established in the first millennium of the Christian era made all those revolutions necessary, from what he calls the “Papal Revolution” of the high Middle Ages to the Russian Communist revolution of our own time. Each of these six great revolutions had different orientations and impulses, but they all sought to remake the whole world:

 

1. The Papal Revolution, begun by Pope Gregory in 1076, had a messianic orientation toward the future. It was the first global revolution—and that planetary purpose was repeated in all its successors. Its new speech, the language of theology, with Anselm’s credo ut intelligam (I believe so that I may understand) was first heard in the new institution of universities.

 

2. The German Reformation, begun by Luther in 1517, emphasized our inner conscience, and its greatest new institution was public education. It saw the Bible translated into local languages and introduced the priesthood of all believers, thereby ending the central power of the church. In fact, it began the process of secularization (particularly visible in the emergence of secular art).

 

3. The British Parliamentary or Puritan Revolution (1649-1688) celebrated the laws and traditions of the past. Its new institutions were parliaments and the rule of law. Power was no longer in the hands of the nobility but turned over to the gentry—the Christian gentlemen.

 

4. The French Revolution (1789) focused on the outer front, where reason and objectivity hold sway. For the first time, the lowly bourgeoisie, the common man, was fully      empowered. National literatures and arts, as well as newspapers, appeared. Freed from religion, all the sciences began to flourish. So did capitalism!  

 

          5. The American Revolution (1776) was a happy combination of impulses from both the

    French and the British. It gave them an additional impetus, as they spread over the new

   continent.

 

   6. Finally, the Russian Revolution (1917) turned into a rather unhappy combination of

  future messianism with the new language of objectivity. Still, it was a needed corrective to

  unbridled capitalism’s exploitation of labor. Indeed, its new imperative was freedom from

  economic exploitation. Rosenstock-Huessy wrote that the New Deal, with Social Security,

 the WPA, etc., would have been unthinkable without the preceding communist revolution.

 

            In The Christian Future, Rosenstock-Huessy saw all these six revolutions, and the two World Wars contributing to what he called today’s “Great Society,” the global society that he described as “heiress of state and church.”  This explains why he said that “Christianity is not a religion.” In light of the history told in Out Of Revolution, Christianity was more important in changing secular society than it was as a religion.