[This
is a portion of an essay published by CJ on Rosenstock-Huessy in the June,
2016, issue of Culture Wars magazine, South Bend, Indiana. It has been
lightly edited.]
“War and marriage are the two
cornerstones of serious life with which we cannot experiment.”
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
could not have foreseen the awful and ironic resonance his words would have for
us today. Born July 6, 1888, in Berlin, Eugen Rosenstock grew up in an
assimilated German Jewish family. (Upon his marriage to Margrit Huessy, in the
Swiss custom he added her name to his.) At about age 17 he became a Christian.
Of scholarly bent and with an aptitude for languages,[1]
Rosenstock received his doctorate in law, and later in philosophy, and became a
professor of medieval constitutional law. In the First World War he was an
office in the German army. The war experience shook him to his roots and he
believed that “never again can we do things the same way” again. The appearance
of a new imperative in individual or social life became an important theme of
his writings. “The future is reached by
imperatives,” he wrote. And in his book The
Christian Future (1946), in response to William James’ 1910 call for the
“moral equivalent of war,” he wrote that “When a new imperative is given and
goes unheeded, the results are much worse than they were in the days before the
new way into the future was proclaimed.” For James’ call went unheeded and was
followed by two devastating world wars. [2]
In 1933 Rosenstock
emigrated to the U.S. He had a teaching post at Harvard. It was not a
successful match because Rosenstock had a way of taking God’s presence in
history seriously, and Harvard didn’t know what to do with that. They stowed
him away in the theology department for a while. Not long, because he found a
better position at Dartmouth, where he
would sometimes ride to his classes on horseback and where he taught until his
retirement in 1957. He gained a devoted following amongst his former students,
some of whom have recorded and transcribed his lectures, published his works in
English, or translated some from the German, and established societies and
conferences for the dissemination of his ideas.
This brief biographical
sketch barely suffices to introduce one of the more interesting thinkers of our
time. I had stumbled upon The Christian Future some time ago
and used a quote from it for my book, Stewards of History.[3]
There, apparently, the matter rested for some years. I don’t recall what it
was that sparked my interest to find out more about this author. But I did some
internet research, eventually became a member of the Rosenstock-Huessy Society
and started this blog in response to his work.
What is it about
Rosenstock’s thought that inspired my interest and the devotion of so many of
his former students and colleagues? The short answer is that Rosenstock’s
“speech-thinking” affirmed and renewed the
Logos – the Word from the beginning. And further, he found a new home for the
Logos, so to speak. It is grammar, which can become the method for a new understanding
of social relations. “The fundamental classifications of grammar and the
fundamental classifications of social relations coincide,” he wrote.[4]
But there were other insights,
extraordinary in their simple and compelling nature. Most striking among these
was his distinction between formal and informal speech – a distinction I have
not read in any other commentator on language. But it seems evident that while communication
exists among bees and dolphins, and indeed the language of the quantum says
that intercommunication is a property of universal life and matter. But only
human beings bestow proper names and possess formal speech. The informal and the
casual depend upon the formal and the specified. Thus, “new speech is not
created by thinkers or poets but by great and massive political calamities and
upheavals.” “What a great day!”
Rosenstock says, depends upon “The
heavens declare the glory of God.” And:
“…we shall have a science of speech or of language as soon as we have
penetrated to the hell of non-speech.”[5]
Rosenstock had high
words of praise for the Catholic liturgy. While not himself Catholic, he was
sometimes considered Catholic in attitude, and collaborated with Joseph Wittig,
a priest and author, in the writing of his three-volume Der Alter der Kirche (The Age
of the Church – not yet translated.) [6]
In writing of the liturgy, Rosenstock
commented: “It always has aroused my
attention that the preface of the Christian Mass, which is one of the most
perfect documents of human speech,
should begin with adjectives and, what is more, with a considerable list
of adjectives. It runs: Vere dignum et
justum est, aequum et salutare, nos tibi semper et ubique gratias agere, Domine
sancte... This prayer … is historical and adjectival language at its apex.
… in the perfect form of one special style.” [7]
Christianity, and
specifically Catholic Christianity, has historically been the vehicle of the
Logos.[8] In its classical meaning Logos means ‘word,
speech, reason, proportion, intelligence, measure, means,’ etc. In the Gospel
of John, Christ is the Logos: the Word became flesh. A contemporary definition
of the Logos was offered by the reviewer of E. Michael Jones’s book, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, and
published in a letter to Culture Wars:
the Logos “…[is] the rational universal order, personified in Jesus Christ,
incorporating the earthly political and social order that He embodied in his
human nature…” [9]. I
would like to offer a slightly different characterization: Logos is how we
become cognizant of the realm of moral intelligence. This moral intelligence may be seen in a
threefold dimension, including the physical, [10]
comprising the intelligence or laws of nature, the best practices of society
which foster civilization and productivity, and the means of intercommunion or
communication between the two. In a
manner of speaking this threefold description is a restatement of the Trinity:
the realm of the Father being the Law, the realm of the Son being Society, and
the realm of communication being the province of the Holy Spirit. Man
participates in the Logos by means of language, specifically grammatical
language. Semantics, meaning, symbolism, biology, genetics: all these play a
role in language. But it is actually by
means of grammar that we become oriented in
space and time, society and world. [11]
How, then, does
Rosenstock elaborate the Logos of grammar? He diagrams the persons of grammar
(you, I, he, she, it, etc.) in what he calls the “Cross of Reality,” first adding
to the spatial continuum of the Cartesian Subject-Object (inner space of
self-consciousness and external objectified space) with a temporal axis embracing Future and
Past. The temporal axis has, as its future pole, the Imperative voice (addressed to You: “You must do this!”
“Sing to the goddess, O Muse, of the
wrath of Achilles!”) which is the grammatical person that demands action and creates future. At the
other end of the temporal pole is the ‘We’—the narrative mode, historical
remembrance, and ritual -- the community remembering, consecrating and
commemorating. The spatial and temporal dimensions form the intersecting poles
of the Cross.
It is thus that we are
conjugated through our human experience: first as “You,” then, thanks to being spoken to, enjoying the privileges of
individual self-consciousness (“I”)
then as part of a larger community (“We”)
and finally, as possessors of “It” – facts,
experiences, discoveries, statistics. “Its” are the indicatives; they have been
“indicated,” decided, and accounted for. In this manner human life represents
and re-enacts this conjugal relation of grammar. Perhaps it is this idea that
underlies the significance of marriage, and war, for the serious life. The fact
that today virtually everything in
America has become unserious, if not unhinged, underscores the promiscuous
nature of our wars and the dissolving character of our marriages.
Rosenstock’s Cross of
Reality
Grammatical
health, Rosenstock believed, comes from being able to circulate fully among the
four grammatical poles and to do justice
to each of them. In this respect America is seriously unbalanced. We certainly have
no deficit of the “I”—the “selfie” pole. Nor any deficit with “it.” Indicative, that is, scientific
and factual statements, are for the most
part the only kinds of statements considered true. Where we have deficits is in
the cross pole, Future and Past, Imperative and Remembrance. For example, in
2013 Patrick Smith published Time No
Longer: Americans after the American Century, which argued that we can no longer afford to
indulge the idea of American exceptionalism.
It has been the ideology of incessant and ruinous wars and has fostered
a spirit of national complacency regarding our politics, schools and quality of
life. Has anyone noticed? Have there been any effects from this book? Aside from a few reviews here and there, the
book disappeared without a sound. But the pattern repeats itself again and
again. For a nation that prides itself on progress and innovation, the United
States is remarkably resistant to dynamic change. This provides an illustration
for Chesterton’s quip, that to have anything sudden, you must have something
eternal. It is the deficiency in history, in historical memory, that leads to a
kind of hermetic stagnation – an inability to hear, to act, and to change
appropriately. Rosenstock often alluded
to a kind of “presentism” in the United States:
“The power to connect more than one generation is not given in
nature. In 1702 Cotton Mather complained
that America was in danger of res unius
aetatis, a matter of one age, and by 1922 Chesterton thought so again. The
U.S. has always had trouble living in many generations. ..” [12]
“Presentism” may indicate a stagnation of history, a
breakdown of the full circulation of the Cross of Reality. To have history, three
generations are necessary. And the Christian story – death precedes birth – is the paradigm of dynamic change. Is not an accident that the word “paradigm”
is a term of grammar specifically, though it is often used as a synonym for
“structure.” We must let the idea of American exceptionalism die. Then, in a
mood of repentance, we can move forward. But I don’t see the possibility of
that happening any time soon.
It can be beneficial to
look back on the course of one’s life, noting the imperatives in particular.
How often it is that it is through the sense of urgent having-to-do something, we
have learned to know ourselves. From
such moments that we have spun our destiny, if we were able to wait and to
suffer with the threads we hold. That waiting and suffering is important, for Rosenstock noted that the great temptation of
our time is impatience: “We seem unwilling to pay the price of living with our
fellows in creative and profound relationships…To be non-committal means to
keep all relations without important consequences, to rob them of their
reproductive, fruit-bearing quality.” [13]
What is unique in Rosenstock’s thinking is the emphasis upon fruitfulness. This concern distinguishes
his approach from Western rationalism’s search for truth. It also divides him
from the academics who, once they forsook truth, did not find the way to
fruitfulness but instead to power, celebrity, and influence, hatching numerous
academic fads along the way. .
We can only out-think
and out-argue this system by finding the words that will awaken the “You” in
the human heart. We must awaken conscience through living streams of words. For
man alienated from commanding language becomes a beast—or worse. He becomes a
heartless predator. But productivity and fruitfulness stand at the gates
of the language of good will, the speech that has
responsibility for truth and for the future. If we cannot awaken language at
this level we will have no future. For “the flow of vital speech is the sign of
living Christians…A Spirit of Pentecost has become our immediate political
necessity.” [14] We are buried under words today, counterfeit
speech—slogans, advertising, political harangues paid for by professional
agitators. Have we lost the ability to participate in genuine speech?
Rosenstock’s writings provide an important source for social awakening. To be
able to respond to genuine speech, to generate it and participate in it: this
is our human necessity, and if we lose this, we lose our humanity.
[1]
He was apparently proficient in Gothic, Latin, Greek, Lithuanian, Russian,
Polish, Czech, Serbian, Celtic, Armenian, Persian, Sanskrit, Icelandic,
Swedish, Danish, Dutch, French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese,
and all other Indo-European languages. All Semitic languages, Hebrew, Syrian,
Arabic, Egyptian. Fifteen Finno-Ugaric languages. Twenty African
languages.
[2]
James made the call in the context of endorsing Voluntary Poverty. He made a
startling proposal: ‘What we now need to discover
in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war... May not voluntarily
accepted poverty be 'the strenuous life’ without the need of crushing weaker
peoples?” This imperative seems remarkably prescient in the light of subsequent
events.
[3]
“Jesus… proved that every end could and should be turned into a new beginning,
that even absolute failure and death could be made fertile. Herewith the last
frontier of the soul was conquered…Death became the carrier of life between souls.” Harper Torchbooks, p. 66. The quote
referenced my ancestor’s loss of his beloved wife, and how his active
participation in the anti-slavery movement dates from this period.
[4]
“How Language Establishes Relations” an essay in Speech and Reality (Argo Books, Vermont, 1970).
[5]
The Origin of Speech, p. 9.
[6]
Father Wittig’s stories were
considered heretical in part and he was
excommunicated in 1926. Later study of his case failed to find any
objectionable material, and Pope John XXIII
once declared that, had he been Pope at the time, there would have been
no “Wittig case.” In 1946 Wittig was restored to full communion with the
Church. The third volume of The Age of
the Church deals with the Wittig case.
[7]
From “How Language Establishes Relations,” in Speech and Reality, Argo Books, Vermont, 1970.
[8]
“…the Church, which in spite of everything, is still the only viable vehicle
which Logos has left in this world.” From a letter to a reader from E. Michael
Jones, Culture Wars, February 2016.
[9]
Quoted by John Beaumont in “The Church and the Jews,” Culture Wars, March 2015.
[10]
I see “moral intelligence” as including the physical dimension as its means of
commission or action. But the physical dimension, in modern philosophy at
least, is more often viewed reductively and lacking in any moral dimension. In
classical languages, the moral and the physical are not as widely divergent as
in modern speech: for example, “pneuma”
meant ‘wind’ as well as ‘spirit.’
[11]
There is little connection between Noam Chomsky’s “deep grammar” and
Rosenstock’s “grammatical method.” While not claiming any extensive familiarity
with Chomsky, even a cursory reading of the Wikipedia entry on him reveals a
highly academic approach to linguistics, e.g. “The basis to Chomsky's linguistic
theory is rooted in biolinguistics,
holding that the principles underlying the structure of language are
biologically determined in the human mind and hence genetically transmitted.” Rosenstock’s work deals not with language as
academic theory but as “question marks of political history.” His thinking is rooted in social history and
in the real life of peoples, tribes, and nations.
[12] The Origin of Speech, 78
[13]
The Christian Future, p. 19.
[14]
The Christian Future, p. 4-6.
